Sheep Guarding Llama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My plan was to sleep in and enjoy my Saturday morning with Oreo like I usually do. Dominica works an hour earlier on the weekend and that leaves me with the dog and, generally, no phone ringing to tell me to get to work right away. Not so today. Microsoft pushed out an unscheduled patch last night and whenever they do that it affects some things. So I had some calls early this morning and had to get moving to make sure that all of our services were available to our clients.

I was reading an article from Jim Rapoza over at eWeek (who has apparently stolen all of David Coursey’s braincells when he wasn’t looking) where he reported on FEMA illegally making its disaster relief website accessible to Internet Explorer only. For those of you who do not know, Microsoft does not make a version of IE for any platform other than Windows. They used to make it for Macintosh but they do not anymore and even when they did it was a completely different browser from the Windows version and may not have worked for the FEMA website in any case. Anyway, federal mandate says that all US government websites must conform to the Section 508 accessibility standards which any of my fourth grade XHTML design students should be able to tell you. That law is in place to make sure that government web designers are playing political games or getting bandend handouts to make their sites only work with one vendor’s product or another. It is there to make sure that all Americans have equal access (hey David, did you hear that… equal access what a concept) regardless of the platform that they decide to use. Just because many Americans choose Windows should not legally limit the rest of us to only choosing Windows. And to do this with emergency services at a time where people are getting access through any outlet that they can? This is not just a gross disregard for standards, rights and trust but this is a total disregard for human life and suffering. To take advantage of those hurt the most, needing help the most to make a personal statement about one unprofessional web “developer’s” preference for Internet Explorer and Windows is absolutely outrageous. If that developer did not have the capability to write standard XHTML he or she should never have even been eligible for a college degree or for work with a federal agency. What is the FEMA web hiring commitee looking for if it isn’t the ability to write XHTML code accurately? There isn’t anything else to hire based on. The number of people who have to have been not doing their jobs or faking their credentials for something like this to happen is just astounding. I hope that someone makes a big stink about this. This is more important than someone just losing their job because of incompetence. At best this was a completely incompetent web developer who should not have taken a job that he or she was incapable of doing when it was for an emergency services agency. Even so the problem should have been fixed immediately as Rapoza pointed out, any competent developer could have rewritten the necessary parts of the site in 30-60 minutes. Thousands would have voluntered, surely. At worst this is a developer who decided to make a real, life-threatening attack on people who choose, or often had not choice, to use non-Windows and non-Internet Explorer computers. Disgusting.

I got hooked up with that information from reading the blog of Jonathan Schwartz, President of SUN, who writes a really good blog that techie folks should be following. He tends to do a bit of SUN advertising but what would you expect. They are paying the bills. But I heard him in an interview at OSCON recently (like I said, I am catching up with the conferences from 2005 this week) and he was really impressive.

I did managed, finally, to pump out the SLG Podcast Episode 39 last night just before Dominica got home. I checked the stats on podOmatic last night while I was there and I was totally amazed by how many people were hitting up the podOmatic page for us everyday to see if there was a new show out. That was really encouraging. Even with almost a month without a single episode people are still looking for new episodes. That should give me a nice kick in the pants to get me working on new shows. I think that the music that we are playing is making the show a lot more interesting. I think that we are playing some really good stuff and that people really appreciate it. Although our lack of feedback makes it hard to know what people are liking about the show. We are no longer on the top 100 at podOmatic but we didn’t expect to be at all at this point. There are tons more people making podcasts over there and it is harder and harder to make the list and with nothing come out for so long there wasn’t much way for us to hold on to our spot.

The gloom has broken and there is some actual sunlight today. There is a flocking of light granular snow mixed in with the green grass and it looks really cold outside but the sun is shining and we can actually see what the interior of our house looks like again.

Toyota might be leading the world in hybrid cars (I don’t actually know that, it is just an assumption but I think that it is probably a pretty safe one) but RailPower Technologies is doing some really awesome stuff with hybrid diesel powered locomotives. Trains are major producers of pollutants because they represents such a huge amount of our transportation even though the average person doesn’t see them very often. Now if we can just come up with a way to cut the pollution and fuel consumption of our trucking industry we will be in good shape. I think that they are still the top polluters on the fuel chain because they are so big and there are so many of them travelling over such long distances. The US really needs to invest in a larger rail infrastructure. Especially now that trains are increasing fuel efficiency they are moving farther and farther ahead in their cost/performance ratio.

Dad came over at noon and we went over to the Omega for some lunch. Now that I am actually dieting I figure that I might as well make use of my What Scott Ate Today blog to keep track of what I am eating. Not very exciting but a useful use of blogging technology. It makes it really easy for Dominica to keep tabs on me to make sure that I am eating what I am supposed to and it makes it really obvious to me what I have been eating if I am constantly writing it down. Much harder to sneak food without catching myself.

Samsung has a nice looking new MP3 player coming out this year, the YP-Z5 is poised to take on the iPod Nano. This is a nice looking unit to keep an eye on. As you all know, I am a big fan of Samsung products generally. Especially the YEPP series.

The big announcements this week are the new physical media formats. Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have come close enough to being finished that manufactures have committed to having the first players for these discs out over the course of the next several weeks. Toshiba is bringing out the lower capacity HD-DVD player in March. And Samsung is expected to release the first Blu-Ray player in April. We will have to wait and see what happens but this is definitely the hot topic to be watching this winter. Now is the time to seriously consider curbing your investment into DVDs. The end is near and you may be quite unhappy if you continue putting money into an older format.

For those of you who have never tried OpenOffice or would like to be able to run it without installing it (for example from a memory stick or from CD-ROM) you can check out the newly finished Portable OpenOffice which you can download for free. This is great for people who want to have access to a standard office environment but work from a number of different machines where they may not have the ability to install their office software of choice. There are other software packages available from the Portable Apps project including some incredibly useful ones like Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird from the Mozilla Project as well as GAIM, the big multi-instant messaging services client, and NVu, a popular web page editor.

This one is an oldie but it is really funny and I didn’t want to forget it so I am including it here, just because:

I did a little work on the site today. Those of you who come here regularly will notice that the links at the top of the page, while sparse, are not working. There is a small About blurb on the left. And the Flickr badge has returned so that you can check out my latest photos easily.

I finally got some decent photos of Dominica and my first model railroading experiment. This is a 2’x2′ N Scale layout on 3/4″ plywood. There are two Model Power buildings, a farm house and a barn. There is an old Bachman church that I have had since I was young. Some of you might recognize it from the picture taken with Eric Millen and I in front of the old train layout many years ago. Like almost twenty years ago. There are no trains in this little layout. Just the three buildings, a tiny chicken coup and a small outhouse behind the farm house. Trees are put on without removing the plastic bases so that we can use them again elsewhere (no reason to keep this layout as it is.) The buildings are all pre-built and have bases associated with them. That makes them look a bit sillier than it should but it was our first attempt at this. The road is scratch built but there are no cars on it. There are some horses and cows around the farm. And there are three people in the layout. The whole thing is very Spartan but it was a really good exercise for both of us and we learned quite a bit by doing it.

I missed Former Intern Andy’s Christmas Blog but it is a good one to check out. No one talks about the commercialization of Christmas quite like FIA.

I actually managed to pull off another podcast today and got it posted both here (via the Internet Archive) and on podOmatic. I have fallen off of the Top 100, along with the Jedi Council Speaks, at podOmatic but I think that I am now back posting again that I will be able to inch my way back into the spotlight. If I can just get everyone here to help me just a little bit. I got a number of awesome new songs onto this latest show so be sure to check them out. I spend a bit of time auditioning new songs and filtering through songs that I currently have set aside to make sure that I am only getting the stuff that I really want to be playing. It is really awesome that so much music comes out so quickly that I can just keep playing great new music all of the time and still be really, really picky about what I play on the show. I am really proud of the selection that we play. It is especially cool that so much of the music that we play is played by almost no one else so our selection is definitely unique and special. For example, we played Katy Wehr today and we are, so far, the only show to have played her music from PodSafe. I am really excited about having played her first because her music is really awesome. Her sound is amazing and pretty original. It’s artists like her that really make this whole thing so much fun.

So over the past week or so I have been doing some searching online and the Internet seems to be mostly devoid of any really good model railroading web sites. Okay, actually it is even devoid of any halfway decent sites. It is really pathetic actually how little there is out there. It is difficult to get information online. It is even harder to find out how to buy anything online. Even some of the biggest manufacturers of model railroading equipment lack the simplest search features on their sites. I am thinking that I need to put together a decent model railroading web page. There must be people out there that want to have model railroading resources on the Internet and just don’t have the ability to do it themselves or something. I find it amazing that such a popular hobby has just no online support whatsoever!

I am trying out a new mapping service called Frappr! It is a neat “personal mapping service” that allows you to put your own personal markers over top of Google Maps. I thought that it would be a neat way for my readers to be able to connect to me even better. So you can now check out my Frappr! page. I have started putting location markers for places that I have lived in the past and the Omega Grill is on there too. I don’t know if this is a really exciting technology or just silly but I thought that I would give it a try and see what people thought of it. I think that it is kind of neat for my readers to be able to see where the locations that I talk about are at. Now people can easily see where Washington Hospital Center is and where I used to live in Alexandria, VA and Pittsburgh, PA, etc. I think that it is a pretty neat idea. I have lived in so many weird places and go to so many different places that I think it adds something to the blog. Kind of gives it a sense of space. Anyway, I think that it is a good idea. Let me know. Someone comment. No one ever comments 🙁

Dominica got home and cooked dinner. Then it was time to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and to do some railroad modeling.

Dominica found one of the funniest websites ever. It is now her favourite way to pass the time. I suppose that it is funnier to people who are or who know knitters but it is pretty funny for anyone. Check out You Knit What.

Well it is snowing this morning. The sky is still overcast but it is much brighter and whiter than it has been in more than a week so the change is nice. I am enjoying having enough light in the office to be able to see for a change. I love overcast but a little light is nice on most days. It is a little much when you have to turn on a lamp at noon to be able to read next to a window.

I listened to an interview with Eddy Cue, Apple’s VP of iTunes, as he talks about the iPod. And the bottom line is that he is super, ultra snotty. He is very cocky and obnoxious. His only answer to everything was that he and Apple were the best and that no one else was any good. But he couldn’t say anything of substance. And as a VP he must be embarrassingly aware that the Apple advertising engine sells all of their products and not their engineering and development departments. And especially as the VP of iTunes. iTunes? C’mon. iTunes is the top reason that so many people don’t buy iPods because that particular piece of the puzzle is such a problem. iTunes is just massively sad and pathetic. I might buy an iPod if it was able to interface with the computer in a simple, useful way like my Samsung YEPP does. Nothing compares with the devices that just act like a hard drive. No weird, difficult extra interface. iTunes just adds complexity. Sad. Cue also missed what I think is a super obvious need in the industry today: downloadable television content in high quality. He thinks that people will only use Apple’s television downloads to view on small screens in low quality and that people who are using 40″ plasmas and they like to say in the interview or as many people that I know use high quality LCDs and projection systems like ours at 168″. About half of everyone I know has as high or higher quality television as they are talking about in this interview and just about everyone of them all ready would like to use a computer as the source for television shows and all of them would like that to be of higher quality than what is broadcast not lower. I think that this just shows Apple really being condescending to their customers. Basically Cue is saying that people who buy Apple products just aren’t into quality and to them it doesn’t matter if Apple makes good stuff or not. But then again, he makes iTunes so he obviously thinks that.

I ordered some new toys today. One of the benefits of working in IT is that you constantly have to try out products so that your clients can turn to you to know how everything works and what is available, etc. Dominica and I decided that we needed some actual speakers for the upstairs office so we ordered a pair of Logitech stereo speakers that we figure will meet our needs quite nicely. Min and I also have our MiniSD cards on order so that we can store lots of stuff on our new cell phones. But my big new toy that is coming is the 2006 edition of Microsoft’s Streets and Trips with the included USB GPS unit. I think that that is going to be a lot of fun and with my expected upcoming sales schedule this year it will come in really handy for finding places when I am out of town. I can’t believe that I haven’t gotten any GPS before. There have been so many occasions when I have really needed to have one. Anyone who drives to client sites would really appreciate one.

I didn’t manage to get into Castile Christian Academy this week like I had hoped. I know that they have had some electrical work done but I don’t know how much is done or maybe all of it is. Dad and I were supposed to be at the school this week but with dad’s hand he hasn’t been able to do very much. I hope that I can get down there on Monday to get things moving.

Has anyone ever spent a day wearing full coverage headphones in a cold room? I do this all of the time because I don’t have decent computer speakers in the office, yet, and I listen to seminars all day long and I keep the house really cold. I have noticed that the headphones do almost as much to keep me warm as my fleece does. It is pretty dramatic.

I can’t believe that it is Friday all ready. The week seems to have just flown by. The weekend is just a few hours away. Not that I get to take the weekends off but I always feel better over the weekend because the phone calls that come in are almost always social and not disaster related. It is substantial what a difference that makes in your outlook on the day.

I saw the doctor this afternoon. It has been about nine months since my last checkup. My blood pressure is up and I have to deal with that. It has always been fine in the past but it was quite high this time. My weight is up too. Apparently our home scale doesn’t tell me anything useful since it showed me roughly holding my weight steady and not gaining like the good scale and the doctor’s office said. But at least my heart rate is way down. Only 72bpm. That is awesome. At least something is improving.

Dad came over at 4:30 so that we could get our regular Friday night fish fry at the Omega (hmmm…. I wonder where that extra weight has been coming from.) While we were at dinner he told me about a recent episode of NOVA on PBS (WXXI here in the Rochester area – Channel 21.) Anyway, on this episode of NOVA they were talking about a mummy that had been housed in the Niagara Falls Museum. The NFM was a super cheesy museum in Niagara Falls that I had been to when I was young. The museum was really awful. It was full of junk and everything was from a mid-nineteenth century personal collection of a guy who bought the stuff from grave robbers. This practice was decently popular at the time which in no way makes it any less appauling (kind of like slavery but not on the same scale.) Anyway, I remember this particular mummy from the museum because even being as young as I was I was mortified by the horrible conditions that the mummy was being kept under. It was under glass but the glass was not sealed so the air was changing in and out bringing fresh oxygen to the mummy making it deteriorate quickly. I was totally disgusted when I noticed flies crawling around on the mummy under the glass. I remember it very clearly. I remember thinking that it was really strange to have a “museum” that was doing less to preserve its artifacts than I would do if the mummy was stuck in my house! There weren’t even any decent environmental controls in the place. It didn’t even feel like a real commercial building but more like an old house. It was truly awful. Anyway, it turns out that in the 1930’s a German visiting the US who had a decent knowledge of Egyptian mummies identified the mummy as being important but no one would listen to him so the mummy went “undiscovered” again until a researcher from Toronto got involved just recently (for those who don’t know Niagara Falls and Toronto are right next door to each other.) After doing some extensive research it was determined that this mummy was truly important and a man in Toronto managed to buy the museum and close it down. The mummy was sold to a museum in Atlanta where it was identified as actually being Pharoah Ramses I! The mummy has been returned to its rightful home in Egypt after a brief display period in Georgia. But how cool is that? I mean I actually got to breath on Ramses I! It isn’t like I just got to be in a room with him in a big display where I couldn’t get close and lots of other people were around. I was probably completely alone with him in a little room at the Niagara Falls Museum just one or two inches away separated by some glass that wasn’t even remotely sealed. Just enough to keep you from spilling your diet soda onto him. And even that was possible if you tried hard enough. Its weird to know now that I was that close to the body of someone so important. You can learn more about the founder of Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty on Wikipedia.

I won an N scale model locomotive (GP-38 #51) on eBay today. It is a model of one of the engines from the Genesee and Wyoming that is used right down the street in Retsof. We got a really good deal on it. I am really excited. I have always wanted to have some models of the G&W trains but have never gotten any. There have never been very many available but recently they have started to appear a little bit more often. Atlas is starting to model a number of their engines so that is encouraging. But finding rolling stock is still a challenge. One thing at a time, I guess.

I finally sat down tonight and got a change to sit down tonight and record a new podcast. It has been several weeks since I have had a chance to record a show. I know that you all have been missing me. Sorry about that but it is almost impossible to just keep the dailies flowing let alone the podcast during the holiday season.

Dominica got home at her usual time and we watched a couple episodes of TNG. At this rate we will have completed the first season in just a few weeks. Tomorrow the plan is that I will be home with Oreo all day. I need a nice, relaxing day at home.