February 21, 2003

Our last day of our second week in Schenectady. After having fallen to only being able to install six computers yesterday (that is two each, down from 3+ each that we were able to do for the first week,) we are looking forward to a slow day in Rotterdam Junction. The elevator was still broken today so we had to move computers up and down the stairs again manually for the third day in a row. But boy are we getting our exercise. However, they now know that we aren’t able to do as many machines as we used to be able to so we are only taking four computers (down from ten) over to the new site because we have extras already over there. We are only scheduled to do six computers today so it should be a short day.

The installs went quickly and more or less smoothly and we were ablet to escape by 1:00 pm and grab some lunch before hitting the road to head back to Ithaca. We got back to Ithaca at 5:30 and managed to have an entire evening at home.

Min is feeling much better. Her back still hurts a lot and she is still on medication. She is able to get around, now, which is a huge improvement. We were able to go down to the theatre and watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding and most of Amelie. I hope to be able to finish watching Amelie tomorrow. So far, it is really good.

I forgot to tell the story about going to Borders on Tuesday. On Tuesday morning I got a call from Borders saying that my special order had arrived. You will remember this special order, the one that they illegally told me that I had to make because they were unwilling to refund my money for a defective product that I was then later able to cancel because the special order item arrived and they hadn’t told me about it and put it on a shelf for someone else to buy. So I had to go in an explain for the fifth time what had happened. At least they didn’t already have my money this time so I was in control. But what an incredible pain. It took such an obscene number of screw ups to get to where we were at that point. Totally frustrating. It is amazing that they are able to functin day to day at all.

The rest of the January Dailies have been moved over to the Archives. Loopy has discovered a new program called PNGCrush that is supposed to do a really good job of reducing the sizes of PNG images so I am anxious to give it a try and see what we can do with the site to get some faster downloads (since I have been working from a laptop over dialup in a hotel room for two weeks, I am even more into reducing the time it takes to bring up these pages.) I have also been out trying to find a scanner so that we can input more images to put up on the site. I know that there aren’t all that many right now but I am working on it. My last scanner was really nice and only cost me about $30 but now I can’t find one that I want for less that $200. That really sucks. I want one that is nice and has specific support for scanning slides and negatives because normal scanners don’t do that very well.

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