Sheep Guarding Llama

No, your calendar isn’t wrong but this is the only way to wish Eric a happy 30th. Mu ha ha.

I had to get up early with Dominica today so that I could drive her over to dad’s. Dad is driving the two of them down to Castile to teach today. I got her over to his house at 8:30, right on time, and then drove back to Geneseo so that I could drop off Oreo at the house (he did, of course, ride along for as long as he could) and take Dominica’s car over to the shop up the street to get it inspected, oil changed and all that stuff.

I dropped off the car and they said that it would be at least forty-five minutes before it would be done and I know that that often means that it will be longer so I decided that I should hoof it back to the house so that Oreo wouldn’t be alone for too long. I needed exercise anyway so it wasn’t too big of a deal to do a little walking. I stepped out of the shop and the weather was fine. The sun was out and it was calm and cold but not too cold. Well, that didn’t last long. Apparently the shop is in the lee and as soon as I got down the driveway the wind came whipping through and I was chilled to the bone the entire walk back. It was very painful and my left ankle (the one that I broke in 1986) was absolutely killing me the entire way. I was limping by the time I got back to the house.

Of course it took me so long to walk back to the house that Oreo had an accident on the carpet while I was trying to get back to him. I just can’t win. I got his mess cleaned up and then settled in to work. I ended up having an awfully productive day and got a lot of calls about jobs all over the place (I never get any real offers but I get a lot of calls.) I got a lot done and managed to stay on task all day long.

Dominica got home close to 4:00. Dad dropped her off at the house. I didn’t eat lunch so that we could eat together so she cooked her fake chicken, pasta and cheese dish and we decided to relax for the evening and watch some movies. I had a huge haul come in from Amazon today – mostly movies that are replacing laserdiscs that I currently own but no longer have a player to watch them on. But a lot of them are updated to widescreen and are new digital transfers so they look a lot better than the laserdiscs did. In addition to replacing old movies I also managed to get the last four films to complete my Pink Panther collection. I now have all nine of the original films up to and including the 1993 release of Son of the Pink Panther. All of the movies are horrible, of course, but there is something nostalgic about them and they are a little funny.

Dominica and I first watched Betsy’s Wedding which is the last of the Brat Pack movies and one that she was not familiar with which is weird because she is fanatical about those movies. It is one of the replaced LDs. It isn’t a great movie but it isn’t bad. A little weird but enjoyable. Good enough that I was willing to replace my LD so that I could keep watching it.

After Betsy’s Wedding I introduced Dominica to Brassed Off which is a really excellent British film from the early 90’s that deals with the incredible hardships caused by the closing of the collieries (coal mines) in Britain as the country began switching to cleaner and more cost effective means of power production. It is one of the earlier Ewan McGreggor films and also features Pete Postlethwaite (whose ending monologue was made famous by being played as the introduction to the song Tubthumping by Chumbawumba) and Stephen Tompkinson whom most people know as the star of the popular show Ballykissangel and who, in that role, made guest appearances on Father Ted and the Vicar of Dibley. Brassed Off is very sad but a great movie and well worth watching.

I didn’t feel like working tonight so I convinced Dominica to watch The Trail of the Pink Panther from 1982 which is the first Pink Panther movie to be made after its star, Peter Sellers, had died. Of course, that didn’t stop Blake Edwards from putting him intot he movie. So the movie’s star is only ever shown in clips from earlier films and outtakes. It is really poor. Not that the other Pink Panther movies are anything special. But this one is really bad because they had so little to work with. Peter Sellers would have killed them all if he would have known what they were going to do.

We ended up not even making it halfway through the movie before we were both really tired and decided to just go to bed. It wasn’t even 10:00 pm yet! Boy, this being over thirty thing is really tough.

I have to be up early tomorrow because I am heading down to Dansville to meet with the hospital there.

Back to the grind. Weekends are so short – especially when you work during them.

Merrill Lynch is estimating that the new Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost Sony approximately $900 to produce at launch, according to this report from Engadget. Engadget says that ML got the addition wrong when they stated $900 and that their totals actually only come to $800 but they have no price listed for the 2.5″ hard drive and if you do some online shopping for the kind of hardware that they are looking at for that particular component then you will easily see where the other $100 comes from. Now, it is unlikely that any consumers will actually have to spend $900 to pick up one of these babies but it does mean that they are not likely to be coming very cheaply. This breakdown really shows why it is so difficult for gaming consoles to compete with computer systems. You could easily buy a regular computer, with far more functionality, for far less money. Sure, the PS3 has some features that are currently unavailable for the PC platform but the reality is that these features are useless on the PS3 for some time (like the Blu-Ray drive, for example which will be used primarily to play DVDs for a long time) and could be added for far less total expenditure to your computer when the time is right. For $700 you can easily have a 64 bit AMD Athlon 64 based commercial HP machine with 512MB of memory, an 80GB SATA hard drive and a GeForce 6 series graphics PCIE card with every single component outperforming the Playstation 3 and blowing everyone away with a three year warranty. Contrary to popular belief, the real money in computers is in buying the warranties. Pay closer attention to how long companies are willing to guarantee their hardware – this is one of the best indicators of a manufacturer’s faith in their own machines as well as their assessment of their customer’s intelligent. And the IBM Cell processor? I am sure it is nice and will do well down the road. But really it is just a rework of the Power PC which hasn’t done that well for video game machines in the past and cost a fortune to produce right now AND no developers are experienced on. Compare that to the super high performance AMD 64 bit family at very low cost and you will have a really hard time justifying the Cell. This isn’t to say that there isn’t value in video game consoles but the value is created artificially by limiting the release of popular gaming titles to only existing on the consoles even when they would perform better, cost less to make and be more useful on the general purpose computer. Once consumers realize this fact and decide to stop paying for consoles the video game makers will realize that everyone loses when consumers have to spend a significant portion of their video game budgets buying unimpressive hardware for every few games that they want to play.

Dominica’s car has to go into the shop tomorrow for its inspection. What a pain NY inspections are. They seem to be way too frequent to me. At least on newer vehicles. What do they think is going to be wrong with them that an inspection is actually going to catch?

Dominica got up a little after ten this morning and we went out to the Omega for some breakfast. It was a little on the late side so we ended up actually getting lunch. We took along some of her A+ study material and did some studying while we were waiting for the food.

Rocketboom fans will be happy to know that today is the shows first official webcast in widescreen. It isn’t quite HD. Actually, HD doesn’t mean anything. But it isn’t in a format equivalent to HD TV. But it still looks a lot better than it did before.

Andy sent me this awesome link to illiterate Kanye West using a relief effort video as a platform to, well, show everyone he is so handicapped that he cannot even talk. I mean this might actually be the dumbest person ever allowed to be on television. Can you believe that people actually pay money to go to concerts to listen to the sound of this guy drooling on himself?

Dad picked us up at 6:00 and we went over to the Omega to grab some quick dinner before going to the Geneseo Cinema to watch Disney’s new film Eight Below. The movie was decently done but it was incredibly sad. It is a really tough movies for children to sit through. Even sadder, however, is the fact that the movie is based upon real life events that happened to a group of Japanese researchers in Antarctica in 1958. In 1958 the Japanese team was forced to leave fifteen dogs behind and returned to find only two left alive.

Apple has finally released the Intel version of the Mac Mini. Personally I think that the Mac Mini is the coolest of all of the Apple products. It’s cost/performance isn’t all that bad, it is really tiny, quiet and attractive. For light computing duties in a space that has serious asthetic requirements this is a very nice unit.

I woke up this morning and checked: yup, still thirty. Darn.

Actually I woke up around 7:30 and my stomach hurt (too many birthday cookies last night before going to bed.) So I had to get up significantly earlier than I had intended. I read more of Baseline and decided, after an hour or so, that I was not getting any better and that I couldn’t make it to Sunday School this morning. I have been really dehydrated for the past twenty-four hours as well, and I have been drinking tons of water.

Dominica decided to go to church anyway and to leave me home to continue the cleaning frenzy. There is always more cleaning to be done. I did dishes, cleaned floors, played with Oreo, took him outside several time (there is so much snow and it is so cold that he decided to not even leave the sidewalk, grrr,) played with him several times (he must be feeling a bit better with the amount that he has been wanting to play the last few days,) and cleaned up the coin/glass mess that occurred in the basement months ago but that I keep putting off cleaning up. It took me some time before I had a nice plastic container to start putting the coins into and since then I have been working on it a little at a time because it is such a pain to do. But I managed to get that all cleaned up today.

We thought that by me staying home with Oreo this morning that we would at least avoid having any accidents happen but that ended up not being the case. I am pretty sure that occassionaly Oreo gets one of his “attacks” from his blood problem and if it is in the right part of his body it causes him to lose control and to make a mess in the house. We were in the middle of playing fetch when it happened. He had just enough warning to run to the “feet wiping rug” that we keep by the deck door and he peed there. No warning or anything. One second he was playing and the next, oops. I am sure that he is not in any way doing it on purpose because he doesn’t prepare for it. It is all so fast that it must be related to his sickness. Poor little boy.

I also continued work on the demonstration email server this morning. A lot of that work involves small amount of work and lots of downloading and installation time (during this particular phase) so I am able to accomplish a lot of things at once.

At ten o’clock the snow plow dude was out plowing our driveways here in the complex. Ah, now this is the life. I can’t imagine having to plow my own driveway or just getting stuck because I don’t own a plow. I don’t ever want to give up townhouse/condo living.

Dominica did some birthday shopping on her way home from church and got me a birthday cheesecake and ice cream. Then she came home and helped with the cleaning. Her parents called and said that they were in Waterloo at 12:30 so we had more time than we had planned on having. Dominica invited my family over for cake and ice cream at 3:00. We are planning on having lunch with Dominica’s parents as soon as they arrive.

After cleaning Dominica settled down in the living room to relax and watch some Growing Pains. I got the remaining DVDs entered into the database that were not in there at all so far so that I could get them off of my desk. They have been sitting in the office for months.

Dominica’s parents arrived around 1:30. Oreo was very excited to see everybody. He and Dexter had a great time had a great time chasing each other back and forth across the house. Oreo loves when dogs come to visit him at home.

We all went out to lunch at the Omega Grill before everyone came over for the “birthday party”. We couldn’t stay long because we had to get back to the house. Everyone came over at 3:00. All of the Richardsons made it and dad too. So we had quite a full house. We had cheesecake and ice cream.

After everyone went home Dominica and I finished watched the first season of Growing Pains. Watching that show brings back so many memories. I can’t believe how well I remember each and every episode. It has been so many years since I have seen any episodes at all and yet I can practically quote most of them. It is almost as if I just watched them just a year or two ago. Isn’t it strange how some things just stick with you?

I kept working on getting our demonstration Scalix server up and running and Dominica watched 13 Going On 30 that she borrowed from dad last week. So far I am liking the Scalix system. It is the backend technical portion that interests me the most and, unfortunately, that is the most difficult portion to test when looking at a new product.

We tried watching Finding Neverland but it turns out that the DVD is bad and doesn’t play for even five minutes. So instead we decided to watch Must Love Dogs. Oreo appreciated the selection. He is very exhausted after his very busy day. He collapsed on his pillow in the living room and slept all evening. But he had fun today even though he is very likely going to be paying for it tomorrow.

I am not going down to Castile tomorrow. I have a lot of work that I want to get done and I just need some time in the office. I think that I am going to be doing some serious hardware work while helping Min study for her A+ exam. She is starting to get pretty close to being ready for that. Dad is going to be teaching tomorrow and then he is coming over to Geneseo at 6:00 so that the three of us can grab some quick dinner and then go to the Geneseo movie theatre to watch Disney’s new movie Eight Below.

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.