Sheep Guarding Llama

Friday. Finally. And a holiday weekend too, sort of. Min’s brother decided that he wasn’t coming down until next weekend so we have this weekend free to work around the house.

Today was the Rochester Microsoft Across America show. I didn’t manage to get to bed until 3:00 this morning and I had to be up at 6:20 to be able to get ready and make it to the show on time up in Irondequoit. I haven’t had enough sleep in a few nights so I really wasn’t ready to get up this morning when the alarm went off. I felt like crap when I pulled my lazy butt out of bed. I was up very late working on homework last night.

We got to the show at 8:15 or so and luckily had time to get our free breakfast. That is to encourage you to get to the show a few minutes early, they have bagels and coffee and juice. Otherwise, everyone would be running late because they would be driving around hunting for some caffeine to get them through the morning. Dominica and I were scheduled for different shows today so we hardly got a chance to see each other all day long. She did the same sessions that I did in Ithaca on Tuesday while I spent my time in the technical sessions. We did manage to have lunch together at Taco Bell just up the street from the theatre. There was a 45 minute lunch break between the sessions so we ran out and grabbed a bite. The show went on until 5:30. I managed to win a t-shirt and get two shirts as free gifts. Dominica didn’t get any so she wasn’t very happy about that. I did win something at the MSDN event but I don’t know what it is yet, I am hoping for a frisbee, because they didn’t have the prizes there so there are sending them out later. It is cool that I managed to win a “participitory” prize in both sessions. It is especially good since I won nothing in Ithaca on Tuesday. The best thing was that the TechNet session this morning was mostly on managing Active Directory and their free gift was a $50 Microsoft Press book specifically on Active Directory on Windows 2003. That is so cool because on October 25th I am starting my new job as an Active Directory administrator and I have a lot of boning up to do before then. I am planning on attending Microsoft’s AD workshop series that start tomorrow as well.

We got home just in time for Andy to want to go up to Avon for dinner. I never did figure out why he really wanted to eat in Avon, especially on a day when all three of us had just driven through Avon and on down to Geneseo so we all had to drive right back up again. But anyway, we went up to the Peppermint for dinner.

I have tons of homework and other “sitting at the computer” work to do so I headed into the upstairs office and Andy and Min went to work in the garage. They were originally planning on painting tonight but decided that their time would be better spent collecting all of the empty recycling cans out there and taking them back to Wegmans. We had about $25 of cans and bottles out there. The garage has a lot more space in it now too. Tomorrow I have to send out all of the remaining T-Mobile equipment that has been sitting in the basement. That will undoubtedly give us a ton more room down there too. I also have to stop by and drop off a box of stuff for Kelley’s Heroes that has been sitting in a big box in the laundry room hallway for a few days now. Once I get all of that stuff taken out of here, there will be quite a bit more room. There is a ton of garbage still in the garage that we need to get caught up on – I didn’t pay the collection bill in a while and we went for a few weeks without pickup and now we are trying to catch back up. We also have a lot of cardboard in the basement that needs to be taken over to dad’s at some point. That stuff alone should get the house pretty close to being ready to start seriously organizing. The last big move will be to get the theatre equipment mounted up into the ceiling and to get the sofa moved into the theatre room proper.

While I was working, Min headed on down to the theatre to watch the new Aladdin Special Edition. I managed to get a bit of homework done. I am starting to catch up a little bit. Not a lot, but a little. I am gaining on the deadlines at least. That is the best that I can hope for at this stage in the game. While I was working, I let the computer do some work and I got a handful of new CDs transferred over to Ogg Vorbis.

We are meeting dad for breakfast at 8:30 so no staying up late tonight. However, I have ten chapters of textbooks to read by tomorrow so I have a lot to do. This college thing can keep you busy! Goodnight everyone!

HAPPY 27th BIRTHDAY TO ANDY “Loopy” WEST!!

Today is my stay at home and try to get things done day. We will see how well that goes. Tomorrow I will be spending eight hours at the Microsoft Technet and MSDN events in Irondiquoit so I need to get as much done today as possible. There is so much more to do now that we know that I will be busy and out of town starting in just five days. Now we are really under pressure.

Well, I stayed at home but I don’t know how much I got done today. I have so much to do that I am finding it really overwhelming. Between homework and contract tasks and getting ready to relocate to Albany and everything else that needs to be done, I just can’t get to everything. The homework that I have to do is for a Project Management class that I was hoping was going to be a bit more useful than it is. The only thing that I have learned so far in this class is that all of the BS that you get from PM’s is stuff that they heard from professors.

Min and I went to a late lunch with dad around 2:30. He wanted to come over and get a first hand look at the progress on the theatre. He is designing our ceiling system for that room so he needed to get a look at it. He watched a little bit of Willow to see how the theatre looked. He was pretty impressed.

Min did some work tonight to help me catch up a little. I have so much to do that it is really bad. I feel bad ever going to bed because there is just more to do tomorrow. And tomorrow we have to be up relatively early to be able to get up to the Microsoft show in Rochester. At least the show is close tomorrow and I really don’t have to be prepared for it at all. I get to relax for the bulk of the day while I am there.

Andy didn’t get home until pretty late tonight because he went over to his family’s house to celebrate his birthday. He is still having a hard time adjusting to his new schedule. He is awake almost the exact opposite hours that he used to be so it is especially rough. About as bad as it is for most people to suddenly start working the overnight shift. Some people can do it just fine, but some have a really hard time not doing things at the same hours as other people.

I did manage to catch up on my homework for my one class a little bit. I hope I am catching up at least. I think I gained about a week but it is hard to tell. I am so far behind. If I get the time that I am hoping for on Friday then I should be in okay shape. It is such a struggle to get classes in these days. Especially these types of classes that aren’t very solidly structured making it very difficult to figure out exactly what to do next. I can’t wait until December when all of this is over and done with. It will be such an incredible relief not to have college hanging over my head anymore. Ten years now on this silly bachelour’s degree!

I had to get some paperwork into a company that I had been contracting for recently so I ended up not getting a chance to get to bed until long after 2:00 in the morning. That is rough because I am still not used to these early morning Microsoft shows. Speaking of which, Jen Bulkley (previously Middleton) emailed me today and said that she got married (apperently to Mr. Bulkley) in August. She is now pursuing a career in web development and both she and her new husband might be attending the Microsoft show tomorrow. She has never been to one and thought that it sounded neat.

Well, we actually got a decent length entry yesterday. Not bad. I had to be up at 5:00 this morning which is really early by my standards. It was all that I could do to get out of bed and to get moving. Today was the Microsoft show in Ithaca and Niagara has a table set up there with some information about us so I need to be there all day.

I attended the Microsoft show. It started at 8:00 this morning at the theatres on Catherwood in Ithaca and it ran until 5:00 in the afternoon. I got to attend two seminars down there and I will get to attend two different ones when I go to the other Microsoft show in Rochester on Thursday. Today I got the chance to attend the Connections show which is targetted at Small Businesses and the TS2 show which is targetted at Partners. Min is going to be going to the exact same two shows on Thursday while I go to the technical events on that day. I did get a chance to wear our new Niagara Telecom branded clothing for the first time today. I didn’t really get any feedback on it, though, so I don’t know how it went from a marketing perspective. But eventually maybe people will get used to seeing our logo and will know who we are. Since they will see our logo on our shirts, in the yellow pages, on the website, at the Microsoft events and in November, at the Rochester Tech Expo, maybe they will start to remember who we are. By the way, we have plenty of tickets to go to the Rochester Tech Expo for anyone who is interested in learning about what services are offered by companies in the Rochester area. It is November 3rd and 4th at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center. So, just let me know if you are interested. It would be nice to have people that we know there so that our booth with look busier 😉

I got called today with my start date for the contract position in Albany. I am officially starting on October 12th! We aren’t too tempted to believe it but that is only one week away so we are right down to the wire. Of course, no sooner do they call with the start date in Albany than SunTrust opens up some new interesting positions in Atlanta:( My timing is never very good. But the important thing is that I have work. And Andy has work too so that all works out really well. And Min is at her new job that has all of the benefits:)

After the show, I drove up to T-burg and had dinner with Nate and Tammy. Then it was up to Walmart to pick up today’s release of Disney’s Aladdin Special Edition. After entering the new DVD and CD data into my spreadsheet, it is official that we now have over 1000 CDs and over 850 DVDs and Laserdiscs with only a small portion of those being LDs (maybe 200-250 total!) Lots of LDs have been switched over to DVD already as I find them cheap. I am always on the lookout for a movie bargain. It is amazing that movies are often cheaper or the same price as a music CD these days. And CDs are about the same price as DVD-Audio and SACD. Which is really weird because that is the same content but on a higher quality media that costs more to produce. I don’t really understand the economics of it all. I did pick up Hilary Duff’s new release today as well as the CD from that new pseudo-country act Big and Rich. I didn’t know how much I was going to like their CD but it really rocks, I really like it. It is hard to define because the music on it is all over the place but there are at least four songs off of it that I recognize from hearing on the radio including “Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy”, “Rollin'”, “Holy Water” and “Wild West Show”.

I didn’t get home until late and I only had about twenty minutes to see Min before she had to leave for work in Henrietta. I decided that I needed to relax this evening so I went down and watched Willow on the big screen. That is the first time that I actually watched that movie in a long time and now I realize that it really wasn’t a very good movie at all. In fact it was really cheesy and silly and the effects were terrible. They used that pathetic stop motion animation on the hydra in the one scene and it just looks awful. It is way to reminiscent of Jason and the Argonauts for me to think that it was okay. And the composite work with the brownies was really bad as well and done in a very silly way. It is too bad because I remember that being a much better movie than it really is. Lucas really should have gone back and updated that one. The Star Wars movies were all really impressive for their time but Willow wasn’t impressive ever. No stop action animation is ever okay unless you are doing an entire film like that like Wallace and Gromit or Chicken Run. Maybe the moral of the story is, “Don’t do stop motion animation if you don’t work for Aardman!”

I decided to write the update tonight instead of going to bed promptly because the hamster was awake and wanting something to do and since he has been so neglected recently, I wanted to make sure that he got some attention. So right now he is tooling around the house in his hot red hamster ball. It is his first chance to use his new ball. He broke his old one and had to go for an entire week without one at all and that is really rough on a little hamster who finds that that is his only form of entertainment. So he is having a good time tonight. He is also happy because the house got really cold yesterday but it is back to a normal temperature today.

I will be around tomorrow but I will be swamped working on homework and contract stuff so I will be home but very busy. Tonight is Min’s last night of work for the week so she will most likely come home and sleep a little tomorrow but will probably be awake most of the day.

Eric and I had been planning a trip to Washington next week but since I have to be in Albany starting on Tuesday (and really, I need to be out there Monday night) there is no way for us to go. So I will probably be around at least a little on Monday. Joe, Min’s brother, was planning on coming out this weekend to go to Letchworth to see the leaves but we discovered today that this weekend is the Letchworth arts and crafts show so it would be a really bad weekend for going down there to see anything.

Okay, time for Scott to get off to bed. Sleepy time.

TODAY IS DOMINICA AND MY FIRST WEDDING ANNIVERSARY!!!

It is true, can you believe it? One whole year ago today Dominica and I tied the knot in Wyoming, New York at the Hillside Inn. It is hard to believe that an entire year has passed by already. Time goes by so quickly. It was nice to have Lori and Perry’s wedding on Saturday because they were at our wedding and we were able to get together with so many people from our own wedding so close to our anniversary and to get us into the anniversary mood. That is two weddings in the last few weeks and three since our own. The past 13 months have been the busiest wedding season ever, everyone we know has gotten married this year. And we have two more weddings on the schedule for the next 54 weeks! Every one of these weddings being for people that were at our own wedding and just about exactly half of the people were actually in the wedding party (coincidence, I think not.) I was really hoping that the Hillside Inn would be open for dinner this evening because that would be perfect to go back there on our anniversary but they are only open for dinner on Friday and Saturday nights these days so we have to do something else. Mondays are a rough day for going out for a nice dinner.

This is going to be a busy week so don’t be surprised if no one is able to find me all week. Today will be busy because it is my anniversary, obviously. Tomorrow morning I have to be up and moving extremely early to get down to Ithaca for the Microsoft event down there where Niagara has a table to promote our services to small businesses in the Ithaca area. Wednesday is a breather day. Then Thursday is the matching Microsoft event in Rochester which we will be at but sans table. Friday, I am sure, I will be going nuts trying to catch up on homework, as usual, and on Saturday morning we are expecting Joe to be coming out although he might come out on Friday evening. Somewhere, in all of that, we need to spend at least a little time painting in the garage to get the primer coat finished and I need to give a final coat to the theatre screen to make sure that everything is even. Still no work on working in Rochester or Albany, don’t hold your collective breath out there in SGLand, I am not holding it here.

Unfortunately there is no practical way for Min and I to really get to spend the day together. She is coming off of a sixteen hour shift with sixteen hours off before returning to do an eight hour shift. And I have to leave Geneseo no later that 6:00 tomorrow morning to make it out to the Microsoft show, so I have a different schedule as well. But, it is kind of good because that means that Min will be sleeping which will give me some time to get more homework done.

Today is Andy’s first day of work at Wegman’s. He has been out of work since leaving BOC Edwards early in the year, sometime around April, I think.

I got up very early this morning, well early for me at least, at 6:30 and ran out to Wegmans to do some last minute anniversary shopping. I got flowers and chocolates for Dominica. Then I ran over to Dunkin Donuts and got breakfast for us. I timed it perfectly to be home just five minutes before Min would get home from work so that breakfast would be hot. I had flowers and chocolate and a card waiting for Min when she got home. Then I put another card and the good flowers in our bedroom and I got into bed and hid the breakfast food and plates next to the dresser.

Well, it turned out that Min stayed late at work and I ended up calling there an hour later to see if she was okay. So she didn’t get home until almost 8:30 and breakfast was very cold. But she nuked it and we ate breakfast in bed anyway. She was very tired after working for seventeen hours so she went right to bed and I slept for a little longer too since I only got three hours of sleep last night.

I worked around the house this afternoon while Min slept. Then she got up and went down to check out the theatre now that it is somewhat operational. I did some more adjusting down there and managed to get the screen a little larger than it was yesterday. It looks like we are pretty much going to be able to operate with the project situated all the way at the back of the room. That will be a bit of a pain from a wiring standpoint but it sure makes for a huge image on the screen. Min was very impressed.

My aunt and uncle stopped by to drop off some new Niagara polo shirts and the table display for the Microsoft show that we are advertising at in Ithaca tomorrow. They worked on this stuff for us over the weekend. We will see how it goes over at the show tomorrow. While they were at the house they went down to check out the theatre too. Everyone is really excited to come over and check it out. They watched a chapter of The Bourne Identity and were pretty excited. We are all really looking forward to getting enough done to really get the sound into place along with the image. Right now we are really lacking in the audio department.

Andy got home from work and told us all about his new job. He is expected to be working for Wegman’s corporate offices up on Brooks Avenue in Rochester for the next six months. They actually got him a computer and a network login and a security badge and everything on his first day. That never seems to happen with contracts. They even got some preliminaries of his work started, that NEVER happens on contracts. They did do one thing that everyone does to Andy, though. They advertised his position as a Visual Basic .NET Application developer and switched it to ASP.NET when he showed up to work. Luckily he knows ASP.NET but it isn’t the job that he had wanted or had agreed to. They are really lucky that he is able to do the job because he could easily not. He has been struggling against this “bait and switch” mentality of contract hiring for years. They always promise him the work that he is looking for and then either switch at an interview or at a testing time or the first day of work. Sometimes it is the contracting companies trying to get him to get to an interview and figure that he will stay once he is that far and sometimes it is companies hoping that he will stay once he has started work. But mostly it is probably retarded HR workers who are completely unqualified to write job descriptions who do the hiring and just make whatever sounds good up. It is a real problem. Can you believe that he made it through all of the interviews and tests to start work and no one EVER mentioned the technology that he would be working on in the job? Imagine if you were hired to be a pilot and they expected you to be an air traffic controller when you showed up, ready to fly. It is a very similar situation. Imagine if it kept happening over and over again after every job. Eventually you forget how to fly and what an airplane looks like even though you have been hired as a jumbo jet pilot in every job that you have taken!

Min and I went out to the Valley Inn in Warsaw for our anniversary dinner. We were there once before some time ago, maybe almost a year ago. Well, tonight was just as good. The food was completely amazing and I hold to my story that the Valley Inn is the best food in Western NY west of Ithaca. And dare I say it, maybe even including Ithaca. No place in Ithaca dramatically tops the Valley Inn, that is for sure. I had spear fish and Min had pumpkin stuffed ravioli. Boy was dinner good. For anyone who is going to try the Valley Inn, be sure to get the “New York New York” salad, it is truly amazing, every bit as good as Banfi’s New York salad at the Statler Hotel in Ithaca. We both got their pumpkin creme brulee for dessert. They served it in little tiny pumpkins that they hollowed out. It was really cute. The Valley Inn really goes out of their way to make their presentation amazing. It is one of the only restaurants in all of western New York that really gets that fancy. It is funny, you would think that there would be more restaurants like that in a region with three million inhabitants but there really aren’t very many and what few there are are all located in Buffalo, Rochester and Ithaca. The Valley Inn in Warsaw really doesn’t advertise very much either but they seem to stay relatively busy. I think they rely on word of mouth to keep them going but it seems to be working for them. If you are going to be in the area, you really need to try them out. They are open Monday through Saturday for lunch and dinner but only until 8:00. You really should make reservations. They do have three guest rooms in case you want to crash in Warsaw (this is a really good time of year with the leaves changing!)

After dinner we went over to dad’s house to pick up some supplies that I needed for tomorrow for the Microsoft show. We didn’t hang around there for more than a few minutes. Then we headed home so that Min could get to work. We made a few phone calls once we got home and then Min headed off to work in Henrietta. I went and wrote up the day’s updates and am now heading off to bed. I have to be up by 5:00 am tomorrow so even though I am not ready for bed, I have to try to get some sleep.