Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is St. Patrick’s day, the patron saint of green beer. It is a tough job but somebody has to do it.

For those of you looking for another cool blog to read to kill some time, check out Andy the Intern’s Page over at BlogSpot.

More blasting today. I can’t believe that this is still going on. We are guessing that maybe it is the salt mine blasting and that they are directly under us now. I have no idea. It is two or three times a day and it scares the crap out of you every time. Neither Min nor the hamster can sleep through it and they both need to be able to sleep during the day. Pretty soon I am going to have to go talk to the village about this and see what can be done.

It was another two yogurt lunch today. Wegmans has had the Yoplait Light Far Free yogurt on sale for just $.40 which is way too cheap to pass up. That means that lunch is just $.80!

I have a 2:00 phone interview this afternoon with Corning. No word yet from Wegmans so I don’t know what they are planning on doing yet about their project. I probably won’t know until it is too late.

I decided that I wanted to start expanding the scope of Sheep Guarding Llama but I didn’t want to just start throwing tons of stuff into the main site here. So, we have a new sister page over at BlogSpot that will be carrying addition SGL content. I think that the new site is rather cool and I hope to make it a valuable addition to SGL. My first order of business is to start audioblogging over there so that all of you faithful SGL Blog readers can start getting the podcast content and can listen to me during the morning or evening drives into or from work instead of that boring radio crap. Talk about fighting the power – we need to get everyone audioblogging (okay, well at least a number of relatively interesting people) and listen to them instead of these inane radio talk show people that are on in the mornings. I can’t take it. They aren’t funny, they are interesting and we spend most of our time listening to commercials. In fact, I have managed to drive from Geneseo to Rochester on a number of occassions without ever hearing a single song! The Internet is going to give us the power to take the media into the public’s hands and it is time that we did so.

Ok, one more yogurt as an afternoon snack. We are up to $1.20 now. Still, try to beat that. Only 300 calories too and non from fat. Plus, don’t forget that just three servings of dairy a day can help promote weight loss of just cutting calories! But that doesn’t mean that it is a substitute for regular excercise, not smoking and eating a well balanced diet. [Stay in school, don’t do drugs.]

I posted my first audioblog today over at SGL2 after getting off of the phone with Corning. My cell phone the instant that I hung up from posting the update so that timing could not have been more perfect.

The interview with Corning seemed to go decently well. It is always hard to tell. It was the same interviewer who had turned me down on November 1, 2004 but they are looking for a slightly different skill set this time and I have six months more experience – ha, ha. Maybe my pending degree will swing the balance. What made them want to interview me for the same position twice I will never guess. But, whatever floats their boat. It sounds like a neat position doing some interesting work and I get the impression that they might end up using me for a lot more than they are planning on because I bring such a varied skill set to the table. They were picking my brain about XForms during the interview – good thing I was studying those recently. If I get the position, I guarantee that XForms will be a major factor in decision.

Even more blasting, three times in two hours. This has got to stop. It is getting disruptive and I am worried about there being damage to the house. The entire structure shakes when they blast.

Well, I have been trying my hand at audioblogging but have not really been getting anywhere. I have done two posts so far but neither has shown up on SGL2 so I am not really sure what is not working. There is pretty much no configuration information to get incorrect so I just am not sure what is not working correctly.

Eric finally got around to really blogging today, the first of the SGL crew to pick up the torch and run with it. Andy has tried a little but stopped. Eric is shooting for a more personal blog rather than Andy’s more technical one. You can check Eric’s blog out at Blogging Eric. It is pretty good! He manages to get personal his first time out! He even gave audioblogging a quick shot although he is having posting problems with that as well. I am really glad to see that Eric managed to mentions turds and urine in his very first post.

Eric, Amanda, Julia and I are having dinner tonight over at the Omega Grill. With Min out of town I have no one to hang out with so they took pity on me. Dad and I are having a quick breakfast in Perry tomorrow before I teach in Castile all day.

Okay, today is like totally blog day. One new blog item after another popping up – but then tends to happen whenever I discover some really handy new technology or service. And I have just begun sinking my teeth into modern blogging tools so expect to see a bit in the future. Anyway, the Friday Night Game site is being moved over to a new location. People will be able to post comments over there so that everyone can look and see who is planning on coming easily without having to call us here. And it is a cool, dedicated site. Hope it works out well.

Eric and Amanda stopped by to pick me up around 6:30 and we headed over to the Omega Grill. We had a nice time at dinner and I got a chance to play with Julia. Boy is she getting big. That really makes me feel old. We didn’t head back home until almost 9:00.

Dad needed me to download some video CDs for him so that was my first project tonight. So while I was working on this and other mundane tasks I listened to Steve Wozniak speaking at Gnomedex on Andy’s MP3 player. I just love Podcasting 🙂 I burned a CD of over 1500 minutes of talk “radio” for Jeremy to listen to since he doesn’t have a real Internet connection.

I meant to get to bed early tonight but, of course, that wasn’t going to happen. The downloads for dad ended up taking much longer than I had anticipated and they ended up going pretty late. I called Dominica just after midnight to talk about the plans for the classes tomorrow. Nothing like waiting until the very last minute.

Well, I have to be up pretty early tomorrow so I am going to call it a night even though there is a ton of stuff that I would like to try to get done before heading off to bed. Today may be the single heaviest blogging day ever. Not only did this page get a ton of my ramblings, but all three of the blogs over on BlogSpot got a ton of stuff added to them. Be sure to get over and check them out. I am going to make one final attempt at getting an audio post made for SGL2 before going to bed. Maybe we will be really lucky and all of my audio posts, and Eric’s, will be posted in the morning. That would be an awfully nice surprise – but I won’t be holding my breath.

Min headed out to Frankfort this morning at 7:00, straight from work. She should have arrived around 9:30 to pick up Dexter from the kennel. I am sure that he was very relieved to see her. He is a very nervous dog. He probably has really bad gas too – that happens a lot, especially when he is nervous.

I know that a lot of you really don’t like reading about the technology work that I do so I have decided to create a new blog dedicated just to that subject matter. ScottAlanMiller.BlogSpot.com is my new blog space that you can check out to see what is going on with me professionally so that SGL can be dedicated to the more personal matter of being my personal diary space. I decided that I wanted to try out using Blogger anyway and since Google provides free and very handy hosting over at BlogSpot I felt that that was just too easy to pass up. I don’t need to act all cool and do an entirely hand crafted blog because I have SGL which I have been hand coding since 2000. I was blogging when blogging wasn’t cool, I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. So there. If any of you have not tried your hand at blogging yet, you really should. Hit up Blogger and sign up for a free account and get started. It only takes a tiny bit of effort and you could have a really cool blog of your own in no time. If any of the SGL crew decideds to get a blog, let me know and SGL will link to it so that we can start a little community of our own here. I am getting tired of doing all of the writing and never being able to link to any of my friends’ or fans’ pages. Help me out a little guys.

I worked in the office this morning but went up to the city just after noon to get my weekly coffee and bagels with Eric and to run a few errands. We did Bruegger’s as usual and hung out there from like 1:30 till 3:00. Then we hit the bank and Home Depot. Then I had to get down to East Avon for the Livingston County Chamber of Commerce Business After Hours event that we have once a month. It is really just a chance for local business people to get out and get to know one another. It is fun and I always manage to meet new people. Tonight, though, the cool thing was meeting someone that I knew long ago. One of my and Josh’s coworkers from our Pizza Hut days (um, can you say 1995?) was working for the company that was hosting this evening’s event and, believe it or not, I recognized her and we started talking. It was weird because I hadn’t seen her in ten years. Ten years! Boy does that make me feel old. It isn’t often that I get to meet someone that “I worked with ten years ago.” And Josh worked with even longer ago than that! We are all getting old, I guess.

After the after hours, I met up with dad and we went over to the Omega Grill to get some dinner. After dinner, he came over and we watched The Incredibles which he hadn’t seen yet. Of course, he loved it. It is such a kickin’ movie! He took off right after the movie and I went to work blogging. Writing two blogs now will keep me even busier. But at least this one will be more fun for everyone to read (everyone who isn’t into technology, that is, which is mostly everyone.)

I did talk to Min briefly this evening but she was in bed because she didn’t get any sleep all day today. So she was pretty tired. She and Dexter (the puppy) had just gone to bed a little while before I called so she was pretty out of it. I should hear from her tomorrow morning, I expect. I have a phone interview with Corning tomorrow as well. I don’t know what I want to do about work this year. I have three good potential jobs right now, any one of them could be really good. Wegmans wants me, potentially, three nights a week until September. This would be great because it is low stress, I already know exactly what needs to be done and it would give me total flexibility to do all of my regular work during the day with minimal impact. RG&E is potentially interested in me for five overnights a week until October. That would be quite a few more hours than Wegmans and would run longer but we don’t know what the pay scale will be like yet nor how hard the work would be. Most likely, that would impact my regular work a bit more – but not so bad that it would be a serious problem. And then, tomorrow, I am interviewing for a second time for a position with Corning. The position at Corning is a regular day job doing a type of work that I almost never do, so it would potentially be really interesting. Corning probably will have the best pay and benefits – but it will cause the greatest disruption to my regular work and cause me to see Min the least since she is currently working nights and probably will be for the next several months at least. The Corning job is six months with likely extensions taking us up to around the same time period as the other two jobs. I was originally turned down by Corning a few months ago but the manager of the person who turned me down decided that they wanted to interview me themselves (it is a really difficult position to fill so we are guessing that I am about the only local resource that they have been able to find.) So I have a really good shot at it since I am going to a second round interview. There is also a slight chance that the Corning and Wegmans contracts could be done together which would be a ton of work and take all of my time and I would have to have someone else managing the company while I did that. That would be really rough. So anyway, that is where I am now. The most likely thing, as always, is that none of these jobs will come through and I will be left with nothing as usual. But if one comes through, they will all come through at once. That is the nature of things. So, I would appreciate everyone praying for guidance for me since whatever I choose will have a pretty serious impact on things for the rest of the year.

Andy decided to stay home today. He has been getting a TON of work done on this 3D game engine that he has been working on and he spent a lot of the day refactoring that (geek speak.) He has had some pretty impressive looking results for days now. It is really cool. I can’t wait until there is a real game running on the engine so that we can try it out.

Tony called this evening and is going to be going to the York musical with me on Friday night. Dad is going that night too. I don’t think that anyone else is going. It is at 7:30, we think, at York Central High School in Piffard, NY this Friday. It is also showing on Saturday and Sunday but I don’t know the details of those shows. Call Jeremy if you need to know.

Before dad left, we engaged in a serious search for my tripod that he needs to borrow for Friday night’s performance. Of course, like all things in this house, we were unable to find it. Even after going through the recently cleaned basement and even going out into the garage to conduct an extensive search. It wasn’t until hours after he left that it occurred to me that the tripod might, just might, be in the hall closet next to the umm… CAMERAS! Yes, yes, of course, there it was. Right where a burglar would have looked for it. Sometimes I am really an idiot. So anyway, dad, if you are ready this, I have the tripod sitting by the garage door.

For any Trillian users out there, there is a new version, 3.1, that has been released sometime fairly recently. John “The Surfing IT Wizard” Stephens first introduced me to Trillian in its beta form back in 2001 while we were taking classes together at TC3 in Dryden! Trillian is the ultimate Windows instant messaging platform for people who have accounts from multiple IM vendors like AOL, MSN and Yahoo! It is also cool to simply fight the power and use indepedant technologies. Yeah!

Ok, well it is time for me to get off to bed. Long day tomorrow.

I slept well last night, nine and a half hours! I woke up just before Min got home. She worked late today but forgot to tell me that she was going to be working late.

I had to spend the majority of the day working on the instant messaging server trying to get that restored. Not what I had been planning on working on this week but you never get to plan for these things, I guess. It is all a part of the job.

More blasting today. Even louder than it has been. Min isn’t able to sleep through it very well. She ended up having to get up early because of the blasting. It really isn’t very responsible: the level of blasting and noise that they are creating over there without even mentioning it to anyone.

Min and I went and did some grocery shopping this evening so that I will be ready for her to be gone for the rest of the week. We went to Wegmans and Aldis and I ran over to Walmart to pick up The Incredibles. Dad is really anxious to see The Incredibles.

Min cooked her Mexican casserole dish for dinner and made some really fancy salads that were really tasty. We watched Terms of Endearment which I have never seen. That was a really crappy movie. That is what I refer to as a “feel bad” movie. Definitely not my type of thing. I don’t mind dramas, in fact I really like them. And I don’t mind feeling sad in a movie. What I don’t like to feel is indifference. And that is exactly the emotion that I feel when I watch this movie. Not one single character in the movie did I care about or connect with. All of the characters were shallow, mean people and I was happy to see them having terrible, boring lives. But that was all that this movie amounted to, just awful and boring. It was difficult to sit through the entire thing. How it won any awards I will never know. And what a pathetic cast. John Lithgow was the only decent actor in the entire thing and he was maybe on screen for five minutes of this drawn out, over two hour movie. I hope I never have to sit through that again.

After the movie, Min had to head off to work. I won’t see her again until Sunday. 🙁 I am very sad.

Well, at 11:21 this evening, our Jabber server is now back online. There are a couple of good things about the server outage of this past weekend. One is that we managed to upgrade four version of our Jabber server so we are running on a much newer codebase now with some new features. Two is that we managed to consolidate two of our MySQL databases so I have less that I need to manage now. Three is that our single, largest, loudest and most power hungry server has been officially retired leaving us living in a much quieter house than it has been in a very long time. I am glad for the break. And I am very relieved that everyone using the IM services can log back in in the morning. I needed to know that that was working before I went to bed. We also have the cool new feature of being able to connect to the jabber server through the cool Jeti Java based IM client which is really handy for people who are away from their regular desktops.

Tomorrow I plan to be around most of the day. I have a Chamber of Commerce event in the late afternoon so I should be leaving the office around 4:00 or so. Thursday I should be in all day. Friday I will be teaching in Castile for Dominica all day and then heading out to York in the evening to see Jeremy and Sara in their high school musical, “The Music Man”. Tony is planning on going to the show too.

Min took her computer with her tonight. She is going straight out to Frankfort from work in the morning. She will be watching a lot of cable television (can you say BBC America) and playing a lot of the Sims 2 University. Maybe she will be tired of it by the time she gets back here. Four days of that game must be enough to get sick of it. I expect that she will be on the Jabber server most of the time while she is gone so look for her online, those of you with Jabber connectivity through Niagara.

I looked at the total used bulb time on our projector last night. We are happy to report that after almost exactly a year and a half, we have used about 1340 hours on the projector bulb. They claim to get approximately 3000 hours from the bulbs. That means we get almost exactly three years from a bulb at our current usage rates. That is really impressive, I think. Since we don’t have any other television in the house to take any significant load off of the projector. Most people use it as a secondary viewing device but it is our only real one. Min does watch a lot of movies on her computer or on my laptop and she uses Andy’s portable DVD player a lot. But for regular family viewing, the projector is all that we have. And we have gotten much better, over the past year, at getting people to turn the projector off when they are done using it. So I bet we are using it less now, rather than more. So, the bottom line is that the projector is much more economical than we had thought that it would be.

Well, it has been a long and stressful day of trying to get that server back online and working again. I need to get to bed and relax a little bit. I would really like to stay up and read but my old eyes just aren’t up to it tonight. So, I am taking a few minutes to jam-pack the MP3 player with some cool content to listen to as I drift off to slumber.

Okay, goodnight everyone, I will talk to you tomorrow.

Well, after last night’s crapfest, you can imagine that today is not looking like a really exciting day to me. I had to sleep for the whole morning because I was totally exhausted after last night. I probably didn’t even fall asleep until after 6:00 this morning. And, of course, if you try to sleep during the day when you usually work during the day, the phone rings quite a bit. So I was never able to get very much sleep at any point. I decided around 1:00 that I couldn’t sleep anymore and got myself up and got to work trying to salvage as much as I could. Fun, fun, fun. At very least, the basement is relatively clean now – the improvement is really phenominal.

I posted the missing updates and got to work looking into updating the Jabber server that we use. We are without instant messaging today which is tough because I use that a ton for communicating with people all throughout the day. I feel lonely without it.

We are still in need of spare keyboards down in Castile if anyone has any to spare. About five would be really handy.

I got called from Wegmans this afternoon. They are not starting the project that I am on with them until next week so my week is more open now – good thing if I plan to keep blowing up servers. I am supposed to be working with Wegmans starting next Wednesday. I am teaching for Min this Friday because she is going to be out of town. She is going to be puppy sitting out in Frankfort for her parents while they are in Houston with Francesca’s family. Min is planning on going out to Frankfort on Wednesday morning leaving me home alone all week. Well, home with Andy anyway. She should be home either Saturday evening or Sunday morning. Jeremy and Sara’s musical, “The Music Man” is this weekend, so I will be going to that. I am also hoping to make it out to the musical at Elmira Southside this weekend that Bob is playing in. I don’t know what nights I will be trying to do what shows, though. Most likely the York show on Friday because I will be going there from having taught all day. But we will have to see.

Min got up around 6:15 and started cooking close to 7:00. Spicy Collard Greens and vegetarian sphagettios. She wanted to cook something more fancy but I was in the mood for spaghettios. Hey, it happens.

We haven’t had a chance to see Wil on CSI yet. Dad recorded it for us but we are waiting for him to make a disc for us to watch.

Dominica was very impressed with all of the cleaning that I did in the basement. She couldn’t believe that we were able to get into the back storage area. That has been inaccessible for so long now. We discovered a box of wine and a rack of wine that have been hiding back there for a long while now.

While eating dinner, we watched Sean Connery and Christian Slater in The Name of the Rose which is a really cool movie that I love from when I was a kid watching late night channel 31 movies. The Name of the Rose deals with the Inquisition in the fourteenth century and a series of murders at an abbey in northern Italy.

I was really tired, even after having gotten up so late today. So I decided to head off to bed right after Min left for work. Maybe I will manage to get an early start on the day tomorrow. One can hope, right?

Today’s update is brought to you by the letter “H” and the adjective “Crappy”.

We made it to church on time again this week. Pretty soon, if we aren’t careful, people are going to start to develop unrealistic expectations of us!

When church was over, Min, Dad and I were going to go over to the Silver Lake Family Restaurant like usual. I stopped to talk with someone at church and I thought that Min had left with dad. I didn’t see her when I went out to get into the car. I tried calling both of them but neither had their cells on. So, I assumed that Min had caught a ride because she wanted to get us moving along so I drove quickly down to Perry so that, if she wasn’t really there already, I could zip right back to the church to look for her more extensively. Well, she was still at the church and realized that I had left just seconds after I had but she didn’t bring her cell phone with her so she wasn’t even able to call me. She managed to find a way to call me right as I was getting in Perry. She found a ride and came down to meet us. She wasn’t very happy. I am in a bit of trouble today.

After Min went to work, Andy and I hung out in the living room for a while talking and then I got to work cleaning the basement some more. I am so much more productive when the office area is all cleaned up that I think that it is really time well spent getting it to be just perfect. Of course, for any of you that has seen the basement, it is SO far from perfect right now! The place is really a mess but it really is improving, one little bit at a time. We just have so much stuff it is practically impossible to get it all put away somewhere. So much of it has no place to go to. There is an overabundance of paperwork floating around in the basement. It is tempting to just throw it all away but you never know when you might end up looking for something that was in all of that paperwork.

I did a ton of cleaning in the basement today. I am really proud of myself, it is really noticable down here. Around 8:00 I went up to the city and picked up Thai from The King and I on East Henrietta and took it to Min at work. I had to make up some for leaving her this morning. While we ate dinner, we watched some of the 1995 Harrison Ford film Sabrina. I always thought that I had seen that movie but I am beginning to think that I never have. Julie Ormond is in that and does a horrible job. They act like she is a little girl in part of the movie but are completely unable to make her look like anything but a frumpy, middle aged woman who has tanned far too much. No amount of makeup can adequately cover that many rinkles. She was only 30 when she did Sabrina (I am guessing they meant her to actually look 18 but they didn’t convey it very convincingly) but she really looked much older. She has a strange accent and I was never able to pinpoint what she was trying to do with it. Min thought she was trying to sound British but I thought that she was trying to fake a French accent. I don’t know. But it had Harrison Ford in it, so it has to be good.

I got back and continued cleaning. Andy watched Coupling: Season Four. I could hear him laughing upstairs. He is completely hysterical.

Well, I was supposed to be doing some minor server work this evening involving installing some new memory in our main server. But this was not to be the case this evening. One of the memory sticks that we purchased recently had a short in it and it burned out part of the server motherboard. What a horrible night I am having. Our instant messaging server ended up crashing during the night as well while I was starting and restarting everything. I decided that that service was less critical so I am leaving it to be dealt with tomorrow. One thing at a time.

I finally got our main server back online and functioning more or less properly by 5:30 am. What a long, stressful night. And I had been hoping to be going to bed around midnight.

Sorry that the weekend updates are running a little bit behind. I was planning on posting everything tonight but things got out of hand and I need to wait until tomorrow.