Sheep Guarding Llama

It is another grey, overcast, drizzly day – I love it! We haven’t had direct sunlight here in a week and it is great. I feel so much better when the humidity is up, the temperature is down and the sun is so obscurred that you can’t tell the time of day at all.

Dominica got me up a little before 8:00. I didn’t want to get out of bed but Oreo came and stood by the side of the bed waiting for me because he had been laying in the office for a while waiting for me to join him.

Eric arrived around 8:30 and brought some Tim Horton’s donuts for breakfast. We wanted some coffee so we played around with the coffee maker (yes, the one that Min and I have had for two years and I have never made coffee with) and managed to make ourselves a pot of coffee. Eventually Min came upstairs (she has been downstairs watching Roswell since she got home) and told us that we had used caffeine free beans, ARGH! What fools we are.

I decided to give Empire Earth II another try this morning. Last night I played some AoE3 and finally decided that the game was crap and that it wasn’t even competeting with other modern RTS games. So I have scratched it from the list of games to be considered for the Friday Night Game. Art has watched it for a bit and was totally unimpressed. Eric watched it a little last night and didn’t think much of it either. No one has seen it and liked it at all. I am severely disappointed in it. I don’t even plan on buying a copy for myself. EE2 is far better. Whether or not we will switch to it for the FNG is unknown. But so far, it is the only game that has any chance at all of competeting with our original AoE2. Only time will tell.

I have been learning to use a Content Management System called Plone. It is pretty popular and a pretty flexible tool. I am thinking about using it down at the Castile Christian Academy. I downloaded and installed it last night and got it up and running and played with it some this morning. It is looking like it will be neat.

My main project for the day is web site development. There is plenty to be done this week. It is going to keep me pretty busy.

The Road Runner guy showed up around 11:00 and took about half of an hour to get the cable Internet working. We had a bad cable modem (it is actually an ethernet bridge but no one ever calls it that) and it just needed to be swapped out for a new one.

After our Road Runner was up and running Eric and I went over to the Omega Grill to get some lunch. We ate and had some coffee and came back to the office. Eric wrapped up what he needed to get done over here and then we went down to the theatre to play some Dreamcast. Eric hasn’t seen the DC yet so he wanted to check it out on the big screen. We played Le Mans 24 Hour for about half an hour before the power went out. It was only out for a few seconds but that was enough for us to worry so we shut down everything in the theatre and Eric left to drive up to the city to get a fax. Yes, he actually has to drive all of the way to Rochester just so that he can get a fax because he is doing business with some company that isn’t able to just scan something and send it in an email or, better yet, just send the digital original instead of converting to analogue (actually, starting with Word, for example and converting to paper, then to fax, back to paper is a digital to analogue to digital to analogue conversion!!) since no one wants to work with paper anyway. I can’t believe that anyone is willing to do business with a company that has to work with paper these days.

For those of you who care about the latest SUSE Linux offerings, SUSE 10 has finally made it out to the mirrors today and you can now download a copy for yourself from an American mirror. I am excited and can’t wait to try it out myself. I talked to the school today and they are getting close to being ready for us to get in there and to get them set up for this semester.

Boy is it nice having both our Business DSL line and the Road Runner line for the house. 5Mb/384Kb on one line with 1Mb/512Kb on the other is pretty screaming. And one of the best things is that I no longer have to worry about anything that I am doing on my desktop affecting any of the stuff from work. When that line gets busy it gets BUSY! Plus, to make things even faster yet, I have added a web proxy to the Road Runner line so occassionally I will be able to leverage the speed off of that and get even better performance.

I managed to get a hold of my old friend and cube-mate from my IBM days, Mike Hritcko, today. I was talking with someone at work about him the other day and figured that I should drop him a line. Luckily his email still goes through so I was able to get a hold of him. He is a web software developer that used to share a cubicle thing (it was a converted but very dinky conference room) with me and an intern named Sarah back at IBM Endicott. Back WHEN there was an IBM Endicott.

I talked to Andy today and found out that he picked up a new InFocus 4805 home theatre projector.

Mary called at 4:00 to see if Min wanted to take over her shift this evening. Min had previously asked to switch with Mary but no one had passed this onto Mary so she hadn’t known about it or she would have worked this out ahead of time. So I woke up Min and she decided that she would like to go into work today so that we don’t have to rush back from Turning Stone Casino quite as early on Sunday. For those who don’t know – we are staying at Turning Stone on Saturday night after Min’s cousin Sam’s wedding which is there on Saturday. We are not gambling just crashing on the casino resort. Normally we wouldn’t stay there because it is so expensive but we wanted to have a room nearby so that we could change and stuff easily and it was the best place because anything else would have meant additional travel time. So we are staying in the tower.

So Min went to work around 5:00. I had to head out to Perry to pick up her dress for the wedding that she was having altered. She was going to pick it up this afternoon but since she had to run into work, I went and got it for her. Oreo went along with me. He just loves riding in the car.

On the way back from Perry I went through Leicester and took the opportunity to swing by and visit with my grandmother. Grandma is very sick. They were really surprised that she made it through the weekend and Hospice has gotten involved now. At this point she is very weak and isn’t able to do anything. She really isn’t even able to eat anymore. She is fading quickly and we are just trying to keep her comfortable. Dad has been down there almost continuously since Sunday and my aunt hasn’t been able to go anywhere either. It seems very unlikely that she will be able to last more than a few days at best. Her 90th birthday is on the 31st, just twenty days away but she scoffed at having any chance at making it to that. All of this time we thought that she had been holding on to at least make it to 90 but now that she is in the home stretch, it isn’t much of a priority to her anymore.

I was down at grandma’s for over an hour. Then I left and Oreo and I went over to Wegmans where I got some pizza and picked up a sub to take to Min at work. I dropped off her dinner and came home.

I talked to Andy for a while this evening. He went shopping tonight and found a new stereo amplifier, a Pioneer Elite, that he is going to use for his apartment theatre system. We talked for about an hour and a half or maybe a little bit more.

After work, Dominica went over to Walmart to see if she could find a USB extension cable for me but they didn’t have any. She did some shopping while she was there and didn’t get home until almost midnight.

Dominica really wanted to watch more of the third season of Roswell so we fired up the theatre and ended up watching until 3:30. At least, at 3:30 am I decided that I wasn’t about to stay up any longer and went to bed. Or at least to the office to finish writing the SGL update for the night and then go to bed. Min was still watching the show when I turned in. We have grown very frustrated with the third season. I can’t tell whether I think that the show was so obviously not going anywhere at this point that the network cancelled it or if the crew already knew that the show was not going to be renewed for a fourth season and decided to sabotage the remaining episodes but the third season has nothing of the first two seasons in it. The story line goes right down the tubes and the show becomes absolute, total crap. You lose all connection to the characters and could care less about how the story unfolds. The first two seasons constitute, IMHO, some of the finest television ever recorded. But the third season becomes silly and pathetic and is only half way decent because of the connection to the first two seasons. I really think that anyone looking to get into the show should simply watch the first two seasons and take the last episode of the second season as the ending and not push their luck. It is really too bad that they left such a cliff hanger at the end of the second season because they almost managed to have a really halfway decent spot to wrap up the show and let the audience imagine how it went from there. But they just couldn’t let it go there. Maybe the first two seasons were planned from the beginning and were thought through ahead of time. The third seasons seems like a tacked on afterthought. It is really depressing because we had such high hopes. The first two seasons managed to be quite possibly my favourite American television ever. But the third season, while watchable, isn’t engaging enough for me to choose to watch it over writing the SGL dailies and calling it a day. Sad, very sad.

Speaking of television, while Min was as Walmart tonight she picked up the first season of Smallville which they have very inexpensively. Normally that isn’t the type of show that I would like but I have heard a lot of people say a lot of really good things about it so I decided that for the low price that it was that I would be willing to at least give it a shot. Min says that Walmart has the second season very inexpensively as well so if we like the first few that we watch then we will probably pick that up as well. It isn’t very often that I like anything from the WB though. So we will have to keep an eye on Smallville. The fact that I like Roswell is really an anomaly. Buffy is some of the worst, most unbearable stuff that I have ever seen. The best stuff, other than Roswell, from the WB that I have ever seen was Angel – which is a vampire themed take on Quantum Leap or Voyagers – which wasn’t a great show by any stretch but a watchable, middle-of-the-road, need-to-watch-something-before-I-fall-asleep show.

Okay, enough whining about television shows. It is time that I got off to bed and got some sleep. Eric is probably coming over in the morning and I am not going to get any more than half a night’s sleep at the rate that I am going. 3:49 am and I am checking out. Good night everyone!

Ah, Monday! My first “workday” on my own schedule after a year contracting at Wegmans. I don’t have to go out of town tonight! Whoo-hoo! What an awesome change that is. Maybe we will all get extra lucky and the SGL updates will keep coming on a regular basis as well. Of coure, Min and I do have to go out of town this coming weekend for two nights so that will disrupt things again for sure.

Dad picket me up at 7:15 and we went over to the Omega Grill taking Oreo with us so that he could hang out in the car while we had breakfast. Dominica managed to get out of work and to get to the restaurant before we did. We had a nice breakfast and then came home so that Dominica could get some sleep.

Some of you have mentioned the awesome Busted Tee Shirts that I have been mentioning so now you can check them out for yourselves. There is some funny stuff there.

Eric called this morning to say that his computer at his office completely died. He has known that it was on its way out since the middle of last week when it started to not be able to start from time to time. The machine is kind of old and definitely on its last legs. It only has 128MB of memory and attempting to run modern operating systems on so little memory just doesn’t do it. So it pooped out on him. That sucks for a guy with a desk job. Now he has no way to get any work done at all.

Nate stopped by this morning to pick up Tammy’s computer. I was able to look at it over the weekend. It would have been easy to not had enough time but it ended up working out okay. Tammy couldn’t come in because the baby was sleeping. Nate was only able to stay for about fifteen minutes.

I managed to get some cleaning done in the office today. I brought up our printer stand from the basement that is going into the upstairs office against the back wall. I think that it makes a nice addition to the room. I still need to find some serious USB extension cables or figure out how I want to get ethernet to the printer so that it can be accessed. The printer stand is a little far from my desk to make it practical, unfortunately.

I called Time Warner Road Runner about my bad Internet connection finally today. I have had that connection for two weeks and it has never worked for more than a minute but I haven’t managed to get a single chance to call them to get the line fixed except for one day that they had so many people without service that they weren’t even taking calls. I was on hold for a while but the people that I got to deal with were very nice and took care of their end of the problem very quickly and easily. A tech is going to be coming out in the morning tomorrow to deal with the issue.

I forgot to mention that yesterday morning on our drive east from Jamestown Dominica and I pulled off in Cuba, New York (for those who thought that we were driving through the Carribbean) and visited the Cuba Cheese Shop. We had a good time looking at their very wide cheese selection. We picked up four or five New York cheeses (four cheddars and an Amish goat) and a box of assorted Pepperidge Farm Entertaining Crackers and had some cheese and crackers in the car on the way home. They have some really good cheeses there.

Eric came over this afternoon to use my computers since he has no access to a computer at work anymore. He came over just before 3:00 and stayed until almost 6:00. We were going to do dinner with the Millens but Min has to work tonight and we didn’t want to do anything too involved because she gets so little time at home. At least she doesn’t have any class tomorrow.

Dominica and I relaxed tonight and watched several episodes of the third and final season of Roswell. Boy that is a great show. We were both surprised to find one or two episodes that we had both seen before. That was really weird. The only thing that we could guess was that at some point when season three was still fairly new that we had watched a disconnected episode together at her parents’ house. But we couldn’t figure out when or how that could have happened.

Min is working the over night audit tonight. She will be home to wake me up a little before 7:30 in the morning and Eric is due over to the house around 8:00 to use the computers and the network. Road Runner is scheduled at the same time so it all works out decently well timing wise. It is 12:12 pm and Oreo and I are headed off to bed to get a little sleep.

Dominica and I woke up in the Comfort Inn in Jamestown this morning. The hotel was nice and we enjoyed our stay. We managed to get packed and out by 11:00.

It was a pleasent drive through the Southern Tier with the leaves changing. We went straight back through Hornell and on up to Geneseo. It only takes about two hours to go from Genese to Jamestown.

We got home around 1:00. We hadn’t been able to get a hold of dad on the way back so I had developed a bad feeling. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But grandma was really sick last night and was lucky to have made it through the night. Dad had left Oreo at the house and had gone down to grandma’s to help out. She managed to get to sleep and was breathing okay when I finally managed to get a hold of someone down there.

Min went to work to work her double at 3:00 as usual on Sunday. I did a little work on Tammy Parker’s laptop which has been having problems. I got started on it but had to head out to Walmart to do some shopping for Michael’s birthday and I had to run over to the hotel to drop off some stuff for Min that she had forgotten when she left for work. While I was there she creatively “wrapped” the birthday presents for Michael.

I left the hotel and headed over to the Ralston’s pretty close to 4:30. We hung out for two hours, probably. Michael opened his presents and seem to be pretty happy with them. I talked to Art to get ideas.

On the way home I stopped by Cooks and ordered some subs for Min and I to have for dinner. That took quite a while. Then I delivered Min’s food over to the hotel. Oreo was really looking forward to getting back to the house. We got back and I went to the office and worked on catching up on the SGL updates which have been a little bit behind the last half of this week. Oreo needed some stable sitting in the office time. He relaxes when I work at the computer. So I stayed there most of the evening.

While I was working I watched Josie and the Pussycats which I have never seen. It is a silly and cheesy movie but it wasn’t all that bad. After that I decided to watch Tin Cup which I haven’t seen since Nate and I watched it together back in ’96 or so at his parent’s house in Perry.

After the movies, it was time for bed. I need to get some sleep because dad is coming by at 7:10 am to pick me up so that we can go over to the Omega and meet Dominica for some breakfast and get back to a normal routine. I have to get myself back into the groove of working from home five days a week. I am very excited to not be travelling anywhere for a while. It is going to be quite a change for me. A really nice change.