Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning I have an Oracle show in Rochester at the Hyatt to attend so I had to get up early and drive up to the city. For a change, this show actually had a full breakfast included (a nice buffet at the hotel, eggs, breads, meats, juice, coffee, tea, etc.) I got there just in time, got breakfast and went into the show. The show only ended up lasting about an hour and a half. It was supposed to be a bit longer than that. But they show didn’t end up being super applicable to me so I wasn’t disappointed. They did a good job, it just wasn’t really geared towards me all that much.

After the show I headed on over to the hospital to catch Eric at work. We took off and went over to Bruegger’s for some coffee (anything is better than Starbucks!) We ended up getting bagels and eating there. I worked out of the hospital for the rest of the day and didn’t get home until almost 4:00.

Eric came over after work for a little while because we have a project that we need to get some work done on and we had to make some phone calls that are much easier to make from the house than to make from the office. So he hung out for about an hour.

Andy’s order of Visual Studio .Net 2003 arrived today… sort of. It turns out that the place that he ordered from, Softwaremedia.com, isn’t a real company and in fact is a racket that takes garbage, throughs it in a box and charges $600 for it. What Andy received was mismatched bits of different products that are neither what he ordered nor legal. He received some CDs that he was able to install the product from but did not receive a certificate of authenticity nor a license. That means that the CDs are worth exactly the amount you can get for the plastic once you melt them down. The media set from Microsoft costs only about $10 but has a certificate of authenticity to make them legal. You still can’t install them legally but at least then you could go get a license for them. But these discs were totally worthless. And it was obvious that the thing was a scam. The discs were not legal to begin with (by the way, this is called software piracy and the amount that was stolen from Microsoft was about $2500 which is way into the grand theft range) but they also just came as discs, not box or books or anything which you get quite a bit of with that product. It was a total scam. If he had wanted to steal the product he could have easily used a peer to peer network to steal it or at least spend $10 (1/60th what they charged him) and get the discs from Microsoft. At least for $10 the discs themselves would have been legal even if the install wasn’t. Then just as a kick when he was down, the jerks charged him extra to guarantee morning delivery but only had regular delivery put on the package so he had to wait all day after paying extra for it. And it wasn’t FedEx’s fault because it was standard delivery that was marked by the company on the package. What a problem. So now Andy has to figure out how to deal with being robbed of $600 and what to do with a company that is a blatant piracy operation preying on people who are not familiar with how the licenses and certificates work.

Min cooked dinner tonight. Shepherd’s Pie and bread pudding for dessert. I know, you all wish you were me!

This morning, Eric picked me up and drove me up to the city to pick up my car which has been in the shop. We had breakfast at Mel’s Diner and then went to get the car. When I got the car, there was some confusion because they tried to make me pay for things that I wasn’t supposed to be paying for (like the tow that they had agreed to pay because they had already screwed up so much.) But they did end up letting me leave without even paying so that we could work out who had to pay what later.

I got the car and drove over to Phil’s apartment and picked him up and we went over to the hospital to see Eric for a little bit. As I was driving I noticed that, even though the one tire had been replaced, the car was still having the same problem that it had been having before which is why we thought that the tire was bad. So we turned around and took the car right back to John Holtz and Phil drove me around the rest of the day. We went over to Best Buy and Phil picked up Red Dwarf Seasons 3 & 4 which released this morning. Then we drove down to the house and watched Season 3 with Min. Min has been dying to see the new DVDs because she has never seen the show on television so these are all new to her and she is really enjoying them.

Phil had to take off early to get to class (sucks having to work around a class schedule) but he left Min and I with Red Dwarf Season 4 so she and I watched that for most of the evening. Andy and I ran over to dad’s to pick up Andy’s car that has been in the barn over there. Dad managed to get the barn doors open and move the car out so we took the chance to go get it.

I had a busy morning this morning. I had to run some errands early in the morning. So I jumped out of bed nice and early and drove up to Rochester, did some banking and stuff and the zipped back home.

Steve Lucente drove up from Ithaca this morning to meet with me. I thought that he was going to be down for most of the day but he was only able to stay for a little while. We managed to get lunch before he had to go but that was about all.

Andy came home today from Puerto Rico. He was originally flying out this morning but that flight was cancelled and he had to fight hard to find another flight. Luckily he managed to get one later in the day that went through another city for his connections. He had to spend the entire day at one airport or another just trying to get home. Every single time that he flies with USAir this happens. Time and time again they delay a flight and miss his connections and don’t come up with any good way to get him where he needs to go. They seem to be completely incompetent. And for the prices that they are paying to fly with them, you think that they would get things together a little bit more. I will stick with AirTran, thanks.

Andy finally managed to get in and I went to pick him up at the Rochester airport around 10:30.

I tried to do the updates from the last few days this evening because I had fallen behind being out of town but while I was working on them, my computer kind of ground to a halt and stopped working. I think that the operating system just died on me. Hard to say. Could be a virus but there was no sign of that. It has been way too long since I did a full install so I dug out my restore CDs and got to work. It actually didn’t take all that long to get the reinstall done and with my handy dandy software install directory on the network, I am able to put all of my software back in place in a matter of thirty minutes or so. I use so little commercial software that I have to have install CDs for that it makes life really simple when I have to do things like this.

The eight of us slept in this morning and then we had to get everyone up and organized so that we could all go out for breakfast. That was a bit of a project. Min and I couldn’t hang out too long because we had to drive all the way back to Geneseo.

We hit the road a little after noon and Min let me drive south into the city because I had never had the chance to actually see the city of Phildelphia before and I really enjoy seeing new cities. It took us about half an hour to get into the city but as we were driving in we noticed that the expressway going out of the city was backed up for miles so we decided that we couldn’t head back out the way that we had come in. So instead we drove all the way south through the city and eventually figured out how to catch the expressway from down there and took it up and took PA 30 west out of the city. That road is so slow. It took us forever to get anywhere. It must have taken an hour and half or better before we were able to get to the turnpike. We had decided to try a different way going home to see if it was faster. Instead of going north on 476, we decided to take 76 west to Harrisburg and take our usual route from DC home from there.

It was dark by the time we reached Harrisburg due to our little adventure driving around Philly so we decided to stop at the Elephant and Caslte to get some dinner (yes, the same restaurant that is on King St. in Toronto that Nate, Josh and I ate at years ago.) Dinner was really good but the crowd there was watching the super bowl and being very obnoxious. We were in a hotel restaurant, very secluded, and could barely talk over the screaming. And it wasn’t excited screaming. It was drunk losers yelling stupid sayings over and over again because no one was listening to them and they wanted attention. It was so annoying.

We got home around midnight. The trip was fine but really long. We think it might be a draw. Going north or west out of Philly is about equal. Fewer tolls going west the way we went though. So maybe that makes it worth it. It really depends where in Philly you are going to. That would make a huge difference.

Min got home normal time this morning. We packed the car and took off for Philadelphia. We ended up leaving around 10:30 and drove down to Dansville to get some lunch. We stopped at the Buckhorn for lunch. I tried their Belly Bustin’ Fish Sandwich and it was awesome. I am going to go there for their fish sandwich more often. Not something you would expect to be so good from there. I did a search on the web to make a link for you to the Buckhorn chain but didn’t have any luck finding it. Funny enough, when I tried to narrow the search with “Dansville” in order to find the right Buckhorn, only about two sites came up referencing what I was looking for and SGL was one of them.

After lunch we drove east out on US 86 and then down 81 to Scranton where we caught the Turnpike’s Northeast Extension, US 476, that took us on down to Philly. I have never gone to Philly from the north before (and only once ever when there from the south) so it was a neat drive for me. That is an area of the country that is so close to us and yet I know so little. I always forget that there is even a major city there and it is a MAJOR city. Philadelphia is the fifth largest city in the US when measured by population inside the city limit (#1 New York, #2 LA, #3 Chicago, #4 Houston and #5 Philadelphia.) We are going to Jenn’s apartment warming party tonight and she lives on the Northwest side of the city (about 30 minutes from the city itself as far as I can tell) in Norristown. The directions that we had didn’t exactly get us straight there and Min was getting pretty frustrated after a while (it sucks having to turn back over and over again on toll roads) but eventually we made it around 6:30 or so. The actual drive time should be under five hours. I think it SHOULD be four hours but I am not sure about that.

We had a really good time at the party. The place was packed. Three of us (Min and I and Erin Seamen) drove down from Geneseo, a ton of people drove down from Long Island where Jenn is from and a number showed that were local. Seven of us crashed there so the place was pretty crowded all night. It was a really good party. Good mix of people. I didn’t know hardly anyone (I had only met Jenn’s friend Bob before the last time that Min and I went to Philly to visit Jenn) so I got to meet lots of new people.