Ah the weekend. Dominica works an hour earlier on Saturdays but fortunately gets out of work an hour earlier as well. So she had to be up at a fairly normal time this morning so that she could get to work. I got to sleep in late with Oreo. A nice lie in for the lads (groans from the Father Ted crowd.)
iPodder fans will be interested to know that the iPodder software was officially renamed Juice this morning. I expect to make it a bit less confusing. Lots of people incorrectly connect podcasting with the Apple iPod which can be used to listen to podcasts but there is no direct link between the two.
Jeremy is here today. He came over last night and spent the night. I did some work with Ben this morning in a continuing attempt to get some sort of “simple” solution in place to let us play AoE2 remotely but after another long bout of working on that we still came up with nothing. We even tried out a really promising new product called Hamachi that really looked promising but it didn’t end up working either. It was nice to learn about Hamachi and to be able to try it out because it definitely looks like it might be a really cool, simple technology that could have a lot of other uses that I will be interested in.
Jeremy and I ended up playing a single one on one game together today since it has been so long since we have had a chance to play AoE2. I crushed him good:)
For lunch we went over to the Omega Grill. Then we did some shopping at Walmart. I picked up the Chia Herb Garden that I have been wanting to get for a few day. Jeremy got Call of Duty 2 which he has been wanting but it just came out recently. We went back to the house and Jeremy installed CoD2 and tried it out. It looks amazing but he wasn’t able to get it to run really smoothly on his machine. It seems like there are some issues with the configuration that we couldn’t figure out. I also picked up Dragonslayer out of the bargain bin. It is an old Disney live action movie from 1981. I am sure that it isn’t very good but it doesn’t have to be all that good for $5.
Ben and I spent a few more hours working on the AoE2 problem. This is one problem that will just not stop plagueing us. This is several years that we have been pounding on this issue trying to get somewhere practical with it. The only working solution that we ever came up with was purchasing hardware VPN accelerators for every location that wanted to join in.
I took Jeremy home at 8:30 and at 9:00 Dominica headed over to the Pakistan House on West Henrietta Road and Crittenden in Brighton to get some dinner. They are just so awesome there.
While Oreo and I were waiting for Dominica to get home I took the time to plant our Chia Herb Garden. It comes with six herbs put you can only plant four of them at a time. Dominica didn’t have any suggestions about which ones she wanted so I opted for cilantro, sweet marjoram, chives and dill. It was very simple.
I don’t think that enough people know what mincemeat is so I decided to include a link over to the Wikipedia. Originally it was common for mincemeat to actually include meat but over time that custom has diminished and now it is relatively uncommon to actually have real meat and instead mincemeat is made of fruits and vegetables. Personally I like mincemeat pie and I am hoping that Dominica will make me some or maybe a nice mincemeat tart.
Dominica got home with dinner and we went down to the theatre and ate our Pakistan House take away while watching the final three episodes of As Time Goes By. I can’t believe that I have finally seen the entire series. After all of these years. Unfortunately I feel that the series deteriorated pretty rapidly after Judi Dench’s husband died. They immediately scaled back the filming schedule and took the show from being a regular full length series to being mostly a “special” thing that they only did a few of a year. I understand why they scaled back the filming schedule but what I don’t understand is why the writing for the series changed so much. The overall storyline stayed more or less regular, I think, but Judi Dench’s character lost all sense of direction and personality and became nothing but a bundle of insanity. They totally took away all of her personal interaction and made her completely nuts and a really mean character that you end up disliking if you aren’t careful when she had originally been the center of the show, more or less, and a real, interesting character. By the end she was only given token screen time and every moment that she was on camera was totally predictable and annoying. It is really unfortunate that they let that happen because they could easily have held the show together more easily than they did. I really get the impression that the original writers left and some other part time writers were brought in and given very little to work with to wrap up the last few seasons of the show. It is very sad. At least they did manage to get the show to drag out long enough to have an actual ninth season wrap-up that they were able to use to end the show in a nice, closure-happy way. You really feel like the last episode is the last episode and it makes sense.
It was getting late by the time that we watched the final episode and I was ready to get to bed. I have no idea why I was so tired tonight. That isn’t usual for me. I do think that I am coming down with a cold and maybe that is knocking me out. It was half past midnight when we headed off for bed. So no podcast tonight but hopefully tomorrow.