Sheep Guarding Llama

John woke me up around 6:00 this morning and I hopped in the shower to get ready. We headed out the door around 6:45 to drive up to Annapolis to pick up the truck that I rented from Budget. We got the truck, a ten foot box, and I was on the road to Washington by 7:30. Boy is this going to be a long day.

I drove through rush hour traffic in a truck and finally got into the hospital center. Luckily Sonny did most of the loading and got the equipment that was there for me to pick up onto the truck really quickly. There wree about four or five servers there that I needed to get because John needed the office cleared out. So I picked up my old Pentium desktops that were there as well. I had three of them down there. So there was quite a bit of stuff that I was picking up. Then it was off to Owen Mills where the real load is waiting for me.

I found Owen Mills and the place that I was going to without any problem. I hate driving a truck through heavy DC and Baltimore traffic, though. So I got to the place and went in to talk to them to find out how we were going to go about loading the AS/400. Ha ha. I guess this wasn’t a trip that was planned out all that well. I was under the impression that I was picking up two AS/400 modules (that is, one 3/4 rack sized unit and one half rack sized unit each weighing 500-1000 lbs.) But hey, what do I know about the computer that I bought? Turns out that it was actually NINE modules of that size!! We managed to get two of them loaded onto the truck but it was all that four of us could do and we only managed to move the smallest two modules and had to means to load anything any bigger than that. We also then decided that the truck wasn’t large enough to get the rest of the machine into. Oops. So we had a dilema. I spent the rest of the afternoon, five hours, sitting in their offices reading and making phone calls trying to figure out what we could do to move the rest of the machine. At the end of the day we finally gave up and I hired a moving company to pick it up and deliver it to us. I just couldn’t come up with anything else to do.

Now begins the real adventure, driving the truck back to New York loaded with computers that are sliding around. I didn’t make it more than a few blocks before the AS/400 modules broke through the cable that was holding them down and they starting flying around in the back of the truck banging into everything. That was a real problem. I made it for a few miles without any way to pull over to deal with anything. Eventually I found a large driveway that I could pull into tnad get into the back of the truck to assess the situation. It wasn’t good. Everything was sliding around and I had to do something. So I laid the two AS/400 modules down. This was not easy at all to do all by myself. They were easily 500 lbs each and they have a lot of their weight up high so they don’t want to lie down without just falling. The one was part way over against the side of the truck, it was easier to lie down. The other unit was totally upright and I had a terrible time getting any leverage on it. I had to jump on it and use my weight to pull it over, it was not safe at all. My worst fear was getting pinned under it since I was outside in 15 degree weather. I could be trapped for a while. I could get it off if it fell on me or my leg, but if my hand got caught I would be in an awkward position and might not be able to lift it. I did end up dropping it on three fingers but just on the tips and was able to pull those out. Boy did that hurt. Felt just like the loanshark and stopped by with his little hammer and went for those three fingers. Once I laid them down I was able to cram them into a decent position and tie a huge metal cable through the casters of the one unit pinning everything else into place. I got back into the truck and got back underway. What a pain!

I made it back to New York without any more incidences. Pheww. Once the computers stopped rolling around and falling all over the place, the drive was much easier. I really wish that there was a CD player in the truck though. Just listening to the radio is pretty boring and there are only one or two stations in a lot of the area that I had to drive through.

It was close to midnight when I finally pulled into dad’s. I talked with him for a few minutes and borrowed his car to get home. We are dealing with unloading the truck tomorrow.

Today ended up being a long and boring day, but I was expecting that for the most part. I slept in a little and then packed and get everything ready to go. I didn’t take my laptop with me because it just wasn’t going to be practical to be lugging that thing around for two days without hardly a place to even think about using it. I am pretty much getting myself back to Geneseo as quickly as possible.

Dad picked me up and we went to Mel’s Diner for some lunch on our way to the city. Then dad dropped me off at the airport around 1:00. Plenty of time to make a flight in Rochester. It never takes more than twenty minutes to get from the front doors to the terminal waiting area. I got myself checked in and went through all of the extensive security checks that I always get selected for and made myself comfortable waiting for the plane. I brought some books and magazines with me so I read a bunch while I was waiting. The plane was delayed because of the bad weather. It is bitter cold and the airport is in a spot of pretty low visibility.

The plane got off the ground around 2:40, just half an hour late. Better than all of the poor people waiting to go to Orlando who were supposed to have left around noon and were still waiting to see the plane that they were supposed to be boarding. The flight was quick and uneventful. I ordered a bloody mary and they forgot to charge me for it. That was nice. I don’t think that drinks are free but maybe they are. Maybe they were free because we were running late.

I arrived in Baltimore around 3:45 and checked my cell phone. John had forgotten that I was coming into town and wasn’t able to pick me up for a while. So I got to spend the afternoon in the airport hanging out. I got some food and moved to an area near the baggage claim that had some nice seats but I could still get outside quickly and plopped down and did some reading. I got quite a bit of reading done while I was there. John came by to get me around 7:00.

We went over to Blockbuster Video and John rented Shaun of the Dead and I picked up a few new movies. It is a long story but I ended up with How to Deal with Fires, Big Girls Don’t Cry (both German films) Gothika and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. So the collection just keeps growing and growing. Min used to have Grail but it disappeared some years ago and we have been without it ever since.

We headed back on over to John’s house and Michelle made grilled cheese sandwiches and we all watched Shaun of the Dead. That movie is hilarious. It is really good, everyone should watch it. I didn’t stay up long after the movie because I had to get up pretty early in the morning and it is going to be a long day tomorrow.

Okay, so we talked to the Marriott down in Maryland and it turns out that there isn’t an employee discount and that the whole thing is just a bait and switch deal that they pull to get people to work at the chain. Instead of an “employee discount”, some of the hotels give out a card that says that you are an employee. Other hotels, at their discretion, can do whatever they want with that information. They can give discounts, but they don’t have to. And since Marriott is a franchise and not a fully owned hotel chain, there is no incentive for the franchises to give discounts to employees, so they don’t, apparently. And when they do, it would appear that there isn’t the fixed “employee rate” that we were lead to believe that there was. So, when I called the Courtyard in New Carrollton last night to ask what my options where, the rude desk workers just put me through to the national call center without even asking me if that was alright (it wasn’t… I needed to know if they were walking distance from the metro station and the national call center sure didn’t know that,) I found out that it would be dramatically cheaper for me to stay at the Comfort Suites where I usually stay which is a nicer hotel. I especially would rather stay there since they treat us far better than Marriott has done. We stayed at the Fairfield in Clearwater and were appalled by how poorly the hotel was kept. I like Comfort because I know that any of their hotels that I go to will at least be clean and have halfway decent beds. Marriott is not so thorough with their chain and are more like the Days Inn where anyone who pays enough, apparently, can slap a Marriott logo on their hotel.

So I was up at 9:30 this morning trying to figure out what the better option for dealing with things in Washington are. I decided that since Amtrak just didn’t have any trains going at really convenient times given the new plans (I am very sad because I was really looking forward to the chance to ride the train down) that I would pay a little extra and fly down tomorrow afternoon. So, I booked my flight with AirTran and I am leaving from Rochester at 2:15PM tomorrow (Monday) on flight 473 and will be landing at BWI at 3:22. I talked to John this morning and either he or Michelle will be able to pick me up from the airport. This seems to be a much easier solution than taking the train and dealing with a hotel which I just can’t afford to blow $200 on right now. But this works out well because it buys me one or two more days of not travelling. Travelling is always rough because it eats up so much time and Min and I are already travelling almost the entire week as it is.

I slept much better with the CPAP last night. I don’t think that I woke up a single time all night and I managed to wake up, on my own, after just four hours of sleep and felt relatively rested. That is a good sign. That is the first decent night of sleep since I got the machine. At least we are moving in the right direction.

It is always nice to get up in the morning thinking that you have a very busy day in front of you but then discover that you have the day mostly free and can actually relax a little bit. It is so much nicer than when you think that you have a day free before hand. Not that I don’t have tons to do – but at least now I can work on things at my own pace.

Min headed off to work at her usual time and I did some work in the basement. I put Bring It On Again on my laptop while I was working. I supposed that it was probably better than I had feared that it was going to be but it definitely was not a very good movie. If you are fanatic about Bring It On like Bob, Nate and I are then you will definitely want to see it. Other than that, though, you will want to pass this one up and look for something a little bit stronger.

It turns out that Tony doesn’t have school tomorrow (probably a holiday that we aren’t aware of) so Andy called him and is going up to get him so that we can play a little much needed AoE2 this evening. I still don’t have my desktop freed up so that I can play on that so I am stuck using my laptop but that is only so bad. I called over to see if Jeremy wanted to play since he too shouldn’t have school tomorrow, but he is sick and not able to come over to play. He will be very disappointed since he has been trying to find some way to play for two months now. Poor Jeremy.

While I was waiting for Tony to come over to start the game, I kept working on a firewall that I have been building (I have to get it done before I can free up some equipment for the school in Castile) to replace our old one. Not that our old one is very old, but we are shifting a bunch of stuff around and need to make sure that everything is working before we turn off a machine. I have two large machines that I am trying to get to a point where I am shut them down. Those two represent a very large portion of our total electric draw in our server room so I would like to be able to do without them if at all possible.

I didn’t get too far before Tony made it over. He and Andy arrived around 6:30. We started setting up the systems for the game (which always seems to be an ordeal, time after time.) This time, I am the biggest pain because I am playing off of my laptop which does not have the game installed on it. Plus I need to find some space to play in as well since my regular desktop is in the way. It is always something. We can’t play too late tonight because Andy has to go to work first thing in the morning and leave a little early so that he can drop Tony off on his way past Avon.

I was doing some housekeeping today (figuratively) and came across some old backups that I have of the Laugh Trak system that Andy and I were working on with the Comix Cafe up in Rochester back in 1999-2000. That project didn’t go so well. They had had trouble with a developer previously and had paid a lot for work that had never gotten completed. Then, when working with us, we were doing the work for free because they had blown all of their budget and we thought that maybe this system could be sold to other clubs. Boy were we naive. They really took us for a ride. Not only were other clubs not going to want to use this system but once they changed managers, THEY didn’t even think that they wanted to track customers anymore. Every time that Andy met with them, they had a new set of requirements and couldn’t remember what they had decided the last time. So the whole thing ended up being a total waste of time. They weren’t very serious about the work that they were doing anyway, everything was running in a messy back room on computers that had been pulled out of the trash, most likely, and were completely unusable. But they weren’t going to be replacing them, they planned on continuing to use them (think original Pentium computers running Windows 98 with 32MB of memory and 2GB hard drives – but not nice commercial HP or Compaq machines but cheap local Soyata white boxes.) It was amazing that those machines even booted let alone could do any work. Having Andy write an Access database application for them was just ridiculous. And the system was going to be designed to be hosted and it took them almost a year to even bother talking to anyone about getting them Internet access. Eventually, I think that they did manage to get Road Runner brought in, but I am not sure that they ever managed to get it run around to all of the machines in there. In fact, I don’t think that they ever bothered getting a firewall or even a router or a hub or anything. I don’t think that they had the CAT5 to run around. The moral of this rather drawn out story is that I deleted all of the old Laugh Trak files because I am pretty sure that after six years (yeah, SIX years!) we don’t have use for those files anymore. It is kind of sad to officially kiss that stage of the business goodbye but it is also nice to let go of the past and move on to bigger and better things. That was never going to be a good project no matter what Andy and I ever put into it. It could have gone better, but there was no light at the end of the tunnel and they were just hoping to get some free software out of the deal and we, most likely, would have been in a worse position for having finished the project successfully rather than just giving up on the whole thing and walking away. We had better places to spend our time than on that.

Tony came over and the three of us squeezed in a game of AoE2, one on one on one. Andy was the first one out and Tony wasn’t ready for me so it was a pretty quick game. We only played the one, I was getting pretty tired and Andy has to work tomorrow. We popped in Aqua Teen Hunger Force and watched three or four episodes of that before I headed off to bed. I felt awfully tired but, of course, I only slept about three hours last night and I have been tired all week so it is no wonder that I was feeling pretty drowsy. I called Min before going to bed, she is having a terrible night because there are over a hunder little eight year old hockey playing hoodlums in her hotel and their bitchey parents. They were so bad that a previous shift had called the police in to settle them down. So she is having a bad night. They did add wireless Internet access to her lobby now, though, which is a vast improvement. Now she will be able to use the laptop at work to read her email and talk on Exodus to everyone. That is really nice. That will make her job a million times more bareable, I am sure.

Don’t look for an update tomorrow until Wednesday. I am flying to DC and am not taking my laptop with me so that Min can have it at work. I never have much of a chance to work on it anyway. This is a short trip so there isn’t any spare time, really. I have to spend the night in Annapolis and will be returning home on Tuesday morning with the loaded truck. I will go straight to dad’s to unload it and then up to the city to drop it off.

John is supposed to be picking up my new (new is a very relative term here) IBM AS/400 computer down in Baltimore today. It is going into the office for the next few days until I can get it. They really need the space right away so I am trying to figure out how I can get down there to get it. It looks like, at this point, that I will be travelling down to Washington tomorrow afternoon. I plan on taking the train out of Rochester at 2:57, which is perfect because Min will just be heading into work and can drop me off without any problem. That couldn’t work out any better. I will take the train to Penn Station in New York and only have a fifteen minute layover before hoping on the next line heading down to Washington. My plan is to head to New Carrolton, Maryland which is just outside the city and very accessible. I think that I can walk from the train station over to the Marriott Courtyard without a problem which will make things really easy since I will be arriving around 1:00 in the morning. But taking the train is a good $50 cheaper than flying and I can’t drive down because I need to drive a truck back. But I like train travel so I am happy. I will take some books and magazines with me and get plenty of work done while I am on the train. It will be a nice way to get some quiet time to myself. Plus, I might even get lucky and have an electric outlet and have a chance to use my laptop for a bit of the way. That would be really nice. But I have plenty of reading to catch up on so I am not worried about having enough to do.

The trip to Washington wasn’t expected so I am in a little bit of a panic trying to get everything taken care of before I have to leave tomorrow. Luckily the beginning of my week is relatively free but Min and I are travelling down to Pittsburgh later in the week and that will disrupt things a little bit. I am pretty much going to be out of town from Sunday until Friday at a minimum. I will be home on Wednesday for about half of the day. So much for having an easy week.

I got rid of the December dailies today so if you want them, go to the archives. This page is already pretty long and we don’t need anything extra slowing it down.

We took out my new luggage since this will be the first two trips that I actually get to use it since I got it for Christmas. It is going to work out really well since there are lots of different sizes (it is a five piece set) so I can take one small one tomorrow going to DC and then I can take a nice big one for Min and I and a garment bag for my suit when we go to Pittsburgh later in the week.

I woke Andy up around 1:00 and the three of us are heading up to Henrietta to get some lunch and to go to Borders. We were tired of eating in Geneseo and I wanted to go to Borders to find a book or two to read while I was on the train (ten hours is a LOT of reading!) So that worked out well. Andy got up and jumped into the shower. I am the only person to actually get up in the mornings around here.

We got lunch at IHOP (it was only barely lunch since we ate at around 2:30.) Lunch was really good but the restaurant and, in fact, the entire shopping area was completely packed with people. We couldn’t believe how many people were out shopping today, it was crazy. Min needed to go to Old Navy to return a sweater and I ended up buying two new fleeces while we were there. Hey, they were on sale. Only $6. Then we dropped Min off at Target and Andy and I went over to Borders and did some shopping. I got two books to take with me to Washington so I shouldn’t get too bored on the train. Although I could, theoretically, finish two books on a ten hour train. I doubt that I will be able to keep myself reading more than half of the time. We didn’t buy any more movies today, a rarity when shopping. Andy did pick up the first volume of Aqua Teen Hunger Force though. So we will probably watch some of that this evening.

John didn’t manage to pick up the server today so I am going to have to figure out how to deak with it once I get down there.

Min had some shopping to do and I wanted some Wegmans pizza (I am sure that everyone is aware that Wegmans won Forbes’ Magazine’s listing of the top companies to work for in the US. They won for the large business category! – AmGen whom Andy worked for last year came in in the top 10, Andy, I am sure, is not impressed) so we headed over to the grocert store. I got my pizza and was very happy to be able to get diet Cherry Pepsi – which for the longest time I couldn’t convince anyone existed – to go with my dinner. I discovered that Wegmans had four or five racks of movies for under $6. So, I went a little crazy as I am sure all of you expected. Min eventually found me and joined in and we ended up bringing home the following movies: Win A Date with Tad Hamilton!, New York Minute, Duplex, Down with Love, The Day After Tomorrow, House of Sand and Fog, Laws of Attraction, Connie and Carla, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, The Alamo, JetLag, Dirty Dancing: Havanna Nights, Uptown Girls and… Bob, get ready for this… Bring It On, Again. What a haul that is. Fourteen new movies! We are bargain movie shopping fanatics. Phil and Kate will be happy that the selection of movies has increased so dramatically. We were stuck getting one or two of the movies in Pan and Scan but only two, I think. None of the really good ones. So, of course, we decided to watch some movies tonight. Min popped some Wegmans French bread pizzas into the oven and I headed down to fire up the theatre.

We started off by watching New York Minute starring the Olsen Twins. It wasn’t a great movie but much better than you would probably expect. Definitely not bad. Then we decided that we weren’t tired so we watched Dirty Dancing: Havanna Nights starring Diego Luna (Y Tu Mama Tambien) which was better than I had expected. It is actually set prior to the original Dirty Dancing and has Patrick Swayze as a dance instructor in Havanna on the eve of the communist revolution there. After that movie, we still weren’t tired so in went The Lizzie McGuire Movie with Hilary Duff. That was cute, mostly a long, big-budget version of the television show. But it was enjoyable and for those who have seen the show before, I think that it was a pretty decent ending to the show – although I think that could have cemented the relationship between Lizzie and Gordo a little bit more to make for a happier final outcome to the show.

By the time we were done watching all of those movies, it was pretty late. Time to get to bed, lots to be done tomorrow.

Another busy day for me. This week was supposed to be my week to relax but instead it has been super busy with meetings almost every day. Today, my meeting was out in Orchard Park with a communications company out in Buffalo. The meeting was supposed to be at 12:30, which meant that I had to leave by 11:00 or so, but I was putting out fires and didn’t get out the door until the very last minute and then realized that I didn’t have any gas so I had to stop and get that too. I ended up being about twenty minutes late but called just before 12:30 and got the guy I was meeting with at his office, 30-40 minutes away from where we were meeting. So I didn’t feel bad. In fact, I would have been really bored had I been on time. As it was, I had to wait for him for about fifteen minutes. We met at a nice little Italian place near Ralph Wilson stadium and ended up meeting for about three hours. I think that the meeting went pretty well. We covered a lot of ground and have some projects that we want to work on together.

Min slept in really late again as she has become accustomed to. She was still asleep for a while after I had left. I did some work after I got back home but there wasn’t too much that I had to deal with since it was already after 5:00. The weather was perfect for driving today, though, the snow was on everything and looked beautiful but the roads were nice and clear. It was the perfect day to have to have driven out to Buffalo.

We went out to McDonald’s for some dinner. They are starting to know us there and we almost don’t have to place an order anymore. Of course, in Maryland, they already know me far better than they do up here and the McDonald’s there is far busier. After dinner, we went over to Walmart because Min wanted to get some movies to watch tonight. So we did a little shopping. We got some decent stuff like Sex and the City: Season Six Part One, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Golden Child, For Love of the Game and Bubba Ho-Tep. We also found some seating stuff that we wanted for the basement and picked up some canvas bean-filled ottomans and another folding circular chair like the other one that we got and liked so much. They also have love seats to match the chairs that we have. Although I sat in one and have no idea how two people would ever manage to fit into one.

We came back home and watched Bubba Ho-Tep. Yes, it is about exactly what you think – an aged Elvis Presley in a fight against a resurrected Egyptian mummy in a nursing home in West Texas. What more could someone ask for? The best part is that the movie stars Bruce Campbell!! But no, Sam Raimi did not direct. It wasn’t a very good movie. It was okay, it had its high points. Mostly it was really weak. We knew that it would be but there was no way to resist a new Bruce Campbell movie. After watching that, we switched a some light BBC and watched the final episode of A Fine Romance. It had a really weak ending, we thought. We couldn’t believe that they had decided to end the series there but I guess the real question would have been “Where could they have gone from here?” The show had gone on for three seasons and hadn’t progressed very far in all that time. It was a pretty decent series but it didn’t have the staying power to keep going on. That is the nice thing about shows from the BBC, they seem to know when to end them far better than we do. So often American television shows decend into the abyss as they attempt to make money long after the writers have run out of ideas and the only people watching the show are the religiously faithful. Look at all the famous American shows like Cheers, Laverne and Shirley, Who’s the Boss, Growing Pains, Friends, Buffy, etc., etc. None of these shows were able to hold it together in their last few seasons and completely lost direction.

I am still adjusting to the CPAP so I needed to get to bed a little on the early side. I didn’t quite make it to bed because the hamster was looking for me and wanted some attention so I played with him for a little while and then put him in his ball to terrorize Andy and went off to bed. Min stayed up for a while watching The Bonfire of the Vantities which she has never seen. We did own that movie before just on laserdisc.