October 16, 2003

I had to actually get out of bed this morning because I drove Min into work last night so I had to go pick her up this morning. It is good, though, because it got me up and out of bed at an early hour. I have a lot to do today so I need to get moving. Danielle came over this morning just after we got in because she needed to use the fax machine (it is her fax machine, we just keep it here because we have the handy fax line.) Then she and I headed over to Walmart to pick up more candy for our sales outing tomorrow. Tomorrow we are going after Dansville. We all think that Dansville might end up being a really good market for us. We are hopeful, anyway.

I went out to Perry to work at a client site today. Our first on site work for a client that we have gotten from all of these sales that we have been doing. Hopefully this is a sign that the sales are going to start working now. The work went well and they might even be purchasing a new computer and firewall through us. So we are excited about that too.

I had to stop by in Leicester and get pictures takes of Min’s car for her new insurance since she is now on my insurance policy. It only saves us a tiny bit (but once again, Progressive is cheaper) but it is a lot more convenient to only have to pay a single bill instead of two. We are really bad about getting bills paid so that works out really well.

In technology news today, SuSE is about to release SuSE Linux 9.0. It was supposed to have shipped to people who pre-ordered it yesterday. The Live Evaluation CD is available for download today from SuSE. Everyone is downloading it today so it takes forever. It is a 649MB download. I am excited to see what new stuff SuSE is going to be including in this new package. They have not gone to the 2.6 kernel series yet but there is a preview for the adventurous types. I will stick with 2.4 myself. I can wait for it to be somewhat stable before I spend any amount of time playing with it. I always enjoy getting the newest versions of packages like KDE, though, because they really do make a big difference.

I worked out of the office for the rest of the day. Min and I ran over to Wegmans for a little shopping. I had to drop off a prescription for my foot medication (I can pick it up on Monday) and Min wanted to grab some ingredients. She is cooking again tonight. She is making BBQ Quorn chicken with salad and oven roasted potatoes and shallots. She is baking dessert too! Boy it is nice to get home cooked meals. Now that we finally have our own kitchen and a dining room table, we are starting to really eat. Eric decided that it just sounded too good and since Amanda already ate without him he decided to come over and join us for dinner. Then Amanda decided that she wanted to come over too.

Min made dinner and then Eric and I ran over to Wegmans to get some missing ingredients so that Min could make chocolate chip cookies. Min and Amanda baked and Eric and I put in Father Ted: Series III. This is the last series that Eric and Amanda haven’t seen yet. We watched a couple of episodes and then everyone was ready for bed. Even Mr. Humphreys who hasn’t been active for days. I hope that he isn’t trying to hibernate or something. He hasn’t run in his wheel as far as we know since we added his new cage. He did venture out around his home tonight but he didn’t spend anytime outside of his little hiding place. He doesn’t appear to be sick but he isn’t acting normal. Not normal for him nor normal for hamsters in general. We are starting to get a little bit worried about him.

Frontier finally showed up this morning to deliver our new line. We have been waiting for our SDSL line to be installed since June. The original install date was July 23rd and obviously, we missed that one by a bit. Today the line was run but who knows how long it will be before the DSL is actually usable. Choice One still has to come out and test the line and deliver my DSL Modem to me (I paid for it in June and have been waiting for it to show up all this time.) So it might be a while before we can actually use the line. Which is okay for now since we haven’t gotten the electrical lines run in the basement yet, but it will be important pretty soon. We were also supposed to see someone today because our laundry room wall is all ripped up from the plumber having worked in there this week. We thought that the wall was going to be patched today but no one showed up. Just another thing that I will have to call about and see what is going on. There is just always something.

Tonight while I was working on the update, we lost our Internet access. I am not sure what is going on. The network is acting really funny. For a little while I was able to contact our servers but I couldn’t bring up any web pages. So I restarted everything. But now I am not able to get out onto the Internet at all. I am assuming that it is Frontier that is having the problem but I am not sure. There seems to be a hardware problem with my firewall. One of the ethernet cards seems to be acting strangely. It is possible that one of the cards just got wiggled a little bit too much in the day to day bumping of the machine since it sits right in the middle of a major walking path to my desk.

I watched The Return of the Pink Panther this evening and worked on Min’s computer. I almost have her new Shuttle XPC all put together. It is a really nice chassis, I am really impressed so far. There is a place for everything in that tiny box. I haven’t had a chance yet to see how well it does with being quiet and cool but I am hopeful.

I had this update all ready to be posted during the night but Frontiernet has been down all night. Danielle called to say that the dial-up service was out from them as well. So apparently they are having a rather widespread issue. Mr. Humphreys did eventually go out and explore his new cage areas and he even started running in his wheel. I think that he has a very variable schedule that is hard for us to follow. He sometimes gets up at 7:00 pm to start moving around and at other times he isn’t active until after midnight. It is strange that his schedule varies that much but I suppose that is okay. He does get woken up all throughout the day and that might have an affect on it as well.

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