Sheep Guarding Llama

The archives for the first quarter of 2005 come to 459KB in text! That is SO much typing that I have been doing over the last three months. I can’t believe how much that there is. Of course, I don’t actually sit around reading SGL every day either. I just write it. I leave the whole reading thing up to all of you. And thanks for that, by the way. According to the most recent count, the total size of the SGL dailies is just shy of .5 Million words in length. Yeah, and if you think that your eyes are soar from reading this, imagine how my fingers must feel. I think that I might have tendenitis or something similar to it in my right thumb that I can only imagine comes from all of this typing everyday. Someday, I think that it would be cool to produce SGL in a traditional printed format and have it bound and sitting on my bookshelves. It would already be more than a single volume, I would think. My children will probably think that this is the dumbest thing ever but my grandkids will probably find it one of the most fascinating things ever. Imagine if you had the opportunity to look back over the entire life of one of your relatives. See them through their own eyes. Watch world events unravel in their everyday lives. Some day my descendants will only know this year as one of the years of the Iraqi War. And yet it is barely in my thoughts and I hardly know that we are engaged or have been engaged there. We have been in armed conflict for close to eighty percent of my entire life and I barely even am conscious of it. And since I have been over a year without any form of television or regular radio, I am impacted by distant world events very little. I only wish that I had started blogging like this many years ago instead of waiting until I was so old because my childhood and my teenage years and those turmoil filled years of 1997-2001 have been lost. All of the really exciting “what’s going to happen” years. The college uncertainties the first professional jobs. Moving from work to career. Living in Pittsburgh, Alexandria and Annapolis. All of that, I think, would be so much more fascinating to be able to look back on. But, I am sure that there is equally interesting or, perhaps, uninteresting stuff going on now and it just doesn’t seem that way because I am here now writing this. Maybe this will end up being the really interesting time because of trying to run my business and get it really doing something. Maybe that will be the big adventure that the grandkids will want to read about. Maybe it will be me raising their parents, if I ever even get around to having kids. Maybe this document will serve, not only to shed light on the early years of the twenty first century, but also to make my grandchildren understand how much more like them I actually am instead of just being an old man trying to remember his lost youth. So, just in case this document survives, intact, through the many, many years necessary for my kids, grandkids or further decendants to be reading it, here is a big “Hello!” from 2005. I will go out on a limb and say that times are good, life is going well and things are probably not really all that different now than they are then. I don’t think that you are living on Mars or that aliens are about to make contact with the planet or that computers might actually become sentient and take over the earth. I am sure that the hindsight of these times will render our fears and assumptions to be as foolish as those held by my grandparent’s generation. I am sure that I will feel that you, you being the future generations, are lazy and liberal and taking the world to “hell in a handbasket” but the reality is you are probably much more on top of things than I was at that age. My parent’s generation (the baby boomers) felt that my generation was lazy and their parent’s generation felt the same thing about them. But the reality is that the world is becoming more conservative, less lazy, more cooperative and social. People seem to be getting nicer to each other, not meaner. Crime is going down, not up. The media might actually lose its death grip on us and a whole new world could be about to open up. Over the last one hundred years, electronic long distance communications have come into existance and are now blossoming and redefining everything. The world is already so small and accessible. I can’t even imagine how create it will be in your day. I have good expectations for you. Things won’t be perfect and you will have to deal with all sorts of new problems that we never envisioned. But you will overcome them and excel beyond our wildest dreams. I am just happy that now, at just 29 years old, I am able to have been keeping this record of my life for the past five years and hope that it will be useful to you. At least something to remember me by when I have left this place – someway to feel connected to me.

Enough being sappy for today. I don’t even have kids yet but I figure that I might as well be preparing because if you wait until you have them then there is no way to have time to do and say all of the things that I would like to do and say. So I will get as many out of the way now as I can.

This morning I had to get up super early and wake up Jeremy and get him out the door to head out to Canandaigua to take his A+ exam. He is taking it out at FLCC.

The testing environment out at FLCC is really nice. If you take a test there, call first because the information desk doesn’t know what is going on and you might have problems getting to the testing room. It is a small testing site with only two stations and they can’t do tests all day long, only at certain times. But the environment is very casual and easy going. Nice for taking stressful tests.

After the test we got lunch at Burger King in Canandaigua. That was about 9:30. The funniest thing happened while we were getting breakfast… Some little kid, maybe five years old, went into the playground area with his parents not paying very close attention to him. As he was entering the playground area, he was picking his nose. Apparently he wasn’t able to get what he was looking for up there to his satisfaction so he went up to the window that was right behind Jeremy’s head (so facing us but on the other side of the glass) and wiped his nose down the glass leaving a big streak of you know what on the glass. Eww. But, apparently, he still was happy with the results. So he tried wiping his nose first on his righ sleeve and then on his left. Still no good. Then he went for some cushioned roller thing in the playground area. He stuck his nose on it and turned it around with his hands. But that wasn’t doing the trick either. Then it was back to another window, this time without the benefit of Jeremy’s head blocking him from the sight of most of the people in the restaurant, and he tried wiping it off on the glass again. We were dying, it was so funny. Really, really gross, but funny too.

I dropped Jeremy off as I headed down to Castile to help out with Min’s classes for the afternoon. I arrived at the school at about 11:30 and was able to help out with all of the afternoon classes and managed to do some technical stuff while I was there too. We didn’t hang around late tonight. We actually managed to get out of the school by about 4:00. We had to stay a little late to do a couple of things with the computers to get them ready for next week and to discuss some details of a Web Site Design class that I am going to be teaching starting to two weeks from today.

We met dad at the Hole in the Wall in Perry around 5:00 and had the Friday fish fry. Imagine that, me getting a fish fry on a Friday. What are the chances of that?

After dinner we went over to my grandmother’s house in Leicester and visited until around 10:30. We did managed to avoid getting embroiled in a game of Skimbo. So things went well.

Its the last day of March. Time does fly. Today is my short day. I got in from working the overnight around 5:00 but I had some work that needed to be done so I had to go down to the office and work for about an hour. I was awfully tired and I really don’t remember that at all. I got to bed around 6:00. Min had gone to bed around 4:00.

I pulled myself out of bed around 11:00. About a half of a night’s sleep. Not too bad. Could be a lot worse. I didn’t feel too tired when I woke up.

Work went well last night. It was the big, high profile Pittford store so that was a little more stressful than most of them will be. But last night was also my last night not on my own. Next week I am in Perinton all by myself. Although there is an issue with working next week as I have not officially been hired yet to do the work so that is a problem. There are only three business days left, at this point, and I have not been hired to do the work. So we will see how this saga unfolds. It was my understanding that the project was done and I wasn’t going to be doing it anymore. But apparently there is a lot of confusion and miscommunications going on.

I kept working on my BrainBench assessments this afternoon. I tied for fourth in the world on the Information Technology Terminology test which is a weird exam and really only exists to be a piece of larger certifications. I also took the Network Technical Support exam and tied for third in the world. In both bases, I skimmed over the next highest person by one fifth of one percent. Both tests were refreshes so I last took them just over three years ago.

I also managed to squeeze in the Programming Concepts exam and did okay. I need that test en route to my larger Java programmer cert.

Jeremy came over this evening to work on getting ready for his A+ exam tomorrow. We are going first thing in the morning so we thought that it would be helpful if he was here already since that would save me forty minutes of driving in the morning and him almost twenty. We picked him up around 7:00 and swung my McDonald’s to get some dinner. We eat there so much that they know that I like two fish fillets, shredded lettuce, no salt on my fries and that I want chipotle bbq sauce for dipping. How is that for being a townie?

Jeremy and I did some Brainbench work this evening and he studied for his exam. It will be early in the morning so he will have no time to study then.

I took enough tests to pull of the big Brainbench Certified Java Programmer job role cert that I have been shooting for. That is pretty cool. I am excited to have gotten it. It really lends some credibility to my analysis work. Andy thinks that I should get a Java programming job just to see how I do but I don’t think that I am very comfortable doing that. I just don’t program that much.

Early to bed tonight. I have some catching up to do and my stomach hasn’t been happy with me today either. Staying up all night is not good for me anymore.

Well, I didn’t really get to sleep until 11:00 like I had wanted to. I actually only slept until 9:30. And I missed two calls during that time. Slept right through them. Never knew that the phone was ringing at all. That is pretty unusual for me. I woke up momentarily when Min got home, just enough to know that she was there and that she was going to bed. But that was it.

I got up at 9:30 and got Jeremy moving so that he could make it to his doctor’s appointment. Luckily that is right here in Geneseo so he actually got to sleep in extra, not less. Then I took out the trash (yup, that’t two weeks in a row now.) Talked to Don next door for a little bit and got ready to face the day. I decided to kill my little free time this morning taking another Brainbench exam. Once I get into the groove, I like to keep up the pressure. I took the Java 2 Non-GUI exam and passed with the same score that I got on the Java 2 exam. I guess it shows consistency, doesn’t it. That is actually a really good sign. So that is three Java certs now in two days. One would think I was a developer.

At noon I had to head over to the Omega Grill to meet with someone from an online yellow page service about placing a listing. Of course, they didn’t bother to show up. Which made me happy because I think that the whole thing was a waste of time. But it is annoying to have to get dressed up, head over to the grill and sit there for half an hour reading a book all alone during a busy lunch time and not have the guy bother to show up. I am glad that I didn’t have to turn him down and can now just say that we don’t want to do business with them because they were wasting out time – but still.

I got back home and decided that it was so absolutely awesome outside that I opened the screen door onto the porch to get some fresh air into the house. We haven’t had fresh air in way too long. According to Weather.com, it is fifty six degrees right now. Sweet. I really feel like the snow is over. Now if we can just hold summer off we will be all set.

Here is a great story: High school students beat MIT Engineering students in a robotics competition. Sweet. Most of you know that I have never been a fan of MIT.

Another note: PearPC is sueing Maui X, “makers” of the CherryOS product. I had said some months ago that CherryOS seemed to simply be stolen code from PearPC. Well, apparently the PearPC team feels pretty confident that this is truly the case and are beginning litigations against Maui X. Maui X is refusing to comment which is a pretty serious indicator that they know what they have done and don’t want to get in any deeper than they are. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that their VX30 software is also a repackaging of someone else’s product and acting like it is something that they made themselves. Time will tell, I guess.

Min woke up around 1:00 and decided to get out of bed because she had a lot of knitting to do. I am not sure what the sudden urgency is but she is working on a sweater that she started in 2002. She made me lunch and then I headed back on down to the office to get back to work.

After lunch I took an old exam refresh from Brainbench, the Networking Concepts exam. I scored a 4.31 making Masters and hitting the 99th percentile. I managed to tie for 38th in the world on the big rankings. I should probably retake the test to move up a notch or two but I don’t know if it is worth it or not. For some reason, though, I got shafted and I don’t appear on the rankings list even though my score is high enough to be on. That isn’t very nice. I kept pressing on and took the Internet Security assessment. I managed to move my old 2002 BCP up to a Master BCP this time with a 4.12. But that one isn’t a world ranking. Oh well. We can’t win them all.

Jeremy tried to sign up for his A+ to be taken tomorrow but it takes up to a whole business day before you can sign into the testing system so he is now waiting until he gets his username and password to be able to use the system.

I decided that it was a testing day and went ahead and took the XML exam. I thought that I was going to fail misserably. But instead I actually got a halfway decent 3.46 which I am very happy with. Good enough for me. No complaints here. So, once again, I forged ahead. This time going after the EJB 2.0 certification. This one I was really not ready for. But, I pulled a 3.0 out of my butt. I can’t believe it. I felt like I was really doing poorly. Boy do I feel better now. I am so glad that I won’t have to take that test again for three years.

Enough testing for a while. Min made popcorn fish again for dinner. That is one of my new favorite foods. They are SO good.

After dinner I really didn’t have time to do anything but get ready to head out to Pittsford. I am doing the Wegmans overnight again. Ugh. Once again on half of a normal night’s sleep because everyone needed me too early in the day. Oh well. At least I will really appreciate getting to come home in the morning.

Jeremy wasn’t able to get his test scheduled for tomorrow but was able to squeeze it in on Friday, first thing in the morning down in Canadaigua at FLCC. So I am taking him down there at 8:30am. That is when we have to be there. But it is a busy day and I can’t really do it later. Tomorrow I am planning on a mid-afternoon meeting in the city. So the rest of my week is pretty booked. For all of you that want to call my house in the morning, remember that I am going to bed around the time that all of you are getting up and I am not very likely to appreciate the phone ringing if it isn’t an emergency.

I got much better sleep last night. I need to get caught up so that I am ready to do the overnight again tomorrow. I can’t believe that a week has gone by already. That was quick. I had a note waiting for me this morning saying that Wegmans might actually move forward on the project. I find that hard to believe. We will wait and see. I am skeptical to say the least.

I am having a “can’t stand looking at a computer screen” day and am probably going to take the afternoon off and go up to the city and read over some coffee. Somedays my eyes just can’t take looking at a computer screen. I guess I really am getting quite old when that starts to become a problem. So I decided to go up to the city this afternoon and get some coffee with Eric. I only had a slim fast optima for breakfast so a little lunch would be good too.

Jeremy thinks that he is going to be taking the CompTIA A+ exam on Thursday. So the plan is that I will be taking him up to the city. The test is a whole day deal because there are two parts. You can take them at separate time but that is dangerous since they have a certain number of days that you can go in between. And if you miss the windows, you have to take both of them again.

I read today that the popular VCR replacement device TiVo has started forcing advertising onto a test group of people’s TiVo devices. So much for fast forwarding through the commercials. Apparently the advertising comes up during regular programming as well. Just goes to show that you shouldn’t all buy hard disk recording devices from a single company. If there was decent competition in the marketplace, no one would ever consider such a horrible scheme. Imagine a device that you purchase that has advertising streamed to it! What if you had to watch fifteen seconds of ads before you were allowed to drive you car in the morning? What if you had your radio broadcast interrupted by ads while listening to music (oh wait, someone of you still have that problem, don’t you – mu ha ha.) There is a reason why recorded media is catching on and replacing streaming media so rapidly – we would rather pay a nominal amount for content that we actually want than to watch one minute of advertising for every one minute of content that we might not even want to see in the first place. I buy DVDs of television shows over watching them on television because: it is higher quality, I can watch them whenever I want and because there is no advertising or other unrelated break from the show. I hate watching good shows that have an ad floating in the corner or that have scrolling information coming across the bottom of the screen even if the snow IS really bad. Since I already knew the snow was so bad is probably why I was watching television in the first place. Gosh! What do you think!

For those of you who loved the Napolean Dynamite Soundboard, here is the Pedro Sanchez Soundboard also from ABS.

I headed up to the city around 1:15 to meet up with Eric. Amanda will call and Eric will have to explain that we are having coffee. She always manages to call when we are getting coffee. It is pretty funny. I think she is convinced that his job is to test coffee or something like that. Or something related. Like testing bagels and we just really like coffee.

We had coffee until 4:00 and then I ran over to Borders (yes, again) and picked up the Exam Cram A+ Practice Questions book since Jeremy is working on his A+ for the day after tomorrow. This is his first real industry exam and will be quite an awakening, I am sure. I took the A+ in 1998, I think, so I only have to much insight into the test as it has gone through many iterations and changes since I first took the exam. When I took the exam, it primarily covered DOS and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and didn’t even mention Windows 95 or the NT series. Talk about a useless, outdated, irrelevant exam. But it was still the entry exam into the industry so I doled out my $250 and took the tests. They weren’t that bad but the knowledge has helped me very little over the years. I am glad to see that the current test is a lot more relevant than the old one was. At least they go up to Windows 2000 now which is ONLY five years behind (three if you base it off of when the replacement technology came out.)

I got back home around a quarter to five and Min was already in the shower. I called dad to see if he wanted to do dinner. (If you REALLY need to know what I ate there, you can check the food site.) He came over and picked us up around 5:30 and we went over to the Omega Grill. If we don’t eat there every few days, I am pretty sure that they will send out a search party looking for us.

Jeremy and Sara came over a little after we got back from dinner. Sara and a friend came over to picked out some movies to watch. They ended up borrowing the first season of Father Ted which, I am guessing, that Sara will find to be hilarious. They dropped Jeremy off and he is going to spend the night. He is frantically studying for his test on Thursday and needs to do some work over here before he will be ready for it. He has finished reading the really big Exam Cram 2 A+ book and has been working through the practice tests from there. I found some of Min’s flashcards for him to study from and another of Min’s huge A+ books. I also had that book of practice questions for him to work on. The big thing this evening is making him work on taking a Brainbench certification as a practice for the CompTIA exam. The BrainBench is actually harder – at least the last time that I took it. But it is easier and quicker to get feedback from and it gives you detailed information about subject areas that you need to work on. Plus it helps prepare you for the panic of the real deal. I think that BrainBench is an awesome resource and I use it for all kinds of stuff. Anyone working in IT should have a subscription to them and use them frequently.

While Jeremy was doing some studying, Min and I watched Apt Pupil with Ian McKlellan and Brad Renfro – a lot of you might recognize Brad from the mediocre Disney film Tom and Huck which you can find in the Scott Alan Miller “LaserDisc not going to be converted to DVD” Collection. Min hadn’t seen Apt Pupil yet and I hadn’t seen it in a long time. I last saw it when it was in the theatre in 1998. It isn’t too bad. Different than your run of the mill Hollywood fare. We got it for $6. Probably a pretty decent buy at that price.

Jeremy finished up his Brainbench certification test around 1:30 am. He scored a 2.17 which fell a little below the 2.75 for passing mark but was still pretty impressive. After finishing up the test, Jeremy decided to fool around and try his hand at the Java 2 certification. He wasn’t planning on passing this one. I wouldn’t plan on passing it either. I wrote a good article over at My Tech Blog about why I feel that the Brainbench is a really awesome certification authority. Jeremy got a 1.34 on the Java 2 test which is pretty impressive since he hasn’t covered really any of that material yet.

I decided to try my hand at a programming certification since I have never tried one. I went for something easy, the Java 2 Fundamentals certification. I wrapped up around 3:10am with a 3.33, a very decent score if I don’t say so myself. Pretty good for a non-programmer like me. Number 24 in New York. Whoo-hoo. I love being ranked. I am sure that the Fundamentals exam is not as popular as the more difficult core Java 2 exam but it makes me happy, darn it.

I am up so late tonight because tomorrow is my second pilot for Wegmans. We are going to be out at the Pittsford location (the super massive Wegmans, the biggest that there is.) I will be doing the overnight again so I want to sleep in late and be ready for a long, long night of server installation fun. Unfortunately, I managed to get a noon meeting scheduled tomorrow that I have to deal with. I also have to get up and deal with getting Jeremy up because he has a doctor’s appointment in the morning. I never manage to sleep when I really need to. At least I got a new certification tonight. I am bummed, though, because it was three years ago that I did the bulk of my certs and a ton of them have dropped off of my resume in the last two months meaning I have to go through an extremely lengthy and difficult recertification process in addition to getting anything new. I hate doing a lot of work just to maintain old certifications that I already earned once.

I was about to go to bed but wasn’t feeling tired enough so I decided to press on and attempt another exam. Normally I would be dog tired by this point of the night / morning. But taking difficult exams invigorates me and I am feeling quite good right now. I ended up finishing the Java 2 exam with only a score of 3.0 however this was a much harder exam and I scored higher comparative to other test takers in general than I had with the Fundamentals test. So that is pretty positive, I guess. Considering I am not a programmer, that rocks. I didn’t get any cool ranking this time, probably because tons more people have taken this particular test. But hey, I did my best and did decent. I am happy.

Now it is 4:17am and I am getting quite tired. I am going to go call my wife to say goodnight and then I am turning in. Please remember not to call me in the morning. I will be sleeping until 11:00!!

Once again, Min wasn’t here and I fell asleep before I put on my CPAP. DOH! Luckily I woke up at 6:00 this morning and realized that I wasn’t wearing the CPAP and I put it on. But I had to sleep in late to make up for the lost night of sleep. I had been planning on getting up and getting moving nice and early this morning. But instead I had to sleep in until 9:30 or so. Another morning lost. Oh bother.

I was looking at Technorati this morning and noticed that a number of the blogs have climbed signicantly in the ranking. SGL2 has climbed way up to the 189K mark and the The Friday Night Game has hit 271K. Don’t ask me why the game site is doing so well. I need to have Min check the stats on her site, she seems to be getting a lot of readers. More than me, I would say. Which is very depressing having been blogging since 2000. I decided to use a new blog site to keep track of what I was eating for my diet (yes, yes, I am on a diet) and found that a lot of people are getting the websites that I had thought of thinking that no one would ever have thought of those. Unfortunately, the blogs that I kept finding were old and no one has been posting to them in forever. It sucks that people suck up the good blog names and never use them like What I Ate Today and What I Ate. Both haven’t been used since 2003. So I settled on using What Scott Ate Today. So, now I have a diet site. Nothing exciting. No reason for anyone to go there. But I do think that it is a really good use of a blog to be able to keep journalled personal information like this.

It is forty six degree farenheit out this morning. Spring is really here. The last few days have been awesome. This is the kind of weather that I really look forward to – the transition weeks. Everything is wet and overcast and just warm enough but not too warm yet. Summer will be here all too soon.

While scouring the Internet today, I discovered this awesome pamphlet from 1965. It fills in so many unanswered questions in my mind. All of you Star Wars junkies should head on over to Pez and get their limited edition Star Wars dispensers too.

Wegmans still hasn’t gotten a contract for the project that I am doing yet. In two days the pilot will be wrapping up and that will be the end of the work that they have contracted us for officially. It will be a pain if we have to keep doing work two weeks at a time like this. I am planning on taking another position immediately if the opportunity arises. I have given Wegmans three months to start this project and they have pushed it off every time that I have talked to them. Unfortunately, lots of people are out today so I won’t be hearing anything from anyone. I do wish that, for once, I would get to know something about what is going on. I have been kept in the dark for so long I just want a few months of forsight. I don’t ask for that very often. Most people demand a lifetime of it. I just want to know what is going on through, say, Autumn. Just a vague idea, really, would be nice.

Well, seconds after I typed that message I got a note from Wegmans that they have agreed to two more weeks of work (after making me take two weeks off, of course.) Ha, ha. I don’t have time to put up with this crap. I called the consulting agency and asked them to take me off of the project. This is not worth the headache at all. I have better things to be doing with my time than worrying if the project is going to keep moving forward week after week. It is nerve racking and after last year’s fiasco in Albany I don’t have the patience to do another one of these deals. So I have moved on and am looking for something a little bit more reliable. For the #1 place in the country to work, there sure are an awful lot of people who don’t seem to be willing to work there. So, needless to say, I updated my resume today.

I was feeling kind of burned out this afternoon so I played a little AoE2 to relax a bit. I find dealing with bad jobs to be very stressful and I seem to have to do an awful lot of it these days.

Min got up at 5:00. She was so tired today that she slept through the incessant blasting that is still going on next door. We had three good blasts today. She got up and cooked dinner. (I won’t put the food details here since there is a site just for that.) We watched Luther starring Joseph Fiennes and Alfred Molina. It was really good. We also watched Uptown Girls with Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning. Min had seen it before but I hadn’t. That wasn’t bad. It was cute and very watchable.

Min and I both commented that when we watch German films we both remember the actors having said the lines in English but with German accents. But neither of us really get this same effect when we watch Chinese, French or Spanish movies. I think that I might get it when watching Japanese Anime though. So weird, I guess.

We wrapped up our movie watching just in time for Min to head off to work. I wanted to watch something else but once I stop watching I find that I don’t like to start back up again. So I got the hamster out to run around and came down to the office to wrap up the post for the day. I am tired having not slept well or long last night and I have a little bit of a headache. Probably from looking at the computer screen too much. I think that I accidentally turned the brightness up on the graphics card and that is making it hard to look at.