Sheep Guarding Llama

Winter has returned. Serious snowfall this morning. Min got called by Keshequa this morning so she got up early and headed down to sub. I stayed in bed to keep Dexter relaxed. He gets very nervous when Min leaves. So I slept in a bit which was nice for a change. I have been getting very behind on my sleep. The snow was falling hard early this morning so Danielle and I decided not to do any sales today.

I worked in the bedroom all day with the little puppy sleeping at my feet. He would get anxious any time that I got up so I was pretty much stuck right there. But he was so cute just sitting at my feet. My Dexter loves me.

The snow fell hard all day. It took Min an hour to drive home from Nunda. The roads were awful. Her car isn’t so good in the snow, it doesn’t have snow tires. She got home and made some Soy Chicken Korma for dinner. Then we headed over to Highland Park to go to the depot to vote. It is the village elections today. Turn out was pretty good considering the horrible weather. I was number 375 from the first and second wards. Not bad for a small town small time election.

After going out to vote, we came home and watched movies. Min baked some cookies for us. Dexter cuddles on the couch with us. He is such a cutie.

We are really knocking off the movies now. Only 24 left unwatched and most of those are on laserdisc so we can’t watch them right now. I got quite a few CDs transferred today too. I hope to have that done soon so I can pack up the discs and get the house cleaned up. There are CDs everywhere.

I am heading out early in the morning tomorrow. I have a breakfast meeting in Canandaigua at 8:30 and then I have an orientation up at Empire State all afternoon. So I won’t be home until normally working hours. Min is working at the hotel tonight. Her week got shifted but she has Friday night off so she will be joining the game. Eric can’t make the game. So we are still a little bit short if anyone is interested in jumping in. I think we only have five or six so far.

I moved February out to the Archives and I updated all of the Archive pages to ASP.NET. That is one more section down. I also filled in a little late February info that was missing.

Well, I was almost done working on the site this evening, in fact I already posted, when Min tried to go off to work at the hotel and got stuck at the end of our driveway. Our homeowners association was supposed to plow the driveway, that is why we pay them, but they didn’t bother on one of the heaviest snowfall days of the year (and not to mention a voting day). The snow was so high in the driveway that Min could barely open her car doors. The car was really burried in deep. To make matters worse, the village hasn’t been out plowing either. You can’t even tell where our unplowed driveway ends and the street begins. It is just a sea of snow out there. That was at 10:45 pm that she got stuck. I went out and tried to push her but the car didn’t budge in the least. We tried putting some stuff under the tires to get some traction but it didn’t help any. The real problem is that the snow is so high that the underbelly of the car is riding on the snow. So there is just no way to get traction whatsoever. Her passenger side front wheel had so little traction that it was spinning at idle.

So for the next hour and a half we poured hot water down the driveway in strategic locations (that is a funny use of the term strategic since it is actually tactical) and eventually started getting the car able to move (we don’t own a shovel you see.) It took forever but I managed to slowly work the car up the driveway. Around 12:30 in the morning I finally had the car up to the garage door again where it had originally come from. So all that work and we were just back to where we had started sans one shift’s pay. So Min missed work tonight and can’t sub tomorrow because she would have to leave before they would possibly consider plowing the driveway. Needless to say, I am not a happy camper this evening. I have no idea how I am going to get to my morning meeting because I will have no idea if anyone is plowing far enough in front of me to get anywhere. My car does go through snow a million times better than Min’s does now with the new tires but it still rides really low to the ground and that is the real issue. Also, I would be afraid to take it down the driveway in case I slipped a little and slid into Min’s car. That would really suck. So it looks like I am cancelling that meeting (which sucks because it was looking to be a really good meeting) and I might not even have a way to get to my orientation at college which is a really big deal.

So since I am back on the computer, I am doing a little work that needed done. Dad ordered himself a projector just like ours today. He used ours a few weeks ago at church and really liked it so he decided to get one for himself. If anyone is interested, we are an InFocus dealer so just ask. The model that Min and I have and that dad has on order is 800×600 with a built in scaler so it acts as an HDTV with a maximum viewing size of 239″ (no really!) Unlike most business projectors, it does not have a 400:1 contrast ratio but rather a 2000:1! Boy does that make a difference. You can get projectors with higher output resolutions but DVD’s only output something like 720×480 so even this unit is overkill. And it had a mode for legacy 4:3 ratio television and 16:9 widescreen high definition. It is a rockin’ projector. We sell them, with the adapter to hook to your Progressive Scan DVD player (trust me, you NEED the progressive scan, it doubles the image quality) for just $1050 plus tax. Aren’t I the salesmen?

We are expecting to be doing business with a new warehouse soon that will allow us to sell video games and video game consoles. Isn’t that cool. It almost fits into our business plan but anything that lets us do more business is good. I don’t know what all we will be able to get but I will try to keep you all posted.

No sooner did I mention the projector than I noticed an email saying that dad’s projector just shipped out of Pennsylvania a few hours ago. He should have it on Thursday most likely. I am sure that he will be excited.

Okay, time to get some shut eye. I am pretty tired and I have to be up early in the morning to deal with cancelling meetings and stuff. What a day it is going to be. I have a lot of driving to do too! Okay, good night everyone.

Well, we got moved over to the new Windows Server 2003 machine with Internet Information Server 6 yesterday and today is the first day of the updates being written in the new ASP.NET format (not that it looks any different.) So, changes to the site should be a lot easier starting today. You should notice that the site is going to begin converging on a consistent look over the next few days – there shouldn’t be anymore of the old navigation bars lying around. I will be doing my best to get the whole site up to date as quickly as possible. I think using the ASP.NET to generate the pages will really help to make the site more dynamic and easy to modify.

I am planning on being out most of the week. Danielle and I have lots of sales work to do Monday through Thursday and Friday I am planning on being down in Ithaca to do a new network install at Lifstyle Properties. They are moving into their new offices in a week or so and they are putting in a new firewall and wireless network. I will be jetting back from Ithaca to make it for the Friday night game. There is at least one open slot if anyone is interested in getting into the game (ahem, ahem, Eric.)

Min and I made it to church late this morning but that works out well because the dog can’t handle us being away from the house for any length of time and the hamster is terrified of the dog and having a really stressful week. We moved Mr. Humphreys into Andy’s bathroom so that he isn’t exposed to the dog all day long. Dexter doesn’t do anything but Mr. H can smell him and he freaks out. Last night he moved his entire home into his wheel to hide. And then he would get really scared and start running in the wheel and all of his food and bedding would whip around over his head and come crashing down on his. So we are hoping that this makes life less stressful for him.

We had to spend the whole day at home since the animals need us so we watched movies. I was pretty tired so I didn’t spend very much time on the computer. I needed a break. I did a little work on the site but am saving most of it for this week. I have been working from my laptop on the kitchen table because the servers are still too loud downstairs for me to be down there for any length of time. I can’t wait until we get the theatre room finished and we can block off the sound of those servers some more. They are so bad.

I finally decided that I wasn’t going back to fill in the missing days in February and removed the blank lines. I don’t remember those days anymore so we are all just out of luck. March is caught up thought, so that is a start.

Today was “Drive six hours to get the puppy” day. I had to be ready to head out the door the moment Min got home from the hotel so that we could drive to Frankfort to pick up Dexter. Min’s parents and her brother are flying down to Houston this morning to visit Francesca and family so we are puppy sitting for the week. I miss the puppy, so this will be fun. We hit the road about 9:30 and got home about 3:00. That is a long morning of nothing but driving. Longer than the trip to Pittsburgh. We got breakfast at McDonalds on West Henrietta on the way out of town.

I did some work this afternoon. I am in the process of moving all of Niagara’s web sites over to IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003 from Windows NT 4 with IIS 4. We will see how it goes. The new server not only supports ASP like we have been using for some of our online applications but also PHP and ASP.NET. I am hoping to be using PHP very soon to dynamically generate a lot of this site. That will give us the opportunity to have all of the pages have the exact same, up to date navigation on the left and we can change all of the formatting all at once without it being some insane undertaking.

Min and I borrowed some movies from her dad while we were in Frankfort. This afternoon we tried watching The Hulk. This movie earns my “Worst Movie I Have Seen So Far This Year” title. I couldn’t handle watching it and worked on my laptop while it was on. Min sat on the couch trying to stay awake for it. It is just so boring and full of pathetic actors and the directing is incredibly juvenile. The movie is so bad that I didn’t even make a link to buy it like I normally do. I don’t want to accidentally have anyone buy it, what a tragedy that would be. Jennifer Connelly is in the movie but even she can’t save it at all. The movie looks like it was made by a seven year old. An uncreative seven year old at that. In fact, the people making the computer effects for the movie thought so little of the movie and knew that the director was so dumb that they didn’t even bother adding any physics to the animated character – instead of having him jump, they would make him fly (he doesn’t slow after leaving the ground, he sometimes actually accellerates in mid air.) It really looks like the entire crew thought that this movie was a total joke and didn’t put any effort into it at all. On top of being a pathetic plot and directoral effort, I also give this movie the award for the worst effects that I have seen in years.

Pastor Jim Storey is staying with my father for a couple of days and he arrived late this afternoon. They both came over at 6:00 and we all went over to the Omega Grill for some dinner. Pastor Storey is speaking at church tomorrow.

After dinner we came back home to spend the evening with the dog. We watched DVDs and I worked continued working on moving the CD collection to Ogg Vorbis. I am getting down to the last bit of the collection. Every so often I discover that there is another box of CDs hiding somewhere and I start converting those. I think we have now located the last box and they are going quickly. Min’s new computer with the super fast Athlon XP processor and the amazing memory architecture just gobbles up the discs in no time. It really shows how much difference the memory system makes for this type of thing. You don’t normally think about it all that much but it really makes a big difference. Memory is a major component of system speed.

Andy left for Canada today. He is going to be up there until week after next. So he is going to miss the game this coming Friday. Art is going to miss it too. But that means that there is a slot open for Chris for sure. Min is home this Friday night so we are looking to have seven already. Maybe we will be lucky and Bob will be able to make it. Bob hasn’t made it for one of the big games yet and he has no idea what he is missing. In fact, I am emailing him now to see if he can make it.

I have quite a few days of updates to post but I am holding off because I am waiting for the site to move over to the new server before I do anything. So that is why the updates are taking so incredibly long.

Later in the evening, Min and I watched a really strange Jackie Chan movie that we bought recently, City Hunter. It is from 1990 from Golden Harvest. It is one of Jackie’s Second Period films but one of the really low budget ones. It is really strange. If you want to see the movie, check you local Target for it in the bargain section. I am not sure it is worth it for anyone short of a really hardcore Jackie Chan fanatic. It doesn’t really have any good fight scenes or anything and the plot is so week that even the funny element of it is pretty weak.

I was working on the CDs and decided to place an order with Columbia House this month. They have a good sale so I got a dozen discs. I haven’t gotten anything new in quite a while and with the new Ogg Vorbis system, we are really utilizing them like never before so I think it would be nice to have more music to listen to. I got all of the Alabama and Sarah McLaughlin discs that I didn’t have. I still have some free CD certificates around the house that I need to use, I forget them all of the time. I have had them for years. I need to use them soon. It is getting harder to order CDs now because I really want SACD and DVD-Audio and the CD clubs are lucky if they handle one or two of those types of discs. Hopefully they will start switching over soon and I will be able to get my discs from there again.

Back to work. At least it is a Friday so everything is slow. Not much going on today. Just catching up with everything that has been left till today since I have been out of town. Dad came over this morning at 8:45 and we went over to meet Min at Leisure’s for some breakfast. That was nice, I have barely had a chance to see either of them this week and dad is going to have Pastor Storey staying with him next week so he will be busier than usual.

Min and I finished watching Mr. Bean this evening. What a great show that it. I haven’t seen it is years. Rowan Atkinson is so funny. He is a total genius. I don’t know anyone who can pull off stuff that way that he can. And he is good in so many different types of roles too. We are planning on getting Black Adder sometime soon because that is one of his earlier works. It is a really famous BritCom. Weird, but pretty decent. It is really interesting that Rowan has two degrees in Electrical Engineering.

Our second day in Pittsburgh. Eric and I got woken up by Shadyside Hospital at 7:30 this morning, thanks Doug. So we got up and tried to get out of the hotel. It took forever to get moving because the DC office didn’t get the credit card sent over to the hotel for hours. So we went down to the restaurant, Fosters, and got ourselves the breakfast buffet to start the day off right.

We finally managed to get checked out of the hotel around 10:30 and we walked over to the Oakland hospitals to deliver a scanner that we have had for them for forever. We hung out there for a little bit before heading on over to Shadyside. We met with everyone over there and didn’t manage to leave Pittsburgh until 3:00.

The trip home went pretty well. It took us five hours to get back to Geneseo. Eric headed back to Livonia and I sat down to watch DVDs with Min.