12.30.2007
9:34pm

I beat Guitar Hero 3 today (on medium). Not too great of an accomplishment but I still enjoyed playing through all the songs. Now I've got to finish the bonus tracks and step up to hard difficulty next.

Yesterday we went up to Roanoke to see the Mill Mountain Zoo. I heard about it from a girl at the FCF convention who said she volunteered there on the weekends. It was a fairly nice day, not too chilly, but some of the animals were off-exhibit anyway. Mill Mountain is a really small zoo, even when all the animals are there, but the location is excellent because you are actually on the top of the hill. Notable creatures on the tour were a bald eagle that we got to watch eat his meal, a pair of snow leopards that didn't do anything except sleep, a red panda who was munching on some fruit, and a wolverine. They also had a fishing cat on exhibit which I did not expect to see there, it's not a typical zoo choice.

We had lunch at Red Robin, then did the shopping thing at the mall, Wally World, Petsmart, and Target. I got a bigger carrying crate for the cats so that they can both be together in the same one instead of traveling in separate small crates. Hopefully they won't complain as much on the trip back. I also need to get them a bigger scratching post, but that can wait until I'm back in Melbourne. We watched Swordfish in HD back at home and had a late dinner around 9pm at Outback.

Today I got up pretty late, fed the kitties, and did the Guitar Hero thing. Dad was gone to work all morning fixing a problem, but when he got back he started the long process of cooking ribs for a late lunch/dinner. Mom and I watched Evan Almighty in HD, which was a pretty decent movie but not quite as funny as I had hoped.

Time to watch a few more episodes of The Office on Netflix. I checked out their web player yesterday and it works well.

12.28.2007
10:40pm

Melbourne made CNN front page tonight. A rare northern right whale was spotted off Melbourne Beach.

12.26.2007
9:45pm

Christmas is over. I got some housewares from my sister, a couple HD movies, some new tools, a toaster oven, blender (with beverage dispenser!), and food processor from the parents, some cash from the grandparents, and a few tiger-themed items. Today I hooked up Dad's new HD-A3 player and some audio cables for his Samsung unit so that he can do SACD and DVD-Audio if he gets some discs. I brought the Axiom EP400 sub with me for the holiday, so that's also hooked up in place of the usual Mission subwoofer. In this smallish room it can impress.

Amazon had another BOGO HD DVD sale today so I picked up the first four Harry Potter movies for $40. Combined with the 5th one that I got for Christmas I will have the whole set in HD.

Flying spaghetti monster defeats anti-evolution FL school board.

12.23.2007
7:46pm

I'm up in Christiansburg, VA again for Christmas this year with the family. I drove up yesterday, from around 3am until 2pm. No major problems on my trip, just some traffic congestion here and there.

Today we went up to Roanoke for some family portraits and to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets. I picked up a copy of Guitar Hero III at Circuit City, so now we can have fun with that.

12.18.2007
12:54am

12.17.2007
11:29pm

The THX Christmas lights (from 2006). Awesome!

6:30pm

I finally got around to registering myself a domain name. jgillow.com now points to my FIT web site.

I'm on the 3rd Pullman book now, but just barely started it. "The Amber Spyglass" is definitely longer than either the 1st or 2nd books.

I also checked the other day on the Inheritance series, and book 3 is not supposed to be out until September of 2008. There's also going to be a book 4 which was not expected.

12.13.2007
8:59pm

Been an interesting week. I'm still reading "The Golden Compass," will definitely have that finished by the weekend. I'm also getting back into the web programming stuff again, I want to improve my poor knowledge about modern HTML and especially PHP. For work I also need to get some familiarity with Perl, which goes along with web stuff as well.

I'm invited to an end-of-semester dinner at Adam and Tammy's place on Saturday along with a few other people. I only had the one master's class this semester but I did get a 100/100 score.

12.08.2007
7:31pm

This afternoon I listened to Phil Collins. Nothing like a good video to go along with it :)

1:07pm

I saw The Golden Compass this morning. After reading the preliminary reviews yesterday, I decided to go ahead and order the novel trilogy. The movie wasn't perfect by any stretch, but it was very enjoyable.

Many people say that His Dark Materials is the antithesis to the "Chronicles of Narnia" series by C.S. Lewis. It was somewhat fitting that the trailer for Prince Caspian, coming May 16th, played before the movie today.

12.06.2007
8:09pm

Harold and Kumar. Coming (not) soon (enough).

12.05.2007
9:19pm

Wow, it is December already. The month of annoying songs, politically-correct "holiday parties" and retail profits. I saw this amusing item on slickdeals today, tempted to buy one. More explanation may be required.

Just today I picked up the 3rd (and final?) Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I would have loved a HD version, but Disney is aggressively Blu-Ray and does not release anything on HD DVD.

Nate was in Mexico for a couple days working at a customer site. I got to do a little lab support since Adam is still doing the part-time thing. We finally got our problem with BusinessObjects worked out, turns out not all Solaris patches play nice with 3rd party software.