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January 2008

SaberSnail's picture

It's that time of year again

Wed, 01/02/2008 - 20:01 — SaberSnail

Barnes & Noble periodically has a sale where you can buy two movies and get the third free. My wife and I usually save up our movie buying for this sale, and it looks like it just started up again. Many of their movies have an extra 10% off the list price, plus as members we get 10% off, so that's essentially two thirds of the 20% discounted price for boxed sets that usually run around $40. That comes to about half price (if you buy your movies in sets of three that are all about the same price (which we do)).

So, today I'm bringing home the 2nd and 4th season of the  animated Batman series (completing my collection), plus season 1 of Dharma & Greg. That's 27.5 hours of movie watching (not counting rewatching) for about $75. That's about $1.50 per hour each for the two of us. Not a bad price for entertainment.

Stay tuned to find out if I bring home something tomorrow too... Smile

SaberSnail's picture

Unexpected update

Wed, 01/02/2008 - 21:20 — SaberSnail

Err... I hadn't expected to post again this soon, but someone at work asked me if I wanted to go to Barnes & Noble, and who was I to say no.

This time I came back with the 4th season of Futurama, the extended edition of The Two Towers (our old copy went bad), and the extended edition of King Kong (the Peter Jackson version). At $60 for 14 hours... so, about $2 per person per hour, it not quite as efficient as the last purchase, but still a good price for entertainment.

I'm pretty sure we're set for over a month of viewing (well, unless we go berserk and spend our entire Saturdays watching).

SaberSnail's picture

Families to go

Sat, 01/05/2008 - 02:43 — SaberSnail

As I mentioned earlier, I'm working on writing a program that will generate families for use in roleplaying games. Well, things are coming along rather nicely. Today I got a good chunk of the visualization routines in place. That means I can now view my output as something other than raw XML. There are still some issues that I need to take care of. Some things aren't aligning properly, I'd like to display more information about the dates when things happened, and for now, family members who died without children are not displayed (in order to save display space), but I'd like to show all those compacted into a single box so that their presence isn't lost.

One way or another, it's still good progress. Probably it's well enough along that I start doing more work on improving the simulation engine (adding details, making it customizable, tracking major events, etc). When it's done, I should be able to make builds available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. We'll see.

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MrsKheldar's picture

Okay, time to post...

Mon, 01/14/2008 - 03:05 — MrsKheldar

I guess it's been a while since I posted, so it's time to fill you in on my peaceful little life (Are you jealous? You should be!) Smile

It surprises me every year how difficult it is to get back into a regular schedule after the holidays. I still am running around, trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing! Slowly though, things are settling down, and I'm finding myself with some new projects that I'm excited about.

It looks like I may spend about 4 hours a week teaching preschool one-on-one with a kiddo from our church. He has some developmental delays, and Mom would like him to have a jumpstart before possibly entering a group preschool experience. I spent some time ironing out the details with her today, and it looks like we are going to start the first week of February. I'd appreciate prayers for wisdom and guidance as I prepare, and then begin working with this little guy.

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