February 2, 2003: Nine Year for the Ralstons, Happy Groundhog Day

Happy Anniversary to Arti and Danielle Ralston! This is nine years!

Min and I slept in this morning till after 10:00am. I have been doing a ton of reading the last three days and have finished two books and am half way through a third. I am teaching myself everything there is to know about making dynamic web pages using Apache2, PHP and MySQL. It is all very exciting. I also did some work on a computer for Bob, fixed Josh’s computer and have been continuing to play Dark Age of Camelot. DAoC is getting to be more exciting. I have learned most of the important parts of the interface and am now able to do things easily enough that it is starting to be enjoyable to play. It takes a bit to be able to find all of the different settings and commands that you need in the game and it doesn’t have built in support for Anti-Aliasing so you have to force that on manually. Once I did that, the game REALLY looked good. I think that I have just enough processing power between the CPU and the graphics card that I am able to have the AA cranked up and have the game still run ok. I am on level 6, now, which is about the point when you are supposed to be able to really start doing things in the game. So, I will keep you all posted. I still have to send away for the free hint book and atlas that come with the game. It should be a bit easier once I have some materieal to look things up in. For now, I keep exploring and ending up going places where I really shouldn’t have been going and getting my but kicked before I even knew what was going on. But I am learning.

Most of the day I just worked on learning more about PHP. It was a lazy day and I needed it. Min hooked up the PS2 that she borrowed from Phil and Kate and has been playing Kingdom Hearts (Final Fantasy with Disney characters in it.) She played it for four hours this evening. Loopy and I watched the second French and Saunders DVD. But, the DVD is bad and we were only able to watch half of it. Luckily, it wasn’t very good and I have the receipt so I am going to take it back and get something a bit more interesting. After that disc died, Loopy and I watched the bonus material on the Goldmember disc. There was a lot of stuff on there but all it really showed was that the people making the movie were as stupid as the movie made them appear that they must be. The entire cast was completely unable to do intelligent interviews at all. Everyone raved about the dumbest parts of the movie – just going on and on about it. It is no wonder that this was the worst of the three movies if these were the people working on it. They really shouldn’t have done the extra footage – it just made them all look worse than they already did.

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