Sheep Guarding Llama

Today really does not feel like a Saturday to me. I got up with Min as she headed off to work in the city. I did some cleaning this morning trying to keep the house up to par with where it was last night but once we get the house clean it is a tough place to keep it at.

My main project this morning was building a computer for Castile that I plan to install on Monday morning. This is the first full SUSE Linux 10.0 install that I have from scratch on a fresh machine. I was really impressed. This new version is screaming compared to the stuff that I am used to. The school is going to be really happy with this. This will make classes so much easier because it will take so much less time to get computers up and running when students need to use them. They will also be quite happy just to have a new computer arriving as well.

Dad called and we got together for lunch at the Omega Grill. After lunch I came home and spent several hours working on the telephone with Andy. Our project is really coming along. He has been doing tons of work on it and we are really starting to get excited about having it working pretty soon.

I did a short SGL Podcast to make sure that there was something up for today. I didn’t want to leave everyone hanging with so many people listening to the show on such a regular basis. I also had to record my Saturday show of Scott Reads the Bible. My new Saturday show is me reading my way straight through the King James Bible one chapter at a time. The whole podcast is me reading the Bible one chapter at a time but I skip all around in the Word and use lots of different versions of the Bible – almost twenty different translations – but on Saturdays I am doing a special thing starting from Genesis 1 today and going all the way through directly.

I tried to shave my head this afternoon while I was waiting for Jenn to arrive. I have been lazy about shaving my head recently and I have gotten pretty scruffy. I started shaving it tonight but after not too long I realized that I had let it get way too long. It ended up taking me almost two hours to get my head shaved and I ended up eating through four razor blades and still getting pretty severe razor burn on my head from the number of times I had to drag a dull blade over it. What a pain.

Jeremy’s friend Ben who has been working on trying to find a free, host based solution to playing AoE2 over the network finally got something working today and we were able to test it. That was a relief. It is nice that we have another group of people that will be able to play now because of that. No one was around this afternoon so Ben and I played a quick game of one on one while I was waiting for Jenn to get to the house.

Jenn arrived at the house around 7:00. We hung out for a little while and then at 8:30 we had to drive up to Rochester to meet Dominica and Tricia at Basha which is an awesome Meditteranean restaurant up on Clinton. Tanner and I used to hang out at Basha a lot back in our old college days at Monroe Community College, MCC. The restaurant isn’t very far from there and isn’t very expensive so it made for a great place to head to when we wanted a nice lunch. We got there right on time and Min was only a minute behind us coming from work. She claims that I gave her bad directions but she called and I talked her through a couple of turns and she was there so quickly that it wasn’t a problem at all. Personally I think that she just missed the exit but I will have to try driving the same way sometime to see if there is really an exit there or not where the map had said that there was. Maps are often wrong, though. Tricia was a few minutes later than us. We pretty much had the restaurant to ourselves. There was only one other table there and they were almost done eating by the time that we were starting so it was very private.

Dinner was very good. I really like Basha. I wish that we would eat there more often. Too bad it is so far away. We almost never drive all of the way up to the city itself to eat. We always have to combine the trip with something else. After dinner the four of us went over to the Olde Toad on Alexander Street in the Medical Arts Building where I used to work for Pilato Entertainment many moons ago (1998 – 1999 maybe?) Tricia’s girlfriend met us there and we all hung out for several hours. It has been a really long time – since my bachelour party, I do believe – since I have had a chance to be up there and to get to have some real ale (that is an actual category of beer, real ale.) We had a really good time. Oreo was happy just to hang out in the parking lot waiting for us. I think that he is starting to get tired of the whole “waiting in the car indefinitely” thing that he has been having to go through over and over the past couple of weeks. His enthusiasm about riding in the car is beginning to wane a little.

Oreo the alarmclock got me up again this morning. Apparently he no longer has any qualms about going out into the snow. It is easy for him to get up early because he just climbs right back into bed and snuggles with whomever is around and sleeps all day. It doesn’t make any difference to him at all when he decides that he wants to go out. But he always does it early enough to cut my night short.

Here is a happy news item for a change: children overseas save mother they see collapse on living room webcam. It would appear that the Internet really does have positive uses beyond being a delivery mechanism for SGL.

After Min left for work this morning I had my hands full doing some last minute cleaning. There is always more to be done, isn’t there? I did some vacuuming, the dishes, red up the office and did some general house cleaning. Now if I could just teach Oreo to wipe his feet and the hamster not to throw his bedding all over the place we will be in really good shape.

While she was at work Dominica found a site that talked about how to make mincemeat pies. I hope that the fact that she is looking means that she is planning on baking me one sometime in the near future. When we used to go to Ohio for Thanksgiving sometimes my grandmother would bake one for me since I was the only member of the immediate family who likes them. There is a lot of that in my family. It seems that my tastes are completely my own.

I left home around 11:00 and took Oreo over to pick up dad so that we could go down to Castile to get some work done down there. It was after noon by the time we actually managed to get down there. We had to do some banking and I had to get gas. The car must have been exceedingly empty today because I put a lot more in than the tank is supposed to hold. We had to stop at the lumber shop in Perry too because we needed to pick up a shelf to install down at the school.

We got some work done. Not as much as I had hoped. We got some critical cabling runs put into the ceiling and that is likely to really help as we continue to try to get the computer lab up and running as quickly as possible.

I did a bunch of work on a computer for the school this afternoon and did a bit of checking out of a number of hard drives that we have here that have been having problems. We have had so many hard drives die recently and we have no real machine to work with them with that they are piling up waiting for me to determine with drives are still useful and which ones are not. That is turning into a real chore.

Jenn was at the house when I got back from Castile. We managed to hang out for about an hour or two before she had to run out to go to Buffalo where she is crashing tonight with friends out there. Eric came over while Jenn was still here to use the computer. He still doesn’t have a computer at work and they are starting to email him all of the time with stuff that he has to do. It has been more than a month now, I think, that he has been working with no means of communicating with the company that he works for. I don’t know how they expect him to be able to do anything. It isn’t like there is another computer at his site somewhere. The company doesn’t have a single computer at the entire location. So he can’t sneak over to someone’s office and use their computer when they aren’t there if he has to. My house is his only option.

Dominica and I were really tired tonight by the time that she got home and we decided that we didn’t have the energy to put on a good podcast so we decided to skip it for tonight and ended up going to bed a little on the early side.

It is that time of year ago. The ground is white and the snow continues to fall. Nothing like waking up to the first snowy morning of the year and looking out and suddenly seeing white instead of green. It is extra strange because at 3:00 am yesterday morning it was 71F outside and last night when we went to bed it had fallen to 36F according to our outside thermometer. And now it is so cold outside that not only is the water in the air freezing but the ground is cold enough that the snow is staying for a really long time.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire opens in theatres tonight. Here in Rochester it won’t go to the DLP theatre until tomorrow afternoon. I am waiting for that. I am very excited.

Dominica was doing some research at work today attempting to find a recipe for custard tarts and came across this very olde recipe: Doucetes. Take Creme a gode cupfulle, & put it on a straynour, thanne take yolkes of Eyroun, and put ther-to, & a lytel mylke; then strayne it throw a straynour in-to a bolle; then take Sugre y-nowe, & put ther-to, or ellys hony forde faute of Sugre, than coloure it with Safroun; than take thin cofyns, & put it in the ovynne letre, & lat hem ben hardyd; than take a dyssche y-fastenyd on the pelys ende, & pore thin comade in-to the dyssche, & for the dyssche in-to the cofyns; & whan they don a-ryse wel, teke hem out, & serue hem forth.

I got started rather late this morning. I have been pretty tired and had stayed up pretty late last night. Late enough to post today’s Bible chapter before going to bed. It was cold out so Oreo and I just snuggled all morning and enjoyed the chance to get a nice sleep in brisk air. What a nice change that is.

Tomorrow dad and I are going down to Castile in the morning to do some work down there to get them ready. I don’t know whether or not we are going to be able to get in there next week during the vacation so I want to get as much done now as possible. Dominica’s college roomate Jenn in coming up to visit us this weekend and is going to be arriving tomorrow afternoon and hanging out for a little while in the afternoon. Jenn will be staying here Saturday through Monday so be looking for her on the podcast. The podcast page is a little different now and some people who were unable to listen to the show properly before should be able to listen to it just fine now while some people who were fine before might not be able to listen to it at all now. I am in the latter category. But I think that overall, it is probably an improvement for the average site user. It only affects people who are listening to the podcast directly off of the site and does not affect anyone who is downloading the MP3s before listening to them.

My Chia Herb Garden started to show signs of life last night. Today it was so cold outside that I decided that they needed to be moved into the kitchen so that they would have some hope of surviving. So they are now next to the range with a flourescent lamp right about them keeping them a little warm and giving them a decent amount of light. They seem to still be growing and the first leaf is now visible. Maybe we will have real plants going by Monday. I will get pics for y’all as soon as I am able to take the plastic wrap off of them. It will just be glare until then. I am resoaking some pepper seeds today in the hopes of getting them going. They are from the grocery store though and not from a seed place so there is a decent chance that they won’t work. Plus I didn’t soak them long enough the first time so that didn’t help things either. We will have to wait and see.

I spent a significant amount of the evening on the telephone with Mary. I talked to her for about twenty minutes early in the afternoon before she left for work. I had been planning on going over to the hotel to eat dinner over there since we have hardly seen each other for the past two months or so. But then she called a little after 5:30 to say that she was still at home in Silver Springs because she had blown some tires on the way into work here in Geneseo and had to go back home. So she missed her shift today but we managed to take the opportunity to get her all set up with Juice and FireANT so that she can check out all of the multimedia splendor of the SGL world. She listend to some of the podcast this afternoon and watched a few of the videos from Disney World. I also got her hooked on RocketBoom. Resistance is Futile.

I installed and began working on the new web server that we are going to be using here for SGL. It will be some time before we are actually able to put this new machine into service but the groundwork is being laid now. My plan is to move the site over to WordPress. It is going to be a tremendous amount of work to have that actually happen but we really need to move away from all of the manual site management that I have been doing for the past five years. The site is just too big and the whole thing is just far too ambitious to try to do by hand. And there are tons of features that I want to be able to offer and so many of them are offered through WordPress that it will make my life a LOT easier. I am going to be running the new site on a Novell SUSE 10.0 server. I did my first server install tonight of SUSE and I am really impressed by how much easier they have made it than previous versions or even compared to Windows. SUSE Linux is a really great product. I am going to be busy at the school working to convert them to version 10 as well. They are currently on 9.2 which is two versions behind. It will be nice to be able to have such an upgrade. This latest version is supposed to be really fast during startup compared to the previous versions which is a big deal at the school where short class times couples with common restarts causes a lot of lost productivity. This will help to minimize that.

Oreo avoided going outside until quite late this afternoon. I think that he knew that it was a lot colder than he was interested in dealing with so he held it as long as he could. When he went out this afternoon it was, to the best of our knowledge, the first time that he has ever seen snow on the ground. He was a Houston dog and they don’ get all that much snow there in the balmy south. He may have lived for a while in Colorado but we don’t really know. He seemed to be pretty comfortable with the snow, though, and wasn’t very worried about it. Eventually he went out and played around for a while outside and didn’t appear to be too chilled when he came back in.

Dominica came home at her regular time and we managed to do the podcast immediately which, IMHO, really helped us do a much better show than normal because we were both awake for it. We tend to get tired right around midnight and if we aren’t careful we end up crossing past midnight while doing the show and then we are too zonked to be entertaining. Mr. Humphries was kind enough to not come down and interrupt us during the show tonight too. Oreo was pretty gassy and that almost caused a problem.

After doing the show Dominica made some custard tarts. As far as we can tell they are as close as we can get to what Lionel eats regularly on As Time Goes By. It is funny that I have been wondering what they tasted like since I first saw the show so many years ago and now in the same week that I see the end of the show I finally get to have a custard tart. They aren’t as amazing as one would hope. Ambrosia Devon Custard is more or less a lot like vanilla pudding. It was good but nothing to write home about. Maybe just something to write to the world about. Hmmm…

We hung out in the office for a little while and played with the animals. The hamster has really been wanting a lot of attention lately. How that he has been moved into the office he is so much more involved with us. I am glad that he is here. I am pretty sure that he is getting enough attention now and less disruption during the day. He seems to be a happier rodent. The problem with him is that the more attention that you pay to him the more he wants. So he is becoming very demanding of our time. If he knows that we are around he will come down to the bottom of his cage, grab the cage door in his teeth and rattle the cage something fierce.

Bed time at 12:30. Dad is calling me from his breakfast meeting in Perry this morning to have me meet him down in Castile so that we can do some work. I will be down there until early afternoon. Then Jenn Generoso is coming over early in the afternoon so I am trying to get back to Geneseo to see her.