Sheep Guarding Llama

There is some big technology news today. The biggest item is that OpenOffice 2.0 has been released to the mirrors and can now be downloaded. The servers are, of course, completely swamped and it is almost impossible to get but it is out there and everyone looking for the hottest office suite around should be downloading it and giving it a try. I have been using the OpenOffice suite since it was known as Star Office and was not in any way affiliated with SUN nor was it open source. I began using version 5.1, I believe, and have always been very happy with it. This new version is expected to be a major stepping stone for the project as it ads many new features including the very important new Open Document format shared with the KOffice project and incredible compatibility with Microsoft’s Office.

Also in tech news today: the Firefox, the Gecko engine based web browser that is – to some extent – the continuing legacy of projects like Netscape Navigator even if not by code base, has been downloaded 100 million times. That is incredibly encouraging. Firefox is a really great web browser and has become the default web browser of almost everyone that I know (or, at least, of everyone that I know what they are using.) If you haven’t tried it out yet you definitely should.

Sorry for all of the technical news but there is some really great stuff today. VMWare, the world leader in virtualization technologies for the Intel/AMD platform, has today released their new VMPlayer which is a really awesome piece of software that allows you to fire up previously saved virtual machines made from VMWare’s own software, Microsoft’s virtualization products or from Symantec’s LiveState software. This free player, yes that says free, does NOT allow you to create new images which is a crippling to most people who are the target audience of VMWare’s commercial products but it does allow you to use those images. I think that this is an incredible move from VMWare and that it will take a while before people really start to understand just how powerful and useful a utility like this will be. Its usefulness in the educational community alone could be unbelievable. This is going to make it possible for all of us with regular virtualization software to be able to make images available to just anyone to try out and to learn on. I am all ready excited about all of the different ways that I am going to be able to use this tool.

Don’t forget that tomorrow Dominica and I along with my dad and the Richardson clan are all driving out to Ohio and will not be returning until Sunday. Dominica does have to work on Sunday afternoon so we are expecting to be back at a reasonable time. Oreo is going to be staying with the Ralstons while we are gone. We are hoping that the experience will help him to prepare for the eight days that he will be without us in a week when Dominica and I travel to Florida to go to Disney World. He will be staying with dad while we are down there.

I was awake at 6:30 this morning but couldn’t bring myself to get out of my nice, comfy bed. So I slept in until Min got up to go to her class in Canandaigua.

Danielle came by around 10:30 to borrow our baby gate for their dog. That baby gate is getting a lot of use for dogs. It will have seen more duty before we ever have a baby than most baby gates see with actual babies.

My work for the day today is still working on my final paperwork for Empire State. I have a meeting set up with my mentor early next week to go over all of the paperwork that I have managed to complete so far. Hopefully I will find out that the stuff that I have been doing is very good and is lining up pretty well with what they have been expecting. That is decently unlikely, however, and I will probably have quite a bit of paperwork left to do. Fortunately I have been scheduling myself a bit of time to be able to work on that in the upcoming weeks so I am hopeful that I will be able to pound on it and actually get somewhere with it. At least all of this work that I am doing for my academic planning (funny that it is called planning as I am doing it an entire year after having completed my classes) will be very useful for both Eric and Dominica as they will have to do almost exactly the same work for their own programs at Empire State so this should, in theory at least, save them a lot of trouble. There is still a lot of the academic planning process that has to be personalized but with all of the paperwork that I will have done they will have a lot of the framework issues out of the way and will have a really clear picture of what constitutes an acceptable program and how to format the academic planning paperwork. The abstractness of the planning process is the part that was so hard for me to deal with. I find it extremely unclear what exactly I am supposed to be doing so it is really hard to make any real progress on it. Speaking of which, Eric still has not heard back from anyone at Empire about getting started there.

About two weeks ago I managed to track down Bonnie Smith (formally Bonnie Reigelman.) I haven’t spoken to her since we went to school together at MCC. She started school there in the fall of 1997, if I remember correctly. She dated Tanner for a while in 1998, I believe. Speaking of Tanner, I wonder what state he lives in now. Last we heard he was headed for Manhattan but we really have no idea where he ended up. After MCC she went on to Binghamton University and is now married and living back in Rochester. So we are getting together on Monday for coffee up in the city. So, Bonnie if you are reading this, HI!

I finished recording the sixth SGL Podcast today that I started last night. This latest one is almost forty minutes long so brace yourselves. Min actually telephones me while I was recording it last night and I decided to just leave the telephone ringing in and edit on the new part from today. Makes the show seem more raw. Or something like that. I am really excited because I checked the stats today and there are as many as nine people a day downloading both the SGL and SGL2 podcasts. That is amazing. I was worried that I would do all of this recording and no one would listen but it appears that that is not the case.

Eric got contacted by the college today and is filling out his paperwork to be admitted. He found out that he is getting more to go to school than he thought that he was so he is able to go to school closer to full time than he had expected to. That is really cool. If he works really hard on it he might be able to wrap up in under six years. That is pretty good for only ever going part time.

Min and I went to the Omega Grill for some lunch before she had to go to work. We waited until pretty much the last minute and got there after 2:00 when she had to be to work at 2:55. So it was a quick lunch.

After lunch I had some phone calls to make. Dominica and I were supposed to go to the teacher appreciation dinner at Castile Baptist Church tomorrow evening but we are not able to because we are going to be in Ohio.

Oreo has definitely learned that when he goes outside and comes back in we always give him a treat. We started doing this to encourage him not to run away from the house. But now he has figured out the trick and is constantly going in and out of the house. Today he moved it up to three times in rapid succession. That is about once every five minutes. And instead of at least going out and wandering around he just walked to the edge of the deck, takes in the scenery and comes right back inside. So I am having to adjust his current “get a cookie every time yuo return to the door” scenario. I am not sure exactly how we are going to work it but we have to do something because he is going outside at least twice as often as he actually wants to be outside. We have rewarded the wrong thing and now he thinks that “do you want to go outside” means “do you want a cookie?”

I am starting to really like this extra little feature of adding a picture to the dailies. It adds something to the site, I think. A little zip. A little zing. Anywho… this is a picture of some super dorky kid, okay, okay… its me. I don’t know exactly when this picture was taken but from what I can tell I must be around eight or nine years old. The house in the background was built during the winter when I was seven and I am pretty sure that the picture is a “first day of school” picture. So, if I was to guess, this is me at age eight on the first day of third grade but it could easily be a little older. That walnut tree that I am standing beside is still there and it is still taller than me. How depressing. You can see from this picture what an awful dress code we had when I was in school. I am wearing dark brown corduroys which were not in the least bit popular at the time. And my mother was convinced that boys were supposed to wear pants with the waist around the stomach instead of around the waist which made me look even dumber than I would have with just a bad outfit. And we had to wear shirts with collars but the school was always kept so warm that it was impossible to stay cool so the combination lead to wearing cheap, thin polo shirts in an attempt to be as cool as possible. Cool temperature obviously. There is nothing cool about the kid in that picture. I figured that since I had that picture of Eric yesterday that it would only be fair to have this one today.

My dad justed IM’d me: My Aunt Gayle’s dog Kristie has cancer and has to have an operation to try to save her. She is having her operation tomorrow. She is a really sweet dog. A sheltie. She is a rescue dog having been abused. She is still very shy and is not comfortable around almost any men. But she is really nice and very affectionate. She has no vocal cords: they were cut when she was young by the people that abused her.

Dad also just told me that the maple tree in his front yard, the one that is directly next to the walnut tree in the picture was severely damaged in the last wind storm that we had. About one third of the tree got torn right off. He said that the tree, which was always a very large and symmetrical maple, is really ugle now. I took a quick look through the pictures that I have here on my desktop to try to find one of that tree but I only found one that just barely had it in the corner of the picture. So I guess that we are out of luck with that one. The only pictures that I have on the computer here are ones that are in print form that I scanned in along with a few that are newer digital originals. The vast majority of pictures that I have taken over the years are in slide format. My dad has a nice slide scanner that I am going to try to use to get all of those pictures scanned in with. That will give us a ton of material to use and give me a way to enjoy all of those memories. He is busy using it right now but I will probably get to borrow it by the end of the year.

Now that a number of projects that I have been working on over the past year have been wrapping up I have been working on getting my files cleaned up as well. The computer tends to get filled up with old documents that I can neither identify nor can I figure out what use they might be to me in the future. The big things include the tons of paperwork that has been involved in the Wegmans project. I feel like I should archive everything in case anyone ever has questions but it is a lot of digital paperwork to keep laying around. And my class work from Empire. All of that stuff will fill up a computer if you don’t keep it in check. So I have been trying to identify renegade files in my “My Documents” to figure out if they are things that I really need or not. While I was going through there I came across, for the first time since I originally wrote it in 2001, my entrance essay for Empire State College. Eric and I were just talking about that today and he was asking me if I had ever done one. I thought that I had but I couldn’t remember for sure. But I actually found it today lost in a mislabeled folder.

I decided that I haven’t ordered any CDs from BMG in forever (nor from Columbia House but they are gone now) and I was looking at the info that BMG sent to me today and I have a number of free CD certificates to redeem so I decided to place an order. I wanted to get some new stuff for Christmas before the season actually got here so I thought that that would work out well. I ordered Nickelback’s Silver Side Up and Curb which rounds out my Nickelback collection. I also got The Essential Dion who did such great classics as “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue” which I love and didn’t want to be without. In the Christmas vein I ordered Lee Ann Womack’s The Season for Romance, Alabama’s Christmas Volume II (mom had volume one) and Dean Martin’s Christmas with Dino. So slowly but surely the music collection continues to grow even though, somehow, the movie collection actually outpaced it. If you would have asked me in 1994 if it would ever be possible to own more on video than I would own of audio I would never have believed it. But video is just so much cheaper to buy these days. Isn’t that weird. My CD, DVD-Audio and SACD collection has held off from reaching 1100 for several years. I topped the thousand albums mark many years ago, I believe around 1997 or so but I might be imagining that. But have never made it to 1100 unless I have just become that sloppy at keeping track of them as they come it. I know that several are not listed and I need to go through and update the lists. The DVD’s are tracked much more accurately. Right now both collections are in the 1050 range but the movies list seems to grow much more rapidly. Although recently it has slown down incredibly as well. Much of that is due to the fact that a large portion of the collection is up for sale on eBay as I unload all of the laserdiscs that I feel are not valuable to me at all. And also due to the fact that Dominica and I tend to purchase large box sets of television shows which add a lot of content while only adding a single line item to the collection list. The movie collection will definitely hit 1100 by the end of 2006. The CD collection will be unlikely to do so until closer to the end of 2007 unless there are simply massive accounting errors involved. The CDs are tracked more liberally than the DVD anyway. To compare them isn’t quite fair. The CDs are tracked by the physical number of platters involved while the DVDs are tracked by the programs. So actually the video collection is more significantly in the lead than previously thought! Weird. No one in the 1980’s or 1990’s would ever have thought that anyone would ever own more movies than albums. But I bet if a lot of you were to keep track of your collections you would notice that your movies and videos have grown at a phenominal rate in the past two or three years and that your music purchasing has dropped off. I am seeing this behaviour happening all over the place. Never before did very many people buy videos in any quantity and now, for the first time in several decades, people are not buying albums in a high quantity. Isn’t it funny how little things like that change so suddenly and yet we barely notice it happening.

At 7:20 I called over to Wegmans and ordered some pizzas for dinner. I am picking up dinner for everyone this evening and running it over to dad’s house where the family is getting together to practice singing again for the interment the day after tomorrow. Wegmans is one of the easiest places to deal with for getting any amount of food to take away and I never end up getting their pizza so often that I get sick of it so we thought that that was a good way to go. It is also pretty economical for a large number of people. Wegmans’ pizza is heavy and fills you up quickly.

At 7:35 I had to wrap up the paper that I was working on and head out for Wegmans and then up to dad’s. Oreo, of course, is coming along for the ride. He is just so happy to get the opportunity to go anywhere in the car. They mowed the grass here yesterday and he has broken out in hives. So it will be good to get him away from the air here for a little while anyway. He loves going over to dad’s house too. He always has a lot of fun over there.

It was almost exactly 10:00 when I walked back in the door to the house. I picked up the pizza, went over to dad’s and we all practiced for a little while. Then I drove back over to Geneseo and visited with Dominica for about fifteen minutes or so before coming home.

Here is a big congratulations to Bob Crissman whose The Jedi Council Speaks podcast is now listed as the 56th most popular podcast of all time on podomatic! Now, podomatic is pretty new at this point and most of the podcasts that are high on the list have only one or two episodes so I think that it will take a while before we get a good feel for which shows are going to remain popular and which are getting hit by search engines. But number fifty six is pretty amazing.

I let the hamster roam around some tonight while I was working and, as always, he decided to spend the majority of his time trying to go from the desk that he is allowed to roam around on onto the desk that he is not allowed on. Hamsters know where they aren’t allowed to be and desire to be nowhere else. Ornary things they are. So once I managed to successfully keep him from getting onto my desk with all of the wires he decided to squeeze himself between his little house and the wall and to let himself fall behind the desk and down onto the floor. What a pain having a pet rodent can be. Luckily I was sitting right here and noticed him instantly and was able to grab him before he made more than a few steps. But he was only a few feet away from Oreo and that could have ended up being very bad. Not that Oreo has even given the slightest indication that he would ever do anything to Mr. Humphries but he has also never had to deal with him being a loose rodent running across the carpetting either. Best not to find out and let that remain a mystery.

Min found out today that I am going to be teaching her very next class at FLCC. That will be on Tuesday. I am going to be teaching for an hour and fourty five minutes or thereabouts. Her class goes from 11:00 to 12:45 and I am being given the entire class time to talk to the A+ Technician students about UNIX and Linux from an historical and technical perspective. That should be a lot of fun. I enjoy lecturing and I enjoy talking about UNIX so that combination should prove to be very enjoyable.

I managed to record new podcasts for both SGL and SGL2 tonight. So be sure to check those out. Both are quite short but I wanted to squeeze some stuff in before being gone for three days. Who knows whether or not I will manage to get anything done while I am in Ohio and I didn’t want to leave everyone with nothing to read or listen to. Luckily it is the weekend when far fewer people check the site than do during the week.

Dominica got home just as I was wrapping up the SGL Podcast. That is episode seven that I just finished. There is now a link for the podcast over on the right hand side that you can use to put directly into your feed aggregator (like iPodder or iPodderX.) Or you can go to the web page version of the podcast at sheepguardingllama.podomatic.com and listen to each podcast directly from there but trust me, getting an aggregator set up and working is well worth the time. You will appreciate the convenience in no time.

Dominica was not tired when she got home so she started working on laundry and packing for the trip tomorrow. I did some stuff like getting the cell ready and getting the camera and MP3 players prepared. There is only so much to do ahead of time. Dominica takes care of all of the clothes packing since I am terrible at that. My laptop and CPAP have to be packed tomorrow at the last minute, more or less, so there is decently little for me to do tonight. I also need to take care of the hamster before we take off since no one will be here to look after him for two days. Fortunately hamsters are pretty self reliant and don’t need constant attention. They are a lot like cats in that way.

If anyone is interested in sending in audio comments to SGL Podcast (aka SGL Radio) then you can record them at home and email them in to [email protected] in MP3 format and I can put them directly into the show from there. So far I have had terrible luck getting people to email in text content for the blog portion of the site but sending in comments that way is far less interactive, I know. So I am hopeful that some of you will take the time to do a little recording and email me your voices. That would be really cool. Pretty soon I hope to also have a way for people to call in and leave audio comments by telephone directly to the SGL Podcast. Once that is up and working I will definitely let everyone know the number.

It is 11:40 and I think that there is little more that I am going to be able to do today so I am signing off and posting everything so that no one is falling behind while I am out for the weekend. TGIF. TTFN.

I can’t believe that I woke up on my own at 6:30 this morning. I am starting to adjust to this regular work schedule deal. I think that I actually get a lot more done if I get started early in the morning. I seem to be more productive.

Dad picked me up at 7:30 and it was our regular breakfast at the Omega Grill. Dominica continued to sleep in. Today is her one decent shot at catching up on some of that sleep that she has been missing for the past two weeks. After breakfast we went up to the city to do some banking and a little shopping at Office Depot and Home Depot.

I was home by 11:00 and when I got home Min and Oreo decided to get out of bed. Twelve hours should help her with her sleep deprivation. She then went grocery shopping over at Super Walmart since we were out of just about everything in the house.

Eric came over just as Min was getting back from shopping. He brought me a Stericycle cap. He has one too. Eric is still without a computer up has his office so he has to come here still to even check his email. What a pain that is. At least he found out yesterday that he is getting his college paid for now so he is able to go for free. I have always recommended getting a job that pays for college because that is so much more valuable than paying for it first and then trying to build up experience. We spent some time looking into degree options from Empire State College. He is hoping to be able to begin taking classes right away in the spring. That isn’t too far away. I even managed to get him to call the school today to get the ball rolling.

As punishment for never reading SGL I have decided to include this incredibly cool picture of Eric. Yes folks, that is correct, this is Eric J. Millen. This picture is from sometime in elementary school but I have no idea when. Probably around sixth grade. The picture was taken in my parent’s living room. That is about all that I know. Eric might possibly be able to fill in more details but, he is unlikely to ever bother to read this page to even know that the picture is posted here. He has yet to notice any of the others.

While trying to pick out movies to borrow today, Eric was looking at The Explorers and suddenly remembered the movie and remembered that it was he and I that had gone to see that movie together in the theatres when it first came out. I guess that that means that Eric and I have known each other for over twenty years now. Wow am I feeling old. Nate and I have known each other for just about twenty three years. Jonathan Stagno and I are coming up on twenty five!

Dominica is thinking about going back to college as well and getting an MIS degree. If they do it right they are likely to be able to overlap in several classes. Eric is only reimbursed for going half time but Min will probably go full time to wrap things up as quickly as possible since she probably only needs to take eight classes in order to graduate. At least that is what we are hoping. Since she already has a BS degree from SUNY we are hoping that she is in really good shape for getting a second one.

After working on some college stuff for a while we went down to the theatre and played some Dreamcast. Working from home can be tough.

I went down to Richardson’s at 7:00 so that Jeremy and I could practice the song that we are going to sing at the interment on Saturday. It took us a while to settle on a song. We finally decided to go with the classic “Abide with Me” just like Garrison Keeler would use. We went over to grandma’s empty apartment with my Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo and we practiced the song. Sharon and Leo sang along to help us learn the song since neither of us really knew the tune very well and then we decided that we should do the song as a family. So my cousin Sara is going to join in as well. We are going to get together tomorrow night to practice again.

Jeremy and I ran down to Cook’s in Greigsville to cut some subs for dinner. We ate down there and then I took him home and came back up to Geneseo where I had to get some dishes and other household chores done before Min came home from work so that she would think that I was being productive.

Min called while I was working on the SGL podcast and had me run over to Tim Horton’s to meet her for coffee so that we could discuss some work that she was doing for her A+ class. I did have time to clean the stinky hamster’s cage before leaving. I can’t believe how quickly he manages to make a mess of that cage these days.

I got my wake up call from Dominica at 6:45 this morning. That is one of the benefits of having a wife that works at a hotel doing wake up calls. I just call her there and have her wake me up. Actually this morning I was all ready awake when she called. Eric will be impressed. He doesn’t think that I am ever up before 10:00.

I went back and added some photos to the 16th’s daily so if you have all ready read that you should go back and check the pics from Letchworth.

Dad picked me up at 7:15 and we met Min over at the Omega for some breakfast. I think that I like this four hours of sleep deal. I tend to get up earlier and get more done and I don’t end up feeling tired until the end of the day so it works out pretty well. It has been a long time since I have been able to get my sleep down to such a low amount but I have a feeling that now that I am able to have a more or less regular sleep schedule that I might be able to do it again. Especially now that I have the CPAP. In theory the CPAP was going to drop my total sleep time quite a bit but instead it seemed to just make me able to sleep all through the night. I think that the secret might be to force myself to get up at a regular time all of the time and I might start to only sleep four hours or so on my own. That would be awfully nice. When I was in high school I only ever slept four hours a night and I felt great. As much as I enjoy sleeping I hate wasting so much of my life doing it.

Before heading off to class Min went down to the theatre and watched the final two episodes of Roswell. She has been waiting to see the whole third season since she was in college and the show was moved to UPN which even now doesn’t have a local station here in Geneseo. Not that it would matter now as we don’t have a television. But if we did we still couldn’t watch it.

Once Min got off to school I was back to work on my paperwork for Empire State. As I said yesterday – that is my one big project this week. Anything that I can do to get caught up with that is a top priority. I would be so ecstatic if I could just get that taken care of. Heaven only knows how much productivity I have lost over the last year because I have had this hanging over my head. I tend to get buried under the load and then I panic and don’t manage to get anything done. But now I am feeling the burdens lifting and I am able to move forward on this and soon, I hope, it will be out of the way altogether.

Today’s picture is one of Oreo that I took late this summer out in the back yard here in Geneseo. The sun was bright and Oreo was having a grand time laying out in the grass and so I went out and laid out in the lawn with him and took a bunch of pictures. He is such a handsome dog. Being black and white he is very difficult to photograph. He doesn’t like to look at cameras either which makes it even harder since he is almost always facing away.

PodOMatic now has statistics on their podcasts which is really cool for us podcasters so that we can get a feel for how many people are actually listening to our shows. I was surprised to find that there are a number of people listening to the SGL Podcast that I just got set up on podOmatic. Even with there being only a single new episode hosted there there have been a number of people listening to the show. That is awesome. Now I will have to start making the show a little bit more regularly and a lot more interesting! But thanks everyone who has been listening. That is AWESOME!

Min got home just before 2:00. Her professor has asked me to go in to their class sometime soon and be a guest speaker to talk to them about UNIX and Linux.

Here is a great quote: In response to a question on the role of open source software in Africa, Gerald Ilukwe, the general manager of Microsoft Nigeria, said that cost is not important, even though he admitted that the average annual salary in the West African country is only US$160.

Dominica was so tired when she got home that she fell asleep on my office floor instead of making it to bed. Oreo thought that that was great and took a nap on his pillow basking in the afternoon sunlight sitting between Min and I.

I managed to get tons of work done on my school stuff today. I am really happy with how much I accomplished. I even got a chance to talk to my mentor at college and she is on track with me now and I think we have a pretty good idea of what we are doing.

By 6:30 I was pretty burnt out. I don’t know why but I felt exhausted. Not exhausted like I wanted to go to bed, though, but like I had just had enough for the day.

Dominica woke up around 8:30 and wanted to watch a movie so we watched The Transporter which we got recently on Art’s recomendation. It was pretty good. We really enjoyed it. Then we decided to watch Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines which is very long and we decided we couldn’t handle finishing tonight so we only watched half of it and then turned in for the night very early around 11:00. We never go to bed this early but we were both really exhausted.

Hurricane Wilma in the Gulf tonight went to 882mb making it the most powerful hurricane in recorded history and bumping Katrina down to number four. It has sustained winds of 175mph and is expected to slam into Miami on Sunday.

Min got home from work around 7:30 this morning and got Oreo out of bed to hang out with her in the office until I got up at 9:30. I got dressed and ready to go and we went out to leave to go to the Covington Presbyterian Church where the funeral service is going to be at. We got into my car and I noticed that my driver’s door was ajar and that my seat had been completely moved since the last time that I was in the car. We searched the car but couldn’t find any signs of attempted hot-wiring nor was anything visibly missing from the car or from the garage. So we were at a total loss as to what might have happened. I started driving down the driveway and the brakes started making some noise so I decided that we should take Min’s car and so we went back to the house and switched cars.

The funeral service was at 11:00 and after all of the issues with the car we only just made it in time. It was a really beautiful service. Dominica and I both noticed that the chapel at Covington Presbyterian is just like the church in Dibley from The Vicar of Dibley. But it made sense once I thought about it because growing up in Peoria is a lot like growing up in Dibley, I imagine.

There was a memorial lunch down at Brian’s USA Diner in Leicester after the funeral. There were a of people there. We weren’t able to stay really long because Dominica hadn’t had a chance to get to bed yet and she was so tired that she was barely able to talk to anyone. She was falling asleep at the table. So we headed for home as soon as we could so that she could get to bed.

I decided that I needed to post a picture of my grandmother today. This picture is of her and her sister Elizabeth who died several years ago. My grandmother, Euphemia Miller, was the eldest of all of her siblings and had two full siblings – her sister Elizabeth and brother Bill. My great Uncle Bill is the last of the three left alive and he is fading fast in a nursing home in Canton, Ohio. We are hoping to be able to all see him this weekend when we are in Ohio. Dominica and I had gone out to Ohio and had hoped to have seen him last winter but no one felt that he was probably up to it. Grandma’s mother, my great grandmother, died in the Great 1918 Influenza Pandemic. Grandma was born October 31, 1915. She was only three years old when great grandma died. Elizabeth and Bill were twins. Great grandpa remarried and there were a number of siblings that were half-siblings to my grandmother. Of them, only my great Aunt Ruth is still alive, I believe.

The sun actually came out today. I think that today is the first direct sunlight that I have seen in at least two weeks. Oreo was ecstatic. He immediately laid down in the sunlight in the office to sleep.

I am extremely excited that the Anonymous Game Developers have released a new journal update today stating that their remake of Sierra’s classic “Quest for Glory II” is still underway. There has been no updates to the developer’s journal since July and a lot of us were getting nervous. I am quite looking forward to seeing their rendition of the game. Their versions of the classic “King’s Quest I” and “King’s Quest II” were amazing and significantly better than the originals. Which isn’t quite fair because the technology now is significantly better as well but still the games are really amazing.

It just occurred to me this afternoon how much the Lord has been watching over us that grandma’s death didn’t come until my Wegman’s project was completed. I would have been in a very difficult position trying to deal with everything while having to be out of town three nights a week. Had the Wegmans project gone just one week longer I would not have been around for the couple of days just before she had died. That would have been awful.

Since Min has been too busy to be able to keep up with things I took care of submitting her to jobs today. She hates job hunting so took over job hunting duties. It is really helpful that I know just about everyone that she needs to talk to about positions already.

I watched some movies while working. I watched The Rugrats Go Wild which I didn’t even know that we had. That wasn’t very good but Tim Curry does one of the voices and it is almost worth watching anything if it has Tim Curry doing a voice. Almost worth watching. Not really worth watching but you could see where it started to come close because of Curry. After that I watched A Cinderella Story. That was cute. Very entertaining. Not what I would call serious cinema but it was enjoyable.

I wrapped up job hunting a little after 7:00 and got to work on my paperwork for Empire State. That is my one and only major priority right now.

Dominica woke up around 8:30 pm and decided that there wasn’t enough time between then and when she had to go to work to bother going back to sleep so she got up and got mostly ready to go to work and started making dinner while I watched the one episode of Roswell that she had all ready seen and that I hadn’t and then she came down to the theatre and we watched an episode together. We managed to get in one whole episode together while we ate dinner and then she got to stay for about fifteen minutes of the next episode before she had to leave for work. We were down to the final disc of the final season so I decided that I was going to wrap up the show and see how it all ended. It was just after midnight when I finished watching the last episode. It was sad seeing the series end. When you watch long series of shows that have a good emotional storyline you tend to get into the show quite a bit and it can be really sad when the show comes to an end. Roswell was definitely a very involved, emotional show and it was sad to see it go. It is extra sad because it is years later now and we know that the show was not continued or resurrected in any way.

Dominica called from work because she was doing some research on the Disney Food and Wine Festival that is going to be going on while we are in Disney World. This is a major draw for us to go to the park when we are going because we think that this event is going to be a lot of fun. Disney has this event every year and a whole bunch of countries that don’t normally have a presence in the World Showcase come and set up small displays and offer a small selection of traditional local dishes that you can get inexpensively and try. We are really looking forward to doing that. She found a website that is listing all of the 2005 Walt Disney World Food and Wine Festival Menus so that we can get ourselves all super hungry way ahead of time. There are a lot of vegetarian, vegan and vegaquarian meny options which is very exciting. We are going to have an amazing time eating in the park. We are planning on probably coming back to Epcot’s World Showcase almost every evening which is totally what Eric, Mark and I did when we were there last.

Eric, Mark and I totally figured out the formula for getting the most out of Disney World on our last trip. We had such a good time and on a decent budget too. We were in Florida for ten days. We stayed just barely off property but closer enough that we could walk into the park. That was one of the best decisions ever. If it is your first time at Disney World I suggest saving up and taking advantage of one of the midline or better Disney resorts. They are some of the best hotels in the world and by staying on property you get a level of immersion that you just don’t get when you are off property at all. I wouldn’t even suggest staying in one of the nice “semi on property” hotels in the hotel area. Best to be in an all Disney resort. When I first went there with my parents we stayed at the Contemporary Resort and that was an excellent choice. You never, ever had to leave the park. You really felt like you were in the “Magic” at every moment. It was really a completely different experience than being somewhere else at night and returning to the park in the morning. Then when my family went back when I was a little older we stayed at the then new Carribbean Beach Resort which was also very nice but not nearly as cool. But if you are three bachelours on a serious budget you might need to be off property. But I digress.

We managed to stay inexpensively for $45 per night or less for the hotel. We would skip breakfast and go straight to the park in the morning and go to whatever park we wanted to do first thing in the morning. We would normally do that all day until that park closed and then we would work our way over to Epcot late in the evening and get dinner very late in the World Showcase. One of the great things about the World Showcase is that a lot of kids don’t tend to find it very interesting so it is mostly adults and it is a lot more mature and much less crowded than other areas of the park even though it is such a great place to go.

Often, after the World Showcase would close, we would then find our way to The Boardwalk or Disney Downtown to get the maximum bang for our bucks. We never went to Pleasure Island. None of us found the club scene to be our thing and paying to go there didn’t make much sense. We had a much better time hanging out in the tamer but more “Disney” areas.

It is 1:30 in the morning and Dad is going to be here in a but under six hours to pick me up so that we can meet Min for breakfast at the Omega Grill. So I am going to get off to bed so that I can get at least a little sleep before he gets here. I only got about three hours of sleep last night. But I shouldn’t complain because I am still way ahead of Dominica. She has been having a terrible time trying to get caught up on her sleep at all and she has to go from work in the morning to breakfast with dad and I and then she has to drive out to Canandaigua for class and she won’t get a chance to go to sleep until at least 2:00 in the afternoon!