January 23, 2006: Scientor the Pharmacist

AGD Interactive finally posted an update on their blog today which gives us hope that their remake of Quest for Glory II is still underway and that they are making progress. They have also announced that their commercial venture, Himalaya Studios, is ready to move into beta testing with their all original game Al Emmo and The Lost Dutchman’s Mine. I am very excited about both games releasing. Their previous work on remakes of King’s Quest I and II were truly amazing and I am pretty sure that AGD Interactive is the best maker of graphic adventure genre games ever. Al Emmo will be a true test to see how AGDI is able to stack up against Roberta Williams and the Sierra team themselves in making games from the ground up. This should be pretty exciting.

Here is a great quote: “There is no magic pill for weight loss and Orlistat is not a magic pill.” said John Dent of GlaxoSmithKline speaking of their new potentially over the counter drug. I guess he wanted to clarify that Orlistat is definitely a weight loss pill and definitely not magic just in case any of us were confused that this drug was for hair and was most definitely magic. It is such a difficult differentiation to make determining when pills are for weight loss and when they are magic. But I suppose when you work for a drug company you get a lot of really confused people and even more confused clients. Many of them probably take these drugs believing that they are delivered by leprechauns riding on sphinxes at the behest of Scientor.

Dad’s car is having an issue with one of its brakes so he needed a lift down to the shop so that he could drop off his car to have it looked at. We took him down a little after noon and then the three of us went up to Texaco Town (yes that is actually its name) and had lunch at the Town and Country Diner.

Andy found out today that he is officially done with his current contract in downtown Rochester on this coming Friday so just five more days of work for him before he is on to working on Waste Watcher 2 full time again. Up until today he had been thinking that there was a decent chance that they would ask him to work one additional week but he lucked out and is on the home stretch now.

Dominica and I came home from lunch and spent about an hour playing with Oreo and relaxing before going up to Rochester to do some shopping. We started off at the Yarn Source on East Henrietta Road. The people who run that store are really nice. They had us bring Oreo into the store to visit with everyone. He had a really good time with that. Dominica managed to find the yarn that she needed too. It is nice to have a yarn store where I am comfortable going in and hanging out with the people that are there while Dominica shops.

Then we went on to Rowe Photo on Mt. Hope to see if they had the Nikon D50 that I have been looking to get. I have priced it out online and it is $513. I figured getting it in person and having a store to go back to was worth something so I would be willing to pay a little more than that. I walked in the door and the unit was almost $650 for the exact same package. No wonder Rowe is able to stay in business. You only have to sell one item per day per employee to be making mad money. I am not planning on ever walking into that store again. Learned my lesson. One way or another I can get anything that they sell someplace else much less expensively. And it isn’t like they are the store around the corner. They are almost an hour away. Totally not worth it. I bought a laserdisc player there years ago. Spent a fortune on it. Really nice high end machine. Ended up taking it back five or six times to get it to work. They were never able to fix it. By the end they were charging me a ton just to have them look at it when the problem was never changing. They would fix a symptom and give it back to me and then it would die again months later. Quite the racket they had going. Guess I am the fool here. But at least they didn’t get my money this time. Lesson learned this time around. Abe’s of Maine it is then. Stupid me for questioning the research that I had all ready done.

On the way home we stopped by Wegman’s in Geneseo to get some needed grocery items like No Calory salad dressing (ugh.) This diet is getting less and less tasty. But having supplies to let us eat at home should help some. I have been needing to go out everyday to get my salads. And getting salads out is not the best way to do lettuce necessarily. And at home I can use, heaven forbid, no calorie salad dressing. Salad dressing is easily 100 calories or more of fat added to a salad which is not very good for you when you are on a low calorie diet. There are much better places to put those calories like protein.

We came home and watched, yes again, TNG Season Three. Made it through quite a bit of that tonight. I finished ballasting the portion of the track that I had put down the other night. So far the ballast work that I have done appears to be going quite well. It is rock solid and looks just like it does in the books. So I think that I am doing it more or less correctly. I am hoping that there won’t be any problem with the train running on it once everything is in place. That is the real fear of ballasting, I guess, is that something will go wrong after everything is solidly in place. Because, let me tell you, it is solid. Rock solid. Not going anywhere. The whole track layer is one very singular piece of metal, plastic, rock and cork.