Sheep Guarding Llama

Well, the big news this morning is that the router is still up and working. 62 hours at the time that I am writing this. This is blowing away the previous record of just 27 hours or so. We are really hopeful that we have fixed the problem.

Min and I did the usual church and then lunch with dad down in Perry. Then we had to race home to get Min off to work on time. It sure would be nice if she just worked half an hour later or so. That would make a huge difference.

After Min went to work, Andy and I went out to get some coffee. Well, he went to get food and I went to get coffee. More coffee that is. Sunday is like coffee day for me. We went to Denny’s and got back home just after 6:00.

I forgot to mention on Friday that Andy decided to take a “mental health day” – being totally exhausted after putting up with everything going on at work. They are starting to get really whiny because he told them that he wasn’t happy because they weren’t providing him with any work to do and just having him sit there all day so his boss comes around and complains about having to find him work now. Really professional environment as you can tell. Yes, his manager actually complains that he has to find work for him to do. I can only imagine the serene life that they had before they hired a worker! It must be nice to live in a world where Danny Wegman is happy to just hand out cash like a private welfare program.

So I checked today. SGL is now more than half the length of the Bible in total number of words. Isn’t that weird to think about.

I spent the evening reading around the house. I didn’t go anywhere or even watch anything. Pretty uneventful.

Today is Josh’s all day Lord of the Rings party. We are watching all three extended editions back to back to back. That will take some time.

Min had an appointment this morning in Perry so we had to get up and get moving first thing in the morning. I didn’t have to get up right away but didn’t really feel like staying in bed.

While Min was in Perry, I got the theatre ready to take over to Josh’s. We are taking the sub-woofer and the projector over for the party. It took me a while to break things down and to get them packed up and into the car. While I was getting ready, Phil called and said that he was going to be going to party and wanted me to bring his computer over for him. His computer has been at our house for almost a month now. So I got that packed up as well. With so many computers moving out of the house the last few days, we are really gaining a lot of space in the basement. I need to start getting as much stuff as I can packed into sealed plastic bins and moved out into the garage. We finally have some shelf space available out there as well. I have had one shell of a computer that died years ago sitting around the house that I finally threw out the other day and another one that needed a power supply that would have cost more than the computer was worth that I threw out. So that is seven computers just this week!

It took me a long time to get things packed up because I kept getting called about this job in Albany. They must have called close to eight times this morning wanting to talk about different aspects of the project. I still don’t think that the project will really happen, the state just doesn’t ever follow through on things that they hire for. I have learned my lesson about state projects over and over again. The state encourages the companies that they work with to lack integrity in all of their dealings.

Min got home just after noon and we managed to get out the door by about 12:15. We arrived at Josh’s around 1:00. Setting up the theatre was quite a project. Getting the projector set up took some doing because we had to deal with the cables and we had to switch DVD players to get one that had progressive scan. Josh built a projection screen out of a couple of white shower curtains which was fun mounting to the ceiling. It worked pretty well, though. We got to watch the movies in DTS ES 6.1 digital surround. It was awesome.

It was 2:30 when we finally got the movies started. It is going to be a long day. It is over twelve hours of movies! Min, Jo, Josh, Phil, Bob (that’s Montana Bob), Foz and I all made it for the marathon. I am writing today’s and yesterday’s updates while we are watching the movies. Bob has apparently never heard of SGL! Imagine that. I thought that we were the most well known site on the entire Internet 😉

Smudge, Josh’s cat, watched almost all of the movies with us. Smudge is 22 this year! Now that is an old cat.

Josh and Joann have moved up their wedding significantly but hadn’t told us. Josh had mentioned something to me a few weeks ago about there only being about fifteen weeks left before the wedding but when Min and I talked about it, we decided that Josh and I must have gotten confused because it was much farther out than that. But no, they are getting married in May, now. Right around the time that the final Star Wars movie releases. Foz said that Josh will be asked “Do you take this woman…” and Josh will answer “I will try” but the preacher will say “No, Do or Do Not, there is no Try!” – we all died laughing.

Boy, these movies are long! It sucks that Min and I watched all three of them not too long ago. But, for some strange reason, when watching them all together, they don’t really seem to be as long as you might imagine. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they really don’t have firm beginnings and endings. When Andy and I try to do the Star Trek marathon thing, it is always exhausting far earlier than with the LotR movies. I think that the starting and stopping and all of the recurring introductions in Star Trek really drags it out as you work your way through all of the films. The most entertaining part of watching the LotR trilogy is all of the running commentary coming from the room.

Only three more days until Eric’s virtual birthday. He will be 29 as well, shortly.

I almost forgot to mention, Jennifer Bulkley gave birth on Friday, the 18th, to a healthy boy – Gabriel Stephen Bulkley – 6 lbs 13 oz.

I ended up laying on the floor next to Min for almost all of the final movie. I was doing okay through the first two but we have seen the last one too many times recently and I just couldn’t keep sitting in the chair any longer. Right at the start of the final movie, Min went upstairs and got my birthday pie and brought it down and everyone sang happy birthday to me 🙂

We wrapped up the last movie around 2:30 in the morning. Got thing packed up and Min and I were in bed around 4:15. What a long day!

I am twenty-nine today. How did I ever get to be so old?

This morning was spent getting computers ready to take down to Castile. I wasn’t ready to leave until just after 11:00 but I managed to get four more computers ready to go. Boy did that clear up some space on my desk. My rear desk was covered in computers this week and now it is clear again. We hit the road and arrived right at noon at the school.

From noon until 1:20, Min and I worked as quickly as we could to get six computers set up at the school. We had a lot of problems and didn’t think that we would have more than a single computer working. But, just in time for the class to start, we got all of the computers working. We had to steal parts from every computer in the school to get them all set up, though. We were terribly short on power cables – about fifteen short. So we had to shut down every computer in the school and take its power cables to be able to hook up “the lab.” We were even taking monitors from other rooms to get everthing that we needed. But in the end, it worked out.

Min’s first class (she has taught before but never not as a substitute teacher) consisted of six eighth grade girls and went from 1:20 to 2:20. It really was a perfect size – other than just because we only had six computers in the lab – but because it worked out that Min could walk around and see what everyone was doing. We learned that the kids are quite a bit more advanced on the computers than we had anticipated them being. Everyone at the school was very excited that the computers were working and that Min was teaching the class. The girls in the class seemed to really enjoy getting a chance to be on the computers. It was fun. I am looking forward to working with more of the kids next week.

We got out of the school around 3:20 which is almost exactly when we were planning to and then we headed up to dad’s place to pick him up so that we could go out for my birthday dinner. Andy decided that he wanted to go too so we swung past the house and picked him up as well.

We went up to Cracker Barrel for the Friday night fish fry. We rushed to try to get there before the dinner rush started. We didn’t really make it. We arrived at 4:45 and there was already a waiting line. But it wasn’t too long. CB was packed (in case Miranda is reading this – um, CB does NOT mean Cracker Barrel.) The fish fry at CB is really amazing. It is battered but I don’t think that it is beer battered. Instead it is a light and crispy batter which is absolutely perfect. More like tempura.

After dinner we made a pit stop over at Borders. Min wanted to do some shopping. She bought me a new compact NIV Bible for my birthday. It is really nice. It has an almost rubberish cover that will, hopefully, be very wear resistant. It is a really tiny Bible for me to keep in the car. I have been wanting one but I wanted something that wasn’t paper bound so that it would last. I also picked up a book on Cisco routers that looked interesting. My dad and my grandmother each gave me money for my birthday. I don’t know where I want to spend it, though. I am really tempted to buy a nice MP3 players (one that can play Ogg Vorbis files as well) but since I have access to Andy’s for now, it doesn’t sound like the best purchase. Those are coming down in price so quickly and getting more and more storage and more features quite quickly, I should probably wait on getting one. I really enjoy having one to use, though. It is a really convenient way to listen to stuff. Funny that I find such a “cool, hip” device so nice for listening to seminars and interviews. Boy am I getting old.

We headed home after Borders. It seemed strange to be going home so early in the evening. It was barely after 7:00 when we headed back. Min and I dropped off Andy and then took dad back home (his car is still in the shop.) We called over to my cousin’s to see what was going on. They were both home so we had them come over to watch some Studio Ghibli films. We knew that they were both into Anime so we thought that they would enjoy that. First we watched Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind which is an older film, about 1983, that deals with pollution and the damage that we are doing to the earth. As are all of the Studio Ghibli films, this one rocked. I am always happy with their work. They really manage to portray a magical world that is able to really deliver a seriously emotionally moving message. Nausicaa is a famous film that I have studied in my book on Anime and have been looking forward to seeing.

Next we watched the 2002 film The Cat Returns which is a really weird, short movie about a girl who saves the life of a cat and gets sucked into the cat world as they try to force her to marry the prince of the cats. It is almost a “What?!?” movie. It was completely bizarre. I wouldn’t call it a great movie but it was enjoyable.

Bob called this evening. He and Lisa are coming up next weekend and will be hanging out for most of the weekend. They are coming up on Friday so there is no game on Friday night. Yes, I know, that two whole weeks without a game. Whatever will we do.

The router went down again just minutes after I had gone to bed for the evening. That sucks. So this morning I installed the fourth router that we have here to see if there is any chance that it will work any differently than the others before it. I find that to be very unlikely. If this one goes down, then I have to start the very difficult process or rebuilding the whole thing which is a royal pain, let me tell you.

Because the line went down last night after I went to bed, the SUSE install that I was working on online stopped about 2/3rds the way along. Now that is annoying.

While I was working down in my office, I finished watching Down With Love, what a weird movie that was. Min said that it got all bizarre at the end and it really does. It is all over the place. But it is very entertaining. Unfortunately we weren’t able to find it in widescreen so we have a pan and scan version of the movie. I can’t believe that they still make this stuff in that old format.

I was told today that I am the top pick for a job in Albany. Ha ha, right, like I will ever get a job in Albany. We have been through this many times before. The job is a 2-3 year deal out there and I would be a senior engineer on a big state migration project. It wouldn’t be very much fun but it would pay the bills. The recruiter that I am dealing with has a really hard time with English so there are a lot of details that I am not very clear on. I know that it would start in about three weeks. But, to put the job into perspective, I have put more thought into writing this paragraph about the job than I have put into the job itself. I am very sure that they will not call me again and that I will never hear another thing about it. Because that is just how it works.

Here is an article proving that Canadians are weird. And here is another one to prove that we are too.

Well, I spoke too soon on that Albany job, they called back already today. I still don’t believe that it will go anywhere – but I am surprised just how much phone traffic there has been about it. They said that they are going to call in a few hours too.

I am really exhausted today. I don’t know why but I am just really, really tired. This happens sometimes. I think that it has something to do with having coffee in the afternoon. Everytime that I have coffee when I am at home I get really tired and can barely function. I think that the caffeine dehydrates me and makes me feel really tired.

That computer that I am installing crashed on its own this time and so I had to start over for a third time. Third time is a charm, I hope. It takes so many hours to get one of these older computers installed that a few crashed can be a real set back.

I decided to try turning the SGL Archives into a regular word processing document to see how long it would be in that, more traditinal, context. It turned out to be, in Times New Roman 12pt Font, 524 pages long (this is only up through December 2004.) Or… 335569 words! I even turned in into a PDF document… of over 18MB in size! I had no idea that I had been writing so much over the years. I have really become a prolific writer, apparently, even if not a good one. If that was to be condensed to a novel sized book, it would be close to 800 pages or so! Think about that when you tell people that you have sat down and read SGL! I have heard of people reading the site from beginning to end before. That is no small undertaking. This has become a major literary milestone.

I got a call from a person in Groveland that I have been supporting and I had to run back out there this afternoon. Just before I headed out, dad emailed me and is taking Min and I out to dinner tomorrow night at Cracker Barrel in Henrietta to get the Friday night fish fry for my birthday.

Min did a ton of cleaning today and the upstairs is really looking good. She did a bunch of work on our bedroom which has been a complete disaster for as long as I can remember. It is really nice to have a bedroom that isn’t a mess. She even did laundry today too.

We went out to Walmart to do some shopping. Min wanted to get some picture frames and some curtains for the living room because our side windows have been left exposed all of this time. We picked up some movies while we were there, surprise, surprise. We weren’t going to get anything but Disney and Studio Ghibli have just released a number of their classics and you get a free movie if you bought all three at the same time so how could we resist? We picked up The Cat Returns, Porco Rosso and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind which is a real classic that they talk a lot about in my history of Anime book. And, in the bargain bin, we also picked out Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th which has to be completely awful but it has a few good people in it like Tom Arnold and Majandra Delfino from Roswell.

We got home and had PB&J for dinner. Sounds like we were being cheezy but we really like eating PB&J.

While we were at Walmart, apparently, the router went down again. This was the first time that the fourth router went down. Now I have to move on to the next phase of trying to get that unit working.

Min came down to the basement and sat down at one of the computers that I have set up for the school to start working on her curriculum for tomorrow.

The other day, when Min and I went over to pick up Jeremy so that we could watch some Star Trek, I got hit by a door on my elbow. We were worried that it had fractured my elbow because it hurt so badly. We ended up being pretty sure that that didn’t happen but my elbow is still bothering me today, several days later. It doesn’t feel broken but it definitely hurts still. I hope that it isn’t broken, that would suck.

Dad IM’d me tonight to tell me that his car is dead again. He thinks that his alternator seized on him which caused his belt to burn up which caused his engine to overheat. He says that the car has 108,000 miles on it (that is 108.000 to our German audience) and that it should be having these kinds of problems by now but it seems like an awful lot of problems to me.

Grandma is on some medication for her ears that is working. She is able to hear well enough tonight that she was able to use the phone. So she is much happier now.

I have decided that I need to start posting some of my non-SGL work to SGL so that people have access to some of the stuff that I have written. It isn’t anything exciting but I do write stuff from time to time and it would be at least partially useful if it was available online. So, I am going to, in the next few days, post an essay concerning computer education to SGL. I will let you know when I put it up.

Ok, so apparently McDonalds has gone completely out of their minds and has recently begun an advertising campaign to get people to have sex with their hamburgers. No, I’m not kidding. Do a quick web search on “McDonald’s I’d hit it” and you will find tons of links to places ripping on McDonald’s for either being so gross or so dumb. For those who don’t know, “I’d hit it” means “I would like to have sexual relations with it.” Andy commented on McDonald’s other poor advertising choice of recently trademarking “‘m Lovin’ It”… um that just isn’t right. He also made a rude comment about happy meals. So, here is a link to some new “proposed” McDonald’s banner ads that are freakin’ hilarious. And, just so you don’t think that this is just a joke, here is a link to a site hosting a copy of McDonald’s actual banner ad. Notice the guy looking inappriately at his food. There are a number of funny links backing up this story. And here is a link to a the Urban Dictionary which explains what this all means. Someone needs to talk to McDonalds and explain that this is not going to make us want to eat this stuff. I am very glad that I am a vegetarian.

Min wrapped up getting ready for her class tomorrow at about a quarter till one in the morning. We were pretty tired and we have to get up in the morning and get down to the school in Castile so we decided to head off to bed. Tomorrow is likely to be a very long day so we need our rest.

I almost forgot, it is after midnight so… happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me…

Okay, just for Wil Wheaton, here is one final and completely unnecessary link for the evening. Everyone’s favorite television actor, William Shatner! (By the way, everyone does know the dictionary definition of Shatner, right?) 😉

Only two more days until my birthday… dum dum dum…

More working on class materials today. Only two more days until Min and I are at the Castile school for the whole day.

I accidentally slept without my CPAP on last night and got like no sleep at all. But I get so tired that I don’t realize that I don’t have the machine on. I know that that is hard for people to understand but the machine become such a part of me that I really don’t even realize that it is there anymore. I actually have to use my hands to feel for it during the night because sometimes I can’t even tell if I am wearing it. So when Min got home this morning, I stayed in bed and ended up sleeping until after noon! So, I got plenty of bed time last night. Min felt pretty rested after her four hours of sleep so we got up.

I had some work I had to do right away considering how late it was so I went down to the basement to work for a little bit. Min finished assembling a new shelving / cubby hole unit that we had bought the other day to help clean up our bedroom a little bit. It has been such a mess for so long – we just have so much stuff that has to be squeezed into such a small space. There is almost no where to put everything. So we are working on that.

This afternoon, Min and I are going over to the Livingston County Chamber of Commerce’s Business After Hours event at the C.G. May Center (BOCES) in Mt. Morris. That is from 4:00 until 6:00 but we will probably go a little bit late since it is just snacks for the first little while and there isn’t a whole lot to do. My grandma is going into the doctor’s today at 3:30 to see about her hearing loss that happened yesterday. Dad and Aunt Sharon are hopeful that it is just an infection or a blockage or something. She can still hear herself talking but can’t hear anyone else, so that is a good sign.

So far today, this is about 3:30 that I am writing now, the router has remained up and running. I don’t have any good explanation for why that is, but it is a really good sign. It would be so nice not to have that unit dropping all of the time. We have a lot of customers that depend on that unit and our telephones turning off is a pretty big nuisance too. We have to worry about that all day long. And at night I have to have my cell phone by the bed every night just in case the regular phone turns off on us.

This Saturday there is a Lord of the Rings marathon planned over at Josh’s place in Farmington starting just after noon. It will be back to back to back all three LotR movies in the extended editions. Everyone always threatens to do it, he is really doing it. I don’t know yet if Min and I are going, I have to talk her into it yet. Josh is asking everyone who comes to bring a couple of dollars to help pay for the pizza. Maybe I will be able to go and work on SGL updates while we watch 9+ hours of movies.

Well, we didn’t get back from the Business After Hours until almost 7:30 but I think that we did some good networking. It was a good time and the culinary arts students from the BOCES did the catering and it was really yummy. We had a good time.

Min decided that the all day LotR marathon over at the Joshinator’s house on Saturday sounded like a plan so you will likely see us over there. Andy might go, he hasn’t decided, but probably not. It is over ten hours of movies.

Andy had a crappy day at work today. Wegmans is freaking out because they refused to discuss Andy’s work with him and wouldn’t do anything ahead of time to extend his contract or to get a new contract and his contract is up in a few weeks. Now, it turns out, they have banked on him moving into a lower position as a tech support guy and staying indefinitely. They never even bothered to ask him if he wanted to stay or if he was already contracted somewhere else or anything. They also haven’t asked him if he would be willing to have a change in contract to do a different position than what he had agreed to. He has already spoken with just about everyone involved and told them that he was not going to extend or recontract but he would be willing to stay a few extra weeks to help them out – until sometime in April. But, for some reason, Wegmans hires contractors instead of employees when the work is really awful and just hopes that they are so desperate for work that they never leave. That probably works a bit of the time, especially in Rochester, but it sure doesn’t work well when you are hiring industry leading professionals. It would never even have occurred to me to try to stay longer than the original contract at Wegmans. I would have had another contract lined up and just moved on and never even have talked to them about it. If you hire a contractor and want them to stay past the time that you have hired them for, you need to talk to them and see what terms they are willing to work with. Contractors will normally be happy to “re-up” at a location but they work day to day knowing, not guessing but actually knowing, that they have a contract end date quickly approaching and that they have to have something else lined up for when that date arrives. Without an end date, contracting is just a very inefficient way of having despairing employees. Wegmans appears to use it as a means of keeping unhappy employees from being able to vote on “America’s Best Places to Work.” It is really insulting that Wegmans treats their contractors so badly. Many of us choose to contract and have done so since the market was good and jobs were plentiful. Some of us like it and take what we do really seriously and see ourselves as a valuable and important part of the industry. When companies like Wegmans use the system to lower the quality of life for regular employees, it just makes me upset. We are professional and expect to work with other professionals who know how to behave in a professional work environment. Andy also caught two of his managers lying today. One claiming that there was no work for him to do and one admitted that there actually was plenty of work but they weren’t letting him do it because they didn’t want to take his focus away from his pending – and unannounced – move over to tech support. So all this time that he has been so upset that they didn’t have anything for him to do and were just making him stare at the walls all day (he has almost left a number of times since he was contracted to be a developer and not as a body – they actually have had plenty of work for him to do and have been actively keeping it from him.

AARGGHH!!!

Okay, enough complaining about crappy businesses. Min cooked BLT’s for dinner tonight. Andy actually hadn’t eaten by the time we had gotten home so we all had dinner together – which almost never happens. I love vegetarian BLT’s. Veggie bacon is SO good and you can have as much of it as you want because it is really healthy.

The router is still up, it has been up for just about 21 hours. I have no idea what is different today than yesterday but it is looking encouraging. Although I do worry that it might work for a few days and then go right back to the way that it was. It is always scary when you have a mission critical system like that doing something that you don’t competely understand. Even though the phone has been staying up and running, though, it still is almost impossible to use because the phone calls keep breaking up. We are guessing that the router is dropping packets on a regular basis but there isn’t an easy way to tell if that is really what is happening or not.

Mr. Humphries got up and came down to his cage door at 8:00 looking for some love and affection. He gets into his “attention” moods from time to time. He played for a while and then decided that he wanted to get into his ball and roll around the house.

Min fell asleep on the futon in the living room around 9:00. She only got four hours of sleep last night. I can’t wait until we are able to have schedules that, at least, part way mesh. It would be nice to have our free times be around the same time as each other – once in a while.

I had to do another SUSE 9.2 install this evening so I came down to the office after Min was fast asleep and watched the end of Lover Come Back that I hadn’t gotten the chance to wrap up a few days ago. I was a bit surprised at just how inappropriate parts of the movie are. It was pretty good though.

I went upstairs around 10:30 and found the whole house asleep. Andy had passed out face down on his bed. Min was sleeping soundly on the futon. Mr. Humphries was even snoring away. Okay, actually I can’t hear the hamster snoring but if I was little, I am sure that I could. I decided to come back down to the basement and keep my Rock Hudson / Doris Day marathon running. So I put in their final movie – Send Me No Flowers. It is a strange premise for a movie: a man who thinks that he is dying tries to set up his wife with her college sweetheart but she ends up thinking that he is having an affair which he then confesses to because she won’t believe that he thought that he was dying. Where do people come up with these things?

The installation that I was working on was still only a small portion completed so I decided that I needed to babysit it a bit longer so I popped in Down with Love starring Ewan McGregor and Renee Zelweger. I really dislike Zellweger but I am hopeful that Ewan McGregor can pull her along like he did with Kidman in Moulin Rouge. Min has already seen it and told me that it was supposed to be just like one of the Rock Hudson / Doris Day movies so I wanted to watch those first before watching this one. Even in the credits you will notice that they took a bunch of stylings straight out of Lover Came Back. The movie is even set in 1962. David Hyde Pierce does an amazing job of playing the part of Tony Randall. I can’t believe how close he gets to the real thing. Definitely do not attempt to watch Down with Love until you have at least seen Lover Come Back. Tony Randall even makes an appearance.

I didn’t finish the film, it was getting late. So I wrapped up the dailies and headed off to bed. Or, I guess I will do so in a minute. Goodnight everyone.