Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is a big day of work down at the Castile Christian Academy. Originally I was going to get up this morning and pick up Jeremy and take him down to Castile with me but he didn’t get home until late last night and ended up getting into trouble and not being allowed to go so it is just dad and I working down there today.

I left the house at 8:00. The plan is to meet dad at Lorraine’s in Castile for some breakfast. I ended up getting stuck waiting for the Buffalo and Pittsburgh running through Leicester. I have never gotten stuck waiting for a train there before. It ended up making for perfect timing. Dad and I both pulled into Castile at the same time.

After breakfast it was over to the school for some serious work. Dad is getting a curriculum together so that he can start teaching the computer classes on Monday, just three days away. I am frantically trying to get the school’s network up and running so that everything is ready for the kids when we get back. There is an awful lot to be done by then. Since the last time I was at the school the electric has been run and there is now a dedicated circuit for every two computers in the computer lab. So, for the first time, I can really work to get the computers set up and into running condition.

It took several hours just to get most of the computer set up onto the desks, plugged in and running. We installed the new LCD monitors that are now available for half of the lab. There is a total of ten workstations and we have five LCDs. There is one more but it won’t be here until Monday. We expect at least one more LCD by the end of the school year. We are hoping that the LCD monitors really help to get the students excited about working in the computer lab. The computers are not all that fast but the nice monitors might really help give the impression that it is an up-to-date computer facility. Most of the computers are up to later model Intel Pentium III’s now but there are still a few older Pentium II’s in the mix which really slow things down. It is significant how much better the lab is going to be this year than last year even so. Last year we ran almost exclusively on Pentium II equipment, no LCD monitors and almost every monitor we did have was on its last leg and ran, at best, in 1024×768 (XGA) mode. This year there isn’t a single machine in the main computer lab that isn’t running at least 1280×1024 (SXGA) mode. That will make a big difference all by itself. I am sure that everyone will notice that upgrade right away.

I had to get SUSE Linux 10.0 installed on about half of the machines that were not completed yet. That took every minute of the day that I had to spare. While I was waiting for several machines to get installed I was able to get networking hooked up to all of the computers and get the computer portion of the room cleaned up significantly. By 3:45 when I was finally able to leave we had all ten computers installed, tested, working and on the network ready to go for first thing Monday morning.

By the end of the day I finally had the lab set up and ready to rock and roll on Monday. I took a picture of the lab as it stood this afternoon.

I got home at just a little after 4:00 and Oreo was very, very happy to see me. He was definitely a little scared that no one had been home with him for so long (Dominica had left for work at 10:00 am) but he hadn’t done anything bad and was in good spirits. He was definitely ready to be let outside but other than that he was fine. He had been sleeping on our bed. I could tell from the warm spot where he normally likes to lay.

I spent the evening hanging out with Oreo and doing some miscellaneous stuff around the house. Oreo was totally in need of attention and was not about to let me get away with not spending just about every single moment with him. So it gave me a good excuse to relax some and to do some reading.

Dominica got home and we watched some more of the third season on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Only a little bit more to go before we are done with that season.

After wrapping up my paperwork for Empire State College last night I decided that my database paperwork was too weak and that I needed something to back up my database experience. So I stayed up late taking Brainbench certifications to improve my credibility and my resume. Getting additional certifications is never a bad thing. I stayed up taking two tests: Data Modeling Concepts and ANSI SQL (Structured Query Language). I passed both tests. I have to retake one test that expired last year and one additional database programming test and I will qualify for the larger job role of Database Administrator (DBA). So that is my goal. Only two additional tests to take tomorrow and I will be there. And retaking a test is never as hard as doing it the first time.

While I was up working on the certifications I also managed to scan in tons more slides. All of 1994 is now complete and I have a good head start on 1995. It is really cool going through the pictures in chronological order the way that I am because it is kind of like taking a walk through history. In some ways some of the things in the pictures seem like just yesterday but other things seem to be from so long ago that it is like I was just someone watching a movie of someone else’s life. One of the saddest things is that I have found tons of pictures of my cat from 1995. He was a great cat and was very photogenic as well. But the sad thing is that he has only been gone now for ten or eleven years and I don’t even remember his name! I remember the cat, but I just can’t put a name to him. I am sure that I am the one that named him too. And he wasn’t one of those cats that we had during a time when we had dozens of cats at once. It was just him. Our one lonely cat for a year or two and I can’t recall his name. If I remember correctly, I think that he just wandered off sometime in late 1995 or 1996. He was one of the rare healthy cats that we had. Most likely a neighbour was feeding him instead of expecting him to be a barn cat like we did. And eventually they convinced him to stay. At least I like to think that that is what happened. If so, there is every possibility that he is still alive. He would only be twelve or thirteen now. Not even that venerable for a cat.

I talked to John Stephens – the Surfing IT Wizard – and the plan is that he is going to drive up on next Friday evening and hang out for the weekend. He is bringing the last three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for Dominica (I won’t watch those shows – they make me very unhappy.) But, more importantly, TSITW is bringing Firefly which I am very anxious to watch. Everyone has said that that is a really amazing show.

I went to bed around 4:30 figuring I would need at least a little sleep before getting up in the morning. My plan is to have lunch with Eric in Rochester in conjunction with taking my cell phone into the Verizon store on Jefferson Road to have the technician check it out. Maybe I will get lucky and they will be able to do something for me.

I slept in a little this morning, as you can imagine, but was up around 10:00 am which isn’t too bad considering when I went to bed. I got up and got onto the computer and scheduled lunch with Eric. Andy is having a super busy day today so he wasn’t able to get lunch with us. I managed to get up to the city to meet Eric at 1:00. In the attempt to get out of the house there was, of course, a million obstacles. From Oreo needing to be played with several times and needing to be taken outside several time all while the phone was ringing and ringing.

Eric wasn’t in the mood for our regular bagel stop so we hit Jay’s Diner. We ended up hanging out for over two hours. Good thing that we have coffee. I took him back to the hospital and then went down to Verizon to get the cell phone looked at. It took Verizon an hour to look at both Dominica and my cell phones. The final verdict was that the issue with my cell phone’s battery dying so quickly is that I am using it full time down in Geneseo where there is no EVDO service and the cell phone is constantly looking for that service. Apparently looking for the EVDO service uses a ton more energy than just getting the service. So my cell phone is running down its battery really quickly and there isn’t anything that we are able to do about that. Bummer.

While Verizon was looking at the phones I drove down to Borders to scan some books. I ended up getting a number of books including “The Visual Quickstart Guide to C++ Programming”, “Linux Server Hacks Volume Two”, “The Perl Pocket Reference” and “Build a Program Now! Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition”. Quite a load of books but I got really good deals today. While I was there I managed to help a retired pastor who was looking to build his first web site. We talked for probably twenty minutes. I think that I was actually able to help him a bit.

After picking up the cell phones again I had to run up to Greece to drop off Dominica’s cell phone at her office. Then it was time to get back home to Oreo who has been home alone all day long. I talked to Andy on the way home. He is really excited about tomorrow being his final day on his contract. Today was a really busy day as he prepared to be able to leave tomorrow but, most likely, tomorrow will be a pretty slow day for him since it is the final day. Generally that becomes a blow off day.

I got home and Oreo was very happy to see me but there were no signs of him having been upset from me having been gone all day. That is a really good sign that he is starting to become comfortable living here with us. He now must be understanding that we are not going to be leaving him and that we are just out for the day. He was definitely happy when I got home. He seemed to have been in a “wanting to spend the day with my daddy” kind of day even before I left the house this morning. He was so snuggly this morning when I woke up that his head was on my pillow right next to my head. I was only barely able to keep from falling out of bed. Then he followed me around all morning right up until I left to go to Rochester.

I continued working on scanning old slides into the computer today. Only so many more days left of this until it is all completed. Then I can return to scanning negatives and prints again.

The plan tomorrow is to spend the morning and early afternoon down at Castile Christian Academy. I am going to pick up Jeremy a little before 8:00 in the morning and we are going to meet dad down at Lorraine’s for breakfast before going into the school to get as many computers as possible set up and ready to go so that we are able to start classes on Monday. It is rather a tall order but I think that we can get far enough along to be in a position to at least begin limping through classes next week.

I pushed forward on my Brainbench certifications tonight. My first challenge was to take the MySQL Administration certification. I was very happy with the results: Number Seven in the World. Whoo-hoo. After that success I attempted the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Programming certification and skimmed by – passing by the slimmest margin. But I am fine with that as the knowledge necessary for that certification is completely outside of my usual knowledge domain. Most importantly, though, I have now completed all of the individual certifications necessary for the must larger Brainbench Job Role Certification of Brainbench Certified Database Administrator or BCDBA. That is the goal that I had been working towards.

I wrapped up the last of my certification tests just as Dominica got home from work. I edited my credit by evaluation paperwork for Empire State and resubmitted it. I wanted to make sure that it was as complete as possible.

We popped in Star Trek: The Next Generation and watched an episode before heading off to bed. I have to be up early in the morning to go over to Castile so I want to get a full night’s sleep tonight.

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.