Sheep Guarding Llama

Friday. I had a really stressful day today. I was supposed to work at Basil’s in Perry this morning but I wasn’t able to get everything that I was supposed to be delivering there ready to go and so we had to put off the work until Monday. I am supposed to be installing a new computer and a KVM switch there and the switch isn’t working for me so I am kind of out of luck. It is a Linksys KVM2KIT unit and it appears to be a total piece of crap. It completely doesn’t work. There is no support from Linksys either. The supposedly offer 24×7 support with extra special service for VARs (like me) but I called their supposed 24×7 support line and all there is is an answering machine. And I have read other people reviews of this unit online and they say that they have had similar problems and Linksys refused to get back to them about it as well. It appears that Linksys tried to make a super cheap KVM unit and failed and is trying not to acknowledge it. This will cost them in the long run, though, since they are a division of Cisco and we now have to tell all of our customers that Cisco is not honoring its product support agreements and that they are selling total crap hoping to sucker customers trying to save a buck or two. Cisco sells really expensive stuff and I have a hard time believing that they really thought that it would be a good idea to risk their reputation on such a stupid item.

My day got even longer when I needed to get two proposals printed out this morning and we ended up with no printers that had any ink in them. We had a document written using MS Office 2003 so no one could open it and no one who could print it had a working printer. After much effort, we finally ended up having Eric print the stupid things in Rochester and then driving down to York to hand them to me so that I could turn them in. After all that, Eric came over to the house and we played a round of AoE2 to relax as it was a very long and hectic day. After our game, Min and I dropped Eric off at Arti and Danielle’s house and we went up to visit mom.

We didn’t know it at the time but this will be the last time that I am able to communicate with my mom. She was barely able to talk tonight. It was all that she could do to be awake while we were there. She said about six words all night and with great effort. She has given up now and is just waiting for it to all be over. It is really hard seeing her because she is in so much pain. We can barely even recognize her now. We stayed until she fell asleep.

Min went to work tonight and Arti came over to play some AoE2. I like to play late on Friday nights because it means that I can sleep in in the morning with Min. Arti and I played three games (I played one earlier with Eric and Arti played earlier with Eric once and with Carl once) and I crushed him all three games. In fact, I improved significantly with each game. I think Arti was getting exhausted by the end. Arti managed to beat Eric quite well earlier today as well.

Sunday. Sorry everyone, I know that I have been not keeping up with the updates these last two weeks. There has been a lot going on here. I have been working very hard trying to catch up on all of the work that I need to be getting done. And for those of you who know what else is going on, that isn’t going well either. Dominica and I have cancelled our honeymoon that we were supposed to be leaving for this coming weekend. It is just a terrible time to try to go so we decided that it wasn’t the right thing to do and we will probably try to go again in February.

I will do what I can to catch up on the past news. There hasn’t been a lot of it so don’t worry that you have all been missing out on all of the excitement. Min’s back is quite a bit better but she is still moving around very slowly and carefully. She is spending most of her time sitting in the new recliner chair that she has in the living room and watching DVDs on the new projector. We are getting a lot of use out of our DVD collection over the past few weeks. More than we ever thought possible.

Min’s back hurt this morning so we weren’t able to go to church. She just isn’t able to sit in the pews. I woke up to a call from Andy in Puerto Rico. He is really hating it down there. Both companies that he is involved with are really going out of their respective ways to screw him over. He is pretty much ready to come home. He is supposed to get Sundays off and every other Saturday. But he has been working every day since he has been down there. He went into the office at 7:30 this morning. And just in case he didn’t go into the office, they sent someone to his appartment to drag him to work. When he found out about that, he left. They aren’t even allowed to have him work on Sundays. And they won’t give him a phone so that they can call him at home. They gave him a Sprint cell phone that only works when he is sitting in the parking lot at Walmart. And he doesn’t live right by a Walmart like he does here in Geneseo so it is really a pain for him to call anyone. The worst part of the whole thing is that they go to so much trouble to make sure that he doesn’t get a day off but neither company will have a single person there for him to work with so even though he is there there isn’t anything for him to do. So they are doing it just to be mean to him. And they know way ahead of time that no one is going to be there but they don’t schedule anyone. And they are constantly waiting to give him any work during the day until after the people he needs to work with have gone home for the day. So he spends his entire day with nothing to do and then is rushed in the evenings when there is no way for him to produce any results.

Min and I went over to my parent’s house around 3:00. The pastor came over to give communion at the house. It is nice since so many of us have been unable to make it to church recently. Min and I hung out there for much of the afternoon. We stayed about five hours and had dinner there.

Min and I came home and watched the first six episode of Season Two of Coupling (the real Coupling, not the cheesy NBC knockoff.) I think that Season One was better but Two is still really good. There are three episodes left that we need to go through.

THE NOVEMBER LLAMA OF THE MONTH IS DOMINICA ANNE MILLER!!

Dominica wins the Llama of the Month competition because she was smart enough to marry me. I figured that that was reason enough. I can’t believe that the month of October has gone by already. It seems only yesterday that we were running around trying to get things ready for the wedding. And now the month has passed right by.

Min and I went over to my parent’s house this afternoon. We are trying to take a big stack of boxes with us every time that we go over there because dad is planning on having a big bonfire for something and so he is going to use all of the boxes that we don’t need. And boy do we have plenty of boxes. I keep filling up the car with them. I feel like they will just go on forever. We visited for about two hours. Then Art came up so that we could scrounge through some of the wood that dad has in the barn because we are doing some work on the basement at my house and we needed wood. Better to take it out of the barn then to drive to the city to buy some. We found what we needed and headed back to my place. Danielle and Michael met us over there.

Art and I spent the evening getting the electrical moving along while the girls entertained Michael as best they could. The girls also went out and picked up some Chinese for dinner. Art managed to get one additional outlet hooked up tonight. But it is enough to really help. Now there isn’t the big tangles mess of electrical sitting behind me while I work and tripping me as I go to and from my desk. Art and I moved some of the desks around and we managed to get the place looking and working tons better than it was before. There is now a “laptop station” where visitors to my office can sit down their laptops and work with either a wired or a wireless connection. My main desk has been cleared off and moved slightly. And the seven foot long peninsula extension to my desk has been relocated into the second cublicle area so that there will be a fully functional workstation there for people who need to use it. That will be much better for people who want to play Age of Empires and Empire Earth as well as people who need to get work done. It is a nice setup.

Danielle and I went out to Warsaw to do sales this morning. It was a most beautiful day for it. The weather was perfect for walking up and down small town main streets. I don’t really like doing sales but the nice weather and the small town settings makes it nice.

I wrote a ton of update yesterday but didn’t get a chance to post all of it. So if you are reading this before Thursday or so, be sure to go back and read October 19th later because it will be much longer. I sat in the living room all day yesterday with Min after she hurt her back and all of the updates that I wrote are on my laptop and I don’t have the energy today to transfer them over to post them. I am going to start carrying around the latest copy of the site on a USB memory stick so that it is easier for me to work on wherever I may be at the time.

Dominica’s back is still really bad this morning. She is in a lot of pain and very upset. We made an appointment to see the doctor today. We weren’t able to schedule her in until this afternoon so she will have to deal with the pain for a bit of the day before we can go. She is going to use my doctor in Batavia since she doesn’t have one out here yet.

Tomorrow is the Microsoft Office 2003 Launch Event. Should be very exciting. We don’t think that Min is going to be able to go, though, because of her back. It is really too bad because she was really looking forward to going. It is an extra shame because they are giving out Microsoft Office Professional 2003 to everyone who goes to the show so she is really going to miss out.

ChoiceOne finally came this morning and installed our SDSL line that we have been waiting for all of this time. It turns out that the line is really ADSL that acts like SDSL but that is ok, it isn’t really a big deal. The important thing is that the line is finally in place. I was so busy today that I wasn’t even able to try the line at all. Maybe I will be able to get to it tomorrow if I am lucky. I have a ton of things to do and I have been having a terrible time trying to catch up. There has just been so much going on recently that I am just falling farther and farther behind. I didn’t even get a chance to really eat today before I had to take Min out to Batavia to see the doctor.

Min laid in the back seat of the car on the way to Batavia. She can’t sit up at all from the pain in her back. We finally got out to the doctor’s office and I left Min in the car so that I could go check her in since they don’t have anywhere for you to lie down in the waiting room and she can’t stand or sit. The doctor said that if she couldn’t sit in the waiting room then she needed to go straight to the emergency room at United Memorial Hospital. Luckily, the hospital is in the same parking lot as the doctor’s office so that wasn’t too hard to do. We drove over and I got her into the emergency room. The staff there were plain mean. They wouldn’t do anything to help us. There was no where for Min to go because all they had were seats that she couldn’t sit in. They ignored us as much as they could and told us that beds were only for people who had hurt their backs falling and all other back injuries had to walk. When we told them she couldn’t walk or sit they brought a wheel chair out and laughed at us. The whole waiting room was furious and talking about how mean the nurses where there. Min kneeled against one of the chairs and leaned her head on the wall while I got her all checked in. Then they made her stand to check her vitals while she cried from the pain. The nurse was really mean about it. Then they made her just stand in the middle of the waiting area for about fifteen minutes while they did whatever it is they do. No one knows what they do in the emergency room that takes more than ten seconds. It seems like you could just walk in and be treated. But, of course, non of them or computer literate (or likely literate at all) so that probably plays a big role in it. That is probably also why they can never figure out which patients are which. Finally a nurse came out to take Min back somewhere and I made sure that they would have a bed for her when we got there before I let them take her. When we finally got there they made me leave (I can only assume so that there is no one there to see what is really done – patients in pain are much more apt to just let the doctors and nurses do whatever they want if there is no one there to support them.) So I went back out and waited in the waiting room for a few hours.

Eventually a nurse decided that I could go back to see Min. They hadn’t really done anything. But at least she was on a bed so it wasn’t so bad. But some jerk had come along and raised her head up so her back hurt again and just took off and no nurses would stop by to check on her and they didn’t give them any way to call her. She couldn’t call out for a nurse because the ER nurses had made her sit and stand for so long that she was so weak that she couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t get a nurse easily either so I put the bed down myself and she was a bit better after that. They gave her some pain killer in her butt but that was about all that they did for her while we were there. The doctor gave her a prescription for an anti-biotic for something that we hadn’t come to the emergency room for and totally ignored her back and just left. But they had drugged her up so we couldn’t do anything more at that point and all we wanted to do was to get out of that place. So all of that pain and torture and they managed to not even look at her, basically. It was a total waste of time and the pain hadn’t been such a big deal until we went to the hospital. I was, and am, furious. This is the same hospital that refused to admit me in 1998 when I had appendicitis and then my appendix burst. That is United Memorial Hospital in Batavia, NY (formally Genesee Hospital) for anyone who is ever considering going there. I know that lots of hospitals treat their patients horribly and that it has become status quo to do so but this hospital has really stood out as a really terrible place to go. Everyone we dealt with was rude, ignorant and incompetent. I hope that the insurance company has a talk with them about charging for services that we didn’t even go in there for and doing nothing for the reason that we were there and only succeeding at making it much worse. Everyone in the waiting room was complaining about how mean and uncaring they were both to us and to everyone in general. No one was very happy.

I was pretty hungry by the time we left the hospital and not in a very good mood. I am glad that I at least have my soapbox here to get these things out of my system or I would be really raging. To have been burned by the same hospital twice like that is really embarrassing. I got Min home and she needed to just lie down and relax. I went over to the Wegman’s Pharmacy to have her prescription filled. While I was waiting for that I grabbed a cheese sub from the new sub shop. I also ran into Chris Briffa, Josh will get a laugh out of that, who has been working there for eight years. Some of you will remember him from high school. He didn’t know my name but recognized me immediately as being someone from York. I can’t believe that he remembered me at all. He is four years younger than most of us. His sister is now the Assisstant DA in Olean. I got the medicine and headed back to the house. I talked to my dad on the phone for a while and ranted about the hospital.

Min watched movies while I retreated to my office to catch up on some soarly lacking work. I worked on Arti’s file server and got that all set. Danielle will be able to take it home with her tomorrow. That is a relief to have one more thing done and out of the way. And another that the new Internet line is in. One thing at a time but I am knocking them down. I might even be caught up soon, ha ha.

Okay, I have to be up early tomorrow and I am already exhausted. I didn’t really get any chance to play with my hamster today. He is going to feel neglected. John Stephens (the Surfing IT Wizard) is going to be coming up on Friday night to hang at the Llama house. He has never been up to stay with us. It is too bad that Andy won’t be around. I hope that everyone has been diligently reading the site recently because I have really been putting an effort into keeping it up to date all of the time again and trying to really get a lot more content into it. I think that as I work on the site day to day and year to year, I am getting a lot more used to having a digital diary and I find it much easier to talk to everyone in this format. It is also a whole lot easier to tell everyone what is going on like this instead of having to email or call everyone individually to let them know the latest news.

Oh, I almost forgot. I totally went off on MBNA American Credit today. They have called me five times on my cell phone out of the last six business days. Everytime it has been incredibly inconvenient and each time I explain to them that this is my cell phone and I a) don’t do any business like this over the phone and b) don’t appreciate getting calls on my cell phone. I ripped into the guy asking why they felt that it was okay to call me day after day. Even if I was buying the stuff that they were selling it wouldn’t be okay to call me that often. Even on a land line. But on a cell phone after many requests to be taken off of they call list is just ridiculous. Plus, it is illegal to make sales calls to cell phones anyway. (That is not totally true, you cannot call cell phones with auto-dialers, but hand dialing is allowed.) But I am sure they are not hand dialing. I really ripped into the poor sales guy. I told him to get his managed and explain to his managed the legal consequences of calling me again. I was in rare form. 🙂 The bottom line is, don’t get an MBNA credit card because they are just bastards.