Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I haven’t been writing as much as I had expected to the last few days but at the end of yesterday’s update, we moved into the number three position according to the archives. So we are steadily marching forward. Not much longer and I will shut up about it.

Min and I slept in forever this morning. We didn’t wake up until a quarter till eleven! I can’t believe how long I sleep when I am on the CPAP. It is good sleep, real REM sleep. But I never wake up. That is really rough. I seem to be sleeping close to ten hours a night on a regular basis. I hate that. I was hoping that I would only be sleeping four hours or so once I got used to the machine. But that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. I must get three entire sleep cycles if I let myself. Luckily, I am able to wake up with an alarm and that works just fine. Or else I would be in big trouble.

I got a message from a contact that I have that has been looking for some memory for me for one of our servers that is pretty hard to get memory for. He has found enough memory to max out the machine which is pretty cool so I am getting that sent right out. That will make that machine able to function for us for quite some time so that we don’t have to buy a replacement machine down the road anytime soon, I hope.

We have been having unbelievable problems with our one router in the house going down. It has been driving me crazy. It is really rough because it disconnects all of our customers and it cuts off our telephones and stuff. It is really a pain. I have been trying one thing after another trying to get it to work but no luck. So, if you have issues calling us, that is probably why.

Jeremy stayed a little bit later than usual this morning so that we could go out and get some breakfast/lunch over at Denny’s.

I got the notice from Apple today that my new Mac Mini had finally shipped. It has five day shipping on it and it left on Saturday so it should be here on Friday. At least I hope so. That would be nice. I can’t wait to get it and try it out and to have something on my desk other than this laptop. The laptop is okay, but the Mac is a lot smaller and I can clean up the cables a bit and not have to take this thing up and down every time that I am going to go somewhere. And the Mini is only a fraction of the size of the laptop. That is a huge bonus. And it is quieter too. There are a lot of pluses. Of course, we may find that I really hate the Mac, but I think that I will learn to get along with it to some extent. I checked in with FedEx and they said that the machine had been picked up and was in transit – but they hadn’t listed an arrival date yet. There site was horribly slow today. It took five minutes just to get onto the site and put in a tracking number. They need to reduce the number of images that they have on their pages if they can’t keep their bandwidth up.

We had lunch over at Denny’s and then I drove Jeremy back down to Leicester. I hung out down there and played with Taffy and Peter (their dog and cat respectively) for about forty five minutes. Peter is currently a top ten finalist in the Knapp Winery contest to find a “model” for the label of their new wine.

My impromtu project for the day is to do a ton of cleaning (mostly of paperwork) in my office looking for any paperwork pertaining to the Netgear router that we are having a problem with. I know that I have had that paperwork sitting around the office for forever. I never have a good place to file any of this stuff. I need a large filing cabinet in my office, I think. There is loose paperwork everywhere down here. At least this causes me to get a lot of it cleaned up. I do think that I have figured out what is wrong with the router – not that that is necessarily a good thing. I am pretty sure that its memory is going bad. So, I have turned off its logging functions in the hopes that with it no longer logging that maybe it will not use nearly as much memory and maybe that will keep it up and running for a while.

Here is a really creepy story about what can happen when incompetent or lazy medical personnel become involved in accidents. This is a really worrisome story when you think about how often a single doctor could have this kind of impact – convincing people that the obvious is not true. I have heard horror stories, not quite of this level, happening locally where a doctor was willing to let a patient die rather than face the obvious that all of the nurses and lay people around him were aware of. Luckily, in that case as well, a non-medical person took ownership of the situation and saved a child’s life. Far too often, doctors just find it too much of a nuisance to care about people’s lives. I realize that being a doctor can be stressful, but any responsible human being with that kind of responsibility should be decent enough to give up a post if they no longer have the interest of humanity at heart. Of course, we have to consider the fact that in a small town like the one in this article, the examiner could easily have known the patient and acted the way he did intentionally for reasons we may never know. That always has to be considered – especially in cases where people have questioned him like that and he shoots them down.

I got onto the phone with Netgear and it looks like it won’t be any problem just having them send us out a new unit. Boy are they easy to deal with. I am really glad that we work with them because it makes our lives a lot easier.

Well, tonight we learned that Scott is not very good at installing insulation. I get really hot and sweaty too easily and it makes it almost impossible to see out of safety goggles when I do anything. We did manage to complete the insulation in the server room. It will probably take a few days before we have a good idea of how much it is reducing the noise in the house. We will have to have an opportunity to listen to it in a bunch of different situations before we can really tell. I am really hoping that it makes the servers quiet enough that you can’t hear them upstairs in the kitchen. Because of the hardwood floors up there, the sound travels right through the floor making the entire upstairs – because it is one big open room – able to hear everything that happens in the server room.

Once I was wrapping up the server room’s insulation, Min cooked some frozen pizza for dinner and we sat down to watch the original The Italian Job from 1969 starring Michael Caine. We made it about forty minutes into the film and Min decided that she couldn’t stay awake because it was so slow. So we switched to Almost Famous which I have seen about half an hour of before but never the whole thing. It was a really good movie. There were a lot of good people in it. After that we watched the famous Goldie Hawn / Kurt Russell film Going Overboard which was their third film together. I haven’t seen that movie since the 80’s. After watching the movies, we decided to head off to bed and actually try to be able to get up in time to make it to church tomorrow. We have not made it in weeks so maybe we can make it tomorrow.

Speaking of sleep, Andy and Miranda didn’t get up until around 1:00 today. They disappeared almost immediately after getting up to go out and get some food. They came home from “lunch” at 5:00 and said that they were planning on going out to a movie. But they were both tired (twelve hours of sleep will do that to you) and so they went to take a nap. That was around 5:30. I am turning in now and it is almost half after midnight and they are still asleep. It will be interesting whether or not they decide to wake up in the middle of the night or if they just sleep right on through and get up late again tomorrow. So, if you don’t hear much about what is going on with them, that is why. There just isn’t anything to tell 🙂

We did test the server room with the door closed and it does get a lot more quiet than it did before. But, unfortunately, the heat builds up so fast in there that we can’t leave the door shut for any amount of time. We are hoping to vent the server room directly into the garage which should be able to keep it at a decently cool temperature for most of the year.

Well, it is official. With today’s update we have just barely skimmed past the limit to make 2005 Quarter One the busiest ever and we are not even half way through the quarter yet. Whoo – hoo. No one can complain about there not being updates now. I am pretty sure that January was our busiest month ever as well and February is definitely doing well to be in the top four. I guess that now I can stop talking about it because we are past the limit.

Night everyone!

I had a lunch meeting today up at the Cracker Barrel in Henrietta. That was a really funny place for a lunch meeting but it worked. I went there at 11:30 and the meeting went on until about 1:15. It went well, I think. Then I had an afternoon meeting at Starbucks with about an hour in between so I ran over to the hospital and grabbed Eric and we went over to Starbucks early to have some Chantico while I was waiting for my second meeting. The guy that I was meeting with this afternoon, Craig, ended up having to cancel on me so Eric and I just hung out until it was time to head on home. While I was out today, Min and Miranda went out shopping in the South Wedge. Miranda claims that “she won’t absolutely never go shopping with Min again.” So Min must have been on good behaviour today.

On my way home from the city I stopped off at Walmart and picked up some new movies. They have new movies in the really cheap bin and they have a new section of almost as cheap as that movies. I went crazy, again, and picked up a number of new movies including the following: Love Me Tender, Terms of Endearment, Funny Face, The Italian Job, Overboard, Valmont, Impromptu and The Talented Mr. Ripley. We are incredibly close to a full 1000 movies at this point. Only a week or two away, most likely.

So, the other day Josh asked me to have a game tonight because he wasn’t able to see Jo tonight and he thought that it would be a perfect opportunity to play some AoE2. We hadn’t been planning on having a game tonight but I said that we would see what we could do so that he would be able to play. So we scheduled and game and haven’t been able to get a hold of Josh in two days. I finally got a hold of him around 6:30 tonight but he isn’t sure if he will be playing or not. We have the VPN working so that he can play from home. I am really hoping that we can get one or two people to play from home on a regular basis. We did that before with Josh and it worked really well. It would be nice to have about three players playing that way because it allows us to have secret teams and forces us to communicate online.

We ended up playing with just Min, Andy, Jeremy and I. Josh never got back to us. Andy called it a night at 12:30. Jeremy and I played one last fast game and called it a night. I am pretty tired and want to be in good shape tomorrow.