Sheep Guarding Llama

The weather has turned so unseasonably warm today that even first thing this morning without any sunlight the house was managing to hold at temperature in the low sixties without the furnace kicking on to help it. At night we generally set the thermostat down to fifty-seven degrees and close off all of the rooms that we don’t need to heat at night to save on fuel costs. With the skyrocketing oil prices it is important to use as little as possible. The grass is green and the sun is shining. And it is mid-January. What a strange place New York is.

Today is the final day of the first year with my CPAP. I can’t believe that it has been a year all ready. And I only just paid it off this week! It is interesting that the CPAP keeps track of the amount of time that I sleep so that I have a way to see how much sleep I get in a year. I have never had such an accurate amount of information about that before. An actual count of an entire year’s sleep. Weird.

Dad has to go to Batavia this morning to see his doctor so that he can have the last of his stitches removed from his fingers. Most of the stitches are all ready out but the last few need to be taken out up there.

I missed the trash pickup again today. It is awful trying to get out there before they leave. They pick up the garbage just minutes after Dominica leaves for work. They used to come a bit later then that so I am used to having time to think about it before they came. Now I remember just in time to look out the window and see them pulling away. At least we generate so little trash around here these days that it isn’t all that important. We could really get away with only getting our trash picked up once a month or so.

For those of you who do not live in the Rochester area and are not aware of our big news up here: the Fast Ferry (aka. the Fast Failure) is finally done. The new mayor of Rochester who is, apparently, not getting the same awesome kickback that the former mayor must have been getting (is that considered giving him the benefit of the doubt over being mentally incapacitated and being controlled by monkey on crack which is the only other reasonable option?), said last night that the City of Rochester would immediately stop putting any more money into the ferry. It has been losing $1,000,000 a month all year in 2005. The first company that ran the ferry lost a fortune. Everyone involved with the ferry in any way has lost a fortune. There was no business plan for the thing at all. The new mayor said that if they raised the prices by twenty percent (which are all ready so high that no one can afford to ride the ferry compared to driving or taking the Amtrak route – both of which are faster and more convenient as well) and managed to back the boat to seventy-five percent capacity on every single run that the city would manage to lose only two million dollars a year!! But that is only the beginning of the story. Because the entire ferry infrastructure is only designed to transport Americans to Canada it also means a high level of lost revenue as Rochesterians begin to do more and more shopping in Toronto instead of at home. The ferry was really an instrument to lower Rocehster’s revenue base. Sure Canadians were welcome to ride the ferry to Rochester. But unlike Americans going north to land in the middle of a giant city with a great public transportation infrastructure that will carry them wherever they want to go Canadians landing at the Port of Rochester find themselves stranded a significant distance from the city of Rochester which is a significant distance from anyplace that anyone would want to go. Rochester itself is in no way a destination. You never hear people from Buffalo or Syracuse talking about how much they would love to go visit Rochester or shop in Rochester. The big malls are elsewhere. The big downtown is elsewhere. What does Rochester have to offer over any other city in the region. Nothing to visitors. And the city is built in such a way as to reflect that. Nothing exists in the downtown area. Hotels are all on the outskirts. The safe parts of the metroplex are far from downtown. Shopping and culture (what little there is) is all out in the suburbs. And if you are a Canadian visitor to the city you had better have a really good grasp of how to get around in Rochester without a car. I have no idea how to do it. It isn’t like we are a big city with major taxi services. The buses don’t go directly from one place to another. You really have to know the bus service and you will be forced to go to a lot of really bad neighborhoods. Even Canadians with their own cars would have a tough time having a good time in Rochester short of visiting the mall (as if that is some sort of entertainment) but as far as doing anything else… what would that entail? I have no idea.

As you can tell, I am pretty passionate about the whole ferry thing. It has been a blight on the Rochester region for the past few years and a total embarrasment to the people who actually have to live here. Just last year Erie County (Buffalo, for those of you not familiar with what used to be America’s second largest city) managed to drive itself into bankrupcy and with the Rochester economy suffering even more than most with the digital imaging revolution devastating the chemical imaging manufacturing capital we were very fearful of Monroe County suffering the same fate as our neighbor.

Formor Mayor Johnson will now be teaching, of all things, ethics at RIT. What an embarrassment for RIT. I have heard that a lot of major sponsors of the school are pulling out their funding because they are so disgusted by this move. Johnson doesn’t even have a degree from a real school, just Howard in DC which is world famous for its racial hatred propaganda. Just the kind of background we need for an ethics professor.

I have decided to compile some links on opinion for the Fast Ferry. From: Andi_67, KeithN, The Green Knight, Commaroto.

Jonathan Schwartz, President of SUN Microsystems, in his blog today talks a little about the CES show going on in Las Vegas but also has a cute little poke at Dell’s poor just juxtaposition of their ads in conjunction with SUN’s recent “Rhymes with Hell” campaign.

I had to drive down to Dansville this afternoon around 4:00 for the Livingston County Chamber of Commerce After Hours event that gets held once a month. I only make to one out of three events or so. This event was held at Noyes Hospital so I really wanted to go because I have never had a chance to be inside of the hospital. I left a little late because I only know so many people at these events and there is always a little bit of awkwardness if you are there for too long so I wanted to limit the amount of time that I would be there since I was going by myself.

I arrived home just a little after 7:00. I realized on my way home that my car’s headlights are not working. Fortunately the bright beams at least work so I had to drive all of the way home with just the brights on because there are no low beams at all. I wonder when and how that happened. One more thing that I have to deal with this week. Tomorrow probably because it is tough not really being able to drive after dark.

If you are looking for some serious cuteness check out CuteOverload.

I heard a really good talk by Jamais Cascio at Accellerating Change 2005 about world wide individualized surveillance. He covers some really interesting stuff.

I was talking to Jeremy over IM tonight. Apparently a teenager from Pavilion was riding a four wheeler around in front of the York High School (where Jeremy currently attends and where I graduated from) and pulled out in front of an eighteen wheeler and was killed. We don’t know any details but that is the rough story that I have heard thus far.

I was listening to another interview today that was talking about online gambling (mostly poker, I think) and one of the questions put to the guy who works at an online “casino” was that the people who are winning money must be taking that money out of other people’s pockets and isn’t that kind of irresponsible. I thought that that was a pretty bizarre question. When can we ever make money that we aren’t taking it away from someone else. Shining someone’s shoes for a quarter is taking advantage of the vanity of the person wearing the shoes. But no one ever blames the shoe-shine-boy for the leather shoe wearing man’s financial woes. You can take this to any situation. Can you blame the burger flipper for being hired by Wendy’s? That poor Wendy’s manager who isn’t allowed to cook the burgers himself. He is forced to give away his unearned money to that kid who ruthlessly flips his burgers and takes his money. What weirdness is that?

No one is going to believe this but Urinal Cakes is finally posting again after a break of four months. I didn’t think that he was ever going to post on his blog again. I guess that situations like this really show the value of syndication because I got his blog just minutes after he posted even though I haven’t checked in on his site in a few months. Cool.

For everyone who isn’t familiar with the Event Database… check out Eventful. It is an events database that is designed to handle all events and all venues everywhere that you can look up all in a single location. Pretty neat stuff but pretty nacent right now.

Dominica got home and cooked dinner before we sat down to watch, yes again, TNG. For some reason tonight seemed like a really short night. It seemed like we had barely sat down on the couch before it was time for bed.

While we were watching the DVDs tonight I installed Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 on my laptop and got my new GPS unit installed. Even sitting in the middle of my living room it was instantly able to lock in my location and show where I was on the map. Pretty neat. I have never used a GPS unit before. It is a really simple thing (not technologically but in use) but they still aren’t so prevelant that it seems second nature to have a device that just magically knows exactly where you are at all time. Neato. I am going to have a lot of fun playing with this. When using Windows XP it even gives me the ability to get driving directions read to me. Cool. I can see that being handy from time to time although getting maps on the Pocket PC will probably be the most useful thing.

Today there is some real sunlight for a change. Sunlight and warm. Very warm. It has been getting warmer and warmer the last few days. This has to be the warmest winter that I have ever spent in New York. The winter of 1999 going into 2000, as I remember it, was very warm and I am pretty sure that I managed to make it through that entire winter without ever coming across any snow at all. But that winter I was not in the Rochester area after February 20th so that may have had an affect on that. But most snow happens, normally, in January and February so it must have been a really warm winter. Or else I just might not remember it very well after all of this time.

I spent the morning in the office, as usual. Dominica’s plan for today was to sleep all day with Oreo. She didn’t quite manage to pull that off but she did manage to sleep until after 11:30. Dad came over to Geneseo at 12:30 and the three of us went to, you guessed it, the Omega Grill to get some lunch. I weighed myself today to see how this new diet is treating me. Unfortunately it currently appears that the diet is causing me to put on weight quite rapidly. I have always had my doubts about these low carb diets. This isn’t encouraging me. My body does not react to anything the way that other people’s seem to do so it just makes sense that diets that work for other people will not work for me. It is really tough with this eating all day long thing because it creates tons of unnecessary food cravings that I am not used to having. I will have to reevaluate the diet after a few more days if I continue to gain weight.

I got a call from the Castile school this morning: the electric has been hooked up for the computer lab. That means that we can now begin the full process of getting all of the computers installed there and classes might be able to begin by next week. That might be overly optimistic but it would be awfully nice to finally have classes underway again. We are so far behind at this point for this school year. Dad, Dominica and I have a lot of work in front of us. But it is fun.

We did some grocery shopping at Wegmans after lunch and then it was back to the house. Dominica and my goal for the day is to be home all day. Once in a while it is definitely nice to be able to stay in town all day. And Oreo really appreciates that too. In fact, even more than we do.

FedEx stopped by dad’s house today and dropped off some new stuff for me. The new speakers for the office have arrived so that we can occasionally watch DVDs or whatever in the office without having to use headphones or the PC speaker which is worthless. The big item that has arrived for me is my new Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 with GPS. I am really excited to get to start playing with that. I have been using Microsoft MapPoint 2004 on my desktop for two years now and I am really happy with it. It is an awesome product. I will be happy to have its counterpart on my laptop so that I can take it with me all of the time and with more up-to-date information. The really nice thing about Streets and Trips is that you get a version for your laptop or desktop as well as a copy for your Pocket PC. Since I have both it really ends up being a very economical package. And to come with a USB GPS unit it is an incredibly good deal. I think that it is going to be an important tool for me once I get used to using it all of the time.

Tonight is another Star Trek: The Next Generation night. We are working out way through season two that we borrowed last night from Andy. So far I am pretty sure that I actually like season one better. Gates McFadden was let go after the first season and the replacement character in the second season is really awful. The second seasons really suffers in general from bad writing and an apparent lack of direction from Gene. Hard to believe that I kept watching this show so many years ago if this is all that I had to go on. This stuff is really not entertaining even though many of the actors do an excellent job (Brent Spiner really kicks butt!)

Dominica worked on some knitting tonight and I did a little work on a train layout and did some reading on PHP and MySQL. I don’t normally get directly involved in development tasks but I have a project that I am really interested in that isn’t deep enough to require Andy’s expertise so I am having a little fun with it myself. Nice to get your hands dirty from time to time.

I checked today and now that I am using WordPress I am writing, on average, about 1,100 – 1,200 words a day. I have no idea how WordPress affects my writing whether it increases it, decreases it or does nothing at all. It completely changes the way in which I write and does make it vastly easier for me to be able to work on the site from just about any location at any time. That alone must have a pretty significant positive impact. It has taught me the importance of web based interfaces. I was really addicted to using a rich client to work on the site but now that there is a web interface for it I really see where I was just wasting tons of time and effort in doing things the hard way because I didn’t want to take the time to set up and learn to utilize this system.

It is almost one o’clock in the morning and time for me to turn in. My plan is to be working one day in Rochester and one in Buffalo this week, if at all possible. I have a short little contract that I need to take care of before too much time has passed.

Happy Birthday to Danielle Ralston who turns old today. Thirty years old, to be exact.

The auto shop called this morning to have us bring in Dominica’s car to get the rear windshield wiper fixed. So we pulled ourselves out of bed after having stayed up late last night watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and drove her car over to the shop. It is really nice having a shop that we can go to that is just around the corner. If we have to we can drop off a car and I can walk home from there. That makes it a whole lot nicer than having to make a major production out of taking a car into the shop.

After dropping off the car we decided to make use of the fact that we were all ready up and about and stopped by the Omega from some breakfast. Funny enough we made it just in time to run into dad and Aunt Sharon as they were leaving. It is times like this that really make you realize just how often we eat there.

We went to Walmart on the way home. We needed to stock up on some groceries and stuff because of the dual diets going on. We have almost no food in the house that we can eat according to the diets so we need to get something so that we can eat. We also found some new fleeces and basic clothing that we wanted. Dominica got a really bright orange fleece. It is really, really bright. Burn your retinas out bright. I like it.

Dad came over at 1:00 and we all went back to the Omega for a late lunch. We had some planning to do about Castile’s computer education curriculum. It is tough trying to decide what to teach and when for an entire K-12 curriculum. There are so many variables and so much to consider. And very little out there to work with that you can work from. It is really a starting from scratch situation. It is extra hard because there hasn’t been any computer education in the past so the variances between students are really dramatic.

This afternoon Dominica worked on taking down the Christmas decorations while I worked in the office. It will be nice to have the space back in the house. I really don’t like decorations of any kind let alone holiday ones. I find them to be weird and very inconvenient.

This evening Dominica and I went up to Caledonia to check out the train store there. We had gotten the impression that it might be a model train store focusing on the needs of train modelers but, once again, we were misled and the store was pretty much just a junk and toy train store. Sure there were a few items of potential interest to modelers… modelers who were stuck in Caledonia with no access to transportation, the Internet, the postal service or a telephone. So we were there for about a total of five minutes before we realized that there was nothing there for us at all. Then it was off to Henrietta.

We stopped by at Andy’s apartment so that we could borrow the next season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Dominica is totally addicted to it now. We hung there for fifteen minutes or so and then the three of us went down to the Denny’s on Jefferson to get some dinner since none of us had yet eaten.

On our way back down to Geneseo, Dominica and I stopped by Walmart in Henrietta to see if they had any additional fleeces in their inventory (which is much larger for clothing than the Geneseo store’s is) that we were not able to find this morning. They had the bright orance fleece that I had been wanting so we purchased one for me and one for dad too.

Then it was back home in time for a couple episodes of TNG.

We got started pretty late this morning but it was really nice to have been able to have stayed up a little late last night and then to have slept in this morning. When you have a snuggle puppy like Oreo you work hard to get maximum snuggle time.

Dad came over and we went to lunch at the Omega a little after noon.

Dominica and I got home from lunch and Art had an IM on my computer. So I called over and the Ralstons came over to visit for the afternoon. They hung out until around 5:00. We just sat around in the living room enjoying the fact that there was at least a tiny bit of light going on. It has been so dark for so long. It does start to get a little depressing after a while, even for me. Not too much. But just a little. Variety is nice but the lack of snow this year has been amazing. Unfortunately it was THIS year that we decided to make the big investment in snow tires for Dominica’s car. The first year that we would not have needed them since 2000 (the year that Andy and I were in Pittsburgh and I managed to make it the entire winter without ever actually seeing snow!) It was nice to be able to visit with the Ralstons. We haven’t seen them in several weeks for more than a few minutes. Our schedules have all been tough. Dominica’s new work schedule makes it really hard for us to see them very much.

We wanted a lazy Sunday afternoon so we popped in some more Star Trek: The Next Generation. We are over halfway through the first season. Dominica continued to work on the buildings for the model railroad. There is a lot of work to be done. Many buildings to make and to paint.

I have recently discovered a really cool online link management service called Delicious that allows you to easily store bookmarks in a convenient way while sharing them with people as well. I have decided to use this service as a neat way for my readers to be able to follow along to cool and interesting web sites that I find. You can view the links by simply visiting My Delicious Page or, even cooler yet, you can subscribe to My Delicious Feed via RSS. Obviously many of my links are included here on the SGL blog but this will allow me to easily share many additional links that I may or may not feel the desire to write about. So subscribe or check often for cool web locales to visit.

We ended up watching the rest of the first season of TNG which was about three DVDs worth of the show. It is nice to get an evening to relax. Dominica managed to finish the painting on another model while we were watching the shows. I am not able to work on the train layout yet because we do not yet have the underlying board work for me to begin construction. That is probably best because I have some work that I need to be catching up on before I get too caught up into anything else. There is always something pulling you in every direction, isn’t there?

Before going to bed Dominica wanted to watch a little of Allo, Allo? because neither of us was quite tired enough to go to bed when we had finished TNG. Oreo was definitely ready for bed though. He had been sleeping on my lap for hours before we actually went to bed.

Today was the first full day of my new diet. I did mostly the diet yesterday but we have been intermingling the South Beach Diet (converted to be a little healthier by reducing its reliance on pork products) with eating whatever was going to go bad in the house that we shouldn’t be eating. Fortunately the Ralstons managed to take a lot of the food that we shouldn’t be eating so that we don’t feel bad not eating it ourselves.