Sheep Guarding Llama

What a beautiful morning there is out there today. I got out of bed and pulled back the blinds in the living room and it is really a spectacular day. Yesterday we started the day with a solid covering of snow on the ground but it ended up being pretty nice all day. Today is looking like it might be even nicer. I think that the good weather is finally upon us. A few more weeks and I will have to get into the shop to get my low profile tires and larger wheels put back onto my car. The only downside is that I wore out two of the tires last season so I have to buy two more. Those things are not cheap.

On an even happier note, I think that Eric and I are planning on working on the RX-7 soon. I really want to get that on the road this summer and get some serious convertible action going. If I was smart, I would take the “6” off of the road and only use the RX-7 this summer. That would rock. I need to spend this summer tooling around in a little red convertible.

Norm got me out of bed this morning calling very early. He is supposed to be working at Wegmans with me tomorrow and next Wednesday but no one has called him about anything yet so he is really in the dark. So that is my project this morning. Getting everyone onto the same page. It is probably best, though, since it forced me to get up and to get moving today. My calendar was actually clear which can end up being encouragement to sleep in and get nothing done.

Before going to bed last night, Andy and I were discussing when we had gone with Blogging Eric to see Steve Wosniak speak at MCC. I thought that it was a seriously long time ago but Andy was convinced that it was soon after moving back here to Geneseo. So, we opened SGL’s Archives to summer 2003, hit F3 (we use Firefox) and type in Wosniak and instantly, there it was. September 10, 2003. It is so cool to be able to go back and find anything from anytime. I wish that I was writing more back then. As it was it seemed like I was writing a lot but the reality was that the posts were really short. Which is too bad because it really is a lot of fun to go back and see what I was doing and what I was thinking at different points. That was a really cool speach to get to go hear. Wosniak is a giant in technology history. He did so many amazing things during the 1970’s. I have a podcast of him speaking at last year’s GnomeDex and he gaves basically the same speach that he gave in Rochester so it is kind of cool to have a recording of what we had gone to hear. I think that he only does one presentation and he has it down to a science. But it is a really good one and not short at all. Very interesting – although I am sure that it is far more interesting for those of us who grew up around all of the equipment that he designed (and for those of us who can just look over our shoulders and see an original Apple ][ sitting on a shelf!)

I should just not get out of bed in the morning. No sooner do I get up and deal with getting Norm lined up for tomorrow night than I find out that there is no contract and that we haven’t actually been hired to do the work yet. Oh boy. Over the weekend we were thinking that work was lined up for the year and that it was going to be all nice and easy and I wouldn’t have to be thinking about keeping busy until October. The schedule was going to be great and Min and I were going to get to see each other a lot. But now, it turns out, was all smoke up the wazoo. There has been no contract and no equipment purchased for us to be working on. There isn’t even time left for them to do the job if they wanted to on their schedule since they are past the point where they would have to have had things in motion in order to do that. It isn’t the end of the world but it does mean, most likely, that I will have to take work with either RG&E or Corning (if they offer it to me.) I was really looking forward to a three day work week for six months. That was going to make things a whole lot easier around here. What a pain life can be some days.

A British television station today decided to start allowing people to download television shows from their website. However, instead of doing it in some logical way, they decided to charge almost $3 for some episodes of some silly car show that didn’t even end up making it onto the television (just great, $3 for a CUT television episode?) Now, $3 is pretty pricey and we can hope that that is for several episodes. But to make matters worse, they are only allowing the downloads in Version 10 of DRM protected Windows Media format (WMV). This is fine, more or less, except that only Windows XP and maybe 2000 support Windows Media Player 10 and only those machines that are kept completely up to date. And because the files are DRM protected, you are unable to share them with your friends or to move them around or make backups of them (for $3 for a crappy television show, I would expect things to be a LOT nicer than if I had just TiVo’d them myself!) So now we have recorded television that costs a lot of money and doesn’t let you use it in the same, simple, straight-forward way that you would use regular recorded television shows. And not only that, but only absolutely up to date Windows users get to partake? Who do they think is going to watch this stuff? This is an early test of downloadable television programming. I think that that is a great idea and that downloaded television will soon displace regular television because it is a better format and more convenient and does not rely on the cable, broadcast or satellite infrastructure to get the programming out to people. You will be able to get the television programming that you want, anywhere that you want. You can get the same programs when you are on vacation in Pakistan that you can get sitting at home. No one will be limited by the stations that their local cable company chooses to carry. What will actually happen is that BBC America will be the only channel left once everyone discovers how funny My Hero is.

But the biggest problem with this British television station’s plan is that they aren’t targetting early adopters with this fledgling technology. Wingows users, while there are many of them, are not the bleeding edge kind of crowd, generally, that the Linux, BSD and Mac people often are (ok, Mac is often not bleeding edge but there are many BE’ers on Mac too.) These are the folks that you need to tarket with a service like this. MPEG1 or MPEG4 (a.k.a. DivX) make much better formats for downloaded video. Anyone can play them. No spyware or expensive software necessary. If you don’t make early technology available to these users, you will never know if anyone will use it because those who lead with cool, new technologies won’t be there using them.

I moved some stuff out to the archives today (BTW: This quarter has already DOUBLED the total content from any other single quarter and we still have more than a week left to go!) I did an update to the navigation system and, for some reason, now the archives are being shown in a really weird, narrow column. So anyone reading the archives today might have an issue until I get that resolved. Oops. Sorry about that.

I had two yogurts for breakfast (yeah, another $.80) and now I am having some cottage cheese for lunch. I know you are all excited. Wegmans still has yogurt super cheap so be sure to stock up while you have the chance.

Ok, I got the archive issue fixed. That was pretty simple. I also removed the Technorati link on the nav bar because I think that it was pretty useless and didn’t look very good. While I was working on the old archives, I also did a little bit of code clean-up. Some of those old pages are pretty rough. I also downloaded tons of new stuff from IT Conversations. It is unbelievable how much content they have there!

While I was working on the archives I noticed how long ago I was talking about the RX-7. I have had that car for four years now. Four years! I have owned that car about as long as any other car I have ever had. That is a really weird feeling. I got my first car, a 1981 Chevy Monte Carlo in 1992. It had about 110,000 miles on it when I first bought it at age 16. $450 and it ran great. And it had a V-8 as well. That was cool. It was baby blue, that wasn’t so hot. But take some, lose some. That car was really good and it lasted me for a long time. I drove absolutely everywhere in that car. It was huge and seated six adults comfortably – or as comfortably as any car can. Wide bench seats made the middle seats almost usable. It wasn’t uncommon to have five or six people crammed in there. It was so cool.

When I first went to college in Michigan in 1994, I didn’t take my car with me. I can’t remember why, but there was some reason like the cost of parking or something. But when I switched to going to MCC in Rochester I started driving it all of the time again. Somewhere around 1997 I decided to sell the car and use the money to put towards a newer vehicle. By this point the car was seventeen years old and had 200,000 miles on it. It was still running pretty well but it was starting to not look so hot and it was only going to last so much longer. Considering the bad gas mileage that it got, it was time for an upgrade. I sold the car for $500 to Seth Webster who went to MCC with me. The car didn’t last long with him. His friends were really hard on it and it was falling apart in no time. I miss that car. I had that car from the summer of 1992 until fall 1997. Five whole years. At the time that I had this car, Arti was driving his 1972 Ford Maverick Grabber. What a beast that was. And Phil was driving a Ford LTD – what a boat. And Josh, I think, was mostly driving his dad’s pickup. Big monster of a thing. Really old with like a Dodge 383 in it or something like that.

In late 1997 I bought my first Buick. It was a blue 1991 Regal. That was a nice car, quite the upgrade for me (1981 to 1991!!) It had the awesome Buick 3.8L V6 engine. I didn’t like that it was front wheel drive but I knew that I would have to get used to that one way or another. That car was awesome until, suddenly, one day in the winter of 1999 it just decided to incinerate itself (a Viking funeral, as Min would say.) I was driving south on 390 heading to work at the Wellesley Inn in Brighton, right across from MCC. Andy was working the shift before me and I was on my way in to relieve him. I must have been covering for someone that day because I was an auditor and didn’t normally work at all during the day. As I was coming south on 390, I was talking on the phone with Andy at the time, the car starting shaking and having all kinds of issues shifting. I wanted to pull over but traffic was really heavy and no one was going to let me get close to the side of the road. So I was stuck in the center of the highway. The car started going slower and slower as it locked itself into lower and lower gears. Then, suddenly, I started to see a little smoke start coming out from under the hood. I told Andy that I saw smoke and what was happening and he was yelling into the phone “Get out of there man!!” Once the smoke started to billow someone let me over to the shoulder. But until I was stuck on a bridge. So, on 390 South in Gates on the bridge going over either Lee or Lexington, I jumped out of my car and stood on the side of the road watching it burn up. The smoke became black and thick and made it almost impossible for people to drive across the bridge. I tried throwing snow under the hood but that wasn’t about to do anything. Andy had called emergency services from the hotel to get the police and fire department out to help me. A nice truck driver stopped and came over with a fire extinguisher to help me out but that didn’t do much either. There just wasn’t anything to be done. The car was toast.

The worst part of the story is that my dad was on his way to work at Kodak in Greece and had passed going north on 390 and had noticed me with the burning car but didn’t know that it was me because of the smoke and because the car looked black. So he didn’t circle around to help and I had no one else to get me to work. And it was rather cold out too. So a friendly policeman (actually the term nice might be better since he helped me out but he definitely wasn’t happy about doing it) drove me up to Kodak and dropped me at the “Theater on the Ridge” where I was able to contact dad and he drove me down to work. What a day that was. Since that time, Dominica (whom I didn’t know until years later) has had her old K-car die in the same way and so has Nate with his more recent late 90’s Buick. Luckily, I was insured through Progressive who took care of the whole thing without any hassle at all. I actually got more money that I figured the car was worth out of it.

So I bought another Regal to replace it because I had been so happy with the last car. This one was a 1992 Regal GS. The GS is the sport wheels and suspension package that they had back then. Same engine but the car rode and handled better. That car did much better and lasted until I bought the RX-7 in 2001. But I didn’t get rid of the Regal then, I had both. The Regal wasn’t replaced until I got the 2002 Mazda PR5. And even then I kept three cars until I sold the Regal the following spring because I got the PR5 just as winter was coming on so I garaged it until the weather was nice. So the second Regal lasted, for me, from 1999 until 2002. Almost three years but with overlap with the PR5. I sold the Regal to a girl from York High School as her first car. She was sixteen at the time, I believe. I think that she is in college now and I know that she still has the car and drives it around York from time to time. It appears to still be running well. It had almost 200,000 miles on it when I sold it.

I kept the PR5 only until the middle of 2003 when I traded it up for the Mazda 6 that I am driving now. My car seems so new but I have actually had it was a while now. About a year and a half. Although out of that time, to be fair, one month was spent without a car and one month was spent driving John’s Camaro. So really, the RX-7 only has the Monte Carlo to compete with in terms of longetivity. And the RX-7 is way cooler.

Min got her car in December, 2001. So we have had that for almost three and a half years. That has been a great little car for us. It has really treated us well. Even though it has been a major expense for us, I am glad that we have had it. It has been important to have reliable vehicles all of this time. And it should be paid off in just a year and a half from now. That will be a nice feeling. My car still has a while to go. But the loan is at 0%, so that isn’t such a big deal.

I went outside to get the mail this afternoon and realized that it is totally amazing out there. I really wish that the courses were open, I would call Josh and see if he wanted to get a round of golf in. The sun is shining and it is warm and there isn’t a lot of wind. So I decided that I needed to get outside and get that excercise that my doctor keeps talking about. I loaded up Andy’s iRiver MP3 player with some good content and headed on out the door for some fun in the sun. Well, at least a nice walk.

Okay, before I left I managed to discover one of the weirdest ideas for a website ever. It is not necessarily appropriate because it is just people calling in to a publicly available audio blogging telephone number. But it is really hilarious. For those of you who can get to it, you have to check out this site. Maybe I will start compiling the funniest parts because it is REALLY funny. The info about them is over at SGL2. I did some searching and discovered a really cool site called PodCasting.net which has a directory of podcast “stations” where you can get tons of cool stuff. I am sure that if we all dig through there that we can find some really amazing stuff. And tons of crap. I already found a really cool podcast called “Teachnology :: Technology with an ‘A'” I am going to be trying that one out.

I was really late getting my check out to our disposal company again. They know who I am when I call. I have to tape the check to the door tomorrow for the guys to get when they get the trash. How lazy am I? Like I couldn’t have gotten that in the mail over the weekend.

While I was out walking I ran into my neighbor Linda. She owns the townhouse that shares the wall with mine. She said that she was down in her basement this morning and discovered a crack in the foundation that we can only imagine is from all of the blasting that Walmart has been doing. Now we all have to check our basements really closely to see if we are having issues as well. What a pain this is going to be. Who knows how we deal with something like this. Is it just an insurance issue? Is it the builder’s problem because the house is only two years old? Is it Walmart’s problem because they are damaging houses? I hate having to deal with this kind of stuff.

I ended up walking around town for about an hour. I went straight down Highland to Oak and around the block that way. The weather is really, really nice. It must be awesome for all of the Yorkers who just got out of school and our now on Easter Break.

Today is the first day that I have ever been sitting in my office in the basement and suddenly heard my own voice coming from the room above me. I guess Min is taking the initiative to read SGL. Maybe the audio posts are peaking her interest. She woke up while I was out walking and was already out of the shower by the time that I got back.

I have to stay up late tonight because we are beginning work tomorrow at Wegmans and I want to shift my schedule a little bit before I go in. So I am planning on sleeping in in the morning (that means don’t call me first thing in the morning, Eric.) So I called Jeremy to see if he wanted to come over and hang out tonight (officially to study for his A+ exam but can I help it if some AoE2 gets played?)

I have a pretty bad cold today. Really congested. Min said yesterday that I had a cold but I didn’t have on yet. I think that she cursed me. Min started blogging today with her very own site Mad Knitter. Welcome to the Blogosphere honey.

Dad came over at 5:00 and the three of us went out to Denny’s for dinner. I think that every single waiter, waitress and manager there knows who we are. We eat there SO often and we are about the only vegetarians in town so they really remember us (I almost always get the mini-burgers with the meat replaced with boca burgers.)

After dinner, Min and I watched What To Do In Case of Fire, a German film about a group of friends who build a bomb in 1988 that doesn’t go off until 2002 and then blows up a building in Berlin. Now they are hunted by the police and they have to figure out what they are going to do. It was an interesting drama. Very different than most films but isn’t that what I always say about German films? It was good; we both liked it.

I got Jeremy at 10:00 and he came over to hang out. I am planning on staying up pretty late tonight because I have to work the overnight tomorrow night and I want to shift my schedule as much as possible. While he was here he managed to discover the Llama Song that I have posted at the top which is one of the funniest and most apropos things that I can imagine for this site so I put the link at the very top of the page and plan to leave it there, at least for a long time. It is from Albino Blacksheep which is a really cool site.

Jeremy and I decided that we could not resist playing a round of AoE2. It has been a month, I think, since we last got a chance to play.

We managed to get in two games before the night was through. Actually, we managed to get two games in before 2:00am! I won, of course, I am the master. The first game went really well and Jeremy did really well. The second one I got the jump on him and that was the end of that.

Jeremy posted his first audio post tonight to his (or is it) website. His posted immediately but both Eric and I had to wait an entire day before our first audioposts came through.

I found a new, free RSS feed aggregator for Windows tonight and I am trying it out. I also got Feedburner set up for SGL2 so you can use that to easily link to there. Eventually there will be an RSS feed for SGL as well, but that might be some time in the future yet. I am not ready to put that kind of work into modifying this page. I have all those back years of dailies that would need to be converted over to XML. Oh, the horror! [Everyone say it with me: SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!] I would have to come up with some storage format for the site as well. There is just too much work involved for me to be thinking about doing it now. And I am just learning a lot of the cool features that I would want to have incorporated into the site when I redo it.

I tasked Jeremy this evening with copying down all of the lyrics to the Llama Llama song. We had that song playing over and over again for the longest time. That is definitely one of the funniest things that I have ever heard. I am going to save the lyrics for tomorrow – but I expect everyone to learn how to sing the song. Eventually we will record a bunch of our own readers singing the song and make that version available on the site. That might be even funnier than the original song.

Everyone needs to check out the new website dedicated just to talking about Blogging Eric: Eric Is An Even More Giant Poop Head!

I think that if I was to write anything else to the site, things would just start to get silly. So I am going to go retire and become a duck.

I had to get up and getting moving this morning because I had a doctor’s appointment out in Batavia relatively early this morning. Nothing to worry about, just the regular annual or semi-annual checkup. I needed to get my acid reflux prescription refilled but nothing exciting there. The evil scale monster reported that I had put on ten pounds, however, since the last time that I had been in about a year ago. And, to add insult to injury, it also appears that we have always been incorrect about my height and I am actually just UNDER 5’9″ instead of being just under 5’10” like we had always assumed that I was. So not only did I gain some weight but apparently I have less frame to squeeze that weight into now.

So, in order to combat my weight issues, my doctor wants me to start using Weight Watchers to watch points and all of that. He said doing it online would be fine. However, the big business supports over at Weight Watchers actually actively block anyone attempting from using the site through the use of the Firefox free web browser and only accept customers who have paid their respective dues to either Microsoft or Apple to have one of their commercial browsers available (that is, Internet Explorer or Safari.) What kind of crappy business practice is that? Is it really possible that Microsoft and Apple are providing such significant kick-backs to Weight Watchers that they are willing to alienate a part of their audience? Or do they simply dislike the open source community so much that they are willing to risk financial losses in order to make a point. And what is the point? It hasn’t been made very well. Is there one renegade web designer inside that decides to block the second most popular browser because he or she hates having to support multiple browsers and not a single executive of Weight Watchers has ever tried to access even the home page of the company (yes, even the main index page is blocked to us Firefox users.) And it is important to note that the site is blocked. Not even cunningly made to work poorly for those of us without IE or Safari but they actually redirect us to a page where they act like there is an error. Of course, this could all be fixed simply by removing the redirect capability and the site would work fine. In fact, the error page even says that the site will probably work fine – except we are not allowed to go to the site to find out whether or not that is true. I am very disappointed in Weight Watcher’s position on this. I can’t believe that they either have such a tremendous level of disgust for serious computer users or such a low quality threshold for their web developers and don’t even bother to check up on their work. In either case, I am extremely unimpressed. I did discover that, at least it appears to be so superficially, that if you go to a legal notice page that there is a link available for on the error page – that from there you can work your way back to the actual home page and the site appears to function just fine from there. But Dominica was competely confused and at a loss for how she would use the site and it took me five minutes of playing with it to get it to work. I tried Firefox on both the Windows and Mac platforms and it reacted identically. What a pain. Min came down after a little bit and said that she had figured out how to bypass the error page as well. But most people would not put this kind of effort into getting their web site to work. I did send them a note about Firefox being blocked. Once I got into the site I also noticed that they are running on Microsoft’s ASP.NET which takes care of all of the browser detection issues and would not have had a technical issue with Firefox in the least so the issue has to be on Weight Watcher’s end. Once we got into the site we found out how much it costs. It is terribly expensive. And every little thing costs more and more money.

After my doctor’s appointment this morning I drove up to the hospital and picked up Eric and we went down to Jay’s Diner for some lunch. Since I am supposed to be eating healthier, I just got a fish sandwich and some potato chips. I guess that that is healthy. Healthier than what I normally get, I guess. We hung out for a while and had some coffee. On the way back to the hospital we decided to stop off at a Chevy dealer because Eric wanted to show me how ugly the new cars and trucks were. He and Amanda have been looking into getting her a new vehicle and they want to get a truck so that they don’t have to always borrow one. We ended up test driving a Chevy Colorado Extreme Edition – or something like that. The Colorado replaces the Chevy S10. It was okay, not too bad. But nothing special either. It did have a lot of interior room which really set it apart from other vehicles that we ended up looking at.

After leaving the Chevy dealer we stopped by Borders so that I could look at some books that I was interested in. That only took a few minutes, though. Then we swung by a Ford dealer on the way back and Eric test drove a used F150. Ford really didn’t have any trucks available that would suit his needs. Not even if he ordered one. They don’t make a truck with the specs that he is looking for which surprises me because what he is looking for is really practical. I guess that truck buying has really become the domain of soccer moms and trucks smaller than the F250 are just considered toys. You can see this in the awful designs and colours that they now come in. The trucks have really become just extremely impractical versions of mini-vans. While we were waiting for the salesman at the Ford dealer, I spotted some stray Chicklets lying on a platter. So I had some. I don’t think that I have had Chicklets in twenty years. Really, twenty years is a real possibility. I was a little kid last time that I had them. Boy did they bring back memories. I used to get them all of the time when my mom used to take me down to the little corner grocery store in Pavilion. They were my favorite thing when I was really, really young. It has been so long…

While we were out we swung my Target and I swapped Raise Your Voice hopefully getting a copy that will work this time. While I was there, I noticed that they had Sex and the City: Season VI Part 2 on sale. It is the last set that Min needs to have the entire collection. So I got it for her. She will be very happy.

We ended up being out truck shopping all afternoon and we had to rush home at the end of the day. I got home around 5:30 and woke Min up. She decided to cook salmon for dinner tonight but she didn’t have everything that she needed so we had to run out to the grocery store to pick some stuff up.

Tony and Jeremy got some blogging in this afternoon. Whoo-oo. Someday my blogging peeps and I will take over the world. There will be a new world order and it will be good. Mu ha ha ha.

I introduced Min to the insane world of Andy the Intern today and she was laughing hysterically reading his site. He has got some really serious insite there that shouldn’t be overlooked. Andy is so popular that he, apparently, gets many regular proposals of marriage and at least one offering him lots of popsicles. No, I am not kidding.

Min made teriyaki and apricot glazed salmon for dinner tonight – it was really good. It was late by the time that we ate and after dinner we only had enough time to squeeze in a single episode of Are You Being Served? before she had to run off to go to work.

It has been brought to me attention that a large contingency of loyal SGL readers is forming at York Central, my old high school. In fact, Art, Danielle, Josh, Phil and my old high school. That is freakin’ sweet guys! Yo to all my peeps. I don’t even know what that means but it is pretty cool. But don’t think that just because you guys get vacation starting Wednesday that that excuses you from regular readings of SGL. Not at all. In fact, while on vacation you will be expected to be reading SGL regulary as well as checking into SGL2 and the other way cool sites that are linked from over there. And you can hear the audio when it is fresh! There hasn’t been any audio for the last few days but I will do what I can over vacation to keep things interesting.

I have heard that my audio blogs are not able to be played at YCS because the firewall is filtering out everything from audioblogger.com. So I am posting links to the audio clips directly from here. I am still new to audio blogging so there are only ten posts right now and the first several of them are just me testing the audio posting service. The clip that everyone at YCS will be looking for is Not Another Poop Out of You.

Here is a quick, and temporary, link to all of the audio posts from SGL2 over the weekend. Not much in there but the last four or so are decently interesting. The first five or six are just test posts. Soon I will have an audio post page, maybe, here on SGL so that we can host all of the audio ourselves since it seems to be in high demand. If you are reading SGL from a regular Internet connection and are not blocked by a firewall you should go over to SGL2 and get your audio posts from over there as they have more bandwidth than we do. St. Patrick’s Day Greeting, Having Issues with Audioblogger, Still Working on Getting Audio to Post, Audio Meant for ScottAlanMiller.blogspot.com, Is Anyone Out There Alive at Audioblogger?, One Last Audio Post Today, Welcoming Blogging Eric with a Poem, East Avon Ham Party and Troubles Posting so Signing Off from Bed. Okay, enjoy.

I am really tired tonight so I am signing off early. I will post more tomorrow.

I promised to provide a link to the audio post from SGL2 so that everyone at York Central School (my old stomping ground many, many years ago) can hear the post. So, without further ado, here it is: Click to Play Audio from AudioBlogger.com Server. I don’t have any way to know if the post will still be blocked in the school or not because I don’t have access to a computer inside the BOCES firewall but at least I know that everyone can get to this page. The audio clip is stored by Google at their Audioblogger site. This is a clip of Sara Richardson and the Ladies Society girls from “The Music Man” doing a quick sound bit of “pick a little talk a little”. Tony West and I recorded the girls in the school’s lobby right after the show on Friday night and posted them directly from there.

Another week of making it to church on time. Who are we? I think aliens have taken over my body and are driving me to church each week.

After church, dad, Min and I were guests of Arnie and Lucy Kelly in Perry Center. I haven’t been over to their house in years. We had a really nice time there altough I dominated most of the time that we spent there talking about military history (maybe that is why I had such a good time.) We weren’t able to stay for very long because Min had to get to work and dad had to get down to Leicester to babysit grandma while Sara and Jeremy (a.k.a. Mini Me – Or is he?) are in their musical and their parents are watching. So we had to cut things short. Min dropped me off at home on the way into work.

I wanted to relax some this afternoon so I planted myself down in front of my laptop and I turned on Zinf and started listening to some Tech Nation interviews downloaded from IT Conversations. While I was listening, I heard Moira Gunn interviewing Malcolm Gladwell on TechNation (TechNation is broadcast on traditional radio via NPR) and they talked about autism and aspergers as those who suffer from those conditions are affected by the use of body language for communication. It was quite interesting. You can learn so much from listening to awesome content from podcasting.

My sinuses are really bothering me today. But I can’t quite figure out why. I can breath just fine and they don’t hurt. But my breathing “feels” weird. I can’t quite explain it. It is kind of like I am on the verge of snoring while I am awake and can’t do anything to stop it. I have realized, recently, that when I go to blow my nose I will quite often cause my throat to close off – just like I would do if I was snoring. It is incredibly painful but for years I always associated the pain with the movement of my tongue in the back of my throat or something like that. Only recently have I realized that since my throat closes with I am breathing in OR out that that has to be what is happening when I am trying to blow my nose. All of that pressure causes by throat to close even when I am trying consciencly to hold it open. And boy does it ever hurt when it closes off like that.

For all of the super Wil Wheaton fans out there, Min just called me to let me know that the deluxe edtion of Stand By Me is coming out this Tuesday. Although I think that $16 might be a little bit extreme for that movie. It is a movie of such an age that one would expect it to be $10 or less and not an unlikely pick for the Walmart $7 rack. So I am rather doubtful that we will be running out to spend that kind of money on it. But Min really wants to get it so I could be wrong – it has happened before. [Update: Jeremy blogged about his performance after he got back from the after party.] [Update: Jeremy has since deleted that blog.]

I talked to my aunt and uncle – they said that the musical went tons better tonight. It is too bad that Tony and I didn’t wait until this afternoon to go to see it but with Min going to work and dinner at the Kelly’s I couldn’t have scheduled that. But I am glad to hear that they managed to pull the show together for the final night. I guess last night was a bit better than Friday night’s show as well. It would have been tough getting a show to be cohesive since Friday was their first time through the show – they would never have seen each piece in the context of the show as a whole.

I have been reading the really interesting book “Got Game” and it has made me realize something: No matter how much I feel right now that I will continue to embrace change and work to understand and keep up with younger generations as I get older, by the time I am sixty I will have lost the ability to fundamentally understand how the “kids” in their mid-twenties think. It is unavoidable. The book looks at how the “video game” generation is changing business and why baby boomers (our parents) are having such a hard to relating to and understanding us. The premise is that a completely immersive life style change happened in the early 1980’s and only those young enough to take part in it even knew that it was happening. The change is that video gaming and boomers, almost across the board, just don’t understand what it is like to have grown up with pervasive video gaming. For those of us in the VG Generation (born post 1975), video games are an accepted and expected part of life. 92% of us play video games. It’s just a part of life. We can’t imagine life without it. We have never known a world without highly interactive entertainment. Television, to us, has always been the “mind rotting” passive form of entertainment that our parents often think that video gaming is. Video games have changed our outlook on the world from that of previous generations in ways that neither they nor us can really understand since no one can really understand, not well at least, both sides of the equation. It must be really frustrating to the older generation(s) to look at us and realize now that we have modified the human cognitive development process and that our minds actually work differently than theirs do. In fact, many of the things we were told to do as children might have been counter productive to us given our modified development. One of the ways that we are shown as being different is that video gamers show a special ability to multitask and to do so very rapidly. Previous generations often felt unable to concentrate on anything if there was too much going on – too many irons in the fire, if you will. But video gamers are often better served by having more going on, it helps to keep us interested, makes life more engaging and, because we can multitask with so little overhead, it allows us to switch between tasks when we meet with a stumbling block in one area so that we can maintain productivity when previous generations would resort to the traditional practice of “making sure the walls don’t get up and leave when no one is looking.”

Look at the impact of video games on my generation (I am considered to be one of the very oldest of my generation, apparently) made me think about how there must have been similar, although probably less significant, factors like this to define previous generations or generation groups (the video game generation is a loosely defined group without an end but beginning in 1975 and encompassing the “baby boomer echo” which includes Gen X and Gen Y and is still gaining new members.) I think that the real impact is probably only going to exist in the baby boomer echo (BBE) which are the kids of 1975-1995 because these are the kids who are going to understand the kids from 1995-2010 or so but won’t likely have many kids of their own until after that time (there is likely to be a little overlap.) So this is the transition period where we are just discovering the factors that separate the generations. Just like kids today are growing up with pervasive communications networks (the Internet, cell phones, low cost telephone, etc.) Imagine life as a typical teen today – easy, free access to communicaions 24×7. Sure, not everyone’s parents allow them to use all of the communications options that are available – but many are allowed to use them and many more use them anyway. Communication has become so simple and available that the world of adolescence has changed so dramatically over the last five years that I can’t even begin to imagine what it is like to be that age now. When I was 15, the only forms of communications that I had with people were traditional post (a.k.a. snail mail) which was ridiculously useless and I probably used for inter-personal communications on no more than 20-25 separate occasions and telephone. But for me, living in rural Rochester southern area, there were no people that I knew that were not long distance. When I attended private school (see: Blogging Eric’s description of our elementary school lives.) from K-8, there was not anyone that I knew from school that was a local phone call (nor did I know anyone who lived within 16.7 miles that I wanted to hang out with on a regular basis.) When I later went to high school (9-12) at York Central High, I was once again confronted with the phone issue as the school itself was now long distance (although a ten minute bicycle ride away) along with all but one girl in my class whom I only barely knew but could bond with over our mutual screwing by the tepephony powers-that-be. So for me, most of my adolescence was spent in a world totally devoid of communications with the outside world. This was enhanced by the fact that we lived in the country and I could not walk to the house of someone I knew and was not able to bicycle to the house of someone I knew until I was 14. And then it was still 16.7 miles in one direction. But now, teens today have a completely different world. The prevalence of cell phones, VoIP and low cost traditional telephony has made voice communications simple and available to almost everyone almost all of the time. Teens today can scarcely imagine a world where they couldn’t reach anyone they knew at any time day or night. And they would especially be amazed to find out that people used to have to pay by the minute just to call their school or a kid who lived down at the end of the road. Telephones didn’t change much for sixty years and overnight they got to be so different that we can’t even imagine how much they are impacting kids in high school today. At age 16 I couldn’t call my friend who lived three miles away without paying long distance charges (that would be Josh Relyea) and today, for less monthly charges, we have unlimited calling to the entire US and Canada! But that is just the beginning. Now with email and instant messaging (not to mention blogs, home pages, video phones, Video-over-IP, file sharing, multiplayer online video games, online directories, etc.) kids are able to communicate with each other, easier, faster, cheaper at anytime of the day or night. And not only can they communicate in ways that replace the need for traditional technologies, but they can also use these new mediums as ways of meeting new people. Suddenly teens and pre-teens can interact with kids from other schools as easily as kids from their own. Kids from the country can talk to kids in the city. Kids can carry on ten conversations at once – plus use the phone. Keeping in touch is just a matter of course. The social aspects of the connected society are of little import to adults but to adolescents the changes happening are reshaping the world that we live in and I can only imagine how it will change the adults of tomorrow. Already I can see the forces that are changing the younger portion of my own generation in ways that will make it difficult for me to relate to them. The digital divide is hitting the generations only now as we discover the effect that simple communication changes will have on the teenage lifestyle.

Looking back I can see similar shifts – much less drastic but similar – affecting two major generations groups. One being the baby boomers – my parent’s generation. They were the generation raised with television. The first really passive entertainment media. Sure, their parents had radio, but radio was just a supplementary form of entertainment. You listened to the radio while you did chores, played with toys, read the paper, painted a picture, etc. Radio was only barely entertainment to be compared with television. But television was disrupting to the household. It made it difficult to eat dinner together as a family. It stopped people from reading as much (the Internet is giving us that back.) It made people expect to be entertained instead of being able to entertain themselves. It taught people to be able to totally ignore huge portions of the information that was presented to them. They learned to consume electronic data quickly. They learned to have very short attention spans and to switch rapidly between subjects. Before television, reading a book would generally cause a person to follow a single storyline for a long period of time since they would only read a single book at a time. Once television was available, people began switching between shows every thirty to sixty minutes. Attention spans dropped and storylines would become disjointed and intermingled. Parents of chilren born from 1945-1965 (the baby boomers) must have wondered what so much time spent in front of a television would do to their children. But I am pretty sure that they were comfortable with it and had a pretty decent idea of its impact. They were able to watch television with the kids and to share in the experience. They only lacked the adolescent impacts such as the social structure that allowed kids to talk to friends about shows, etc.

Now look back another generation. My grandparent’s generation, born from around 1915-1935. I don’t know the common designation of this generation. [This generation was to additionally be shaped by the Great Depression which was a one time occurrence and not a significant technological shift that would permanently change the way that we dealt with, understood or interacted with society.] But this generation was the first generation to have ready access to both electronic long distance communications and to long distance modes of travel. The telephone was invented in 1876 but it was this generation that was finally able to really use the telephone on a regular basis. They would grow up with the telephone being available almost everywhere. Emergency communications were always available and, when necessary, talking to a person from another town was almost always an option. In fact, the telephone usage of this generation would be almost identical to the usage by their children and by their children such as me. My grandmother’s telephone experience would have been extremely similar to my own and my father’s. This generation was the first to have semi-affordable and somewhat reliable automobiles. Travel between cities was not only possible but almost regular. Long distance travel was still very uncommon but suddenly very accessible due to the introduction of the airplane and the recent opening of airports. The generation previous to this one would have seen any distance over 10-20 miles as a major difficulty (except in the rare cases where train travel was available) and personal communications would have been limited to post or, in an emergency, telegraph. Imagine how this generation grew up in a “foreign” world to the one of their parents. They were also the first to have radio. Radio allowed for news to be diseminated dramatically more rapdily than newspaper had ever been able to do and it gave a real sense of people being connected to each other. Radio created a real sense of community that would have been unavailable previously.

So Andy and I were looking up something about the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” or Mormons as most of you know them. We had some questions about secret (sorry, I mean sacred) underwear – but I will let Eric blog about that topic. Anyway we found a clip taken from the “Book of Mormon” and apparently, there is a book or chapter in the BOM called Moroni. Now, maybe I am confused about this but isn’t moroni the plural form of the word Moron? Maybe the Mormons know something that we don’t. Oh wait, no, we know it too.

Andy actually went to bed significantly before me tonight. I didn’t even know it was late at all and I went upstairs to get a drink of water and he had gone to bed. That almost never happens.

I keep hearing sounds from upstairs like someone is up and walking around. I can normally tell exactly what is going on upstairs when I am in my office because we haven’t insulated the floor yet so it is just the plain joists there and you can hear every little thing. So I run upstairs to see who is up there and I don’t see anyone. Andy is still sleeping and there is nothing weird going on. No one could be hiding upstairs, it is a small house and it just isn’t feasible. This happened a few times. I have no idea what is going on. I finally gave up trying to figure out what I am hearing.

I decided that there needs to be a new term generated to deal with all of the fake blogs that there are around so I have decided on the term BLAM. You can read more about BLAM at SGL2. But I thought that it was pretty cool to have my own original industry term but I think that it is a good one and that it is needed so now we have one. Everyone should use it right away to refer to all of those awful, fake blogs trying to sell us stuff.

So, at 2:17 this morning I decide to be safe and to check my calendar for tomorrow. Oops. Doctor’s appointment first thing in the morning. I guess I need to get out there for that. It is in Batavia. What a pain. Forty minutes of driving. Ten minutes waiting in the lobby. Then for five minutes he says “Everything okay?” And I say “I ran out of Protonix.” Then he writes me a prescription and it is forty minutes back home again. No wonder Target is planning on putting in the ten minute clinic into their stores.

3.5 hours of sleep. Oh just great. I didn’t go to bed until after 5:30am and I was up by 9:00 because I wasn’t feeling well. Ugh. Now I don’t feel well AND I am really tired. Just great. So I went ahead and got up and took a shower and got ready to face the day. Dad called just after I got out of the shower and said that he needed to come over to use my Internet access and that he would be over in half an hour or so.

Dad arrived around 10:30 or so and set up in the basement to do some work with the high speed connection. I had to use his laptop, anyway, to test some theories out about offline files and caching and stuff, so that worked out pretty well.

At 12:30, dad, Andy and I went over to the Omega Grill for some lunch. I have been trying to get fish into me to keep up my protein so I got the fish fry (leftovers from last night.) It was really amazing. I think that they change their batter. After lunch, dad ended up working at the house until just after 3:00. He never stays that long.

I had some cleaning to do. Min is due back home tonight and I want to make sure that the house looks much better than when she left. But it will take a bit of work.

Andy and I went up to the city around 6:00. I am really late on paying the RG&E bill (electric and gas) and I kind of have to pay it today. So we ran to the back to deposit some money. Then we hit Borders real quickly. There are a couple of books that I have been looking for. I didn’t find the one but I did find “Got Game” which looks really interesting. It addresses the impact that the upcoming “video game generation” is going to have on the workforce over the next several years. I read some clips of it online and have been very interested in reading it. It is from the Harvard Business School.

Then we had to get to Tops in Avon to actually pay the bill. We got there and found out that I had to pay with a personal check which, of course, I didn’t have. We tried everything that we could think of but ended up having to drive back to Geneseo just to get a check and them rushing back to Avon. What an incredible pain. While we were there we got dinner at Tom Wahl’s. Yummy.

When we got back to Geneseo, Min had just pulled in and was starting to unload her car. We got her in and visited for a little bit. She is really tired and is ready for bed. She was excited, though, that dad had dropped off the CSI that he had recorded with Wil Wheaton in it so she decided to watch that before going to bed. While she watched that I worked on getting tonight’s post taken care of. I ran in just to watch the bits with Wil which amounted to about thirty seconds, it seemed like. Very disappointing.

Sorry but today was rather uneventful. So I will sign off and go get my much deserved snuggles!

I woke up this morning to an extremely painful cramp in my left calf muscle. Because I was wearing the CPAP, I wasn’t able to reach down to my foot to pull it up and the pain kept me from thinking clearly so I had a really hard time dealing with it. I will be limping all day from that.

I ended up getting out of bed at 6:00am because of the leg cramp. So, nothing like an early start when you don’t need it. I went down to Perry to meet dad at the Silver Lake Family Restaurant for breakfast before I headed down to Castile to teach for the day.

Before I left the house this morning, I checked over at SGL2 and the audio posts from yesterday that I had been working on finally came through. So I am very excited that I am now able to easily record audio posts. That is going to be really cool once I can think of something interesting to say.

I started teaching down in Castile at 9:30 this morning. One of the parents from the school had been listening to Tradio (um yeah, there is actually a radio program called Tradio that runs on Warsaw’s WCJW Radio out here) – anyway, so they heard someone auctioning off some computer keyboards and so the parent bought them. When I got in there were about twenty five Dell Quietkey keyboards waiting there for us. The Lord really does provide in mysterious ways. Last week it was the mice, this week the keyboards.

While I was teaching, a local farm called the church and said that they had a printer for them to take a look at and see if they were interested in. The church didn’t want it so they called over to the school. They brought it over for me to check out. Once again, the Lord is providing for us. Just as we were thinking that the school was probably going to have to spend over $500 on getting a nice laser printer to meet the needs of the student’s printing throughout the school, we suddenly had a high volume Minolta colour laser printer delivered right to us. Praise the Lord.

Classes went okay today. I am definitely not the teacher. I am sure that all of the students will be very happy to have Dominica back in two weeks – there is no computer class this week because of Easter vacation.

After the school day was over, I had to get home and take care of some emails and stuff because I was out all day. The biggest thing was that Wegmans called while I was out and they are going with my proposed schedule for their project this summer which means that I will be busy working with them, most likely, until September or maybe even October. The schedule has me working overnights Monday – Wednesday of most weeks with some weeks being only two nights. Over the next two weeks there will be two total nights of work and then the real work begins after that. It is really wonderful that the schedule is going to be the first half of the week because my overnight schedule is going to completely coincide with Dominica’s schedule so that we will get the opportunity to see a lot more of each other this year. It is also a big relief just to have a good idea of what is going to be happening for the next six months and to know what the revenue stream is going to be looking like. I am only going to be working part time – but it will be enough to allow us to relax quite a bit and get some things caught up a bit while simultaneously allowing Andy and I to really get a lot of work done on other projects this summer that we really need to be focused on.

After talking with Wegmans and getting everything ready for next week I drove up to Avon to get Tony so that we could go see “The Music Man” in York this evening. We stopped by the house for a little while before going to the show. While we were here, Tony set up his own blog, Urinal Cakes, that everyone should head on over to and check out.

We got to the show about ten minutes before it started. I hate to have to say it, but the show was pretty much unbearable. Tonight’s show was the first entire run through that they managed to do and it was painfully obvious when they got to the end of the show that they had never even discussed what was going to be done when the show was over. But I will let Jeremy tell you about the show himself at his blog ItSmEoRiSit. He was definitely not happy about how it turned out. Everyone knew that it was going to be really rough – we have known for two weeks now. They lost a couple of cast members within the last two weeks which made it really rough since they were trying to get new people ready for their parts at the last second. Sara seemed to be having a bit more fun. After the show, we managed to get a sound bite from Sara and some of her friends in the Ladies Society (the pick a little, talk a little girls) and we posted it to SGL2 while we were still at the show. I just love audioblogging. On Sunday night, I will try to make a link to the audio clip directly from here so that everyone at York can hear the clip since all of the big blog sites are blocked but SGL is not.

(Update July, 2006 – Originally there was a link to Its Me Or I Sit by Jeremy Richardson but in the year following the original post he deleted the entire site and there is nothing left to link to.)

Tony and I took Jeremy home and checked to see if the sound bite had posted yet. It had and we laughed about that. Then I took a look at Jeremy’s latest programming project that he had just wrapped up two or three nights ago.

I didn’t really get a chance to eat much today. I went to breakfast with dad but just got two pieces of toast. And I was able to steal two donuts from Castile while I was there. And I got one meal in the middle of the afternoon from McDonalds in Avon but that was a long time ago. So Tony and I went up to Denny’s in Geneseo for some coffee and to get a bite to eat. We got there around 11:00 and it took forever to get seated because Livonia, York and Letchworth had all had musicals and everyone was there having a party. The place was a mad house. Tony and I ended up hanging out there until 4:30 or so in the morning. Then I drove him back to Avon and then took myself back home to Geneseo.

I didn’t have my laptop set up so I decided to do a timely update on SGL2 through my cell from my bed. So go over there and listen to me posting the evening’s events from bed. Who would have ever thought of blogging from bed?