Sheep Guarding Llama

Slow day today. I slept in late this morning because I have just been exhausted. Work during the day, nothing exciting.

This evening, Min and I drove down to Hammondsport to have dinner with Reverend Hickey. Rev. Hickey is performing the ceremony this weekend. I had forgotten to tell him that we were vegetarian when he had invited us for dinner but luckily my mother called them and let them know. What was even cooler was that we found out that they were vegetarian (more or less) also and were really excited to be able to have vegetarians over. We had a really good dinner.

Well, most everyone survived last evening pretty well. Only one person ended up getting sick and that was one of the girls so the guys did a good job. Today is mostly a relaxing day for Min and I. Phil, Josh and I had been thinking about going out wine tasting today but we ended up thinking better of it and not having much time to do so anyway.

Phil, Kate and Josh did stop by later with our new washer and dryer. They aren’t really ours but Josh and JoAnne had just purchased these before moving to their new apartment and they don’t have any hookups where they are now so we are the lucky new house with a washer and dryer now. We didn’t have the correct pigtail for the dryer so Min is going to deal with that tomorrow when she can.

After Phil and Kate left to go to a birthday party, Josh, Min and I went to the Omega Grill for some dinner since none of us had eaten all day. While we were at the Omega Grill having dinner, I just happen to see Mary and Jocelyn walking by the window heading to the movie theatre. So I jumped up and ran like mad over to catch up with them. We haven’t seen Mary and Jocelyn in over two years and Dominica has never been able to meet them at all. And with only six days left until the wedding, it was really nice to be able to catch them because they are going to be able to come to the wedding even! So everyone can look forward to seeing them this coming weekend. How cool is that. I had been really worried that they wouldn’t be able to make the wedding. Apparently they had heard through the grapevine that I was getting married but couldn’t find out where or when it was going to be.

So, Mary and Jocelyn came over after dinner at the grill and hung out at our house for a while. They were really excited that we had moved back to the area. We hung out for a while and then went to the movies. After the movies, they returned and hung out at the house until midnight or so. We are so excited to have them back!

Nate crashed at our house last night. Today is Andy’s last day here before he is heading down to Puerto Rico. He is flying out of Buffalo tomorrow afternoon at 3:00. Min worked last night so she went to bed this morning while Nate and I started to run errands. We had to first drive up to Fairport to get the van from Josh (Josh rented a van for tonight’s festivities.) We got to check out Josh and JoAnne’s new apartment, it is really nice. Both Nate and I really liked it. After getting the van, Nate and I drove back to Geneseo and got some lunch at Aunt Cookies. Then we decided that we would kill a little time and drive around Conesus Lake like we used to do when we both lived out here many, many years ago. On our way back up the east side, we stopped in Livonia to pick up Eric so that he wouldn’t have to drive himself home later. We got back to Geneseo and picked up Craig who was waiting at my house and then headed up to the mall to pick up Bob and Zach who were waiting for us at Tuxedo Junction. Andy drove over to the mall (he had spent the afternoon at his family’s clam bake) to meet us and we all piled into the big white van and drove over to Media Play because I needed to get some new CD and DVD racks because we need to get our house organized. I ended up buying two $100 racks, one is to hold 1008 CDs and the other will hold 500 DVDs. That should do a lot to get stuff out of our living room and into the basement in a nice and attractive way. I also got a Recoton switch that Andy found that allows me to switch different components going into the television in the living room so that we can have the Playstation hooked up for Michael and the DVD player hooked up without having to go behind the television to switch between them each time. That will make life a whole lot easier. I also got a couple of cheap movies, Kundun and Steve Martin’s A Simple Twist of Fate.

After shopping we went up to Rochester to pick up Joe at his house (which I hadn’t seen until now.) Then we all headed down to the King and I in Henrietta for some dinner. In all, there were nine of us having dinner. Art met us at the King and I. At dinner, there was Nate, Joe, Art, Craig, Bob, Zach, Eric, Andy and I. Phil and Josh met up with us later in the evening since they were both busy early on.

The night was a success. We got home around 4:00 am and I was ready for bed. The girls got home just a little bit before us. They had a good time too.

So after dealing last night with our Internet Service Provider in DC going down, tonight Frontier Lightning Link goes down. I just can’t win. And our SDSL still hasn’t been installed. How ridiculous is all of this. If we can finally convince someone to give us service, the service is crappy. DSL.net called me this morning to try to tell me that the problem was on my end after their technician last night identified the problem as being theirs. And it isn’t like this doesn’t occur on a regular basis and they always act like it must be my fault and then two hours later they fix the problem and give me some weird reason for what was wrong. It isn’t like anyone ever works on my equipment. Never. We don’t even reboot it, it works so well. I think it is time to just start getting T-1’s and be done with it all. Our SDSL was supposed to be 2-3 weeks to install and we are now into our fourth month and not even a date set yet for the install or even an official acknowledgement of the service being ordered! Bastards.

I slept in late this morning and woke up in a panic because Min was running late for getting down to Ithaca for her final dress fitting. Danielle is driving her down there and both of her parents are meeting her there as well.

I had to run over to Art and Danielle’s house to deal with Michael getting home from school. The school decided to have an emergency drill today and didn’t inform all of the parents that the kids would be coming home much later than they had been told. So Danielle was supposed to have been over to pick up Min at 1:00 and at 1:30 she found out that she had no idea when Michael would be allowed to come home and that they had moved all of the kids off of the school property without notice and were refusing to give out any information about where they were or when they would be allowed to come home. Michael ended up getting home just as I got there so it didn’t really matter much anyone but what a hassle. It turned out that the school had sent home notes with some of the kids to inform the parents about what was going on but not all of them and they didn’t make sure that the parents knew before they did it.

So we finally got Michael over to the house and we got him set up playing some Playstation games while I cleaned the house. Lots of people are going to be here tonight so I have to get the place ready. Min’s dress fitting is in Ithaca (Groton) at 4:00 so they are already on the road and running late. Min called me from the road because we don’t have our marriage license yet and we need to remember to do that on Monday. I am mentioning that here so that everyone who reads this can be sure to double check with me to make sure on Monday that I really did go and get that. That would be really bad to forget about!

I got a lot of cleaning done and then Art came over and played some games with Michael. I did some more cleaning and then the three of us played a little AoE2 before I had to hit the road to get up to Rochester to pick up Trisha for her dress fitting.

It is official about Andy’s job. He got a huge raise and he is heading for Puerto Rico THIS SUNDAY! He is flying down Sunday morning and he will be there all week and flying back on Thursday just in time to be here for the wedding and everything and then they are flying him right back down again. He already has his new cell phone and his laptop. They weren’t able to get him an apartment down there but he has his choice of hotels and the one that he will probably be staying in has free, wireless Internet access. So that is a pretty good deal. And they are paying him for his travel time as well. So he is making out like a bandit.

I ran up to the city to pick up Trisha. She came down and Nate and Tammy were already at the house. Min and Danielle got there just behind us. They did some wedding stuff. The Min, Trisha and I went to the Omega Grill for some dinner and then Min had to go to work and I took Trisha back up to the city.

After taking Trisha back to Rochester, I drove on down to Arti’s house and we played a couple of games of AoE2. Nate came over after the first game and he watched Deliver Us From Eve while Arti and I played our second game and drank all kinds of coffee.

I wrote this update on time but then I didn’t manage to post it so it is going up late.

I moved Mr. Humphreys into my bedroom last night so that he could be near me while I slept. He is a very social hamster and only seems to be happy when I am around so I figured that it would be better if during the night I was close by and that seemed to make him happier. I could hear him running in his wheel just before I fell asleep. And I figured, since Min and I sleep in shifts, it would mean that he would have a person near him for almost sixteen hours straight not including the time that I played with him before I went to bed. So maybe that will make him feel more like running around. He would appear to have become kind of lathargic over the past few days. We think that he might just be lonely.

In technology news today, OpenOffice.org went to version 1.1 RC5. One step closer to final release. I wonder what new features made their way into this release candidate. Also, Samba, the software that allows Unix machines to communicate with Windows machines by making the Windows machines think that they are Windows too, went to its official, stable 3.0 release. This is the much anticipated release including the addition of Active Directory into the feature set. So this should be pretty exciting to play with.

This morning, Dad, Eric and I have a meeting in Rochester. That is at 10:30. Then at 12:30, Danielle is coming to the city to go to the hospital and learn all there is to know about the Waste Watcher. I know, how exciting. So I will be out most of the day (read: Don’t call me today.)

I decided that I needed to know how many computers where currently in the house (or being stored at Nate’s temporarily) since I have recently been bombarded with people talking about how many computers they each had at home. Here is the breakdown (these are all working computers with all of the parts – and we threw a number out when we moved recently too): Commodores (4), Macintosh (4), Pentium MMX (2), Pentium Pro (1), Celeron (1), Pentium II (2), Pentium III (5), Athlon 4 (1) and Athlon XP (4). That is 24 currently not including my Linux handheld which is really a full computer on its own. In addition, four more Pentium III machines will be moving here in the near future.

Andy had his interview with the printer in Tonawanda today. He thought that the interview went well but they gave the job to the guy who interviewed just before him. He said that his impressive resume and experience didn’t help him since the job was totally non-technical. He went back to work at BOC and made them an offer to send him to Puerto Rico for a couple of months with a pay raise, expense account, apartment, etc. And they went for it. So he might be going down there in a couple of days (October 6.) He would be down there until the end of the year. So hopefully it will all work and he will be able to go. He is making them give him a laptop too. So that is a pretty rockin’ deal. He should know what is going on by Monday. So the big party on Saturday will be the last chance for just about everyone to see the Loopmeister until 2004!!!

Min and I booked most of our honeymoon this evening. We are going to Disney World from November 9th until November 20th. I called the Radisson in Lake Buena Vista where Eric, Mark and I stayed at when we went down there in 1997 or 1998. The hotel still had me on record after all of these years. And since Min still works in a hotel, we qualify for the same discount that I got all those years ago. So we are using that really cheap rate to extend the amount of time that we can stay down there. We are going to get to stay two extra days by staying at the Radisson for four nights and then moving to one of the expensive Disney hotels. What a great deal! After the Radisson, we are planning on going to an on property hotel in Disney. We are getting annual passes to the parks too because that saves even more money and it will let us go back down anytime we want to for practically nothing. Now that airfare is so cheap, it is easy to just go down to Florida whenever you want to. We got a great deal from Airtran, we are able to go down for just $58 and back for just $53. We compared to Jet Blue (who is currently being sued because they sold all of their customer’s private information in violation with FAA regulations) and Airtran was dramatically cheaper. We have been so happy with Airtran over the last two years. They are the best airlines ever. They are so cheap and they have the newest planes in the sky. Andy said that someone told him that they weren’t that nice but they were cheap enough to make it ok but I have flown with them more now than with any other airlines and I have to say that they are the best airlines I have ever flown with and I have flown with just about everyone except for Jet Blue.

Andy, Min and I went out to the new pizza and wings place on Main St. for some dinner. Min really wanted to go to the Omega Grill but they closed just as we got there so then we tried Pizza Hut and they were already closed so we went down to Main St. and lucky this new place is open until 3:00 am. So we tried them out and they totally rocked. Min and I got a pizza and it was amazing and Andy got a sub and it was amazing too. I don’t know the name of the place off of the top of my head but I will get it for you all so that you can go there and try it out too.

For all of you how use Trillian as you instant messaging client, there is a new Patch – .74E – that will fix the recent MSN and Yahoo! problems that we have been having. Isn’t it nice that I keep all of you up to date on all of these things?

Min has to work again tonight at the hotel. It is very lonely here when she has to go to work at night. I do manage to get a lot of work done on those nights but it is very sad. She did take off of work all next week, though, so that is good.

After I went through and did that computer inventory this morning, Eric managed to get me another computer out of the trash that I was able to pick up today. So now, in addition to the 29 computers that I listed previously, there is an additional HP Vectra PII-233. That makes 30 computers in total. And that does not include the one computer that is not mine but is currently here for maintenance. Computers, computers everywhere. I need to put in a workbench because so many machines are ripped apart so much of the time that I need a solid place just for working on them.

Nate is coming up tomorrow evening and might be crashing with us. If he does, he will be only our second house guest yet. We have been in the new house for exactly two months today and Bob has been the only person to stay with us and he only stayed one day. Of course, the place has been a disaster so that might have contributed to it. But now that the closet is done, things are starting to get better rapidly. All of the gifts from the bridal shower are still in the dining room (except for the coffee machine and the dragonfly bathroom set) because we are waiting for the wedding presents before we start trying to figure out what to do with everything. So that doesn’t help either but that isn’t for much longer. The laundry room is going to be an issue though. Right now, we are using the laundry room like another basement and it is just packed full of stuff being stored in there. In fact, there is so much stuff in there that I have no idea what is even in there! That will change tomorrow. That room needs to be emptied out because Josh is planning on bringing down his washer and dryer on Saturday (he and JoAnne just moved to a new apartment that doesn’t have washer and dryer hookups so they needed a place to store their appliances and we were happy to help out.) So that will undoubtedly create another pile of stuff that we have to deal with shortly too. So I guess that the bottom line is, wait at least another month before coming to stay with us. Maybe we will have some of this stuff put away by then. Saturday is also the Applumkin Festival in Wyoming so Nate and I might go over to that as well depending on what time allows us to do. Saturday will be a very busy day so we will see.

Ok, once again this update has gotten completely out of control. We might have a new single day update record. In addition to the daily, I have also added yet another page in the funnies section. This one isn’t as funny (I don’t think) as many of our other entries but this one gets included both because it is just a ton of stuff having to deal with marriage and because it was sent to me this morning by one of my largest customers once he discovered that I was getting married next weekend. So I just thought that it would be appropriate to include this list on the page. So there is a ton of new content today. I am very proud of myself and Emily should be very happy because she loves to read the site everyday!