Back to the work week. Min drove down to Nunda this morning for her interview with Keshequa High School. She said that it went really well. They said that there were really short on subs right now so that it is very likely that she will be called very soon. The board is voting on her on Thursday.
While Min was out, I got a lot of work done. Tons of new software is available today. The big stuff is from the Mozilla project. First the cutting edge Firebird web browser has changed its name to FireFox and is now available in version 0.8. Also Thunderbird, Mozilla’s email client has advanced to version 0.5. Also, a new graphical web authoring tool, NVU, is also out and is based off of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. I was lucky this morning to see that users of NVU were eligible for a free copy of the new Lindows 4.5 Linux operating system. I have been wanting to get a copy for a while to try it out so I am glad that I have one now.
I tried downloading my copy of Lindows today. They say that first impressions are the most important, well here is my first impression. The download site is incredibly busy, and when you go to download a copy of the software, they place you in a queue that you have to wait through before you can begin downloading. That in and of itself isn’t so bad. But the queue is really long. So I waited for six or seven hours in order to begin the download. At 7:15 I attempted to get the download started. The system told me that I didn’t have the right to access the download. And it reloaded the page in such a way that I had no way to back up and start over. So the six hours that I put in waiting for it were wasted and the only thing that I could do was send an email out to their support department and find out that they might get back to me in five business days. That is not very encouraging. So I started the download over again using a different browser to see if that would make a difference. This time when I connected, the queue was at least fifty percent longer than it was before. So now I am waiting for that. It should be ready to start around four or five in the morning.
I had a lunch meeting at the Omega Grill with Joe from The Berry Company to talk about our yellow page ads for the Rochester Southern area phone book. We have two ads going into there in June or so.
Dad came over this afternoon to help out with a few things and then we ordered out some Chinese take out from the Main Moon down on Main St. After dinner, we watched Monsoon Wedding which is still one of my favorite movies. It is a such a beautiful movie through its imagery, story and music.
I moved January over to the archives today. It was a fairly busy month. One of these days I will take the time to look back through all of the archives myself to see where all the time has gone.
I have learned that installing WinZip on Windows XP doesn’t work. You can install it and you can unzip things but it breaks the simple extracting that is built into XP. So you actually lose functionality and simplicity. Integrated decompression is just so handy that once you get used to it, going back to the WinZip style of working with zipped files is just way too cumbersome. Linux showed us how nice it was to have compressed folders work just like regular ones and Microsoft got on the bandwagon and no one will look back now.
Dad liked Monsoon Wedding, believe it or not. We are going to get him into foreign films now 🙂 Dad took off after the film. Min was feeling tired and decided to do some knitting. We watched Bringing Down the House. Min has a lunch meeting tomorrow and I am stuck at home without a car (yes, John Holtz still has my car). So if anyone wants to get lunch with me tomorrow (hint hint) give me a call.
We got Mr. Humpreys out of his cage this evening. We decided that he has been such a good hamster that he should be allowed to run around the house when he wants to. So we put him down on the floor and he went exploring. He disappeared behind the bookcase. We had no idea that there was a space beneath the bookshelf. But Mr. Humphreys went right for it and disappeared. When he finally poked his head back out, he had something huge stuffed in his cheek. He went for his ball that was on the floor and I let him back up into his cage. When he got to his cage, he unloaded part of his chew stick from his cheek. Apparently, when he escaped last week, he took his chew stick with him and stashed it under the bookcase. He left little stashes of food all over the house that we had already found in corners but we had no idea that he had a huge chew stick under the bookcase. We thought that that was really funny.