News from Great Castle Wilson

Category: Family

  • “The Champions”

    For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this vague recollection about a TV show about 3 people who had some kind of psychic powers that they used to fight crime. That was basically all I could remember, except that there was something about water shooting up into the air (like from a fire hose) in the opening credits.

    Quite by accident, I ended up surfing to Clivebanks where I finally learned the answer to this mystery. The show is called “The Champions”. You can read about it and a host of other random old sci-fi/fantasy shows by following that link. Anybody remember Joe 90?

  • I like it.

    Got the PSP and a couple of games (Tony Hawk, Dynasty Warriors). The PSP was bundled with Gretzky and the Spiderman 2 movie. Capsule summary: very nice screen, reasonable battery life, movies play well off the MS. The largest MS pro duo I could find locally was 512 Meg. Is the 1Gig one out yet?

  • Woot! PSP comes tomorrow.

    The guy from EB called me today to say that my “PSP Gretsky bundle” was in. I said to him, “Have I ever bought a sports game from you?”. He thought about it for a moment, and said, “No, I don’t think you have.” (I have over the years spent thousands of dollars at that particular EB, and they really do know my buying habits.)

    In any case, it turns out that I am getting the Gretsky bundle since that is the only one that was still available at the time I pre-ordered. Oh well. I’m not going to let $50 get in the way of me getting a PSP on the first day!

  • Ears

    Dennis and I both got our left ears pierced yesterday. By going together, we didn’t have to pay twice. Basically, they will pierce two ears at one sitting — it doesn’t matter if they’re on the same head or not. I’ve had mine done before, but let it grow in again at one point. Dennis thinks his is pretty cool though. 🙂

  • Deb is doing ok.

    She seems to tire very quickly, but as long as she’s getting lots of sleep and not moving around too much, she seems to be her chipper self again. Of course, I’m sure she’ll be doing even better once the er… “last remaining remnant” of the operation is removed a week from tomorrow. Until then she’ll be pretty tied to the house.

  • Well, we’re home.

    Deb got out of the hospital today. She managed to take a shower before I got there, and she made it through the ride home, past the enthusiastic guard dogs and all the way to the living room before she was too tired to go further. Not bad for the day after surgery. She’s currently napping on the couch. We’ll try to make it upstairs later today.

  • Over at Mom & Dad’s

    The family is over at my parent’s place for supper tonight.

  • What a day.

    We ended up in the emergency room this morning at 5am. Deb is going in for an operation next Tuesday, but it looked for a while this morning like we weren’t going to make it that long. After three hours of sitting in a “gynee room” to get some blood results, they sent us home. Things seem to have settled down a bit now, but we’re still not happy campers. Tuesday is still on.

  • Cheap technology

    So Deb accidentally went out and bought an SACD of Yo-Yo Ma instead of a CD. Of course, being the geek that I am, I took this as an excuse to go buy an SACD player. There is actually a reasonable selection of various makes and models in Ottawa, but most are either too expensive or too limited in capability. I eventually found a Samsung that, in addition to playing, SACDs will also play DVDs and DVD-Audio disks. It seems to have pretty decent specs, but I won’t know for certain until I’ve got it home. In any case, $200 seemed like a surprisingly low price for something with this many features.

    update: I played around with it last night. The picture quality is good — I’d say slightly better than the old one. The GUI is pretty basic though. It played everything I could throw at it: DVD with DolbyDigital, DVD with DTS, CD, SACD and DVD-Audio. The only wrinkle was that I had to plug in the analog outs to get SACD to work. This actually makes sense: It’s not a PCM signal, so it’s not suitable for writing out over the optical digital connection.

    (Did I mention it has a DVI out and will upsample to HiDef? 🙂 )

  • Last snowboarding lesson of the season

    Today is our last snowboarding lesson for this year.

    (I’m just waiting for Dennis to get ready. I’ll update tonight to let you know how it goes.)

    update: We’re back. It started snowing heavily just as we were leaving, so by the time we got to the slopes there was about 5..10 cm of new powder. What an awesome way to end the season! Actually, I think Dennis and I will try to get out one more time over the march break.