July 23, 2002

Boy did I sleep in today. I must be fighting off the flew or something, I managed to actually stay asleep until almost 11:30 this morning. I can’t remember the last time that I slept that long. I even went to bed a little bit early last night. This morning, I managed to come across four more pictures from the New Year’s Eve party. Of course, now I don’t have my awesome StarOffice 5.2 picture cropper so I need to find another way to cut them down to a reasonable size to put on the site. I will try to get that done today. They aren’t anything exciting, just some pictures taken from the balcony before the party got started. I am still looking for more pictures from all of you that were there and had a camera that night. No one ever sends us any pictures to add to the site!

For those who are interested (I know that Loopy, Dominica and Eric are…) Broken Sword on the GBA is awesome. The graphics are the best that I have seen yet and the game play seems to be very similar to King’s Quest and Monkey Island. It looks like it will prove to be a lot of fun. The animations are really exceptional. It is really amazing how much different the GBA is from the older Game Boy Color.

I am doing all of the laundry today that I have been pushing off doing for forever. I mention this because I don’t want Eric to feel like he is the only person who ever has to do laundry. Although he is still the person who does the most laundry. I am expecting that the new Preamp / Processor for my stereo and home theatre system will be arriving tomorrow. It is supposed to be arriving tomorrow by UPS but the tracking number that I have is invalid so I am trying to find out what is going on now. It would be really nice if it would arrive before I have to leave for Maryland because I would like to have at least a little bit of a chance to play with it. I spent some time yesterday listening and measuring as much as I could trying to get the speakers into the right places. I think that I have them pretty good now. They seem to be sounding really good and they are all symmetrical. We have the center channel mounted underneath the television like they do in a lot of pro setups but it is so low that we had to use some rubber cushioning to tilt it upwards. I think that we have it pretty good now.

For those of you who hang around much at the house, you are aware that I have an awfully extensive laserdisc and DVD collection (much of the LD collection is now available for purchase for anyone who is interested – a player can be found on eBay for as little as $10 – $15. What a great way to start a serious movie collection!) And in addition, I also track how many times each movie is watched allowing me to determine which movies have been the best purchases and how much money I am spending for each time we watch a movie. So, since all of this work is being done, I decided to share with you the “Most Watched” list generated by the movie database.

Movie Title Times Viewed Format

Raiders of the Sun 11 LD
Bulletproof 10 LD
Alladin 9 LD
Happy Gilmore 9 LD
My Blue Heaven 9 DVD
Chasing Amy 8 LD
Jurassic Park 7 LD
Liar, Liar 7 LD
Muppet Treasure Island 7 LD
The Truman Show 7 DVD
Coyote Ugly 6 DVD
Dragon Fire 6 LD
The Game 6 LD
Mallrats 6 LD
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh 6 LD
Shooting Elizabeth 6 LD
Tenchi Muyo OVA Episode 1 6 LD

I know that you are all so excited to see this list. It really shows, though, how much we used to watch laserdiscs. I have had an LD player since late 1994 and some of those discs have been around a long time. Raiders of the Sun (which is terrible) has been around since 1995 and is just so funny to watch how bad it is that it manages to keep finding its way into the player. It is our first What! movie and is totally a classic. Nate and I first discovered it so long ago! My Blue Heaven and Coyote Ugly are the only recent additions to be on the top 17 list. There are a ton of recent DVDs that have been watched 5 times. The big jump seems to come at 6 times. This will eventually increase as the discs are watched more and more. Effecting things a lot is that Dominica watches a lot of movies but is not willing to use the LDs and so she only adds to the DVD counts. As many of the LDs get replaces by DVDs you will see the DVDs taking over as well. I am going to miss those LDs when they are gone. They have become like friends to me. They get watched so little now that I forget many of the ones that I own. There are many duplicates as well. Those I will be weeding out shortly. Some to sell, some to trade, some to give away. I want to have as few LDs as possible before moving again because there are so many that they are way too heavy to deal with. Moving them three times in the last three years was torture enough. If anyone is interested in taking over a large portion of the collection, just let me know.

Here are the movies that I know are available right now, Army of Darkness, Chungking Express, Anne of Green Gable and LA Confidential. Those are all duplicates that I don’t want to be storing. They area all in excellent condition. Let me know.

More movies! I picked up K-Pax, Life as a House and Zoolander today and Dominica got Harry Potter 1. We watched Zoolander tonight (it was awful) and The Big Lebowski which Dominica had never seen. I watched Notting Hill this afternoon. That is one of my all time favorite romantic movies. Goodnight everyone. I leave for Maryland tomorrow so the updates might be a little belated but I will keep working on the site.

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