Today is Dominica’s final for her A+ certification class at FLCC. I am sure that she is really excited to not have to be driving in to Canandaigua every week very soon. She still has one more day of class next Tuesday. We have no idea what they are going to be doing in that class but it is just one day left. So we had to get up this morning so that she could get ready to go in to class.
I had to get up this morning too because Eric is coming over to work out of the office today. His laptop is so completely useless when he is at work that there is so much that he is still not able to do. One of the big things is that he is not able to transfer his files that he had backed up previously so he had to come down here to get them. He came down around 10:00 after taking Amanda’s car into get its state inspection. Another year of not being able to believe that it passed inspection.
Eric and I did a little work around the office today. His laptop is all but useless and completely insecure but we at least got his files transferred over to it. While we were working on it I discovered a Knoppix CD sitting on my desktop and I had him give that a try. It fired right up and worked perfectly on his laptop. Instantly his laptop became a useful device. How funny is it that even a Live CD of Linux can provide many times the functionality of a bad IT department’s Windows distribution. Linux wins again.
Eric left a little after noon to go up to the city to actually go to work. Dad came over just after 12:30 to go out for lunch. I called Dominica’s cell phone to see if she was on her way home but I ended up disturbing her in the middle of her final. I thought that she would have been done by that point or would at least have had it turned off as long as she was in the test. Dad and I decided to wait for her so dad came in and we hung out in the living room for almost two hours while we waited for Min to get back from Canandaigua.
While we were waiting I got started on assembling one of the new servers that we are going to be installing in the next week or so. Dad delivered the new rack mountable case today. I have a lot of work to do with two new servers being built and installed.
Dominica got home just before 2:00 and we all went over to the Omega. Big surprise there.
After dinner we came home and I continued working on my projects. I am busy today building a demo SugarCRM server so that we as a company can test out their software. I am getting my old laptop ready for my dad. I am placing orders from one of our suppliers. And I am building a new server that needs to be in service rather quickly. So I have a lot to get done. Dad’s laptop, a PIII 800 that he has been limping along with for some time now, is finally on its last leg and needs to be replaced ASAP. His screen has been near useless for quite some time now but now even more of the system is beginning to fail and continuing to attempt to use it is beginning to look like a total waste of time. So we finally decided that it was time for me to get the new laptop that I have been needing for a while and he is going to get the laptop that I am using currently. I am really excited because the new laptop is my first real commercial quality HP laptop. I have always been stuck using a hand-me-down laptop all of these years. For one reason or another I have never ended up with a nice new laptop. Well now I am getting one. It is a real HP with an AMD Turion 64 and 1GB of memory. It has built in wireless. Oh what a relief. And even a fingerprint reader. I can’t wait to play with that and see whether or not it will be useful for anything. It will be so nice to have a good laptop for a change.
While I was working moving parts around today as happens from time to time I managed to come up with an additional 1GB of memory for Dominica’s desktop. That is the desktop that I work on all of the time. It is officially hers but I get to use it 90% of the time. She has a laptop as well and that is what she normally uses when she is not at work. Now this desktop has a total of 1.5GB of memory. Three times what it had previously. I was desperately in need of more memory. This is really going to make working on the desktop a pleasure.
Dominica ran out to Walmart this evening to do some shopping. While she was out she picked up The Fantastic Four which I haven’t really wanted to see but it will probably be mildly interesting. Comic books turned movies are not my cup of tea. Especially comic books that I have never heard of. At least Spiderman, Superman or Batman mean something to me. I have no idea what the Fantastic Four is.
After she got back from shopping she cooked dinner and we watched the BBC’s first season of Chef! in the living room. That show is really funny. I am really glad that we picked it up. It isn’t a very long running show but it is really well done and Lenny Henry is a really funny actor. He is able to deliver some really hysterical lines that few actors would be able to pull off as well. We ended up watching that for a very large portion of the evening. As far as I can tell we watched it for about four hours. The living room is a mess as I have been building machines there while watching DVDs so I am able to be productive while we are watching shows.
Tomorrow evening I am giving a tour of Eric’s facility at the UofR at 6:30. Dad and I are hoping to be able to schedule going to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe just before the tour. He hasn’t seen it yet and the DLP theatre is near by and there is a showing that might work well with our timing. We will be playing it by ear and will know whether or not that works sometime tomorrow. I am looking forward to seeing the movie again all ready. I don’t normally want to go see movies more than once right at the same time but this one is worth it. I have been waiting almost twenty five years for there to be a really great movie adaptation of those books. I can’t wait for the next six movies to come out. It is so exciting that they are actually going to make the entire series. I really hope that they follow through on it all. That is a really huge undertaking but the movies won’t be nearly as important unless they follow through and do the whole thing. Being able to watch all seven movies together will be really something, I think. I am not aware of anyone ever having made The Magician’s Nephew, A Horse and His Boy or The Last Battle into movies. I think that only the four better known books have ever been attempted and even them not very well. The old BBC movies were pretty bad.