Sheep Guarding Llama

The last day of January. Whoo-hoo. We passed another quarter in the archives and are now in the second busiest quarter of SGL EVER! And two whole months of updates left to go. We are really underway now. I hope that everyone is really reading the pages now because I am putting a ton of work into getting these up to date all of the time.

Min and I went to breakfast with dad this morning over at the Omega Grill. We haven’t seen dad in a while because he has been spending so much time with grandma who has been in intensive care up in Batavia for over a week now. He is really exhausted from having spent so much time over there. Jeremy was supposed to have gone to breakfast with us this morning but he didn’t go to bed until after 7:00 and he was dead tired so I just let him sleep when we went. We woke him up when we got back and dad took him home for me.

I was busy today moving web sites over from our old firewall / web accelleration server and over to our new web server that went into production a week ago. I have been very busy relocating and reasigning machines recently but the basement is getting cleaned out, the systems run more smoothly and soon there will be fewer machines taking up space in the basement.

I did a lot of work on the server today and it caused the site to not be available for a large portion of the day. Sorry for the inconvenience to all of the people that were trying to look at the site while it was being worked on. I know that there were a number of people who were trying because I was watching the proxy logs and I could see people trying to look at the site. It was very sad. Both the web pages and email has been up and down all day as I work on it. Unfortunately, since I work on that stuff during the day it really ties me to the office because I really can’t do anything while the servers aren’t working.

I called Mazda tonight about my car and the clutch issue and they sent down a flatbed to haul the car up to the dealer in East Rochester. That is really nice because I was concerned about driving the car and about how much a tow was going to cost. So this worked out really well. I love having a car that is still under warranty. After the car got taken away, Andy and I drove down to Main Street and went to Aunt Cookies and picked up some subs for dinner and brought them back to the house.

Min’s car is due for its inspection today but we weren’t able to schedule getting it in anyplace so we had to settle for having it inspected on Wednesday. But at least we don’t have to leave town to get it done. But we have to drop it off all day which is annoying, especially when my car is in the shop too. Not only that, but dad’s second car, the one that he was going to sell to Andy, died. It’s engine just died, apparently a really common problem in the GM’s of that year. My aunt and uncle’s car of the same year died last week within a few days of dad’s too. So there are NO spare cars anywhere in this family. Good thing that Andy didn’t get that car earlier because this would have really sucked.

Min and I ate dinner and watched some movies. We watched Town and Country and Jet Lag with Jean Reno and Juliette Binoche. Town and Country was okay but nothing special. Jet Lag, I thought, was really good. It was a nice change from the ordinary love story and I am a really big fan of both actors and they were pretty much the only people in the movie. We started the movies so late that Min had to rush right off to work as soon as we were done.

The site went down again sometime during the late evening, I am not sure why. I ended up working on it really late and didn’t get the site back online until after 2:30 am. Just what I needed, another really late night. I have been having a terrible challenge just trying to get back to a regular schedule. Min working extra overnights this week and next aren’t going to help anything either. She is working Wednesday nights in addition to her regular shifts because someone at work needed the time off. It is good because it is extra money but the timing isn’t real great.

Well, with today’s decently long update, we have passed yet another archived quarter of updates making this January alone the ninth busiest quarter for updates, whoo-hoo. Finally we are back on track! I know that it has taken a long time but the fact that I can write so much faster now really helps too.

I woke up just in time to realize how late it was and to get Min out of bed and off to work. She was probably running a little bit late but she wasn’t too bad when she left. That was a close one, though, everyone in the house was asleep and there weren’t any alarms set. She could easily have slept through a few hours of her shift. Because I have modified the office downstairs, the only computer that I have to work with is my laptop until my new Mac Mini arrives so Min wasn’t able to take my laptop into work tonight. She was very sad. It is unfortunate that it is the next few weeks that I am without a regular desktop because we JUST discovered how Min can be online with the laptop while she is working. We were really looking forward to being able to chat over Jabber while she was at work and she could catch up on her emails and stuff.

I worked down in the office for a little while and then Andy and I went out to get some “lunch” or maybe it was dinner. We went over to Denny’s. We got there a lot. We were going to go up to Henrietta and bring some food to Min while she was at work but we called just after she had ordered some Chinese food to be delivered so we decided to just stay down in Geneseo and to not tempt ourselves to go to Borders and to go shopping.

We got back from dinner just in time for my dad to call and ask if I waned to go to dinner. But we are going to go to breakfast tomorrow morning instead. Andy did some practicing on AoE2, trying to catch up with the master, I guess.

Jeremy came over this evening pretty late. He was really bummed that he hadn’t had a chance to play AoE2 the other night so he came over to get a little gaming in tonight. Andy didn’t want to play but eventually broke down and went for a game. He could not resist the call of AoE2. We only played one one-on-one-on-one game but it was a pretty good one. I won, of course. But it was a good game.

Jeremy spent the night and dad will probably be taking him home tomorrow after breakfast.

The game went until early this morning so we ended up sleeping until afternoon today. When I got up to answer the phone early this afternoon, Tony was still passed out in the living room so apparently no one was up yet.

Min slept in quite a bit later than me so I went down to the basement and did some work. I have been trying to get some servers moved around in the basement and that has been quite a project. It is taking a lot of my time. And keeping up with the rapid update pace of SGL is quite daunting as well.

After I got enough work done to call it an evening, Min and I went up to the city to do a little shopping, to get dinner and to drop off some bills at the post office in Henrietta. We hit the post office first and then went over to the Pakistan House on West Henrietta at Crittendon. That place is so awesome, we just love it. The food is so good and the service is just phenominal. We are really worried that they are going to go out of business because there are never very many people there. But there was a decent number of people there tonight so that was encouraging. They haven’t been open very long and maybe word is just starting to get around about them. Hopefully that is the case. We would hate to have found such a good restaurant just to have it close on us. That happens way too often.

After dinner we drove out to Chili and hit Walmart. We needed to get out there because the Geneseo and Henrietta Walmart’s sold out of the mushroom chairs that we wanted for the theatre room and Chili was one of the last places to have any. So we picked up two more of the mushroom chairs and two of the cubic bean bag ottomans to go with them with some Christmas money that we had. We went through the bargain bin and found a couple of movies that we were interested in (I am SO the king of bargain movie shopping), we got Town and Country (Warren Beatty, Dianne Keaton, Goldie Hawn, etc.), the real Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Almost Famous with Kate Hudson. AF wasn’t in the bargain bin but it was cheap and I haven’t seen it yet and min really likes it and we are both big Kate Hudson fans so we had to have it. We ran across the parking lot to Hollywood Video to check out their used movies because we had watched a trailer last night for Big Shot’s Funeral and we thought that it had looked interesting and I was pretty sure that I had seen it at this particular Hollywood Video. I was right and it was still there, just one copy. So we got that and scoured the racks looking for good deals. We also managed to get The Missing Gun, Luther, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and one other movie that I can’t remember because Min took it away before I could write it down.

We got home and had a mini movie marathon (not so unusual around here.) We started off watching Big Shot’s Funeral starring Donald Sutherland who is always hilarious along with Rosamund Kwan and You Ge (Farewall My Concubine). It was almost a What! movie. Very, very strange. But it was pretty decent. Ended up being a good story with interesting characters. Then we watched First Daughter which just released this week. I didn’t really like it. It was one of those movies where I didn’t end up liking any of the characters so I didn’t have anyone to root for. The father was a jerk, the boyfriend was a lyer and the lead character didn’t act like a grown up and fight for herself but gave in and acted like a child and eventually, it all just “worked out.” It was pathetic. So we felt that we had to watch a third movie to end on a better note. So we watched The Missing Gun which is a drama about a cop in China that loses his gun which is a major crime there since guns are illegal and almost no one has one. The cops have to be very protective of theirs. It wasn’t bad. Very hard to follow because so much of the movie was based on cultural differences that were not explained very thoroughly and had to be inferred as much as possible. But it was okay. Strange ending.

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.