Sheep Guarding Llama

For all of you Linux fans out there, SUSE 9.2 Professional was released to the mirrors today. So the site will be SO busy for the next few days but it is out there so get your downloads started. Or, wait for me to get mine and I can get copies out to you. We have been waiting for this for months. Now I can really start work on getting the Castile school’s systems together that have been waiting on this release. They actually released a bit earlier than expected. They had original said the middle of January, then the tenth and now they actually released on the eighth. I think that they new owners, Novell, are really having a positive impact on SUSE.

I started the SUSE download for x86 at 11:50 this morning. Georgia Tech is the first place that I found that had everything posted. They are awfully busy, we will see how many days it takes to get everything downloaded. It probably won’t finish up until Monday since it will keep getting slower throughout the day as people realize that it is up.

The first mirror that I tried to get the SUSE download from was so busy that it stopped after just a few minutes and wouldn’t let me reconnect so I tried a different site. Starting again at noon, we will see how this one goes.

Our phones are really awful today because of all of the downloads. The download process turned into a real headache. Only a couple of mirrors got replicated this morning and they stopped functioning from all of the people trying to get to them.

Jeremy was thinking about coming over today but then realized that he had solo festival today. So he is busy playing trumpet today but might come over later tonight.

In the middle of the afternoon, I finally located some SUSE mirrors in Germany that are still working, which is surprising since it is early evening there. I am hoping that as it comes closer to Saturday night in Germany that people will be downloading less and less so that I can get a piece of the bandwidth.

Min and Andy decided to return to Borders and do some more shopping. Andy was heading up anyway and since I am busy working on the SUSE download, Min decided to go up and do the shopping that she didn’t get a chance to do last night. They took off a little after 2:30. There is a bit of snow out today, it apparently snowed during the night and a bit of the morning. They decided to get food up there and leave me home to fend for myself. Luckily I had thought ahead a few days ago and picked up some vegetarian corn dogs so I am all prepared.

Min and Andy went out to Perkins while I sat at home and worked 🙁 They got back around 6:30 just as I was about to head out to pick up Jeremy. He is coming over to work on some programming stuff this evening.

I drove over to Leicester to pick up Jeremy around 7:00. He came over and did some Java programming. I worked with him on his understanding of Object Oriented Concepts. OO is really difficult to learn on your own, it is very abstract and non-intuitive when you are first working with it. It took me a long time to get used to it myself and even now I am reading “The Object Oriented Thought Process” to get it down even more.

After doing some programming, Jeremy, Min and I watched the second half of Napolean Dynamite which Jeremy’s sister has but he has only had the chance to watch the first half. He thought that that was hilarious. Then the three of us watched the first three episodes of Father Ted: Season One. Jeremy has never seen Father Ted. By the time we were done, it was half past midnight and I was getting pretty tired so we went to bed. Min has been staying up late most nights, though, so she decided to read for a while so that she could fall asleep.

We, now there have been SGL updates for an entire week! This is the first time that I have managed to go that long in about as long as I can remember. I am pretty sure that January now has more updates than any of the past three months have and we are only one week into it!

I have a busy week coming up. I have meetings and appointments away from home every day this week. It has been a while since I have had the chance to really schedule anything normal so it is nice to be getting back into the swing of things.

Finally it is Friday. I am really looking forward to the weekend. Min and I stayed up late last night with the Millen’s watching The Return of the King. After they went home, I did a little bit of work on my next certification but was really tired and fell asleep quickly. Min stayed up until 4:00 in the morning playing The Sims 2. I think that this is starting to not be healthy.

Min didn’t get up until after noon. I spent the early part of the day on the phone setting up meetings for next week. Dad came over a little before one and we all went out to the Big Tree Inn in Geneseo for some lunch. It was really good, I was significantly underdressed not thinking that we were going anyplace like that for lunch. I was planning on Denny’s or the Omega Grill.

After lunch, we came back and watched the extended edition of The Two Towers because dad hasn’t seen it yet. We have been trying to get him to watch the series for a while and he has finally agreed to struggle through it. We made it through the first one a few days ago although it wasn’t the extended edition. Those really are long. He was falling asleep during this one. Only one more to go. It will probably be the middle of next week before he manages to watch that one.

We went out to McDonalds after the movie and got a quick dinner. Then Min and I came home and played some air hockey with Andy. But then Min decided to return to her video game upstairs. Andy and I ran out to Wegmans to do some quick shopping – just snacks and stuff.

At 10:00, Min and I decided that we wanted to do some shopping so she and I hopped in the car and drove up to Borders in Henrietta. I have been wanting to get the book “The Object Oriented Thought Process” for a while and Min wanted to look at some knitting magazines and books as usual. We also picked up the third and final season of A Fine Romance starring Judy Dench back in 1983. Then we went over to the Henrietta Walmart to do some small shopping. We closed down both stores and then decided to try the Movies 10 in Brighton to see if anything good was showing there. But there wasn’t anything worth sitting through at all. In fact, they are still running Napolean Dynamite even though it has been out on video for weeks. And at $2 each, that is way too much of the total cost of purchasing that movie to even consider it. Plus I have seen it just recently since both Andy and my cousin own it. So we decided to just come home.

We watched the first three episodes of A Fine Romance: Season 3 before going to bed. We also read in bed because Min has been keeping herself up late every night playing video games. And she really wanted to read some of her new knitting book and I wanted to read some of my new book on Indian history.

I slept in a bit this morning. I seem to say that an awful lot don’t I? But Min slept in until the afternoon. I, at least, was out of bed mid-morning. I was up late last night working. Up until 4:00 actually. Min was playing The Sims 2 in case you hadn’t guessed. She loses all track of time when she plays that.

A bunch of us were supposed to be going to the Microsoft show this morning but the weather was potentially not going to be very good so we decided that it wasn’t worth going to the show today when they are going to be in Ithaca in two months. Besides, I made it to the show on Tuesday and that was the most important one for me to be at so it worked out well, I think. But, since the weather is bad and there was nothing pressing on my schedule anyway, I am kind of taking today as a snow day. All I really have to do is run out to UPS and the post office for a couple of things and I can call it a day. I need to relax a little bit so this is nice.

I think that I forgot to mention, the only class that I was worried about came through as completed. So, I am one step closer to having officially graduated in December. All of my classes for graduation are done and there isn’t any concern about me having passed them. All I have to do yet is defend my courses as appropriate for my degree and I am done.

The weather got a bit better today so Min and I went out to lunch in the middle of the afternoon and ran some errands like going to the post office and to the new UPS store that is just around the corner from the house. I have been needing to get to both of those places for forever. It is so difficult to get all of the little errands run but they really build up.

We went to Aunt Cookies for lunch and got some subs. Yummy. Then we ran our errands and headed back to the house. Nothing exciting. We did see that a Starbucks is going into the old Dell Taco just around the corner from us. I don’t really like their coffee but I really like coffee shops. But I don’t think that Starbucks has free wireless and that makes them kind of worthless.

Eric and Amanda came over around 8:00 and we watched the new Return of the King: Extended Edition which none of us had seen yet. It is still missing large amounts of the books that we were sure that they were going to include in the movie. But they left it out. It was probably a good decision but we were really expecting some stuff. The movie was really long and they didn’t get to leave the house until after 1:00 in the morning. They both have to be up at 5:00 tomorrow and Julia will probably be awake all night so they will probably be really tired tomorrow.

Dad got online this morning at 6:30 and we made plans for him to come over and to do some work on his computer. He is swapping out the old, 40GB harddrive in favour of a new 200GB hard drive. I wish that I had hard drives that size! My main machine does have 200GB of storage but spread out over three drives.

Min got home at just about 8:00 and brought me a donut from Tim Horton’s. Then I hopped into the shower to wake myself up a little bit before I had to be on an 8:30 phone conference with Dell and Wegmans. That project is still moving forward and we are still planning on performing the rollout for Wegmans this month. It is nice to know that there is work on the horizon but also to know that it isn’t going to be very stressful and to have some time to get caught up on other things between now and then.

Dad got over to the house around 8:15 but I had to get onto the phone for the conference. But it didn’t last very long so we were able to go to breakfast before 9:00. The three of us went over to Denny’s and hung out for a while.

I worked around the basement for an hour or so before deciding that I had to call it a day. I just had no energy left and was getting a little bit delirious. So I went to bed. Min, who had been working all night, decided to stay up for a while longer to keep playing The Sims 2. She probably played for a total of about three hours before going to bed around 2:00 in the afternoon. She is really addicted to that game.

I rolled out of bed around 5:00. It has been a while since I slept during the day. I really do think that I prefer doing that though because I find that the middle of the day is very relaxing to be for sleep but very unproductive if I am awake. But since everyone else is awake during the day, it doesn’t normally work out all that well for me. If I didn’t have to ever interact with other people, I would almost for sure sleep during the day almost all of the time.

Min and I went out to dinner at McDonald’s in Geneseo. We were the only customers there when we got there and walked in in the middle of a fight between one of the employees and her manager. That is always a little bit uncomfortable. We got our order in and just barely sat down to eat just in time to watch the girl go storming out. It is too bad, she was one of their best employees. The McDonalds here has a really hard time keeping the place running smoothly. Must be all of the college students. Often we will avoid eating in Geneseo and will get McD’s from Henrietta where the food is consistently quite a bit better.

Originally Min, dad, Jeremy and I were going to be spending the day at the Rochester Microsoft show tomorrow but the weather is expected to be really bad and everyone felt uncomfortable about going so we decided to reschedule and go to the same show when it comes to Ithaca in March. That should give us better weather and it will give us more time to get people scheduled to go with us.

Min and I went down to my grandma’s for the evening to hang out. We almost never get a chance to spend any amount of time down there so we wanted to visit for a while. We ended up staying until after 11:00. While we were there, Jeremy was down in the basement playing Dance Dance Revolution (or some version of it) on the PlayStation 2 so Min went down to try it out. She really liked it and decided to try to get a version for herself. We are hoping that that does not involve buying a PS2 just to play something like that.

I ended up staying up late again tonight working on our Desktop Assurance program. I am definitely earning my money on this initiative.

When I got home last night, I decided that it wasn’t worth getting up really early in the morning for the Microsoft show in Buffalo so I only registered for the afternoon show and slept in this morning. That is good because I would have been far too tired to have been of any use today had I not done so.

There still has been no word about the CPAP machine that I am supposed to be getting. These doctors don’t seem to be very concerned about getting their money because they sure are taking their sweet time getting me the machine. It has been three weeks today that I haven’t gotten the machine after I did the second sleep study that confirmed my need for it.

I called Eric at the hospital at 11:00 to see if he was busy and if he might want to join me for the Microsoft show out in Buffalo. He decided that he would come along so he drove down to the house and met me and then we headed out for Buffalo. The weather was still really nice today so the drive was fine. What a great January we are having!

The show lastest until 4:30 and then we headed home. On the way back, we stopped in Varysburg to get some gas. Gas is down to just $1.92 a gallon! After a year or more of $2+, it is nice to see the prices down nearer to where I remember them. It is hard to believe that just a few years ago I saw gas for under a dollar!

Dad came over just after I got home and he, Min and I went out to the Shanghai for some Chinese Buffet. Then we headed back over to the house to watch The Fellowship of the Ring. We didn’t watch the extended edition because Jeremy borrowed that one a week or two ago and hasn’t brought it back yet. But it probably worked out for the best since dad has a really hard time making it through the movies and having it shorter makes it a little bit easier. Min didn’t quite get to finish the movie because she had to get off to work. At least it is her last night for the week.

Dad went home after the movie and I went to work. We have been so busy recently with our new Desktop Assurance program that I have barely had any time to get any of our new customers set up and running. It has been a real problem that we have, for once, been getting requests for service faster than we can deliver. Those are the kinds of problems that are nice to have but the real problem is that we are totally swamped right now and will be completely slow again in no time. If it was all spread out evenly, it would be a lot better. But, beggars can’t be choosers. So I am very busy again much like I was last month.

I ended up working all through the night. I didn’t even bother going to bed. I made some real headway so I wanted to keep moving and there was stuff going on in the morning so I didn’t feel that I could go to sleep past a certain point and be able to function in the morning so I decided that the best thing to do was to stay up all night. It has been a while since I worked all through the night. I almost feel young again. Okay, not really.