Sheep Guarding Llama

Another long day of driving for me. I am on my way back to Washington again today. I slept in really late because we got in so late last night. I really needed the sleep. I got up and did a couple of things around the house and hung out with Andy for a little bit. I got the car packed (which is getting easier and easier now that I am not unpacking from the trips but just doing laundry and throwing things back into the hampers) and I got on the road around 3:30. I had called Min at work earlier and she has nothing going on this afternoon so she drove down to Big Flats and met me at Barnes and Nobles. We met around 5:15 and did some shopping and then went over to Red Lobster to get some dinner. It was nice to get a last chance to see my wife before leaving for twelve days.

I didn’t manage to leave New York until after 7:00 which makes for a long evening and night of driving. I like it best when I drive and can arrive no later than 11:00 but that isn’t happening today. Since I was coming from Big Flats, I took the scenic route down through Elmira and Mark Twain country on route 14. It takes longer that way but the drive is interesting. I love seeing all the little towns. I was able to borrow a book about Benjamin Franklin from my grandmother two days ago and so I listened to that the entire way down. It is really interesting. I have been learning all kinds of American history recently. Pretty soon I will have managed to make up for all of the lack of American history that I didn’t have previously. I am also excited that Min and I found a new series of CDs from Barnes and Nobles that is important college class lectures on CD. How cool is that? They aren’t very expensive either. I am planning on trying some of those out soon. Almost all of them look pretty interesting. They are about ten hours of audio for $40 which isn’t bad at all, very comparable to regular non-fiction books on CD.

I arrived in Bowie, MD around 1:30am. I was pretty tired. I set up shop to check out the state of the world before going to bed and ended up having to call Andy to help fix a server that has been having issues. Some of our regular readers will probably notice that we have been down from time to time. We are ordering new hardware to, hopefully, eliminate this issue but only time will tell. I was glad when I finally got to bed.

Today is Nate’s bachelour party. I slept in late and got up and ready just in time to learn that everyone had decided to go to Tahou’s for lunch so I hit the road. I beat everyone there because Bob missed his exit off of the thruway and had to come up 390 and then we were running late enough that we had to drive back down south to the airport to pick up the rental car. Well, this turns into another story about the incompetence of Hertz. Most of you probably know the story from years ago when Josh tried to rent a car from them and instead of just telling him that they didn’t like him and weren’t going to rent him a car they made up some ridiculous excuse that they didn’t accept credit cards issued by banks. Now, at this point everyone should reach into their wallets and pull out all of their credit cards (yes, even Discover and Amex) and look around to see what bank issued them. In fact, in the retail trade, Visa and Mastercard are collectively known as Bank Cards. Well, Hertz had a sign saying that they took Visa, Mastercard and Amex but then claimed not to take any (Amex is issued by Centurian Bank, in case you never looked.) So, because I couldn’t believe their audacity and capacity to believe in our naivete, I turned to someone who had just rented a car and asked to see his credit card. Of course, it was issued by a bank, what were the chances? Anyway, it ended up in quite and argument with Hertz never being able to explain why they were being so prejudice nor why they were unwilling to honor their merchant’s agreements with their credit card companies (if you display a sign for a credit card, you must take it.) So anyway, it turned out that this time, Hertz had rented Bob a car from a rental location that didn’t allow the public to enter. It was a rental location inside of a private airport. But they don’t inform you of that when you rent the car. You show up and they don’t let you in and your car is just in there mocking you. Luckily, we didn’t spend a whole lot of time looking for the place. Eventually, Bob managed to wrangle a Chevy Suburban from another Hertz location at the real airport.

After that fiasco, we were on our way back to Tahou’s for that lunch. We were all pretty hungry by this point. We ate quickly and then drove over to Irondequoit to Durand-Eastman Park for some golf. They have recently redone some of the course – Josh, Phil and I played there three years ago. There were seven of us but just six golfing so we played three on three scramble. It was fun and we ended up dividing the teams very well because the teams ended up tying! That was a lot of fun. We were pressed for time, however, so we wrapped up quickly and drove up to Joe’s house in Greece to change and get everyone together for some paintball. Joe is the only one of us who has ever played previously so we figured that this would be pretty interesting.

We played paintball for almost three hours in the basement of Rochester’s old Cumberland Street post office. That was a load of fun. We were all really soar afterwards, except Joe. Joe never even got shot once. The rest of us were all relatively even in how poorly we did. I think that a lot of us will be looking forward to playing again sometime soon. That really is a neat sport. If any of us do it much, though, we will want to get our own face masks because the ones that they have there really suck. They are gross, they smell and they fog up really easily which makes you blind in the dark basement.

After all the sports, we headed out to Alexander Street to do some drinking. I am on lamisil for the next month so I can’t drink. Alexander Street was having their festival so the place was crazy. It was so packed that it wasn’t very pleasent being there at all. We decided that we needed to go someplace better so we drove up to Charlotte to go to the Pelican’s Nest, or something like that. Andy and I headed home after the bars closed, we both have busy days tomorrow and need some rest. Most everyone else crashed at Joe’s house and were just starting to watch Eurotrip when we left.

Happy Birthday Dad! My dad turns 58 today. SuSE 9.1 is also available for download today although I am sure that the servers are quite busy for the next few days.

Today is the only real day that Min and I have together. She has been working the last two nights and I have been busy during the day. This morning Eric and I worked around the house getting policies in place for Waste Watcher in Washington. Min tried to sleep a little but it didn’t work out so well.

This afternoon, Min and I drove up to Henrietta to see Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban which released today. It was really good. We both thought that it was a bit of an improvement over the earlier two movies. Unfortunately, to make it better they also changed some things that made inconsistencies with the ealier movies but nothing unforgivable. I think that they are headed in the right direction but that they are still working too hard to keep the movies way too short. It still seems rushed and you don’t feel like you are in the theatre for long before it is over. A movie should only slightly leave you wanting more but all three make you wish that it was just intermission.

After the movie, we went down to my Aunt Sharon’s house in Leicester for a birthday dinner for dad. We hung out as long as we could but Min is working in Ithaca tomorrow and needs to get to bed.

We did receive the company copies of Symantec’s Client Security 2.0 today which we are very excited about. We have already rolled it out for one of our customers but it is nice to have it for ourselves as well. I didn’t have any time to work with it this weekend, though, so I am planning on working with it when I return in two weeks. I hate having to put things like this off when it would be so much better to just get them done.

We stopped by dad’s house to borrow mom’s car and to pick up stacks of my books because Min needs things to read while she is in Ithaca and when she is working at the hotel. She has read everything around and is getting restless.

I didn’t manage to post yesterday because I wrote some in the morning and then hit the hay as soon as I arrived home in NY and never got around to posting anything. So, here is everything now.

Busy day today. Josh and I played a golf tournament in Holley today to benefit the Orleans and Genesee County highway departments. We played three man scramble against all teams of four and managed to not quite lose. And we were quite brutally honest with our score as well. We had a good time. We are terribly out of shape but it is good that we are playing today because we are playing again in two days at Nate’s bachelour party.

After golf, I had to run to the DMV to take care of some stuff and then I went home. I finally decided that I have waited long enough to get things done through John Holtz – Min’s car has been waiting forever to get into the shop and hasn’t been drivable since last week. My car has had minor things that need fixed under warranty which wouldn’t be a big deal but I have been waiting for four months on the one thing and they don’t even bother returning my calls. I was so tired of dealing with them that I decided that I was going to look up a dealer in either Buffalo or go to Burdick in Syracuse to get the work done because anything would be better than dealing with Holtz. But then, when I went to the Mazda website, I discovered that there is another Mazda dealer in Rochester! I was very excited. I picked up the phone and called them. They appeared to actually WANT to do business with me. In fact, I don’t think that they even found taking my money to be inconvenient. I am pretty sure that Holtz finds answering the phone to be too much effort. So, Vincent Mazda of East Rochester answered the phone and actually dealt intelligently with me (in addition to having their Mazda staff answer their Mazda number, if you call Holtz Mazda the Audi department answers and acts like you are an idiot for calling the wrong place even though they listed their numbers incorrectly.) So, instead of a two week wait to get in and a month wait for repairs (so it goes), Min and I actually had to hop in the car and run it straight up to the shop. They got it in in under and hour for warranty work! I have had to wait over a week just to get an email returned from Holtz! Not only did Vincent manage to get Min’s Protege 5 in right away but looked at my 6 and got work moving on that as well. Then, they showed us the new models and let Min and I test drive the awesome RX-8!! It is amazing. Dominica really wants one. She had a blast rocketing down US490 in it. It is really comfortable too. The gas mileage isn’t too hot. That would be the biggest issue.

I am working in DC today but heading home this evening. I haven’t seen Dominica all week and I will barely see her tonight if I am even lucky enough to see her at all. I am going to try to spend as little time in DC as possible because the air conditioning is broken and it is unbearably hot in the office. With the autoclaves next door and the steam plant underneath us the room just heats right up in no time flat.

I moved the first quarter out to the archives yesterday and noticed that we managed to have the largest quarter of updates yet, even with me missing so many days. Of course, April was the really bad month and that is in this quarter so we will be lucky to be anywhere near last quarter at the end of June but anyway, here is hoping. Of course, with me being out of town this month, I am getting a lot of writing done. I have also begun to go back and to make an archive page that tells the history of the Llamas in 2000. 2000 was such a crazy year for the llamas and to not have any records of that years seems a shame. The site had been up at the end of the year but the updates weren’t saved back then. It never occurred to me to keep any kind of record so I was just updating the site and throwing the old stuff out. What a shame. I would have really appreciated having that stuff now. Of course, there wasn’t very much then and almost no one read the site until late 2001 so there isn’t as much lost as one might have imagined.

I managed to make a decently short day of it and hit the road in the late afternoon. Early enough to bypass DC’s rushhour traffic but not Baltimore’s. It was a decent drive home and I spent my time in the car listening to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five which I have been meaning to read ever since Phil told me about it. It was really good. Very interesting. I learned a lot of history. We don’t realize all of the things that are important for us to know until we have learned about them and think to ourselves, that must be about all I need to know. Then something else shows up.

I arrived home late, around midnight, and went to bed.