Sheep Guarding Llama

Dad and I met out in Perry this morning and ended up spending the morning working until almost noon. He really needed to get some food into him so we went over to the Silver Lake Family Restaurant and got some lunch.

I have had to do a lot of work with QuickBooks recently and I have been more and more coming to the conclusion that I really do not feel that it is a good product. From an accouting perspective it does a lot of really good stuff and it is pretty easy to use. But from the technology persective, it is a totally embarrassing product that is, apparently, intentionally bypassing the standard safe guards and backup procedures of the Windows operating system and making itself incredibly unstable so that they can blast you with advertising for their own backup services which you wouldn’t need if they weren’t keeping you from making your own backups. In fact, we are pretty sure that under certain circumstances, the QuickBooks program is actively deleting copies of your files just to make it more attractive to use their “online backup” services. I am really happy that Microsoft is bringing out a competing product later this year. As long as QuickBooks doesn’t give me any option but to be on the Windows platform, I would definitely prefer working directly with Microsoft. If QuickBooks were to consider working on different platforms, I might consider them still – but I really don’t see them removing their heads from their proverbial storage locations quickly enough to keep Microsoft from taking their lunch money and someone else moving into the Linux space leaving Intuit dazed and confused.

We are still having problems with our phones today. This is going to be a never ending issue for us, I can tell. Once you get weird problems like this, they never stop.

On my way back home, I had to swing by dad’s house to pick up the spare routers that were sitting over there. We just found out that my grandmother has lost her hearing and they have started to have to write messages to her because she can’t hear anyone talking anymore. Her hearing has been getting worse recently but we weren’t expecting anything sudden and dramatic like this.

My big project this week is going to be preparing some sort of lesson plan for Min to teach from on Friday. I am going to be busy all day on Friday trying to get as many computers working in Castile as is possible in one morning. I did manage to maneuver some of our equipment around here and come up with a switch that we can use over at the school to at least let Min start teaching this week. We were worried that we weren’t going to have any way to hook up enough computers to really do anything but we are just barely going to have what we need. But she will have to work on the laptop for herself because there just isn’t enough computers for her to use one of the ones that they have.

Min was totally exhausted when she got in from work this morning. She had to work her regular double last night only she had two children’s hockey teams staying in the hotel which always makes for a lot of fun as well as having the chain’s QA guys checking in on her shift and beginning inspections first thing in the morning. So she had a ton of work to do and was sort-of under scrutiny the whole time. Not a lot of fun.

I had an important meeting up in the city today and not much else going on that really demanded my attention. So, to be sure that I would be on time, I went up to the city very early and met Eric over at Bruegger’s for a quick lunch. I love PB&J bagels for lunch. We got our regular coffees and hung out until it was time for my meeting. I had Eric drop me off because the meeting was at the UofR and it is always a complete pain trying to find your way around or to find anyplace to park. And even if you do find a place to park, it is going to cost you an arm and a leg just to park there and you will still have to walk three miles to get to the exact building that you need to be at. So having Eric drop me off at the door of the library made life a whole lot easier.

The meeting went well and I was on my way home by 3:00. I had to swing over to Home Depot to do some quick shopping for dad on the way home and head over to his place to get a replacement router to give a try. It turns out that accidentally three replacement routers were sent out to us instead of just one. Nothing can ever be normal.

I got home at 4:30 and got one of the replacement routers installed. Cross your fingers. Then I had to head right out because I am working on someone in Groveland’s home computer tonight. I don’t normally do this sort of stuff but the person was kind of desperate and wasn’t able to find anyone who was able to come out there and work on her computer so I had agreed. I was to be out there at 5:30. It ended up only taking me a few minutes out there and I was able to get home by 6:30.

We weren’t up to really doing anything for dinner tonight so we went over to Burger King and got some spicy fish sandwiches. I was hoping that they would be really interesting but it turns out that the “spicy” is really just Frank’s Red Hot poured onto the fish and that really isn’t a very good taste to go with fish. Actually, I alwasy complain about vinegar being a bad taste to go with fish and I also complain that Red Hot is just flavoured vinegar so that was definitely the wrong combination for me. It is weird eating at that Burger King now because I really have not eaten there very many times over the years and I have spent far more time working at that Burger King since that is the BK where I was trained as a manager back in the 90’s. So it holds a lot of memories for me. I can remember quite vividly sitting in the back room by the back door in a “closet” kind of space watching training videos showing Floridians making burgers and touching the food with their bare hands because in Florida there is almost no health code for restaurants and that is where the training videos were made. So everything we learned had to be prefaced with “do what we say, no what we do.” Man that was a lifetime ago.

After our quick dinner, Min and I ran down to Leicester and picked up Jeremy to come up and watch some Star Trek. It had recently come to our attention that Jeremy has never seen Star Trek and didn’t really know what it was. And I am not just talking about the original series but he has never seen anything of Star Trek, not even the movies or one of the newer series! So we had to remedy that situation. We showed him “Space Seed” with Khan from the first season of Star Trek and the we watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan which is by far one of the better movies. He wasn’t very impressed with the old television show but he did think that the movie wasn’t too bad.

I took Jeremy home just a little before midnight and came home to play with Mr. Humphries. He hasn’t been awake at time to get much attention lately and he has been really lacking in human companionship which is very important to an isolated hamster.

We were up and at’em early this morning. Min and I actually managed to get to church early for once. That was pretty amazing. I can’t remember a time that we were actually early for church. More or less on time, sure, from time to time that will happen. But early is unprecedented. We tried a new way of getting from home to LaGrange today going up Covington Road in Leicester and that took a few minutes off of the trip.

After church it was time for our weekly luncheon with dad at the Silver Lake Family Restaurant where Eric used to work, many moons ago. We got home just in time for Min to head on off to work. The weather is supposed to be really awful tomorrow morning so I might have to go up to Henrietta to pick her up.

I got home and Andy and I hung out for a few hours in the living room talking. It is nice having a real living room that doesn’t have any sort of a television in it because it doesn’t tempt you to just turn it on and watch whatever happens to be on. Of course, since we don’t have cable or an antenna, we aren’t normally all that tempted to do that anyway. But at least we aren’t tempted to pop a DVD in.

I rode along with Andy over to Denny’s to get dinner. I had eaten relatively recently so I just got some coffee and a salad. After eating we went over to Walmart to see if they had a doorknob that we needed but we weren’t able to find one. We did find some good movies in the bargain bins, though, like Abandon, Swing Shift, Memphis Belle and The Terminator. We didn’t get back to the house until almost 7:00 or so.

I have some catching up on the blog to do today. I have fallen a little bit behind the last few days because of the new computer. I don’t have everything set up yet to allow me to write the dailies from there so I am over on my laptop for now. I assume that I will have that all set up over the next few days. I am still getting used to the new system.

Only five days until Min is teaching her first class over at Castile Christian Academy so I am working tonight getting, hopefully, another computer ready to take over there. We want as many decently fast computers there as possible to make it easier for her to teach. The slow computers will be a real hinderance to the process. She and I plan on spending most of the day Friday over there getting things ready for the class in the morning and then her teaching the class in the afternoon. This is her first time as the actual teacher having to prepare a lesson for the class.

While I was working on the dailies, I decided to try out watching a movie on the Mac – so I watched The Man Who Knew Too Little with Bill Murray. It is awfully silly but relatively entertaining. It has some really funny people in it that you would never guess like the guy from the British television show that always says “I don’t believe it” – Father Ted fans know who I am talking about – and Alfred Molina who is always really, really good.

After The Man Who Knew Too Little, I decided to move on to Josie and the Pussycats. But between movies I spent some time reading Dancing Barefoot as I had to go back and forth between a couple of comuters for a while and wouldn’t have a chance to get into a movie. Actually, I was GOING to watch Josie but when I sat down to actually watch it, I decided that I was in the mood for something sentimental so I switched to Lover Come Back – another sappy sixties Hudson / Day movie. You know the ones, anything with Doris Day singing the title credit music has to be a certain type of movie.

When my cousin Sara stopped by to pick up Jeremy this morning, I was so dazed that I was barely able to get to the door and I didn’t have my glasses with me so I wasn’t able to see at all. We really need to wrap up the Friday Night Game a little bit earlier so that I can continue to function on Saturdays.

After Jeremy went home, Tony, Min and I went out to Denny’s for breakfast. Andy was pretty exhausted and decided that he wanted to just stay in bed. So just the three of us went out to lunch.

When we got back from lunch, Andy took Tony back to Avon and spent some time up there hanging out with his family. Min wanted to do some shopping so we headed up to Henrietta. We went to Home Depot and picked up the insulation that we needed for my office. I really want to get that done because the room is still really live. But the insulation that we put into the server room really is helping make that a lot quieter. I can barely hear the servers upstairs anymore. After picking up the insulation, we went to Borders and did some book shopping. I picked up Wil Wheaton‘s latest book, Dancing Barefoot which I have been wanted to get for a week or so. Min kind of wanted to read it too and I know that Andy will read it so I figured that it would be a good buy even though it was a little bit expensive for such a short book. I had really wanted to get his first book, Just A Geek but they didn’t have it at the store. Of course, their computer had it reversed which one they had there. Their inventory system is completely useless.

We came home to have some dinner. I wasn’t really hungry after the late lunch so Min just cooked some dinner for herself. I had a little but not very much. While we had dinner, we watched Hilary Duff’s new movie, Raise Your Voice. It was okay. Not her best film but it was well done and enjoyable. While we were watching the movie, Josh called and wanted to play AoE2 again. He hasn’t been able to play much over the last few months so he is addicted again, I guess. Being able to play remotely over the VPN connection really makes it convenient to play. I wish that we had a few more people who could play that way, it is so easy to play a pick up game.

Josh, Min and I got two games in. It didn’t take too long. I completely squashed them on the first game. The second game we kept having problems wih my computer crashing so we finally gave up with me losing pretty significantly at the end.

Min and I decided that it was bed time because we had to get up to go to church tomorrow.

Its Friday! Whoo hoo. The game is tonight. Everyone is looking forward to it, we are expecting a full house.

I had a lunch meeting today up at the Pakistan House in Brighton. Boy is that place good. After my lunch meeting, I went over to the UofR for a little while. Eric and I went over to Bruegger’s, our regular hang out. We took off to head home around 5:00. I had to get home and ready for tonight’s game.

We ended up not getting a full eight players, only seven. Art, Min, Jeremy, Tony, Andy, Josh and I played two games starting around 8:00 and going until 3:30am! It was a really good set of teams, though, even with an odd number of players. We had a really good time. The first game was quick but the second one went on for hours. It was a really good night.