Sheep Guarding Llama

Today ended up being insane errands day. All errands. All. Day. Long. Ugh.

Check out a site that might as well be our llama sister site: Spitting Llamas. What a great name for a blog!

So I was filling out Best Buy rebates this morning. You all know how that is. You buy lots of stuff at Best Buy cheap during the holiday season and then get stuck with hours of work trying to get the price that you thought you were paying originally. Well, as I was filling out the rebates I discovered that when I had purchased the products that I had that the store had told me that I could buy an unlimited amount and still get the rebates. But now as I was filling them out I notice the fine print on the rebates themselves from the manufacturer that says that they will not honor more than one rebate from an address. I look again at the Best Buy receipt and it clearly says right on it, in addition to the person in the store having told me and the display saying nothing about limitations, that everything that I bought on that receipt together were eligible for the rebates although the rebate printed on the same piece of paper clearly disputes that fact.

So I called the Best Buy store where I had purchased the products. I couldn’t get through to anyone for twenty minutes. Now, think back, when is the last time that you called a regular brick and mortar store and couldn’t get through for twenty minutes? I mean the whole store is SO busy that they are no longer taking calls? I eventually called through to the appliances department and had them get a manager for me through that route. The manager attempted to get out of having to do anything because “Best Buy is not responsible for the rebates and Best Buy says that advertising a price and not giving it isn’t really false advertising but after you purchase the product and get the rebate is the actual advertising.” Now many of you may think that that makes no sense – that advertising only exists after a product has been purchased and that you can state anything you want prior to the sale as long as you don’t lie about it after the fact. Well, I have no retort. Anyway, the manager finally admitted that the store was wrong to mislabel the display, misstate the rebate limitations and misprint the receipt confirming that misstatement. Now that the store has finally admitted to being at fault the question is: will their honor the stated price (or… will they honor a rebate that they claimed to offer but didn’t… just semantics at this point.) The answer: no. Since it isn’t false advertising or anything and just plain lying. Oh I see. No wait… Anyway, they did agree to take back anything that I couldn’t get a rebate on. That is better than nothing but does NOT qualify as honoring their advertised price. Now I have to make a drive to the city (read: Henrietta) just to deal with this. They do this, quite obviously, because most people won’t bother but I purchased almost $1,000 of things that they were refusing to honor rebates on where the rebates were worth over $750 of that amount. So it was VERY important to take them back. The prices were awful without the rebates.

So Dominica and my day became a day of errands. Lots of errands. I woke Dominica up and told her that we had to go to the city to take care of myriad things so she got up and got moving and we were out of the house by 2:00. Okay, maybe a day of errands is too generous. A day of resting with several errands tacked on at the end is more appropriate.

We started by getting lunch at the Omega. We were both really hungry although Dominica is barely able to eat anything at this point because she is so disgusted by everything that is allowed by the diet. She can barely bring herself to eat at all.

Our first errand was Best Buy. Fortunately the girl working the counter was very nice and helpful and as soon as she looked at the receipt that clearly stated that we got the rebate she didn’t give us any problem returning all of the items. That was a big relief. I was half (or more than half) expecting there to be another big argument about how it isn’t Best Buy’s fault if they misrepresent their vendor partners.

Then we ran to the bank to do some much needed banking that we have been putting off for forever because it is never, ever convenient. Then up to Despatch Junction. There were some train supplies of which we were in need and we wanted to get it taken care of while we could. Mostly we got things like track and paint. Just basic stuff.

FedEx had tried to deliver my replacement cell phone today but dad hadn’t been around so they took it back to the transfer facility way out on the west side of the city on Manitou Rd. Since our timing and location was decent we took the opportunity to drive out to FedEx and pick up the phone so that we don’t have to figure out how to deal with it tomorrow. That went smoothly and quickly. Then we drove down to dad’s house because he had gotten a shipment of stuff that I needed to have over in Geneseo and it was more or less on the way home from that part of the city.

We got home and spent the evening relaxing and watching more of the second season of Angel. We watching two episodes, I think, and then went to bed on the early side because I have to be up quite early in the morning. I have a big project day in Rochester and Buffalo tomorrow and I need to be ready for it. It is going to be a really long day.

I got up this morning and called over to LBC Model Trains in Buffalo to see what their hours were. LBC is the only store that looks like it might take modeling seriously that we were able to find in the entire area. I called over and got no response at all. No answer. No voicemail. No answering machine. And it is after 10:00 in the morning! I can only hypothesize that they are no longer in business. How annoying. Of course Kurt’s in Caledonia did the same thing and they are still around just not worth going to because they are a junk store. Either way it is not a good sign for LBC. So I guess we will be giving up on them. Their website doesn’t quite totally work and hasn’t been updated for two years so they probably closed shop and just left the website in place. That happens way too much. Someone needs to scavenge these things.

After several calls they apparently decided to turn on their answering machine and I got a message saying that the store was closed and that it would open again tomorrow. Oh sure, we finally get a chance to go there and they don’t even bother being open on a big shopping day!

I called M&R Automotive and they were able to get my car in today. So we had to get moving and get my car over there so that they would have the day to look at it. Dad was on his way to the Omega for breakfast when we took the car over so we decided to stop in there to meet him.

In a surprising move, Nikon has decided to cease the manufacturing of all analog cameras! And yes, that press release is directly from Nikon. This is very surprising as Nikon is considered to be the leader in analog SLR cameras (the kind most people associate with serious photographers.) Obviously, the sales of new analog cameras is only a fraction of what it was just a few years ago. Even though many people continue to use analogue cameras very few people go out and buy them. And of those buying them I would assume that a very large percentage of them are buying them used. I was not personally expecting this move to be made for several years yet. I thought that Nikon, Canon, Konica and Pentax would keep making analogue film SLRs until at least 2008 or later. Apparently I underestimated the speed of adoption of digital imaging. It is true that digital is just so much more convenient and so much less expensive. Perhaps the biggest factor in its use is the one that I have noticed for myself which is that I only even want to use photographs in digital form regardless of what medium they were originally taken with. I don’t look at prints. I don’t project slides. I look at photographs on my computer. I watch slideshows on my computer. I send pictures online to friends. I put pictures into web pages. Et cetera. Bottom line is I do nothing that makes use of the physical media. I have owned three “photo” printers and yet have never used any of them for the purpose of actually printing photographs.

John Battelle (of Google) makes fun of backwards New York Times today as they run a story about Google Ad-Sense years behind the times. Haven’t they used the web in the last year? What do they do all day? Did they just now notice the ads on the sides of so many websites? What did they think those little ads on the side of half the pages in the known universe were random? Dirt on their screens maybe? File this under “why traditional media is irrelevent.”

At 2:00 Jeremy and I went over to the Omega for lunch. I just got a cup of soup while he ate since I had eaten just a little bit before. Then I drove him back down to Leicester.

At 3:40 dad came by and picked up Dominica and I and we went over to the Geneseo Cinema to watch Glory Road which I didn’t know much about but ended up being a really good movie. Dad has been wanting to see it for a while but I don’t really keep up on movies that are coming out so I only kind of knew what it was. All of us really liked it. I am sure that dad will be buying it as soon as it is out.

It was dinner time when we got out of the theatre so we drove up to Denny’s for dinner. Min was getting a little tired of the Omega. The diet we are on is awfully limiting and it is starting to make all food just boring and blah. It is bothering her tons more than it is bothering me. Mostly it is making me not care about eating nearly as much as I used to but that is a good thing since that is why I eat so much 🙂

After dinner I did some work in the office and Dominica knit and watched some of the Gilmore Girls which I really do not like. I don’t even like listening to it. Then we watched more of Angel and I got to work getting out next model put together. Boy is there a lot of work involved in doing that.

Tony ended up not being able to work with me tomorrow. I wasn’t able to find anyone that was able to work so we ended up having to push off the project until Wednesday so that Jeremy is able to do it. That will work out really well for Jeremy. He is even managing to get out of school to be able to do the work. He is happy about that.

I got up this morning around 9:00. At this rate I will be lowering my sleeping average over the course of this year! But I was awake so I got myself up. Dominica slept in until noon. Her Friday into Saturday schedule really wears her out and this is her chance to catch up.

Yesterday and today I have put in a bunch of time with dad’s slide scanner getting my massive slide collection put onto the computer so that I can get some practical use out of all of this chemical film archive that I have amassed over the years. I have previously scanned in the bulk of my prints because I had a flatbed scanner handy to me but the slides have been neglected until now. The slides make up the bulk of my images so this is going to be a long process. But it is nice getting a chance to go back through this huge collection and look at all of these pictures again and from now on I will have easy access to them so that I can do whatever I want to do with them. It will probably take me several weeks to get them all converted. It might even take that long just to find them all. Most of the slides are stored in special storage sleeves which makes them a little but hard to deal with in bulk form like I am doing now. So that will slow me down a bit. I will be selectively posting the images to Flickr when I get to some interesting stuff.

Dad came over for lunch after church. The three of us went over to the Omega as usual. Now that we are not going to church at LaGrange on Sundays we never go over to the Silver Lake Family Restuarant anymore. In truth, eating isn’t very much fun anymore because of this new diet. I am not having a problem staying on the diet but it does make eating very boring. There are only a couple of meals that work out as things that I actually can eat and that gets old really quickly.

Dominica and I spent the afternoon just relaxing around the house. We finished the last two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season Two. Then we moved on to watching Allo, Allo which we also finished as well. There were only two short seasons made of that show.

We were supposed to go up to Rochester today to hang out with Tricia but she never called to let us know when to come up so we just stayed home waiting for her to call. I kept working on the “Railroad Hotel” model that has been taking us about a week to put together. Dominica worked on her knitting.

Originally we had thought that Jeremy and I were going to be working on a job tomorrow but that ended up not working out so he is not going to be able to do the job with me on Tuesday which is really too bad because it was going to be a really good opportunity for him to get an actual IT contract on his resume even if it was just a little one for one day. So since he isn’t able to do it I called Tony to see if he wanted to have a go at it. I haven’t heard back from him so I don’t know whether or not he will be able to help.

So here is an interesting news item today. The Major Baseball League is attempting to get Federal approval for them to have intellectual property rights to statistics from their games. Now the big fight that everyone is talking about is between the league and the fantasy baseball organizations who use those statistics for financial gain. But I think that everyone here is missing the big picture. If fantasy leagues don’t have the right to use statistics that can be gathered by casual observers or from unconcerned parties who happen to read a newspaper then there may be wide reaching consequences. Any law that protects statistics from open use (statistics have traditionally always been history not IP) will also keep newspapers, blogs, television, radio, podcasting, etc. from publishing game reports. The media will have to license the rights to game information to be able to tell who played, who won and how they did. But this could go beyond sports. Imagine if you have to license the rights to report on anything. no one is allowed to talk about any event because the news is owned by the people who perform it. A criminal could make a fortune by licensing the statistics to the news media that tell how many people he has killed or how many banks he has robbed. If anyone wants to keep the media from reporting on anything bad they will simply make the licensing cost of that news too expensive for anyone to afford. This is more than a little fight about sports – this is a major attack on individual rights being attacked by major corporations with the power to own history and news! It is a good thing that I read the news and keep everyone informed about this stuff.

Around 8:00 I finally finished building the “Railroad Hotel”. By that point I was a bit woozy from the plastic cement fumes. Then it was Dominica’s turn again to start painting the parts to the next model. We started with a really complicated one with a lot of parts. The next one should be significantly easier to put together. I will hopefully be able to post some pics of the hotel by mid-week. I would do it tonight but you can’t ge a good picture in this until there is daylight in this house and I might not be around the house during the day until Wednesday. If I am lucky I might have some new railroad rolling stock by then to add to the pictures. The hotel is not actually quite done yet because I have to go back and add internal divisions and lighting. To make the buildings more realistic I plan to put in lighting that works in different sections of the buildings so that the entire building doesn’t just light up all at once which is completely unrealistic. I don’t have any lights here so that is something that I have to go shopping for yet.

Tomorrow Dominica and I are thinking about going out to Batavia in the morning to do some shopping at BJ’s Wholesale Club with dad who has a one day pass. Dominica has some shopping that she wants to do there. Then we are thinking about going on to Buffalo to spend the day hanging out out there. Just a nice relaxing day with just the two of us. There is a model railroading store out there that we want to check out. After our past experiences we don’t have a lot of faith that it will have anything much or take the modeling aspects of model railroading very seriously but it is our best shot this side of Syracuse so we wanted to give it a go. Plus we have been talking about doing a day trip to Buffalo for a while because it is such a neat city that is so close to home (less than an hour away) and yet we never go there and neither of us really knows our way around. We figured if we intentionally spent some time there that we might get comfortable with using the amenities of the city that we would eventually be able to take advantage of it. It is strange to me that I grew up just one county away from the city that just seventy years before I was born was the second largest city in the country! Buffalo is replete with history, architecture, culture, etc. I am extremely familar with Rochester which was only ten or twenty minutes closer to me growing up than Buffalo. I wonder why Buffalo was always considered to be a different region and so far away. Well, maybe we will find out.

Okay while working on the photographs I came across an awesome picture of Eric and I just could not resist posting it up here. So check out this awesome shot of Eric Millen taken in 1994 on his way to the York Central High School YCHS Junior Prom. He went to the prom with Tammy Hopkins. Mary Johnston and I went with them as well. Mary and I hadn’t been planning on going at all but my friends Lindsay and Jim were going together but barely knew each other and wanted us to go along so that they would have people that they were comfortable with to hang out with so we went.

That’s right. That is eighteen year old Eric. Can you believe that hair? More importantly, can you believe that he had hair?

Jeremy came over around 9:00. Originally the plan was for him to spend the night so that we could go straight on to work in Rochester in the morning but that fell through. So he just came over to hang out for the evening. He got a look at the “Railroad Hotel” that just got completed and now he is addicted to model railroading. That is all that it took. Once you see real modeling in action it is easy to get hooked.

Tony West called over around 10:00 to check in and see what cool new excitement is up in Llamaland. Tony is hoping to be able to work on the project on Tuesday that Jeremy isn’t able to do now. We should hear about that in the morning.

It was a long television night (television on DVD, that is) with us also watching the entire third season of Red Dwarf, Clue and then cracking open and watching some second season of Angle. There was a lot of model railroading work completed. The second building model seems to be coming along nicely. There is a lot of technique to be learned but I think that we are starting to get the hang of it.

Remember that tomorrow is a holiday so no school, banks or post.

I had to get up early this morning so that I could drive Dominica to work. My car is dead, we think, with electrical problems. I hope to be able to get it into the shop on Monday. If not it is going to be a tough week. The plan is that I will drop her off at work and then when I go to pick her up we are going to go out with Tricia for her birthday up on Alexander Street.

On the way back from dropping Min off at Fuji I swung into Best Buy and picked up a tripod that I need for my cameras. I have been needing one for a while and now that I have the digital camera and even moreso with the camcorder I really need to have something steady to put them onto. I found one that I liked pretty well and headed for home.

It was raining all morning and the temperature had dropped considerably since yesterday’s incredible warm spell. By the time I got back to Geneseo it had started to snow. Dad IM’d me shortly and said that he was cancelling his plans to go see “The Odd Couple” which is being put on at SUNY Geneseo and wasn’t going to be able to watch Oreo tonight while Min and I were out. The weather gets to be a lot worse up at his place than it gets over here.

Dominica and I decided that, because of the weather, we shouldn’t go out tonight up in the city – especially with Oreo getting stuck home alone all night. So I talked to Tricia and the plan is for Min and I to go up to Rochester tomorrow to hang out with her during the day instead of going out tonight.

The Ralstons stopped by to pick up some software today. Art had two new computers (one actually new and one just new to them) arrive this weekend and he has been trying to get them up and running all weekend. He has been having a terrible time with them having all kinds of very difficult to pinpoint problems on both machines. It is things like this that make working on computers not fun.

Jen and Steve Bulkley stopped by this afternoon with their newest addition, Gabrielle, who is ten months old. They also brought over their chihuahua named Bruiser. Bruiser and Oreo had a great time getting to know eat other and then chasing each other through the house as fast as they possibly could. It is a good thing that I had tried to clean the house before Steve and Jen stopped over or there would not have been anyplace for the dogs to have run and they would have hurt themselves or the house. They had such a good time and Oreo was totally exhausted by the time that they left.

I had to drive up to Rochester to pick Min up from work because I had driven her into work this morning. On the way up Oreo and I stopped by at Michael’s in Henrietta and picked up some foam core that we need for the model railroad layout that we are working on. We have been unable to get the size that we actually need so I bought four smaller pieces that I am going to have to put together myself. I foresee many problems with this approach but we didn’t know what else to try.

I picked up Min and then we drove down to Borders because they are open late and I had an item that I have been wanting to get. I found the book that I had been looking for: “PHP and MySQL Visual QuickPro Guide” from Peachpit Press and I also found a couple of other inexpensive and really handy books: “The PHP Phrasebook” and “MySQL Crash Course”. So I was pretty happy.

We got home and Dominica made dinner and we watched up until the final two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Dominica did some model painting and I did a few hours of assembly getting our “Railroad Hotel” put together. Yes we are still working on the very first model that we started about a week ago. It takes a lot of work to get one of these put together well and looking good. I am pretty happy with how it is coming along and I think that it will probably be done, more or less, in a day or two. I am up against a tough part now because there are a few pieces that don’t fit together as they expect you to put them together so I am going to have to improvise a little to make it work.

We went to bed around 2:00 or a little later.

That’s right folks, it is Friday the 13th. Oreo got me up at 5:30 this morning, yes just four hours of sleep which is only two-thirds of a usual night for me. So, since I was all ready awake I decided that it would be a good opportunity to get some much needed exercise so I walked over to the Omega Grill for my morning breakfast meeting with the electrician that I am working with this week. It was so warm out at 6:00 am with the sun not even attempting to come up yet that I was able to walk all of the way over there in just a fleece and no jacket. I had a baseball cap on and I even took that off because it was so warm.

I ended up staying at breakfast until 9:00. Eric was coming over to use my office this morning so he stopped by the Omega and picked me up so that I wouldn’t have to walk back to the house. Eric came over for about an hour before he had to drive down to Elmira for a little while.

I called the vet to see what we should do about Oreo and his roundworms. Ick. He is still feeling fine as far as I am able to tell. He has been in very good spirits. The vet said that the medine that we regularly give to Oreo should be fine for taking care of his worms so we don’t have to do anything special with him.

For those who don’t always remember, Amazon rocks.

Here is a neat take on RSS feeds: RSS Slide Shows. Slide is a neat kind of RSS feed reader that reads feeds containing images and translates that directly into a slideshow. So you can easy subscribe to tons of peoples RSS image feeds (like mine from Flickr) and automatically have them just scroll along the side of your desktop.

Dad came by at 6:00 to pick me up so that we could go to the meeting in Brighton with Andy and Eric. We got to Andy’s apartment at 6:45 and watched a presentation that he had ready for us for about an hour. After that presentation we all went down to Denny’s on Jefferson Road and got some dinner. Dad had to drive this evening because my car is apparently having electrical problems. I don’t know what is wrong yet but my headlights are not working but they are coming on very dimly so we are thinking that it must be a problem with the battery or the alternator.

Dad dropped off his slide scanner so that I could convert my slide collection into digital so that I can actually get some use out of the tons and tons of images that I have taken over the years. So far I am having a really hard time getting the pictures to come out very well. Dad says that it takes a lot of practice to get it to work well.

Dominica came home and we ran right over to Walmart to do some shopping. We needed some groceries for this new diet because there is almost nothing in the house that we can eat and very little at any restaurants. This diet is most definitely cutting down on our total food cost. While we were there I bought a new cordless drill. An eighteen volt Black and Decker. Nothing special but it is my first power tool (hey, at least I bought my first power tool while I am still in my 20’s.) I need to have it for a project that I am working on this week for Deutsche Telekom and I figured that I would be needing it for the model railroading work that I am doing. When Andy was living here he had a drill in the house and we need to have one for just regular household needs. We also managed to get Clue which is an awesome movie for just five dollars. That is one of the movies that has been high on my “to buy” list for years.

We came home and watched a little Star Trek: The Next Generation before going to bed. I continued to work on the “Railroad Hotel” model that we have been working on for several days. I did a lot of work on it during the day today. I would walk by for one reason or another in the living room where the work table is set up for it and I would glue another piece together and then go do something else while the glue dried. It is a pretty good way to do it. I forgot just how much time even a simple model can take to put together! This is a major undertaking but it is a lot of fun. If you don’t enjoying the modeling aspect of model railroading then you might as well do something else.