Sheep Guarding Llama

Oreo was kind enough to not force me to get out of bed too early this morning. What a relief that was. Finally enough sleep. I didn’t have to get up this morning until I wanted to. Or at least not until I felt it was important that I get up and check to make sure that no one was leaving phone or email messages for me.

This morning managed to actually be a nice, relaxing morning. Boy did I need that. I didn’t have to do to much stressful work at all this morning. Dad came over a little after 11:00 – about an hour after Dominica left for work. He mounted a shelf in the basement for me that is going to hold all of the data communications equipment that I have like the cable modem and the DSL modem up off of the desk that they currently are sitting on top of. They have been a pain for the past two and a half years because they have a lot of cables and they take up a bit of space that can’t be covered or crowded on one of my desks in my basement office. Now that they are mounted to a shelf they can be up and out of the way, the cables can be organized and the lights on the front of the units will be visible so that they will be a lot easier to work on. It will make the office just look a lot nicer too. I have a patch panel that I want to get mounted in that same space as well so that I can clean up all of the Ethernet cabling that is running into that room.

Dad and I went to lunch at the Omega Grill after the shelf was up. I got stuck on the phone fixing some email problems just before we left so we didn’t manage to go as early as I had hoped to have and I didn’t manage to get Oreo ready before lunch so I left him home and returned for him after we were done eating.

After lunch I grabbed Oreo and we went over to dad’s house so that I could get some work done over there. Dad wanted me to fix a few things with his computer and I took the opportunity while I was there to get him set up with an HP LaserJet printer since, in the long run, laserjets save tons of money compared to regular printers. And since I own three spares it seemed pretty dumb not to be making use of at least one of them. I worked over there from about 2:00 until 5:00. We decided that it was getting late and that we should just get some food someplace simple before we went to the York High School senior play tonight. We went down to Cooks in Greggsville and got subs. I love their subs there. They are really good and cheap. And it is a very convenient location being halfway between our place in Geneseo and dad’s in Covington.

After dinner we went to York for the senior play. Yes, it is a Wednesday so it really doesn’t make much sense to have the play be tonight. I agree. No one wants to go out to a show on a Wednesday night. But the show was scheduled for this coming weekend but the girls volleyball or some team or other is going to the state finals this weekend and that was going to take too many people out of the play so that had to be adjusted. For some reason they decided to move the show forward to a weeknight with no warning and almost no notification given to anyone. Not only that but they reduced the show to just being a single performance as well. Since the show is a fund raiser for the seniors to take their senior trip it seems kind of rough to lose half of your performances. Anyway, the show was scheduled to begin at 7:00 but didn’t actually start until just a little before 7:30. It took so long for them to start and they didn’t do any announcement at all. They just flipped off the house lights all of a sudden. There were tons of people walking around all over the auditorium because most of us were convinced, I think, that they had printed the wrong starting time and that they were actually going to begin at 7:30. Then, the moment that the show started and going all the way through there were just tons of people taking flash photographs and using video camcorders with their backlit LCDs turned on that it was impossible to pay attention to the show. I have never had such an inconsiderate audience at any high school or middle school performance. The flashing was so regular that it almost made me ill. And there is no reason to use backlit LCDs when you have perfectly good viewfinders that are meant for this sort of thing. It would significantly detract from the show if the show was any good at all. The show was something called “Kodiak Flapjack” and it is, by far, the worst play script that I have ever heard of being used. It was pathetic. And it was short. Intermission came at 7:50. We had barely gotten to see anything. People who had walked in the door right at 7:00 had spent just as much time waiting for the show to start as they did actually watching the show. Those of us who came early would end up having the same ratio by the time the entire production was completed. But the worst part was the horrible script – Kodiak Flapjack. Don’t ever see anyone perform this show.

To make matter worse, unlike the picture that I attached here, York decided to have many of the girls in the show attired in mini-skirts. Not only was that somewhat inappropriate for a high school production but they were supposed to be playing girls in a high-brow finishing school and the outfits that they were wearing did not fit the part at all. Many of them were wearing a very inappropriate form of the “school girl uniform”. I can’t believe that they were allowed to go on stage that way. But the real issue came with a portrayal of inproper teach or principal and student relationships. It was made very clear that the school principal and a high school student were supposed to be dating for much of the duration of the play. And it isn’t even addressed. They just act like it is normal and I think that everyone watching the show, due to the poor consistancy of the script, forgot that the one character was supposed to be thirty to fifty years old and that the other was just a teenager in school.

At the end, writer Tim Kelly forgot his own plot and just ended the show. I must have been the only person left in the entire auditorium who was actually paying any attention to the show at all because I couldn’t figure out how the writer and the cast and done that entire show and missed the most important plot hole that you could ever imagine. Okay, here is the synopsis: Old man leaves his girl’s finishing school (yes, that is creepy) in his will to someone he has never met for no good reason, inheritor is required to be the school principal for one year before the inheritance can be actually claimed, if at any point the inheritor does NOT maintain his or her position as principal then the entire estate reverts to the old man’s great grand niece who, coincidentally, is a teenage girl attending the school. The “big twist” is that the first guy who comes down to run the school ends up being an error on the part of a private detective and he is not actually the person who was supposed to inherit the school. Okay. But the entire play from minute one until five minutes before the end the only thing that is driving the entire show is that this guy HAS to remain the active principal and the student who is set to get the school should he decide not to be principal is trying to convince him to quit. Then, when they find out that they have the wrong guy, this other inheritor shows up and announces that they have sold the school. Sold the school? For the past hour everything has rested on the inheritor maintaining the job of principal for one entire year and the first guy only did it for a little while. Suddenly the lawyer apparently thought that actually executing the will was too much effort and suddenly the teenager who spent the entire play trying to get back her school never even once mentions that she just inherited it. In fact, not one person involved in the play or in the audience, apparently, realized that they had just dropped the play’s only plot device. It was so obvious of an ending that I couldn’t even figure out what they were trying to do because everything had been solved. It was ridiculous.

Anyway, that is my rant about that play. I can’t believe that high schools perform this stuff. They have to pay to be able to perform this crap. Shows like this are so bad that any high school student should be able to write something just as good. It takes no skill to get something like this written. I feel bad for all of the students who put effort into shows like this. It feels like the school is mocking them and doesn’t actually want them to do well or to provide an artistic service for the community. I am really embarrassed that this is my old high school. The kids did a pretty good job. They sure didn’t have anything to work with. Heaven only knows how you would put any more into that show than they did. My cousin Sara was in the show. That is why I went to see it. At least it provided plenty of material for SGL and for the podcast.

Min and I did manage to get episode twenty-three completed tonight and posted. We are working hard to keep the shows shorter from now on, as close to daily as possible and to end each show with a cool musical selection. So if you aren’t listening, be sure to check it out. I think that it will be several more weeks until we are familiar with how to do a show together but we are learning.

I did a bunch of work tonight trying to clean up Min’s computer. We do so much online multimedia (I hate that term) stuff that the 80GB drive is practically full.

I have to give a talk to a PTA in the near future about Internet dangers for children. I have heard of but have never done anything with My Space – I try to stay away from the kiddy bopper sites – but I needed to learn about it so I got an account and way trying it out tonight. It is a neat idea, sort of, a personal connection service. I can see where it would be handy but there is no one on there worth connecting with unless you are a high school student and in that lies the problem. It is a neat idea because it is a free and open service that duplicates a lot of functionality that was in disparate locations before. It has the potential to allow you to find long lost friends if lots of adult users actually sign up and use the service. Only time will tell. Right now it is mostly an underage dating service. I am the oldest person, by several years, registered from my high school and my elementary school is not even an option to mark on it yet. If anyone of my readers is on it or is thinking about checking it out, here is my personal link. I will be interested to see if anyone actually uses this thing over the age of twenty two. This is a really ambitious site because it conglomerates the functionality of so many different systems. It even does the blogging portion and I think that that is where so many younger kids are getting into it not really realizing how it is being used by the vast majority of its membership. This is a real problem with services like this that they are designed to be kind of a generic personal profile framework and if the majority of the user base does one thing or another with it it can really change the flavour of the service. For adults, though, it is a pretty neat service from what I can see.

In another move that is hurting Sony’s reputation, it is now widely believed and rapidly being investigated whether or not Sony was involved in stealing software from the LAME project in order to make their new root-kit virus. Isn’t it ironic (yes, actually ironic and not coincidental) that in an attempt to forcibly stop people from being able to steal their CD’s that Sony has stolen from others? Microsoft has officially listed Sony’s software in their spyware database and the Microsoft Anti-Spyware tool now removes that virus from your computer or, at least, attempts to. A+ to Microsoft, F to Sony.

Once again, Oreo decided when it was time to get up this morning. He has taken to needing to go outside after six hours of sleep and it is making my life very difficult. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in days. And since I have a cold that really isn’t working out all that well.

Dominica had to get out to her class this morning. While she was out at her class I took the opportunity to go down to the Castile school to check out the new computer lab situation and to see where we were with all of that. I called dad and he decided that he would go down there with me so I swung by his place with Oreo and picked him up. We got down to the school a little before noon and spent an hour at least, I would imagine, getting an idea of where things are in regards to getting a lot of new stuff set up at the school. I have an immediate task list for this week now which will help a lot. We have a lot of work to do before things are ready but now is the time to jump on it and to get things done so I am optimistic. We are getting a full blown ten computer lab set up which is twenty-five percent larger than the lab that we had last year. We still don’t have quite enough computers to fill the lab and nowhere near enough monitors. So if anyone out there has any spare stuff we definitely still have places where we can put it to good use.

After working at the school dad and I went to Lorraine’s on Main Street for some lunch. Boy is that place inexpensive. I can’t believe how cheaply you can eat there. We both had country fried fish sandwiches for lunch. It was delicious.

I took dad home and then rushed back over to the house in Geneseo because we have guests coming over to the house later and the whole place is a complete and utter disaster and has been since about two weeks after Andy moved out. So we had a ton of cleaning that needed to be done before anyone came over to the house. It was about 2:30 or maybe a little later when I finally got back to the house. Dominica was out at the grocery store getting supplies for tonight since she is making dessert. I got to work getting as much of the house cleaned as possible.

Eric is still without a laptop at work and so he came over this afternoon while Dominica and I were cleaning so that he could use the computer to at least check his messages and take care of some basic things. I can’t imagine having to work without any access to a computer or the Internet. How do people get anything done?

Dominica and I cleaned like mad right up until 5:15 when dad arrived to pick us up to take us over to the Shanghai for dinner. We met our friends Amy and Dan and their kids over there for dinner. The eight of us enjoyed the buffet and then came back to our now clean or almost clean house in Geneseo for dessert and coffee. We only ever get to see them once or twice a year. Just recently they finished working on a house here in the area and just eight weeks ago or so moved into that house. So now they are much closer to us than they were previously. Maybe we will get to see them more often now. Amy and I go way back. We have been friends for as long as I can remember. She is the only friend that I have that comes from before kindergarten. And, in reality, my only friend from just after that is Jonathan Stagno that I still talk to on a regular basis. Amy and I go back to age two or so. I guess she is my only friends from the 1970’s. The SEVENTIES!

Dominica and I managed to get a short podcast done before we went to bed. We have to work on doing the show earlier in the day because we keep ending up so incredibly tired by the time that we actually do the show that we sound like crap on the show. But we are shooting for a shorter but more often format and hopefully we will just naturally improve over time. So get over there and check out the show. I really like the tune “Irony” that we play on tonight’s show. It is really good. I picked out the tune to be on our playlist but Dominica picked that song to be played tonight.

It was decently warm today and the furnace is not even close to having to kick on to keep the house warm. We have it set to 66F and this evening the house was holding 73F without any extra help. That is awesome considering the super high cost of heating fuel this winter. I wonder how long we can keep this up. The wind is blowing something fierce tonight. I can’t believe how windy it is. This house makes so much noise. It always sounds like people banging on the side of the house.

Congratulations to the Nicklins, John and Michelle, down in Arnold, Maryland who have purchased and have now moved into their new house. This is their second house. We haven’t seen it yet but John is hoping to get me pictures off of his laptop very soon. They were looking for a house that had more space. The house that they were living in previously was waterfront on Deep Creek but it didn’t have very much space to work with. Dominica and I are planning on going down to Annapolis very soon so we are hoping to have a chance to see the house in the very near future.

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.