News & Updates in November 2002

Added character profiles for Kaoru Kognei (Flame of Recca), Kurai (Angel Sanctuary), Raspberry and Blueberry (Dragon Ball Z), and Cameron Bloom (Mobile Suit Gundam).

Our garage door opener broke last week. Although it would still open the door, it would no longer close it, so we bought a new belt drive model from Sears and had it installed on Thursday. It's a little bit slower than our screw drive model, but it's much, much quieter. It's also nice to have an external keypad entry and separate buttons to turn on the light. The installer dude told us that we would need to get a new garage door pretty soon, but we kind of expected that for a while now.

The MX-500 remote finally arrived, and I must say that it is awesome. I won't go into a full review of it as there are a ton of those at Remote Central, but the best thing about it is that Treeses loves it too. Oh yeah, on the evening of the last update, Treeses surprised me with an anniversary Castle Cake, which was way cool. I took some pictures of it and put them online that evening. You can view them here.

Treeses has been in a lot of pain recently, and had to go to the emergency room twice. Apparently she has some kind of virus that affects the heart (which they don't have a name for). Although she is feeling much better now that when she went to the ER, she is still in constant pain. It really sucks not being able to do anything to help.

I finished Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus this week. The full 100% complete, which was really challenging with those time trials. Most give very little leeway. I also played a little bit of Mark of Kri, but it was extremely boring. I just got a beta version of EverQuest in the mail, and once I was able to free the required four megabytes of free space on my memory card and sit through the hour-long process of setting the whole game up, I finally got to play it. It was very boring as well.

I forgot to list all the DVDs we saw recently, so I'll just quickly run through the list: National Lampoon's Van Wilder (good), A Beautiful Mind (good but long), Dark Descent (stupid), Big Fat Liar (good), The Others (boring), Return to Never Land (I didn't see it), Impostor (stupid), Clockstoppers (not bad), Urotsukidoji 2 (boring), The Sweetest Thing (good), Monsters, Inc. (very good), Jason X (not bad), Black Knight (dumb), Vanilla Sky (way too long), The Art of War (lame), The Rookie (good), Attila (good), Monster's Ball (I didn't see it).

Added anime profiles for Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack and Flame of Recca. Added character profiles for Recca Hanabishi, Fuko Kirisawa, Domon Ishijim, and Tokiya Mikagami. Made a few corrections here and there. I also removed the big, red lettering format for the first character of a new section. It was just causing problems in too many places, and in Opera it added space below the first line of the paragraph which just looked awkward.

As you may know, last Halloween I got married, so this Halloween was our one-year anniversary. Unfortunately, Treeses had to work, so I also went in to work, but came home early to hand out candy. And when I say candy, I don't mean that bite-sized crap. I'm talking about real, full-size candy bars. We went to Costco and picked up two different variety packs, a box of Twix bars, and a box of Kit-Kat bars (plus a box of plain Hershey's bars, almond Hershey bars, and Snickers for ourselves). We went through most of the Halloween candy, but didn't run out. Along with candy, I also handed our free Lunar II Ghaleon Punching Puppets. Both treats were a big hit.

While handing out the goodies, I was dressed in basically the same costume I wore for my wedding, except this time I didn't have the motocross boots and I used the hood of the cloak instead of the top hat. From the beginning I had problems with the hood slipping so that I couldn't see, and it took almost half the night before I found a way to fix it. I ended up wearing a black PlayStation 2 baseball cap with three large paper clips attached to the visor. This kept the hood spread out enough so that I could see. I then used a small safety pin to attach the hood to the center paper clip, and this kept the hood in place while still allowing it a little freedom of movement to look natural.

Also for this Halloween, we bought a fog machine. I attempted to make a fog-chiller so that the fog would stick to the ground, but when it did not produce the desired effect once it was completed. The basics of a fog-chiller is to run the fog over a cold area so it will cool down and won't float away. Mine didn't work because I used too small of an ice chest, and the fog didn't cool down enough by the time it came out the other side. All I should need to do now is get a bigger ice chest, and I should be able to have a cool fog effect for next Halloween.

For an anniversary gift to ourselves, we bought a Sony home theater system. It seemed pretty cool at first, but then I noticed a problem: it wasn't compatible with our TiVo remote. This seemed odd, the remote has codes for Sony receivers, and Sony is such a big name. Anyway, I still wanted to keep the receiver, so I began a search for a universal remote. We found one that looked promising at Circuit City, so we bought it without hesitation (because we knew that we could return it with no re-stocking fee if we didn't like it).

The remote we bought was an One For All URC-8910 upgradable universal learning remote. It looked and felt very nice, and had a really nice red back lighting. Unfortunately, it didn't work with the Sony receiver. So I called up the number in the manual, and they told me that new Sony receivers made within the last six months used completely different codes. So basically they are not compatible with any existing universal remotes. What the hell was Sony thinking?! Anyway, because it was upgradable, they were download a new library to my remote. And the coolest thing was that they did it over the phone. I just held the back of the remote up to a phone, and after a short modem sound occurred, the LCD displayed a success message! We tried it out, but the directional pad and select button really sucked, so we took it back. Now I'm waiting on an MX-500 remote that I bought off of eBay.

Also for our anniversary, I bought a silver anniversary edition of R2-D2 for Treeses. Unfortunately, they didn't have any at our local Toys 'R Us, so I had to order it. Apparently it's quite a popular item. It still hasn't arrived, and I also haven't told her about it yet, but she doesn't read these updates very often so I should be safe writing about it here.

Oh yeah, I tried out my sprinklers again. And again they leak, but just barely. I'll need to fix it up again later, but for right now it's good enough.