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I should have suspected when Sarah and I took Elf out at Hollywood Video this evening that a dwarf would be in it and that the dwarf would be Peter Dinklage. That now continues the Peter Dinklage marathon for the week after the Station Agent and Living in Oblivion. We went to Hollywood Video because Sarah was getting a little tired of my picks in Netflix of offbeat movies recommended by Ami and my mom. So we paid five bucks to rent a movie (gasp) but I did talk to the guy at the counter for fifteen minutes about their new pricing scheme of three movies at a time for $9.95 per month. What I really wanted was for him to sign us up with the five bucks we paid for Elf but he didn't process that and instead gave me a long lecture and a flyer about the program. With movies getting cheaper and cheaper I am consuming them faster than I can find the good ones.

Elf was a cute little movie full of Christmas cheer powering a sled. I was entertained by it but could have done without any scene in it involving food. I don't want to see anyone eating used gum from a New York subway station. Something intangible also bothered me about Elf. I think it was that the movie was the equivalent of a flat soda when it came to chemistry for the actors and script.

We also watched The Happiness of the Katsukaris which appeared to have been a combination of The Nightmare Before Christmas (because of some odd claymation), The Hotel New Hampshire (Because it is about a family who sets-up a dysfunctional hotel in the woods where things and people keep dying), Little Shop of Horrors (Because it has some corny musical numbers that appear to have been designed to draw a cult crowd), and The Sound of Music (They sing while running through the countryside below a mountain and there is a karaoke sing-along duet scene with colored text in japanese so the audience can sing along). It was a very odd movie with the moral that you should stick together as a family. It was all in Japanese with subtitles. I enjoyed it but I think most people would find it too odd and be put-off by the grotesque introductory scene. I haven't watched many Japanese movies but this one may be like most of them. It would be a sure cult classic if it were in English.

We had a lazy day today trying to recover from our wine and cheese gathering last night. I began the evening trying to fix the wireless network at six. What I was really trying to do was to avoid having people come over and be unable to play music in the living room and I hadn't intended to have to do anything with the wireless network. The living room media PC was disconnected from the TV when we organized the apartment and untangled all the wires behind the TV. It looked better but there wasn't any sound. So I figured it would make the most sense to use VNC from the bedroom to control the computer in the living room to pump sound to the stereo. I was going to use Remote Desktop but I wasn't sure if the music would ever play on the local audio out since it does pump audio to the computer connected to it. This relies on a couple of simple technologies to work. The first is the wireless network and the other is the connection between the computer and the receiver. So as I was working to connect the living room computer to the receiver I rebooted it because I was having some trouble with VNC. Upon rebooting it no longer connected to the network. Now the living room computer should use the television and the receiver as the monitor and the wireless keyboard and mouse to control it but I didn't have time to make all those things work plus without the Internet I couldn't listen to Launch.

So things were starting off poorly. I thought I had fixed the network last time but it must have been a strange fluke as usually occurs when I am fixing things that I fixed it temporarily through luck and rebooting the computer didn't work. The error on the screen was "limited or no connectivity" even though the wireless network was available. I didn't have a monitor for the computer so I had to bring first the big fat monitor into the other room and then later brought Jeremy's second flat screen monitor because the speaker magnet was making the screen distorted and I feared it might permanently ruin the screen. I tried the fix on PCHell again but even after goofing around with the registry installer it still didn't solve anything. I was moving the files back and forth from my desktop using the media card from the camera. I had the same problem on my laptop so I switched to try to fix it on the laptop and still nothing worked.

Finally I got so frustrated that I gave-up on fixing the network on the livingroom PC and went to look for help from a real human being. So I chatted with a man named Ricardo on the Linksys live support forum. Ricardo was very nice but he was probably servicing twelve other people at the same time. He kept asking me to do something like go to start and run cmd. I'd tell him that I had done that and thirty seconds later he would reply. This worked well for me since I stopped replying quickly too and went to just connect the computer in the living room to the receiver so that it could play songs. After confirming that the receiver speaker worked by using the DVD player I then struggled to figure out why the PC never put out any audio. My theory was that I didn't have the right plug connected to the right spot but I finally figured out the problem. The computer was muted. The volume had the mute check-box set. Once I solved that I was all done and I put on my favorites in MP3s from the 90s. Sarah thought it was too loud so she had me turn it down so that it was nearly inaudible. I took to drink at about seven to test the wine and to relieve the stress from the deadlines. I also put an old Dali picture of butterflies up in the kitchen at Sarah's request leaving Ricardo alone for about five minutes.

Things weren't going well with Ricardo and after forty minutes with him the buzzer rang with our first guest Jorey at 8:20. Having invested about forty minutes with Ricardo I really wanted to fix the network. Jorey counseled me against working on my wireless network during the first party with a group of real guests. At some level this was a house warming party for when I moved into Brookline in 1999 five years ago. It should have been a big moment which was why I couldn't believe that after five years I still couldn't play music for guests in my living room and was afraid of death by technology embarrassment. Most people were unaware of this terrible fear as the room continued to fill with friends and family from all walks of life. Ricardo recommended that I uninstall all my network cards and install the latest drivers. I sadly let him know that I'd have to do that later and Ricardo faded back into the world of cyberspace.

Jory and Lynne spent a long time chatting while I was playing with the computer and being rude. Ron Schmelzer appeared with Jen all dressed in the swing dancing clothes ready to leave a little early to go to Swing City. I hadn't seen them in a couple of years. With Ron, Jorey, and me we had three members of the original Roadkill cast. Ron is ready to take a stab back at Improv. Maybe we can do it. Lots of other people attended too. Lisa and Dave came with their guitar. Matt and Kate came. At least I had one technological success. I managed to show Kate the Yoshimi Vs the Pink Robots video in my bedroom. She has Yoshimi as her ring tone on her telephone. Matt brought Santa and Snow Men straws which I used to drink too much wine out of throughout the night. Hattie and Jose came and Hattie brought her always famous Rice Krispy treats. Those disappeared fast. Both Waichi and Lynne brought potstickers and I ate tons of them. Stephanie and James came and brought a gift of playing cards made with an image of Leelin from my photo library. Stephanie is the master of using OPhoto to create cool gifts. She also brought a bottle of champagne. I treated the early crowd to a brief tour of Jeremy's closet. Most people could identify the majority of toys were for. Sarah's friends Matt B. and Dick came.

Kim and her boyfriend were there. I think they may have felt the most out of place but I gave Kim rave reviews as my organizer and Hattie was quite impressed at the difference in the shape the apartment was in from her last experience here. Kim brought a wine called "House Wine". In all we drank about 15 bottles of wine and two boxes of wine.

One of the interesting tidbits from the party was that a lot of people had been reading-up on what is going on with me and Sarah based on the blog. Ron Schmelzer had found the blog because I mentioned him and he has a utility for monitoring everything anyone says about him in newsfeeds. I don't remember what tool it was. I think it was something like feedster , the subscribe to search and ego finder appear to be able to do such magic. Ron is the guru of XML so if that's where you go to feed your ego that is the place to go. Hattie mentioned that I had a candle in the bathroom and was surprised given my big issue with toilet candles from last week. Kate had been poking around and knew all about my obsession with being called persistent. Maybe the party was the reason for the sudden burst in traffic.

Lisa and Dave started playing a little concert with the guitar in my bedroom and Sarah quickly moved them to the living room to play for the larger crowd. They played a couple of Lisa and Dave favorites like Wherever you go and one of Lisa's new songs. I then talked them into playing some Bob Dylan songs so they played I shall be released. We all broke into a very animated chorus of Leonard Cohen's So Long Marianne before Lisa and Dave had to go for the night to wake early to play the subway. James, Stephanie's boyfriend, sang some tunes using a five string guitar that I pulled from on top of a book case. So it turned out we had music anyways even though I never did get things working right on the network.

At one o'clock I staggered out to move the car to the parking lot and while it was only about a twenty second drive I was probably too drunk to move the car. Next time I'll move the car before I drink. I was so drunk in the parking lot that I was fighting with the blue tag and ripped it so I had nightmares about getting the boot.

So today became an extremely lazy day focused mainly on sleeping off a hangover, watching movies, and a very short workout. The big event for today was making breakfast. I did have some nasty scary dreams, one of which was that the apartment was infested with evil college age thugs who were stealing things but also wouldn't leave when I told them too. I got so angry and frustrated with them that I started screaming and running around the apartment threatening to lock them in Jeremy's room and calling the police. It got me so excited that when I awoke from it my heart was racing because I had released a bunch of adrenaline.

Anyways. I set back to the task of fixing the network when Elf ended at about ten. I followed the directions to reinstall the drivers on the laptop but that didn't do anything. I could tell that the problem was that DHCP wasn't assigning me a network address on either machine so my hunch drove me away from the individual client machines and back to the little Linksys router itself. First I thought it might need security so I turned all the security stuff on the router and reconnected only to find that it had the same problem. Then I get bold and brave enough to change the DHCP settings. There aren't a lot of settings for DHCP, just one regarding how addresses are assigned in terms of the starting address. The starting address had been 172.16.0.120 so I changed it to 172.16.0.5. Suddenly everything worked and I could connect from all the computers. So all is well.