Sheep Guarding Llama

First of all we have to celebrate a little today because I finally had a chance to do a word count again after quite some time and SGL has significantly surpassed the King James Bible in length! We are just a day or two away from topping 800,000 words. That is a lot of writing.

I had to get up quite early this morning and take Dominica to work. Her car needed new tires for the summer as she is was still driving on her winter Nokian snow tires and that was getting us bad gas mileage, bad handling and burning up her expensive winter tires. So I drove her to work at 8:00 in the morning. I was not very thrilled about getting up that early on Saturday. We had to be up around 7:00 🙁

I got her to work at 9:00 and then I ran over to Tim Horton’s on Ridgeway to get bagles and muffins for her and her coworkers. Normally she grabs the goodies in Geneseo before she goes in on Saturday.

I hung out at Fujifilm for about half an hour. Then I drove down to Henrietta and dropped off her car at Dunn Tire. I had called ahead and had ordered her tires yesterday afternoon so that I knew that they would be ready for us. It is a pain because both of our cars have really odd sized tires and it makes it really difficult to find any. Our selections are never good. Luckily Dunn was able to find her some nice B.F. Goodrich tires that will work well for her and should last for a while.

By the time I got the car in and everything taken care of it was around 10:30. Andy came by and picked me up so that we could go out and get some breakfast. He was running a little late because he had his fourth kidney stone this morning! He is in really rough shape.

We had breakfast at Jay’s Diner around 11:00. We haven’t seen each other in about a month. I know, tons of my readers only see me every six months at best.

I found out that Min’s car needed more work done than we had anticipated and so it ended up taking all day. I dropped it off just after 10:00 and wasn’t able to get it until 4:00. Her front suspension needed a lot of work. Nothing outrageous, just the result of being a car with almost 70,000 miles on it. But, including the tires, it ended up being almost $1,100 which was a bit more than I had anticipated paying.

It turned out to be a really good thing that I had Andy pick me up and didn’t attempt to just sit at the shop while they did the tires. That would have been awful. After lunch we went back to Andy’s apartment in Brighton and I installed his new IP phone in his office. Then we just hung around for a while. Andy’s little sister Lindsay came over around 2:00.

Andy drove me out to the bank so that I could take care of making a deposit of my paycheck since I have not yet had any chance to set up direct deposit. That is a real pain. It will be nice when that is working again.

At 4:00 Andy ran me back over to Dunn Tire so that I could pick up the car. I drove back down to Geneseo and swung into the house for about fifteen minutes to take care of a few things and then I had to run down to Leicester to pick up Oreo from dad because dad was down there having dinner. Oreo was very happy to get to go home with his daddy. I also managed to pick up the HP D325 desktop that I was buying off of Jeremy while I was there. One less thing to have to deal with tomorrow. Art was just dropping Jeremy off just before I was leaving so I go to see him for about fifteen minutes.

Then it was back home for my longest stretch of the day – forty five minutes. That was my entire, relaxing Saturday at home. My only day without traveling or work. What a busy day. I just sat in the office and talked to Min over AIM and played with Oreo.

At 7:15 I had to pack little Oreo into the car and drive up to pick Dominica up from work. She was waiting outside for us when we got there and we drove down to Henrietta and we got a late dinner from Bill Gray’s restaurant on Jefferson Road. That was really tasty. We don’t eat there often enough although the prices are pretty high so it is probably best. We got some frozen Abbott’s custard too.

After dinner we went to Buffalo Wild Wings with a bunch of Dominica’s coworkers. Apparently they go there fairly often. We stayed for several hours and they even goaded me into getting up and singing “Come Crying to Me” by Lonestar.

Today is my driving back to Geneseo day. My first time back in three weeks! That is kind of weird, isn’t it?

I got into work this morning kind of early to make sure that I would have an easy time not staying late tonight. I don’t want to stay late on driving days.

I left the office at 5:00 and got stuck in bumper to bumper stop and go traffic for quite a while – pretty much until I got out to Pennsylvania. From there on the traffic was light and I made really good time up to Binghamton.

In the Binghamton area I had to stop off in Endicott to pick up some stuff from John Stephens (aka The Surfing IT Wizard) before heading home. He was borrowing our digital camera and Dominica is going to need that on Monday because she is doing a job in Syracuse. I stopped at McDonald’s and got some quick dinner. As I pulled back out onto Main Street I got pulled over for making a left onto Main St. What a pain. The cop was really nice and didn’t give me a real ticket, though.

It was around 11:00 when I got to the house. Dominica pulled in just minutes behind me with Oreo. He had been with dad all day and she had stopped at dad’s house to pick him up on her way home from work.

I was really exhausted and pretty much went straight to bed.

I am glad that I got to bed a little early last night. I felt pretty good this morning.

I had a nice drive into work and today, for the most part, is a relaxing day. Not relaxing because there is nothing to do but relaxing because there is a good level of things to be done. Enough to keep me working but not enough to make me sweat.

Tomorrow I am driving back to Geneseo after work. My first time back in three weeks! I think that this has been the longest stretch away from the house since we bought it in July, 2003. It will be weird to be back at the house. Not that I am going to get to see it any. I am working in Rochester on Saturday for TMobile out at the Pittsford Plaza and hopefully going to Dunn Tire and getting new tires mounted on Min’s car before she has to do any additional long distance driving. That will eat up my entire day. Then I come back down to New Jersey on Sunday afternoon. So it will be a very short weekend for me. I will be plenty exhausted come Monday morning.

At least I do get to pick up my “new” computer on Sunday. I bought Jeremy’s HP D325 off of him. He is getting the new parts for his new machine delivered on Monday, he thinks. This will be his first attempt at building his own machine so it will probably prove to be quite the adventure for him. His friend Ben is going to come over and help him get it together.

After work I came home and just relaxed. I watched some more Remington Steele and broke down and ordered a pizza from Dominos. The Sicilian pizza that I ordered the other night was awful and I decided to just through it away rather than to suffer through it. I won’t be getting pizza from that place anymore. It is too bad because they have good prices and fast, friendly service. They do have a wide Italian menu so once in a while I will probably get something else from there.

Today was my insanely early day. I was up and out of bed at 4:30 in the morning. Way too early for the likes of me. This is the earliest that I have had to have gotten up since starting in New Jersey. I am glad that I don’t have to do this all of the time.

I was out the door just before 5:45 and arrived at the office in Warren just after 6:15. That is the fastest that I have ever made that commute. That was awesome driving all that way without any real traffic. I wish that it could be like that everyday.

I had about half an hour to kill so I went down to the pond with the fountains in front of the building and sat there with the ducks and checked my email on my BlackBerry. It was very pleasant out and the ducks were having a good time swimming around the two big fountains there.

I got on the Manhattan shuttle at 6:45. It took a little more than an hour to get into the city via US78 and the Holland Tunnel. The drive was a bit worrisome as the transmission was dying in the shuttle and we really thought that the shuttle was going to die at any moment and leave us stranded in the middle of the highway. But the transmission held and we arrived just fine. The poor driver had to take that piece of junk all the way back out to Warren before he could have it repaired. That had to be really bad. I didn’t hear whether or not he made it.

The shuttle dropped us off downtown and we had to take the subway up to midtown to the SUN event. This is only the second time that I have ever ridden the New York subway if I remember correctly. I am not very enthralled with subways so it is possible that I have ridden it more than I think. I really don’t remember but it hasn’t been very much. I have ridden the Washington and Toronto subways so much that I really don’t remember the NYC one. It sure isn’t as nice as either Washington or Toronto though.

We got up to the Parker Le Meridian Hotel for the event in plenty of time and had quite some time to just sit around having breakfast and talking. I stayed at the event until about noon. I had planned on staying later but there wasn’t a lot of stuff that I wanted to see and I didn’t want to spend the entire day there if possible.

My the time that I got back to Columbus Circle to catch the subway at 59th I discovered the station entrance had been closed so I ended up walking around quite a bit and finally deciding to take a different line from 57th which dropped me off quite a bit farther away from the shuttle pick up than I had been planning on. So I did a bit more walking to get back to the shuttle and ended up missing it by minutes. So I was stuck in Manhattan for an hour with nothing to do.

So I decided to get some lunch and a beer. I walked over to the Greenwich Street Pub and got some Bass Ale and some fish and chips. It was nice to get a chance to just sit and relax for an hour with absolutely nothing to do at all. I used my BlackBerry to keep up with everyone via email.

I caught the 2:00 shuttle back to Warren. On the way back the driver had the misfortune to have a piece of the ceiling of the shuttle come lose and swing down and nail him in the nose while he was driving. To make matters worse it continued to swing in front of him practically blinding him. Someone at the front of the shuttle jumped up and grabbed the loose piece and pulled it out of the way so the driver could safely get the shuttle over to the side of the road. It had hit him hard enough to have given him a nose bleed.

I went into the office for a little while but not too long and then headed back to the apartment. I spent quite a bit of the evening working from home so it wasn’t like having the evening off. I worked until almost 8:00. I popped in Remington Steele and watched a couple of episodes while I did a few things. I experimented with using rsync as a remote backup system to see how that would fare against Microsoft’s backup system. Tomorrow I hope to try out some speed tests to see how it works performance wise.

I also got a chance to finally install Solaris 10 on my SUN SparcStation that I got two weeks ago. I had accidentally left the house for the unit at home and was not able to do the install without it. Dominica had brought that down for me so I finally got to do that. Now the machine is finally working and useful. I am looking forward to getting to play with that.

I got to bed at a reasonable hour – just a little after 10:30. But I was pretty tired.

Have you ever wanted to know more about spelling bees? I thought that you did. I mean really, who doesn’t? Check out this great blog posting on Spelling Bee Winning Word Reporting in the Media. It really helps illustrate how pointless reporting often is – even in such simple things as spelling bees.

I was pretty tired this morning and decided that I needed to sleep in a little bit more than usual. So I wasn’t out of bed until almost 7:30. Yesterday was so slow that I figured that there wouldn’t be very much going on this morning and I was right.

By mid-morning I was swamped with work though and it ended up being a really busy day. Tomorrow I am going to a show being put on by SUN Microsystems in Manhattan. I am really going this time unlike the last event. That will be somewhat interesting but not very. It is neat that I get to go into New York City finally but that, again, is only so interesting. It isn’t like I haven’t been there before. The show is going to take up the entire day. The downside is that I have to be at the office at 6:45 in the morning to be able to catch the shuttle that runs from the office into the city. That is nice because I don’t have to drive in the city or do anything extra but it means that I have to commute for a total of almost four hours tomorrow which is going to make for a really long day. Especially that early in the morning – I am going to be struggling big time just to stay away. At least SUN feeds us.

Dominica came up and met me at the Thai House for our regular Tuesday lunch. We are all ready old regulars at the Thai House and they are expecting us. Dominica left for Geneseo around 2:10. This is the first time that she has been down here that she has been able to drive straight back without needing to stop in Endicott on the way to drop something off or to pick something up from John Stephens – The Surfing IT Wizard.

I was exhausted after having had a busy morning and between that and the large Thai lunch I had a very sleepy afternoon. I really wanted to get some chocolate to get some caffeine into me but there was nothing that I wanted from the vending machine for $.75 or less and I didn’t have any more change than that and I didn’t have anything smaller than a $5.00 bill so I was kind of stuck. Back to tea as my core caffeine source.

Foiled again! They have run out of regular tea and only the decaf stuff is left! It’s a sleep afternoon for me.

Have I mentioned that Nintendo has decided that its next generation (or, since the XBOX 360 has been out for some time I guess it is correctly called a THIS generation) console isn’t revolutionary enough for its old, and by now well established, name and has decided to appropriately rename it the Wii. The Wii? As in, Wii bother buying one? Wii should we care if they are making a new console? Wii would I spend my money on it? Yup. Wii. Apparently Wii is Japanese for “Americans are idiots.”

Or even worse they might try to convince us that it is a misspelling of “wee”. As in “this is likely to be a piss poor console”. Or “I drank eight Mt. Dews while playing my Nintendo and now I need to Wii.” Or maybe they are trying to draw on the marketing power of Gonads and Strife.

In either case, do you really think that adults are going to go down to the local video game store and when the kid behind the counter asks them what they wants that they will work themselves up into a frenzy and in their best squirrel imitation voice say “Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii”. No, I think the embarrasment alone will cause them to say “An XBOX 360, please.” The real question is “Wii would wii want that?”

Apparently Nintendo’s next (and by next I mean for the generation after now) generation console will be called the Tuurd and Nintendo’s marketing department will make some claim that the name is all out “You” and engineering’s job will be to make it live up to its name. Wii?

Here is some cool news: Lego is open sourcing the firmware for Lego Mindstorms. Cool.

In addition to AOL’s in2TV service (which I managed to exhaust of shows that both looked interesting to watch AND actually worked within three days – except for Babylon 5 which I am interested in checking out as I have never seen it,) ABC has launched their own, free, streaming television system. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet but it could be interesting. The biggest question will be what content do they plan to make available?

In archealogical news, it looks like the world’s largest pyramid may have been discovered in Bosnia. It is believed to be 722 feet tall which is one third taller than the great pyramid of Giza in Egypt. If it turns out to be real, this is a truly amazing find. Satellite imaging suggests that there may be two other, smaller pyramids near by.

The end of an era has come. The US Military has started replacing expensive human trumpet players with “bugle bots“. These are tiny little speaker/amp compos that actually fit into the horn of a bugle (I am sure this is where all of those cheap, practice bugles start coming in handy) and play taps for you. How wonderful – a military funeral with a RECORDING of taps and some guy in a uniform holding the tape player and doing the army’s rendition of “air guitar”. How embarassing!

AntiVirus software vendor McAfee has an online Spyware quiz. The results of this quiz show that at least 65% of respondants are unable to identify spyware when surfing online. This does not refer to viruses or worms or other malicious code that is infecting your computer against your will but is refering to software that users voluntarily install onto their computers. Of course, does McAfee really know what is and isn’t spyware? This is the same vendor who thought that Microsoft SQL Server and other major products were viruses and their own AntiVirus product has been labeled one of the most devastating malwares of the year! Anyway, if you are quiz happy feel free to take the quiz yourself and see how you do.

I talked to Min at 6:00. She was approaching Corning and should be home in about an hour. I am still at work. Tonight needs to be a relaxing night for me. I am tired all ready and tomorrow I have to be up around 4:30 to be able to make it into work on time to catch the shuttle. So I am going to duck out of here a little on the early side and spend the evening just relaxing. I will probably watch an episode or two of Remington Steele and have a snack. I am feeling a little hungry all ready. I am going to post early today since I know that I am not going to feel like writing once I get back and I could easily not have any time tomorrow to work on the site. So don’t be surprised if there is not another update until Thursday morning. I may not even be in “my office” tomorrow at all. I have no idea how late it will be by the time we actually return from Manhattan. It might not be all that late or it could easily be very late.

Fortunately I have no pressing work on the dockit for this evening. So I can just head for the apartment and relax. I am really glad that I got so much done on Saturday that I am in a position to not have to do anything tonight. Nothing even hanging over my head! What a nice change. I didn’t know that I was going to be going to the SUN show tomorrow until this morning so it kind of caught me by surprise. I knew that there was a show coming up but I didn’t know when and I didn’t figure that I was going to be going to it. I will appreciate the change of pace. I like mixing things up and keeping work fresh. I think that it will be a mildly fun day.