Sheep Guarding Llama

Boy January has just flown by. But I guess that just means that I am getting old. Min and I REALLY slept in today, I didn’t roll out of bed until after 2:00 in the afternoon and Min didn’t get up for hours after that. We adjusted our schedules last night and it really threw us off.

Min and I were supposed to have dinner with Eric and Amanda tonight but Eric wasn’t able to get out of work until really late and it ended up not being a good idea to try to sqeeze so many things into such a short time frame. We decided to just get together next week (we are all having dinner together on Thursday at his parent’s house). So Min and I just grabbed a quick bite to eat figuring that we would get pizza later on in the evening once everyone was getting hungry after a game or two.

Tonight is the big game, the first big AoE2 game in months. We are all really looking forward to it. We managed to get a hold of Josh but he wants to spend the evening with Jo instead of playing with us:( Jeremy forgot that we were going to play the game tonight so he was out all night last night and wasn’t allowed to come and play here tonight. Phil was able to come over and Art and Danielle were both able to come over because Michael was over at his grandparent’s house tonight which was really cool because Danielle has never been able to come over for the Friday Night Game before. Min, Andy and I were of course there and Andy picked up Tony on the way home from work. So we were seven. Too bad that we didn’t have a full compliment of eight but what can you do. It ended up taking us forever to get started with the first game because we had a lot of technical issues. We get that a lot. We got a total of three games in but we had technical issues almost the whole time and never really managed to finish more than a single game. But it was still fun for all, or almost all.

Well, as of yesterday, Quarter 1 2005 is already the eleventh busiest postings quarter ever for SGL and with any luck, it will be tenth after today’s update.

The install last night went pretty smoothly, about as smoothly as could be expected. We had our glitches but we worked through them and wrapped up on time. It went pretty well though. I got home around 8:00 and boy was I tired. I pretty much went straight to bed. Min stayed up all night so that she could go to bed with me this morning.

I didn’t manage to get a whole lot of sleep, the phone kept ringing this morning. I finally got out of bed around 3:00 and took a shower and got back to life. Luckily, there really wasn’t any email or anything waiting for me. That was nice. I did a little catch up before Andy came home. He got home around 5:30 and he, Min and I decided to go out to Denny’s for dinner.

After dinner we stopped over to Walmart and did some quick shopping. We wanted to get more mushroom chairs for the theatre but they had sold out of them. We picked up the newly released First Daughter and got Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much as well. While we were in Walmart, the power went out and we were in the dark. The generator kicked in and power came back. We are pretty sure, though, that power was only lost at Walmart and not around town. Nothing at home seemed to have lost power and with as much as we have running, we can normally tell pretty easily.

I called around and found that Walmart on Chili had the mushroom chairs so Min and I headed out to go up there to get them. We got to about the end of Lima road when I clutched in to slow down and the car made an awful noise and the clutch felt pretty weird and the car started acting funny. I decided that driving up to the city was probably a bad idea so we turned around and came home. I am not sure what is wrong and it is a little bit late to call someone. I will probably have to take the car into the shop tomorrow. At least it is still under warranty. What a pain though. It is always something.

My Mac Mini is still on backorder but my Apple USB keyboard arrived this evening. I plugged it in and am typing on it now. I like it. It is a bit smaller than my traditional PS/2 keyboards and the action is nice. It is attractive on the desk and with my new minimalist approach to my office, it should work out very nicely. The Apple keyboards also don’t have a Numlock key which is a really nice feature because, after all of these years of working on computers, I have never come across a situation where I had wanted my numlock to be turned off but very often, it was.

For those who need to know, the Friday night game is on tomorrow at 7:00. Min, Andy, Tony and I have confirmed already. Josh, Art and Jeremy know about it. Looks like we will probably have a pretty good turn out. It has been quite a while since we have played. I am really looking forward to a good night of AoE2!

I am pretty tired this evening. Even though I slept in late, I am feeling the schedule shift and the rought six hours of sleep. Min has been watching original Star Trek episodes like they are going out of style. She stayed up all night last night watching them and has been watching them this evening as well. She is turning herself into a zombie.

For those of you who use OpenOffice, a new beta has released that now includes the new OpenOffice Base component that is designed to compete with MS Access. This is a cool feature that I have been looking forward to for a while. I downloaded the latest test version of the software from OpenOffice.org tonight so that I could give it a try.

Min and I watched a movie before heading off to bed. We finished So Close which was pretty good. Then I did about another hour of work getting SuSE 9.2 installed on my desktop and Min did some work upstairs. Then it was off to bed. It didn’t feel all that late but I looked at the clock and it was about 4:00 am by the time we actually got off to bed.

I slept in as late as I could stand this morning, which was about 11:00. That was eight hours of sleep and I was restless. The phone rang and I solved someone’s computer problem and my day began. I went down to the basement and got to work updating SGL. For those of you who follow us every day, you probably noticed a lot of updates coming throughout the day as I slowly got caught back up. But we are completely caught back up and on track again. I am going to do my best to get today’s update completed and posted before I head off to Wegmans to work overnight. I am starting at 9:00 pm in Penfield which means that I am wrapping up somewhere around 8:00 in the morning and THEN going for breakfast before heading home. I will be sleeping most of the day tomorrow. Min, Eric, Amanda, Dad and I were supposed to be having dinner at Eric’s mom’s house in Warsaw with his parents tomorrow night but dad is sick and then Eric’s mom called and she was sick too. So we rescheduled for next week at the same time. That is good because I was going to be tired this week. It took me most of the afternoon to get caught up on all of the SGL updates. But I think that everything is there. We might be on track for January to be the busiest month of SGL ever and that would be a really nice way to have a comeback after the pathetic performance of the last few months. I want to make sure that everyone knows that the site is on track and busy again. There is always something new to read on SGL!

I forgot to mention the other day that I did finally order myself one of the new Apple Mac Mini’s. I got the same one that Andy did, the base model, but with a memory upgrade and I ordered a real Apple keyboard to go with it. Mine will take 3-4 weeks to arrive, though. So Andy gets to play with his right away and I have to wait for mine 🙁

I headed out to Perry around 4:00 and ended up working out there longer than I had anticipated. I didn’t managed to get back home until 6:30. I had just enough time to collect Min and to head out to Denny’s for a quick dinner. Andy had eaten just before getting to the house so he wasn’t hungry. So he took a nap while we were at dinner. Dinner was good but rushed. I wish I didn’t have to get out of the house so early. But if I don’t, then we will be there all night. Better early than late, I guess. This is going to be a really long night.

Okay, I am wrapping up the udpate for today and posting so I can hit the road. It is just about 8:00 now and I have to drive way out to Penfield in bad weather so I need to be on the road. Hopefully they will have a lot of coffee waiting for us.

I had to head out to Perry to meet with a client at 4:00.

Busy day today. I had to run up to the city for a meeting at Wegmans at noon. So I did a little work here in the morning and then took off for the city. The lunch meeting went well, but I didn’t get lunch, I didn’t have any time. We are doing an install tomorrow night during the overnight so this was our final meeting to get prepped for it.

I had another meeting at 2:00 downtown. That went well and didn’t take long. Then I had a meeting over on Park Ave. that lasted until 5:30 or so. Then I headed out to Batavia to visit my grandma in the hospital there.

I was walking into the Batavia Hospital just as my Uncle Leo drove by and honked, so I waited for him and we went into the hospital together. Dad was there earlier but went home. He has a really bad flu and is exhausted. I stayed until they closed visiting hours for the ICU.

I came home and had dinner and watched half of a movie with Min before she had to go to work. I hadn’t seen her all day so I drove up to her work with her and hung out for about three hours there. They have wireless Internet access in the lobby area there now so I am able to sit out in the lobby and surf while she works. That works out nicely. The roads were absolutely awful on the way up. It took like forty minutes to get up to the hotel!

I was trying to stay up late tonight because I have to work all through the night tomorrow and I won’t be able to do that very well if I am tired when I first get there. So I am trying to shift my schedule a little bit. I am going to be dead to the world on Thursday so don’t even think about trying to get a hold of me during the day then.

It looks like there is going to be an AoE2 party on Friday night. So anyone who wants to come and better plan on it and let me know now. Remember we have NO spare machines here so everyone has to bring their own. Everyone keeps thinking that we have lots of spares and we don’t have any. I am expecting Andy, Min, Jeremy, Tony, Art and I already. Josh definitely knows about it.

Back to the grind. This morning I have a service call to make out in Perry so I had to get up and head out there. I was there for most of the morning and the early part of the afternoon. I got home and found out that Wegmans needed me to run up to the city for a meeting so my light afternoon turned into a busy day. I hopped back into the car and drove up to the city. I stopped by my bank in Brighton and did a little banking before heading over to the meeting.

The meeting was pretty short, about an hour and a half. I drove down to CompUSA to see if I could find one of the Mac Mini’s left on the shelves. No luck. Not a one to be found of either model. They had the keyboard that I wanted to get for the Mac but it was $20 MORE than the Apple store’s price for a $29 item. That was pretty ridiculous. So I just went on over to Petsmart and picked up some necessities for the hamster. He is running out of bedding material and his main food is running low so I stocked up. I also bought his a little hamster potty with litter to see if he would like that or not.

I stopped by Best Buy hoping that they carried the Apple Mac Mini’s but they don’t carry Apple products at all. I did some shopping for DVD’s while I was there and picked up some new ones including Mystery Men, the original Night of the Living Dead, The Big Easy, Josie and the Pussycats, The Story of Us and Darkman. All for $6 or less. Good deal.

I came home and Min and I hung out and watched Laws of Attraction which, I thought, was really good. We also watched the first half of Mystery Men before she went to work. But we didn’t have enough time to finish it so she took it with her to work. It is a really bad movie but it has a really amazing cast.

After Min went to work, I watched the new remake of Dawn of the Dead. I have never seen the original but the remake wasn’t too bad. I thought that it would probably be awful but it was much better than I had expected. They made the zombies really move in this one which is a lot scarier than the slower lumbering things of the old movies.