Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Okay, busy day today. Two clients in Ithaca who need to see me today and another that I need to stop by if time allows (when does time ever allow?)

I did a bit of work yesterday so as to have as much ready for today as possible. We have so many people coming on to our Desktop Assurance program that I have had to do a lot of work getting ready for all of them. It is very exciting though, we are really happy for the business.

I didn’t get a chance to actually get on the road until almost noon. There are always a million things going on around the house / office and I can never get to everything. I swung by McDonald’s and got some lunch on the way out of town. It was foggy and rainy and it ended up taking longer than usual to get down to Ithaca. The fog was actually pretty bad today, especially just north of Ithaca on the east side of Cayuga.

I worked all over Ithaca today and ended up having so much to do that I didn’t manage to get to the Lucente’s home until around 8:30 at night and didn’t manage to leave there until 10:00 or so. I decided to run up to Henrietta and visit Min at work for a little bit before heading home to get some sleep. I have to be up fairly early tomorrow, though, because I am going to the Microsoft show in Buffalo first thing in the morning.

While driving today, I have been listening to the book “Lies My Teacher Told Me” which is very interesting. It addresses the common myths, lies, omitions and falsifications perpetuated by the American high school establishment in the teaching of American history. It is a really long book and I am only a short way through it so I will let you know how it is when I manage to make it through a bit more of it.

For all of you instant messaging freaks out there who haven’t tried Trillian yet, it is time that you downloaded it and gave it a try. The new version is out, it is free, and it is worlds better than it has been in the past. The older versions were really slow in getting new features and weren’t always as nice as their individual component conterparts. But this new Trillian, IMHO, is way better than anyone else’s IM clients. My only real complaint is that they are not supporting the Jabber protocols yet so it isn’t all that useful to me and a lot of people that I know because that is what we use. So, just because you get Trillian, don’t expect to see me on there because I am almost never on anything but the corporate Jabber server. But, anytime I AM on regular public IM, I am definitely using Trillian for all of my chatting!

I have been working hard to get as many machines as I can out of the house one way or another. We have had a number of them leave recently to go out to lease. That is the ideal situation. Nate finally, last Wednesday, took his computer home that has been sitting here in my office for over a year! And Bob took one yesterday to borrow until he is able to buy Min’s Shuttle PC (we have decided that we are going to do what we can to eliminate all machines that we own that won’t qualify to eventually go out to lease.) Six monitors left last Wednesday and I expect a number of printers and other stuff is going to leave sometime this week. My office is really starting to open up a bit. There have been so many computers, monitors, printers, etc. sitting around here idle that it has really been tough to keep it clean and neat in here. So I am glad to see everything leaving so suddenly. My desk is practically clean now and I am able to sweep the floor again. By mid-January, before I go back to Wegmans, I hope to have a ton more stuff out of here including that huge floor standing server that we have in the server room. It would be nice to have some more space available in there as well.

For anyone waiting to install the latest version, 9.2, of SUSE Linux, Novell has stated that they plan to release the latest version for download on approximately January 15th. SUSE Linux is especially nice for anyone running on AMD’s AMD64 architecture (Athlon 64, Athlon FX and Opteron processors) because it completely supports the advanced features of the 64-bit environment instead of running old 32-bit Windows on such a powerful machine (hint, hint, Nate!) If you want to get the latest SUSE software, you can check for availability by going to SUSE FTP. Just click on the architecture that applies to you.

I was supposed to have an appointment with my foot doctor this week to have my plantar’s wart hyfercated on Thursday because we haven’t seen any progress with it for over a year. In fact, over last Christmas holiday, I had it hyfercated and by the time we took off the bandages, it was worse than it had been before. I ended up spending most of this year on Cimetidine (or Tagament for those of you who only know brand names) in hopes of that helping it and that did nothing. We have tried every trick in the book to get this wart to go away for the past three years and nothing has had any affect. But in just the last few weeks, the wart has really started to go away at an incredible pace. It coincided very noticeably with my switching to Protonics for my acid reflux. I had hypothesised that the Protonics might have an affect on it months ago. My theory is that the highly effective acid reducing properties of Protonics alter my body chemistry enough – by changing the way that I digest foods – that it changes the nutrient levels in my blood stream and it must cut out a forth of nutrient that is very good for the wart. Warts are a parasitic virus that feeds directly off of the blood stream so that is very possible. I believe that that is why Cimetidine works for so many people because, for most people, it really reduces stomach acid. I happen to be allergic to it so it doesn’t work for me for the acid or for the warts. I bet that studies would also find that people with acid reflux have a highly than usual tendency to have warts. So anyway, I am planning on cancelling my surgery this week because everything is going so well with my foot!

Min and I slept in pretty late today. We didn’t get up until almost 11:00, so we missed church. Min played The Sims 2 until about 2:00 in the morning. Then she started playing again as soon as she got up today. She is addicted already. She has to get all of her game play in before this afternoon because she has to go to work and there is no way that she could play that on my laptop.

I can’t believe how warm it is, we are in January already, typically the coldest month of the year and it is raining today. Raining and warm! I can’t really remember a January that was as warm as what we are seeing now. I kind of get the feeling that we aren’t even going to get a winter this year. December was nothing. I am sure that we will have some major blizzard in a month or so, but it won’t last.

Min decided to get right back into The Sims 2 as soon as she got up this morning to get maximum gaming time in before having to go to work. She is really addicted to the game. It is pretty cool though. Just before Min had to go to work, she and I ran out and got some McDonald’s for lunch.

I spent the day working down in the basement. I pretty much didn’t leave the basement all day. I did talk to Bob quite a bit though 🙂 Andy and Miranda went up to Red Lobster for dinner. Miranda is heading back to North Bay tomorrow. And Andy has to go to work again tomorrow. I will be working in Ithaca all day tomorrow.

I took a break from being in the basement long enough to run out to Wegmans and pick up some food for dinner. I got a microwave pizza but it had bleu cheese on it and it ended up being really gross.

The latest death toll from the Indonesian Tsunomi reached 155K.

Okay, I hope to be going to bed pretty soon so I am signing off and posting. Have a good night.