April 14, 2006: Good Friday and Errands

Happy Good Friday.

I got up with Min this morning and we had breakfast with dad before Dominica had to go to work. There was some confusion about the timing of breakfast so dad and I ended up going to the Omega Grill at 8:40 and Dominica joined us about half an hour later. We ate breakfast and then Dominica headed up to the city for work. No holidays in the photo business.

Dad and I went up to the city to look at a 1988 Chevy Cavalier Z24 convertible that dad had seen at a dealer there. Dominica has really been on a convertible kick and has been looking at quite a few of them. We wanted to check this one out so dad went up with me to look at it and to run some errands. We looked at the car and thought that it looked interesting so we called Dominica at work and let her know that she should come down on her lunch break and take it for a test drive.

Dad and I swung by the hospital and picked up Eric and the three of us went over to Jay’s Diner to get some lunch. Eric had an older laser printer for me to take to New Jersey to use as my printer down there. That works out really well because I didn’t have any printer earmarked to go down there with me and now I will have a decent, high volume laser printer that won’t cost me a fortune to use. Not that I have any printing plans while I am there but things always come up.

After lunch Dad, Eric and I all went down to the dealer and met Dominica. We took the car for a drive and looked it over carefully. The price was pretty good but we decided that with the amount of rust that it had in bad locations and with the condition of the engine that it just wasn’t going to be a safe purchase so we decided against it.

Min returned to work as did Eric. Dad and I ran around running errands here and there. It was pretty late in the afternoon, around 4:00, when he got down to Geneseo to drop me off. At least Oreo got to have a fun day riding around in the car.

Asterisk@Home 2.8 was released today. I have been waiting for this most recent version to be announced as I am in the process of working on my Asterisk server and wanted some of the features, such as FreePBX, that are available in this latest version. Asterisk@Home is an amazing VoIP product that anyone looking to build their own telephone system should seriously consider. It is the perfect product for a lot of smaller or even decently sized businesses. Very few smaller businesses that I work with have a phone system that even begins to touch the power of Asterisk@Home. It is such a great product that I think that a lot of people should run it at home too. That probably explains its name. But since it is free and so easy to work with (relatively speaking, of course) there are a lot of techie people out there that could use this at home and have an awesome multi-extension phone system with really great and useful features.

Finally the commuting video that I made on April 4th has made it onto OurMedia and you can now check it out. It ended up getting posted twice, after all of that effort, and so I had to delete one. It is unforunate when that happens because the one that I deleted had been watched thirteen times so far. That means that about thirty five people had watched the video before I was even aware that it had been posted or had posted a link to it. Not too bad.

I spent most of the evening working on setting up my new desktop so that it will be ready for the apartment. I have been working from a laptop and Dominica’s desktop for the last several months or maybe over a year now and I will most definitely need my own desktop down in New Jersey. I got the same model that Dominica has but mine is the small form factor which is much more attractive. I am really excited about my new 20.1″ LCD monitor. The 1600×1200 resolution is awesome.

Besides setting up the desktop I also worked hard on the Asterisk server – the same one that has been such a pain for such a long time. I made some real progress tonight but basically I have discovered that the latest version of AAH, Asterisk@Home, which is 2.8 doesn’t set up extensions correctly and just nothing works with it. I tried working with it for quite a while and finally decided that I just needed to fall back to the last version, 2.7. The older version works like a charm. I had been hoping to have gotten some of the features from the latest edition but I guess that I will just have to wait for those until a future version is releases.

Dominica got home and we watched an episode of Remington Steele before going to bed. We are over halfway through the second season now.

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