Sheep Guarding Llama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.