Sheep Guarding Llama

Yup, David Arman turns 30 today. Who is David Arman do you ask? David was in elementary school with me from kindergarten up until fourth grade, I think. Eric doesn’t remember him and Eric came to my school in fifth grade so that seems to pinpoint when he left (in a class that never topped eighteen people you don’t forget anyone that you went to school with.) Anyway, I always remember his birthday because it was exactly a month before mine. So, for what little it is worth, happy birthday David.

For a change there is snow on the ground this morning, but it seems to be disappearing quite quickly. The house held itself at 61F all night so it isn’t very likely that it could be all that cold outside.

Dominica wore her hair down to work today for the first time since she has been at her new job which has been several months. A lot of people commented about it. She thinks that some people almost didn’t recognize her.

I put in a bit of work today on my paperwork for SUNY Empire. Only two last papers to submit and one of those is almost complete. It will feel really good to finally have this out of the way and no longer hanging over my head.

Dad came over at 6:00 and we went over to the Omega for some dinner. Over the past two days I have been putting weight back on even though I have been eating very little and pretty healthily. I guess that my body has decided that it is starving and is trying to conserve food. So I have to up my caloric intake to be able to keep losing weight, I guess. It is so frustrating that it is so hard to figure out what you body is doing and why.

My cell phone was dead this afternoon when I went to use it. Only 28 hours after I took it off of the charger, again. This is the second cell phone that I have had in the past two weeks because of the same issue. I called Verizon and they want me to take the phone into the store that they have on Jefferson Road in Henrietta because there is a technician there that can look at the phone to see what is going on. So I am planning on taking care of that tomorrow, if possible. Not having a working cell phone is a scary thing these days. I really need that cell phone to be working all of the time.

I kept pushing ahead with scanning slides into the computer. Boy there are a lot of these slides. It is going to take weeks to get everything scanned in to the computer. I am doing a lot of stuff from 1994 which is really weird because I haven’t really seen a lot of these pictures since then and boy does it take me back. I can’t believe that I graduated from high school a dozen years ago.

Dominica had a really nasty drive home tonight. The snow is apparently coming down in Rochester far worse than it is here. It took her close to an hour to finally get home. When she got in she made herself some food and looked over the paperwork that I had completed for my Empire graduation, made some corrections and settled down to watch some TNG. I decided that I was on a role and finally getting some real work done so I stayed in the office working.

By 2:00 am I finally managed to submit all of the pending paperwork needed for my graduation. Yes, you heard that correctly. I have submitted all of the paperwork necessary to graduate from college. That is my four year degree that I am talking about. Now, hopefully I will get some feedback by the end of the week. I am undoubtably going to have to make some minor changes to the two papers that I turned in today but it should be really minor and will only take me an hour or less, I would guess.

So, everyone can get off of my case now about college. I am not longer the obstacle. Now we are just waiting on the college for the next steps. I have to get approval for my paperwork from the local “council” now. I don’t know how quickly that will go. Once it is past there, if there are no changes that need to be made, then it will pass on to the state level for the university in Saratoga to approve my degree. I think that I have to go through four indepent reviews before then but I am not really sure about that. We will just have to wait and see. I got the impression that the process tends to move pretty quickly once all of the paperwork is in. Of course, nothing else at Empire has moved quickly. I am still waiting for the grades from two classes that I completed more than a year ago.

Went to bed later than we should have last night as we were watching Star Trek and that always keeps us up. So we slept in again this morning. It has become pretty common for us to sleep in pretty late when Min has the day off. Oreo loves it. It is kind of tough to consider it all that late, though, because Min’s normal schedule is shifted so late that our lives are just skewed from normal people’s schedules. It just seems late when compared to that.

I had to get up and deal with a scam this morning. Just the way I wanted to start my day. Dad got a bill from The Berry Company who run the yellow page “racket” up here. We have been advertising in the yellow pages for the last several years and have decided that it is a totally ineffectual way to drum up new business. After three or four years of ads we have found that we get more and more calls from people looking to get free service from us and absolutely no serious customers who even understand what it is that we do. Almost everyone that calls is just a kid looking to get free advice or to ask us to fix their computer for free since somehow that is our responsibility even though we have no connection to these people at all, live in a different county and they bought their computer from a competitor of both us and our hardware partners. Anyway, I digress.

My recollection of my last dealings with the Berry Company was that we had talked and they were going to send us some paperwork to look over so that we could make sure everything was correct and then we could confirm that we wanted to go ahead with another year of advertising or not. I remember this pretty clearly because we were in the process of trying to change our company name and never talked to them about it because we were going to do that when we confirmed or didn’t confirm. Well no confirmation ever came. We assumed that they had forgotten about us or we had waiting too long and the spots had filled up. We really weren’t concerned since we had decided not to do the advertising anyway. That was in June of 2005. Then two weeks or so ago we get a bill for our yellow page ad. Great. This is what is called slamming. Remember when telephone companies used to call you and change your telephone service without your permission. Yeah, same thing here. So I called the Berry Company knowing that under no conditions would they be able to produce a signature.

Well, they had no signature and they had no confirmation from us. They had a voice recording of me agreeing to have a confirmation sent out for me to look over but nothing of me agreeing to service. The Berry customer service woman said that contrary to what I was told it wasn’t actually a confirmation letter just a letter than was sent out. The confirmation was the voice recording even though I hadn’t agreed to service in the recording. They had “records” of the mail being sent out and she said that they rely on the postal service and there is no confirmation system. The whole thing is a scam. She knew full well that there was no mail ever sent out. She had her lines rehearsed. Obviously this is how they do business at the Berry Company. They knew that if they reported us to a credit reporting agency that it would cost us more to clear the record than it would be to just pay them. This is clear cut extortion. Rochester’s own version of the mob. Oh wait, we have one of those. Well, maybe they work together.

So we are stuck paying for a full year of yellow page service that does us absolutely zero good. To make matter far worse we changed our company name this year and they didn’t change it in the yellow pages so we are now paying for an ad for a company name that we don’t use. And to really rub our faces in it they raised our rates by 22% (their punishment for being a fool for another year.) Well, lesson learned here. No more yellow page ads for us. No more phone calls, no more meetings, no more chance to even talk to us. We don’t do print advertising anymore, anywhere. Time to leave the dark ages and time to stop advertising to people who are stuck in them.

Sorry but I had to rant. There is little recourse against companies that harm people these days. The Better Business Bureau doesn’t even have a way to report these things anymore (believe me I have tried.) Once I even tried to report the BBB themselves because they were saying that you could report but had a whole system set up to keep you from being able to (by having you fill out twenty forms just to be returned over and over again to the place that you started.) When I tried to report the BBB based on their phone number it turned out that the BBB had listed themselves as a Fish and Tackle Shop in Texas. Sound fishy? You bet.

In another vote of confidence for the American education system: Ethnicity Teacher Humiliates and Discriminates Against Student Because He Doesn’t Root for Local Football Team! I can’t believe that stuff like this is allowed in public schools in Pennsylvania. How can this be okay?

By waiting an extra day the Nikon D50 that I am ordering has come down another $2 in price. How cool is that. Even that much cheaper than Rowe. And the shipping is only $9. Not bad at all. So I placed the order today. It is coming by UPS Ground so it will be several days before the camera actually arrives. I decided to go with the Nikon D50 camera kit that comes bundled with the 18-55mm Nikkor DX lens. I am really looking forward to having a chance to play with the new camera. I am so happy with the little Kodak CX7530 that I have now that I am sure that I definitely want to move to all digital. Film is just too much hassle for me. I am hoping that I will be able to unload my Nikon 5005 35mm SLR on eBay along with two of my lenses for it. I just don’t have the time to deal with both digital and analogue film cameras at this point. If I was a professional photographer I would want to have both for now but I only get to take pictures once in a while and I want to get the best value possible with the least effort. I guess I am getting old.

Okay, now this is gross: An Australian couple strike it rich when they discover a very large chunk of Ambergis. Ambergis is found in whale vomit and is highly valuable as a key ingredient in perfume. Thanks again to Eric for this great link.

I had a bunch of errands that needed to be run this evening but Dominica was nice and ran them for me so that I could keep working in the office. She had to run to the post office (because of the change in the postal rate from $0.37 to $0.39) and to FedEx, to the town and the village offices. It was a busy day here in Llamaland. While she was out Dominica went for a haircut too.

Okay, this one is cool. A Mexican man has built his own island out of soda bottles and now lives there. Yes, that is right, he now lives on an island made of recycled soda bottles.

I got back to work on my attempt to actually obtain my undergraduate degree from SUNY Empire today. It keeps getting put onto the back burner.

Dominica and I went over to dad’s house for dinner after she got back from running errands and getting her hair cut. Dominica and I just had salad. Oh joy. After dinner we visited and worked on plans for teaching down at Castile for the remainder of the year. Plans are that we are currently set to start again on Monday.

After leaving dad’s house Dominica and I went to Walmart and did some grocery shopping. Then it was time to come home and to continue watching TNG.

Andy was watching Homestarrunner today and managed to capture this following screenshot. For those of you familiar with Trogdor, this is an awesome license plate of the Burninator. This is a Virginia plate but look closely- that Subaru was purchased at Van Bortel Subaru in Victor. Yup, that is correct, the very dealership where Josh works! Josh, your dealership is famous now.

Isn’t that awesome. I thought that you would all like that. Andy emailed me that late this evening. BRNIN8TR

Well, it is late and I need to get to bed. And, for once, I am remembering to take out the trash so I don’t have to get up in the morning and do it. What a nice change that is. Of course, with the way that the weather has been the last few weeks, it is likely that all of the trash will blow away by the time they come to get it in the morning. It has been so windy for weeks. I hate that. Wind is the thing that I hate the most. It really drives me crazy. Of all of the weather issues that we have here in New York it is the wind that makes me want to move away the most. The snow is fine. I love the gloom and the rain. The constant change is all right. But the incessant wind never lets up. It makes being outdoors so unpleasant. It makes the cold really cold. It makes it hard to talk. It makes it hard to eat outside. When you watch television people are always doing things outside. If Hollywood was located in Upstate New York no one would ever even think of the idea of eating outside. The whole skit would just be about parts of the meal blowing away.

Finally a sunny day again. I opened up the blinds in the office and Oreo went straight in there to enjoy his warm patch on the floor. He loves laying in the sunlight. Especially now that the house is never over 65F degrees. And much of the time much colder than that.

Since we didn’t go to bed until well after 3:00 this morning we slept in rather later. I was awake by 9:30 but Dominica wasn’t out of bed until a little after noon. Dad was supposed to come over after church to get lunch but he forgot his wallet and had to run home before coming over to get some food.

The roadbed that I layed down last night seems to have taken quite well and I am looking forward to attempting to ballast the track later today. Our plan is to do some shopping up in Henrietta. Dominica and I have some jointly assigned holiday money and we are thinking of purchasing some new furniture. Right now we have a futon in the living room that is not very useful for much except when someone is staying over which isn’t very often. It is not a very comfortable place to sit on normal occassions because of the bed frame underneath. So our plan is to replace it with a normal sofa that will be far more practical and take up less space in the living room and to move the futon down to the basement where we intend to finish off the first room at the bottom of the stairs to turn it into a small guest bedroom. That way when people do stay at our house they are not stuck sleeping in the living room but can have a small “private” room to themselves.

Dad arrived around 1:00 and we went over to the Omega. I lost .5 lb this by this morning over yesterday’s gain which was in addition to two pounds lost during the two weeks of South Beach Phase I that I did directly prior to that. So my total weight loss since starting dieting is 8.5 lbs. Far from my goal but it is a start. After lunch we went to Walmart and did some shopping. Mostly groceries. Dad also delivered my new Con Cor “Chicago, Burlington & Quincy” boxcar set that arrived by post yesterday. They are very nice looking units. Three matching red Burlington boxcars in a set so each one has a different number on it so it doesn’t look like three identical cars on the layout.

We got back home around 4:00 and hung out with Oreo for a little while. Then it was off to Henrietta. We went to Value City Furniture but we very quickly realized that Dominica had gotten an incorrect idea of how much furniture was going to cost so we didn’t shop there for very long. Not that the prices were high but we had been hoping for some seriously low prices. We are not really in need of furniture right at the moment and buying a bunch for no particular reason is kind of a bad use of our current funds, I think.

Since we were in the area we swung into PetCo and got Oreo a doggie seatbelt. We are worried about him travelling in the car without one. We then ran over to Borders and picked up a couple of books about Chicago so that we can plan out mini vacation that we are taking in a month.

We stopped by Andy’s apartment while we were up in the area so that we could borrow Star Trek: The Next Generation Season Three. We have been going through television series really rapidly recently.

Dominica and I came home and watched some of TNG while Dominica knit and I worked on laying the ballast onto the track that I have corked. I have never done this process before so I am learning as I go. I managed to ballast about three quarters of the 2′ x 2′ section that I am working on and should easily be able to finish the rest tomorrow. It is all wet tonight so I won’t have a good idea of how it worked until it has dried which it should by the morning. So far it seems to be going well. I think that it looks pretty good. The nice thing about ballast is that it really holds the track in place. There is a lot of material and glue to keep everything solid.

If I was Winnie the Pooh I would call today a blustery day. The is dark, gloomy, windy and there is a little rain too. Oreo and I slept in nice and late today until 10:30. It is definitely a lazy Saturday 🙂

I decided that the South Beach diet was way too lenient for me and that it was causing me to eat far more often than I really should given the way that my body processes food so I decided to alter the diet significantly to me appropriate for me personally. So I am now working on maintaining a diet of less than 900 calories or so (not keeping really strict track) which basically results in me having a large salad for lunch and just some veggies with cheese for dinner. That is so much less food than I am used to having. But I weighed in this morning to see how my first day of extreme dieting was working and so far I am down six pounds since yesterday morning. I won’t be able to keep that up for more than a day or two but it is a nice start.

Dad discovered that the Abbey of the Genesee has a website.

The British government was discovered to be secretly storing DNA information on tens of thousands of minors who have no criminal history whatsoever. Finally it isn’t us for a change.

Brainbench is now offering a series of fun tests for people to answer trivia about thinks like Star Trek and Dilbert.

Andy arrived at the house at 12:15 just as the rain that was coming down turned to snow. He and I had decided to get lunch today and dad was coming over to Geneseo to do some shopping so he decided that he would meet us over at the Omega at 12:30. I got my simple lunch salad like I did yesterday and two cups of coffee. This extreme diet thing isn’t very much fun.

After lunch Andy and I came back to the house and worked for about an hour or so on some Waste Watcher 2 designs stuff that needed to be taken care of before Andy could continue on the work that he was doing. He is at his current contract for just one to two more weeks before he will be back working on this project full time again. This will be, I believe, his first full time work on the project to this degree since we were in Pittsburgh six years ago. Can you believe that it has been almost six years (we moved to Pittsburgh on March 20th, 2000.) Boy time does fly.

While Andy was over at the house he was looking at the N scale model trains that we have sitting around and it brought back memories that he had of having model trains when he was young. He said that he must have had N scale trains when he was little because the size even seemed to be the same.

I haven’t seen Dana and her baby in over a year. Actually, since her baby is only six months old that means that I haven’t seen her at all yet but I haven’t seen Dana since she was just barely pregnant so it has been almost exactly a year. So I tagged along with Andy when he went up to Avon to visit with his family since Dana was over with the baby.

The weather is so warm here today that it is half raining and half snowing while Russia is stuck in a deadly cold spell that is killing all kinds of people who are unable to get to warm locations there.

I did a little maintenance on my Flickr site today and for those of you getting the RSS feed from there you should notice that the titles are now working properly.

Both Dominica and I independantly told people that our fiber supplements were like not as sweet versions of sweet-tarts! How funny is that. They really are good tasty fiber supplements. They are kind of like Flintstone’s vitamins. How funny is it that kids today eat Flintstones vitamins when they are really unlikely to even know who those characters are anymore. Boy how time does fly.

Does nobody pay any attention to their own websites these days? I mean the days of your website mattering were like ten years ago. I went to the web site of Rowe Photo today and noticed that they had posted a picture of their website (the mockup given to them by their web designer to show them what the site would look like, most likely) instead of the actual web site. Take a look at that site. Looks just like a normal web site except it is just a picture and there aren’t actually any links there. Who does that? That site has been there forever. I was thinking about shopping with them since they are local instead of going to an online retailer for the new camera that I want to buy but I guess my business is a pretty low priority to them. They don’t even let me look up prices, stock or anything. Abe’s of Maine it is then.

Dominica came home and headed for the living room to watch the final three episodes of the second season of Angel. We wrapped up that show and then watched In Good Company with Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid and Scarlett Johanson. That was a really good movie that was totally not what I was expecting. Nice to see a movie try to do something different for a change and with a lot of really good people in it.

Because of the diet that I am on I tend to get a lot of energy and don’t really need to go to sleep as early as I normally do so I stayed up and watched two episodes of Red Dwarf before finally deciding to wrap up the daily and head off to bed. While we were in the living room watching DVDs Dominica knit and I worked on laying cork down on the model train layout that I have been working on. I am working on a 2′ x 4′ layout in two pieces (each 2’x 2′) that is just a simple single track in an oval that will be built with four “scenes” for the train to pass through. It is kind of a modeling experiment to see how some things work. The idea is that it is really simple but complex enough that it will give me an opportunity to really exercise my modeling muscles. I want something that isn’t too ambitious and yet is easy to build and store but is still interesting for people to look at. I am only working on one 2’x 2′ section currently but I have the track laid out for that section and I have the cork roadbed down and glued for that entire section. I am hoping to have the track actually cemented into place tomorrow if all goes well.

I have also been working on trying to get my older N scale engines running again. My two old locomotives, a Life Like Union Pacific that was a birthday present many, many years ago was not running at all but I took it apart and it appears to be showing signs of life. It now moves irregularly up and down a straight piece of track that I have in place and its light works which is something since my two other older locomotives have lost their lights. I also have a Bachman Burlington Northern engine that is starting to work again. Its light is no good but it moves with a little more assuredness and should work pretty well again in time.

It is 3:30 in the morning and I think that it would probably be a good idea if I got myself off to bed. Dad is coming over after church to get lunch. Oh boy, another salad. I did really well today without messing up anything on my diet. I may not be staying under my goal of 900 calories but I am definitely close.