Sheep Guarding Llama

Boy the wedding is getting close. The kilts should be arriving on Monday. The “parties” are this coming Saturday. What a busy week.

I went out to breakfast with my dad this morning. We went to the Geneseo Family Restaurant on Main St. Min and Danielle are out in Geneseo and Mt. Morris this morning doing sales calls. Hopefully we will have a productive day today. I am working from home again. My arm feels a little bit better today. I am sure that it has improved since yesterday.

For some reason, we lost our web site again today. Our ISP seems to lose its connection on a fairly regular basis. It isn’t very impressive. They seem to deal with it rather quickly but it happens way too often and I always have to call them about it. So we are down indefinitely and I don’t know when this update will get posted. This is really a problem because we are trying to hard to do advertising right now and there is no way for people to get to our website.

Min has to work tonight. I have to play with the little hamster. He is so cute. I am trying to get him to not freak out when we try to pick him up. He is still pretty nervous. But he should get better over time. He is definitely sociable. He is only happy when we are around. As soon as we close up his cage he stands up and looks out at us. He is happy to let me pet him a lot, he just doesn’t want to be picked up yet.

Andy ended up not having an interview today but they rescheduled it for tomorrow. So he should know something tomorrow morning. The interview is with a printing shop in Tonawanda. It is a long drive but it is only a 1-3 month contract so nothing can be that bad and it isn’t during the worst parts of winter so he will probably be fine with the commute. Come January he will really need to find something a bit more local though. His car still requires another trip to the shop because there is something fishy going on with one of the front wheels when he brakes.

Tomorrow Dad, Eric and I have a meeting with some people up at the UofR so I will be out all morning. I expect to be back in early tomorrow afternoon but we will see. Min and Danielle are going down to Ithaca on Friday for Min’s final dress fitting. Michael is coming over to hang out with me when they head down there and Arti is coming by after work so we can play some AoE2. But I have to run to Rochester in the middle of that time so I don’t know all what is going on that day. Megan isn’t able to come up for the wedding so that added some more stress to Min today. I think that Min is on the verge of a breakdown. My cousin Sara is going to fill in for Megan and luckily the dress is actually more likely to fit Sara than Megan so that ended working out really well in the end anyway. There are still about fifty outstanding invitations so if you are one of the many people who have not yet RSVP’d, get that information into us because we have to get a headcount to the Hillside Inn ASAP. Thanks.

Our Internet access for our servers came back on after three hours. Everytime I call to report an outage they ask me if I have restarted my equipment. After four years it has never been my equipment and I call them with outages all of the time. And they always have some silly reason for it too like the port on the switch was bad. I have never heard of switch ports going bad until this company. And they lose more than anyone. I think that they need to find some new hardware vendors if these are the kinds of problems that they keep having. I have a number of pieces of hardware in the house that run all of the time and never have any ports go bad. They must really beat on this equipment. Oh, speaking of equipment… some of the guys here at Niagara Telecom have decided that we are going to (after a few YEARS of discussion) get into the business of making high end video game workstations competing with companies like Alienware and Falcon Northwest. We are going to focus on super awesome AMD and nVidia based machines with all high quality components and reasonable prices. So if anyone is interested in a totally amazing video gaming system, let me know. We can put something really amazing together for you. And our prices will only be a fraction of what Alienware charges for slower hardware. We will be happy to put together either 32-Bit (Athlon XP and MP machines) as well as the new 64-bit machines for those who are really daring and have a little bit deeper pockets.

Ok, that is enough rambling for tonight. I accidentally updated part way through the day so some of you might have noticed that the update got tons longer all of a sudden. That was an accident. Have a goodnight everyone.

After finishing the update and going to upload, our service went down again. So I called into support and talked to them. It turns out that DSL.net’s support crew are located in New Brunswick, CA. How funny. So I ended up talking to the support guys for a while while we tried to figure out what the problem was and were it was occuring at (looks like the issue is in Georgia.) So I just thought that that was a funny story so now you all know. Ok, goodnight for real this time.

Min had to get up this morning and drive down to Ithaca for another dress fitting. This should be her last fitting, in theory at least. Danielle came over this morning to work with me. We got a lot of work done and now I have a big “To Do” list that I need to work on. The company did manage to hire a new Web Developer today from Binghamton. Another guy that we managed to get from our time at IBM a few years ago. I am working hard to get maximum benefit from my year there.

Mostly I just worked around home this afternoon. I have plenty to do here. Min got in from Ithaca around 4:00. Art, Danielle and Michael came over just after 6:00 and Art helped finish putting up the closet organizer system. He also moved the dresser, Min’s desk into the basement and one of the good desks up to the bedroom so that Min can have a nice office up there to work from. Our bedroom looks so much better now, it is really an improvement. And now there is a desk in the basement specifically for administering the servers once they are put into place. So that killed two birds. After we (read: Art) got the closet together, Min spent the evening getting things organized and piled into the closet. I went down to the basement and completed the training videos that I need to do so that I could take my CNS exam. I took it and am now a Novell Certified Salesperson. It isn’t the most exciting certification in the world but it gives us a leg up with Novell as a partner and gives us access to some additional resources that we really need. So it is a good deal.

My arm was a lot worse today so I am starting to take Ibuprofin again, this time in smaller dosages that hopefully won’t make me sick. So far, so good. I am also starting to ice my wrist in the hope that that will bring down some unknown swelling.

The wedding is coming up quick. Min has a dress fitting in Ithaca tomorrow. Today, she and Danielle are going to be doing door to door drop-by’s for NTI in the local area. Today is their first day of doing this and they will be working in Avon today.

Josh and JoAnne, fresh from having moved from Greece to Fairport, stopped by this morning after dropping off their UHaul in Livonia. They are exhausted from the move. They hung out for a little while and met Mr. Humphreys. Then we all went up to Avon to meet Min and Danielle for lunch at Peppermint’s.

This evening, Andy started working on putting Min and my closet organizer up. We need to get this organizer up so that we can start moving things into the closet because our room has become an explosion of stuff. Our old closet shelves were not installed properly and they were falling down even before we put anything on them. So we needed to do something and everything that should have gone into the closet has been sitting around the bedroom taking up space.

I spent a lot of the day today working on Novell CNS (Certified Novell Salesperson) classes online so that I can take the exam tomorrow. It is nice that the classes are offered in video form so that I can just sit at my desk and watch them. It is a really good format for training. I had to install some software to be able to watch Real Media files because that is how they delivered the classes. I didn’t want to install Real Player itself because it is spyware and really shouldn’t be installed on my computer. So I looked around and I discovered a neat product called Real Alternative. This product is a small Freeware package that allows you to watch Real Media without having to install that awful software. I suggest that everyone goes and downloads this the next time they are stuck having to use Real Media for something. I wish everyone would just use regular video standards like MPEG and DivX instead of these wacky proprietary standards like Real and QuickTime.

Min and I slept in late today and then raced up to the city to find a copy of Empire Earth Gold Edition to get for my cousin for his birthday. He has been itching to play it for quite some time. Hopefully his computer will be able to handle it. He and his sister share a PIII-600, 256MB, 7.1GB with a GeForce 4 MX 420 graphics card. The only issue is that the hard drive is like totally full and fragmented to the point of no return. Andy says he knows of a utility that should bring it back so we will have to look into that.

The birthday party was in Leicester at 1:00 and we were about half an hour late. We hung out there most of the day. Min came back early to do some laundry.

Lots of playing with the hamster today. He is so cute! Min, Andy and I started working on the closet in Min and my room this evening because it needs new shelves put in before we can organize the stuff that is in our room. We took out the old shelves and moved everything from the closet into the living room. Then we discovered that we didn’t have the drill bit that we needed. So that didn’t work out so well. So everything from our bedroom is all over the living room until we can get that project moving again.

Boy am I glad it is a Saturday. I am not sure why, I just am really looking forward to the weekend this week. Andy and I got up early this morning to take his old Buick Regal (1992!!!) into Jimmy’s II here in Geneseo so that he can finally get his rear suspension worked on. He should be getting it back this afternoon and he will finally be able to really drive again. But, of course, he doesn’t really get his car fixed until his quits his job and no longer needs to commute to Buffalo every day.

Min got home form work around 9:15 and was tired as usual. Andy and I went out to McDonald’s to get some breakfast and brought some back to Min. She ate, played with the hamster and went to sleep on the futon in the living room. This seems to have become her routine.

Art and Danielle stopped by this afternoon for a little while to hang out on their way back from the city. They only stayed less than an hour. Then Min went back to bed and I drove over to my parent’s house because the new house Webramp 350e had arrived and I needed to pick it up. A Webramp is a telephone to Ethernet router. We are going to be using it to manage the three telephone lines coming into the house. It was a lot easier to buy a small unit like this than it would be to build an equivalent unit myself. Webramps were extremely popular just a few years ago when broadband Internet access was relatively rare and expensive.

I took a three hour nap in the afternoon and then at 8:00, Art came over and he, Min, Andy and I played two rounds of Age of Empires II late into the night. We played teams, Art and I vs. Min and Andy. Min and Andy won the first round but Art and I came back to win the second time around. It was a good time. We played until 3:30 in the morning.

Josh and Joanna moved from Greece to Fairport today. I will let you know how that went once I talk to them.