Sheep Guarding Llama

At noon tomorrow Dominica and I will be on the direct AirTran flight headed for Orlando, Florida and Walt Disney World! Dominica is starting to get pretty excited about it. The ticket confirmation that I was so upset about last night did finally arrive this morning so we are going to be able to get tickets and actually go into the park. That is a relief. If that hadn’t worked I wasn’t sure what we were going to be able to do.

The SGL Podcast continues its steady climb up the charts. We are still doing decently well on the daily chart and today climbed from #84 to #75 on the all time chart. The Jedi Council Speaks moved up again to #69 or we would have caught them. We keep closing in though. We will get there.

For those of you, and there are a lot of you – myself included, who have the need to play QuickTime movies but do not want to have to install Apple’s awful QuickTime player that hogs system resources, runs at startup and displays advertising there is an alternative that I have mentioned to many of you but have never provided a link. The best way to watch QuickTime MOVies is to download QuickTime Alternative for Windows. This is a Windows only product but it is free and does not have any of the issues that the Apple product has.

I figured out how to use my Kodak CX7530 digital camera as a video camera today. Unfortunately it takes videos in the Apple QuickTime MOV format that is a real pain to deal with. I am not happy at all about that. That makes it much harder to do any video editing. But I am on a mission now to figure out a good way to do it.

I was up and moving nice and early this morning around 7:30. Not bad for not getting up to an alarm. Of course, with the time change it is always easier to get up and moving when you gain an hour. But we did stay up late last night to take advantage of the time shift. I wish that every day could have an extra hour in it. That would rock.

Dominica and I are able to make it to church this morning but instead of going to LaGrange like usual we are going over to Perry to go to Brick Presbyterian.

We took Oreo with us to church since it was a nice day with some sunlight and since he is going to be without us for an entire week (he isn’t going to like that one bit.) He was happy to sleep in the car while we were at church. It is nice getting back to Brick from time to time because I still know so many people there. Joe was not there today, however.

After church Min and I went over to Parker’s for a light lunch with the whole family. We had a good time hanging out but didn’t get to stay for very long because Dominica has to work her regular Sunday double shift tonight. The awesome news is that this is the last double that she has to work at the hotel, ever. That is such a relief for her. These sixteen hour shifts are killers. They are better than working two separate eight hour days but they are still really tough. This new position at Fuji is actually, once Min manages to phase out the hotel, going to reduce Min’s total work load a bit because it will keep her full time, fourty hour week in four days that she is doing now but it will do it in four even ten hour days that only shift by up to one hour from day to day and not one sixteen and three eight hour shifts with a full eight hours of swing between the shifts. That alone will be a huge difference. Dominica is going to feel so much better having a regular schedule that is the same from day to day with a real weekend – even if it doesn’t fall on the actual weekend. Even with her going to school one day a week, Tuesdays, she will still have two full days off once the hotel work is done and she will have three days off once she wraps up at FLCC.

Andy was supposed to be coming over to work here in Geneseo this afternoon but he called around 3:30 and said that he was pretty sure that our phone conversations over the past few days had ended up giving him enough to work on for the week and that he wouldn’t actually need to get together today and instead could get a lot of work done if he stayed home. So I ended up having the afternoon to myself to get things done around the house. That is probably for the best since I do have a lot to do going into the week away and I would not have managed to have gotten very much done had Andy been here hanging out this afternoon. I have bills to pay, banking to do online, blogging, podcasting and vlogging to do, online accounts to set up and feeds to prepare, a camera to learn how to use, shopping to do an Wally World, a hamster cage to clean, etc., etc. And none of that even takes into account any packing or my regular work. The packing is almost all complete. Dominica did most of that yesterday and there is just a little bit that I need to do tonight and a little to do in the morning. My laptop is going to be packed up tonight so there is not going to be an update to the dailies until sometime on Tuesday once I post this update tonight. All “up to the minute” updates will be posted directly to SGL 2 starting around 1:00 in the morning on Monday. There is going to be a ton going on making this the ultimate “virtual vacation” or so we hope.

I am working with some new tools this afternoon in an attempt to get our vlogging features ready for the trip. Here is a direct link to the test video that I made to see if the upload features are working. This video requires Quicktime which you can check yesterday’s post to see where you can download a nice alternative to Apple’s product to use to view these videos.

Min needed me to bring a USB Extension cable to her at work so I grabbed the camera and drove over there and filmed a quick clip so that there would be some stuff for people to download who are testing everything early. I dropped off her cable and then went over to Walmart to do some really quick shopping. I picked up a 1GB SD card for our Kodak digital camera so that we can get a whole day’s worth of action onto a single card without having to have multiple cards or go back to the hotel or anything. I also picked up a five dollar camera bag so that we don’t have to worry about the camera getting ruined from a little rain or anything. We have been needing that for a while and have never bothered to get one. I am glad that I waited because it is pretty nice and was dirt cheap.

I came home and have been working on getting video editing software. I decided to go with the least expensive and simplest option that I could find: QuickTime Pro. It is only $30. I had just started to get to a point where I could try it out when Min called and wanted me to return to the hotel. She has developed a migraine and is getting ill. She needed me to come in and bring her some Excedrin. So I packed the pooch back up and we drove back over to the hotel. While I was there I shot a short film to kick off the Disney trip. It is cute. I wanted some material to play with with QT Pro. I hung out at the hotel for about twenty minutes or so until Min started to feel a tiny bit better. Then I went across the street to Tim Horton’s and picked up some soup for her and a few donuts. I walked over to the hotel and delivered Min’s food. She was very happy. Then it was back home. There is a lot to get done tonight. That is the problem with vacations: there is SO much that needs to be taken care of just before you leave. What a pain it all is.

Susan called tonight and we got a chance to talk for a little bit. It is tough living so far from everybody. It is so seldom that you really get a chance to talk to anyone anymore. I guess that is just something that happens when you get to be around the age that we all are.

I took an hour out of the evening to clean the hamster cage. Boy is that a major undertaking when you really clean the whole thing. Mr. Humphries has two full hamster condo units to deal with and it is a pain. I put him in his ball and take everything out to the kitchen to work on it. He wasn’t in much of a mood to be in his ball tonight so he spent most of the hour just trying to get to anything that smelled like his cage or bouncing against my foot to tell me to put him back in his cage. Oreo wasn’t too thrilled that I was working with the rodent either.

One of my tasks this evening is to charge things. We have two cell phones that need to be fully charged before we head out. We also need my iPaq to be charged and ready to go. We are taking along our walkie talkies and they need to be charged and ready as well. So I am managing all of that stuff.

I had some problems posting the video that I took when I was at the hotel with Dominica. I am not sure why it didn’t work. After a few hours I finally just posted it again and this time it worked just fine. OurMedia is only in an alpha release so there is a lot of room for error there. But when I reposted it seemed to work right away so I think that everything is okay now. So now you can go check out the SGL Goes To Disney video that I shot at the hotel. I promise that the videos will get better after this. I just really wanted to make sure that this process was going to work before we were out of town and didn’t have any way to deal with things. But it looks like as long as I have some patience then we should be pretty good working with OurMedia. It really is a wonderful service so I am really happy that it is working now.

It is getting late and I need to wrap up the SGL update so that I can sync my laptop and get it packed up and ready to go. I am hoping to get a halfway decent night’s sleep tonight so that I can really enjoy the day tomorrow. There is so much to get done. It feels overwhelming. Oreo wants to get a good night’s sleep too since it is his last chance to snuggle with me for a whole week.

Okay, first things first. Oreo seems to be feeling much, much better today. It really looks like his stomach was just very upset yesterday and he kept eating and drinking and making himself sick over and over again. He seems to be fine, more or less, now and is happy and hanging out like normal.

The SGL Podcast has finally made it onto the all time most popular list. We are currently Podcast #84 and the Jedi Council Speaks is at #74. We have not left the #50 of the day for an entire week, though, and should be climbing through the all time list at a pretty good pace now.

I woke up to the alarm this morning at 8:30 but then fell right back asleep and didn’t wake up on my own until around 9:20. Oops. I am supposed to be in Springwater in southern Livingston County at 10:00 this morning. I jumped out of bed and got ready as quickly as possible. I wasn’t doing too badly and was out of the door by around 9:40. It is a bit of a haul down to Springwater though. Maybe forty minutes. Not quite I guess. But it is a bit of a drive.

So why am I in Springwater today? I am mentoring a student in programming down there. He is a student that goes to Wayland-Cohocton school down in Steuben County. The school called the Chamber of Commerce and got ahold of me through the Business Education Alliance here in Geneseo and they called me and asked if I would be interested in working with this student. We have been talking about it for about two weeks ever since Eric and I went to Business After Hours a few weeks ago. So today was the first day that he and I worked together. I was down there from about 10:00 until almost 1:30. We got a lot done. I had a good time and I think that it was pretty successful.

I came home and picked up Min and Oreo and we over to the Omega to get some lunch. We came home and Dominica got to work packing up everything under the sun for us to take with us to Florida. Oreo went into the office and enjoyed some of the only sunshine that we have had in weeks.

We just found out that we ARE going to have high speed Internet access while we are in Florida BUT we are not going to have it all of the time. Internet access at our hotel costs $10 a day so we aren’t going to be having it available to us all of the time. We are most likely not going to have it at all on October 31st, Monday, the day that we arrive. And we will definitely not have it on November 7th which is the following Monday when we are leaving. We will most likely not have it the day before that either. That means that the SGL and SGL Podcasts will not be updated on certain days but you can be sure that we will still be working hard getting content together so that we can blast it out on the days when we do have access. We might luck out and find some way to get access everyday but it seems rather unlikely. We will do what we can though. I am trying to get as much stuff in place to make the whole interactive experience even more exciting. Since we are not going to have regular Internet access we will be doing more than expected on SGL 2 through the podcast there to keep people connected since we are able to do untitled audio posts there without having any direct connection to the Internet. The cell phone will be indispensible while we are down there. We are also taking the “new” digital camera with us so we should have lots of great images for everyone by the time that we return. The first thing that we are going to be doing to make the trip more interactive is to add an SGL Flickr Stream that people can check out. If you are using a media aggregator then just point it to the stream and you will be able to see our syndicated Flickr images coming through with RSS. There is also a new Flickr badge over on the right in the navigation menu to make it easier for everyone to get to my Flickr page. You will be able to see the latest images automatically over there but just click on the badge and it will take you to the page.

If anyone is interested in seeing what SGL was like way back when you can check it out at the Internet Archive which is an amazingly cool project attempting to catalogue all human knowledge and is doing a pretty impressive job of it.

Don’t forget that tonight is your chance to set your clocks back an hour. Min and I wanted to hang out tonight so we watched Disney’s Ice Princess. I think that it probably goes without saying that this movie stank so bad that I had to open the windows. Can anyone say “Josh cooking rotten monkfish?” If you want the whole story check the review but definitely avoid this movie. This film is totally, absolute crap and Disney should be ashamed for doing so much to mock figure skaters. This movie doesn’t do to much to encourage people to become movie script writters either. This movie smacks of having been written by a hoard of monkeys. Clearly Disney is not paying anything beyond minimum wage to their writting staff. Can anyone say interns? Dominica is definitely skating on thin eggshells as far as getting to choose movies in the future.

I am working on trying to discover how to do vlogging using the free hosting from the Internet Archive. If it ends up working then we should have some movies from WDW to show you. At least that is the theory.

Min and I needed to forget having watched that awful movie so we popped in Herbie Fully Loaded. We had all ready seen HFL at the drive in but we own all of the other Herbie movies so we couldn’t skip over this one.

I had to order our tickets for Disney World tonight. Let me tell you, the Disney web site… oh wait, they don’t have a web site, they use the crappy GO.com service. No one knows why Disney made the decision to have the smallest web presence of any company with more than twenty employees in America. So anyway, I tried to use the awful web site to order some tickets. First I went through the entire order process (which is confusing because they don’t give you the option of “ordering” tickets anywhere) and then found that the button to actually order the tickets didn’t work. So I went through the entire process again using a different web browser. This was extra annoying since the shopping cart feature on the site didn’t work. Then I discovered that there was a check box that had to be clicked but that was hidden on the page (and I mean HIDDEN so that you had to scroll to find it without anything indicating that it was there.) Once I figured out that bit of sloppy, “I didn’t pass my freshman year of web design” site design then I had to fill out all of my contact information (again… that didn’t get saved either.) Then the site would not let me continue complaining that it needed my email even though the email was clearly filled out AND my username was my email. Then it turned out that the button that I clicked to automatically fill out the shipping information didn’t do anything and they needed that to be manually filled out even though it wasn’t indicated. So I finally got to the point where I could actually purchase the tickets and then, after they took my credit card information (TWICE!) the site said that I couldn’t get a confirmation number because of a system error and that I should wait for an email to tell me the number that I need to pick up my tickets. As you can imagine: that confirmation number still hasn’t come and I am FURIOUS. If I didn’t have plane tickets all ready paid for and confirmed I would not be so sure that going to WDW was such a good idea. I can’t believe that Disney is willing to treat their customers like this. I just spent $500 (or maybe $1000, I have no idea) and they don’t even have the decency to make sure that I have a confirmation number! And I was given no way to deal with not having a number. And they assume that I will have access to my email before I get to Florida (which is only one day away!) Which I might but it really matters when they decide to send that confirmation number. We could very easily end up not getting those tickets.

Well, that is just what I needed just before going to bed. Oh brother. I am getting so sick of Disney that I really am beginning to hope that I don’t have to go back there again. It is so unfortunate because I used to love WDW so much but I find it harder and harder to really enjoy doing any kind of business with them. It makes me unhappy that I have given them my money. They don’t care about me as a customer and so I don’t care to be one.

Before I begin to record the events of the day, one quick announcement: Dominica got her first professional IT job today!! That being said… read on for details.

Min and I had to get up this morning so that she could get up to the city to an interview. This is only the second job that has been interested in her so far. It is hard for her looking for word at this stage because she doesn’t really have any experience yet so everything is based off of what she has learned in school, done in certifications or whatever. The first couple of jobs are always hard. The interview was at 10:30 this morning up on Lexington in the city. We got up there plenty early with Oreo riding along with us. He is so happy to get to go places with us and hates being left alone so even if he never gets a chance to get out of the car it is still better if he gets to go. So Oreo and I sat in the car while Dominica went into the interview. They told her that the interview would only last twenty minutes. I had some phone calls to make so that worked out all right. I got some stuff done that I needed to. I took Oreo out for a walk and still had plenty of time. Dominica ended up being in the interview for almost an hour! There was definitely a bounce in her step as she came back out. She was very happy with how the interview went and was very confident.

We went to Borders after the interview because I wanted to see what JAVA book options there were. Then we decided to go to Friendly’s to get some lunch. We called Eric and he came down and met us at Friendly’s. He just had some coffee while we ate lunch.

We arrived home around 2:00 and were hardly there at all before the recruiter called to tell Min that she had been offerred the job. Boy was Min excited. She had to go to work at 3:00. But she was able to go in and tell them that she got a new job and that she is cutting back her hours there. The hotel was looking to scale back hours anyway because they are heading into the winter season and things just aren’t busy there during the winter. So Min told them that she would work just the two audit (overnight) shifts and not the evening desk shifts starting next week. The hotel was pretty happy as that actually made a lot of things a lot easier for them. Min is scheduled to start at Fuji eSystems in Rochester on Wednesday, Novemeber Ninth. They wanted her to start earlier but we are on vacation obviously and Dominica needs an opportunity to talk to her professor out at FLCC so that they can figure out what they can do to work around her schedule.

As mentioned on the SGL Podcast, you HAVE to get out there and check out FireANT – a free video blog or vlog aggregator for Windows and MacOS X. The incredibly cool vlog RocketBOOM. If you haven’t seen Amanda at RocketBOOM yet, you are missing out on the vlogging revolution. RocketBOOM also releases all of their content under the Creative Commons license making them extra cool.

I should mention that according to Technorati this blog is the leading authority on both sheep and llamas! Now there is something we can say about ourselves.

Oreo got really sick this afternoon. Sick enough that the vet made me take him in right away so that they could get a look at him. They were pretty worried. Oreo was definitely feeling badly – I could tell from the way that he looked at me. He was scared. They gave him some medicine at the vet and made me take away Oreo’s food and water for most of the night. I stopped by Wegmans on the way back to pick up some supplies for Oreo and some dinner for myself. Then we came back home. I tried to work in the office but Oreo was so upset and needed me so often that I wasn’t able to do anything in the office. So I finally just put in a DVD in the living room and watched some BBC television while Oreo tried to snuggle with me. He really wanted to sit on my lap and be held but he couldn’t get comfortable. It was really scary with him acting strange. He couldn’t decide where he wanted to be and he kept wandering from one part of the house to another. He was so restless that it was really worrying me. I have no idea what he thinks he is doing. I am hoping that he is dazed from the medicine making him so tired and just wanting to do something and so it makes him wander around. I know that I can get tired yet restless sometimes. I hope that that is all that it is.

Nate called this evening from Perry. Apparently he is over there this evening without a lot going on so he decided that he was going to come over to hang out. That is pretty awesome since we almost never get a chance to see each other. Our schedules just don’t ever give us a chance to hook up these days. Getting old is tough.

Min came home from work and the three of us watched Napolean Dynamite down in the theatre. Nate hadn’t seen it yet if you can believe that. Of course he thought that it was hilarious. Oreo managed to sleep through the entire movie to our great relief.