Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I had to get up super early this morning. Eric got to the house at 6:10 am and we headed right out the door to go to the Microsoft Technet show in Buffalo. We grabbed a quick breakfast at the Hess/Dunkin Donuts in Lakeville and hit the Thruway west. We got to the show at just the right time. The show ran from 8:00 – Noon. It was good but pretty boring. Neither of us won anything this time. This was Eric’s first real show. He was ready to fall asleep during the second half when they were talking about security the whole time.

Part way through the show, we discovered that the Waste Watcher had gone down (because I am an idiot and did a change last night) and so we had to deal with some problems with that during the show. I figured out what I had done so I wasn’t too concerned. It did suck that everyone was away from our desks and no one could fix the problem until Eric and I got back from the show, though. We left Min at the house waiting for the furniture to get delivered and the plumber to stop by and fix up our plumbing for our washer. Danielle came over to the house and helped Min kill time.

While Eric and I were out, Danielle helped Min get her car into the shop. Nothing major, her driver’s side headlight was out and needed to be replaced. It is kind of fishy that that particular headlight went out since it isn’t an old headlight at all and it is the same one that kept going out in my PR5 when I had it. So we will be watching it carefully. Min also managed to get us set up with garbage pickup service – yup, after living in the house for just over two months we finally are having our trash picked up, can you believe it? They will start picking up from us tomorrow. We are very excited. Pretty soon, we will have that garage all cleaned out! Which is important as I found a tremendously huge spider in there yesterday so we need to nip that in the bud! We still have to take a couple of huge loads of cardboard out to my parent’s house, some to store in the barn and some to burn. There is just so much cardboard that we have to find something to do with it all.

Eric and I got back from the show and Min was still waiting for both the furniture and the plumber. Both were supposed to have come by in the morning. The furniture place called and said that they were just running late. But Min has been calling about the plumber all morning and hasn’t been getting any response from the construction company. I called and left some nasty messages and then went over to the construction site to see where it would get me. They told me that the plumber said that he had already been to the house and no one was home. Which really pissed me off since the excuse that they had used last week was that he had come to the house and talked to some guy who said that he didn’t think that there was any problem! So I went off in a huff saying something about calling my lawyer. Which I did and left a message. Then I called the builders back and gave them one hour before the plumber had better be back because we didn’t appreciate having to wait around for two whole days while no one showed up to fix anything. Apparently they got the message either from me or from the contruction guys because the plumber showed up in about fifteen minutes.

So, of course, both the plumber and the furniture arrive at the same time. The furniture got set up in the living room (it is awesome, we really love it.) We immediately put the new, low book shelf up on the wall between Andy’s room and the main hallway and put Mr. Humphrey’s cage on it. We think that he will really appreciate being able to live in the middle of everything again. It was nice having him in the bedroom to have him nearby when we were sleeping but he will see people during his more active parts of the day if he is in the living room. We also got him new hamster living quarters the other day so those are sitting out on the book shelf too. They will probably be all hooked up tomorrow. The new stuff will about double the overall size of his cage system. We hope that he really likes it. We want a happy hamster.

The plumber worked for a long time and was never totally able to identify what was wrong with the pipes. We knew for sure that they were leaking but we could never positively determine exactly where they were leaking from. So he cut out a huge section of wall and took out a huge section of pipe including the trap and a T and replaced it all. Everything seems to be fixed now (except for the huge hole in the wall.) So we will hook the washer back up and do some laundry and see what we get. It will be really nice to be doing laundry again (we got used to it in that one day that we were able to do it before.) And I am sure that Josh and JoAnne would really like to come down and get some laundry done as well. They were expecting to be able to do laundry here and haven’t been able to do any since the machine got here. So this will be a big relief to them as well.

While all of this was going on, Phil Ayers arrived at the house. Tuesday is his day off of work and we never get to see Phil so he stopped by to visit. Today is the release date for The Matrix Reloaded so he ran out to Walmart while we were moving furniture to pick it up. I hadn’t seen it yet so I figured that we would watch it even though I hated The Matrix. Min liked it though and I am sure that she wanted to see the next installment so that worked out okay since I would never go get the movie on my own. Before we watched it, Phil helped us move some of the wine racks down into the basement. While he was down there, he managed to drop one of the bottles of wine and we ended up with Lakeshore red all over the floor. Glass and wine everywhere. Luckily, it was a cheap bottle of wine (Lakeshore rocks but it was a special cheap wine we had picked up) and so it wasn’t a big deal at all. Probably the cheapest bottle in the entire collection. But, the downside to cheap wine is that it doesn’t smell nearly as nice when it explodes all over the place. So we mopped that up and got all the glass that we could find.

So then we watched the movie. I thought it was okay. A little bit better than the first one but it looks a lot like a video game. So much of the movie is digitally created that it starts to loose the feel of real people. Some of the scenes looked just like scenes out of one of the 3D acceleration test programs and the video game Max Payne. The movie was just so loaded with effects that it hurts it, I think. Much like the first one, they were so concerned with getting cool effects into the movie that they forgot about everything else. This one was a little more interesting and better thought out, though, I think. So for those of you who liked the first one, I would think that you would like this one as well.

Kate arrived just after we had finished the movie and we all sat down to dinner at our new dining room table. We don’t have dining room chairs yet so we had to use a combination of folding chairs and computer chairs. But it worked. It is really nice to have a real table now. Min cooked up a storm all afternoon and served a wonderful dinner. She made Autumn Delight (or something like that.) It was basically pumpkin stew served in the hollowed out pumpkin. She will probably never serve it again inside the pumpkin as that was way too much effort. The stew was really good. There were a couple of surprise chunks of ginger in it that Phil and I were lucky enough to get. That really surpised us. Min also made a salad and we had bread too. It was all very delicious. We also had grape pie from our recent outing to Naples so we had that for dessert. After dinner, we watched the first three episodes of Father Ted: Series I. Neither Phil or Kate had ever seen Father Ted so we told them that they just had to see it. They thought that it was really funny. None of us could stay up very late though. Everyone has a busy day tomorrow. I haven’t been lively all evening. I was up way too early in the morning for me and I have been exhausted ever since I was halfway through the Microsoft show. I was ready to go to bed somewhere around 1:00 pm! That is pretty unusual for me.

Columbus Day. Not really a holiday and yet no one has school and all of the banks are closed.

Mrs. Miller (hee, hee) and I spent most of the day doing cleaning and organizing around the house. The new furniture is arriving tomorrow and there is a lot of stuff that has to be done so that there will be room for it when it gets here. And the house has just become a mess after our week off and all of the gifts and just all of the stuff that has been going on. So we had a lot to do.

Min assembled one of our new CD/DVD racks in the basement. We got two like Josh’s big ones so that we could move all of the DVD’s down from the living room. We didn’t want to clutter up the space up there. So we got that together and set it up in the basement. We moved down a ton of DVDs and moved one of the book shelves from the living room down to the basement. Things are really starting to come along.