We got up and got breakfast from Market City and played some Settlers of Catan while we ate. Dominica has been continuing to beat me repeatedly now that she has gotten addicted to it.

Dad’s HP Pavilion laptop, which has been on its last leg for weeks now, finally died completely today and does not boot up anymore. So he attempted to switch back to his even older Toshiba Satellite laptop and found that it decided not to fire up today as well. So he is suddenly down two laptops and only has his Hewlett-Packard desktop which desperately needs to be rebuilt because of a virus infection. The plan is to dig out my G4 based Mac Mini that is at his house and to use that for his normal, day-to-day, computing needs like surfing the web and checking email.

It makes me feel better about owning that PowerPC Mac that never really got any use before. We had used it as our “guest” computer in the living room of our house in Geneseo but it never came to New Jersey with us because we didn’t have any space for it and no real need for an extra machine of that type since all of our computers are already in the only space that we have for them anyway – no need for a computer in an alternate location. The Mac Mini that we currently own isn’t wireless either so it would only be useful along one of the two walls next to the routers that we have. The next Mac Mini that we get will have built-in wireless so that we can use it anywhere connected to our Apple AirPort.

I had homework due on Friday night and more due today by midnight. So my afternoon is set aside for working on object modeling for RIT. Dominica decided to avoid her computer and to was Mr. and Mrs. Iyer on DVD that she borrowed from a friend at her office. Dominica worked on a knitting / sewing project that she finished two years ago but had to make one small alteration before she could use it. So hopefully tonight she will have a “new” sweater to wear.

I uploaded a couple new pics today and put them on the last couple day’s posts – in case anyone missed them. The Abby Mott show ticket image and the Newark St. Patrick’s Day Parade coming down Mulberry Street.

It’s the weekend and so that means tons of laundry going on all of the time. It might be noisy but having the laundry facilities in our apartment really helps us to be able to spend a lot more time together. You don’t realize how important this is until you live without it for a little while. Then when it takes a huge toll on your ability to spend time together you figure out that it is a critical investment to make.

I wrapped up my homework at a quarter until six. So we tried to see if people would still be available for some Dungeons and Dragons tonight as we haven’t had a chance to play in quite a while. We didn’t end up managing to get a hold of everyone, though, once we knew that we would be able to play.

Dominica and I played two games of Settlers of Catan and then Dominica realized that her Computer Operations and Security class is set to begin tomorrow. She had been thinking that her class was not going to begin for another week yet. She hasn’t ordered her books yet or checked on the class requirements so she is scrambling to get ready to start tomorrow. She got all of her books ordered right away. Hopefully she will have all of them in time.

This is the first semester in quite a while that Dominica is attempting two classes overlapping while working full time. She is going to be really burned out over the next sixteen weeks. The later half of her GPS and the New Geography class overlaps with the first half of Computer Operations and Security. And the later half of COS overlaps with the first half of her Intro to Web Design with HTML class.

Since I was doing Flickr updates today I went back and updated February 22 with its “snow day” image – a picture taken from the apartment to show just how much snow we were getting all day. I also updated February 15 with pictures that I took on Wall Street that morning.

I needed to do some editing of QuickTime videos so I bought Apple’s QuickTime Pro 7 tonight. My first project is to see about converting videos taken with my Kodak digicam and making them playable on the AppleTV. I am converting the videos to 720p h.264. Unfortunately the sound isn’t very impressive.

I talked to John Stephens (a.k.a. The Surfing IT Wizard) tonight – he is just moving into a new apartment in Apalachin, New York this weekend. He has moved up from a tiny little one bedroom in Endicott where he has been for years to a bigger two bedroom although I think that he is a bit farther away from work now. Apalachin is famous as being the home to the 1957 Mafia meeting (known as the Apalachin Meeting) which is featured in the beginning of the movie Analyze This. A friend of mine lives next door to the famous home.

Dominica spent the later part of the evening playing MySims with Oreo snuggled on the bed. Oreo had decided that he really just wanted snuggles and wasn’t going to be happy until someone went to bed and stayed with him. He gets that way sometimes. He is such a funny dog.

We met up with Ramona and Winni around noon. We would have been over there sooner but our valets today completely fell apart and it took us fifty-five minutes to get out car out of the garage and we had to go over there and get it ourselves. Then we had to fight with the managers in the garage who just couldn’t understand that we wanted to be able to drive our car and that holding it hostage was not acceptable. The turn around time on a car is supposed to be just fifteen minutes and waiting almost and hour and having to walk to Military Park to get the car ourselves on a slow Sunday afternoon when there should have been more than ample time is really a problem.

The four of us drove down to Elizabeth, New Jersey to try to find some board games at Toys R Us. But really shopping in Elizabeth is not the best place to find intellectual games and the store there was completely devoid of them. We did pick up Mad Gab which Dominica and I learned to play while we were last visiting my family in Ohio. So then we were off to breakfast.

We discovered a diner in Elizabeth that we ended up really liking. The food was good and inexpensive and the people there were really nice. We will definitely be going back there again. They also had fried New Jersey crab cakes on mac and cheese which I have not had since going to the Omega Diner down in North Brunswick more than a year ago.

We hit Best Buy because our wireless access point hasn’t been working recently and it was always a bit problematic. So we decided to just pick up an Apple AirPort Extreme to use as our wireless. It wasn’t cheap but it is attractive and supposedly works extremely well so we decided to just give it a try. It has an included Gigabit Ethernet switch which might be nice depending on how we end up using the system. The AirPort also supports 802.11n which is makes it the first device that we have that will do that.

We recently decided that we are moving our home “entertainment system” over to Apple Mac and AppleTV based so the AirPort Extreme plays into that very well. Our short term plan is to get a Mac Mini for the living room which we will use as our “iTunes Server” and to keep using our AppleTV in our bedroom as our remote television station. Eventually, if and when we manage to get a house again we expect that we will have a guest bedroom and, in that case, we will add another AppleTV to add television to that room as well. We have a plan and it seems to work pretty well.

What I wish that Apple would now do, considering the pieces of the system that they have in place already, is design and build a dedicated “iTunes Media Server”. The ITMS unit idea would be that it would be a standalone unit with four hard drives (up to four terabytes of raw storage or three terabytes with RAID 5) that runs iTunes internally and is used to feed program content out to AppleTV, FrontRow or iTunes on Windows. It should also have one or two USB connections that could be used for syncing an iPod. The interface would be controlled by iTunes on Windows or Mac (or Linux, hint, hint) but all data would be handled local on the ITMS. The iTunes on the ITMS would run continuously so that no computer would need to be left on in order for subscription content to be downloaded at any time day or night. I believe that this is a key component missing from Apple’s iTunes and AppleTV strategy. And I also think that if they decide to build such a device that they should send me one for free for coming up with the idea (hint, hint.) Other possible features of the ITMS could be the inclusion of Time Capsule compatibility, a built in AirPort wireless access point and possibly even routing capabilities to make this truly an all-in-one unit. Although I would prefer it without all of the extra capability with the exception of the Time Capsule feature which I think is perfect for this device and ends up filling another important gap in the Apple lineup – that of RAID protected Time Capsule storage.

We came back to Eleven80 and set up the AirPort so that we could put Ramona and Winni’s laptops online and we taught Dominica how to play Settlers of Catan online. We ended up having someone from Slovakia jump into our game. He was rather annoying but it gave Dominica a chance to learn to play with Ramona sitting with her and showing her how to play. It worked really well and Dominica ended up completely demolishing everyone.

We had a small shipment from Amazon arrive today too. I am guessing that it actually arrived yesterday and we just failed to check the mail. We received the first season of A Different World and the second half of the fourth season of Family Guy. I also got “Lake Wobegon U.S.A.” which is the third in a collection of “News from Lake Wobegon” Audio CD collections. The other two in the series are “News from Lake Wobegon” and “More News from Lake Wobegon”. They are generally considered to be roughly the best fifteen hours of the classic “News from Lake Wobegon” stories. I also got the book “Agile Retrospectives” which I have been looking forward to reading for a while.

We ordered in dinner from Dominos. And then it was back to Settlers.  The game took a while to play (we are playing to thirteen points) and that was all the more time that we had tonight.  Ramona and Winni headed back home at eleven thirty on the Eleven80 shuttle.