Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today is my one year anniversary of having a CPAP that allows me to actually sleep at night. It is neat that the machine keeps track of its running time so that I have really good information on how much sleep I have gotten over the past year. In exactly 365 days the machine has run for 2272 hours. That is 6.22 hours of sleep per night for the entire year. Isn’t that neat. That number isn’t exactly my sleep number since there have been times when I have fallen “asleep” without the machine but, according to my sleep study, there is no actual sleep during those periods and that is definitely what it feels like in the mornings. But there is also that time being recorded when I am wearing the machine and have no yet fallen asleep or are lying awake with it on in the morning. This could be just a few minutes ranging up to several hours per night. So I think that the sleep number for the year is actually a bit higher than actual instead of lower.

The weather is awesome again today. The sun is shining and it is decently warm. Oreo is loving it. He likes to go out and explore when the weather is like this. Luckily it is still cold enough that he doesn’t want to stay out for really long periods of time.

Okay, so yesterday I was ranting about the failed Rochester Fast Ferry but that is over now and life can move on. Today, though, I have a new topic: the model railroading industry. As many of you know, I have recently been searching for a local model railroading store that specializes in serious model railroading not toy trains. These are distinctly different entities. It is a difference that many people are unaware of but I will not go into that yet as that is actually an important part of my future argument.

In searching for a nice local model train store the only store that I was able to find in the area that catered in any way to the model railroading crowd was Despatch Junction in East Rochester. Now first of all this makes the term “local” have to go a long way. It is a good forty-five minute drive to get to East Rochester from here but I realize that I live a little far out from the city but I do live just twenty minutes from the city’s largest shopping area. Finding a decent model train store should not constitute a serious challenge. But, alas, it has. Even Despatch Junction, where the shop keeper was very nice and helpful, specializes mainly in toy trains and does model trains as a large secondary activity. But this really changes the behaviour of a store. The displays are targetted towards children and it is set up mostly like a toy store. Not a single store that I went to in the entire Rochester region had a single serious model train layout for people to see. A few had some basic displays that showed different scale of trains next to each other which is handy (it would have been more handy if they were labeled) but nothing was modeled. Just some train loops next to each other.

I did some searching online and found that Buffalo looks as though it has no modeling targetted store either. Very disappointing. There is some hope that there is a store in Syracuse but that is very far away for a hobby shop. There is a small store in Vestal too but it is really small although the people there are very nice. But Vestal is really far away. About three hours. So that isn’t really reasonable.

So, I decided that maybe I needed to start an online model train specialty retailer of my own. I did a bunch of searching online and managed to come up with no places that were really good online dealers. Nothing rivaling the online sales of the average computer shop, for example. Nothing that made me confident enough to want to shop online. No place really looked reputable and the ability to search for products was pretty much non-existant. Basically it was like shopping online in the mid-1990’s before Amazon came on the scene and taught everyone how to do it. The best bets are buying through eBay.

I contacted a number of model train distributors and one manufacturer and they all said the same thing: they only sell to brick and mortar stores. Now, granted, this can be a good idea and I will give you an example of why this is true. In the high end audio reproduction industry it has long been held that selling through the Internet or through mail order was not acceptable as it was necessary for brick and mortar stores to exist in order to provide a place for people who had never had a chance to hear high end audio before to go and hear it in person because the average person does not believe that high end audio actually differs significantly from low end audio until they actually hear it. By forcing stores to have listening rooms the high end audio manufacturers have made sure that people who are interested in learning about high end audio have a way to do so. If their products were sold online they might see short term sales gains and lose in the long run as the entire industry collapses as they fail to bring new audio enthusiests into the fold. This is, apparently, the sales model that they hobby industry is attempting to foster. However there is a major flaw in this logic when applied to the hobby industry.

Hobby shops are extremely unprofitable in general and, in order to increase revenues, generally act as specialty toy stores. Toy trains, model rockets, R/C cars, etc. are much higher volume items with lower overhead costs than model trains. Because of this hobby stores quickly find that they are actually toy stores that also sell some models. But lets face it, even real models can be toys if presented and used as such. Because of this many (or perhaps most) model train stores end up presenting the entire model railroading hobby as being “kids playing with trains that just run in a loop around the Christmas tree” instead of being the serious modeling hobby that it is. Sure people can look at the pages on Model Railroader and see photos of amazing layouts that would blow them away and definitely show them what model railroading is all about but that is easier to do online than it is to do in a magazine so that is not a vote for brick and mortar stores. Dominica, for example, until I personally introduced her to the world of model railroading was unaware that it was, in any way, separate from toy trains. In consequence what has happened is the very system of supporting brick and mortars instead of online dealers in order to promote a community and an opportunity to educate and indoctrinate a new generation of modelers has, in fact, resulted in exact opposite effect where the brick and mortars are actually responsible for turning people away from serious modeling (unintentionally, of course) when online stores might have done a much better job. Since so few model train brick and mortars (B&Ms) maintain their own layouts, clubs, gatherings, etc. it is most likely the case that online stores would be more likely to maintain photographs, forums, videos, customer reviews, etc. of the products that they are selling.

Every product group on the market has a different value in being sold online versus in a B&M. Books, for example, work well in both situations hence the incredible success of both Amazon.com and Borders B&M stores. High end audio, as we discussed, relies upon the B&M showcase and the customer interaction with the knowledgable salespeople in order to carefully educate them (if you have never experienced a true high end audio shop I suggest that you take a few hours out of your schedule and visit Soundworks in Pittsford just to the east of Rochester – visit with an open mind and tell them that you are interested in high end audio but have never actually heard a high end system but that SGL said that you should go there to learn about it – they will amaze you.) In another case, computer components have little no value in the B&M market because the prices in physical retail outlets becomes extremely high because of high product turnover from the manufacturer’s side as well as a need for highly detailed knowledge that very few computer B&Ms can provide. This is a marketplace that favours the ability to easily order, at the lowest price, parts specified by part number based completely on detailed specs that are garnered from vendor web sites. Sometimes people use online reviews but you almost never get specific product reviews from friends or stores because products change so often that almost no one ever knows someone who buys exactly the same part that they need to purchase.

The bottom line is that B&Ms are important in some circumstances and online is important in others. But for the model train industry we currently need to convert to an online model and stop trying to artificially support a failed B&M market. Given the amount of potential buyers who must be going online and attempting to get information about railroad modeling we must be losing people in droves who basically discover that the industry has collapsed and that there is no interest in bringing new modelers in at all. It is all very sad. I hope that the model railroad vendors like Atlas and the rest get a clue before it is too late. The one good thing is that it only takes one or two big players switching to an online model before the market will shift as B&Ms rapidly lose business to their online counterparts.

After all this I am not trying to say that a properly done B&M wouldn’t be the best possible situation for model railroaders. In fact, I believe that it is. But it must be dedicated to modeling and not to toys (real modelers are embarrased to be shopping in toy stores – knitters don’t get yarn in toy stores, photographers don’t buy film in toy stores, artists don’t buy paint in toy stores) and it must strive to be a commuity focus for the region where modelers get together, new modelers or potentially new modelers get educated, where products can be viewed first hand, where questions can be asked, etc. Currently I know of no such place and until such a place exists I think that the “Amazon” of online model railroad stores is definitely the best option that we are going to get.

Okay, so today Eric found a stapler in the trash at work. And on this stapler’s side is etched: “Cheese is as cheese does! Go flipscotch!!” On the other side: “Kill me now, the life of a stapler is even more pitiful than that of a food service manager!!!” And finally, on the top: “Bend over and I will staple your butt!!” There is obviously someone at the University of Rochester with way too much time on their hands.

It looks as though wind power is going to coming to Wyoming Country sooner or later. The town of Perry just passed local legislation allowing commercial wind farms to be set up in the town. Given how incredibly windy the entire region is it seems very logical to utilize a large portion of Western New York for wind power generation.

I had lunch with dad at the Omega Grill. My new Atlas Genesee and Wyoming Railroad GP-38 Locomotive #51 arrived yesterday – I got an amazing deal on it new on eBay – and he brought it with him to lunch. It has been several years since I have purchased a new model train locomotive. It may have been as many as twenty years although I don’t think that it has been quite that many. This new model is of slightly higher quality than my last locomotive and the twenty years of additional development that has happened since purchasing my last one really, really shows. This new engine is totally gorgeous. The detail is incredible. This unit is definitely a work of art. I put the train on a piece of track on the little grassy layout that I have on my desk and took some pictures while the sun was actually out. I think that they turned out really, really well. I put four pictures up on the Flickr page so go and check them out. I checked on eBay later today and the same seller is selling the same engine today for $75. So I think that I got a pretty good deal.

I was on eBay tonight and managed to win a Bachman N Scale Burlington Switcher for just sixteen dollars that “matches” my old Bachman Burlington Northern engine. It is a different colour scheme but it is in a colour scheme that overlapped with the new colours that my older engine has. They will look quite appropriate together. I was pretty happy to have it be so inexpensive.

Jeremy stopped by this evening and borrowed a couple of movies. He is going to love Shaun of the Dead, that is some seriously funny stuff although I am not sure whether or not he is familiar enough with the classic Romero films to really get all of the jokes. He also borrowed King Arthur.

So we discovered tonight that Oreo has worms. What a pain. We forgot to give him his heartworm medication that is supposed to take care of that for just two weeks and all ready he has them. We have no idea how bad it is. He needs to go see the vet tomorrow. He needed to go anyway. I am really glad that we have not yet taken him because we would have had to have gone back all ready so it would have been a waste. He is in good spirits and, in fact, he seems to have more energy than usual. It is hard to believe that he actually has worms with the way that he is acting. He has been really active all day and just wanted to play and play and play.

Art stopped by this evening because he needed a cable for his new computer that arrived this afternoon. He has been waiting for several weeks for this computer to come. It is his first Athlon 64 machine. So I think that he is pretty excited to finally have that.

Tomorrow is going to be a long and busy day. I am actually starting the day by going to a breakfast meeting at the Omega Grill at 7:00 am. Yes, that is first thing in the morning. Several hours before I normally even bother to get out of bed. And then just after that Eric is planning on coming over around 8:00 – 8:30 in order to do a little work before he has to go down to Elmira for the day. I have to take Oreo to the vet to see about his worms and to get his toenails trimmed and to get his medicine refilled. At some point I have to go to Walmart too because I need to own a battery powered drill set for this big job that I am doing on Monday. Then at 6:00 pm Eric, Andy, Dad and I are all meeting at Andy’s apartment in Brighton for a meeting. So it is going to be a long day plus I have to do my normal work in there somewhere too. Plus, if possible, I need to get my car’s headlights working. Who knows when I will get everything done.

Dominica got home and we moved into the living room to move forward on the second season of TNG while she made dinner. We ended up staying up until after one in the morning which was not a good idea since I have to be up so early contrary to my usual schedule. I did a little work assembling the first model that I have put together myself in as long as I can remember: a Model Power “Railroad Hotel” model made in West Germany (it is dating itself here) by Pola. I only got a tiny bit of work done on it but boy does the project bring back memories! I must have been twelve or thirteen when I last did any modeling like this.

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.