Sheep Guarding Llama

I managed to sleep in a little today but not too much. Jeremy called this morning to see how the game went last night so I had to get up for that. I worked most of the day on getting a new email server built in an attempt to replace the old one that has been giving us so many problems. I can only complain so much, we have gotten quite a few years out of it so far. But replacing it has been on the “schedule” for an incredibly long time now and it has never been completed so I am really concerned about having to deal with it now. I am not really in a very good position to estimate how much work it is likely to end up taking.

Well, SPAM has gotten to be way too much of an issue so we have eliminated the email directory on the page. I know that everyone is heartbroken. We have been guessing that a large quantity of the email that we get is from harvesters getting our addresses from here so we decided to eliminate it altogether. Since having been down for a couple of days, we are only getting a fraction of the SPAM that we had been getting just a week ago. I am not totally sure what caused the sudden change but it is awfully nice.

Everyone was still at the house when I got up this morning. Andy and Tony were just about to leave to take Tony home. Phil took off after not too long. Then Min, Jeremy and I went out to Denny’s for a late breakfast or late lunch (Yup, that late.) Then we took Jeremy home.

I worked down in the office most of the afternoon and evening and Min came down and did a little studying and then watching hours of That 70’s Show to keep me company. I managed to get some homework done, some real work and some cleaning.

Andy, Min and I decided that we needed an evening out so we decided to go out to see The Incredibles out at Tinsel Town in Gates. It has been a while since I have been out to see a movie at a theater. When I went on line to look up the showtimes, I hardly knew a single movie that was showing at the theatre. Man am I starting to feel old.

Well, The Incredibles is a must see movie. That is one of the best movies that I have seen in a long time. All three of us loved it. I am really glad that we managed to get out to see a show. That was awesome.

Today is the first day of my second week at Wegmans. But I had a lot to do before I could go to work. I got up early this morning and drove out to Batavia to see my foot doctor. I can’t believe that I had an appointment before 8:00 in the morning way out there. The doctor said that my foot is pretty bad and that I need to get prepared to have surgery in early January. That kind of sucks.

I had to deal with my jury duty again today. I have been trying to convince Wyoming County that I live in Livingston County now. For some reason, the state doesn’t tell anyone where anyone lives. Which must cause all kinds of problems. In fact, the whole jury system is really bad in this modern age. There are so few people who qualify for it. Because the whole system is dependant upon people living in one place for a decently long period of time. And it is dependant on people still having jobs after the duty is over. But that is a real problem because the law that they passed that keeps companies from firing employees during jury duty doesn’t protect contractors in any way. And with more and more contractors on the market, that is a real problem. Imagine a college kid who takes a temp position for two weeks during the summer to earn some money. Then gets called for jury duty. Jury duty might take two weeks. But it only takes one day for someone else to HAVE to fill in that position. So they just lose that job. Sure, they don’t get fired. Because they are contracted, they just don’t get work. The system doesn’t take that into account when they think about making people do jury duty. And if you think that can never happen, think about the fact that I am working a 13 day contract now, and was contacted to start jury duty on day 4. If I had to have gone in and blown a day on that jury duty, they would have found someone else to do the contract because they don’t have the option of waiting for me. And the law doesn’t protect me in anyway. Luckily, the wrong county contacted me. This time.

Nothing exciting at work today. It went okay. Kept me busy:)

Andy and I grabbed Blimpie subs on the way home. They weren’t very good. We won’t do that again.

It was a really slow evening. Nothing really happened. So, I will stop writing because it will get boring.

Another fun day of trying to get everything working again. Min and I went out to breakfast with dad this morning. I only got about 5.5 hours of sleep but that seems to be about the max that I have been able to get recently. I will get hardly any tonight since we have the game tonight. We have six players all ready planning on coming which is pretty cool. We hope to get a couple more as the day progresses.

Dad came over this morning to work on getting the Waste Watcher up and running again. Today is our first real day of potentially full functionality.

Tonight is the biggest game that we have had for a long time. We have seven players tonight, Andy, Tony, Min, Me, Phil, Jeremy and Art all made it out for the game. Josh tried to play remotely but we didn’t manage to get that to work. We had a good time, though. We played for about nine hours. Boy were we all exhausted by the time that we were done.

Well our Internet access is back up and we are mostly back online today. Things haven’t been going smoothly. Our MS ISA Server 2000 installation puked when the new line came in and we have had to spend a lot of time dealing with that. We have upgraded to a newer 2004 installation but that isn’t really making things any easier.

Today was the second day of the Rocehster B2B Tech Expo. Min and I got to the show a little after 10:30. After yesterday’s light crowds we didn’t think that it was worth putting too much effort into getting there really early since there were only really any number of people there between 11:00 and 3:00. And even then there weren’t all that many.

The show seemed to go decently well. We got lots of compliments on our booth construction. Everyone thought that it was really cool. Dad and Aunt Sharon came by around 3:00 to help us tear down. It only took about 45 minutes to an hour to get the booth all broken down. That was a ton easier than the five hours that it took to set it up when we first got there.

After getting the booth packed up, we all ran over to Perkins and had some dinner. Min and I had passed on eating at the show so this was our first food of the day other than BK for breakfast.

We got home around 7:00. Min and Andy watched a bunch of That 70s Show but I got stuck spending the entire evening working on getting our systems back up and running after the switch over from ChoiceOne to Frontier. What an incredible pain that has been. We are really happy with Frontier, though, who really put in a serious effort to help keep us up and running as much as possible.

I was up until about 2:00 am working on our network. So I was really tired by the time that I finally got to bed. It has been an exhausting week.