June 26, 2003

Sorry that yesterday was so insanely boring. Imagine living my life! I slept in late this morning hoping to get over whatever was causing my headache. I left the hotel a little after noon and headed out for the grocery store because I need some soy milk for protein because it is hard to get enough being a vegetarian in the south. I hit SuperFresh and then went to the Bay Mills deli to get a sandwich for lunch before driving into the hospital. I am sure that today is going to be a long day again so I want to be prepared as much as possible. I also stopped at the Walmart in Bowie and picked up a few movies since I have run out of things to watch down here. I got The Love Bug, Punch-Drunk Love and Just Married. They were a good deal since all of them were on sale. I am on the prowl for Children of Dune from the Sci-Fi channel’s mini-series. I have been excited to see it ever since the first series came out a few years ago. The second one is just out and supposedly even better than the first one which I thought was really incredible.

Mom had to go to the emergency room this morning. She was having a hard time breathing – we assume because the ozone levels are so high because of the weather.

It is very hot again today. I hate the heat. Weather.com says that it is 92 but feels like 95 here. You New Yorkers get to relax in the high 80’s. 89 in Ithaca today.

After a long day of working around the office, I finally got a chance to relax a little bit after Thomas, our driver for the evening, took the route truck out on its first evening run. I have little to do while he is out since I am pretty much just waiting for him to get back. So, I popped in The Love Bug, one of the great Disney classics. What a great film. Some day I will have the whole series. Buddy Hacket and Dean Jones are hilarious. I love those old feel good family movies. It just occurred to me that Dean Jones and Paul Walker look a lot a like.

I have found a new DVD player that I really like for playing DVDs on the computer. I have never been very impressed with WinDVD or PowerDVD. And on Linux, there have never been any good DVD players for the longest time which has driven me crazy because I don’t want to watch movies on Windows very often. But I finally came across VideoLAN. VideoLAN has been around for some time but I had been under the assumption that they were no longer working on the project. But this is apparently completely not the case. VideoLAN is now a full fledged piece of awesome software that runs on many platforms including Windows, Linux, BeOS and MacOS X. It also has the unique capability to play movie files from harddrive, broadcast movies over a network or watch movies that are being played over a network. It is a really neat piece of software. And it is OpenSource available under the GPL so it is totally free. Everyone should download it and give it a try. And they are constantly making improvements to it to so it just keeps getting better and better. And of course it can do other cool things like ignore Regional Encoding to allow you to watch movies from all over the world.

I also found another cool piece of DVD software that rips a DVD movie onto your harddrive. It would be neat to have an online movie library that would come from a central server so that you don’t need to go looking through all your discs to find what you want. It would make movie watching a lot easier. And the ripping software is nice enough to remove any extra menu and advertising crap from your movies so that you can show them like they are shown in the theatre without all of the setup and announcements.

I am staying at the Comfort Inn in Annapolis again tonight. This is probably the last night that I will be staying at the hotel. I expect that I will be at John’s house in Arnold after tonight. I am hoping that tonight is my last really late night at the hospital for the rest of the week. We have new hardware coming in over the next few days that we need to try out so I will be working during the day a little bit more. We have new signature pads to try out.

Dad called. Mom has to stay in the hospital. They think that it is her pneumonia but they don’t know for sure. She will be staying in the hospital until they know more, which may be a while. Dad is going to be working out of the hospital during the day for the next few days.

After watching The Love Bug, I watched Adam Sandler’s new film, Punch-Drunk Love which won “Best Director” at Cannes. So I am very excited. I am a huge fan of independant films. This is also the first title in my collection that is transfered in “Super Bit” which is supposed to really help how good it looks. It has its sound in DTS and Dolby Digital AC-3 EX too. Too bad I am watching it on a laptop. This is most definitely not your average Adam Sandler movie.

I am making up, now, for all of the falling behind that I have done recently with the updates. I think everyone has plenty to read each and everyday now.

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