Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.