December 14, 2005

Today was my usual Wednesday morning disaster. Because Tuesday is Microsoft’s security patch day there are always consequences to be dealt with on Wednesday.

Dad decided to not try to make the movie today and that he wants to wait until next week to try to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At least that makes my schedule today a whole lot easier.

I had a lot of miscellaneous work to do around the house today. Dad is getting my old laptop and I got that ready for him last night but then decided that I should get SUSE Linux 10 installed on it as well under the Microsoft Virtual PC so that he will have a full blown Linux environment to play with as well without having to resort to a weird Live CD. Since he is going to be teaching computers down at Castile he is going to need to be really familiar with the system that we use. He really hasn’t worked with Linux before so it is going to be a little bit of a shift for him.

One time when I took Oreo outside today to do his business he spotted a neighbor dog in the backyard of a house out on Lima Road and he took off like a rocket to go after that dog. I saw him look and lurch and I was about as ready as I could possibly be. I took off after him as quickly as I could. I had no coat on and no shoes either. Fortunately I was wearing my rubber soled slippers or it would have been really bad. Oreo wasn’t wearing a coat and he got cold really quickly or I would never have managed to catch him. He is so much faster than I am. He is a really fast little dog. He stopped before leaving the “yard” that is associated with our complex but that was still way too far for him to be away from the house. He knew that he was in trouble when I showed up to get him. He humbly followed me back to the house and was frozen by the time we got back. He was shaking and his feet were really cold.

Today I managed to get a new web server built and working. One of the most exciting things about it is that it is shortly going to be the new host for SGL! I have all ready begun the very lengthy and tiring process of moving the site from the current hand coded XHTML over to WordPress. It is going to be a really immense effort when all is said and done but I really think that the end results are going to be worth it. The new site is going to give us a lot of site automation which means I don’t have to spend so much time writing about how much time I spend writing the site. We will have a search function. The site will change its look and feel more often and with less hassle. Updates will be able to be made while travelling more easily. Bloggers will be able to link directly to a particular article instead of having to just link to the site or to the archived season. The site will automatically notify search engines when there are updates. Registered users will be able to leave comments on the site. I hope to be integrating the podcast and the vlog as well. RSS and Atom feeds will be automatic. In short, lots of new features. It is really exciting. Oh, I almost forgot. The new site engine will also turn all of my little 🙂 into actual smiley faces. Isn’t that just nifty keen?

At 5:45 Oreo and I bundled into the car to head out into the cold. I am meeting someone up at Eric’s office to give them a tour of Eric’s facility and to show them the Waste Watcher in action. I got up there right on time but discovered to my horror that my cell phone had crashed and was “on” but not able to make or receive calls. Poop. I ended up having to pull the battery out of it to be able to get it to shut off. Once I got it restarted I found that I had missed a few calls. The person that I was supposed to meet had locked herself out of her house and was not going to be able to make it to meet me this evening. Oreo was quite happy with this change of events. We drove back down to Geneseo and we swung into the Quality Inn to hang out with Mary for a little while before going back home.

Dominica got home from work and we did some Christmas card duties and ate out late night snacks while we watched some of the second season of Chef! which we are really enjoying. That is a really good show. Any BBC fans who have not yet seen it should be sure to make a point of checking it out.

Leave a comment