Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I was up and moving at 6:00 this morning. That is twice in a row now. I hope that this isn’t going to be the start of a trend! I like having time to sleep in with Oreo. He likes to hang out in the morning and just relax. If I get out of bed he will follow me into the office and sleep on his pillow there.

I went to Burger King on my way out of town. I needed some breakfast and knew that I wouldn’t very likely be able to get any lunch.

Nothing exciting going on today in Ithaca. Just fixing a broken desktop.

It ended up taking longer than I thought which I should really be used to by now since it always takes a lot longer than I thought. I managed to get out of Ithaca around 5:15 to head back for Geneseo.

While I was in Ithaca I had to make a stop over to Best Buy and while I was in Best Buy I checked out some of the new portable media toys from Samsung. I am very depressed that they are no longer making the same MP3 player that I have. The one that I have is near perfect. It has a few minor problems but the cost is good and the size is perfect. And the best feature is the forty-two hour run time off of a single AA battery. I don’t like the rechargable units because they get far lower run times and you have to have a charger for them and cannot simply go out and get a battery for them. You can get batteries anywhere making them extra easy to use. I think that there are a lot of people like me who like to use their MP3/Ogg Vorbis players for many things like long walks, car drives, flying, etc. In many of those cases you need to have very long play times or the ability to just change the battery so that you can keep on listening. With a rechargable battery you are often stuck with not enough charge, even if fully charged, to last for the whole time that you might want to use the device! Especially on days when you are doing some serious travelling – liking riding a bus. And on those days you never have any good way to use a charger so you are doubly out of luck with those types of units. But while I was there I did discover that Samsung has a first generation audio/video player out that looks to be very interesting. It is very tiny for what it is and it allows you to play all of the audio files that you are used to except for Ogg Vorbis which is a real shame but it also allows you to play MPEG4 videos! MPEG4 is a very high quality, small file size and popular web video standard. It is very exciting because it means that you can use this tiny and inexpensive unit for both podcasting and videocasting! I am totally wanting one now but I am sure not going to spend any money on one until I have a chance to really try one out and see whether or not it is really able to do anything useful. But it would be really cool to be able to watch my own Vlog on there as well as Rocketboom, Villagegirl and other neat Vlogs. It is a cool idea and a start one way or another. It would be really neat to replace television with something like that.

I got back to Geneseo at 7:30 and met dad and Jeremy over at Denny’s for some dinner. Jeremy has been begging to go to Denny’s for two months now so we finally got to go.

After dinner Jeremy came over and set up his computer in the living room. We tried to get a VPN set up with some of his friends so that we could play Age of Empires 2 but after several hours of trying we finally ended up giving up on it for the night. We worked on that until 11:00 when Min got home from work and grocery shopping. It is not an easy thing to get to work.

Jeremy played video games into the night. Dominica and I recorded the twentieth SGL Podcast last night and, for the first time, we have added music to it. I am excited about Min doing the show with me. I think that it will take some time before we start to get anything super interesting but if we keep at it, and you guys keep listening and sending in comments, that we will manage to figure it out and get a pretty awesome show going. We all ready have a special guest host that is planning on joining us for next weekend’s podcast. That will be neat.

By the time I had finished editing the show and getting it ready to post it was around 2:30 in the morning and I really needed to get to bed. Dominica managed to go to bed a bit before I did. She has to work tomorrow but it is her last shift for the week and she gets the next three days off!