Sheep Guarding Llama

Min had class today and then was off to work on the “B” shift. Thursdays are my “day off” and I took advantage of the time to get some work around the house. I got a ton of cleaning done and a lot of preparation of stuff for Danielle to sell on eBay. I am finally clearing out all of the duplicate laserdiscs. There are tons of LDs that we have already replaced with DVDs and tons more that I have finally decided to admit that I will never, ever watch again nor will I ever replace so I gathered them all up to be sold on eBay. I also gathered the duplicate DVDs which we had from when Dominica and I combined our DVDs collections. I have been working very hard at getting rid of all of the extra stuff that we have just sitting all over the house.

Before I forget, here is a list of free furniture items available to the first person who wants one or all: bedside table with three drawers, dresser, futon with a broken weld and a large standard couch.

Last night’s work went pretty smoothly and I was back at the hotel by half past midnight. While I was at work I managed to have a nice stroll around Williamsport and get a little bit of a feel for downtown. Williamsport is a very odd place. It is a tiny city located in a very remote part of the world being several hours from the nearest cities of any size which are Rochester to the north by three hours and Harrisburg to the south by a few hours. They are in a an area with some through traffic but not a lot. They are in the process of finally getting a US Interstate (the new Route 99) to run to them but it isn’t finished yet and won’t be for several years. So, because of its relative isolation, Williamsport has to be very self-sufficient. So it has a little bit of everything. Nice hotels, fine dining, dance clubs, the works. There are two small colleges there as well. I think you have to spend some time there to get any feel for the place.

I got to sleep around 2:00 and was out of the hotel at 11:00. It took just over two hours to get back to Geneseo. Williamsport is never as far away as I imagine it to be. One of these days I am going to spend a weekend there and get to know the place.

I got home and had almost an hour to spend with Dominica before she had to leave for work. She is working the “B” today and I am staying home with Oreo. It worked out really well that I was able to get home before she left so that Oreo wouldn’t have to be left alone more than necessary.

John is in town today but very busy so I am hanging loose until we are able to get together. Eric called at 3:00 and said that he was extremely bored and that I should come up to the city early. I have been wanting to stop by at Game Craze on Mt. Hope anyway so that sounded like a good idea. I left the house just after 4:00 and met Eric at Game Craze (they are the best place around for getting used games and stuff for older game consoles.) I did some looking around and got a second controller, a memory card and three games for Min on the Dreamcast. They had Bust-A-Move 4, Ecco the Dolphin and Seaman. All games that I have no interest in but she wants them and they had them and right now we have hardly anything in hand to use on the DC so I figured that I would get them for her.

John met us at The Distillery on Mt. Hope a little after 5:30. We had some drinks and hung out for a while. Today is the day that Eric finds out (and that I can finally post here even though this didn’t actually end up getting posted until a week later because it was trapped on my laptop) that the company that he is working for was bought out by a large national waste company and that he is now working for a $600 million organization.

I wasn’t able to stay out long because I had to get back to be with Oreo while Min is at work. He gets nervous being alone.

Min got home around 11:15 and we went down to the basement where I had hooked the Dreamcast into the theatre system and played a little DC. Bust-A-Move doesn’t work with the system that we have because it doesn’t support the 480p output so I am going to have to come up with some way to play that game before we can give it a try. Min tried Ecco the Dolphin and immediately agreed that the game was so incredibly awful that we should sell it on eBay immediately. Neither of us ever managed to make it past the training phase it was so unbearable.

Seaman wasn’t much better. It is a freaky game narrated by Leonard Nemoy. The game is about raising a sea creature in a tank and talking to it (yes, with a microphone.) But the game is so difficult and makes so little sense that we never got it to do anything. Whatsoever. At all. I will be surprised if we keep that one.

I arrived in State College on time last night which is amazing considering how late I left Geneseo. According to Google Maps, I was going to be at least an hour late. But I was right on time. I got into the store and discovered the guy who was supposed to have installed the server for me to work on had just arrived. Normally the server would have been installed in the morning or maybe the day before. He had had car problems on his way out from New Jersey and hadn’t been able to get there any sooner. So I had several hours to kill. So all that work to get there on time and it was all for naught anyway.

I walked over to Applebee’s which was right across the street from Wegmans and got a beer and ordered some dinner. I figured that I might as well make good use of my time since I was going to be around for a while. I got some wings for Chris since he was having a crappy day and got myself some shrimp and salmon. Once I got the food I walked back over to the office and we had dinner. Boy was that meal good. Now that I eat fish, Applebee’s has a much more appealing menu.

I still had lots of time to kill so I went through all of my mail that I had had in the car and read all of the magazines that I had brought with me. Then I went on eBay and did some shopping and then I hopped onto the MUD and played for a while. I managed to get some good deals on eBay (good is a relative term since none of this stuff was stuff that I actually needed and so, in reality, it was a total waste of money.) I got the video games Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II before leaving New York. And additionally I got Sega Ralley 2, Sega GT and Le Mans 24 Hour all for the Dreamcast. Dominica said that she liked racing games and the Dreamcast is well known for having had some really good ones so I thought that we would try them out. And besides, why own a Dreamcast if you aren’t going to get good games for it? So now we have six and I am bidding really low on one or two more that might be interesting.

I was finally able to start work around midnight (normally I have already finished by then.) And it took me until 3:00 to wrap up. So it was a very late night. I got a hotel room in Williamsport which is where I am working tomorrow night and well on the way home so I have a bit of a drive back up to there tonight.

On the ride to the hotel I finally managed to finish listening to “A Basque History of the World” that I have on MP3. The book is well written but it is, let’s say, exceedingly thorough. It is a rather long book that covers the history of the Basques, the people who live on the Atlantic coast at the point where Spain and France meet. There is a total of about 2.2 million people in this area or maybe slightly more and they speak their own language that is not related to any other language group in the world. But very little is known about their history and so the book spends a little time doing a survey of the time from the Roman occupation of the region leading up to the semi-present era and then spends forever going over every person of any significance at all in the region for the past two hundred years. It was a poor choice, I think, for a book to listen to in the car to keep me awake while I drive. What I did learn from the book is that I absolutely have no interest in ever setting foot in Spain or Basque country. I would love to be able to go to the Iberian peninsula and see all of the history and culture that have happened there but it really is a horrible, cruel, unstable area that hasn’t been able to get a grip on itself for the past two hundred years. Most importantly, it is an extremely dangerous area where there is no check on the police and they can do as they want. It is not a democracy as they have no freedom of speech. It is a crime to ever say anything negative about the government which, of course, means it can be taken as illegal just to run for office if they deem you to be someone that they don’t like. Americans are routinely stopped in the Basque region because the police think that they might be Basque. It really shows how awfully people are treated in Spain. It is a police state with no human rights. They are still a quasi-facist state still functioning like it is 1935. The Basque provinces are controlled militarily so that they cannot leave and because of their and one other non-Spanish regions forced financial contributions to the “country” Spain is able to keep its head above the third world water line. But only barely. But frankly, I have little desire to go to a country where the only thing between you and ten days of state sanctioned torture (yes, that is legal without cause – only if someone is held and/or tortured for over ten days must a charge be brought against them) is a really good relationship with your embassy and a lo-jack device in your butt. And remember, since it is illegal to speak out against the government and since the police are controlled by the government, it is therefore potentially illegal to even mention that you were “detained.” So, bottom line, I am not going there. There is so little to see in that impoverished country compared to so many nice places in the world that I think I can safely bypass it. And the author didn’t, in the end, make the Basque sound all that much better. If I want to see Iberia, I will stick with Portugal, thank you very much.

I arrived at the hotel around 4:15. I had a terrible time finding the place because of the way that the streets are numbered in this town. I actually went past the address of the hotel more than once but obviously there was only one hotel and I wasn’t able to find it because the street numbers clearly directed me elsewhere. I got checked in and into my room and was finally laying down to go to bed around 5:00 am. Boy was I tired. I have also recorded SGL Podcast: Show No. 4 for you. This is the first show that I have recorded while on the road using my laptop.

Eric woke my up this morning at 8:00 to inform me that our servers were offline. What a way to start a day. A total disaster at work and only three hours of sleep in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere. Yippee! I did what I could but was definitely unable to do anything to help the situation from here as everything was offline. I tried to call Dominica but she had just gotten in from work and was probably napping between her overnight shift and her class in Canandaigua. So I called dad and he was going to go over to the office to see what he could do. I had a little gap of time there so I laid down and took a quick power-nap for twenty or thirty minutes. That actually ended up helping quite a bit.

Dad got to the office just after 10:00 am and we quickly discovered that our CPE (CPE is customer premise equipment – the equipment owned by our Internet service provider but located at our site) was not functioning properly. Eric had said that we had had some power issues caused by the lightning storm during the night and that that might have caused problems. So dad reset the CPE and everything came right back online. None of our own equipment had had any problems at all. Which is a relief but doesn’t make it any less of a pain. The really depressing part is that if we had had the new Road Runner line installed already (instead of not going in until next week) I could have at least done all of the troubleshooting and known exactly what was wrong before dad even went over there instead of going into everything blind the way that we did. Oh well. At least it will be fixed soon enough. So by 10:30 everything was working again.

I finally got out of bed around 1:30 with a total of four hours of sleep. Ugh. That is the problem with working the overnights. Even when you have a day off and nothing going on something is bound to happen and you don’t get any chance to actually sleep enough.

I got an email from Andy this afternoon and found out that he has one or two games yet for the Dreamcast that he had forgotten to leave with us. I know that he had Crazy Taxi – which I am pretty sure that everyone who has ever had a Dreamcast has had – but I don’t know what else he might have. Min is excited that we have a collection of Dreamcast games already. It is great getting a slightly older system. It is such a tiny investment to get so much good stuff. It is tougher for people who are really into the fast, 3D action games because those games demand the latest, greatest hardware to make them really cool. But the kinds of things that I play, I am perfectly happy playing on the Playstation, if they are available for it. The reality is that the Dreamcast is decently competitive wth the PS2 though. Since the PS2 doesn’t support high definition output the Dreamcast has a big advantage right from the get go. The PS2 does have more power but not as much more as people like to think that it does. And the Dreamcast is a lot easier for developers to work on so they are more likely to get better results out of the hardware. The Sony is such a bizarre architecture that it is difficult to find programmers who can or who are willing to work on it.

I looked through the hotel’s restuarant guide and discovered an OIP just up the street. Since I have never had a bad meal from an OIP I thought that I would give them a go. Their driver doesn’t arrive until 4:00 so I have to wait for an hour before he can deliver the food but that isn’t all that bad.

Food came at 4:00 and I watched some That 70’s Show while I ate my pizza. What a great show. I played some MUD while I was in the hotel. There is a lot of time without a whole lot to do.

Hurricane Rita is up to a CAT2 and has headed into the open water of the Carribbean. They think that it is gong to hit the Texas coast at Freeport but they are already talking about evacuating the few people who are in New Orleans again.

Dad and I were planning on going out to Ohio this weekend. Min has to work and should look after the puppy so she isn’t going to go.

At 7:00 Dominica called to let me know that Francesca’s family has been ordered to evacuate. They live in League City, Texas and are right in the expected path of the storm. Francesca’s husband has to stay behind because he is on the hurricane response team. He will be stuck there as long as the hurricane level does not rise too high. If they hit Category Four, then he will be airlifted out of the area. Francesca and the girls are headed up to Fort Worth to stay with family up there until they can return.

I am working in Williamsport, Pennsylvania tonight. Handily it is just up to road from where I am staying in the hotel. I would walk there but as I drove here I noticed that the stretch between here and there is not through some of central Pennsylvania’s most respectable neighborhoods and I think that it would be best if I stayed in my car. Hopefully I will be able to get started at a reasonable hour tonight and I might be able to get back to the hotel early enough to actually get some sleep for a change. I have had another week where I just haven’t managed to get enough sleep all week and I just keep getting more and more tired as the week progresses.

Okay, I am off to work and posting early as I try to do. Have a good evening everyone.

Never a chance to sleep in. Min’s alarm went off this morning and the sun was blazing down on our heads and I couldn’t lay in bed any longer so I got up. Even though it was her alarm I was up at least half an hour befor she was if not closer to an hour. We didn’t get to bed too late last night but late enough. It sure would be nice to get a full night’s sleep one of these days.

I am working in Central Pennsylvania this week. Tonight I am in State College and tomorrow night I am in Williamsport.

This morning I have spent the entire morning on the phone with DSL.net trying to troubleshoot their line that we have in Washington. We pay for a 256K line but we actually only get about 16K which is pretty ridiculous. We have had pretty bad service from them over the years and this has been on ongoing issue that they will turn down the line and not tell us or get authorization to do so. Now the line is unusable and we are having a hard time getting them to fix anything. We are only under contract with them until January and believe me I have very little intent to resign. I have had to spend far too much time dealing with this company to make any deal on the line worth it. And the worst part is that they are completely unable to do anything without someone being there to do things for them. They really need to have solid remote access to their equipment if they are going to not allow us to manage it.

Min got back home a little after 12:30 and dad came over around 1:10 so that we could go to lunch. It was 1:30 before I was finally able to get out of the office long enough to get some food.

Dominica went back to bed as soon as we had returned from lunch. I had to shower and get ready to head out to State College. I was bidding on some items from eBay and actually won some stuff today. I won a three volume set of Edward Gibbons “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” which I have wanted for a long time. I also won “Grandia II” for the Dreamcast. Dominica will be very happy about that. She is very excited about having a mostly modern video game console again.

Eric was working up at the hospital today and was unpacking some new plastics totes (these are big 96 gallon totes that have their own six inch wheels so these are nothing small) and discovered a black widow spider living in the totes. Always a fun thing to find.
Scott and Eric Railroad in 1988

Today we have another picture from the great Scott-Eric Railroad of 1988. This is a picture from the right hand approach. The table was in an L shape with two long sides against a back wall and two long sides and the two ends exposed. It was a very convenient size for what we were doing. As you can see in this picture, we hadn’t gotten very far. There is only one piece of rolling stock even on the tracks.

I am about to leave for my trip. Short and sweet. I will be back on Wednesday. Only a two day week this week. What a relief!

I was up at 8:30 this morning and ready to leave for church before 10:00. Min didn’t get up until 10:00. She had been really exhausted between work and school and all of our other activities. She hasn’t been getting enough sleep for weeks. She is working the “B” shift this evening after church.

We almost made it to church on time today. But at least I was ready early. Art and Danielle brought Michael to church today for the first time.

After church the Ralstons, my dad and us went over to Perry to get lunch at the Silver Lake Family Restaraunt.

So I decided that it was time to post this picture on the site. This one will prove whether or not Eric reads the site on a regular basis. This picture was taken sometime around fifth grade. It was taken during the winter, in case Eric’s winter coat didn’t give that away. This is a model railroad that Eric and I were working on in the basement of my grandmother’s house when she used to live down the road from my parents up on Peoria Road in Covington. Back then she was just three houses away but more have been built since then and she now lives with my aunt and uncle in Leicester. Dad built the train tables for me down there in my aunt’s old graphic arts studio. She ran a studio out of the basement for years but had moved to Leicester at this point. Probably just about a year before this picture was taken. Then the studio was converted to be a model railroad. We never got very far into the modelling bit of things. The track was set up and working which you can kind of see in the background and there were some buildings on it. In this picture we are holding one of the train cars to commemorate the opening of our railroad. You can see some fake shrubs sitting around and some trees and a little tiny church. It was an N scale model so everything was really small. I still have the trains and all of the scenary packed away in the basement.

Holy Cow we were dorks! Oh wait… ARE dorks. Darn.

Min went to work at 3:00 as usual on Sunday. I got to spend the afternoon and evening at home with Oreo. He loves his days being lazy with his daddy. He just sits quietly beside me while I am working on the computer.

I played the MUD this afternoon. Saw a couple of different people hop on and off throughout the day. I also watched some stuff on eBay that was ending today. I had been very hopeful to get this one item but it just ended up getting to be too expensive for me. So I had to let it go. I do think that shopping on eBay is good for me because it lets me “do a lot of shopping” without buying very much and what I do end up getting tends to be at a very good price. At least I think that it does.

I got Danielle hooked on listening to podcasts tonight. She downloaded iPodder and I hooked her up with some cool podcasts and now she is excited about it.

Chicago had a train derailment today caused by an engineer driving the train at almost seven times the speed limit (69 in a 10 zone). It turns out that the engineer was new with that company but had been at CSX for years previously. I guess that explains it. CSX was the same company that had their trains going at totally ridiculous speeds in Rochester and killed an elderly couple just last year. I think someone needs to begin an investigation.

Min got home at 11:30 after stopping at Tim Hortons to get me some treats like a danish and a hot smoothie. Mmmm, butter cream. She was very impressed by all of the work that I had done around the house. It looked completely different when she got home.

She had been excited about trying out the new Sega Dreamcast now that we have one game for it. So I hooked it up in the office to my computer monitor (one of the really cool features of the Dreamcast is that it has VGA output and since we have VGA input on every device in the house that works exceptionally well.) We fired up Shenmue and gave it a try. We were instantly impressed by the amazing quality of the graphics output by the Dreamcast. It doesn’t seem like an aging system at all. The audio and video in Shenmue are amazing, for a console system, and seem to me to just about compete with any 3D games that I have seen on the current reigning systems. We do always get the impression that the Dreamcast is a lot older than it really is just because it is no longer on the market. But the reality is that it was the first member of the current console generation and even though Sega is now out of the console business it is hardly obsolete. We don’t yet have a memory card for the Dreamcast nor a good place set up to play it so Min played Shenmue for fifteen minutes or so to try it out but then we gave it up. Now that we know that everything works I am going to be working on buying some much needed parts like additional controllers, memory cards and additional games. Thanks Andy, we love the Dreamcast.

We weren’t quite ready for bed yet and Min had just cooked herself some dinner so we popped in Are You Being Served? into the Mac and watched an episode (the one where Mrs. Slocumb gets hit on the head with a golf ball) and then we went to bed.