John Ratcliff's Weblog

Terry's surgery went fine. She is pretty miserable today though. I'm working from home so I can help her out. Hopefully she will start to feel better in the next few days. Sunday is my son Alex's 10th birthday. Hopefully we can do something fun that day. Our friend Patty Solomon was very helpful yesterday with taking Terry to the hospital and staying with her though the day. Patty was especially kind by bringing Alex and I a fantastic home cooked dinner of BBQ ribs and corn on the cob. I believe her own family got Macoroni and Cheese or something. I just closed my ten auctions on Ebay last night. It was a lot of fun! I made $220 off of the ten items, each with a starting bid of only $1 with no reserve. The funniest auction was for a "Paddington Bear" cartoon I only paid $5 for. I described the cartoon as a "stoner flick" with a $30 opening bid, and it *SOLD*. It's all about the advertising. My copy of "Mary Poppins" sho

Little bits of news. I received my print of ET yesterday. The color is near perfect and there are no splices. It was well taken care of, obviously treated with film guard. It does have some base scratches throughout,and the brightness seems oversaturared, like it was slighly overexposed, but still an excellent print nontheless. I'm really looking forward to showing it. I bit the bullet yesterday and bought a new notebook computer. I haven't bought a notebook in over 4 years. My last one was 350mhz Pentium and it is still a great day to day workhorse. Thing is, I can't very well do any real 'work' on it. My new notebook is an HP ze5185, 2.4ghz Pentium 4, 512mb ram, 60gb hard drive, 15" screen, DVD player, nice ATI 3d chipset. Hopefully it will be a benefit in the end. I am goiing to get high speed internet at my home sometime soon, using a wireless provider on the Lake called 'Infiniplex'. This way I should be able to work in a more 'p

My frend Johnny started up a fresh weblog today. That represents the sum total of my 'big news'. Have a great week.

The movie prices web page is here . I have just created a web page devoted to cataloging the closing prices of A-list movies on Ebay. This allows 16mm film collectors a chance to check for availability and approximate market value. Any 16mm film collector who wants to contribute their pricing information to the cause it more then welcome. I will try to incorporate your pricing information on the site.

Allow me to introduce my latest three children. Here are the movies I have won at auction this past week. " North Dallas Forty ", $40. Considered by many to be the greatest football movie ever made. " Mary Poppins ", $250. The classic Disney childrens movie. " ET ", $400. Yep, you heard it right. An excellent condition copy of Steven Spielberg's timeless classic ET, the extraterrestrial. I'm very excited about these additions to my collection. Prices for movies are really quite low this time of year. Everyone seems exhausted from overspending near Christmas last year. Many of these movies are closing for hundreds of dollars less than they have in the past. Hopefully these are all excellent investments. By the way, my showing of "101 Dalmations" turned out great. It was a lot of fun, and much thanks to Rob for showing up with his projector and cartoon short. With these new additions to my collection, I'm looking f

I hate for people to come to my site and see nothing new. So, for your amusement, here are some images taken from the 'Only in America' website.

I feel bad I haven't updated my blog in a while. I just haven't had the time. I am still working on the 'things to do' web page and I'm still very excited about getting it out. However, in the meantime, I can share this one piece of news. If you live in the area and have children you might find this something fun to do. This Saturday, January 18th, we are having a showing of the original '101 Dalmations' . If you are interested in coming, email me and I will give you all of the details.

My new recently found old friend Donna Owens has been coaxed into creating her own blog site . I don't know if she will keep up with it, but reading her first post makes it seem like she found it somewhat theraputic.

Thanks all for the great suggestions folks! I already got a nice list from Lynn Worrell and Stephanie Shaver. I will be building a web page with all of these suggestions, and credit the person who made it on each link. I will also try to provide hyperlinks to any of the activities that have web sites associated with them. Hopefully I will find time to get the activities web page up sometime this weekend. Note that I now have a link and an 'open/closed' sign on my sidebar for that chat rooms. If it says 'open' that means I have the chat client up on my machine and feel free to drop by and say hello if you are visiting the site. Thanks!

Today's Blog post is a request for input. I am going to be creating a 'things to do' web page. I'm tired of doing searches on 'things to do' and getting the same old list of the 5 popular tourist attractions. I'm looking for something broader, and more creative. Something that can grow through time, based on the input of friends and family. This 'things to do' list is focused on things to do as a family, not necessarily as a single person. It does not mean a list of 'chores' to do, it is things you want to do when you have a spot of free time. The catagories are: (1) Things to do inside the house . (Examples, watch a movie, play a musical instrument, play a board game.) (2) Things to do in your immediate area that are relatively inexpensive . (This includes backyard activities like a barbeque, as well as things in your general area like biking on the Katy trail, bowling, etc.. For example, going to a Rascals baseball game is r

I'm really pleased with how some people have responded to my lengthy post and photo-album on the subject of flawed and failed memory. Tracy just updated her blog with a post sharing some of her own thoughts on the subject. And, as I posted earlier, David Metzener started reminiscing as well. I love it when a blog becomes interactive. Speaking of interactive, my chat room is still waiting for a fresh hit.

Short note to anybody who wandered here from the film-center forum. This blog site is really stupid, boring, and personal, and not really about 16mm films. However, because I am a 16mm film collector, I have some links and a couple of blog posts about my experiences and observations with 16mm collecting. I have one blog post about ' how I got into 16mm film collecting ', and another one about my thoughts on what makes a 'good film' to show as a social event . Ignore everything else on the site because you might die from boredom. BTW, just for the heck of it, I'm going to try to keep up my chat rooms when I'm sitting at my computer. Just click on this link if you want to chat about anything on my website . Hey 16mm Doug, sorry I missed you. I was out to lunch. Had my first chat hit and I was AFK. Somebody can ping me any time, I'm here for the rest of the day.

I brief follow-up on the subject of memory. This is just the kind of feedback I was interested in getting. David Metzener sent me this email about his own difficulties with memory and how he reacted to the ancient photographs I have posted. The thing is, they aren't really that ancient. In the mid 80's I worked at St. Louis University Hospital and helped David get on there as well. Later my boss formed a company called 'Cardiosoft' to do biomedical software applications. I hired a kid out of college named "Mark Glaenzer". Mark, Dave, and I all worked on the software project at 'Cardiosoft', which was being done under contract for Biosensor Corporation. Mark Glaenzer went on to Minneapolis to work for Biosensor. I suspect that will be enough to jar Dave's memory loose. I wonder if it's possible to piece back together a lost memory? I think I'm going to attempt to form a basic history of my life. This is something that will be v

I am about to embark on a series of web log posts that are going to be a little bit different. I know who some of my audience is. It is John Obershelp, David Metzener, and some other old and dear friends. However, the main audience for the upcoming posts is myself. I know I'm writing a 'public' journal, but it feels pretty private at times. With a New Year we each tend to do some amount of self-reflection and introspection and I'm no exception. Starting with a dream a few days ago I am, at least temporarily, consumed with a topic which has been a burning interest to both myself and my good friend John Obershelp for some time. The subject I speak of is 'memory'. Neither John or I have one. John is worse off than I am, and I'm pretty bad. Our memory difficulties include short-term, mid-term, and long term. We both feel like there is a hole in our 'whole' lives. Beginning to end. We feel robbed of our own lives to some extent, because we are robbed of o