Sheep Guarding Llama

I had to be up this morning so that I could get down to Castile. Dad is monitoring the labs today but there are a few classes help over from earlier in the week so he is going to be teaching as well today. So I am going down to help. We have only been up and running for one whole week now so there are still a lot of glitches in the system. Best if I am there in case anything goes wrong. We have also found that having two people down at the school is really helpful because computer classes really work better when there is someone able to teach and someone available to help students.

I spent most of the day working on miscellaneous projects at the school and testing everything to make sure that it is still working. The printer that was installed on Tuesday appears to be working really well now. That is a huge relief. It is so much better to have a large, centralized printer so that everyone can use it. One less major project that I do not have to worry about now. Of course, now I need to look into getting the other big laser printer, the colour one, installed and onto the network so that we can print colour as well. And there is that nice duplexed deskjet that really should be put to use as well. Boy, there is always something more to be done, isn’t there?

I managed to video tape one of dad’s classes today. It is the first thing of any length that I have recorded with my new videocamera. I was very excited. I was just barely able to get the entire class onto a single video tape. That will give me something to work with later. I have never really worked, at all, with editing video on a computer so I need to get some experience at that. It is unfortunate that current the only computer that I have that can extract the video from the camera is my laptop. I really need to get a firewire (IEEE 1394) card for my desktop. Then I need to get an additional hard drive as well. Boy, I just want everything don’t I?

Dad and I did lunch at Lorraine’s as usual. They are just so cheap and the food is just so good. It is hard to pass up. We wrapped up and managed to leave the school at about 3:00. I had left Oreo at home by himself so I needed to get back to him quickly. Plus I had things that needed to be done before John “The Surfing IT Wizard” Stephens arrived.

I got back to the house and got to work cleaning and installing that computer as quickly as possible. Mary stopped by and dropped of the card that Dominica and I need to be able to get a cheaper hotel stay in Chicago in a few weeks. That is creeping up on us quickly. We need to get everything scheduled for that trip soon. I managed to get the house mostly cleaned before John arrived. It could have been a lot worse, I suppose.

John arrived in Geneseo a little after 5:00. It only took him two hours and forty minutes to get to us from Owego where he had left from. We haven’t seen John up in this neck of the woods for about two years! That is hard to believe. This past year has really just flown by. I have only seen John twice since having moved up here to Geneseo. As you get older you strangely end up seeing people quite seldom and it seems natural. I do talk to John all of the time over the internal company instant messaging so it seems like we see each other more often than we do.

John and I were both pretty hungry when he arrived so we pretty much took off right away to get some grub over at the Omega Grill. John really liked the Omega. It is his kind of place. Back in Ithaca we would always get food at the Dryden Queen Diner which was pretty similar.

After dinner we ran up to Henrietta because John wanted to hit our Best Buy to see what sales they had since our store is larger than the store in Ithaca. We shopped there for almost an hour. Funny enough Andy was in the store shopping in the same section that we were but we didn’t run into each other and didn’t find out that he was there too, until later. Just funny that we were all in the same spot at the same time and didn’t see each other in that store. It isn’t like that store is THAT big. John managed to find additional seasons of Stargate SG-1 that he had been looking for and I picked up some additional Mini-DV tapes for the camcorder and some discounted CDs. The stuff wasn’t very exciting but I got a really good deal on some older classics.

We got back to the house just a little bit before Dominica did. We all hung out for a little while but Dominica has to work early tomorrow so she went to bed. John and I went down to the theatre in the basement and watched the first two episodes of Firefly by Joss Whedon. That is a really awesome show. I really like their fresh take on sci-fi – mixing it up with western themes but explaining why, sort of. Not so much serious sci-fi as much as it is a “futuristic western” but it is still a really good concept. It is really sad that an actually good show had to be cut part way through its first season. They had such a huge following that they even managed to get a full movie made and into theatres. It just goes to show how much the success and failure of a television show is just a product of the network and nothing having to do with the show itself. Television is a lot like pop music – the only people making decisions about what is good and bad is a small group of record company executives in closed rooms. Because the entire distribution system is controlled by such a tiny group of networks it is impossible for shows to be judged on their own merits. Espiecally since shows with less common demographics may need to be placed at a certain time slot in order to be available to its market. This is the very reason why I think that it is so important that the studios creating “television” content wake up and realize that they are only hurting themselves by working through the established network distribution chain and need to turn to the on-demand structure of the Internet to distribute their content. Sure it means an entire rethink to everything that they do but it will work. And all it takes is one or two shows with huge followings of highly intelligent fans like Firefly to start a revolution. Firefly fans will happily go online to download episodes as their come out and they will be happy to pay two dollars per episode to do it. Especially if those episodes are available in high quality, “high definition” MPEG-4 formats. Who needs DVDs? We don’t want physical media. We just want to download and watch in really high quality. I don’t want to have to downgrade what I am watching because the DVD specifications do not allow for really high quality even when it will fit on the disc. What a waste! The time is right. Viva la revolution!

Art and Danielle have been married for TWELVE YEARS today! Now doesn’t that make all of us that are the same age as them feel really old? I mean really, really old.

Well, today did not go as planned. I had originally thought that I would get up and spend a leisurely day cleaning around the house to get ready for our visit from The Surfing IT Wizard this weekend. But that is not how my day went.

At 10:30 this morning I got a call from Craig asking if I could come downtown and pick him up. Downtown Geneseo, that is, not Rochester. He lives in Greece so I was surprised to hear from him in Geneseo. Turns out that had been driving down to Dansville to work today and ended up getting pulled over for talking on his cell phone out on 390 as it comes through Geneseo. When they pulled him over they had one of those “DMV lost your paperwork three years ago and suspended your license without notice” deals and so they hauled him in. That means that almost everyone that I know has had their license suspended by the NY DMZ without notice of any kind. Is this just how the DMV works to keep our costs down, by saving on stamps?

That was around 9:20 and Craig had called to see if I could go out to 390 and pick up his car but I was in the shower and didn’t get his call until 10:30 when he had posted bail and was out on the street with nowhere to go. He was right downtown so I ran down there and picked him up. We had coffee at the Bagel Cafe downtown and then drove down to Leicester to get his car out of the impound. For some reason they have the impound in a different town than where the court, police and the infraction occurred. Great planning, Geneseo.

It didn’t take too long to get the car released to us but the logistics of moving a person and a car when the person doesn’t have a drivers license is a bit of a problem. Especially when you are stuck out in the middle of the boonies in the middle of a weekday. So I called my Aunt Sharon and we drove Craig’s car up to her house so that we could at least leave it in a driveway where we knew that we could come back and get it from. Then she drove us back down to Jimmy’s in Leicester where Oreo was waiting in my car so that we could pick up that vehicle. Now we had to find someone that was able to take off in the middle of the day to be able to drive Craig’s car around.

Andy was available so Craig and I drove up to Brighton to pick him up so that we could take him back down to Leicester with us. Before heading back down we all went to the India Palace in the plaza right next to Andy’s apartment for some lunch since none of us had eaten all day. It was okay. Nothing like the Pakistan House. I think the drive across town is probably worth it. But the food was fine and they did have Tofu Saag which was really good. We all just got the buffet so that we could get moving quickly. There was a lot to be done today.

We drove down to Leicester and picked up the car from my aunt’s house. Andy followed Craig and I as we drove up to the city again. Lots of miles being put on today. We got up to Greece and got to Craig’s house. We took a little break there and hung out for about an hour or a little less. Craig’s wife came home shortly after we got there with the new baby (just twelve weeks old) so we finally got to meet him as well. Then Andy and I left Craig to try to figure out how he is going to be getting to work over the next few days or weeks until he gets his license situation straightened out.

I took Andy back to his apartment in Brighton and then drove back home myself. Originally the plan had been to spend the day cleaning and working on a machine that needed to be installed early next week but, obviously, that wasn’t happening today. Once I got home I did what cleaning I could but there was a lot of installation work that had to take precedence on my time. I didn’t manage to finish either as I had been hoping. I have a busy day tomorrow so it will be hard to get anything additional done then either. It is amazing how quickly my days off become awfully full of stuff.

Normally I sleep in until Dominica gets up to go to work but I got a couple of phone calls right at 8:00 this morning so I just got myself out of bed and got to work. Almost immediately Oreo wanted to go out for a walk so we took a twenty minute stroll down the street. He was very happy.

I remembered this morning that on Sunday when driving to church Dominica and I noticed a sign that said “Welcome to the Town of Leicester – Circa 1802”. This sign was set up, presumably by the town, on routes 20A and 39 as they cross from Geneseo into Leicester. Circa 1802? Are they trying to tell us that they have turned the town into a museum of buildings that looks exactly like it did in 1802? The town might be established 1802 but it sure isn’t a replica of the way that it was in 1802. There are few if any buildings dating from before 1850 anywhere in that town or even Geneseo for that matter. I think that people in Leicester don’t have a good grasp of the English language and don’t know what the word ‘circa’ means. The sad part is that Leicester is the village that my high school was for (but not in.) Even sadder is that if you use the term circa then the town was called Leister in 1802 and not Leicester until 1805.

Interestingly, the town of Mt. Morris was separated from Leicester in 1813. And the town of York, where I went to high school, was created out of land taken from Caledonia, Leicester and Covington (where I grew up.) Covington really got the short end of the land deals. It is the second smallest town in Wyoming County and has a tremendously low population but its two largest population centers were both removed from it. The largest being the Village of Pavilion to the north (where I went to elementary school at Pavilion Baptist School) which was annexed to Genesee County and then Greigsville to the east which was annexed to Livingston County. Even now there is no remaining village in the town of Covington. Our largest population centers are Covington Center (maybe twenty homes on a cross road), Pearl Creek (maybe twenty houses and no cross road) and Peoria (less that twenty houses on a cross road – where I grew up.)

Speaking of my high school, which is York Central just north of the town of Leicester, here is a nice web site from the York Historical Society. You can find out more about the history of Livingston County by visiting the Livingston County Historical Society.

I continued working on scanning in the legacy slides today. I have been making really good progress and I am almost through everything that I have.

Okay, now here is a web site that everyone has to visit. Find out about the army of feral robotic dogs!

Two nights ago I dealt with Dominica’s 401K that she had amassed when she was working in Ithaca. It was moved to a safe harbour and then I had to work to get it actually invested into some sort of investment. That was a lot of work but I got it moved over and now it is actually invested and today we even earned $10! Okay, that isn’t very much but it is my first day of investing since I was 18 so give me a break.

Dad came over for lunch today and we went over to the Omega Grill. After lunch we went to Walmart and did some quick shopping. I got the latest Enya CD as well as the DVD rerelease of A Bug’s Life which I have seen without sound more than twenty times but have never actually sat down and watched so I don’t actually know what the story line entails. Dad was looking for a treadmill but the one that he wanted was out of stock so we were not able to get that today. Then it was back home for me.

I was reading Wil Wheaton’s rememberances of video games in his childhood and I left this comment “The best ever was Double Dragon. My buddy Eric and I used to save up quarters and walk down to this little small-town deli (The Oatka Deli) in Warsaw, NY. We would blow $10-$20 at a shot trying to beat that game. We did that for an entire summer. It took all summer before we were finally able to beat it. That takes me back.” Here are some games that take me back. Castlevania, Duck Hunt, Ghost ‘n’ Ghouls and Contra that I used to play with Jorge Maldonado in the basement of his home in Mt. Morris. He was the only kid I ever knew who actually owned a Sega Master’s system too. I always wanted one of those with the 3D shutter glasses. Super Mario Bros. I, II and III as well as Clay Fighter reminds me of playing NES and later SNES at Eric Millen’s house in Warsaw when we weren’t busy walking down to the Oatka Deli to kick bad guy butt on Double Dragon. Sometimes Eric and I would break out his awful Atari 2600 and play Hero which was the one and only good game ever made for that system. At home my favourite games to play on my own were on the Commodore Amiga 1000 that my family got in 1987. 1987-1990 were my really big video game years. I loved the games of that era. The Bard’s Tale and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Pool of Radiance were awesome role playing games. Deja Vu and its sibling Uninvited by Mindscape were ground breaking in adventure games. Sierra Online (what kind of weird name is that) produced King’s Quest and The Black Cauldron. The Faery Tale Adventure was awesome as well. It was truly amazing because they managed to make a game that fit on a single 880KB floppy disc that had over 19,000 monitor screens full of isometric landscape to wander over. It would take a really long time just to walk across the map. Exploration was really possible. Speaking of exploration – Seven Cities of Gold was super cool combining history, geography and game play. Boy do I miss those days. I think that the late 1980’s might have been the pinancle of the single player video game era. I don’t really feel like we had any major breakthroughs except for the advent of 3D rendered gaming until networked games came into popular being in the late 1990’s.

Dad IM’d me shortly after he got back to the house to let me know that my new Nikon D50 digital SLR (single lens reflex for those of you who are not photography buffs) had arrived. This is my big present, mostly from dad, purchased by the collective purchasing power of many birthdays and Christmas’ gift money that I had saved until I found something that I really wanted to purchase. So Oreo and I drove over to dad’s house and picked up the camera. The battery has to charge (it uses a special battery and not anything normal that you can pick up at the store) so we took it home to charge it up so that we could play with it. The manual said that it would take two and a half hours to charge but the thing was totally charged in just over an hour. I got the camera with a lens because digital cameras have different sensor sizes that 35mm film cameras do (the sensor in this camera is closer to the size of APS or 120mm) which causes lenses from 35mm cameras to act as if they are different lengths than they are meant to be. So I got an 18-55mm lens (which, for those of you used to 35mm cameras that is roughly the equivalent of a 28-85mm lens – you can figure out the difference by multiplying the digital lens length by 1.5) which should do a good job for me for the time being. There is a matching 55-200mm lens that I would really like to get as well so that I will have the same lens range, roughly, that I did on my analogue Nikon 5005 SLR. Originally I had a 50mm fixed length lens and a Tamron 80-210mm zoom that I had gotten in 1993 or 1994. Then, much more recently, I had also added a 28-80mm Nikkor. I really wish that I could find a nice 35mm fixed length fast lens for this camera but I haven’t come across one as of yet.

I took a few pictures with the camera. Even in the poorly lit house at night the camera was able to turn out some awesome pictures. I can’t believe the image quality on this thing. I am looking forward to having an opportunity to take some pictures tomorrow using daylight to see what this thing can really do.

Dominica got home and made pad Thai for dinner. We watched two episodes of Star Trek before going to bed.

Up early this morning. I kind of like getting up a little on the early side. Mornings always feel better when you have been awake to enjoy them although it is hard to pass up snuggly puppy in the bed. Dominica had to be up even before me this morning so that she could get down to Castile. She is teaching on her own today. I wanted to be able to go down with her but I am working in Buffalo today wrapping up the project that I have been working on. Today is the last day of the month and everyone wants to get billing items taken care of without letting things roll over into February.

Tim Wood picked me up this morning at 8:45 and we drove out to Buffalo together. We got out to the store just after 10:00 which is right when we had wanted to have arrived and we did a quick scoping out of the project, made a list of the supplies that we were going to need and then walked acrossed Union Avenue and grabbed some breakfast at a nice family restaurant that was very close by. I was bad on my diet today and had French toast for breakfast. But only so bad I guess. At least I am on my feet all day doing something somewhat physical and hey, we did WALK to breakfast.

The project today went really smoothly. After the last site from two weeks ago we were expecting the worst today but in actuality everything went just about as well as one could have hoped for. It definitely was not perfect but it wasn’t bad at all. The Lord definitely was watching over us because these things never go well.

Dominica decided to leave school early because Oreo was sick (he went to school with her and was staying in the car.) He had gotten sick yesterday and really hadn’t eaten all day and then got really cold today and was definitely not feeling well. His tummy kept making lots of noises too. And I mean really loud noises. So Min took him home and took care of him. He still didn’t eat anything for a long time.

Tim and I grabbed McD’s on the way out of Buffalo and ate our late lunch in the car. It was probably around 6:00 when Tim dropped me off at the house. We ended up talking in his truck for maybe half an hour before I went into the house. Dominica was watching Red Dwarf when I got in and Oreo was really sleepy. I had some work to get done so I fired up the computer and got to work.

I knocked off work around 8:00 and we watched a little Star Trek. After about an hour Oreo wanted to go out so I took him for a walk down Lima Road. He just loves going for walks and it really seemed to do him good. We came back and he actually did some eating for the first time really in two days and after not too long he was asking me to play fetch with him. It seems that he has come out of his “illness” and is feeling okay now. At least we hope that he is. So far the “having to keep him on a leash thing” has caused me to do a bit more walking than I had been doing so I guess that this is going to be good for my diet/excercise thing even though it is a major inconvenience to have to put him on a leash and get all dressed up to be able to go out every time that he needs to pee. It is tough because he often needs to go out every fifteen minutes or so during the evenings. That is a lot when you have to put on shoes, a jacket, his leash and walk around with him outside.

Dominica was really exhausted this evening and went to bed before 11:00. I wanted to get the updates posted to SGL so I stayed up for a while and Oreo came into the office to stay with me. Originally dad and I were going to do breakfast tomorrow but I have two packages expected to arrive tomorrow and UPS often comes in the morning so he is going to wait until they come with my new Nikon D50 SLR so that he can bring that over and we will do lunch instead of breakfast. I am really excited to be getting my new camera tomorrow. I can’t wait to play with it. I love getting new toys. Both Dominica and I are expecting out MiniSD storage cards to be arriving tomorrow evening as well but that isn’t so exciting. Those are the cards that we ordered to allow us to be able to store a lot of pictures on our cell phones. It is a camera world now, isn’t it. I will now have three digital cameras that I use all of the time. A 1.3 megapixel cell phone, the 5 megapixel Kodak point and shoot camera for casual photos and the new 6.1 megapixel Nikon SLR for serious stuff.

Before I went to bed last night I discovered that the server down in Castile had lost power during the day. That prevented me from being able to do some of the work that I had wanted to do last night in preparation for this morning.

The alarm went off this morning but I didn’t hear it and Dominica fell back asleep so we were not awake as early as we had hoped to have been. The original plan was for the two of us to be to Castile Christian Academy by 8:30 or so but that didn’t work out. I got out of bed as early as I could and got ready to go. Dominica had decided that she would drive down to Castile separately when she woke up. But she ended up waking up just as I was getting ready to leave so we ended up driving down together and arrived closer to 9:30. Dad had gotten there around 8:30. The plan is that he is going to be teaching down there today and Dominica will be teaching tomorrow.

Today was a really busy but productive day. Dad taught three computer classes today. It was a good thing that Dominica was there because we needed a lot of extra help getting things taken care of like hands on help and inputting tons and tons of students who did not have or who had forgotten their passwords. I had my hands full today. I had one new computer that needed to be installed, an unbelievable number of problems that “cropped up” throughout the day and one major printer installation that needed to be taken care of as soon as possible.

The big breakthrough today was finally getting every single computer in the entire school updated to SUSE Linux 10.0. Now we are finally standardized on a single platform. That is going to make things a lot easier very quickly. The second really big item today was finally installing a massive centralized printer for the school – an HP LaserJet 5si MX. That thing is BIG. It took a while to get it installed but I managed to get it onto the network and every computer in the school got configured to print to it. That is going to make a real difference there. Previously the school only had a single, old HP DeskJet colour printer in the principal’s office that the entire school had to share. And only one computer was configured to print to it! What a pain that was. But now every computer in the school can print to the big black and white laser. Now every student can print anytime that they want.

Dad, Dominica and I did lunch at Lorraine’s in Castile when the school had the water line going to the school cut by some road construction crew. We figured that that was as good a time as any to take a lunch break. Today was dad’s first day teaching at the school so he had quite a full day. All three of us were totally exhausted by the end of the day.

Dominica and I got home and she immediately went out to do some shopping at Walmart. I had to sit down and sift through all of the messages that had piled up during the day while I was out. There is little Internet access right now at the school just because I spend such a huge amount of my time taking care of network issues that I never have a chance to have a machine on the Internet for me to use. And my cell phone does not work down there very well so it is extra hard to get in touch with me. I had a lot of messages and a lot of things that needed my immediate attention including a lot of planning with a lot of different people to get ready for the work that I am doing tomorrow in Buffalo. But by the end of the day we got everything worked out and we are going ahead with the work in Buffalo first thing in the morning and hopefully we will be done by 2:00 and will be able to come back home. I also had to deal with a really angry neighbour who was upset about Oreo’s “deposits” in the yard. We had been unaware that any of his “land mines” had gone over into the common property to the side of our house (there is empty yard on the side of our house between us and our neighbour’s on the other side but instead of each of us owning up to the middle we each only own up to the side of our houses and there is common property in between which is really annoying.) We knew that he had lots of surprises in our own yard but when I went out to clean up after him the stuff in the common area was only inches off of our property and so incredibly far from anyone else’s property and on the far side of our property from the property of the person who was complaining. But oh well, what are you going to do. Technically we were wrong and he shouldn’t have been going over there. Their description of “having to dodge” his droppings was quite the exaggeration as I was barely able to find them and only a person meandering along the side of my house spying on me would ever walk near them. So I went out and did a bunch of cleaning up just to make sure that everyone is happy tomorrow. Sometimes I really dislike living in a townhouse. The worst part is owning some of the yard but not all of it so that a lot of people think that they have free reign to your property which is what the real issue is here. The pissed neighbour literally uses my back yard just feet off of my deck far more than I do because she doesn’t walk through her own house but uses my yard to access hers. Apparently the home owner’s association rules say that Oreo always has to be on a leash. I am not totally convinced of that but it is most likely true. One more thing making life far less convenient.

So I took Oreo on a long walk today all the way down to North Street in town. He was really happy to have a chance to go on a real walk. He was so excited, tugging on his collar the entire way. Boy was he tired by the time that we got back to the house.

Dominica made BBQ’d fake chicken for dinner that was really good and we watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, the fourth season, before going to bed. I also spent a lot of time working on Dominica’s former 401k turned IRA account. What an unbelievable hassle that turned out to be. She didn’t do anything about it when they contacted her and it ended up rolling over to a safe haven account with eTrades (whom I hate) and I spent several hours trying to figure out eTrade’s confusing system enough to have the money at least in some actual type of investment situation. That took a huge piece of my evening away from me and really made me frustrated.

I have to be up early tomorrow. My electrician Tim is picking me up at 8:45 so that we can head to Buffalo to finish a project for T-Mobile. I will be glad to have that over and out of the way. The work is good but I hate dangling projects. I like things to be wrapped up so I don’t have to keep thinking about them.