Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

OUR JUNE 2004 LLAMA OF THE MONTH IS NATHAN PARKER!!

Nate is getting married this month and is one of our original llamas so he earns the semi-regular honor of being our LOTM!

Another month already. Is it possible that there are only twenty days left in Spring? It doesn’t seem possible. This year is just flying by.

I am loving working on my new laptop. It isn’t so much new as new to me. But it is barely used and I think will suit me well for a while. I haven’t heard from Min how she is liking her laptop but I am guessing that she is very happy. She is using my old one now. My new one is an HP Pavilion (yes, yes, I know, NEVER buy a Pavilion – but beggar’s can’t be choosers) with an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ and 256MB of memory. It is bigger than the Compaq Evo that I have had, the screen is bigger and brighter and I like the keyboard action better, I think. I really like that the USB are exposed and I don’t have to open a flap to get to them. I have been using this laptop for almost a week now and am pretty happy. I am planning on getting another 512MB for it to really make it usable for me. It is less noisy than the Evo and that is really nice.

In case anyone needs to track me down, I am back in Bowie and I am staying in room 315. I am trying my best to keep the cell phone on but I don’t always manage to. I only have one battery with me (I think) so it is a struggle to keep the phone charged.

I decided that I had waited too long before moving updates out to the archives so I caught up with that this morning. I need to make sure that we aren’t getting too long in the loading here.

I spent the morning hanging out in the hotel. I only got a few hours of sleep because I was up working last night and then the hospital woke me up really early this morning. If they had called when they were supposed to, they would have caught me before I went to bed. But instead they waited until the next shift and woke me up. So I plan on making it a short day today.

I ended up working all afternoon and didn’t get back to the hotel until 5:30. I took a short nap, maybe an hour. Then I showered to get the sleep out of my eyes and I drove over and fueled the car, picked up dinner at McDonald’s and off I went back to the hospital. It was light when I left but dark when I arrived. I worked at the hospital until about 9:30.

When I got back to Bowie, I parked at the hotel and walked over to Borders because Min said that the third season of Coupling had released today. I figured it was a long shot but I didn’t have a lot of other stimulating things to do so I used it as an excuse to take a walk. Much to my surprise, they actually had it!

I am back in the hotel now, in for the evening. As I strolled back from my late night shopping I began thinking about the secret lives of travelling consultants. So many people think of travelling for work to be glamorous and exciting. But the reality it is exceptionally lonely. Lonely dinners at odd hours, a quiet hotel room to return to. Shopping for things not needed just to fill time. Walkingd the quiet parking lot of the Borders/Target shopping center here in Bowie takes me back to living in the Extended Stay America in Alexandria, Virginia when John and I were first getting Washington up and running. I remember walking over to the CompUSA, Bennigans, ChiChis or the mall for something to do. Walking the streets of sprawling suburbia late at night when all of the regulars have gone off to bed. Now, sitting alone in my hotel room, talking to you in my head as if you are really listening as I sit at my laptop. Behind the laptop is a mirror. The room is dark and my face is lit up eerily in the mirror from the light of the laptop. It is strange to work at night with me looking over my own shoulder.

It is June, that means that I have now been working for Nicklin Associates for five years. It doesn’t seem possible. Back in those days all there was was our account at the University of Rochester. John was living out of the Wellesley Inn Rochester South. That was before Andy and I moved to Ithaca and then on to Pittsburgh. In some ways it seems so long ago. In other ways, just like it was yesterday. Man, how time passes. It is nights like tonight that make me feel old.

I keep meaning to mention on here about how to find free Anti-Virus solutions for home users. As everyone knows, it is vitally important that everyone have a good, up to date Anti-Virus solution on their computers. It isn’t just important for protecting yourself but by protecting your own machine you are helping to prevent outbreaks. I know of two solutions. One is Free-AV which I, Min, Eric, Andy and many other people have been using for some time. It is a good package but it does require manually updating the package everyday. So it is important to be diligent with your updates if you are using it and if you leave you computer on for weeks at a time when you are not around then it is not a good solution for you. The other option is AVG by Grisoft which Cory turned me on to just recently. This one has a much more complicated intall and registration process but it has automatic updates which makes it really nice. So, everyone get out there and try one out and help defeat viruses!