February 28, 2005

I read until almost 4:00 in the morning last night so I was still asleep fairly late this morning. I was pulling myself out of bed at 10:15 or so when I felt what I was only able to guess was a truck plowing into the side of the house. The entire house shuddered and there was a loud noise. I threw on some jeans and a fleece and ran out into the cold in bare feet looking to see what had happened. It took me almost two minutes to get outside but there was nothing to see. Nothing had evidently touched the house, there was no obvious marks anywhere on it. There were no vehicles anywhere in the area. But then I heard sirens from the direction of downtown. I can only imagine that there was an earthquake, a mine collapse or maybe an explosion. We do live over the salt mine, or almost over it and we do live awfully near a major fault line – so those are real possibilities. I have never felt an earthquake myself and would imagine them to be silent. But maybe they aren’t when they are that strong. Whatever it was woke Min up after only being asleep for two hours. I figured that she would have slept through it but she sure didn’t. She even ended up getting out of bed for a little bit. So, as of now, I have no idea what it was. But I will try to find out and keep you posted.

Well, its official, Rochesterians have gone completely insane and have purchased the fast ferry at federal auction over the weekend. Now the city is burdened with the impossible task of making money with that thing. The mayor really has it in for the city and really appears to be out to ruin it. He knows that that thing can’t make any money and that the city just doesn’t have any infrastructure to support it. But he convinced those loser in the city that they needed it. Ha ha on them, I guess. Doesn’t hurt me, really. The city is going nowhere and if they decide to head more quickly towards bankrupcy, I guess it is no business of mine. It is tough for those of us who live on the outskirts of a city like Rochester because the outlying communities are affected by the collapse of the city. But at least it isn’t my tax money that will be bailing them out.

Today was mostly a slow day. Lots of returning calls. Monday’s are always slow. So are Fridays. It is really amazing that all work in the universe seems to be done from Tuesday through Thursday. How does anything actually get accomplished? I am very thankful for the curtains that Min got for my office, it is now dark down here during the day so that I am able to see my computer screens at any time of the day or night. The curtains in the living room have really made the house feel a lot more like a normal house as well. It was a little bit stark up there before. Hopefully soon we will get our wedding quilt mounted to the large, bare wall. That will really brighten up the room. It will also reduce noise, which as everyone knows, will make me happy.

Min is going to be teaching again on Friday. The school is having a “Winter Fest” day so they don’t have any regular classes but they are having Min teach one or two computer classes that the students will come in for. We don’t know what grades she will have this time yet.

The stats were released today and the Firefox and Mozilla web browsers have garnered 8.45% of the browser market share. That is a really big deal. Internet Explorer has fallen into the high 80%’s. They are losing ground and a phenominal rate. In case anyone hasn’t worked with one of the alternative browsers, I highly recommend making the switch. I use Firefox almost everywhere but I do use Safari on Mac OS X and Konqueror on Linux often as well (Safari and Konqueror are related browsers – both members of the KHTML family.)

Today is more or less Eric’s birthday… Mr. Leapyear himself. It is a strange and morbid coincidence that he has to drive out to Syracuse today to go to the funeral of Amanda’s grandfather who died last week. Amanda’s grandfather’s birthday was also February 29th.

For those who are wondering: There is no AoE2 game this Friday night. But plan on it the following week. Bob Crissman (aka Montana Bob) is planning on getting into the game soon and will be playing remotely from Binghamton. So that will make it easier for us to have get a full house. Bob hasn’t played AoE2 yet (boy is he in for a surprise) but he has played the Star Wars Battlegrounds game that is based on the same engine. I am hoping to have a machine to use other than my laptop by that time. We will see.

The router is still going strong, coming up on 88 hours. Boy is that a relief! I am going to try the risky maneuver of turning the regular logging back on to see if that will bring it down.

I had to do some remote configuration work at Castile today. That is turning into a pretty cool project. Having so many UNIX machines in one place is neat. My dad is so excited that he is probably going to install Linux at home on his main computer (dual boot, that is) and Min wants to make sure that she has access to it as well. We even have some people already looking into installing Linux at home that have kids in the school. How cool is that? I am converting the world very quickly, all of a sudden.

I have been very cold for days. My feet especially have been really cold. This is weird for me. I hope that this isn’t some byproduct of turning 29! Not that I mind being cold compared to being overly warm all of the time. But it is strange that suddenly my feet are always cold. I actually have to put an extra blanket over them when I am sleeping! Me, of all people.

I have a meeting in the afternoon tomorrow so I will be out of the office after lunch. I should be home before lunch.

For those of you who use Niagara Telecom email, I have, I hope, fixed the time and date issue that has been going on for forever. I am anticipating that there will now be a solid timeclock that will keep our mail labelled correctly. This has been an issue for months. It will take some time (ha ha, time) befor we know for sure if it is working or not.

Okay, so here is something weird. I was walking through the basement and the basement lights turned off. Only the three ceiling lights. All of the power in the house stayed on. No other lights were affected, just those three going off all together. They didn’t come back on. So I flipped the switch to off then on and they came back on. But before I could walk back over to my office, they went off again. So I went upstairs to be sure that there was not someone in the house who could be playing a trick on me but there was no one here. Min is fast asleep and no one could get near to the top of the stairs without me hearing them. It is impossible to move around this house without making a lot of noise. So I tried the light switch at the top of the stairs and it did the same thing again. Very strange. Then while I was sitting in my office, I heard a strange sound like some sort of an alarm. As I was listening intently, the house shook again. This time not quite as violent as before. At least, I don’t think that it was. I ran upstairs to see if Min was okay – the sound definitely did not come from the basement. She was still in bed but thought that something must have happened to me. So I ran outside and couldn’t find anything. I could hear a lot of machinery over at the new Walmart contruction site and I could hear what sounded like that alarm coming from some of the equipment. So I am pretty sure that that is the origin of that. I went back into the house and searched high and low for anything that could have been the source of the rumble but failed to find any possibilities. It is very disturbing. Dad said that maybe Walmart was using dynamite and that is the only thing that I can imagine. It is a quick blast that we are feeling. It is very strange.

I had to run out this afternoon to get an oil change for Min. I took a swing past the Walmart construction to see if there was anything visibly going on but I couldn’t see anything to indicate that they were blasting. So I am at a loss. I asked the managed down at Jiffy Lube if we knew about the blasting but he had no idea. I didn’t realize this but Jiffy Lube now carries (at least the one here does) Mobil ONE and they do state inspections. That is really handy to know since I live around the corner from the Jiffy Lube.

I managed to get another computer ready to take to Castile this afternoon. Only one more to do after this and I will be waiting for parts (unless I managed to dig up more computers than I was aware are here.)

Min got up at 5:00 and we decided on left over pizza from Josh’s LotR party and PH&J in case that wasn’t enough. We wanted to watch a movie while we ate dinner – then I realized that I still hadn’t set the theatre back up after having taken it apart to bring over to Josh’s on Saturday. Oh joy unbounded. So another project ensued.

Min and I watched Hildalgo tonight. It has taken us forever to around to watching that. We borrowed it from my dad. The dvd had a really hard time playing but we sort of made it all of the way through just skipping little bits here and there. It was a good movie, we really enjoyed it. A bit long though. Then we watched Shriek if you know what I did last Friday the 13th which was SO awful I can’t even describe it!

Okay, well I have to post very early because Min has to take the laptop to work with her. So I am posting now. Night.

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