Sheep Guarding Llama

Min’s back hurt this morning, we assume from trying to move furniture last night. So she ended up just lying on the floor in the living room sleeping for a lot of the day. We don’t think that her back is too bad but it is really sore.

A quick technology udpate: New Mozilla software is available from Mozilla.org, both the web browser Firebird and the email reader Thunderbird have been updated with new versions.

Min and I watched The Pink Panther and The Return of the Pink Panther which is actually the fourth movie in the series. The third one, A Shot in the Dark is available but I haven’t gotten it yet and the fourth one is totally rare and no one knows it and heaven only knows how one would go about getting it. I hear it isn’t any good and it has a different inspector, not Peter Sellers. Few people really consider it a part of the series even though it is officially.

I cooked lunch today – a very dangerous undertaking – while Min was stuck lying on the floor. I just did eggs, toast and fake bacon. I think that it might be my first time cooking in the new house. My parents let me borrow some folding chairs yesterday so that we will actually have four places to sit when we eat until our real chairs arrive in a month or two.

Andy called from Puerto Rico today. He has moved into his new apartment yesterday. It is a studio on the beach. It isn’t in San Juan, it is a lot closer to where his job is. He said that the place isn’t very nice. Everything is dirty and not very well taken care of. It is a tiny studio with everyting in one room, including his laundry. There is powerful air conditioning but it blows in a straight line through the middle of the apartment so you can either stand in that air stream and be cold and stand outside of it and be warm. Either way, it isn’t very good. He has no phone reception there so he has to drive to Walmart to be able to make a call. It’s hard to believe that there could be any place on such a tiny, overcrowded island without cell reception. But they only got him a Sprint phone so maybe that is why. He has no Internet access yet. They are supposed to be installing that tomorrow. His choices for high speed broadband down there were 64kb/s or 256kb/s (in New York, it is hard to find any service offering less that 256kb/s.) So he won’t have a really fast connection no matter what he does. The apartment is furnished but with really crappy stuff. He is considering buying himself a microwave so that he can cook and just leaving it there when he leaves. He has a television but one have the television is one colour and the other half is another colour. He is thinking about buying a cheap television to use while he is there and just leaving that there when he is done too. Luckily, he did take his integrated DVD/Monitor unit along with him so that he is able to watch DVDs down there. Otherwise, he would really have to do without anything. He works so much, though, that it doesn’t make too much of a difference. He does have two golf courses and tenis right there at his apartment. That is nice. But he doesn’t like golf so it isn’t all that good for him. He was at Walmart getting groceries and then he was shopping for a digital camera. It will be nice if he gets one because he will be able to send us pictures of his new place and where he works and stuff.

After watching the Pink Panther movies, Min fell asleep so I went down to the basement and played some Age of Empires 2. I played in the basement for four hours or so while she napped.

When I came back upstairs, Min had just woken up. Her back is much worse than I thought. She wasn’t able to get up herself. She was in a lot of pain. So we decided to order dinner in since it was best not to have me cook again and she sure couldn’t do it. We got pizza and french fries. They forgot the bleu cheese again. That is like the fourth time. If only we had Andy here to rough them up a bit. He knows how to take care of a restaurant that doesn’t deliver bleu cheese. But now he is in Puerto Rico where they probably don’t even know what bleu cheese is. Luckily, Min bought some bleu cheese at the grocery store so I could still have some on my pizza. For those of you who know good bleu cheese, we recently discovered that Marie’s was bought by Morningstar. That is why they have new packaging.

So, we started watching the BBC’s Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair. The Silver Chair is one of my favorite, if not my favorite, of all of the Chronicles of Narnia. Warwick Davis – the actor made famous by his staring role in George Lucas’ Willow in 1988 – is in both of the later Narnia movies. In one he plays the mouse and in the next we plays the owl. Min and I both heard his voice and knew who he was immediately. We were interested to know what other roles he had been in that we weren’t aware of so I did a little research. He has done a lot of movies but the ones that really stand out are his first role as Wicket in Return of the Jedi and his subsequent recurring roles as Wicket in the Ewok movies. He appeared in some famous films like Labryinth, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone.

The laserdisc player that we won on eBay is expected to be arriving tomorrow. We are excited to be able to watch the LD collection again. There are tons of movies that we haven’t seen in a long time and lots that Min has never seen at all. There are five boxes of discs just sitting in the cellar waiting to be watched again.

Art went to the city to see how much it is going to cost to get the wiring done in our basement. We are very anxious to get the electric run in the basement so that we can get my office cleaned up, get the theatre set up and get the server room in order. Everything is coming together in the basement now. The new projector will be along soon, the new subwoofer is here, the SDSL should be in and running any day. Things are good.

After watching The Silver Chair, we decided that it was time to move onto The Pink Panther Striker Again. I just love the Pink Panther movies. Peter Sellers is just a genius. It is hard to believe that Blake Edwards directed the Pink Panther movies and movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. For those who are wondering when the infamous “Pool of Jello” scene appears, it is in the beginning of the seventh film, Trail of the Pink Panther, 1982. That is the first film made after Sellers died in 1980. The film was made using unused clips of Sellers from the first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth Pink Panther films (Sellers character was played by Alan Arkin for the third movie.)

Our Internet connection is flaky again tonight. Frontier is very unreliable. It has already been down for over 24 hours in the past week. And not just their high speed ADSL service but their dial-up as well. The problem that we have is weird, though. We loose the ability to look at web pages but we do not loose our actual connection. We are able to look up DNS names and email keeps working. But if we restart the “DSL Modem”, then we are just out of luck because the DHCP server will not get us a new address. Of course, as I am writing this, we have lost all connectivity and cannot even send email anymore. Great, probably another day of not having any way of communicating with the outside world. Who knows how long it will be before I am able to post today’s update. Luckily, I updated this morning so we are not behind at all at this point. I am very happy that this October looks like it is going to be our busiest updating month ever. I guess there is just a lot going on here this month.

Next, we were on to The Mummy Returns. I saw part of it before but I have never managed to see the whole thing. As you can tell, I am writing the update while we watch the movies. It’s days like today, when Min’s back hurts and we can’t possible go anywhere, that I am really thankful that we have a movie library right here at our dispossal. If we didn’t have it, there wouldn’t be anything for her to do. She would like to play video games but she has tried that before and she can’t do that while her back hurts this bad. She can’t really read either. I am very glad that she got this new recliner for her back, though, because it lets me sit in comfort while we watch all these movies. Since she is stuck on the floor, it works out well. The Hamster is really enjoying us being around in the living room. He is very active running around his cage tonight.

While I am sitting around writing what could easily be the longest update in SGL’s long history, I should probably also point out that this autumn means that we have completed our THIRD year of updates. Three whole years of Sheep Guarding Llama. Can you believe it? SGL started by announcing the Llama New Years Millenium Party for Dec. 31, 2000. Since then we have come a long way. The site has changed a lot. I moved first from the 8-1 Sanctuary Dr. house to 13 Observatory Circle and now we are living in Geneseo. Roomates have moved in and out. Jobs have changed, many, many times. There is a new hamster. We have met new friends. Even discovered a few who were missing. A number of us have gotten married. The economy has fallen and now begun to return. The political world has even changed around us. It has been an exciting three years. We look forward to another exciting three years. I hope that all of you can join us for the adventure.

Well, that is more than enough update for one day. We have no Internet access so I am going to shut down for now and hope that we can do an update tomorrow. Min will still be stuck in bed for at least one more day. The telephones will be going to my cell phone since the main line is down. I expect to be working from the house tomorrow, especially since I can’t really leave Min here alone. Hopefully she will be able to go to the Microsoft show on Tuesday, that will be a really good time. Only two more days. Okay, everyone have a good night – Scott out.

Andy moved into his new apartment on the beach in Puerto Rico today. He doesn’t have any phone reception or Internet access there so we won’t hear anything from him today while he is moving.

I slept in late this morning. Min went to bed at 9:00. I got up around noon. I went over to my parent’s house and spent the afternoon there visiting. At 6:30, Min and I went over to Art’s mom’s house in Mt. Morris for dinner. We had dinner there and then we all played Fictionary. It has been years since I have played that.

After dinner, Min and I tried rearranging the furniture in the living room. We tried some things and decided that it was better back where we had started. So we went to bed early. I was exhausted and needed some slee

Our Internet and phone lines are still down this morning. Frontier must be having a pretty serious problem to have been out for this long. It is going on twelve hours now, maybe more. I hate having to use my cell phone for everything I want to do, it is really a pain. But at least I have some option. I shouldn’t complain. I am really looking forward to the weekend, for once I don’t think that the Mrs. and I have much of anything scheduled at all. Tomorrow night we are having dinner with Art’s mom in Mt. Morris and that is about it. No plans at all. That is good because we still have tons to do around the house to get things in order. It is a lot better than it has been but it is still a mess and Min is going to want her computer to be put together and working as well and I can’t do that until the Internet access comes back up. Most people aren’t affected this much by the power going out!

This morning, Danielle and I are working in Dansville doing sales. We are expecting Dansville to be one of our best markets. It is an especially good target for us because it is one of the towns where we offer high speed broadband Internet access over SDSL. Most of our target areas we don’t get to offer SDSL as well so that is nice. A couple of SDSL customers would really help us out. It is amazing how inexpensive SDSL has gotten now. I remember when it was outrageous. Now it is only a little more than ADSL. In fact, if you don’t need to already have a phone line, SDSL is now cheaper. But the phone line is almost always needed so ADSL almost always wins out on price. But at least they are comptetitive.

I stopped by Arti and Danielle’s house after doing sales this morning because our Internet access was still not on and I needed a break for a little bit. So Arti and I played some AoE2 for about 45 minutes. When I got home, our Internet access had just come back on. What a relief. It is really frustrating for a person with my job to have to go a single day without being able to communicate effectively.

I finished getting Min’s new computer all assembled. Then I started installing Windows XP Pro on it. I really like this Shuttle XPC. The case is a bit hard to work on but it is so tiny that it is totally worth it. It is really attractive. I think that Min is really going like in instead of her old one.

Art came over this evening to work on a whole bunch of his computers and play some AoE2. We installed SuSE 8.2 on his old PIII-550. He is going to be using it as a file server and as a dial up server to dial into our network here at the Llama house. That went pretty quickly and smoothly. Then we played one game of Age of Empires 2. I wamped him again but he is getting better. He has beaten hard now, so he is getting the hang of it.

I had to actually get out of bed this morning because I drove Min into work last night so I had to go pick her up this morning. It is good, though, because it got me up and out of bed at an early hour. I have a lot to do today so I need to get moving. Danielle came over this morning just after we got in because she needed to use the fax machine (it is her fax machine, we just keep it here because we have the handy fax line.) Then she and I headed over to Walmart to pick up more candy for our sales outing tomorrow. Tomorrow we are going after Dansville. We all think that Dansville might end up being a really good market for us. We are hopeful, anyway.

I went out to Perry to work at a client site today. Our first on site work for a client that we have gotten from all of these sales that we have been doing. Hopefully this is a sign that the sales are going to start working now. The work went well and they might even be purchasing a new computer and firewall through us. So we are excited about that too.

I had to stop by in Leicester and get pictures takes of Min’s car for her new insurance since she is now on my insurance policy. It only saves us a tiny bit (but once again, Progressive is cheaper) but it is a lot more convenient to only have to pay a single bill instead of two. We are really bad about getting bills paid so that works out really well.

In technology news today, SuSE is about to release SuSE Linux 9.0. It was supposed to have shipped to people who pre-ordered it yesterday. The Live Evaluation CD is available for download today from SuSE. Everyone is downloading it today so it takes forever. It is a 649MB download. I am excited to see what new stuff SuSE is going to be including in this new package. They have not gone to the 2.6 kernel series yet but there is a preview for the adventurous types. I will stick with 2.4 myself. I can wait for it to be somewhat stable before I spend any amount of time playing with it. I always enjoy getting the newest versions of packages like KDE, though, because they really do make a big difference.

I worked out of the office for the rest of the day. Min and I ran over to Wegmans for a little shopping. I had to drop off a prescription for my foot medication (I can pick it up on Monday) and Min wanted to grab some ingredients. She is cooking again tonight. She is making BBQ Quorn chicken with salad and oven roasted potatoes and shallots. She is baking dessert too! Boy it is nice to get home cooked meals. Now that we finally have our own kitchen and a dining room table, we are starting to really eat. Eric decided that it just sounded too good and since Amanda already ate without him he decided to come over and join us for dinner. Then Amanda decided that she wanted to come over too.

Min made dinner and then Eric and I ran over to Wegmans to get some missing ingredients so that Min could make chocolate chip cookies. Min and Amanda baked and Eric and I put in Father Ted: Series III. This is the last series that Eric and Amanda haven’t seen yet. We watched a couple of episodes and then everyone was ready for bed. Even Mr. Humphreys who hasn’t been active for days. I hope that he isn’t trying to hibernate or something. He hasn’t run in his wheel as far as we know since we added his new cage. He did venture out around his home tonight but he didn’t spend anytime outside of his little hiding place. He doesn’t appear to be sick but he isn’t acting normal. Not normal for him nor normal for hamsters in general. We are starting to get a little bit worried about him.

Frontier finally showed up this morning to deliver our new line. We have been waiting for our SDSL line to be installed since June. The original install date was July 23rd and obviously, we missed that one by a bit. Today the line was run but who knows how long it will be before the DSL is actually usable. Choice One still has to come out and test the line and deliver my DSL Modem to me (I paid for it in June and have been waiting for it to show up all this time.) So it might be a while before we can actually use the line. Which is okay for now since we haven’t gotten the electrical lines run in the basement yet, but it will be important pretty soon. We were also supposed to see someone today because our laundry room wall is all ripped up from the plumber having worked in there this week. We thought that the wall was going to be patched today but no one showed up. Just another thing that I will have to call about and see what is going on. There is just always something.

Tonight while I was working on the update, we lost our Internet access. I am not sure what is going on. The network is acting really funny. For a little while I was able to contact our servers but I couldn’t bring up any web pages. So I restarted everything. But now I am not able to get out onto the Internet at all. I am assuming that it is Frontier that is having the problem but I am not sure. There seems to be a hardware problem with my firewall. One of the ethernet cards seems to be acting strangely. It is possible that one of the cards just got wiggled a little bit too much in the day to day bumping of the machine since it sits right in the middle of a major walking path to my desk.

I watched The Return of the Pink Panther this evening and worked on Min’s computer. I almost have her new Shuttle XPC all put together. It is a really nice chassis, I am really impressed so far. There is a place for everything in that tiny box. I haven’t had a chance yet to see how well it does with being quiet and cool but I am hopeful.

I had this update all ready to be posted during the night but Frontiernet has been down all night. Danielle called to say that the dial-up service was out from them as well. So apparently they are having a rather widespread issue. Mr. Humphreys did eventually go out and explore his new cage areas and he even started running in his wheel. I think that he has a very variable schedule that is hard for us to follow. He sometimes gets up at 7:00 pm to start moving around and at other times he isn’t active until after midnight. It is strange that his schedule varies that much but I suppose that is okay. He does get woken up all throughout the day and that might have an affect on it as well.

Another busy day, no matter what I do I can’t get away from it! I had to get up early again this morning and head out to Batavia to see my podiatrist. It was a bit of driving in some really ridiculous winds. It was gusting up to 50 mph and raining too. Not too nice for driving. So I got out and saw my doctor. I hadn’t seen my foot doctor since 1997. I have been having a couple of problems with my foot recently that I wanted to talk to her about. The big deal being a plantar’s wart that just won’t go away. I have had it for a while and haven’t really worried about it but it is starting to really bother me so I am doing something about it. My doctor recommended that we just do surgery so we have an appointment for late November (I am just too busy between now and then and I don’t want to have a problem on my honeymoon because I have a huge hole in the bottom of my foot.) So she gave me some topical treatment to try until then. If we are lucky, that will take care of it and we won’t have to do the surgery. But chances are, it won’t do anything and we will have to do the surgery anyway.

I got back from the doctor’s around 10:30 and did some work around the house for an hour or so. Then Mrs. Miller (I can’t get over that) and I drove up to Jay’s Diner in Rochester to meet Eric and Amanda for some lunch. We had lunch and then Min and Amanda went to the mall to do some shopping and Eric and I went to Borders to work on a proposal that we need to get done. We worked in the city until about 3:15 and then we went and picked Min back up and took Eric back to his car. Then Min and I headed over to my parent’s house to visit for a little while and to pick up the mail that has been collecting for me there. There was quite a bit of mail. Regular mail and a number of packages from different IT partner companies. I get all kinds of promotional material from different companies these days. It is pretty cool. Nothing ever super exciting but there is often some pretty interesting stuff in there.

At 6:00 we went down to Arti and Danielle’s house for Michael’s birthday party. He is six now. We were originally going to go down there for dinner but the power is off from the high winds so we ended up just having cake and rapidly melting frozen yogurt. The power came on after not too long. We dropped off Art’s new computer. He is going to start assembling it tonight. Min’s new computer arrived too. I might have a chance to get to it tonight, we will see.

We came back to the house and I had to go down and spend some quality time with my computer. Min did some cleaning. While I was downstairs, I noticed a brown mouse go running across the floor! I figure that it must have come into the house yesterday while the plumber was here working since there haven’t been any signs of any mice for so long and for the door to have been left open for so long and now suddenly there is a mouse is awfully coincidental. So I broke out the humane trap again and had him caught in about an hour. I walked him out to the mailbox and let him go. He was just the tiniest thing but so cute! Probably the cutest mouse I have ever seen. But nearly as cute as my hamster. Speaking of Mr. Humphreys, Min got his new cage hooked to his old one so he has twice as much space to run around and play in now. We expect that he will really appreciate the extra room. It gives him a lot more opportunity to explore and exercise. It will help keep him from getting so bored so easily. I did manage to really pick him up for the first time yesterday. It was only for a second but the important thing is that he didn’t freak out when I did it so he is making progress.