Sheep Guarding Llama

Another awesome day today. Sixty degrees and sunny. What a change! It is a really great day to be having casual meetings in the city so that I can get out and enjoy this weather a little bit.

I got a couple of calls this morning and had to leap out of bed and take care of a few things before starting the day. But that is okay, the weather is awesome.

I managed to get out of the door at 9:30 on the dot and headed for downtown. I got to “The Spot” at 10:10 and met Craig for coffee. We only stayed inside for about an hour. After that we just stood in front of the coffee shop because the weather was so nice. We hung out until 1:00 or so and decided that we should stop loitering in downtown Rochester and move on to some lunch. Craig only pencilled me in for two hours. I have no idea what he was thinking. Like anyone can talk to me for only two hours. HA!

We called Eric and swung by the hospital to pick him up. The three of us went over to Aja Noodle at Twelve Corners in Brighton. That place is great. I have never been up there before – I don’t usually hang out in that part of town. I am glad that we went there because the food was amazing and not expensive at all. They do a variety of upscale Asian cuisine from all over the place. Good lunch menu. The three of us hung out there until around 4:00. Eric had to “get back to work” so we took off.

After work, Eric and Amanda met Min and I over at the Omega Grill for some dinner. Rachel actually got to come along. We never managed to get to visit with them when Rachel is around. I won’t bore you with food details 😉

Min and I watched an episode of Angel before she had to head off to work. She is training another auditor tonight. The other main auditor quit recently and Min is stuck as the trainer for part of the time. She hates training.

I wanted to stay up late tonight so that I would sleep in late tomorrow so that it would be easier to work late tomorrow night. We will see. I have yet to be able to sleep in in the least after doing this same thing for three weeks. At least this week I remembered to take the trash out before going to bed instead of having to jump out of bed and run out there with the trash like an idiot. There is a lot of it too since I kept forgetting to take it out for so long.

I poked my head out of the door around 7:30 this morning and let me tell you, it is looking like it is going to be a beautiful day. The Weather Channel says that it is only 36 degrees right now and that it is only supposed to hit 44 as a high today but I think that they must be mistaken. Tomorrow is due to be near 60, though. I am looking forward to that.

Min just got home, it is 8:00, and even though it is so gorgeous out here, she said that the thruway is closed to the west due to extreme blizzard conditions. There are people trapped in cars south of Buffalo that can only be reached by snowmobile at this point. And Rochester didn’t get touched. She had a ton of people cancel their reservations last night because they either got stuck in their cars or they decided not to leave Pennsylvania. It is weird to have such radically different weather so close in proximity to us. I guess New York is really like that.

Dad picked us up for breakfast at 8:15 and we headed over to the Omega Grill. We hung out there until about 9:30 then Min and I headed home to get some sleep. We were both totally exhausted.

I was up and moving by 2:30 this afternoon. I can’t believe that I managed to just wake up after that little sleep and being awake for so long before hand. But my stomach was bothering me a little and sleep wasn’t helping it so that was a contributing factor.

I managed to get a hold of Craig today, he is actually still alive but had a really busy weekend. We are doing coffee tomorrow morning. We say tomorrow morning, but it will probably go into the afternoon significantly.

Today was tax day for me. I got all of the paperwork together for my taxes last night and Min got them together this morning. This afternoon I had to go through all of my electric bills and figure out what my power consumption was this year. Power is really expensive. I know that everyone things that I spend a fortune on my utilities but I want to know how people are getting away much more cheaply than I am. We average $205 per month, that is electric and gas together. The gas is between 25% and 30% of the total utility bill, on average. The house is totally lighted by florescent lights except for a few stray lights here and there that are still incadescent – but I am still working on getting rid of those too. The bedrooms each have one incadescent bulb and the basement has one in my office – but not my main light. Speaking of which, we have at least one spare halogen lamp and maybe two, if anyone would like one. We aren’t using them and they are just in the way here. Plus I use a low power Mac and a laptop for all of my computing which are both like a quarter of the power consumption of regular computers and we have all LCD monitors in the house which are just a fraction compared to CRTs as well. Plus my computers and Min’s are off at night. Min’s is off almost all of the time. She only has it on maybe three or four times in a week.

I had one last test to take this afternoon to qualify for the big Brainbench Certified .NET Programmer, the Web Services Application Engineering exam. So I took that while Min was cooking dinner. I thought that I was going to do really poorly (okay, I know that everyone is getting sick of hearing that one) but I pulled off a really half decent score. Enough that I am quite happy with it.

As soon as Min went to leave for work, I can down to the basement and discovered the mouse that had been lured into the mouse cube. With any luck, that will be the only one that is in the house. I am sure that that is not the case, but at least we caught the one. So, of course, that meant that I had to take a walk to take our little friend far, far away from the house. Mice seem to be really good and finding their way back to the house so we can’t let that happen. He was very cute and looked very sad to have been caught and yet quite thrilled with all of the peanut butter that he got to eat.

Well, I went walking for about half an hour. It was good that I caught the mouse so that I had to get out and get a little exercise. I got back and updated What Scott Ate Today and SGL2 but, of course, Blogger lost my post to SGL2. They lose about 50% of what I upload to them. They are really having serious issues there and they are going to be losing customers quickly if they don’t do something about it. I did end up getting the info posted. So you can go read my short tidbit over there. I have noticed that almost none of you out there in the blogosphere have been writing anything for me to read. Tony is about the only person who has been writing anything at all. Min and Jeremy have been silent for a week and Danielle for two or more. C’mon people, I need stuff to read too, you know!

After I got back from my walk I took one last test. I took the C++ Programming test. I skimmed by. Just barely passing but hey, good enough for us non-programmers. That got me not just my BCP in C++ but also my Job Role Cert as a C++ Programmer. I am now heavily certified on every major programming language group (C++, Java and .NET) so I could compete for jobs just about anywhere. Not that I am looking to do that. But it is nice to have options these days.

I am not really tired and would really like to stay up late tonight but I am meeting Craig for coffee tomorrow morning downtown so I have to get some sleep tonight. Hopefully by tomorrow I will have something to talk about other than my test taking. Sorry to be doing that so much but I can hardly change my lifestyle just to make my blog more interesting to read.

Spring ahead. Man I hate daylight savings time. I think that that is the dumbest thing in the world. What idiot ever thought of that? Okay, I looked it up and it was Benjamin Franklin. We didn’t implement the ruling until 1966, however, when we enacted the Uniform Time Act. This act didn’t actually force us to change the clocks, it just required that people be uniform about whatever they do. Now if that isn’t confusing. Usually I think that old Ben Franklin is a pretty bright guy, but has no one ever noticed that the effects of Daylight Savings Time would simply be redundant if people did things at a logical time of day anyway? All we are doing is making idiots more likely to do things at a certain time because the television schedule changes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the US government didn’t make some deal with big broadcast media conglomerates to be sure that they were going to honor DST. If I owned Time Warner or Cox Cable, let me tell you, I would keep the schedule rock steady all year long and let the world try to change around me. Maybe I would move all of the programming to a more logical time if that is the real issue. But I wouldn’t go changing it forward and back every six months like a looney. Apparently, the purpose of the whole deal (as originally stated by old BF himself and reiterated later by the feds) is that DST is used to reduce the total electricity consumed by 1%. Okay. So what they are saying is that the time of day that people choose to do certain activities is inappropriate but since Americans are generally idiots, they can just shift the official clocks and we will shift right along with them and solve the issues. Seems to me that the real issue here is a poor education system if people are having that much of a problem doing activities during daylight if that is what they really prefer. Me, I prefer to do a lot of work at night. I also prefer, most of the time, not to have a whole bunch of extra lights on for no reason. And just to save electricity, I make sure that all of my house lights are florescent (of course, then they are full of mercury – I guess we can’t win, can we?) If we were just teaching our kids how to use less power or how to do activities at logical times, none of this would be necessary at all. But since schools HAVE to run on a certain schedule (classes begin at 7:45am) we figure that we can just set our clocks to make 7:45 at the most convenient “time” and the education system will never figure out what hit it. Now teachers are teaching home room at what is actually 8:45 but apparently, they don’t realize that. And all of those businesses that keep making people come to work too early – they will never notice that the overseas contacts that they are trying to call are not available when they used to be. No, that doesn’t have an impact on anyone. Hello Mr. Congressman, we live in a global economy, we work with people from all over the world. DST makes us look like idiots. I have tried to explain DST to a friend in Singapore and she honestly thought I was off my rocker. She couldn’t believe that our country would be so backward. It is amazing that we use time zones at all, really. Why not run the whole world on GMT and have everyone know what everyone else is talking about all of the time. Sure there are downsides, but not many. Most everything would be REALLY straightforward – all of the time.

Tony went with Min and I to church this morning. It was his first time going down to LaGrange. He seem to have a good time and enjoy the service. Pastor Dan wasn’t speaking today. That has happened to us almost every time that someone comes with us to visit the church. I think that our friends all think that we make him up.

As we were leaving church, Dave Marsh stopped me and told me that he had been doing a search on the web for information about finding a good Indian restaurant in Rochester. In doing his search he found, you guessed it, Sheep Guarding Llama! He read the site for a little while because it was SO interesting (I am paraphrasing there) and eventually figured out that he knew who I was. How funny is that. Imagine how many people must read this site and not know who I am. There must be millions of people reading SGL. Okay, but over a hundred at least.

After church was lunch in Perry. No surprises there. Then Min was off to work and Tony took some more tests. I did some reading and Andy worked on his video game engine some more. Only four more weeks until he is done with work.

Tony hung around for a little while this afternoon taking more tests. Eventually I ran out of reading to do and set up a computer to do a test myself. Might as well take advantage of the quiet in the house. After my test I ran Tony home to Avon. He has school tomorrow. I stopped at Walmart on the way home and picked up Mulholland Falls, Once Upon A Time in the West, Roxanne and Closer which just released with Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law and Clive Owen. I have been wanting to see that.

Like all Sunday evenings, I reclused to me office to get some “me” time. I did some catching up no the blog(s) since the earlier part of the weekend is always rough. Earlier I had discovered what I thought might have been a mouse dropping in the other room. “Oh great” I thought. “Just what I need.” But it wasn’t enough to convince me that that was what it was. Every so often I think that I might see something or hear something moving in the basement but I always manage to convince myself that it is just my imagination. Well, tonight, while sitting quietly and writing the daily, some animal in the piles on the other side of the office decided to move stuff around. Maybe it is a mouse. I hope that it is a mouse. It made so much noise that I am afraid that it could be something larger. It was a lot of noise. Not like a raccoon or anything. But maybe a rat. The dropping really was tiny, though, much smaller than a hamster dropping. I guess that it is time to put out the mouse cubes again. I hope that this eventually comes to an end. Of course, I was supposed to have put cement into the holes around the house and didn’t do that. So that is going to be one of my tasks the moment that the weather is remotely warm again.

Well, I put out two mouse cubes tonight with peanut butter on crackers in them. Hopefully the mice will go for them right away. Hopefully they will be little cute mice like before and not huge rats that don’t fit into the cubes. That would be bad.

I wasn’t tired at all tonight so I decided to try my hand at the Brainbench VB.NET certification. Andy is ranked No. 2 in New York on that one and Tony had given it a shot yesterday. Having never written anything more than a simple Hello World in VB.NET and only having used VB6 a tiny bit some five or six years ago, I figured that I would have a pretty tough time with this one. It was really hard but I passed with a 3.24. Not bad for my first time going after that exam. I ranked number 28 in New York.

I really must not have been tired because at 4:00 in the morning I was still playing with the hamster. And dad is coming at 8:00 for breakfast. Min actually signed off at work and I was still up. Around 5:30 I decided that I wasn’t going to get the chance to get any sleep and since I would be working the overnight (presumably) in two nights, I might as well stay up all night and be able to sleep in with Min in the morning. That seemed like a plan.

Aroung a quarter till six I decided to take another Brainbench to keep myself awake. There can only be so many worth taking so I figure that I will get as many out of the way as possible. There are a bunch of really dumb ones that I have to take because they are part of the bigger job roles. Things like spelling, vocabulary and written English. I decided to try the .Net Framework exam. That one was pretty tough. And I had an especially hard time taking it because I kept nodding off while I was taking it. I fell asleep completely at least twice but luckily woke up quickly enough to be able to answer the questions. I made number 31 in New York. Of course, it is a really weird test to ranked on but at least I am on the list.

I am afraid that I am getting a little bit delirious at this point in the morning and I am probably not making very much sense. I have been up for almost twenty-four hours at this point. Of course, Min does this every week and I am starting to do it on Wednesday nights now and will be doing it more soon – but still. Well, it is 7:00am. Anything that happens after this point should be considered tomorrow anyway. The sun is up and streaming into my basement office. I might as well go upstairs and get my shower out of the way so that Andy can take his later and have hot water.

Good morning, everyone!

The big news today is that Nate and Tammy had their baby! Annalee Ruth was born at 2:53am. Six pounds, seven ounces and 19.5 inches long.

We didn’t stay up all that late last night but we got up pretty late today? I guess that we had some sleep to catch up on. Min and I got up somewhere around 11:00. But I feel much better. I have been losing a lot of sleep all week and I needed to do some catching up.

Min was knitting and watching Angel: Season One in our room so I decided to watch a little of it with her. I normally take Saturdays off since I pretty much have to work on Sundays and so does she so it just works out to make Saturday our day off (imagine that, taking the Sabbath off, what a bizarre concept.) So, after wrapping up the episode that we were watching upstairs on her 17″ computer monitor, we moved down to the theatre so that we could really watch it and she started from the beginning of the series so that I would know what is going on. We made it through about two episodes.

Tony called just a little after we had gotten up because he wanted to come over and work on taking some of the Brainbench exams while they were still free – which is only until Monday.

Andy was just about to head out the door to get Tony when his pager went off and he had to head into Wegmans. It is so much fun being on call. Actually it isn’t too bad. He gets paid quite a bit to do very little while on call. I would actually much prefer it to not being on call if I had the choice and the price was decent. I like spontenaity. Or however that is spelled. So I headed out to pick up Tony and bring him down to do his certifications.

So Tony did a couple of tests while Min and I continued watching Angel. I have never been a fan of the “Buffy” shows but Angel isn’t too bad. It isn’t awesome or anything but pretty decent. It is entertaining. Mostly just an action television show.

After his tests, Tony came along with Min and I to do some shopping in the city. Min and I both needed new shoes so we stopped by the shoe store in the South Town Plaza and managed to get four pairs at buy one get one half off (I am pretty sure that they always have that sale.) I got one pair of sneakers, they are exactly like the pair that I already had but new (duh!) and a 10 1/2 Wide instead of 11 1/2 Normal. When I was a young teen, I used to wear size 13’s! Now that I have figured out the shape of my feet, I can wear shoes far smaller than I used to be able to wear. Min got one new pair of Adidas and two pairs of dress shoes. Then the three of us headed off to the Pakistan House, Rochester’s most awesome Indian restaurant. I am pretty sure that the cuisine is actually Pakistani but they call it Indian when you are there but I think they are just dumbing it down for the Rochester crowd. I think that Pakistani cuisine and Northern Indian is extremely similar. I talked to one of the owners as we were leaving and he was really excited that we were driving all of the way from Geneseo to eat there on a regular basis. It was a great meal as always and Tony really like it to – it being his first even Indian meal.

We went to Borders after dinner. I wanted to look for a couple things. I found a really nice reference to the Microsoft Windows command line from MSPress that was 40% off so I got that. And I found a good book for learning J2EE and with all of the Java testing that I have been doing I decided that I needed to learn more about that.

We got home and Tony did some more tests and Min and I went to bed.

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.