DAN’S BLOG

YAY We made it! After the failed attempt to go to Knott’s Scary Farm during Halloween, 4 of us (Myself, Ken, Dave, and Liz), all had tickets to use still. So we went yesterday. Look how happy we are. haha.

Unfortunately, the Silver Bullet was not running that day. Bummer. That one is awesome! maybe next time. We rode the accelerator, which is one of my favorites too. 0 to 80 in 2 seconds. WEEEEE.

I had two “firsts” this time at Knott’s. I had funnel cake for the first time ever. Ya ya, stop laughing. The funny part is Ken and I discovered that Knott’s plastic forks suck. LOL. Both of us broke our forks on our funnel cakes.

My other “first” was riding on Extreme Scream. It’s that one that takes you WAYYYYY up high and drops you straight down. It’s actually not as scary as it looks from the ground.

We rode most all of the rides except the ones that were closed. We did Bumper cars, Ghost Rider, Stage coach, Boomerang, Montezuma’s Revenge, Jaguar, Bigfoot Rapids, and more. From the stage coach I could see into one of the haunted houses left over from Halloween. Liz got soaked on Bigfoot Rapids. The lines were really REALLY REALLLLY short. I’ve never been to Knott’s while it was this empty before. The wait to get on any ride was negligible!

We did see some interesting things during our day. Like lots of power strips laying on rooftops for the Christmas lights everywhere. We found a grammar error on a ride sign. It read, “Riders must this tall to ride.” Yea, sign makers must intelligent to work. LOL. I also like the photo booth that crashed.

When in the arcade we learned that Liz has an unusual but useful talent. She’s real good at the crane game. Those ones where you grab stuffed animals with the claw but they always slip out. Well she managed to grab 4 stuffed animals. 2 of which were in a row.

At the end of the day we took our pictures in Santa’s slay, saw the tree lighting show and then left. We ate dinner at a place called PoFolks. That place is great! Good cheap food and a train going around the dining room area. I had a good time, we all had a good time yesterday. I look forward to doing something like that again some day.

Ok, here we go. Thanks go out to Victor, who organized our first annual SausageFest (2006)! It was held at his house on Sunday. We ate various types of sausages and hot dogs which were grilled to perfection on the BBQ. Toppings ranged from mayo to bacon bits, to cheese sauce, to chili, to smoked Wensleydale cheese, and much much more! Scott brought his Wii so a lot of people were having fun playing Wii Sports while others were playing Guitar Hero 2 on the PS2. Sausages were cooked for lunch and then again later for dinner. Everything was very tasty. I played in a game of Settlers. I almost won half way through when I managed to obtain 21 sheep and tried to trade them all in to convert my towns into cities all at once. But then Scott rolled a 7 and I had to give up half of all my cards. OY. It was a very good game though!

Here’s the pictures, separated into categories because SausageFest is just too BIG and demands lots of pictures.

• Sausages:

• People:

Here’s some pictures from last night. We went to Carls Jr. for dinner and they had an automated ordering kiosk! Just like the ones in California Adventure! I had to use it. hehe. UK Dave, this is for you because I know you’d like it.

And Here’s pictures of me playing boxing on the Wii. Also in advance, Shut up! I know I’m not wearing the wrist strap. I wore it the whole evening but I forgot to put the strap back on after handing off my camera for the photo shoot. Plus I’m not retarded and I CAN hold on to a Wiimote without killing someone or breaking a TV. LOL.

Hey there. Well it’s over. We came, we ate, and we burped. This year we had my dad’s side of the family over for Thanksgiving. Well most of them anyway. Steve and Sudi came too. It was a good time. We were lucky that Bob made a turkey at home in his BBQ and brought it. We had some prepackaged turkey breasts, but they turned out to be reconstituted crap. I hate reconstituted meat. What’s the point, really. Anyway, we had all the usual food items, stuffing, pies, etc. Of course I had Turkey Cam on Line 4 on my web cam page. I’m sure a few people got hungry watching that. Later in the afternoon we played some Cranium and Mexican train. Here’s the pictures. I’ll post more when I get the rest of the pictures from Steve. Steve, this is your reminder to send me your pictures.

Update:

Here’s some more pictures taken by Steve’s camera. Thanks Steve.

I played with Scott’s Wii! Ya well… I did. Ok so I think Nintendo should have thought a little harder when naming their new game console the Wii. Scott got his preordered Nintendo Wii yesterday and today I had a chance to play with it some. I must admit, I thought that funky new controller wand thing was kind of a dumb idea before. But now after giving it a try I think it’s actually rather cool. Playing traditional games may be a little harder without a normal game pad but the new “Wiimote” really opens up some new possibilities. I played some Bowling and Tennis. It takes some getting used to and is awkward at first but you get used to it. We had a lot of fun using the built in paint program to draw things on Ken’s head. The Wii can read memory cards from digital cameras, show photos, do slideshows, play videos etc.

I think we are going to see a lot less fat kids and a lot more carpal tunnel syndrome in the near future! LOL. As this system forces you to get off your ass and move around with the controller. However it also left my wrist a bit tired at the same time.

Edit:
In response to the comments below…  It looks like the picture in Chris’s link is not the actual TV that broke but just some random picture of a smashed up CRT (probably to make it seem worse than it really is).  This link shows the actual TV in question which is rear projection and plastic.  Not glass.  So I can imagine a Wiimote breaking a plastic projection TV screen but never ever ever EVER a CRT.  CRT’s are so freaking strong you could shoot a Wiimote at a CRT from Jamie and Adam’s chicken gun and at most get a small chip off the glass.  The Wiimote would be totally destroyed! As for the wrist strap breaking, I think he’s a lair.  I bet his TV was cracked by a baseball or something and he just snipped the strap and blamed it on the Wiimote to see if Nintendo would pay up.  Everybody wants to believe something like this could happen, and I still think it could.  But come on, really.  I say If you throw your Wiimote and it hits your dog, mames your friend, or blows up a city block… It’s your own damn fault.  lol.

Sorry for the delay between my blog posts.  I really should blog a little more often. 

A few days ago I think MyDomain.com’s DNS servers freaked out and dropped all my DNS records.  MyDomain.com is my DNS host.  That means, when you go to http://gliebetronics.com, it’s up to their servers to redirect your browser to my servers here at my house.  But for some odd reason my DNS records vanished.  Then a day or so later most ISP’s DNS servers’ cached records for gliebetronics.com expired. So there was a delay before anybody noticed a problem.  To make things worse, this problem doesn’t affect my internal network at all.  Thusly I didn’t know anything was wrong until people started e-mailing me. LOL.  It seems to be fixed now and everything should be fine.

Sorry if that was too nerdy.  I tried to simplify it as best I could. 

I recently got an e-mail about an upcoming public auction by Fischer Auction Co. Inc of all the contents of MicroSkills. It was to be on Dec 4th and 5th. 4th being the viewing and 5th being the auction. This was to be held at the actual MicroSkills campus. I told a few people about it and was going to tell more. I wanted to see who all would be interested in coming with me to get some great deals on 17″ LCD’s, Dell’s, Servers, and a hell of a lot of chairs. Here’s where the bubble bursts. Today I got notice that the auction is canceled and all the stuff will be liquidated in bulk by the end of the month. GRRRR. I was so looking forward to this. Oh well. :-/

Everything went pretty well this year. The official Trick or Treater count was 290. That is less than last year which was 361. I am unsure why the numbers dropped this year. I did notice there was less van loads of people from Mexico coming down the street. Maybe all this political US/Mexico border stuff going on this year had something to do with it.

We gave out a bunch of cards to people with the Halloween web page URL. If they go there they can search for their photos taken of them. How much do you wana bet someone is going to hotlink their photo on their MySpace account. LOL.

Jesse came earlier to help me setup a lot of the technical things. More friends arrived after 4:00PM. The setup was really tough actually. We ran into a few snags and the sheer amount of wires and junk that we use is insane. What really kills me are the fine details. I feel like no matter how hard I try there’s always a ton of small details that need my attention. Even during the Halloween event it is hard for me to relax and enjoy the party while still making sure everybody is happy and everything is running ok.

Things for me/us to remember for next year:

• Remember to set the Snapshot Camera to Manual Focus. It was auto focusing on darkness for a while so some of the pictures came out slightly blurry.

• Make sure ShoutBox is turned ON! I accidentally had ShoutBox disabled for most of the evening. Oops.! Sorry those of you who couldn’t send shouts.

• Buy no more than 30lbs of dry ice. I bought 78lbs of dry ice this year is it was WAYYYYYYYYYYY too much. Though we did get the bulk discount!

• Next year cover up the LED’s on the Shaun of the Dead sensor. People were getting confused, thinking they could activate him. In reality, the new remote hand control for Shaun was so popular that we never used the IR sensor at all.

• Next year we need to work out a maintenance-free heated pot for dry ice. It is a real pain in the butt to keep changing out the hot water after if freezes over.

All in all Halloween 2006 was a success. We scared A LOT of kids this year. We also scared a little dog if that counts. I want to thank all the people who came and helped out; Jesse, Mark, Chris, Ken, Scott, JJ, Liz, Dave, Mom and Dad, and UK Dave who was on the webcams for a while. Hopefully next year will be just as fun or better!