Sheep Guarding Llama

Four more days and counting until our trip to Walt Disney World!

Well, the SGL Podcast made it back into the top 100 list yesterday sneaking in at #100.

I am very glad to not have anything pressing to do today. I am just doing some work at home until dad comes over this afternoon around 3:30 so that he, Min and I can go up to Rochester to see Wallace and Gromit which we have been waiting many years for. Last night while Dominica and I were watching a little of the 1995 season of Last of the Summer Wine – which is a series that is so immensely slow and boring that we have decided not to watch it anymore and didn’t even bother to complete the episode that we were watching – I noticed that I recognized one of the characters voices: it is Wallace from Wallace and Gromit!

Normally Dominica has to work this evening but she switched with Mary and Mary is working tonight and Min is working for her on Friday. I am going to be out a bit of Friday evening as I am having a mentoring session.

I talked to dad and we decided that we are going to have lunch here in Geneseo instead of going out for dinner tonight and then go do some shopping in Henrietta.

Dad came by at 11:00 and then the three of us went over to the Omega Grill for some lunch. Dad is taking us out today as a kind of anniversary celebration. We had lunch and then we drove up to Henrietta to go to the movie. Normally dad drives but he has diabetes and it has been kind of bad recently and he isn’t feeling the best today. We got there in time to get into the theatre and to relax for a while. We are all very excited about this movie. I have been a huge fan of the Aardman films ever since they did Creature Comforts so many years ago.

Dominica did some shoe shopping after the movie and dad and I went up to Jiffy Lube and got an oil change and wash for my car. Then it was back home. I can’t believe how much we ended up doing today and are back home by 3:30!

Today’s main projects include getting a JAVA programming environment set up for Dominica so that she can start working on stuff for college even though she hasn’t actually applied yet. And getting a good solution for the Castile school to be able to have Internet access by providing a whitelist driven web content filter. I think that I found a solution to that but it will be a little while before I am able to test my theory. I think that SUSE offers squid and squidguard in the list of supported packages and it looks like squidguard will allow me to have a whitelist of sites pretty easily. I have not worked with squidguard before so I don’t know how difficult that it will be to use.

Min has taken to knitting in the office and watching movies on our portable DVD player that we bought off of Andy a few months ago. She wears headphones and is able to be with me in the office but not interrupt what I am working on. It works out pretty well.

Dominica got a call this evening and she has an interview at the same place that I was interviewing at just a few weeks ago. Not for the same position. We are really excited because the company sounded really good and the people there were very nice. Even after not getting the position I was very happy with them and would definitely consider them in the future. They have really good benefits and pay and everything. The position is a bit of a long shot for Dominica since this would be her very first real solid IT position but it is a great opportunity for her and for us. So, once again, we are looking prayer concerning her getting this position. She is interviewing on this coming Friday morning at 10:30 in the morning. It is a ten hour, four day a week position which would be very nice. So we are prematurely excited, as you would guess.

We decided to watch some Keeping Up Appearances this evening to relax. We watched one episode and decided that we wanted to go to Walmart and so some quick shopping. We packed up Oreo and went over to the store. We got some groceries and Min got a pair of sunglasses for our trip to Disney World. I got a new watch. It is just a $10.00 Walmart Faded Glory watch but that is plenty fine for me. I wasn’t going to get one but I had a long time to look at them with nothing else to do while Min was looking at the sunglasses and I found an orange one that I really liked that will go well with the blue polo work shirts that I wear often. Lindsay Lohan’s Herbie Fully Loaded was on sale so we got that as well. It isn’t the greatest Herbie movie but it was okay. It lacked something that the original movies had. We saw it at the drive in over the summer.

On the way home we stopped at the Mobil station to fill up Min’s car so that she doesn’t have to deal with it tomorrow on her way to school. Gas here is down to $2.70/gallon. Boy is that a good feeling. That is another nine cents less than it was this morning. We are extremely close to the pre-Katrina prices.

As we were leaving the gas station we noticed a movie rental place in the Dollar General plaza that we had never noticed before. We decided that since it was early and we shouldn’t have businesses in town that we don’t know about we decided to stop in. It is called Movie Gallery and it is pretty nice. The best part is that they have a pretty decent selection of previously viewed movies for sale and currently they have them on sale for buy two, get two free. That sounded pretty good so we took a look at what they had. I asked the person working there and she said that they guarantee their movies for life. That is what Hollywood Video used to do and it caused us to buy from them all of the time because we always felt safe doing it. But then Hollywood changed their policy to only one month and that wasn’t enough for us to feel confident buying there so we almost never do. So we are really excited to have a rental place with a good sales policy walking distance from the house. And they are open until ten or eleven most nights. That is really handy. Boy do I love living in Geneseo. There can’t be anyplace that is as handy as this place is. So we looked around for a while and decided to pick up The Longest Yard, Ice Princess, Miss Congeniality 2 and Finding Neverland with Johnny Depp. Not a bad selection. There were some other movies there that we were interested in as well but we partially made our selection based on which movies were the same price so that we would be able to take maximum benefit of their sale. That is the trick to those sales. Normally you end up getting movies of mixed prices and only the two lesser expensive items end up being half price and you don’t get the value out of the sale that you think that you are going to get.

We came back home and it was only 9:00. We decided to watch Miss Congeniality 2 which neither of us have seen yet. It definitely does not live up to the first movie. And the first movie was only so good. It was definitely a stretch to attempt to make a sequel to that movie and they really didn’t have any material to work with. Sandra Bullock does a really poor performance which is probably a result of her being embarrassed about the plot and the writing of the movie. The first movie was a really bizarre fantasy look at the FBI but this movie takes it even farther and to new levels of dumb and ridiculous. The whole movie is flat, dumb and boring. Is it the worst thing ever? No. It isn’t the worst thing ever. If you get it cheap or get stuck having to watch it you might enjoy it a little. Deidrich Bader is awesome as always but is not in the film nearly enough to save it. If you can avoid watching this movie I think that I would have to say that that is the way to go. Maybe the best part of this movie is that it clearly marks the end of what little career Sandra Bullock ever had. This is one of those movies that has an important underlying moral. And that moral appears to be: it is okay for girls to want to be professionals and have careers as long as they keep their hair in place and do their makeup carefully. Oh yes, and they also demonstrated that the girl who slept with her boss worked her way to the top. I think that women’s advocacy groups everywhere should be up in arms about this movie. I am a man and I am offended by the portrayal of female FBI agents in the film. I guess this is what happens when Sandra Bullock and HER SISTER get to produce a movie. How did her sister get to be a film producer? Must be nice ot just “be a producer”. It isn’t like you audition for a position like that. You just have a connection and people give you money. Its kind of pathetic.

The movie was bad enough that Dominica agreed to let me watch The Longest Yard to help make up for it. She didn’t agree that it was all that bad but she didn’t try to tell me that it was very good either. The Longest Yard is a departure from the style of films that Sandler normally does. I am not sure what I thought of the movie. Overall I liked it. I think that it had decent character development and was decently entertaining. As many movies today do it portrays the inmates of a West Texas prison as being the good guys and the prison guards and warden as being the bad guys. It goes pretty over the top in this regard, I think. Having never been in prison I don’t really know and I am sure that they vary significantly from prison to prison. And I am painfully aware that the US has abandoned its policy of jury trials, no one being held without trial and innocent until proven guilty and now, with the patriot act, many people are instantly under gag order if a federal overstepping is in progress – many people are denied the option of lawyers under the Patriot Act barring them from even having council to tell them what they can and cannot do. But in general I think that this movie takes it a bit far and really makes you hate the prison system a bit more than was necessary. But that isn’t to say that it was a bad movie. I really am proud of what they did with the ending. I think that a lot of people will be expecting something quite different from what they end of getting. But that isn’t bad. Hollywood is far too formula these days and it is nice to have even a little variation from a full budget American film.

It was 2:00 by the time we were done watching the movies. There is always so much to do around the house and we never end up being tired when it is finally time for bed so I came up to the office and got to work on the updates for SGL and Min started doing more laundry and dishes. Oreo, of course, was determined to get to bed so he layed down by the desk in my office and relaxed in protest. Min has a long day tomorrow so she really does need to get to sleep. She has her class in Canandaigua in the morning (although it is her last class for a week since we will be in Florida all next week) and then she has to work from 3:00 until 11:00 tomorrow night. I also have to do some hamster care before heading off to bed. That hamster manages to make such an unbelievable mess around and within his cage every few days. I can’t believe that so much mess can come from such a small rodent. I swear that he has gotten drastically worse in his old age. Old meaning that he is older than they thought hamster could live just ten years ago. Today he is a middle ages hamster moving into the Autumn of his life. He sleeps more, plays less and makes bigger messes for me to clean up more often. Dad is going to have fun watching over him next week. He will probably end up having to clean the cage at least twice before the end of the week. Fun, fun, fun.

I almost forgot, on October 12 Niagara Telecom, Inc. officially became the Niagara Technology Group, Inc. So if anybody wonders who it is that I work for, now you know officially. It took almost the entire year to get the name change to go through just from the standpoint of the official channels. We started the process internally of trying to change the name a full year ago. It has been a long wait and a stressful one for us as many things have had to be put on hold during that time. So it is a huge relief to have this weight lifted off of all of us and nice to really know what the company is going to be known as. I even got a chance to send out a general email announcement about the change this evening. That felt really nice.

I am planning on being in the office all day tomorrow. I might have to run Oreo over to the vet tomorrow because he needs some shots and we are going to be away next week so that pretty much only leaves tomorrow to squeeze him into the vet or maybe Friday if we have to. Eric is planning on coming over and working out of the office here tomorrow but we will see if that really happens or not. He says that he is going to do that everyday and I am lucky if I see him once a week. Dad and I have a dinner meeting tomorrow evening. I am not sure what time that will be but as you can imagine we will be going over to the Omega. Friday I am at home most of the day but will be mentoring in the evening for several hours. Saturday Min and I will be using as our one chance to prepare for the trip to Disney. We will have to be all packed and ready to go before we go to bed on Saturday or there just won’t be any other chance. Sunday is our usual schedule. Andy is planning on coming down on Sunday afternoon so that we can work. This will actually be the first time that I have seen him for more than five minutes, literally, since he moved out almost two months ago! Boy that has been weird.

Dominica and I got the opportunity to completely pay off one of her long standing college loans today. Boy did that feel good. We are still a long ways from being debt free but that was one big chunk that it was nice to see go bye-bye. One less payment that we have to make month after month. What a relief that was.

For those of you who tried reading Its Me Or Is It and gave up because Jeremy vanished forever, he appears to be blogging again. So I guess it might be safe to go back in the water. Or, just add his feed to your feed reader and see how often he really manages to blog. The Urinal Cakes show is still missing in action, however.

I got a chance to work on episode ten of the SGL Podcast this evening. I am very excited as this is the very first time that we have had an audio comment to add to the show and I think that that is just so cool. The show tonight is the longest one yet going almost a full fifty minutes. I hope that it isn’t too long for everyone. I kind of got carried away. There is some really good stuff in there including the post from Bob but also some more poetry and news and what not. So be sure to log on and check out the show. I am really exited to have a tenth episode done and posted. It is a lot of work and time to keep a podcast up to date. It is tough but I really enjoy it. I am hoping to get one final show done and posted prior to Monday. Then it is the Disney week show.

It is 4:00 in the morning and I really need to get to bed so that I am able to function tomorrow. Doing the podcast always keeps me up super late. Unfortunately after spending over and hour and a half preparing the new podcast the hosting service, podOmatic, was down and not functioning in any way so I was not able to post. I am hopeful that nothing bad has happened and that they are simply offline for a little while. It is the middle of the night and they might be doing maintenance. They have been down for about an hour, though, that I am aware of and could have been down much longer. So I will try to post again first thing in the morning. If they are not up by then then I will have to start looking for a new hosting provider for the podcast. I am just having too much fun making the show to not keep doing it. Good night everyone.

Five days and counting to Disney World!

I tried to sleep in a little this morning but I was awoken to the sound of Dominica screaming as Oreo went darting off of the back porch in an attempt to chase some deer. I twisted my head and made it just in time to see Oreo’s blurry form (not from his speed but from my lack of glasses) go shooting off into the trees. What a way to start the day. I jumped out of bed and dressed myself as quickly as I could so that I could go running after him. Luckily the cold rain and fast deer were a bit much for our little dog and he quickly gave up the pursuit. Min had gone chasing him and after a few minutes was able to find him and bring him back to the house. He was awfully cold by the time that he got backed and soaked through.

So that little incident got me up and running earlier than I had anticipated so I decided that I might as well not go back to bed since I was wide awake at this point.

Min and I had to leave to go to Canandaigua at 9:45. Class is from 11:00 to 12:45. I was the guest speaker today covering basics of operating system architecture and the history of UNIX as well as a look at UNIX systems today. I think that it went really well and that the people taking the class had a good time and got something out of it.

After class Dominica and I went to Tim Horton’s in Canandaigua and got some lunch. Then it was back home. I had a phone “meeting” with my mentor from Empire State today and she told me that the paperwork that I had submitted was close to what was needed and that I was on the right track and that things seemed to be moving forward well. I should be in good shape to wrap up quickly.

Kudos to the city of Rome for passing some much needed animal cruelty laws today. Now if we could only get more of the world up to speed.

Shame, shame on Xerox for tattling on their customers. Turns out that Xerox got caught by the Electronic Frontier Foundation putting secret tracking codes onto every piece of paper being printed on their colour laser printers. This code tells anyone who cares to look on what printer the paper was printed. Now, the theory is that this is used to track people who are producing counterfeit money. But lets be reasonable. Counterfeiters do NOT use things like laser printers to make false currency. What a ridiculous way to try to scam the system. But what really does come of this is that regular everyday people who are printing things at home are not being tracked. This is America. A country founded on “Common Sense” – the pamphlet not the real thing. What if you could no longer make political or religious statements without being tracked down? More importantly how is this going to affect people trying to start democracies or support churches in other countries where those things are illegal? Now those goverments can track down all of those unwary “revolutionaries”? Apparently Xerox doesn’t want Christian churches in Pakistan or free elections in China. They don’t want them enough to put the lives of their paying customers on the line for it. I am picking on Xerox because they were the first to get caught but there are many other printer manufacturers doing the same thing like Dell, HP, Brother, Epson, etc. I am truly offended that these companies think so little of their customers. It would be one thing if these companies were clearly making it known that they were providing this tracking information and that it was only (we think that it is only) on colour laser printers and not on black and white printers which cannot be used at all to counterfeit currency. But since there is a rumor that this technology is being used to track things like copied papers who knows what all devices are doing this now. I think that the public deserves some answers. Xerox refused to talk to the media today claiming that they could not disclose any information about what they are involved in for security reasons. Security reasons! They might be selling information about their customers to anyone and everyone and their only answer is silence! How many missionaries or governmental visionaries might die at the hands of evil governments because Xerox helped anti-democratic regimes track them down? Could America have ever been founded if our founding fathers had every note that they wrote or had printed marked so that could have been identified? Xerox has made a strong statement about how they feel about our freedoms. Individuals freedoms as well as those of society. They also are giving Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, et al a big slap in the face. Well, here is one technologist that won’t be doing business with Xerox and one Rochestarian that is embarrased that they are located here in our city.

It is another massive day of rain today. Rain all day. It has been raining for days. Still only that one glimmer of sunlight several days ago. I can’t believe how grey and wet it has been for almost a month now. I love it but it would be nice if it was just foggy and overcast and not wet. I love rain but there hasn’t been enough at any one time to be all that nice but mostly it has just kept the world very, very soggy. Oreo is freezing himself everytime he goes in or out of the house. We think that he might be catching a cold. He definitely hates going out and runs out, does his business and runs back as quickly as he can. Being from Houston this weather is all ready something that he wasn’t prepared for and by the time the snow starts to fly, which could be later this week, he will really be in for a surprise. We hope that he is ready to deal with how cold it is going to be.

This afternoon Min sat in the office and did some knitting that she wants to get done for Oreo. She is making him a sweater to wear around the house so that he stays toasty warm. Min watched more of Smallville while she did her knitting. I got a chance to listen to it while I was working at the computer. I definitely am not very interested in actually watching the show. From the sounds of it, it doesn’t sound very good.

Dominica found out today that the State University of New York has changed their general education requirements for students attempting to obtain new degrees. We were aware of the new general education requirements as I have recently had to be exempted from them. But what we weren’t prepared for was the fact that I was exempted because I had matriculated at Empire State earlier enough to have obtained the exemption that way. Dominica is looking at enrolling in the spring and there is no more grandfather clause. Not even for students like her who all ready were granted a degree from SUNY. So she is going for a second degree and is going to have to significantly more work than I had to do to get my first one! It looks like for her to get a second degree from SUNY will require her to do a minimum of forty eight credit hours and possibly a little more. A full third of that is just in the process of satisfying simple, freshman level general education requirements. That will cost a fortune and gain us nothing. It is really pathetic that the SUNY Regents think so little of their own degrees that they are not willing to even accept them as having met the general education requirements. Not much of a statement of faith from Albany. Embarrassing really. It is great that they are making all of their programs state-wide more stringent but they really need to think about what they are potentially doing to students who graduated from their schools in the last ten years who are still involved in their own educations and need to not be told suddenly that all of that work that they did just six years ago no longer counts for very much. I realize that they base the system around the idea of people only going towards graduate work and not second undergraduate degrees but lots of people need to be able to acquire additional undergraduate degrees so that they can qualify to get into graduate programs. The whole thing is very poorly thought through, IMHO.

Bob Crissman sent me the first SGL Podcast Audio Comment today. I hope to have it on today’s podcast if I managed to get one out.

Dominica wanted to watch something down in the theatre. She cut up some Cuba smoked cheddar cheese and she and I headed to the basement and watched the rest of Those Magnificent Men and the Flying Machines which we started the other day but didn’t manage to finish. It is a good film but very dry and weird. We were commenting on how much it must have cost to make this movie. There were so many people in it and so many working airplanes made for the movie that it must have cost a fortune. After finishing the movie we watched some of Keeping Up Appearances which is always good and relaxing. It didn’t take long before Min fell asleep. She had to work all last night without having gotten any sleep so she has been pretty exhausted. Oreo has been pretty tired too. He has been working hard to make up for his exhausting weekend.

For those of you (those of you twenty one and over that is) who have forgotten, remember to make plans to come to the SGL/BITS New Year’s Eve Party here in Geneseo on December 31st! This is the sixth New Year’s Eve party announced on SGL. Same bat time, same bat channel. Maybe we could even get a “live” podcast from the party and get everyone to do a quick word.

I was doing some geneological research today and discovered that my family, that is my mother’s mother’s father’s side, is originally from Oyster Bay and later from Fishkill, New York. I had no idea that we were originally in New York. So I started doing some additional research to see when the family had arrived in the area. It turns out, according to the preliminary research that I found online, that the family dates back to the New Netherlands colony that was here before New York was conquored by the British. We apparently arrived in 1625 from the Netherlands as one of the five head farming families sent from the Netherlands to help oversee the farming in the colony. We started off, apparently, in the Albany area but then moved down to the New Amsterdam area and ended up settling a 2000 acre farm on Long Island now known as Flat Bush and it became the first white homestead on Long Island. It was really cool to find some new information about the family. Apparently that portion of the family is originally from Utrecht, the Nethelands. A generally central and slightly western city that is today the home of a very large and prominent university. I was really excited to have found this new information. It was especially interesting after having just recently studied the New Netherland’s colony.

It is only 10:30 but both Dominica and I are totally exhausted and the dog isn’t exactly full of energy. So it is off to bed. Maybe I wil manage to post a new podcast in the morning.

Six days and counting to Disney World! Boy is that getting close.

I managed to get to bed at a reasonable time last night and was up at 7:15 this morning. Just enough time to get dressed and ready for dad to pick me up to go to breakfast. We met Dominica at the Omega Grill. We were back home by 9:00 and she went straight to bed.

Today’s podOmatic listing is the first day that both the SGL Podcast and The Jedi Council Speaks made the top 100 list on the same day TJCS sneaked in at #99 with SGL placing an impressive #39. SGL still isn’t on the all time popularity list but we have to be closing in. Keep up the listening everyone, we will make it yet!

I changed around the navigation bar a little today. I wanted to get a clear Podcast chicklet to make it easier for people to subscribe to the Podcast. Now you can easily go right to the Podcast XML feed or just look at the web page itself for those of you who are not using iPodder. But there is an iPodder link as well so go and download that as well. There are downloads available for Windows, Mac OS X and UNIX so no one should have any problem finding what they need.

I spent most of the day preparing for the class that I will be teaching tomorrow. I have to get a lot of example software ready and that takes a long time. I am trying to get a number of UNIX systems running on my laptop in Microsoft’s Virtual PC and it takes a while to do installs and setups. I have SUSE Linux and FreeBSD working so far and Solaris 10 seems to be coming along pretty well. I also discovered that Minix has finally gone to version 3.0 and is available for download so I acquired that today as well in the hopes of being able to use it. I have been hearing about Minix for many years and it will be nice to actually give it a try. I probably should have taken the time to look at it years ago but there is a new version now and development has been continuing so I think that Andrew Tannebaum and team have earned my interest.

I left the house around 1:30 this afternoon and met Eric up at the UofR so that we could hit Bruegger’s for some coffee. I hadn’t eaten since my early breakfast so I decided to grab a bagel. Bruegger’s is a surprisingly economical place to grab a bite. I got a toasted tuna fish melt bagel. It was yummy. We hung out until 4:00 when I had to get downtown to have coffee with Bonnie (a significant part of my day today involves coffee.)

I got up to The Spot on East Ave. a little before 4:30. Bonnie arrived just a few minutes after me. It was weird seeing her again. I am pretty sure that we haven’t seen each other since 1998 when we were at MCC together! Seven years! That is a really long time. We had a really good time and visited for about two hours. She has been reading SGL some too! (Soon you will all be assimilated! Mu ha ha) It was great to get a chance to catch up after all of these years. I am really glad that I managed to track her down.

Min sent me down to Henrietta to do some shopping for Oreo and Mr. Humphries. They are both about out of food so I had to pick up stuff for them. I also swung into CompUSA and picked up a Logitech Desktop USB Microphone for Min and I to use to do the SGL Podcast from Disney World since all I have right now is a set of headphones that I do all of the recording with.

I got home at almost 8:00 and Min had dinner ready for me. She made our Quorn Chicken Fillet’s in vegetable broth with garlic, onions and mushrooms with spaghetti squash and peppered cauliflower. It was awesome. It was nice to get to eat together sitting at the dining room table. We haven’t done that in a really long time. I can’t even remember the last time taht I saw the top of the table.

I still had a lot of work that needed to be done before tomorrow so I got into the office and got to work on that. Dominica did some knitting sitting in the office with me while she watched the first season of Smallville. She had to scoot off to work at 11:00 so I was left alone with the aminals.

You can thank Wil Wheaton for discovering this one: Google Print. You can search books in print. Very neat idea. If you do a search for “Holy Shit” you will discover that Wil’s book is ranked at number four!

I got a chance to talk to my cousin Monica on instant messenger this evening. She is the first of my cousins that I am aware of to be online on a regular basis enough to actually find that a good way to communicate with her. Which is cool because being one of my youngest and most distant cousins I get to see her the least so it is nice that I am actually able to talk to her now. And I also managed to get her to check out SGL and the SGL Podcast so maybe she will be a new regular reader and listener.

I got the ninth episode of the SGL Podcast recorded tonight. This is the longest yet. I was planning on it being only a short show and it ended up being forty minutes. I wanted to try out the new microphone to see if it would work while Dominica and I are in Florida and I think that it is going to work well. So here is a scary statistic: I produce currently close to 1 GB of new content every day. I may soon have to come up with some alternative form of storage to take care of the amount of space that the Podcasts take up in raw form on my computer. I am going to use up hard drives quickly with that kind of data creation.