Sheep Guarding Llama

I spent the entire morning working in the hotel today. It is cold and raining outside. And not a drizzle either but a rather full blown rain. Not a downpour, but heavy enough. It has been raining since I got up and it hasn’t stopped at all. It has been raining on and off since yesterday evening so everything is good and soaked. I didn’t leave the hotel until I went out to McDonald’s to get some lunch in the early afternoon. I was raining light enough for long enough that I still walked over there. I am avoiding going into the city today because it is President Reagen’s funeral today over in Georgetown and the city is completely mobbed.

I was busy enough all day that I didn’t really manage to do much of anything other than just sit at my computer plugging away at one task or another. Nothing exciting today, just mostly financial stuff and some basic training at the hospital (we do all of our work remotely to make life a bit easier for us.)

John and I had to get together to discuss some things this evening so I headed on over to Annapolis. John, Frankie and I went over to Deep Creek to talk over there. They had Rock Fish on special tonight and I have never had that so I gave it a try. That was really good. Deep Creek is a pretty amazing place for fish in general. I found that Rock Fish was rather similar to chicken instead of fish. Very meaty and heavy. And it was served with mashed potatoes which is unusual for fish. It took forever to get our food, though, it is Friday night and the Creek is always packed on Friday nights. We hung out there until around 8:00 or so. I have to work at the hospital this evening so I don’t get to relax all night like some people.

I went back to the hotel and worked from here for a little while before going in to the office. I wanted to get some downloads started on the laptop before I was out for a while. SuSE Linux 9.1 has been out for five days now and the mirror sites are slowing down enough to start downloading it. They are always so busy for the first few days after a release that you just can’t do anything with them. I am very excited that it is out because we are going to be updating the office here in DC and I plan on trying on the AMD64 version on my workstation at home. I am very excited to try the 64bit version because it will be the first time that we will really get to see what my computer can do. Micrsoft only has a beta of their 64-bit Windows XP released and there are so few drivers available for it that it is totally useless at this point. But Linux is like fully there and available. So, I might start using that a whole lot more now. Especially now that I have a Windows XP laptop that is a bit more powerful that I can do almost everything that I need on. It might make better sense to have my main office desktop be on Linux almost all of the time.

Eric’s old broken down laptop arrived FedEx today at the hotel so that I could take a look at it. It is dead. Not worth spending time to try to fix. I can’t get it to turn on and it isn’t worth any money so it isn’t worth putting time into attempting to repair. So, we are trying to figure out what to do about Min not having anything at all. She really needs something for while she is out of town. It is her main form of communication and entertainment. She watches movies and plays games on it at night and she uses it for email and instant messaging during the day while she is in the office in Ithaca. With her and I both being out of town, it is important that she has something.

I went in to the hospital around 10:30. I didn’t have a ton to do but I did need to get together with our night manager tonight and walk him through some things because I haven’t seen this particular manager in weeks and things keep changing so he is a bit out of the loop. So I can’t skip work the next four nights when he is on. I get too few opportunities to see everyone.

I got back to the hotel around 1:00am. I was pretty tired but didn’t want to go to bed so I watched some Who’s the Boss until I fell asleep. I am really amazed by how many of the really classic episodes are from the first season. I haven’t seen the show since it went off the air in 1992. I have seen every episode many times (this was my favorite show during the 1980’s) but I am surprised by how many that I remember so well are from 1984. That was so long ago.

I can’t upload the pages tonight because the SuSE download is running and I can’t cut it off to open the VNP connection. So hopefully I can get them up shortly.

More work at the hotel this morning. I do actually like working from the hotel most of the time. It is quiet and someone else comes in to clean the place and that makes life easy. I am heading back to Geneseo a week from today. I really miss Min 🙁

Eric called today to say that his old laptop had died. And by old I mean that it is from 1999 or something like that. Very old. It has been passed around from one person to another over the years. I had it in late 2000 for a while. Phil and Karen at NAI both had it at one time or another. I think that it was originally John’s. He had had a really old thing back in 1998 – as in, it was old in 1998. And this is what he replaced it with before getting the little micro thing that he has now in around 2001. So anyway, Eric said that the machine was totally dead and that it wouldn’t even turn on anymore. So that is the end of that. It is too bad. Min had just gotten her laptop earlier this week and was just getting used to it. Now she is losing it again. Eric is going to have to take hers in the morning because he can’t do any work without it. So she is going to be pissed.

I had to run over to Target today to get my acid-reflux medicine refilled. The Target is right behind the hotel so that works out wonderfully. I dropped it off and then I drove out to Annapolis. I haven’t been out there since I got down here earlier this week.

John and I worked a little bit this afternoon but we really couldn’t get anything done because the phone just wouldn’t stop ringing. So we got a little bit done and came up with a task list. But then I had to get back to Bowie to get my prescription and to get some work done. There is just so much work to do, it never ends. I have done nothing down here but work for the last few weeks and it just keeps on piling up. The going to college full time thing really does take a toll. But there is only so much left to go. It will all be over is a year and a half.

I also had to spend a bit of time today dealing with billing and technical issues with Verizon. They have a lot of internal communications probems and have a really hard time getting their billing and technical departments to be on the same page. Everyone is very nice there and they get things fixed but they are even more confused than I am. None of them seem to know what is going on in other departments. I got everything fixed and my wireless Internet access is working well again. But because the hotel’s Internet access is working so well, I am just getting the Verizon card ready to give to dad when I am home in a week so that he can get online and not be tying up his phone line all of the time. It has been so long since I have had dial-up Internet that I forget how much of a pain it can be.

After working for a couple of hours, I headed out to Riva Rd. in Annapolis to meet John, Michelle and Frankie at Outback Steakhouse. I havent’ eaten at an Outback in years so I was looking forward to it. I remember that their fish was really good so I wanted to try it again after all this time. They had the Mahi-Mahi on special which I love so that worked out well. But, it wasn’t very good. It was very tough and over cooked. I wasn’t very impressed. I remember it being much better than that.

I wasn’t able to hang out too late at dinner because I had to get into the hospital to get some work done this evening. I didn’t work too late tonight. I have seen everyone that is there today day after day and they know what they need to be doing pretty well. So I got to knock off early after making the rounds.

I got back to the hotel and watched some Who’s the Boss before going to bed. It is pretty much the only thing that I have with me down here. I have that and two movies that I still have with me from last week’s trip down. But, with Target and Walmart so close, it is easy to go look for bargain stuff although I didn’t see much the last time that I was at either place.

Before going to bed last night, I took the time to get a few more pages updates on the site. I figure that if I keep pace with a few a night that it will only take a few weeks to get the rest of the site up to the same level as this page. It is quite the undertaking but I really want to get it down. The funny and poetry pages are going to be the biggest challenge. They contain the oldest, crustiest code. And let me tell you, some of that stuff is pretty old. It is surprising how much nicer the site looks now than it used to not so long ago. Here is a cool one, do a Google search on “Has Ruined My Christmas” and I think you will be pleasently surprised. Yup, that is Tim Stedman writing for us ranked at #2!! We also appear to be the only website anywhere that is tackling the very serious issue of Fonts and Age Discrimination. It is amazing that other people let these things go. No wonder the world is so out of control.

I spent the afternoon working over at the hospital. We finally have things working on the dock, electrically speaking, and Children’s National is now working again because of it. So I had a bit of training to do with everyone to get everyone onto the same page and doing the same thing. But things are coming together. I put in a long day at the hospital and headed on back to Bowie around 9:00pm.

I went over to Target just before they closed tonight to see what they had on DVD. I was very excited to see that they have Who’s the Boss Season One on DVD and at a good price too. That was my very favorite television show during the 1980’s. I still remember the pilot episode airing in 1984. I was eight years old at the time. I was at that age when most things that came on television after 8:00 weren’t things that I was allowed to watch. But I remember asking my dad if I could watch this show and he let me. I was very excited. Most of the other shows that I really like in the 1980’s, the famous Miller-Boyett shows, would’t start to air unti 1985. Family Ties had been on and Cheers too but I didn’t like either of those shows. Family Ties was okay and I will get it on DVD when it comes out, but it wasn’t anything that I got excited about. The shows that I had really liked before now were Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley and Mork and Mindy mostly – which were all joint spinoffs of each other. There was a lull in good programming in the early 80’s until 1984. After Who’s the Boss, there were tons of good family oriented shows that did really well all throughout the 1980’s. It is really weird to think of them picking Tony Danza to do this show right after Taxi and Cannonball Run II!!

I got a lot of work done on the site last night. I am slowly getting the entire thing up to speed. I also made some changes to how the site works so let me know if there are some glitchy pages out there yet. One of the biggest things is that I managed to shrink the file sizes of many of the pages. Many of them by very large margins. This helps increase the download speed of the pages to make using the site more enjoyable. I put about three hours into working on the site during the night so I hope that everyone appreciates it. For anyone who read yesterday prior to me posting this update, you should have noticed that the dailies were stuck in a narrow column. That is because I was halfway through the changes. Everything worked just fine so I left it as it was just for the day. I figured that maybe it would even make someone pay a little extra attention.

I need to really keep up with the site while I am down here because living in the hotel and going into the office on odd shifts and sleeping at all different times really causes me to lose track of the days. I took a short nap this morning around 5:30 and then actually went to bed at 8:00. I got up at noon and now plan to be up for at least a while. At 7:30 I ran down and got my free breakfast. It isn’t much. They have yogurt and some bread products but nothing to knock your socks off. But, it is free and nothing is bad.

I worked in the hotel all afternoon. Dominica has her instant messaging working now so she is able to talk to me while she is at Lifestyle Properties working. That makes it a lot better being in seperate places all of the time. I decided that I have a lot of printing that needs done so I am hijacking Eric’s new printer that is on its way to him and using it here until I return home. I got Dominica hooked on playing SuperTux at work today. I thought that it was pretty well done. I hope that they make more stuff like that. That would make me happy.

I headed over to McDonalds for a late lunch or early dinner around 4:30. I have been eating there way too much because they recognized me coming in the door and knew exactly what I wanted, the number nine with lettuce and an extra fillet-o-fish sandwich, also with lettuce. They even knew my method of payment. After lunch I walked over to Borders to see if they had a book that Min and I had found a few days ago on building an arcade machine at home. They didn’t have it but they did have another book that I needed so it was worth the trip. After getting back I took a shower and headed out to the hospital center to get some real work done.

I spent about three hours at the hospital and managed to get the camera fixed that has been causing us probles for a couple of weeks now. Little victories. I also nabbed the HP Laserjet 5L printer. Hee hee. Why have a portable printer in your hotel when you can have a full blown workgroup laser printer! Aren’t I obnoxious. I have to rearrange the lamps and stuff in the hotel room just to be able to put it somewhere. It is actually a pretty practical printer for me to be using for most of the stuff that I will be doing here.

I got back to the hotel around 10:00. I made the very cool discovery that the McDonald’s next door is open 24 hours a day! Now how cool is that. They take credit cards and they never close. Now if I just had a Super Walmart instead of the little one that is here and a good diner, life would be almost perfect (if Min could come down here and didn’t have to work all this time in NY.)

Now that I have a printer in the hotel room, I am busy printing out the new Waste Watcher manuals that we are going to be handing out in DC. It is good to always have something fun to do. I am guessing that the manuals will eventually be around 100 pages long and I am currently making eight copies of them. Of course, no sooner did I get two pages printed than the printer died on me. Hmm.. Isn’t that just always how it is? Who knows how long they have been using this in the office without a problem. But I get one in the first ten minutes.

Well, around 1:20am I decided that I was feeling up to a walk and I wanted to see how this 24hr deal at McDonalds worked. So I put on my shoes and headed out. It turns out that McD’s is only open 24hr on the weekends and that I had missed my window for today. All for the best, I am sure, now I will spend less, eat less and save my appetite for the free breakfast that is just five hours away. I decided that I was still in the mood for to walk so off I went to explore Bowie on foot. I ended up walking for more than an hour. It has been a while since I volunteered to go get excercise without their being a golf club involved (or a golf cart for that matter.) The night was relatively cool but humid. Nice for walking. I should have worn shorts and not jeans but I will know better for next time. I really should bring something with me that I can use to excercise down here. I have nothing. It is rough being in a hotel because even walking anywhere is a little awkward. It isn’t like I ever come up against stairs or needing to walk into the other room or anything. I just sit at the desk, lie on the bed or walk all the way over to the bathroom. All in all, it is a rather sedintary life.

When I got home I tried to get online and was shut off because of passing the day marker so I need to get a new password from the front desk. It is annoying that they do this because there are so many reasons why I might get cut offline (server in Geneseo has its usual problem, DSL in NY goes down, password in MD expires, wireless network goes down, etc.) There is just too much opportunity to panic.

I continued working, not being sleepy yet. It occures to me (many strange things occur to me when I am alone for days on end) that I would never have believed, when I was a child, that I would grow up and live in a hotel. What a strange life it is. I decided that I was getting tired around 3:00am so I set a wake up call to get me up for breakfast and I called down to get the code to get back online so I can post today’s update. I am trying very hard to get the post done everyday.

The girl working at the front desk is definitely sleeping everynight when I call down and isn’t very happy that I am calling. I don’t understand why they cut me off in the middle of the night, though. It seems like 11:30, just after checkout would be the most logical time. With the system that they are currently using, everyone who uses it check in one day and has to call down first thing in the morning again. If they did it midday, then you would get a lot more spread out calls, I would think. And no one would have to call and wake anyone up unless they were just coming in really late. Anyway, I am back online now and posting. Goodnight everyone.

Thus begins another two weeks of hotel life. I am back at the Comfort Inn in Bowie, Maryland. This time in room 408. It is a King, non-smoking room but I didn’t get the good view this time. The important thing is having the king room. It is so much more comfortable than the other rooms. My foot seems to be much improved. I think that it is better today than it has been in a long time. I think that I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow but I am not sure, I need to call and find out.

While reading the news this morning (by news I mean the technology news, I seldom bother with world news unless Eric sends me a link to a BBC article) I discovered a neat new video game that is available for Linux, Windows and MacIntosh called, SuperTux. This game is in the same spirit as SuperMario Brothers from the original Nintendo Entertainment System in 1984 but has far better graphics. The game isn’t done yet and isn’t perfect but it is playable and shows a lot of promise. It is a free download so everyone should give it a try. I thought that it was fun.

I slept in late today, I get tired when I drive. Then I got up, fixed the server that had died, AGAIN. Then it was off to the hospital. There is always something to be done. I worked at the hospital all afternoon. Luckily, nothing bad happened and I was able to return home right at the onset of rushhour.

I am back in the hotel after a fancy dinner at McDonald’s next door to the hotel. I plan to be in the hotel all evening to get work done. I find working here really comfortable. It is nice and quiet but I can listen to all of the cars drive by as well.

I forgot to mention the other day that Andy is wearing glasses now! He and Miranda went shopping for them last week. He says that it really is helping his eyesight. But, he has already noticed an increased dependance on them.

I decided that the May archives needed moved out so you can find them in Q2 now. It is so much easier to work on the site when I am only dealing with a single month at a time.

I did some work on some old pages today, bringing them up to current standards of SGL (no, we are not 100% over to ASP.NET yet but we are getting there.) It is amazing to me how long I have been writing on this site. There is just so much stuff on here that I have forgotten about. In ten years it is really going to be amazing to go back and look through all of this stuff and remember how young I used to be! How young we ALL used to be. One thing that really caught me by surpirse is that I have had my head shaved since sometime in 2001! That is a long time. I feel like this is a new hairstyle but I have been doing this for three years! I have been a vegetarian for almost as long. Boy is that weird.

I found my other cell phone battery (mobile battery if anyone British is out there.) It was hiding in a box that I have been carrying back and forth to DC all this time. So, I can now be reached regularly again. No more mobile charging issues. I have plenty of battery to keep one on and one charged now. That is a big relief. It would be rough to be down here with that being my primary form of communication and having it be dead all of the time.

I spent a quiet evening alone in the hotel working on homework and other miscellaneous items. It feels good to get things done. There is a lot that piles up whenever I get busy and it is a daunting task to wade through it all. At least being in the hotel makes it easy to stay on top of SGL. I am so glad that I have this new laptop, it is really letting me live here. And now that the hotel as wireless Internet access in the room, I am super productive. I think that I might leave dad my Verizon wireless card the next time that I come down because I have so much reliable access down here now that it really isn’t the issue that it might have been. I actually just leave my laptop running on the desk all day long and online. That makes life a lot easier. I need to get that new Anti-Virus package from Symantec loaded up on here though. I am running without anything right now because I have been waiting for it which is a big no no. But so far everything has been okay. [Crosses fingers]

I have been exceptionally not hungry today. I didn’t eat anything until I had a late lunch at McDonalds around 4:00. It is midnight as I write this and I am still not hungry. I wasn’t really hungry earlier; it just seemed like I should eat something. So now I am wondering if maybe I am not feeling well. Hmmm… I am not really tired either and one would think that I would be.

We still don’t have the electrical issue on our dock fixed so I don’t have nearly as much work to do in DC as I would have hoped. I can’t believe how much of the stupid, little stuff holds us up all of the time.

Well, there is plenty of work for me to do so I am going to call it a night. I am starting to get a little bit sleepy and I want to be up early enough in the morning to be able to get the free breakfast that comes with the room. It is nothing special (nothing at all) but it is something. Free is always good.

Well, here is a first. I was working on uploading the daily updates when the system died on me. What a pain. It used to always let me work remotely but now it is starting to stop that on a regular basis. It used to be an inconvenience but it is getting out of control. I really wish that I could figure out something about what is going on. This is one of the world’s seriously baffling problems. It is so intermittent and it happens on three different logical connections that have been representing four physical ones. The number of combinations that exist that cause this problem is unbelievable.

Ok, after calling Andy at 1:30 in the morning and having him restart some things, we realized that the actual problem was that the hotel cut me off. What a pain.