Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up this morning and was just about to leave to go down to Castile when dad popped up on instant messenger to tell me that all of the schools in Wyoming County had been cancelled for the day. The snow was bad here and really bad, as it always is, over at dad’s place. So I ended up getting a day at home that I hadn’t been expecting. It looks like I will be at home tomorrow as well since there is very little chance that class will be held then. There have been no snow days all year so far so everyone has them saved up and is using them now.

Winter is definitely here now. There is a lot of snow coming down outside and it is bitterly cold. Taking Oreo for walks has gone from “needing to seriously consider a sweatshirt” on Friday to “wishing I had woolen cap, earmuffs and mittens” last night. Hard to believe that it was feeling totally like mid-Spring just seventy two hours ago. Boy is it cold now. The last thing that I want to do is to leave the house. Hopefully this will not last for long. According to the Weather Channel it is going to be getting worse for the next ten days. That is as far as their forecast goes out. That is not a good sign. I sure hope that it is warmer than this by the time Dominica and I are in Chicago. We were planning on walking around the city while we were there. If it is anything like this that will be totally awful.

I got a note from one of our biggest clients today saying that they want me to schedule a trip down to visit with them because they want to talk about our services. Now there is a way to make me really nervous. We are definitely not in any type of position to be losing one of our main clients right now and having us drive six hours to talk about it does not bode well. Of course, Eric and dad both agreed that it seems unlikely that they would want us to go all that way just so they could cancel our service. But it is a distinct possibility. That will mean major hardship for us all (as if times weren’t hard enough.) We are hopeful that they are just looking to find out about our current innovation and maybe they are interested in expanding what we do down at their facilities. One can hope. I tried to get a hold of just about anyone down there today but was unable to get through. Not to managers or even secretaries. Maybe the weather was really awful and no one came into work today but then, how did they email me? So, bottom line, we are all pretty nervous but realize that there is a really good possibility here as well. We are going to be praying hard over the next few weeks before we go down there and would really appreciate if everyone would add this to their prayer request lists – both that God would watch over us as we do need clients to be able to keep eating as well as peace for us that we won’t worry about this unnecessarily.

I spent a lot of the morning getting caught up on out of date SGL dailies. With John here all weekend I didn’t have much time to keep up with them. That kept me pretty much busy up until lunch time. Dominica and Oreo decided that today was going to be a sleep in really, really late day so I had to go and get them up around 11:30!

Dad came over at 12:30 so that we could get some lunch at the Omega. The weather was awful and he was barely able to get out of his driveway but he had the new soup signs for the Omega that he wanted to get hung up so he drove on over. We had two soup sign advertisements up there before but they ended up getting the crap beaten out of them and they don’t have the company name on them anymore so we had to get them replaced. The new signs have our advertising put onto them with a magnet so they will, hopefully, hold up a whole lot better than the old ones.

While we were at lunch dad gave me a Bible that used to belong to his father’s mother – Lydia Anne Miller. At the time she lived in Hartville, Ohio. It even has her rural route and box in the front cover. This Bible was printed in Arthur, Illinois in 1928 by the Amish Mennonite Congregation Press. It is a tiny little Bible, not much larger than the pocket NIV that I keep in the car. The binding is in rough shape and it is extremely delicate. It is really cool. I also have a very old, leather bound complete works of Shakespeare that used to belong to, I believe, my dad’s mother’s father. All of this is confusing, isn’t it? That one was printed, if I remember correctly, in the late 1910’s.

For those of you who would like to see a German Bible but who aren’t allowed to touch mine (that would be all of you) then you can check out this cool German-English Parallel Bible online. Neat, huh?

Dad also delivered my new blood pressure monitor today. It has been on order for weeks. I have been supposed to have had one ever since I last went to see my doctor. I am supposed to be watching my pressure on a daily basis to make sure that it isn’t getting high. My pressure is not that bad but it was a lot higher this last checkup than it has been previously so they want to watch me to be sure that I am not getting hypertension. Hopefully with some weightloss I will be right back down to where I was. Traditionally my heart rate and blood pressure have always been pretty good.

I spent a tremedous amount of time working on setting up my first Asterisk server tonight and finally got two softphones in the house to be able to call each other. Okay, I know that that sounds like hardly anything but it was an awful lot of work on my end here! Learn a little about VoIP at Wikipedia. After finally learning how to get Asterisk working to a minimal level (enough to use it as a complicated network based intercom system) I decided to download the newest version of the Asterisk package that I have been working on and try the whole thing all over again with the latest code. Yup, one glutten right here. But this is how learning happens. One painful step at a time. I have never done much of anything with IP Telephony on my own up until now and there is a pretty steep learning curve. Sure I use Vonage at home but that is just a device that you plug in and everything is set up for you. Almost no configuration at all. It’s great but nothing like what I am trying to do now. Now I really need to know what is going on. It is a lot of work but the payoff should be pretty good. Not just will this be a majorly awesome internal service but it will also be a really good skillset to have on my resume.

Dominica spent most of the afternoon working on her A+ studies. She still hasn’t taken that test and it is really important that she take it soon so that all of the class work that she did doesn’t fall out of her head before she goes for the certification. She had originally been scheduled to have to go into work late tonight (read: 2 am tomorrow morning) but her manager called this afternoon to let her know that they didn’t go ahead with the project that she was going to have to come in for so she is back on her regular schedule for the week. That is good. We didn’t really want her to have to go to work tonight – especially with how bad the roads have been today.

Dominica cooked dinner, BBQ Quorn Fake Chicken, around 9:45 and we sat down to watch a little Star Trek: The Next Generation while we ate and while a major software installation was taking place on my desktop.

I was doing some research on Amazon tonight and discovered that the amazing band “Boy Meets Girl” that did songs like “Waiting for a Star to Fall” back in the late 1980’s and who wrote hits for others like “I Wanna Dance With Somebody Who Loves Me” by Whitney Houston have recently released an album that they recorded in 1990 and a new one from 2003. I will be getting those very soon. I had been looking to try to find an album with a recording of “Holiday Road” by Lindsay Buckingham that was made famous by the movie National Lampoon’s Vacation but it is nowhere to be found. That soundtrack was only released in a special limited edition with only 2,000 copies having been pressed. I found where I could buy a used copy for around $90 but that was a little much to get a single song that I wanted. There must be a better way to get that one song. I tried lookin on some music download services and wasn’t able to find it. One would think that in this modern age of the Internet that if someone honestly wanted to purchase a really well known song for a dollar or two that some service would offer a simple and convenient way to do that. I guess we still have a long way to go. Sometimes I forget that the world has always been so organized and connected and that there are still a lot of things that haven’t caught up with the mainstream yet.

After watching an episode of TNG Dominica returned to studying for her A+ and I kept working on installing my second Asterisk server. While that was busy doing its own thing I began the long and arduest task of creating the new Niagara Technology Group website (there is no link because we don’t have a site yet.)

I have been kicking around the idea of phasing out IthacaPortal.com. I need to look into its logs and see whether or not anyone is still using that site. Since I am not in Ithaca anymore it isn’t really up to date and I think that it has lost its momentum. That is sad, really, because it was such a neat idea. But there are other services that are starting to compete with it and it just isn’t as cool as it once was. It would be neat to discover that it was being used on a regular basis, but I find that to be rather unlikely. Hopefully I will have a chance tomorrow to dig through the logs to see what the traffic has been like on IthacaPortal the last few years. Believe it or not I have not even looked at the logs in probably two years or more. It just hasn’t been a priority.

I ended up staying up quite late working tonight. It has been a very productive day. I needed to feel productive today. I always feel better when I have managed to get a lot done. Even if it is nothing more than getting a lot of SGL updates taken care of but I got a lot more than that done today. While working late tonight I always was able to get some seminar listening in as well. I am really close to getting caught up with my backlog of stuff to listen to.

Both Dominica and I ended up staying up until after four in the morning. She watched a bunch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that John Stephens had dropped off for her. She studied and watched the show at the same time in our bedroom with Oreo snuggled up on the bed. I worked in the office listening to IT Conversations podcasts while doing web site design. I am pretty happy with the progress that I made tonight. Hopefully I will have something to show to everyone in a day of two.

It was about five o’clock when I decided that it was finally time for bed. I can’t believe that I stayed up so late. But I just wasn’t tired until then and even then I wasn’t all that tired. Isn’t it weird how one day you will be so exhausted and the next you will be just fine. It isn’t like I slept in late or did anything weird yesterday. Hmmm…

Dominica and I were up early this morning so that we could get to church for our book study on Max Lucado’s “Come Thirsty”. We are only going to Sunday School and not staying for church because John Stephens, The Surfing IT Wizard, is still at the house and because Dominica’s back is unable to handle sitting at church for such a long period of time. We learned that lesson last week when we stayed after Sunday School for the church service.

Dad remembered to bring along the new MiniSD cards that got shipped to him for Dominica and I. They will allow us to store 512MB of stuff on each of our cell phones. Pretty cool, huh?

Oreo hopped into bed with John and snuggled with him while we were at church. Isn’t Oreo a good dog?

We returned from church and Dominica, John and I ran over to the Omega Grill for some lunch. To give John the real SGL experience we went to the Omega at least once each day that he was here.

After lunch we returned to the house and John packed up and got ready to go and then he and Dominica went down to the theatre and watched one final episode of Firefly. I was going to join them but we just discovered that Verizon has disabled important features of our cell phones and I wanted to speak with them. When we had first purchased the phones they had come with the awesome capability of being able to play MP3’s which is really cool because I could play my podcasts on them. And since they have built in stereo speakers it is that much cooler. Well, when I recently took mine and Dominica’s cell phones up to Verizon’s tech to have them look at them to figure out why mine was not even beginning to meet their battery life expectations they did a software update for me. They said that it was so that we would be able to download music from their V-Cast service. I couldn’t care less about that. I just wanted a software update so that we would rule out the possibility of my cell phone having old software that was causing the problem. They didn’t warn me about any functionality loss at all. Well, as it turns out, lots of people are having problems with this process because it totally removes the ability of the phone to even recognize MP3’s much less play them. Apparently this is a “feature” as being able to play MP3’s was too confusing for Verizon’s customers. Now their argument is that the phone can still play music but now you MUST own Windows XP (not even Windows 2000 or ME) and you must update to Windows Media Player 10 and you must buy a USB cable from Verizon and after all of that you now have a really annoying and just about useless tool that allows you to load your MP3’s into Windows Media Player and then syncronize them over to the cell phone. What it does is it converts your MP3’s into WMA files which are locked down by Windows (even if you made them yourself and totally own them) so that you are unable to share them from the card in your cell phone. So, after all this, I have lost the ability to play MP3’s, I must down buy a cable, I must only use this “feature” in places where I have Windows XP installed AND have my files located that I want to move to the phone, I must wait for the computer to transcode the files (which is a quality loss regardless of the quality of the final format) and then have useless files on the phone that I cannot share because they are locked. All of this after having purchased MiniSD cards so that we could just share the MP3’s back and forth with my laptop. I can’t believe how much they screwed us. And when you call Verizon they just say “Oh, the store should be able to revert you back to the old version of the software” but when you call the store they say “No, the conversion is one way and you can’t go back. It is your own fault for having it done because we tell each and every customer ever that this happens and there is no possibility whatsoever that we missed someone.” But, of course, they do not have you sign something saying that you acknowledge that they told you something so they are setting up a situation where it is your word against theirs. They have a “policy” of telling you that Verizon is very adamant about but why would they have a policy with no way to enforce it? Oh right, because they don’t want anyone to know. I had two phones done that way and wasn’t told on either one. What are the chances that anyone is being told? Not very high, I think. There are an awful lot of people online trying to find out why their $400 cell phones no longer have nice features that they had paid for. Somehow I doubt that all of them agreed to give up their MP3 players and then realized later that they used them.

Needless to say, I am not really happy with Verizon right now. The MP3 functionality was a relatively minor feature for me as I own a much nicer dedicated MP3 player but I was looking forward to having two units and having the built in speakers and being able to use bluetooth and such. Of course, Verizon has currently had to face a class action law suit about intentionally disabling the bluetooth feature of some phones that they had advertised that they came with. Sound like their is a trend here? The thing that makes me the most upset about this is that Verizon did something very underhanded in the intention of locking you in to getting your music exclusively through their V-Cast service. Of course, you can buy hardware from them and get around it but that isn’t fair. I all ready paid for this functionality AND paid for expensive memory cards to enhance it. They STOLE that advertised functionality from me. They took it through deception and then lied about having done it. Then they “lied” about being able to switch it back although I told them that they couldn’t and they checked into it and admitted that they could not. Then they said that they would do some research into it and would get back to me tomorrow. We will see if they actually do that or not. I think that they were just blowing me off. Just like Time Warner did and then yelled at me for thinking that they blew me off. I am still waiting for that phone call. Do you think I should follow up with it yet? It happened in 2002!!

I am debating whether or not to bother getting the cable to be able to put WMA files on the cell phone. Once I am spending that much money I am 1/3rd of the way to another dedicated MP3 player that will work much better. And the dedicated MP3 player will just plug into any USB port and act like a little hard drive. So much easier to work with. And it won’t drain my cell phone batteries. Basically I think that Verizon has managed to turn their really cool integration device into an irrelevant piece of crap. Sure it HAS features but they are so poorly implemented that I have no idea why I would ever use them. It is like making a food replicatore (okay, too much Star Trek for me) but making it take hours of setup to use for each meal so that it is still easier to cook for yourself. Why replicate food when cooking is easier? Why use the cell phone when every other option is now a better one? I was so happy when I first got this cell phone but their has been too much non-disclosure about it. The battery only lasts if you are in a major metropolitan area because their is a battery draining “feature” that kills it if you are outside of Verizon’s main operations areas. And, of course, what feature is that? The feature that isn’t part of the cell phone service but is the service that is used to buy additional “features” from Verizon like ring tones, video games and, oh yes, V-Cast music. So my phone is not working as advertised (6.75 days of standby time) because they are draining my battery trying to make it ultra-convenient to buy music from them. And then they secretly disable my cool MP3 player capability so that I find it too difficult to use music I all ready own so that I will, once again, buy music from them. This is not encouraging behaviour. I foresee a rebellion. I will call it – the WiFi VoIP revolution. Sure, it will take a while, but I have all ready heard people starting to talk about it. Lots of people are starting to be in positions to be able to use wireless VoIP handsets and to take them all over the place with them and not need land lines OR cell phones. Now that will take a while to really catch on but not as long as people might think. It’s all ready happening. The baby bell’s time is coming. The writing is on the wall. Time for the ‘donkeys’ to face the music. The V-Cast music, I suppose.

Okay, enough of that. If it wasn’t such a huge portion of my day I wouldn’t talk for so long about it. I spend almost two hours on the phone trying to deal with all of that. Later in the afternoon a really nice girl from Verizon called and talked to me for a while about the problem. We discussed it from a really educated and intellectual point of view. I explained to her how the new service had made the phone irrelevant and how I had intended to use it. She was really interested in my take on new media and took a lot of notes. We even talked about how Verizon could even make better use of this poor decision to at least remedy the situation a little bit by adding in Audible books into the mix since the new system is perfectly set up for DRM’d content like that. (Audible really should be paying me for all of the promotion that I do – Verizon could easily become the biggest account ever for them!) She even asked me when I would be speaking in the area because she wanted to hear me give a seminar. My cell phone number is a Pittsburgh one so she thought that I was local. We did discuss the possibility of me speaking at Verizon because it is quite clear that Verizon is very focused on the teen/tween iTunes pay-per-tune crowd and are forgetting about the podcast/talk ‘radio’/book-on-MP3 crowd completely not even realizing that they are there. What a huge, upwardly mobile, educated, well paid audience they are ignoring.

Okay, so that was dealt with as well as it could be. John Stephens had to get going so that he could beat the bad weather that was coming so he headed off for Endicott around 2:00 or so. Dominica and I settled into the living room and watched more of season four of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We are making really good progress. We need to get through it soon because Andy just picked up season seven of Red Dwarf and we really want to borrow that.

While we were watching TNG I did a bunch of work learning how to install and work with the big VoIP Asterisk Server. We have been needing to implement one of them inside of the company for some time now but it has not become a priority. We are really starting to see a need for it so I am seeing just how much work is going to be involved in getting one working that will get us through for a while. It is definitely a set of features that we really need. Currently we just work off of one company line that is actually my home line. We can only take one call at a time and everything else goes to voicemail. The service that we currently get is really good but it just isn’t adequate for the business. So we want to put in a real PBX that can handle multiple extensions, have a digital receptionist, transfer calls, do conference calling, etc. That way it isn’t just me answering the phone when someone calls but they can actually select the person that they want to talk to and be put directly through to their extension. We will really start seeming like a real company once we have stuff like that! Also it will allow our phone lines to go with us with we travel. That will be really important this year if I am out on the road doing sales all year. I will be able to set up in my hotel room with broadband and the company line will connect to my laptop and ring me there just like I was in the office. Isn’t that COOL! Okay, only so cool. But when you are a small company every little step to the enterprise is a really cool one.

I didn’t manage to get the new server working tonight but I did learn a lot and I think that I am making good progress. Fortunately we are not in need of a lot of really big and difficult features yet (I think that features is my word of the day today) so it doesn’t look like it will be all that hard to get something running that should do well for us for a year or two.

Both Dominica and I were really, really tired today. So tired, in fact, that I went to bed at 10:00. I read for about an hour before actually falling asleep. Min stayed up until 11:00. I have to get up in the morning because I am going into Castile Christian Academy to help out with the classes and that is first thing in the morning.

John Stephens and I decided to get up just shortly after Dominica had left for work. Currently our only futon is in the living room so John didn’t have much chance of sleeping through Dominica getting ready for work. Just another reason why we would like to be able to have a “guest bedroom” kind of space available down in the basement so that people staying at our house could have a little privacy. And a little darkness. Our living room is a very hard room to keep dark during the daytime because there are windows on both ends of the open space as well as a skylight right in the middle of the room. It is difficult to cover up all of that light.

After getting up and showering and checking out some cool website like Ask A Ninja and Super Secret Dance Society and, of course, Rocketboom, we decided to grab some lunch and so returned to the Omega Grill to get some food.

Here is a question: Why did someone post a video of Mike Dancing at a Basketball Game? This stuff is weird people. Weird. And boring. Actually, more boring than weird. I just can’t believe that I come across this stuff.

After lunch we came back to the house and hung out in the living room while I completed the work on the computer that needed to be installed and shipped today. It took a few hours to get everything in place. Just as we were starting to get ready to go Andy called down to see what we were up to. So we decided to all get together to get some dinner. It was around 4:30 by the time that John and I managed to get out of Geneseo. We drove up to the FedEx on Scottsville Road but they are not open on the weekends so then we had to drive down to the FedEx Kinkos on Jefferson and get the shipping done from there. It is really handy that they are open twenty-four seven. A place that does shipping is not the kind of place that you want to have closing.

We got the packages shipped out and then went up to Brighton to pick up Andy so that we would all be in the same car. Oreo came along for the ride too. We decided to go to Applebee’s so we drove up to Webster and checked the place out. It was a forty-five minute wait and the line was out the door so we decided that someplace else would be a lot better. I looked while we were there and the Fizoli’s where Josh used to work that shared a parking lot with Wegmans and Applebee’s in Webster is gone and it looks like the old building was turned into a bank. It is probably for the best. Whoever thought that Italian fast food was a good idea wasn’t someone who liked eating. The food there was not good and even just mentioning it to someone tends to make them think that it was a bad idea. Fast spaghetti? Ewww. It is hard enough to come up with good spaghetti at a real Italian restaurant.

So we decided to just save money and to go down to Jay’s Diner for dinner instead. It is more casual there anyway and a lot easier to talk and hang out since it is not completely packed and loud. I like eating in relative quiet so that I can actually talk to people. If I didn’t like to talk to people I would just eat by myself. We had a good time at dinner and then we all went over to Borders to do a little book shopping while we were out. John and I both found some stuff that we wanted. I found a couple books on Asterisk and VOIP as well as a book on learning Ruby which I have been interested in checking out.

We took Andy home and then drove back down to Geneseo. Dominica managed to beat us home by seconds. She was still standing in the garage when we pulled in. Dominica was hungry so she drove over to Walmart and did some shopping and picked up a pizza for dinner.

I had some work that I wanted to do and Dominica wanted to get caught up on Firefly so she and John went down to the theatre while I worked up stairs for about three hours. I was working on trying to learn how to compress and encode video taken from my DV recorder. I would really like to be able to get my videos in Xvid format (an open source implementation of the MPEG-4 format) but I haven’t come up with an easy way to do that on Windows yet. If my laptop was Linux this would be a lot easier. But it isn’t so I have to figure something out. I have converted the videos into Windows Media files and I am able to get pretty good quality out of file sizes of 150MB and 300MB for a one hour recording. So I think that that is pretty good. But since I can’t use Windows Media files at the school and don’t feel like dealing with a proprietary format anyway I want to get Xvid working.

After they had watched the two episodes that I had all ready seen I went down and joined them for two additional episodes of Firefly. John was sleeping on the couch in the basement for most of the time. He had fallen asleep for about half an hour in the car on the way up to Henrietta earlier. He worked an early shift yesterday and needed to catch up on some sleep.

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.