Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Min was exhausted when she got in this morning. But she was so tired that she couldn’t really sleep so she decided to watch the first season of Red Dwarf. Then she passed out on the futon in the living room next to Mr. Humphreys who is sleeping peacefully there as well. We never got the big storm last night like we were supposed to although the power did skip a beat here this morning.

I am having an incredibly slow day today. Last night I started installing Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server and I babysat it for about four hours and then let it run through the night. Then it kept on going this morning. It takes at least ten hours to install, at least on the machine that I have to install it on. I am anxious to get to play with it, though, because it is supposed to have tons of cool features.

I did a backup of the web site today. I can’t believe how huge it is. It took more than 25 minutes to backup the site over our high speed connection! I did add one more thing to our Funnies page. It has been a while since anything new was added there. I also moved the August material out to the archives. I feel like there hasn’t been very much written on the site but the archives prove otherwise. The last two months have been just as busy as they ever were.

Eric and I got free USB Memory sticks from Dell the other day. They were a free gift because we went to a Dell show a month or two ago. They are just 16MB sticks but still, pretty nice for a free gift. I plan on using mine to store security keys so that I can have extra strong passwords without having to remember them. Andy bought a 128MB stick a few weeks ago and loves his. They are a really handy thing and have pretty much replaced the floppy recently since they are SO much faster, small and resilient.

I can’t believe how slow things are today. I have gotten no phone calls or emails all day. I am enjoying the quiet and am working hard on learning new stuff today. Maybe the big storm that is “supposed” to be hitting us today is having an affect. I know that all of the schools are closed.

Eric stopped by since there was nothing for him to do at work either. We didn’t really feel like doing anything so we just hung out a little and then he went home to work on his lawn. Andy got home a little bit early today because he just couldn’t handle his work anymore and he put in his two weeks notice today. He had been really hopeful yesterday that a new project would pan out and that they would give him the opportunity to really shine over the next few weeks. Andy realized that even if they did give him the project, they would never support him on it and leave him hanging out to dry even though it would be their faults that the project went bad. They would make it look like it was his failure and that wouldn’t be good for him. So he decided that he should just leave and look for a more professional environment. His boss skipped work so he doesn’t know yet.

Andy, Min and I went to the Omega Grill for some dinner and then hit Wegmans. After that we watched some of the Simpsons Season Three on DVD (Andy’s, not mine) and played with Mr. Humphreys. He is so cute. Then Min went to work and Andy and I went to bed (seperately but at the same time.) We both have to be up early in the morning because we have to get his Buick Regal into the shop because the suspension is totally shot and he needs to get that fixed or he basically can’t drive the car anymore. This is his third round of major repairs in a month and a half.

Art wants to play multi-player Age of Empires 2 tomorrow night. Eric can’t make it because he is going to Comix Cafe. Min and Andy are in so that is four of us. It will be in the early evening or late afternoon. If anyone is interested, let me know. There will be a laptop free. If you don’t want to use that, it is BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer.) But we do have monitors, keyboards and mice, at least one or two opticals.