Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was my usual Wednesday morning disaster. Because Tuesday is Microsoft’s security patch day there are always consequences to be dealt with on Wednesday.

Dad decided to not try to make the movie today and that he wants to wait until next week to try to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At least that makes my schedule today a whole lot easier.

I had a lot of miscellaneous work to do around the house today. Dad is getting my old laptop and I got that ready for him last night but then decided that I should get SUSE Linux 10 installed on it as well under the Microsoft Virtual PC so that he will have a full blown Linux environment to play with as well without having to resort to a weird Live CD. Since he is going to be teaching computers down at Castile he is going to need to be really familiar with the system that we use. He really hasn’t worked with Linux before so it is going to be a little bit of a shift for him.

One time when I took Oreo outside today to do his business he spotted a neighbor dog in the backyard of a house out on Lima Road and he took off like a rocket to go after that dog. I saw him look and lurch and I was about as ready as I could possibly be. I took off after him as quickly as I could. I had no coat on and no shoes either. Fortunately I was wearing my rubber soled slippers or it would have been really bad. Oreo wasn’t wearing a coat and he got cold really quickly or I would never have managed to catch him. He is so much faster than I am. He is a really fast little dog. He stopped before leaving the “yard” that is associated with our complex but that was still way too far for him to be away from the house. He knew that he was in trouble when I showed up to get him. He humbly followed me back to the house and was frozen by the time we got back. He was shaking and his feet were really cold.

Today I managed to get a new web server built and working. One of the most exciting things about it is that it is shortly going to be the new host for SGL! I have all ready begun the very lengthy and tiring process of moving the site from the current hand coded XHTML over to WordPress. It is going to be a really immense effort when all is said and done but I really think that the end results are going to be worth it. The new site is going to give us a lot of site automation which means I don’t have to spend so much time writing about how much time I spend writing the site. We will have a search function. The site will change its look and feel more often and with less hassle. Updates will be able to be made while travelling more easily. Bloggers will be able to link directly to a particular article instead of having to just link to the site or to the archived season. The site will automatically notify search engines when there are updates. Registered users will be able to leave comments on the site. I hope to be integrating the podcast and the vlog as well. RSS and Atom feeds will be automatic. In short, lots of new features. It is really exciting. Oh, I almost forgot. The new site engine will also turn all of my little 🙂 into actual smiley faces. Isn’t that just nifty keen?

At 5:45 Oreo and I bundled into the car to head out into the cold. I am meeting someone up at Eric’s office to give them a tour of Eric’s facility and to show them the Waste Watcher in action. I got up there right on time but discovered to my horror that my cell phone had crashed and was “on” but not able to make or receive calls. Poop. I ended up having to pull the battery out of it to be able to get it to shut off. Once I got it restarted I found that I had missed a few calls. The person that I was supposed to meet had locked herself out of her house and was not going to be able to make it to meet me this evening. Oreo was quite happy with this change of events. We drove back down to Geneseo and we swung into the Quality Inn to hang out with Mary for a little while before going back home.

Dominica got home from work and we did some Christmas card duties and ate out late night snacks while we watched some of the second season of Chef! which we are really enjoying. That is a really good show. Any BBC fans who have not yet seen it should be sure to make a point of checking it out.

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.

Tonight is Dominica and my big Christmas shopping night. We have a lot that we need to get done and not very much time to do it in so we decided to make tonight a big time shopping night and to just run up to the city and get as much done at once as possible. We left just after 5:30 and ended up shopping until just before 10:00. We were very efficient and even shopping in parrallel at one point so we actually did really well. Dominica made a list and we were able to spend very little time in any individual store. This is how shopping should be. Once big push and then it is all over.

While we were out I made it to Best Buy to pick up some hard drives that I need for the servers that we are building. I managed to pick up seven 160GB drives while I was there for dirt cheap. That worked out really well for me. Dad had told us that Media Play was going out of business and that we should stop by there and see if there was anything good on sale. So we made an effort to get enough done so that we could go there before they closed. Boy are we glad that we did. They had an entire section of British television that was on sale and we made out like bandits. We managed to complete our Red Dwarf collection picking up the third, fifth and sixth seasons! We also got the complete series Chef! which is awesome. And we got the first two seasons of Allo, Allo and got the last half of Keeping Up Appearances. Everything was 20% off and that made it super affordable compared to normal. None of this stuff is anything that we can ever get any kind of discount on at all. So this was really great. And now we have tons of new BBC programming to watch.

We grabbed some McDonald’s while we were out. We almost never eat there anymore since we realized that the Geneseo McDonald’s really does a horrible job with their food quality, they are always having staff issues and the prices are thirty percent higher than any other McDonald’s in the area. And to top it all off, they don’t take credit cards when everyone else does. They are also the only non-twenty four hour McDonald’s in Livingston County! Definitely not earning our businesses. It is actually less expensive for us to eat at the full service Omega and get much healthier and tastier food than it is to eat at the local McDonald’s. Tom Wahl’s isn’t cheap but isn’t any more expensive and their food is tons better. So we have been avoiding it whenever possible and saving our eat at McDonald’s for when we are away from Geneseo and get a better deal.

After shopping we came home and watched most of the first DVD of the second set of Keeping Up Appearances. Most of the episodes in the second half of the series are new to me which is awesome. The downside is that the show got seriously stale and every single character is just saying the same old lines over and over again. They actually get so bad that they repeat the same scenes over and over again. The show is good but it is definitely not meant to be watched very much at a time. It really shows how little creativity existing in the writing staff. It is really too bad because the characters were really original but they stopped doing any character development after the first or second season and it really shows.

Today begins the two week countdown to Christmas. You know even with there having been so much snow on the ground all ready this year I am not particularly feeling like we are approaching Christmas time. I haven’t seen any Christmas specials yet and haven’t really heard any music playing except for quick excerps here and there. And they always starting playing the music and putting up the advertising so early that it loses all of its impact anyway. But, one way or another, we are rapidly approaching the Holidays. Dominica and I are planning on doing most of our shopping tomorrow. We tend to wait until pretty much the last minute. It wouldn’t be us if we didn’t.

Today Dominica and I drove down to Silver Springs to worship at the Letchworth New Life Fellowship church there in the middle of town. It is almost directly across the street from Mary and Jocelyn’s apartment. Church starts early down there which is always tough for us on Sunday mornings. It is hard enough making it to the north side of Perry for 10:55 at LaGrange but getting all of the way to Silver Springs for 10:30 is a little beyond us.

After church we stopped at the Silver Lake Country Market in Perry and grabbed subs for lunch. We have a busy day and didn’t want to spend too much time out on the road and we figured that that would be fast and easy. It is always entertaining to stop there because they are like a general store and sell just about everything in the world that no one could ever need in there. So much junk that it is hysterical.

We came home and spent the afternoon with our puppy just hanging out. Phil and Kate called and rescheduled out trip to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because they had to run over to sign the papers for their new house! They are very excited to be finally buying a house. They have been trying to get one for quite some time now. So we decided to wait until the 8:15 show tonight to see the movie. Originally we were going to see the movie and then go out for dinner. We switched the order and decided that we would meet them at Friendly’s on Spencerport Road and then go to see the movie after that. So we got more time to hang around at home with Oreo. He is going to go over to dad’s house while we are at the movie so that he doesn’t panic from us being gone for too long. He is getting better but we are going to be gone longer today that he is used to yet so we wanted to make sure that he was comfortable and dad enjoys having him from time to time.

We went up and met the Ayers at the Friendly’s on Spencerport Road next to Nick Tahou’s. We had a good time hanging out although I didn’t get to see them as much as Min did because my stomach was bothering me. They got a chance to show us pictures of their new house that they had just closed on. They are moving up to the north east side of the city on February 15th. The are really excited. It will take a while before owning a house really becomes a reality to them. I can vouch for the fact that even having lived in my own house for over two years that it really seems strange to own a house of your own.

After dinner we rushed over to the theatre to catch the movie. We, of course, went to Tinseltown to watch the movie in Rochester’s only DLP theatre. We figured that the place would be totally packed but, in fact, there were only about twenty people there. So we got totally choice seats. Even so we did get stuck with a family right behind us who had to explain every little detail to their child but at least they weren’t saying annoying stuff.

I know that everyone is waiting to hear what we thought of the movie. Well wait to now more… the bottom line is: This may be the single best book to moving picture conversion ever done. We were totally thrilled with the movie. It was amazing. The effects were great and the adaptation was simply perfect. I am so happy that they managed to make such a faithful compliment to one of the greatest works of literature ever written. For any of you who are fans of the Chronicles of Narnia you must go see this movie. And if you are not a fan, which of course means that you have never read the books, then you should probably not even worry about reading the books first as the movie is so incredibly faithful that you really won’t even miss anything. And believe me when I tell you that I am not one to go easy on movies for not following the original print faithfully.

I grew up with the Chronicles of Narnia. My mother read me the entire series (there are seven of them) when I was about four years old. She used to read me a chapter each night before going to bed. When she read them to me she would record them on a Radio Shack cassette tape recorder. One of those silly portable jobs that were popular around 1980. Boy were those silly tape recorders. They had a terrible little built in microphone but I think that she actually used a plug in microphone. The recording quality was autrocious but it was both my introduction to “adult” fiction as well as my first introduction to the genre of fantasy. It was a major turning point in my life. I have a lifelong appreciation for literature because of those books. Going through them “live” the first time was important but then I listened to the tapes of the entire series over and over again over the next several years. I must have listened to each book twenty times or more. For years I would listen to them almost daily. I developed the desire to listen to all of the books that I wanted to read from that experience. It took a long time before having audio recordings of a large number of books became practical but recently I have reverted to that paradigm and now I see how it happened. All those years ago the seed was planted. I loved those books. I knew each one of them by heart. I knew every character and their significance within the story. I knew how each character related to every other character. So it means a lot to me that Disney has pulled through and created such a wonderful screen adaptation of the books. It is almost as if they took a piece of my imagination and brought it to life for me. Just for me.