Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning I had to run down to Ithaca to do some work. I was down there for the day. I was smart enough to bring along Andy’s MP3 player and I was able to listen to hours of seminars while I worked which was really nice. Normally when I am working at a client site I have nothing to do while I am waiting for the computer – this made the time pass a lot more quickly and I was able to actually get some seminars out of the way.

While I was down in Ithaca, Min called and said that my new Mac Mini had arrived. Finally. It has been weeks since I ordered it. I have really been looking forward to it.

I got home around 8:00 and got to work setting up the new Mac. This is the first new computer system that I have had in a long time. I have had plenty of chances to work with all the different Windows and UNIX/Linux systems but using a Mac is something that I haven’t done in years. I am really interested in trying out the Mac to see how it has changed over the years. Last time that I tried it, back in 2001, it was absolutely pathetic. It was totally unintuitive and I was unable to get anything to work when I used it. I had no idea how anyone who wasn’t a total computer expert with plenty of time to work on the system could possibly use it. But, I head that a lot has changed since then and the new OS X platform has really improved.

Min and I decided to wrap up the evening watching a movie. We watched the Roc Hudson and Doris Day classic Pillow Talk which is really good. Min and I just love the feel good movies of the sixties.

I got the computer set up without a problem and got started using it. It was pretty late so I didn’t get much chance to really use it but I got the basics working. So far so good.

Happy Birthday to Art Ralston! He is 29 today.

I was supposed to be going out to breakfast with dad and Pastor Dan this morning but when I got up the weather was really awful and Min hadn’t made it home yet. I checked my messages (our phones are still having major issues and lots of calls are being redirected straight to me cell phone) and dad had been trying to get a hold of me for hours. They had cancelled breakfast but not because of the weather but because his car’s transmission was having serious problems and he needed help getting his car into the shop. Min got home almost an hour late. She said that the drive home was just awful. It was above freezing outside and thick, heavy snow was falling very quickly making the road very slippery. Andy had gotten up after me and decided not to go into work unless the weather got better later on in the day. At 9:20 I headed on over to dad’s. Dad and I had a morning meeting down in Perry that we had to go to so we went down there in my car that has a working transmission (yeah Mazda!) and has absolutely amazing snow tires. Even though there was a ton of snow on the roads – as much as four inches, my car didn’t have any problems cutting right through it all. We got back from our meeting a bit later than I had anticipated and I had to call the guy that I was supposed to be having a lunch meeting with in Rochester and postpone until Friday. We have been having a terrible past two weeks trying to get together for lunch or coffee. Then I took dad home to get his car and we drove it over to Balconi just up the street from my house. Since we were already in Geneseo, we picked up Min and went over to Denny’s to get some lunch. When we got Min, she said that Andy had decided that the roads were good enough to drive up for at least half a day of work.

After lunch Min and I drove dad back home. Min hasn’t seen the AS/400 yet and was pretty surprised by how big it was. Dad’s tractor has died so he is now unable to move the AS/400 even if we have a spot to put it into. His house is like the black hole of mechanical equipment… everything goes there to die. We stayed there for about an hour hanging out but dad was really sleepy and starting falling asleep on the couch so Min and I came back home.

I was doing some searching and found SGL listed on this random page. But better yet are these people talking about our LotM on Yahoo Groups – they actually liked the site! Here is a Google quick image link to a bunch of our headshots. I think that the guys talking about us is awesome. Someone out there actually knows who we are and stumbled across our little site here!

I added a new site for the Friday Night Game. I will have a menu link to it soon. This will give everyone a single place to go and check in on the status of upcoming game nights. Hopefully all of the information that people need will be able to be made available here. This should be a lot easier than calling everyone. Maybe we will make a sign in page so people can reserve a seat at upcoming LAN parties.

I had to get onto the phone with Netgear for about an hour this afternoon. They have been having problems with their website and haven’t been able to get our new router out yet. I talked to them and got everything squared away. We should have the new unit on Friday afternoon which means we will hopefully be back up and stable sometime Friday evening.

European papers are apparently beginning to uncover case after case of blackmail against European governments that are considering opposing the insane software patents law there. The proposed new law is causing unbelievable turmoil throughout the world as it will allow any and all software to be patented making anyone who uses any software anywhere prosecutable for patent infringements as the laws do not in any way protect common practices.

I have been asked to serve on the Professional Advisory Committee for the Computer Science Department at Onondaga Community College. That is pretty cool. Tim must be behind this. This should be fun and a really good opportunity to get some stuff onto my resume that will help me land a professorship somewhere.

I got Andy’s MP3 player prepped for my day in Ithaca tomorrow. It is nice to be able to load up a whole day’s worth of stuff to listen to all at once. I am hoping to get an MP3 player for myself relatively soon. I think that one with 512MB would do me well. I have been using Andy’s player when I go to bed to be able to listen to things as I am falling asleep. I have been finding a ton of really interesting interviews and talks to listen to.

Dad’s laptop is beginning to die. Actually, it is just about dead. A few months ago he decided to lift and hold it by its monitor and he must have squeezed it too hard because it apparently busted a seal on the LCD screen and the screen has been deteriorating. It is just about to the point of not being usable. So he had to do something to replace his laptop. Our meeting this morning resulting in us releaving ourselves of our Verizon wireless Internet access so that we can scale down to the more affordable Road Runner service that is now available over at his place. That is the first step. We are thinking of letting dad use my laptop (yes, the only machine I currently have on my desktop) and getting me a Dell Axim X50v handheld PDA. Yeah, it would be a bold move not only doing away with Windows XP on the desktop but also doing away with an Intel architecture (I have to say architecture since I moved physically away from Intel to all AMD years ago) desktop altogether and living only with the PowerPC based Mac Mini. It is especially bold since I haven’t used the Mac Mini yet. But, it seems like it may be the option that best fits our overall needs. I am really looking forward to getting a handheld that is powerful enough to be truly useful. The new units are fast enough and have enough features that I am hoping to be able to really replace the laptop and actually do a significant amount of work on it. Now that there is built in 802.11b wireless, it means that I can use it in almost all of the places that I was using my laptop previously. And as our customers are adding wireless faster and faster, it is less and less common that I have to work in a place where I do not have regular access to wireless. I can work in Ithaca without a problem at all of our customers there, in Perry, in Geneseo, soon in Castile and very soon at dad’s place since he will have wireless as soon as the cable line comes in. The DC office, the hotel in DC and John’s house all have wireless. If things go as planned, Eric’s office at the UofR should even have wireless in the next six months. So, I think that I can probably get away with using the handheld a lot of the time. It is going to be a stretch, but I am really interested in the possibility.

I got an email from Emily and Craig tonight. Yes, they are still alive, can you believe it? They may be visiting the area sometime in April. The big news is that Emily is pregnant and is due on July 4th! So congratulations to them.

Min has been trying to cook tilapia for two days so we are finally having it tonight. She decided to try mashed potato encrusted tilapi and whipped carrots and crescent rolls.

Okay, another cool link for the day. Everyone needs to check out utility fog which is a cool new material (not a real material but they are working on it) that is built out of nano-robots that change dynamically to suit temporal needs. It is a long way off and I think that they get a little extreme in this article but it definitely holds a lot of potential down the road. I will be really interested to see what they end up being able to do with this stuff.

Dinner was delicious. I really like mashed potato encrusted tilapia. I have always been a fan of tilapia and luckily we can get it at Aldi’s very inexpensively and Min seems to like it too now so I can actually have it occassionally. Tilapia is now America’s sixth most popular seafood product!

While we ate we watched my dad’s copy of I, Robot which Andy said he didn’t think that I would like so we have been avoiding but actually I quite enjoyed. It wasn’t an amazing movie but it was pretty good. After that we watching Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk. We have the entire Hudson/Day collection now.

Min got home this morning and did some laundry before going to bed. She was really tired, though, and decided not to join dad and I for breakfast. Dad picked me up at 8:30 and we went over to the Omega Grill. They actually had some cinnamon rolls there today – so I had two. I was supposed to have a lunch meeting today with one of our competitors up at the Pakistan House in Brighton but my schedule for the day was getting pretty full so I decided to postpone the luncheon until tomorrow when I could actually fit it in. Of course, now tomorrow is already starting to become a very busy day.

When I got home from breakfast around 10:30, Andy had just gotten out of bed and hadn’t headed into work yet. I guess he is going to be a little bit late today. Miranda was still here when I got in but I expect that she is going to use the good weather to get back to North Bay since the weather is supposed to be bad again starting tomorrow and for almost a week.

Eric sent me an interesting link about Lake Titicaca today, I thought that I would share.

I went upstairs around noon and found Andy and Miranda both gone so I am imagining that they went out to get some lunch before she headed back to Canada and he headed back to Wegmans.

I worked on some training paperwork for the Castile school for the few hours that I had this afternoon. I headed out around 2:00 to get down to the school. Dad is meeting me down there and Min decided that it was more important for her to sleep than to get a chance to actually see the school. She is supposed to be teaching there once a week or so starting next week.

I spoke at the school from 3:00 till about 4:45. I think that I gave everyone enough information to definitely make them completely glaze over. But it went well – I think. I will probably be in there a bit next week getting them ready for Min to teach on Friday. She will be working with the ninth graders on Friday.

Dad came over after working at the school and we grabbed Min and went to dinner at Denny’s. Andy was pulling in the driveway as we were pulling out and he decided to come over to Denny’s with us but had to stop by the house first. Dad was in a little bit of a hurry because he had to get down to Grandma’s by 6:00. Andy took a really long time getting over to the restaurant so we went ahead and ordered. We ended up getting our food just as he was getting there. He had decided that he needed to talk to the contracting firm that he works through to let them know that he was turning down further work at Wegmans and that they needed to deal with it because Wegmans was making some weird assumptions that he would be there forever even though they never asked him to extend past the original six months that they had discussed. So his plan is to be done there around the first week of April unless they are willing to drop him to just three days a week, then he will probably stay on for a long time. But no one ever does that, even though they don’t even begin to have work to keep him busy three days a week they will only be happy wasting forty hours worth of money and not just twenty-four. No one knows why, that is just the way managers are. It’s the Dilbert Principle.

After dinner, we got home and Min was really tired. I can tell when she is so tired that she is going to fall asleep one way or another and there is no point to me trying to get her to do anything because she is just going to sleep through it anyway. So we took a nap for a couple of hours before she had to go to work. While she was napping, I listened to a few hours of IT interviews recorded from ITConversations on Andy’s MP3 player.

After Min went to work, I went down to the office to work on preparing another computer for the school. If possible, I would like to get two or three more ready for them before next week. I had some technical challenges with this one computer – but then again, when have I ever worked on a computer and not had technical challenges. It is really amazing just how often things go wrong even when you are doing the simplest things. What I am doing on this machine is removing the existing processor and installing a slightly faster one. It wasn’t enough to make it worth putting in the new one just to go a little faster but I was unable to let this machine leave previously because we needed its processor for something specific. So being able to replace the processor was a big deal. Basically it resulted in a free machine just appearing out of nowhere. What a good deal.

I checked on the shipping for my Mac Mini and five days is not exactly how it is going to work out. They shipped it on Friday night or Saturday morning. Assuming that all of the weekend days were not to be counted, five days would put the delivery on Friday with the weekend as a shipping buffer since FedEx does transport over the weekend. But no, it isn’t scheduled to arrive until the 21st. Nine days of shipping, not five. It is very sad, I am ready to try the switch. I need something new to play with and this is taking an awfully long time. Andy has been having fun with his new Mac Mini for weeks now:(

I am meeting with dad and Pastor Dan for breakfast in Perry tomorrow morning. After breakfast, dad and I have a super short presentation that we have to give in Perry. Then I have to go to the city for lunch at the Pakistan house that I missed today. I don’t think that I have anything really planned for the afternoon. Thursday I should be in Ithaca all day.

The game is on for this Friday. As far as I know, we are going to have a full house. Min, Andy, Jeremy and I are definitely confirmed. Josh thinks that he can play from home through the VPN. Art and Danielle can probably play. That only leaves Tony or Phil as the unknown factor. Or Bob if he plays remotely.

I decided to add a link to Wil Wheaton’s Blog over on the navigation bar because I think that he really does an amazing job of writing a blog. He really knows how to write entertainingly and yet gets really personal and is able to express his feeling very well in his writing. So there is a link to head on over to his site. He only updates every few days so he doesn’t need to be visited everyday like some really cool blogs do.

I actually managed to wake up this morning a minute before the alarm went off. That is a good sign that I am adjusting to the CPAP and getting a little bit back to my regular sleep habits. I got up at 6:20 and showered and headed on out to do my early Valentine’s Day shopping. I got a dozen pink roses and a card for Min and then headed up to meet her at the hotel so that we could go out for breakfast. I got to the hotel around 7:40 and we went up to Mel’s Diner. Breakfast was nice but Min was falling asleep before we were done so I took her back down to the hotel and she got her car and headed on home. I drove up to the hospital and met up with Eric. I had to drop off some stuff for him to ship to Washington and then we ran out to Bruegger’s to get some coffee. They have better coffee than Starbucks – Starbucks only offers burnt coffee but Bruegger’s has a selection of different types of roasts not just the wussie low caffeine stuff like SB.

After coffee I had to run up to Walmart to return one of those mushroom chairs that collapsed but, of course, they didn’t have any more of them there and I didn’t have a receipt with me because I was planning on just exchanging it so I ended up having to bring it back home with me. I hate shopping at the Chili Ave. Walmart because everyone that works there is so upset that they had to come to work and earn a living. It is really awful being in there.

Min slept the majority of the day having gotten home late because we went out to breakfast. Miranda didn’t leave today like she had been planning on because the weather was really bad and it was relatively dangerous to drive anywhere. Not a good day for long distance travelling.

Min cooked dinner here because we didn’t feel like going out to eat. Valentine’s Day is just such a pain to deal with if you go anywhere. So we ate and watched Elvis’ first movie Love Me Tender which was pretty awful. Elvis wasn’t really the star and played the pathetic, spasmatic little brother of the star who hasn’t got a clue. He spends most of the movie acting like he was being electricuted and singing love songs to his brother and mother. Really bizarre. The movie was not entertaining in the least. We barely got enough time to finish the movie before Min had to get off to work. So it was a really short evening.

After Min went off to work, I sat down and finished watching The Italian Job that we had started a few days ago. That movie was even worse than Love Me Tender. I can’t believe how dumb and boring it was. I can’t believe that it even occurred to them to remake such an awful film or to use the name again.

Okay, before I forget to remind everyone… tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day so don’t forget to get your dinner reservations and gifts and whatnot taken care of while you have the chance. I know that today is Sunday and I didn’t leave very much time for people to do things – especially since I write this update and post it at the end of the day so no one will actually read this until Monday – but at least I gave you a little bit of warning.

Min and I actually got up on time this morning which might be an all time first for a Sunday morning. We made it out to church on time – a little bit early in fact. Andy and Miranda were still asleep when we left just before 10:00. After church, Min and I went down to Perry with dad to have lunch at the Silver Lake Family restaurant as usual. Then we had to rush home so that Min could rush off to work. Our regular Sunday routing – just on time for once. Andy and Miranda had woken up at some point while we were gone and had, presumably, left the house to get some lunch as all of that sleeping must have made them awfully hungry.

Currently, the plan is not to have an AoE2 LAN party this coming weekend. We think that some friends are probably coming over to watch Lord of the Rings 3: The Return of the King – Director’s Cut which will take all evening. But we don’t have that scheduled for sure yet. My new Mac might arrive by then. We are very hopeful that AoE2 will work on it but there is very little chance of that. Okay, I just went out and did a little research on it and have discovered that multiplayer games on AoE2 for the Mac are not compatible with the Windows version! That really bites. Microsoft did some really stupid things with their DirectPlay software that integrates into so many titles that they release. They have a lot of problems with their own Windows XP SP 2 firewall working with any software that uses DirectPlay. I think that Linux users who get the game running on Linux are able to play multiplayer with Windows players but I am not sure. That is really tough for us since we have been counting on me to be able to play on the Mac instead of on the Windows laptop that I use. It wouldn’t be such an issue but the game is so buggy that it crashes the laptop all of the time.

It is a gorgeous, bright and sunny day today. What a weird winter we are having. We have had very little snow or cold days. Last week it was almost spring for three days. It is a still a bit cold today but not bad at all. I could take a whole winter of this.

I am starting work today on an introductory book to the KOffice Productivity Suite that the Castile school is going to be using. After doing some research, though, I did discover a manual for the office suite that is included with it in HTML format. I think that that will make a good reference but won’t really suffice as a teaching aid for Koffice.

Around 4:45 I went upstairs to see what was going on. With the new insulation it is a lot harder for me to hear the upstairs from the downstairs – which means that I am REALLY looking forward to getting the entire ceiling insulated if the little bit that we did made that much of a difference. Anyway, I figured that Andy and Miranda had left to go do something. But I was wrong, Miranda was playing her Simpsons video game and Andy was… are you ready for this… napping! LOL

I was originally planning on going up to the city this afternoon to do some shopping but decided against it when I discovered that the books that I was hoping to find didn’t really exist. So that made the trip less useful. I decided that I would go up in the morning and get Min from work, do breakfast and do my necessary shopping then hitting Walmart and Home Depot.

Some information about the upcoming Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is out. We now know who is going to be in it although it looks like Zooey Deschanel is going to be their biggest shot at star power and even she isn’t all that well known – Almost Famous, The New Kid, Elf, Mumford and Big Trouble are her major credits to date.

Some time ago I decided that it would be awesome that when doing a Google search on some of the llamas that it should actually be pictures of us that come up. There are so many millions of people out there and so many popular web sites that it isn’t easy to get to happen but you can check out me, Josh, Dominica (under Tocco), Dominica (under her married name), Eric – okay, that one didn’t work so well, Miranda and Andy – Andy got screwed, he is the only one that ended up not being on the first search page but is buried way back on the fifth page. But hey, better than nothing. Unfortunately, Google searched us when all of these were on the front page so the links aren’t quite right but since the images were hard linked, it still works more or less. It is still pretty cool though. I thought that it would be neat if people trying to find us would actually be able to. You know, like friends from high school who want to find us. If they know our names, they are likely to be able to find us. Especially those of us who are the only people to come up in the search. I didn’t do too badly, I am one of two. I will try to add some more of you from out there in Llama land so that you can see yourselves on a search too.

I played a game of AoE2 to relax for a little bit but it ended up in some serious butt whoopage and not in the direction that I prefer so that sucked. I went upstairs to find a snack and discovered that Andy and Miranda had disappeared again. I think that I have seen Miranda for a total of less than five minutes the entire time that she has been here this weekend.

I did some work on the Scott and Dominica web site tonight. It will take me a while to actually have anything decent on there… but at least I am getting started a little bit.

I did more the January updates out to the archives today. Boy was that bogging things down! Okay, it is late and I have to be up really early in the morning to go to breakfast and to do some shopping with Min up in the city. So I had better get some sleep.