Sheep Guarding Llama

Having stayed up so late last night my plan had been to sleep in nice and late this morning so that I would be totally rested so that I could really hit the day running. I do have a cold and need my sleep you know. But alas, Oreo decided to get me up at 8:10 which was only five and a half hours of sleep. Far less than I had been anticipating. But at least it gives me a kick start.

Dominica and Danielle are hanging out today. Danielle came over at 10:30 and picked Min up and they headed up to Henrietta to have lunch and to do some shopping and banking.

I have plenty of work to do this morning so I got right to it. Lots of little miscellaneous things.

Now here is some exciting news for us broadband techno-geek types who refuse to own televisions: AOL Time Warner is opening a free Internet television network! How exciting is that. The company ownes tons of classic television shows and has the rights to use them however they want. I guess they figure that getting a solid audience out of them instead of having them sitting on dusty shelves is a better use of their previous investments. Um, duh. I am excited to see how this plays out. Apparently Yahoo! and Google have been looking at a similar system but neither of them own television content that they are able to draw on to bring the system out as quickly as AOL can. This should prove to be quite interesting. I will most definitely be checking it out. I am also eagerly awaiting regular television style content made by amateurs on the web using syndication technologies like RSS. Sure, I do that with my vlog but it isn’t the same. I want sitcoms and dramas and real production. I want the shows that no one can make for regular television because the audience just isn’t big enough to be able to squeeze it onto prime time but there are enough people who want to watch it to make it feasible for Internet distribution. Imagine if Roswell has come out now and everyone would have been watching it online. It wouldn’t have died from being transfered to a network that no one had access to and everyone would have had solid viewing numbers because the Internet lets us know each and every time someone watches a station. No more complex, inaccurate and cumbersome Nielson ratings. How do those things work anyway? Anyone ever met a person who as been asked to do a Nielson rating? Do they represent our demographic accurately? Somehow I doubt it.

Dad picked me up a little after 11:50 and we went over to the Omega Grill to do a business lunch meeting. After lunch I came home and tried to get back to work. I made some calls and followed up on some things. It was only ten or twenty minutes before Dominica got home. She managed to get me the rockwool that I needed to start the pepper plants that I have been wanting to grow. So I am planning on getting those seeds started today if possible. My insurance company called today and said that my car insurance was way too high and that they had found a better spot to get my insurance through. It will lower my insurance by almost $1,200 a year! I am really happy about that. And no it is not that stupid company with the lizard either.

I talked to the Castile school today and they do have the computer lab ready for me to come in and begin getting the computers ready. That is going to be no small project. There is a lot of Linux installing to do. Some hardware repairs and changes that need to be made and a whole bunch of new wiring that needs to be taken care of. It is going to take me a while to get everything into place and ready. We could easily have just about nothing done until next semester. That is really depressing after all of the work that we did in the spring to get things up and running but we know better what we are doing now and should be able to have a much better system much more quickly. I am anxious to see how the new computer “lab” has turned out. It is still only a temporary space. I guess in some ways anything would be a temporary space. But this one is extremely temporary with only the intention to use it for one to three semesters as I understand it.

I have a new podcast that is available starting today. Everyone should check it out. I think that it is pretty cool. I am starting a project, well continuing the project that I mentioned some time ago, to read the entire Bible and record it. So, to make the project more interesting, I am now podcasting the entire Bible one chapter at a time and hoping to keep up doing one chapter per day. The first chapter of Lamentations is all ready posted and available. You can check out the website at Scott Reads Bible or you can subscribe through your friendly neighbourhood podcatcher like Juice to the Scott Reads the Bible RSS Feed.

Information has finally come out about iPodder’s name switch to Juice. As many people though, it was because of its confusing name. Although I think that everyone assumed that they had done it because the name was confusing and not because Apple and sent them a cease and desist order. Bah hum bug. I wonder what will happen to so many other products that are similar such as iPodderX, iPodder.net and iPodder.org. Well, I all ready noticed that the last of those has been taken down and they switched their web site address but are still no longer online. So I wonder if Apple hasn’t contacted them as well. I think that this is a really bad idea from Apple’s viewpoint because so many people were buying iPod’s because of the name connection to podcasting but if they force everyone to take the word pod out of anything that they do then they are only diminishing their own mindshare. They had a really good thing going on with everyone being so confused and thinking that they had to buy an Apple product just to listen to music on the Internet.

Dominica laid down on the floor with Oreo in the afternoon sunlight streaming into my office and took an afternoon nap. Oreo normally sleeps in the sun so Min just laid down next to him and fell asleep on his doggie pillow.

This is a picture of the cabana that was next to the house where I grew up. A lot of you have heard me talking about the farmhouse that I grew up in from age zero through seven. We moved into the second house over Christmas break from school when I was seven. In this picture the farmhouse is all ready gone and would have been just to the left of the picture. The new house is visible on the right. The cabana was originally attached at the side of the old farmhouse and then the new house was attached at a ninety degree angle to the same concrete slab that the old house was. This picture was taken because the cabana was going to be taken away and I wanted something to remember it by. The cabana was a really weird thing to have when I was growing up because I had never really thought about how weird it was until I was older. But the cabana was a full free standing building that we only ever used for storage but had plumbing and a full working bathroom. What a weird thing to have. Had we not gotten rid of the cabana I probably would have wanted to move into it when I was older. I think that it was strange that we had such a useful building right there attached to our house via the pool’s concrete slab and we never used it for anything other than pool storage. If I had that building today I would easily have a thousand much cooler uses for it.

This entire afternoon ended up being very, very busy. I can’t believe how much time I ended up on the telephone. Dominica thinks that she is coming down with a cold. I have one so that is pretty likely I think. She slept from about 1:00 until a little after 5:30 after having gotten a full night’s sleep last night. And she is feeling a little stuffy. Sounds like a cold to me.

A little searching onling and we found Shop England Online’s Double Devon Cream which is what we fell in love with when we were down in Walt Disney World. Yummy! I am planning on ordering some quite soon. Maybe a case of it.

Dominica did a little house cleaning after she got up but it didn’t take very long before she was really exhausted and needed to relax. She sat in the living room and watched the first season of Aardman Entertainment’s Creature Comforts which is a new television show based on the classic BBC shorts of the same name. She watched most of that while I made her some dinner. She and Oreo sat on the couch and I did the cooking for a chance. I just made sandwiches and simple stuff. Then I did more work in the office and Dominica watched Dragonslayer from 1981.

Tonight Oreo decided it would be fun to spend long hours sneaking around in the darkness at the back of the house. He kept telling us that he needed to go outside and he would go out and stay out until I came looking for him which is not normal. The third time he was out for a really long time and I had to take his favourite bouncy ball out onto the deck and bounce it loudly so that he could hear it before he would come back. Dominica was pretty worried but he came back straight away once he could hear the ball bouncing. Once he was in the house we could smell that he had been rolling in some large animal’s feces. Oh boy was he ever gross. He had chunks of it caked onto him. Ewww. So we had to throw his straight into a bath. He had been needing a bath anyway but we were not exactly planning on giving him one just that second. He is getting visitors tomorrow afternoon so it is good that at least he will not be smelly for them like he has been. That was not fun. I hate when he does that. The lay of the shrub and trees behind our house is just perfect for us to have absolutely no visibility out the back of the house at all. We have only a single 150 watt equivalent flourescent bulb to light up the area but even during the day there is almost nothing that can be seen because the entire open area behind the house is perfectly obscurred by a few choicely positioned shrubberies. What a pain.

Dominica was totally exhausted tonight but I did convince her to do a podcast before she went off to bed. Tonight is our twenty-first podcast. I think that we started off pretty strong but by the end both of us were really tired and were barely able to wrap up the show like we had wanted to. But at least we managed to get another podcast together. Maybe part of the secret is not trying to be so ambitious with the show. Very few podcasts attempt to do as much as we do and it is definitely a strain. It takes me about an hour after having finished a podcast to actually have all of the editing taken care of and everything ready to go. There is a lot more involved in doing a podcast than people realize.

I had planned to sleep in this morning but after eating Pakistani food last night my tummy wasn’t agreeing with those plans. So I was actually up before 7:30 this morning. As he does every morning, Oreo got right up and followed me around the house. Dominica hates that he always chooses the office with me over staying in bed with her.

I installed Visual Studio 2005 this morning while I was waiting for Dominica to get up. Andy did it yesterday. We got copies of VS2K5 from the Microsoft show that we went to on Thursday. This is one awesome door gift let me tell you.

Our plan had been to make it to Sunday School this morning but I don’t know how reasonable of an expectation that is since Dominica works so late on Saturday nights. She officially gets done at 9:00 but it is over half an hour to drive home and then we have to eat dinner. Even with her picking up take away that I had called ahead to order and have waiting for her took us until almost 11:00 before we were actually able to sit down to eat. By the time we are done eating and she takes a little while to relax after having just gotten off of a shift it is, at a minimum, midnight. It takes us almost half of an hour to get to church. Dominica really needs eight hours to sleep at a minimum. Put that all together and we are right down to the wire for managing to get to Sunday School at 10:00. Church at 10:50 is hard enough to get to. Having Oreo makes it a lot more difficult because we can’t just rush and run out the door anymore. However, if we don’t go to Sunday School then we are able to take Oreo with us and have him just stay in the car during church and he is much happier. He is a difficult dog to keep happy.

It is very windy here today. The Weather Channel website says that we are having 22mph winds but it sounds like more than that. It isn’t that cold out, though. In the sixties. Not bad at all for this time of year. Our furnace has only had to kick on a few times all year in order to keep the house warm enough. That is saving us a ton on heating bills now that the price of natural gas is sky rocketing. Just a year ago and for as long as anyone can remember natural gas has always been the cheap way to heat your house. It still is, as far as I am aware, but the margins by which it leads have shrunk to almost nothing at all. For us with the two of us, the small and well insulated house, the warm shared wall with our neighbour, the small amount of windows, the dog and the computers this tend to stay pretty warm in the house. We only really have two exposed sides of the house to the north and to the east (more or less, the house is on an angle.) Our west wall is shared with Linda and that doesn’t get very cold. And our south wall is buffered by our garage that is almost the entire width of the house. Only the office has an exposed south wall and that isn’t very big. So our heating cost isn’t bad at all. And we never worry about heating the basement. We really need to take the time to finish insulating the basement, though, because that will help keep the upstairs warm and the downstairs can go pretty cool without a problem. I would be perfectly happy if it fell to 50F down there.

We almost didn’t make it on time to church anyway this morning. Dominica refuses to believe that it takes half an hour to get over to LaGrange from here. I timed it on the way there this morning and it was pretty close to half an hour. I know that Dominica is reading this now so maybe this will reinforce her memory of how long it actually takes to get there:)

After church we went over to Perry and had our regular Sunday lunch with dad. We hung out there until about 2:00. Then we came back to Geneseo and did some shopping at Walmart. Min got some clothes for her new job, we got some additional clothes hampers and we picked up Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the new first season of Creature Comforts based on the short film from 1990 which I also have.

It was around 3:30 when we got back to the house. Oreo was quite glad to finally be out of the car. He wasn’t being impatient but he was definitely happy to not be there anymore. I had some work to do today so I started with that as soon as we got in. Dominica is doing the laundry this afternoon because we are so backed up after having been on vacation for so long and then coming home to her working so much this week. She is really happy to have tomorrow off. She and Danielle are going to be hanging out most of the day tomorrow. I am scheduled to have lunch with dad over at the Omega at noon. So I will be out for just a little bit.

I have been having a lot of fun checking out cool alternative music over at the Podsafe Music Network which provides music that can be played on podcasts safely. It is a pretty cool idea. I hope to see more good stuff show up on there. There is all ready a lot to sort through if you are looking for stuff for your own podcast.

We went to church tonight at 6:00. The evening service is a lot more informal than the morning service and there is a lot more music which Dominica likes a lot. The Ralstons have been going to the evening service so it is nice that we have someone to hang out with them. We have barely seen them at all over the past month. With everything that has been going on our regular schedules have been really interrupted. We are finally starting to be able to get back to a fairly normal routine.

On our way home from church we went over to Cooks in Greggsville so that I could get a sub for dinner. While I was there my friend Steve Linus from high school came in. I haven’t seen him since I left York High School in 1994. But we both recognized each other right away. I introduced him to Dominica and we talked for a few minutes. It was really cool to see him again after all of these years. Hopefully he will end up giving me a call sometime and we will get together.

We came home and I ate dinner and Dominica called her parents. She hasn’t talked with them since before we left for Florida. They talk for half an hour or more while I worked on getting caught up on things like SGL!

Today in the news there is a headline about a potential border dispute erupting between Ethiopia and Eritrea. I realized that I had no idea who Eritrea was so I did some research on it and thought that I would share some of that with you. Isn’t learning fun? I also learned more about Eritria over at the wikipedia. I love the Internet.

To relax this evening we watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which we got on DVD just the other day. I am starting to become wary of purchasing movies and things on DVD because it seems like the format doesn’t have much longer that it will be very useful and it will be nice to own things in a higher quality format all ready. I don’t want to invest too much now at the end of an era. But the prices are really good right now. It is a tough decision. The next generation of media is just around the corner and it is tempting to want to be using that. I do like Charlie – I like it tons better than the old Willie Wonka movie from the sixties. I couldn’t stand that movie. I found it to be really creepy. The new one is fun and interesting. Definitely silly but I can get over that.

I still had a lot of stored up work that needed to be done this weekend so Dominica went to bed after getting some more laundry going and I went into the office with Oreo and got back to work getting desktops working all over the land. This is the curse of taking vacations: as soon as you are back there are a hundred things that demand your immediate attention. I am getting pretty tired and would like to be able to go to bed. Hopefully the stuff that I am working on will not end up taking all that long and I will manage to get some sleep tonight. But that is never very likely.

I ended up working until after 2:00 am. That is pretty normal for me. I am getting back to my routine, I see. I may have been up late but I do feel that I managed to get quite a bit done. It is nice to feel productive. After having taken vacation I have been feeling particularly unproductive the last several weeks and I want to get back into the swing of things and get out from behind the eight ball.

Surprisingly, even now in the middle of the night, our house is managing to keep itself totally warm without the use of the furnace. The thermostat is reading 72F and we only have it set to 66F so we have quite a buffer before the furnace should kick on. I have been trying hard to keep the curtains and everything like that in place to do the maximum to insulate the house. But overall I have done very little. Min has been doing a little laundry today and that has been enough to keep the house so warm that I am on the verge of sweating.

I did some site maintenance tonight while waiting for some things to syncronize. The page was getting a little slow to load with all of the content going on here. So far from the size of the fourth quarter archive, the past six weeks are all ready the second busiest quarter ever on SGL with a full seven weeks left to go including the traditionally busy Christmas season. I also did some more research into WordPress tonight. I am really excited about getting a chance to finally start working on getting everything moved over to that. The site will be a million times cooler if I manage to get that to work. There are so many awesome features that I would like to include that are just way too much work to do just using my own hand coded XHTML. I could do whatever I need in ASP.NET but I do not have the kind of time necessary to do that.

Ah the weekend. Dominica works an hour earlier on Saturdays but fortunately gets out of work an hour earlier as well. So she had to be up at a fairly normal time this morning so that she could get to work. I got to sleep in late with Oreo. A nice lie in for the lads (groans from the Father Ted crowd.)

iPodder fans will be interested to know that the iPodder software was officially renamed Juice this morning. I expect to make it a bit less confusing. Lots of people incorrectly connect podcasting with the Apple iPod which can be used to listen to podcasts but there is no direct link between the two.

Jeremy is here today. He came over last night and spent the night. I did some work with Ben this morning in a continuing attempt to get some sort of “simple” solution in place to let us play AoE2 remotely but after another long bout of working on that we still came up with nothing. We even tried out a really promising new product called Hamachi that really looked promising but it didn’t end up working either. It was nice to learn about Hamachi and to be able to try it out because it definitely looks like it might be a really cool, simple technology that could have a lot of other uses that I will be interested in.

Jeremy and I ended up playing a single one on one game together today since it has been so long since we have had a chance to play AoE2. I crushed him good:)

For lunch we went over to the Omega Grill. Then we did some shopping at Walmart. I picked up the Chia Herb Garden that I have been wanting to get for a few day. Jeremy got Call of Duty 2 which he has been wanting but it just came out recently. We went back to the house and Jeremy installed CoD2 and tried it out. It looks amazing but he wasn’t able to get it to run really smoothly on his machine. It seems like there are some issues with the configuration that we couldn’t figure out. I also picked up Dragonslayer out of the bargain bin. It is an old Disney live action movie from 1981. I am sure that it isn’t very good but it doesn’t have to be all that good for $5.

Ben and I spent a few more hours working on the AoE2 problem. This is one problem that will just not stop plagueing us. This is several years that we have been pounding on this issue trying to get somewhere practical with it. The only working solution that we ever came up with was purchasing hardware VPN accelerators for every location that wanted to join in.

I took Jeremy home at 8:30 and at 9:00 Dominica headed over to the Pakistan House on West Henrietta Road and Crittenden in Brighton to get some dinner. They are just so awesome there.

While Oreo and I were waiting for Dominica to get home I took the time to plant our Chia Herb Garden. It comes with six herbs put you can only plant four of them at a time. Dominica didn’t have any suggestions about which ones she wanted so I opted for cilantro, sweet marjoram, chives and dill. It was very simple.

I don’t think that enough people know what mincemeat is so I decided to include a link over to the Wikipedia. Originally it was common for mincemeat to actually include meat but over time that custom has diminished and now it is relatively uncommon to actually have real meat and instead mincemeat is made of fruits and vegetables. Personally I like mincemeat pie and I am hoping that Dominica will make me some or maybe a nice mincemeat tart.

Dominica got home with dinner and we went down to the theatre and ate our Pakistan House take away while watching the final three episodes of As Time Goes By. I can’t believe that I have finally seen the entire series. After all of these years. Unfortunately I feel that the series deteriorated pretty rapidly after Judi Dench’s husband died. They immediately scaled back the filming schedule and took the show from being a regular full length series to being mostly a “special” thing that they only did a few of a year. I understand why they scaled back the filming schedule but what I don’t understand is why the writing for the series changed so much. The overall storyline stayed more or less regular, I think, but Judi Dench’s character lost all sense of direction and personality and became nothing but a bundle of insanity. They totally took away all of her personal interaction and made her completely nuts and a really mean character that you end up disliking if you aren’t careful when she had originally been the center of the show, more or less, and a real, interesting character. By the end she was only given token screen time and every moment that she was on camera was totally predictable and annoying. It is really unfortunate that they let that happen because they could easily have held the show together more easily than they did. I really get the impression that the original writers left and some other part time writers were brought in and given very little to work with to wrap up the last few seasons of the show. It is very sad. At least they did manage to get the show to drag out long enough to have an actual ninth season wrap-up that they were able to use to end the show in a nice, closure-happy way. You really feel like the last episode is the last episode and it makes sense.

It was getting late by the time that we watched the final episode and I was ready to get to bed. I have no idea why I was so tired tonight. That isn’t usual for me. I do think that I am coming down with a cold and maybe that is knocking me out. It was half past midnight when we headed off for bed. So no podcast tonight but hopefully tomorrow.