October 12, 2005: My Paternal Grandmother Passed Away

Euphemia Miller (Allan) Passed Away Today.   My paternal grandfather, her husband, died on November 27, 1971: Mahlon J Miller.

I got up first thing this morning and wrote a bit of updates but I decided to uninstall Window Blinds because it was bogging down my computer too much and the crappy software immediately closed all of my applications without warning and didn’t save anything so I lost all of the work that I had done. What a pain.

I was up by 8:00 this morning. I had hoped to sleep in until about noon. But that didn’t happen. By 8:00, the phone was ringing constantly and there was little chance of me getting any additional sleep. So I decided that it would just be better if I sucked it up and got out of bed.

Eric found out this morning that it will be at least three weeks before he is given a new computer for work. It has all ready been one week. It is pretty tough for a guy whose entire job revolves around using a computer and who doesn’t even have an actual office to work in to be without his computer for an entire month. Heaven only knows what he is going to do at work for the next three weeks.

The good thing about being up when I did helped me get outside to deal with the trash that needed to be taken out this morning. I took the opportunity to clean out both of the cars of all of their trash. That really needed to be done. I also managed to take out a bunch of recycling that has been sitting in a bin in the garage since one of the first weeks that we were in the house. At least eighteen months ago!

I went down to the basement and did some cleaning down there and got together another trash bag full and managed to get it out just in time to actually hand it to the LT Disposal guys as they drove by. Now I know exactly when they come: 11:00.

Last night I decided that I wanted to try out a desktop focused BSD project. So I downloaded DesktopBSD. DesktopBSD was super easy to install. Very impressive. It totally beat out any Linux or Windows system that I am familiar with. And it was fast to install as well. Once it was installed I was really impressed by how fast and responsive it was. The system is still pretty sparse and needs some work to meet all of the needs of normal home desktop users but DesktopBSD definitely has an amazing jump on most desktop UNIX projects and I will most definitely be keeping a very close eye on it. I am very interested in trying out DesktopBSD on some of the equipment that we have at the Castile Christian Academy to see how it compares to SUSE Linux.

I just noticed today that Bob Crissman has a podcast out now, with only one episode so far, that you can subscribe to. So give it a listen. I haven’t heard it yet but expect to listen later today.

Min got up around 1:30. She showered and got ready for work and then she and I drove down to my grandma’s to visit for a little while. She isn’t feeling well enough to talk to us and Min was going to be late for work so we were only able to stay for about twenty minutes. But grandma couldn’t handle any more than that so it worked on well. Min got to work and I came home to get ready to go to the Livingston County Chamber of Commerce monthly After Hours event with Eric which is being held over at Leisure’s in Lakeville today.

Before I was able to leave I checked the mail and discovered a huge bill from Associated Healthcare who provides my CPAP machine. I was really surprised since I knew of nothing that they would be billing me for. I had received a bill from them last month that was the first I had ever received from them. It had two monthly rental charges that I had assumed to be for May and June and it said that that was the total that I owed. Since I knew that I owed rental charges starting from May and since in late September they had billed me for two months I assumed that the two monthly charges must have been May and June and that that was the total that I would ever owe. Oh boy was I in for a surprise. With today’s bill I found out that those were actually a “mistake” and that those bills represented an accidental double billing of August’s rental. I originally hadn’t considered the possibility that the two bills for the same date were an accidental double billing since they were expected to have been back billings and I assumed that they were able to bill correctly. Who would let two rentals go out for the same item for the same day? I guess I shouldn’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt, should I? I had even called them back in September when the bills had come to talk about them but the billing person was not in and did not return my call. I was not too concerned as I assumed that I would receive another statement in October that would show the final amount again and I could talk to them then when there was a unified statement. The bill that I received today added mysterious and unexplained and previously unbilled “back due amounts” that had not existed at the time of my last billing statement as well as three more months of rental charges from May, June and July. So now, instead of less than $400 I owe more than $1,500! All of this over some items that I could replace online, new, by buying outright for under $400! To make matters worse, I asked when my “rent to own” would be over and I would no longer have to pay 50% of the value of the CPAP every month. Turns out they had no idea. The rental was going to go on forever until someone questioned it. The whole thing is a scam. They are supposed to call me back tomorrow to see what we can do. But I feel like my only reasonable course of action is to take them to court over this. Apparently it is their practice to totally overcharge insurance companies and to keep charging them until someone audits the books and notices that they have been paying thousands of dollars for a $250 item. This is the same company that delivered a much higher end CPAP model than I should have received and set it up not as a CPAP but as a C-FLEX which is a very different device which does exactly the opposite of what a CPAP does – but to their credit is preferred by most people who get CPAPs – that seriously aggrivated my central sleep apnea causing me to not be able to sleep with the CPAP for a month or more and causing Dominica to not be able to sleep well from the sounds that it creates. So, the bottom line is that everything that has gone on with this company has been awful with the exception of the delivery service. That part was fine. But now I am caught between a rock and a hard place and have no idea what I should do. I could simply refuse to pay and then dispute the charge later if they decide to try to put it on my credit. That might be the best way to go. I could send the amount I think that the machine is worth along with a letter from my lawyer and see if they drop it at that. Or I could pay the total amount and take them to small claims court in Erie County. Either way, it isn’t good. I am losing out no matter what because it will be a huge headache. But I really can’t stand unethical companies taking advantage of me and countless other people this way. I really don’t want to let this go but I don’t know what I should do. I guess I need to pray and wait. Maybe they will give me some halfway decent news in the morning.

After dealing with that for an hour (it took extra long because to get time to collect themselves they put me on hold and then disconnected the line after five minutes) I had to run over to Lakeville to meet Eric at the After Hours event. That was supposed to start around 4:00 and we weren’t doing to badly when we got there. It was the United Way hosting tonight and there was a good amount of food. We were really impressed.

On my way home from the Chamber event I stopped at McDonald’s in Lakeville and picked up a quick dinner. I really wanted a sub but I had been out of the house too long and I didn’t want to leave Oreo there any longer than I absolutely had to.

I got home pretty close to 6:00 and Oreo was bouncing off of the walls, he was so happy to see me. I was pretty tired so I laid down on the bed and listening to “1491” for about fourty-five minutes to relax. Now that I am not travelling nearly as much I get to listen to books at home as well as when I am in the car which is nice.

By 8:15 I had actually wrapped up listening to “1491”. “1491” is a nonfiction book that takes a look at recent research and how it effects our views of what the New World was like just before Europeans arrived en masse. It was a pretty interesting book very much along the lines of what I like to listen to. I wouldn’t say that it was as good as Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” but it was quite good.

Since Bob discovered the podOmatic service I decided to give it a try. It is very easy to use. It is too bad that they only give you 250MB of storage, which is very generous, because when recording so much audio you can fill it up very quickly. The average SGL show is almost 4MB in size and so you can do the math but we will eat through the storage limits very quickly. But the site is nice and easy to use and for people who are not doing really long posts or aren’t posting very often it seems like it is a great service. So I am trying it out and I will let you know how it is. Tony should really give this service a try because it is SO easy to post podcasts. I know that all of you are just going crazy trying to figure out how you can get ever simpler access to my voice so here it is: The SGL Podcast Website and for those of you with a podcatcher here is the SGL Podcast RSS Feed. You can subscribe now using your favourtie podcast reading software and listen to all of the great SGL podcasts as a feed now.

I had to call Turning Stone tonight and cancel our reservations in the Tower for Saturday night. With grandma sick we don’t have anyone to watch Oreo because dad is with her all of the time so we need to get back home as quickly as possible. So we are now going to drive out to Clinton for the wedding rehearsal on Friday and drive home that evening. That way Oreo can go with us and we can all sleep in our own bed. Then we will get up early on Saturday morning and drive briskly out to Clinton again for the wedding. The Ralstons are able to watch Oreo on Saturday so that dad doesn’t have to, fortunately. I called Eric tonight to let him know that I wouldn’t be able to make it to the ARC JobPath breakfast thing that we were supposed to go to on Friday morning. That is actually the one positive thing to arise out of all of this because I really did not want to have to go to that. After the breakfast that we went to last week I don’t want to get stuck going to anymore of those!

I have finally managed to get SUSE Linux 10.0 downloaded today so that I can start playing with that and getting ready to install it over at the school. It is always a big deal to me to be able to get my hands on the latest and greatest technologies. I also downloaded PC-BSD today so see what that project was all about. That one I actually took the time to install while I was working tonight so that I could play with it right away. My quick take on the BSD systems is that they are very nice. Obviously *BSD running KDE on the desktop is almost indistinguishable from Linux running KDE but the BSD systems seem like they might be a little bit more responsive. DesktopBSD seemed to be a little more responsive than PC-BSD was and definitely a lot faster to install. But both were incredibly easy. PC-BSD has a new and very simple software installation mechanism that works great – at least when I tried it. The downside is that there are very few software titles prepackaged for the PC-BSD installer so it isn’t as useful as it might appear. But DesktopBSD didn’t appear to have any software packing utility and I think that both systems would be tough for novice UNIX users because of the lack of apparent means to install new software. Both systems rely totally on the core KDE packages to provide all of the core software, which is great, but making more available easily would help things a lot. It is nice to be able to get a really bare system so easily but there are certain things that almost all users need that are not included and I think that it would be handy if they were easily accessible. Things such as an Office Suite and some simple games. I love that they aren’t included in the base install. But they should be just a click away to make users really love using these systems. In SUSE or Fedora Linux getting KOffice or OpenOffice up and running would be no problem at all.

I did do a little bit of cleaning tonight. Not much but I did manage to squeeze in a little reading up and a little vacuuming. Min is always happier when I do some visible cleaning. I got the dishes taken care of as well. She hates doing dishes.

For anyone who hasn’t heard the novel “Brace for Impact” – you can check out the MP3 Promo. No really, check it out.

I did get a chance to listen to Bob’s podcast of “The Jedi Council Speaks” where he speaks in depth about, yes you guessed it, Star Wars. I am going to make an audio segment for him so you might get to hear me talking on his show as well.

I managed to squeeze in the fifth SGL Podcast tonight. It is about twenty-five minutes long so you might want to save it for your drive into work. Now that I am done with Wegmans I hope that I will be able to Podcast a bit more often. Instead of providing a direct link to the MP3 file, I am going to encourage everyone to bop on over to The SGL Podcast and download the audio from there. Or even better yet: install iPodder and get the subscription.

Min got home from work around 11:20 and ran into the shelves on the side of the garage so left the car running, half out of the garage. Since I had to go out and move the car anyway and since she really hasn’t eaten anything today we decided to run over to Tim Horton’s (Timmy Ho’s as Art would say) and get something to eat. Min has been having an even worse day than me and is really upset and doesn’t feel like going to bed so it is good that we are going out. To make matters even worse on top of her having a bad day today in conjunction with me having a bad day today but she has a test, basically her mid-term, at FLCC tomorrow morning and she really isn’t able to deal with it because she is so upset about other things tonight. So timing is bad on top of everything else.

After getting a light dinner at Tim Horton’s, we stopped by Walmart because we wanted to get some USB cables so that we can rearrange the office to get the printer off of my desk and onto the printer stand. The plan is to move Mr. Humphries into the office so that he will be able to get more attention more easily.

We got back to the house and dad was looking for me. Grandma passed away at 11:00 pm tonight. That means that she died while I was talking about her on the podcast. Dad is doing okay. It worked out well that everyone managed to go down and see her today. Min hasn’t seen her in some time and managed to go down and see her today and all of the grandkids were there (that is Sara, Jeremy and I.) We are all very glad, obviously, that we got to see her today. We must have been there for one of the final moments that she could have known that we were there. She died in her sleep and it was very peaceful. She only had to be on pain killers since yesterday evening. She was going to turn 90 in nineteen days. She was born on Halloween Day 1915.

Well we really couldn’t have asked for anything more. Grandma isn’t suffering anymore and she went in her sleep which has been her biggest fear. Ever since mom died awake and gasping for air grandma has had a terrible fear of sufficating. Everyone seems to be doing okay. Dad and Aunt Sharon are exhausted but I think that the relief is keeping the grief at bay. There has been so much to worry about recently. Its hard to believe that it is over now. I don’t think that it will hit me until tomorrow.

October 11, 2005

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!

October 10, 2005

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.