The final countdown has begun. Only two more days. Da da da dum….
Yesterday and today I have been working on getting our new dial in system up and running. We got it in place last evening and now it seems to be working solidly. Art and Danielle are now using our network as their Internet Service Provider and are dialing into our house. They are getting a faster connection through us than they have been getting through Frontier and they are able to get on and stay on when they call. Right now they are just dialing from their regular modems but in about a week Art is going to be setting up their new network with a dedicated dialing Linux server that will also act as a firewall and as a content caching server to speed up the connection. The new modem that they got for that supports the latest V.92 and V.44 standards that, supposedly, will make the connect time and the connection be even faster. And it might even support call waiting while on the Internet. That is pretty cool for old telephone technology.
Min and Danielle went up to the city today to deal with last minute wedding stuff and pick up some stuff that Min and I ordered last night. They spent most of the day up there while I worked out of the house. I got a lot of work done today so it was good. Niagara Telecom got their reseller’s agreement with Microtel approved today which we are very excited about. Microtel is going to give us the ability to sell very inexpensive computers for people who are looking for something a little more basic than other products that we have been selling. For most casual (read: non IT professionals and non hard-core gamers) computer users, a nice Microtel machine might be just the ticket to low cost computing at home. Microtel also offers a 64-Bit video game machine based on the Athlon 64 3200+. We are expecting Microtel to be a major part of our sales in the near future.
My arm is feeling a little bit better today, I think. It is really hard to tell but there seems to be some subtle improvement. I shaved my head today in preparation for Saturday. Min wants it to grow in a little before the wedding so I am trying to give it a little time to grow. I got halfway through cutting it and my razor died and wouldn’t cut anymore. I had to send Min out to Walmart to buy a more heavy duty trimmer to be able to cut through the rest of it.
Art, Michael and Danielle came over this evening so that Art could work on some projects around the house that we had for him. He put up a bunch of bathroom hardware in Andy’s bathroom that has been needing to go up for quite some time. His bathroom looks a lot nicer now which is good timing since many people are going to be staying here over the weekend. And Art helped carry a lot of heavy stuff down into the basement. That really helped us get the living room in some kind of decent order. We want the house to look halfway decent before everyone comes out to see it over the weekend. Michael played some Playstation while we worked. It is a good think that I didn’t end up getting rid of that thing years ago. I almost never used it. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any good games for it. I have Final Fantasy VII which was only so-so at the time and was mostly a showcase for modern game graphics and it has aged badly. I also have Parasite Eve, ditto on that one. The only really good games that I have are Suikoden and Chrono Cross and neither of those are really good for a six year old. About the only thing I have is Ridge Racer 4 and that wears out pretty quickly.
I worked on getting a computer together for Michael today too. One of the PII’s that Eric has scrounged up for me will make a perfect first computer for him. It only had 32MB in it when I first started working on it. I decided that that wouldn’t work at all so I managed to find 32MB more sitting in the living room (no really.) I got Windows 2000 Pro loaded up on it and got all of the updates done. Art picked up Age of Empires I Gold Edition today because it is old enough that it actually will run on a PII 233. Michael is very excited about learning to play it. It should be a little easier than AoE2 as well. A little bit less going on all at once and less that you have to learn to be able to play. I really wish that they would just get around to making AoE3 but it will probably never happen. What they should probably really do is make another expansion pack for AoE2 that ads a lot of the features that people keep looking for in newer games. Like a couple new Civs, maybe an extra few techs. Scouts that scout all by themselves without you having to babysit them. It wouldn’t take too much tweaking to really get AoE2 to be an even better game.
Andy is coming into town tonight. His flight gets into Buffalo around 10:00 pm or so (that is about an hour from now.) He has been gone for a week. Jeremy (Dominica’s friend from high school) is getting in around 3:00 am. I am assuming that he is driving but I don’t know for sure. Nicklin and Michelle are getting into town around noon tomorrow. I expect that they are coming down to see the house early in the afternoon.
Well, I have done my part to get October off to a big start with a big update. This weekend will probably be weak on updates since, you know, there is stuff going on. I will do my best to keep things rolling in while all the activity is in motion.