Sheep Guarding Llama

It is my birthday. I am thirty. Thirty years old. Old old old.

I got up at 8:00 this morning because it is Saturday and old people don’t sleep in on Saturdays like they do when they were young, say, in their twenties. I got up and I read Baseline Magazine. I read an article on Bearing Point the financial consulting group and their failure to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley which is a cruel twist of fate for them since they are a SarbOx consultancy. Sounds like light reading for someone so OLD… doesn’t it?

Dominica left for work at 9:00. It is just Oreo and I for my birthday. Dad and I are going to do lunch later on. Min’s parents are coming down tomorrow and we are going to have cheesecake then. So I have house cleaning to do today. The house isn’t bad now but there is always more work to be done.

Dad and I did lunch over at the Omega at 11:30. For my birthday he got me a remote controlled lighting “system” for the basement theatre. Strangely enough he happened to pick out the exact same unit that I had looked at just a few weeks ago at an electrical supply store in Buffalo so I knew the unit instantly. Not the kind of technology that I am usually associated with. Hopefully we will be doing some work in the theatre in the near future. It would be really nice to get that moving forward.

Oreo is feeling sick again today. He is not has bad as he was a week ago but he is not nearly as good as he has been for the last several days. Maybe the change in the weather today is affecting him. He seems to be in some pain. He is restless and walking around the house. He doesn’t want to play. Hopefully this is just a bad day and not a relapse.

One of my larger current projects is an updated email system. I have completely built, from “scratch” if you will (from a system engineering standpoint not from a developer’s standpoint) the last two email systems that we have used and I have become a little bit of an expert when it comes to flexible email. It is unbelievable how much work goes into having a stable email environment with all of the necessary features. The time has come to begin looking into options for a new system. So I am in the process of building a demo server to test out some options. It is a tremendously daunting task but email is such a critical piece of our operations and really of any company’s operations that it really is worth all of the work that it entails. So today saw me putting many hours of work into getting the demo up and running.

I put in a bit of time working on getting updates into the movie database system. Eventually I couldn’t handle starring at the monitor anymore so I decided to switch monitors and watch a movie in the living room with Oreo. So I popped in Foul Play with Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase from 1978. I was expecting this to be a really bad movie but it wasn’t bad at all. It was actually quite enjoyable. It was cute with a tiny bit of action. Maybe a little too drawn out but it was an early film for both actors and they both did a good job. In fact I think that it might be one of my all time favourite roles for Chevy Chase.

Dominica was going to bring home dinner tonight but the weather has gotten really bad so she is going to come straight home instead. I ordered pizza from Mama Mia’s which we haven’t had in a while. She let me have my favourite pizza because it is my birthday. Normally we have to get Walmart or Pizza Pauls because she doesn’t like Mia’s style.

Oreo finally killed his green moon binky tonight. He has had that binky since the summer. It has far outlasted any of his other toys. It just kept going and going. It was really expensive compared to his regular binkies but it proved to be well worth the investment. Normally they only last him a month or so. Once he manages to tear into one he decides that the stuffing must come out so he proceeded to rip the moon apart and make a mess in the dining room.

We ate pizza while watching Growing Pains upstairs. After eating we moved down to the theatre and watched the final episodes of Firefly. It is very sad that we don’t have any more Firefly to watch. That really was a great show. Thanks to Wil Wheaton for recommending it and John Stephens, the Surfing IT Wizard, for bringing up his copy and getting us hooked on it. While we watched the show Dominica made me cookies for my birthday as well.

Oreo ended the day feeling pretty well. I think we managed to get by with him only have the one brief bad spell in the middle of the day. It is bound to happen from time to time. Hopefully not very often. He appeared to recover pretty quickly today.

Overall it was a rather uneventful birthday. I didn’t even leave the house to go any farther than the diner around the corner. I guess this is what happens when you get older. Home seems more and more appealing. I wonder if fifteen year olds would feel the same way about staying home if they owned their own homes? It is overwhelmingly the case that I like just being home far more now that I own a house than ever before. Having an apartment had the same effect but not to the same level. I guess when you own the home there is a sense of permanense and anything that you do that improves the house whether it is adding on, changing, improving, cleaning or decorating takes on a different meaning than that same activity did when it was a place that wasn’t your own. A house seems like something that you will always have even if it is pretty unlikely to be the case.

It is weird, in some ways, to think of this house as anything more than just an apartment. Having never lived in anything but apartments before the idea of owning a place where you can live is a little foreign to me. But in other ways the idea of ever leaving this house seems even more strange. It kind of seems as if buying a house is a commitment not easily walked away from. Unlike an apartment with rent the house doesn’t have an annual renewal or a landlord or anything. Any of the objects or events that create constant reminders of the temporal nature of apartments are lacking when you live in a house that you own. It really is quite different.

Well, I can’t stay up late tonight. It is two o’clock in the morning as I write this and everyone knows that once you are in your thirties you can’t be staying up past midnight anymore. We have to be to Sunday School in the morning and I will be needing a full night’s sleep so that my body can repair itself from a full day of being awake. Church is at 10:00. We should be home just after 11:00. Then it is a little panic cleaning and then Dominica’s parents are due to arrive a little after noon. Dominica said something about having cake in the middle of the afternoon but I don’t know if she has talked to anyone about that or not. With the snow coming down the way it is right now, though, we aren’t totally sure whether or not anyone is going to be travelling tomorrow. It has been windy and snowy here pretty much all day.

I was up and at’m this morning. Dad called before I left the house to let me know that the server was down at the school again. I had actually seen that last night and knew that it was down. They have so many power issues in that town. I swear that the power must go off at least twice a week down there.

I arrived at the school around 9:30 or a little later today. Dad was teaching when I got there. He managed to get three classes in today. Pretty good for a Friday. I did some playing with the Asterisk server that I have been working on while I was there. I managed to get an IP phone to work from the school back to the office and the sound quality was great even over the multiple asymmetrical links and the VPN. You couldn’t tell that there was a VPN in the middle at all. I was very impressed. This system is going to work really well once I manage to get all of the kinks worked out of it. That will take some time. There is a lot to be learned. It is definitely keeping me busy.

My Aunt Sharon is teaching art classes at the school for the seventh through twelth grades and today is her first day at the schoo. The juniors and seniors were out on a field trip today so she just had the lower four grades. Apparently it went really well. She really enjoyed herself today.

Dad, Aunt Sharon and I all went out to Lorraine’s for lunch. We all got the Friday fish fry. Wow was that good. I was not prepared for their fish fry to be so good but it might just be the best fish fry that I have ever had. I am not afraid to say that that fish fry had to have been better than the amazing fish and chips that Dominica and I got several times while we were down in Walt Disney World. No kidding. I am going to be getting the fish fry in Castile quite a bit more often from now on.

I left the school a little on the early side this afternoon so that I could get home to be with Oreo. I was still too late though and he had made a mess on the floor again. We think that it might be his new diet. He just doesn’t have the same amount of time between “trips outside” that he used to have. But, other than that, Oreo seems to be feeling really well. Today he wanted to play just like he used to. He has all kinds of energy and is acting like his old self. We are thrilled with the progress that he has been making. While playing with him today I managed to get his green, moon shaped binky stuck on the ceiling fan.

The vet finally called near 6:00 to let us know Oreo’s blood test results from the sample that they sent to Cornell last week. It turns out that he does not have a thyroid condition. So we don’t know exactly what that means. The doctor thinks that there is a good chance that he simply susceptible to having high blood fat content and that the diet might make the difference. So Oreo is going to be on this prescription, low fat diet (Dr. Hill’s W/D) and we are going to have his blood checked again in April to see what kind of progress we have been making. Apparently they think that the diet alone has a very good chance of taking care of the problem. So far so good so who are we to argue.

Dominica found this hilarious online article on dealing with a monk infestation.

Sorry to anyone who was trying to listen to the Ogg Vorbis version of the SGL Podcast Episode 45. Somehow the file that was sent to OurMedia was bad and it was useless. I got that fixed tonight.

Tonight is a really busy night for me even though nothing is really going on. I have three big projects that I have been working on that I am trying to make some progress with plus Oreo is making a pretty heavy demand on my time now that he is feeling better. He has this thing about bugging me to play fetch with him but only playing for two or three throws and then wanting to be on his own. But that only lasts a minute because then he wants to play again. I think he learned this behaviour from the hamster. Plus, I have lots of little things that I need to get taken care of for people that I have not had a chance to get to all week. Not to mention SGL updates that need to be taken care of. Thank goodness for Saturdays or I would never be able to get anything done. I really appreciate being able to work on days when it is almost impossible for a customer to call me.

I have managed to do a bit of ready this past week or so. I finally completed reading “The Object Oriented Though Process, Second Edition” which I started quite some time ago. And I read the new O’Reilly book “Asterisk” in just two days. I am currently forcing myself through “Database Systems” which is a super technical book that I can barely get through but I am learning so I am trying to keep at it. I need to force myself to read more books. I have so many magazines that I get all of the time that they distract me quite a bit and I never feel that I can spend any time away from the computer so books tend to take a back seat to everything else. But I really do, generally, get a tremendous amount of value out of them. So I need to just make more time for them is the bottom line.

I had three students at school today start blogs although I am not sure that any of them really grasp the purpose and they are just doing it because it is the “cool” thing to do. If they actually start posting to their blogs I will give you some links.

Art and Danielle are hosting the youth group that is doing the 30 Hour Famine this year. The kids are all over at their house this evening and then they are splitting up and the boys are spending the night at the Ralstons and the girls are going down to Perry.

I ordered Dominica the third season of Gilmore Girls because she wouldn’t stop whining about it. I have no idea why she likes that show so much but she is totally addicted to it. So that is on its way from Amazon and should be here in the middle of next week.

By 8:30 my brain was pretty much burned out and I needed to take a break. I gave up on working on the Asterisk box for the day and decided to just spend some time working on the movie database system. That isn’t stressful at this point and is pretty relaxing. It is at a point where it is easy to see real progress happening without me having to put in lots and lots of brain-busting work.

I took all of the reviews that I have done over at Scott’s Reviews and copied them over into the movie database system so that you get to see my movie reviews when you are browsing for a movie to watch. I think that this is a pretty neat feature. It really makes using the database a lot more useful.

I also wrote a review for Zathura. I have been neglecting my movie review site so I need to get caught up a little bit. Now that the reviews are also going into the database maybe I will be a little more diligent about it.

Dad and I are planning on doing a birthday lunch at the Omega. It seems appropriate to celebrate my birthday there.

Dominica’s parents are coming out from Frankfort on Sunday to visit. They will be arriving around noon and staying for the afternoon. They haven’t been out this way in quite a while. It is perfect timing since I spent quite a bit of time cleaning the house this week and, overall, things are looking pretty snazzy. I should have plenty of time to do additional cleaning tomorrow too. Having three sets of people over to the house in the same week really has its advantages. If only the house looked like this all of the time. But that doesn’t seem like it is very likely to happen.

Just in case there is anyone out there who has been trying to go to IthacaPortal.com and haven’t been able to get to the site for the past week that is because the site is gone. I decided that it was time to stop putting money into the site so I let the domain expire. Just like IthacaEats.com that went before us we tried to make a review site but we ran into the barrier of the restaurants and other businesses changing so rapidly that we couldn’t keep up. We also found that Ithaca’s businesses were very fickle when it came to maintaining web presences and often a given restaurants (and by a given restaurant I am referring to close to half of all of the restaurants that had sites at all) would let their sites go down for months at a time and when they came back up they barely worked and were totally inaccurate and out of date. At one point probably close to ten percent of the sites that we listed were for restaurants that were out of business and most of the restaurants in town didn’t bother having sites at all. Because the purpose of IthacaPortal was to be the site that linked to all of the local business sites it was not very useful since none of the businesses seemed to care at all. So we decided that we didn’t care all that much either. I still plan to have a new site up at some point but I am letting the IthacaPortal name fall away.

Andy got home from North Bay this evening. He called around 10:00 and we talked for about an hour. I worked on getting more movie reviews and pictures entered into the database. It is going to take a while to get that all taken care of but I have over 10% of the pictures done so far. That isn’t too bad. Boy will it be nice to have that all done though. I am looking forward to that.

Well, I am going to post and go to bed. This is it, the final SGL posting of my twenties. Tomorrow I turn the big THREE OH. Thirty years old. It’s hard to believe. In some ways it seems like I must have been in my thirties for a long time all ready but in other ways I don’t even feel like I am an adult yet. How can I be turning thirty?

I am finally caught back up on the dailies. Having my desktop down for two days really messes me up. Especially when I was a day behind going into not having the desktop for two days. So the last few days have had pretty short updates. But I am back to my normal routine now. We should be good to go.

The Hanging Stranger this morning had a post about a Rochester high school senior who never got to play a varsity basketball game ever but was allowed to in for the final five minutes of the final game of the year – and scored twenty points!

Dominica and Amanda went over to the Omega to get breakfast this morning and I stayed home with Oreo. They ended up running into dad and my aunt Sharon while they were over there.

Dominica had me order my birthday present today (it is way too much work to have her order it and since I know what it is going to be this was just a lot better all around.) I am getting a Nikon 55-200mm lens for my new D50 digital SLR camera. Since switching to the digital unit I have been without my full range of lenses so I need something to cover the telephoto range.

Dad met with the company’s accountants this morning and then we did lunch over at the Omega. He delivered the new IP phones so that I could play with them this evening. We got three Grandstream phones that come highly recommended from a number of sources that I have used for research. They are very affordable for our testing purposes. I am excited to get a chance to play with them. We also got a Sipura 3000 adapter which I am going to use to attempt to get us online through the Vonage account. That isn’t a long term solution but I wanted to be able to make actual phone calls and it is the only way without getting an account from someone else and I didn’t want to commit to anything if we didn’t know that things were working.

I actually had a decently busy afternoon. There was plenty to do to keep me going. Oreo was really enjoying the sunlight and spent most of the day directly behind my chair napping and occassionally snoring. He must be really exhausted to be sleeping so much.

It has been so nice and warm these last two days. Both days have been so warm that I haven’t even needed to have a jacket. IT has been great. Who would guess that this is the last week of February?

Oreo and I went for a walk this evening. But, of course, by the time that we ventured out (read: the work day was over and the dog finally got out of bed) the wind picked up something fierce and it was a lot chillier than it had been during the day. Strangely enough it was snowing this morning and we had white ground. So our walk was not nearly as long as we would have liked but at least we managed to walk down to Woodbine. Ten or fifteen minutes after the wind got really bad and we were very glad to be snug in the office. Oreo just stood for a while in the dining room looking around listening to the wind creaking the house. I checked with NOAA and they only had us listed as getting gusts to 34mph but I am pretty sure that we are way over that.

I spent the evening working on getting our new IP phones working. It is much easier said than done. It took me hours before I managed to just get one of the new IP phones to be able to connect to the phone system and play the system message. Of course I had plenty of samples from books and web sites but, of course, there were errors and it took all kinds of research to figure out what was wrong so that it would actually work.

On her way home from work Dominica stopped by Walmart and did some grocery shopping. She brought home a pizza to bake. Yum. We watched an episode of Growing Pains and then headed to bed. We both have to be up early tomorrow.

I am a little behind on the updates. I am going to try to do some catching up today. We will see how well that ends up working.

Dominica and I got up earlier than usual for a Wednesday morning. Dominica has decided that sleeping in late and rushing to work doesn’t really do it for her so we are trying the getting up early thing. We got up early enough that we were able to go over to the Omega for some breakfast. Min took along some flashcards for her A+ exam and I helped her study for a little bit. Then Min dropped me off at home on her way into the city.

Min’s computer, the one that I always use in the upstairs office, is out of service currently from us working on it last night and I didn’t feel like putting it back together this morning because I am going over to dad’s with it around lunch time so that we can try to get his HDTV working over there.

I cleaned around the house for a few hours. I got a lot done and it is looking much better than it was this morning. There is still a lot to do but it is coming along. We really need shelves in the basement so that there is someplace to put this huge pile of books that I just got from grandma’s “estate” because right now they are just piled in the living room. There wasn’t nearly enough space for all of the books that I had before let alone any new ones.

At a quarter after noon I packed up Oreo and the computer and drove down to Cook’s by York Central School and picked up some subs and chips for dad and I to have for lunch. Then I went up the hill to his place. I arrived just minutes after his new Westinghouse 37″ 1080p LCD HDTV arrived. He was in the process of unpacking it when I got there.

We ate our lunches and then we went down to the “tv” room to get the new HDTV set up. We got in unpacked and then set to getting Dominica’s desktop set up so that we could hook up the new television and see how it performed. We tried a bunch of things but never really got it working all that well. We can’t tell whether or not it is the computer not keeping up on some channels or if the channels themselves are having problems. And during the day every Rochester station just broadcasts NTSC over the HDTV channels so mostly you are just decoding really low resolution and large grey bars on the sides so it is really hard to tell what would happen with real HDTV. Let me tell you, this entire experience has really turned me off from the whole HDTV concept. It is really expensive, it is complicated to get working, even when it does work it apparently doesn’t work very well (it can take several minutes for station to “tune in” once you switch channels so if you switch from channel 8 to 10 to see what is one you might miss half of a show), often the audio and video don’t sync so you listen to one thing and watch another. Very frustrating.

Minutes after I left dad’s house our new IP phones arrived so I didn’t have a chance to get those. But I really have no spare time this evening so it wasn’t like I was actually going to get to use them anyway. I got home and I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning like crazy. I actually managed to get a lot done. I cleaned floors, dishes, several rooms, some of the basement, etc. The house looks really good. It is pretty much all that I have done today. Dominica had been be impressed when she comes home.

Craig called at a little after 6:30 from downtown Geneseo. He came over and took a quick tour of the townhouse. He has never been over here before. We didn’t have much time so we drove up to the city and picked up Tim, a friend of Craig’s, and then we went over to Woody’s II on West Henrietta to meet Craig’s other friend Richard who had been there for a little while. We had a good time hanging out until 9:30 when Craig had to drive me up to Fujifilm so that Dominica could bring me back home.

We came home and watched one episode of Firefly before going to bed. Dominica is getting up early in the morning and having breakfast with Amanda so she couldn’t stay up very much tonight.

Here is a great link to why Windows is not the appropriate software to use for giant electronic billboards. Not that other things don’t crash but they don’t have you advertise to the world exactly what you are running and ask to submit the issue to Microsoft. If I have a billboard control system like that I hope that it is extremely well tested, doesn’t do anything as embarrassing as this as part of its design (this is the sytem’s intended response to this problem) and that it will do a LOT to correct itself even if that is as simple as automatically restarting itself. A general purpose OS that you really can’t modify does not work for things like this. They should have an OS that is designed specifically for this purpose. Something like BillboardBSD or BoardOS or whatever. Okay, maybe not an entire dedicated OS just for billboard systems. But has no one ever heard of embedded systems? If everyone is running regular Windows on these giant systems why doesn’t anyone ever play Quake 4 on them? Now that would be cool.

I had to get up and drive into the school this morning. This is our one normal teaching day for the week so I wanted to make sure that I was there to be able to eliminate as many problems as possible. Not time to spare. We have to squeeze the classes in as quickly as possible. Dominica decided to stay at home today because Oreo is not ready to be left alone yet. He has had an accident in the house every time we have gone out for the last several days. So she got to sleep in and play with the dog all day.

Classes went well today. Dad did all of the teaching. I was just there for support. I managed to get two additional computers set up today with Linux and wireless connections so that we can deploy them to classrooms that do not have Ethernet run to them yet. Eventually we plan to have at least one computer in every classroom but that will take a while to accomplish. We also deployed ten new optical mice today so that the entire computer lab is now using brand new Logitech three button scroll wheel optical mice. That is going to make a big difference. The old, two button mechanical mice that they were using were awful and everyone always had something different. Now they can actually get used to using a scroll mouse like normal people have instead of using those ancient things. Even if the computers are on the slow side we are working hard to make the experience as modern as possible. They are all using either 1280×1024 or 1600×1200 displays, over half of them are LCDs, the operating system is about as new as you could possibly hope for and now nice, scroll optical mice. So I don’t think that we are doing too badly. I have not figured out how to deal with sound. We have sound on a lot of the monitors but that will just cause distraction in a lab setting. I am thinking of having “extension cables” that allow us to have a headphone jack on the desktops that the students can just plug into with headphones whenever they want to be able to listen to something.

I came home and Dominica and I set to cleaning the house a little because dad is coming over later and we only ever clean the house when we know someone is coming over. I stayed at the school late so that kids could use the lab after school. Dad left a little earlier so that he could run to Warsaw and pick up some commercial light bulbs and fixtures to put into the server room in the basement. Currently we have no light in there at all and it is really dark. Fortunately there is a large glass window looking into that room from the “DVD room” and there is one light bulb in there so there is enough light when you really need it but it is far from comfortable.

We managed to get a decent amount of cleaning done before he came over. His HDTV isn’t working very well so he brought over his HDTV tuner card so that we could try it out in Min’s computer. We didn’t manage to discover anything except for the fact that there is no HDTV reception here in Geneseo whatsoever. We are nowhere close to even getting a single mediocre signal. At least not using the antennas that dad brought over and we sure are not going to be investing in anything better just to find out if we can get a station or not. When Andy was here he had a regular old NTSC television tuner and a powered antenna and he was unable to get anything with that. So it is very unlikely that we can get any television out here. Which is really crappy because we live so close to the city. Dad is much farther away and we got tons of television when I was a kid. We could get Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and once in a while something out of Canada. But nothing here. I guess it really shows why cable and satellite took off so well. If we can’t get anything here in Geneseo who can? And we even have line of site to one of the antennas.

So it didn’t take too long before we knew that we had to give up on trying to figure out what was wrong with the HDTV. I am going to take Dominica’s computer over to dad’s house tomorrow so that we can try working on it there.