Sheep Guarding Llama

Work, work, work. Min did a ton of cleaning today and the house is looking really good. She is getting the house ready for the new dresser that we are getting today. My dad is giving us one of the old dressers that they had for years. I don’t know how old the dresser is but remember it from when I was really young. I am sure that we had it before I was around. Phil and Kate are coming down to look at the house next to dad’s this evening at 7:00 and then they are helping us move the dresser over to the house. It is a good thing that we know someone with a truck.

Min made me lunch today. We are trying out Yves Deli slices which actually make a really good sandwich. I am impressed. Yet another product that allows us to act like we aren’t veggetarians without having to eat meat. It is nice to be able to make regular sandwiches again.

Andy arrived in Puerto Rico early this afternoon. He still doesn’t have a car or any means of transportation and his company isn’t bothering to do anything about it. He managed to get to his apartment after spending $100 on a taxi just to discover that he has no Internet access and that his phone can only make calls to the continental US and Canada. So he is unable to call for another taxi or get food delivered or even look up phone numbers to call in case someone stops by to offer him a phone. He lives too far from any place that he knows so he isn’t able to walk and it is too hot anyway. Luckily he still has television and a few books to read or he would be going completely insane. Not that he isn’t, but we haven’t really noticed anyway. So he is stuck with no way to communicate and no way to get to work. He is not happy.

Min and I went over to dad’s around 5:30 to help get the dresser ready to move. There were a lot of memories in and on that dresser. Dad also found the books that had been stored back there when we were moving up from Ithaca. I knew that some books were missing and even knew what a few of them were but I wasn’t able to figure out where they could have gone. Two boxes were hiding back there. My subscription to Microsoft TechNet arrived today too. That is nice. New stuff to play with.

Phil and Kate came over from looking at the house, 877 Peoria Rd., and loved it. It is directly across the street from where Min and I hope to build some day. It would be really cool to have them living right across the street from us. We hung out with dad for a while and then got around to moving the dresser.

After moving the dresser, we all went out to Denny’s for some late night dinner.

Ah, back to the weekly grind. This morning I worked around the house as usual. At noon, Min and I drove Andy up to the airport so that he could fly back down to Puerto Rico. He is going to be there until March 13, or so the schedule goes currently. That will, most likely, be the end of his trips down to the Carribean.

Min and I met Eric at the UofR and we went over to Breugger’s for some coffee. Andy called while we were there to say that his flight was delayed and he didn’t know if he would be able to get out at all. So we were prepared. We headed back home and I did some more work around the house. There wasn’t a lot of work to be done today since it is a semi-holiday and few places were doing business.

Devin Richards stopped by this evening to pick up some ink that he had been waiting for. He hung out for over an hour and got the tour of the house and office. Andy called while he was here to tell us that he had been able to get out of Rochester but inept USAir had flown his connecting flight on to Puerto Rico without waiting for the flights that connected to it to arrive in Philadelphia. So he is stuck in Philly with no way out until tomorrow. Then, to rub it in his face that he took the wrong airlines, USAir tells him that they aren’t responsible for keeping their own connecting flights and schedules so that it is his own problem to find a place to stay in Philadelphia. (Too bad he doesn’t book his own flights or USAir’s attempts to get him to change airlines might be successful.) So he doesn’t know what he is going to do tonight. Then, to make matters worse, because he no longer has a flight to get to and because of the heightened airport security, they forced him to walk a very long distance outside of the airport in the freezing cold. And, of course, he has no coat because he was going to Puerto Rico and returning at the end of winter and was going to be inside the Philly airport the entire time inbetween so he had to pratically freeze to death out there. All this after they have lost his luggage on more than one occassion. Let me tell you, I will be sticking with AirTran.

Speaking of bad airlines, Northwest (on whom Josh, Andy and I flew some time ago) has violated customer privacy laws and sold our personal information, including credit cards, addresses and such, to some agency. I am hoping that there will be a class action lawsuit, like there was against JetBlue because I, for one, intend to pursue the issue. I think corporate officials should go to jail. They are involved with identity and credit card theft and then they hide behind big companies. I am putting this in here because I will forget to tell Josh and Andy that it was in the newspaper today and I just happen to read it. I am pretty sure that we all flew during the time period of the theft.

Min cooked us a nice dinner and we ate in a very quiet house. Andy has only been gone for a few hours and already the house seems empty and quiet. Strange, isn’t it?

Apprently in a World War II mood from last night, Min and I decided to watch The Pianist. Neither of us had seen it before but dad had and said that it was really good. Adrian Brody who stars in this film was also in The Thin Red Line that we watched last night.

Well, so far the updates have been rolling in fairly regularly in 2004. It looks to be an exciting year at SGL. Tomorrow I might hear something about whether or not I will be spending some serious time in San Francisco soon. It is unlikely but I am really hoping that I get to go. It would be really nice not to have to spend the winter in New York. And it would be really nice to have steady work coming in for a change. I do know that I will be spending next week down in Washington, DC. Eric and I are heading down on Tuesday morning and will be there all week. If anyone needs us, we will be at our usual spot, the Comfort Inn, Annapolis, Maryland on Old Mill Bottom Drive. We have been staying there for years. And luckily for me, this month is double air miles on my card for staying there. So good deal.

We actually woke up early enough this morning to be able to make it out to LaGrange for church. It is rare that we don’t have some silly reason why we can’t go. On the way this morning, the roads got really bad. After church, we went up to the house next to my father’s to see it because they were having an open house today. Art and Danielle had made it up an hour or so before we had to see it. They decided that they weren’t really interested in it but Phil and Kate might be interested and they are hoping that they might get a chance to see it on Tuesday. We think that the house would be really perfect for them. It is a small three bedroom ranch hand built by my old neighbour Bill Seamen in 1951. Dad told me the story. Bill had built the house for his wife but she died before he was able to complete it. I had never realized that the house was so new. I had always thought that the house was much older. It was weird to be in the house that I had grown up next to but only ever been in a handful of times and only when I was very young. The house was completely redone in the last few years. New windows and siding and a completely new kitchen. We were really impressed. The really cool thing about this house is that it is directly across the street from the spot where Min and I hope to build our new house someday.

Phil and Kate came over for dinner. While Kate and Min cooked, Phil and I played a round of AoE2.

After Phil and Kate left, Min and I watched The Thin Red Line which I have been wanting to see for a long time but have never gotten to. It was good. Not great but interesting and different. It was neat to have a movie made about Guadalcanal in 1942 but we had been hoping that the movie would be much more historically informative and instead we learned very little about the campaign. We both thought that we probably would have enjoyed the film better if we hadn’t had such skewed expectations of it going into it. I will have to watch it again another time to get a better impression of it.

We all got up really late today. I don’t know when Josh and Joanna got up but it was way before we did. They got up, packed, stole the head of our speaker cow and took off. Apparently they went to the Omega Grill for some lunch because they ran into Eric and Amanda there and Josh told Eric all about the game that he had missed. Jeremy and Tony got up kind of early and started playing more AoE2. They didn’t manage to get a whole game in before Jeremy had to leave, though.

Andy got up after we did and then the four of us went over to the Omega Grill for our own lunch. It is the popular lunch spot around here. I had a terrible headache, probably from stairing at the computer screen for so long last night and then getting so little sleep. So when we got back to the house, I went back to bed while Min played some Sims. I didn’t really get any sleep but I felt a lot better.

After I got up, Min, Andy and I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade because Andy hadn’t seen it yet. He liked it much better than Indiana Joned and the Temple of Doom.

Today is the big game. We managed to get eight people to confirm for the game this evening. We are worried that the house may not be able to handle the amount of power needed for the game so we called Phil and he is hooking us up with three additional LCD monitors. We have five here in the house so that is enough for everyone to have one. York and Avon had school cancelled today so Tony and Jeremy don’t have to be at school. Andy and I went up to Avon to pick up Tony and we went over to Tom Wahl’s for some lunch. We headed back to the house and Tony spent the afternoon trainging with Andy and I.

I spent most of the day working on NTI’s new instant messaging server. It took quite a bit of work but it is finally up and running. We are very excited to have our own corporate IM server. It is a nice addition to our services line-up. We are hoping to be able to sign up new IM users as early as this week. Eric and I are already beginning to use the new system.

After the work day was over, Jeremy came over to get started. Arti arrived around 7:00, Josh around 8:00 and Phil arrived around 10:00. We did away with out slowest machine because we have been concerned that it might be causing problems in the game. Our slowest machine was removed and Phil provided us with another one of almost double the speed. We had to do a lot of work to get places for everyone to play at. Min and Andy got to play in their own rooms and I got to play at my desk. Art and Jeremy shared the secondary desk and Tony played at the third basement desk. Josh and Phil split the dining room table. We had to run ethernet cable around the upstairs to get connections for Josh and Phil.

We got two games in but it took almost eight hours to play them. The first game was Min, me, Jeremy and Phil vs. Josh, Art, Andy and Tony. We got our butts handed to us in the first game. We took a twenty minute break or so between the game and then swapped Jeremy and Josh and played another game. We did pretty well in the second game. It was really exciting to be able to play with so many people. We tried playing with 200 population giving us 1600 total units to control. It was really exciting. But we decided that having a few less units would work better so we went back to our regular 150. That worked really well.

We played until almost 6:00 am. Boy were we tired. Phil had to be up at 7:00 to be able to get to work. Phil, Josh, Joanna, Jeremy and Tony all crashed here.