Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Got up and moving quite early this morning. Eric and I are driving down to Pittsburgh today, so we have to make an early start of it. We managed to get out the door around 7:00 and we hustled our way south. Our first stop was breakfast at McDonalds. Then straight on to the hotel in Oakland. We arrived around noon which means that we made really good time. It is so much nicer coming from Geneseo, it is an hour closer than Ithaca is and that is really noticeable.

Our first meeting is at 1:00 at the Oakland hospitals. We were there for a couple of hours. The meeting went well. We were over to the hotel to check in (we weren’t able to check in earlier) around 4:00 and then we headed off in rush hour traffic to meet up with our partners over at Westband for a dinner meeting. It took us quite a while to find their offices on the southeast side of the rivers. We didn’t make it over there until almost 6:30. We got a tour of the offices and then we went down to TGI Fridays at Riverside for some dinner. Eric and I didn’t end up making it back to the hotel until almost 12:30!

Min got to sub today. But she didn’t get a whole day in. She was called around 9:00 when the sub that they had called before her didn’t show up. So they had to call Min and admit that they had called someone else and had to beg to have her bail them out.

Today is the Novell sales training show in Rochester. Min signed up so that she could spend the day with me. This is her first industry show so she is pretty excited. We had to get up early since the show started at 8:30 up at the Marriott Airport (which isn’t anywhere near the airport.)

Novell provided a light breakfast for us. There were supposed to be eleven people in the training session but only eight people arrived. One of our competitor companies was there with four people, we had two and two other companies each had one. So we had a real presence anyway. The Novell guys spent a lot of time talking to us finding out who we were.

The training class went well. I already had last years certification so it wasn’t much different from what I had already done but the classroom setting was nice and covered some things that I didn’t know. Min got a lot out of the day. She didn’t really know what we did with Novell going into the show and now she is really gung ho about them. They provide a really good product range and really fit our business model well so we are hoping to be able to do a lot of work with them in the near future.

Novell provided a nice lunch for us. They forgot to ask if we were vegetarians but luckily I thought of it in time and told the waitress and she had time to alert the chef (yeah, it was a real hotel restaurant meal.) It was a really nice lunch and we managed to make some good contacts there. The Novell guys ate lunch with us so we got to know them a little bit more.

The training went on until about 5:00. It was a whole day thing which is nice because too often these things are way too short for the hours of driving and prep needed to get to them. This was a really valuable day and at the end of the day we got to take the CNS 2004 exams right there so that was really handy as well. So Min should find out whether or not she is CNS Certified in a few weeks. It is really nice that they do it like that. Really works out well for sales staff.

After the seminar, Min and I stopped by Phil and Kate’s place in Henrietta. Phil had to run off to a class (midterms today) so Min and I went down to CompUSA and did some shopping that we needed to get done. We came back and the four of us went down to Friendlys for some dinner. Phil had to run back to class because he had left in the middle of the test to have dinner with us.

Then it was off to the airport to pick up Andy flying in from Puerto Rico. Yup, a whole week there. He is planning on returning to PR on March 25th. He made the arrangements himself so he will probably be actually going then. But he is planning on being in Canada next week so he won’t be joining us for the Friday night game even after he whined and asked us to hold off on the game and wait for him.

We got home and I just had to get to sleep because I have to get up really early in the morning and head down to Pittsburgh with Eric.