Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I wrote today’s udpate and somehow managed to get it completely deleted. How do you like them apples. Maybe we will be lucky and decide what I had written was really boring and something better needed to be said anyway. But boy is there a lot of typing involved with writing this thing! I don’t really relish the idea of writing an entire day’s worth of updates twice. But, what are you going to do. So here we go.

Min and I got up really early this morning around 6:30. This is incredibly rare for us and no one should be expecting us to be getting up this early on a regular basis or anything. This morning is the early morning Easter service at church. We have seven people being baptized this week including three of Min and my students from Castile. So we really need to be there. I didn’t feel very well this morning so it was hard to get going but we made it. I had to call over to Jeremy’s house to get him out of bed because he forgot about church (he had asked if we would pick him up and take him to church with us this week.)

We got Jeremy and managed to just make it to church on time, no thanks to me. Church was long with seven people getting baptized. We left around 9:30. Tim Kelly that Eric and I went to elementary school at Pavilion Baptist School with was there. Tim and I went to school together from kindergarten through eighth grade. But I haven’t seen him in five years or so. He got married just a little while before I did and they live outside of Batavia in Corfu now (Corfu is just north of Darien Lake.) But Tim is working in Geneseo now at T.A.B. across from the Jiffy Lube.

We had to drop Jeremy off on our way back to Geneseo because he still had to attend his regular church service. Min and I stopped at Burger King on the way back home and got some breakfast. Min tried to go to bed when we got back to the house because she has to work tonight yet and is going to be really tired but she wasn’t able to fall asleep because she was worried about not bringing something to eat with us this afternoon.

So Min got out of bed and drove over to Wegmans and got some cooking supplies and came back and made a green bean casserole and a peanut butter chocolate brownie dessert. That took her right up until we had to leave to go get lunch. We got over to my aunt and uncle’s at 1:00 and had lunch there with the family. Min had to leave at 2:00 to get to work so we didn’t have a really long time to visit. Min left me there and I hung out for a while. Dad brought me back home at 5:00 or so.

As usual, I worked down in my office while I had the time to myself. I also watched Airheads which I haven’t seen since it was new. It is a relatively dumb movie but it has a lot of really big names in it like Brendan Fraser, Steve Buscemi, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Michael McKean, Judd Nelson and Joe Mantegna. That’s a lot of people for a pretty much nothing movie.

If anyone is looking for some short but entertaining cartoons, check out Spinnerdisc. There isn’t a lot there but it is funny.

I was actually up and moving first thing this morning, well 8:30 – but that is pretty amazing for me. I had a little bit of a headache from the game last night. I seem to get one almost every week. I am not sure if it is from my eyes staring at the screen all of that time or if it is from the junkfood or if it is just caused by straining so hard for so long trying to win.

I came down and worked in the office for a while this morning. Min got up a little bit after 9:00. Jeremy was still here from last night until Sara came and picked him up around 11:00 which is when she gets out of bowling here in Geneseo.

After Jeremy left, we got ready to go and headed up to the city to meet Josh and JoAnne and Phil and Kate at the IHOP in Henrietta. We had a good time at lunch – and our waiter was hilarious. He was new but deinitely shouldn’t have been working at an IHOP. There are much better restaurants around that he should have been able to get some work at.

Kate took off after lunch to get things ready for their Easter dinner and the rest of us went to Marketplace Mall to deal with the clothes for the upcoming wedding. We ended up just going to Tuxedo Junction and getting everything taken care of in no time. That was really easy. We ordered the tuxes and did our fittings and everything. Only Montana Bob has yet to be fitted. I supposed we should be calling him Binghamton Bob or Southern Tier Bob but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it. JoAnne and Min did some looking for accessories and a dress for Min but didn’t find anything. We tried to find shirts for the guys but had no luck doing that either. We are going to have to find shirts online so that we can all get the same thing. I did pick up a new pair of Dockers while were there. The teflon coated stain resistant ones so that I can be cool like Zach. Phil had to take off at this point to get to Easter dinner so we saw him on his way and the rest of us did a little bit more shopping before heading over to Friendly’s for some ice cream. We were all really in an ice cream kind of mood so it really worked out well. It really hit the spot.

I had to look for a book at Borders and no one was going to object to going there so the four of us ran over to Borders and shopped for a little while. I needed a book on Windows scripting and luckily I was able to find just what I was looking for. Josh and Jo had to get moving, though, so we parted company there and Min and I headed on back down to Geneseo.

Min and I wanted to relax so we watched a couple of movies this evening. Saturday seems to be the only really good night for relaxing at all. We started off with the German classic Anatomie starring Franka Potente. It started off pretty gruesome but wasn’t too bad, overall. We thought that it was entertaining and somewhat intelligent. Not really my type of movie but better than most. You can still find copies of it in the Walmart five dollar bargain bins so keep an eye out for it. It is a pretty good value. There is a sequal but I have never seen it available here in the states. The sequal was made in 2003. The guy who plays the antagonist in Anatomie, Benno Furmann, starred opposite Franka in her popular romantic film The Princess and the Warrior, also made in Germany. Another one of the actors was Sebastian Blomberg who also starred in the film What To Do In Case of Fire that we had watched earlier in the week. He did the movies about one year apart.

We decided to keep with the foreign film theme and followed up with Merci pour le Chocolat which is sort of a suspense slash drama sort of thing. Very hard to put your finger on. It is really out there. Even after watching it we had a hard time knowing where the film had been trying to go. It didn’t do a good job of connecting you to the people in the film. You couldn’t really identify with any of them – which, as all of my SGL readers know, is a major downpoint to me for any movie. The movie was in French which really confused Min because she thought that the movie was set in France but it didn’t really make a lot of sense to be in France. The film was actually a Swiss film shot in western Switzerland. Min wasn’t aware that French was one of the official languages of Switzerland. The film quality was really low: making it look like something out of the early eighties. But it is a recent film. The scenery was gorgeous which really made us wish that they had filmed it in higher quality.

Tony has gotten in on the Eric Poop Head project and there is now an additional page further explaining the plight of poor Blogging Eric. You can check out Tony’s tribute to Eric at Eric the Urinal Cake Head. I would feel bad for Eric but, he did start this one. He should have seen this coming for a long time now.

Tony managed to hang here last night and spent the night. We were blogging until the early hours of the morning and slept in really late today. Min and I woke up to dad calling about getting together for lunch. He came over around 1:00 (yeah, we slept in really late) and the four of us went to the Omega Grill for a Friday Fish Fry. The Omega did something to change their batter for their fish and it is really amazing now.

After lunch we came back to the house and watched The Passion for Good Friday. None of us had seen it yet. It was really amazing. It is really difficult to sit through, though, being so graphic.

I had just enough time to take Tony home after the movie for us to get ready for the game tonight. While I was gone, Miranda arrived from Canada. We had seven people and it went really well.

Tony, Jeremy and I managed to get onto the news last night. None of us have had a chance to see the footage yet but my dad recorded it and supposedly you can see all of us sitting with Steve Bulkley and watching the seminar. That is pretty cool, I don’t think that I have ever been on the news before. It is only for one second, quite literally, but it is something. Too bad I don’t have television myself or it would seem like a bigger deal, I am sure.

We were seven for the game tonight. Josh played remotely and Art, Danielle, Michael, Min, Andy, Jeremy and I all got to play. Michael didn’t play in “the game” but played on my laptop upstairs or on Min’s GBA. In order to save everyone the gory details of the game, that information will all be posted over to The Friday Night Game blog on BlogSpot.

It is difficult, when working overnights, to know when to end one blog day and when to begin the next. But I made it home early enough yesterday that I will consider my day today to have begun when I woke up this morning – like most people do. I got up at 10:00 and got in the shower to get ready for the day. Jeremy got to the house at 11:45 and we took right off to get up to Rochester to see the Microsoft show. We stopped in Avon and picked up Tony around 12:15.

We arrived at the Microsoft show right on time at 12:30. We got signed in and had enough time to make it out to check out their “technology truck” which was mildly interesting. The truck was neat, sort of a blend of technology and comfortable seating. The only issue was that I was not sure what they wanted us to see on the truck. It was sponsored by HP and Intel but the only thing on the truck really worth looking at was an HP Tablet PC which was pretty nice, but hardly worth a whole demo truck. There were some computers showing some Microsoft applications but the place wasn’t set up in such a way as to learn anything from them. So we only looked at that for a minute.

The seminar itself started at 1:00 and we met Steve Bulkley (Jen’s husband) as we went into the show and he sat with us. The show went until 5:00 and was pretty good. Robert Jackson was our presenter and I have seen him many times – he is very good.

While we were at the seminar, Fox News arrived and took pictures of Tony, Jeremy and I as well as of Rob while he was speaking. We don’t know if we will be on the news or not tonight, but we have everyone attempting to record the news, just in case.

I won some cool stuff at the seminar including a book that sounds really cool and an MSDN subscription which I am really excited about. I had an MSDN subscription a number of years ago but it wasn’t nearly as cool back then. Or maybe it just wasn’t as cool to me because I didn’t know how to get any use out of it. It is a $1,200 value and something that I should buy but have a really hard time justifying spending the money on it.

After the show, we came back home and both Tony and Jeremy were able to hang out for a while and Min cooked dinner for us. She made her first attempt at deep frying fish. She made her own batter and fried them up in the deep fryer that I got for Christmas. It turned out pretty well. After dinner, Tony, Jeremy, Min and I tried to get in a game of AoE2 but Jeremy only had until 9:00 and we weren’t able to get very far. Tony didn’t bring his computer over since he was not planning on coming over and so I was stuck playing on my laptop that keeps freezing up on me while we are playing the game. It is really weird because it never crashes any other time. Just during AoE2. I am convinced that it is caused by a bug in the game that only manifests itself in that way on my machine. Min has another weird problem that her mouse stops working each time after my laptop crashes. Strange coincidence? I think not.

Jeremy took off and Tony called home to see if he could spend the night. He is actually allowed to stay so, he is staying. He and I tried playing a game of AoE2 but my laptop was being really awful and we eventually just had to give up on it. Oh well. I have a desktop to use tomorrow so the game should be good.

The infamous Albino Black Sheep (which, coincidentally, also is named after sheep) has some really good videos to take a look at including: The Star Wars Kid. You have to feel sorry for this kid. He probably made this video in his basement thinking that no one would ever see it but then, someone, managed to sneak into his basement, steal this video and get it posted up onto the Internet. Life can be rough. I guarantee that this kid will grow up knowing the importance of hiding videos of things that you don’t want the world to see. And, for those of you who just can’t get enough of this stuff but don’t bother looking for it yourself because you know I will post links to it (although I am sneaky and unlike other people who have simple “link blogs” to put all of the links in one place I intersperse them throughout my blog so that you have to read it all all of the time in order to find them – or just look for the blue text) here are some dancing badgers.

Min spent the evening discovering weird videos and video games online.

The other day, Jeremy expressed amazement at the fact that I knew the Hampster Dance. Little did he realize that I have been a net user since the beginning of time and every famous website in the world is known by me (All Your Internet R Belong To Me!) Although, Jeremy was not aware that the cool Hampster Dance Song used to be more than a tune on the radio but was actually a really awful website long, long ago. Anyway, I have a rough example of what the original site looked like here – now remember kids, this was originally viewed in 640×480 or 800×600 and it was JUST the dancing hamster nothing else. The Original Hampton the Hampster Dancing Hamsters Page. I know you have all missed this one. They have removed the music from the page but I think that you all know exactly what it sounds like. And for those of you who just can’t get enough of this old time entertainment, try out the classic Jesus Dance from the same era.