Sheep Guarding Llama

Back to the working week. Its just another manic Monday. This morning Min and I got up and headed down to Ithaca for the day. She has errands that she has to run down there and I had work to do with one of my clients. So I spent the middle of the day working down there and then the afternoon running errands around town. It was a very busy day. In the evening, Min and I drove down to Binghamton to meet up with my old boss from CTG/IBM days. Her family and us went out to the Olive Garden for some dinner.

I actually managed to get up early this morning, around 7:30. Only five hours of sleep. Min got in from Amanda’s party at Patti’s in Warsaw around 12:30 and went straight to bed. But it is almost 9:00 as I write this and she is still asleep as is Andy. Pete and Eric had to be down to Warsaw to set up chairs for the ceremony today at 8:00 this morning. That seems awfully early. Drew had to be at work at 6:00 am so he got basically no sleep at all, but he is young, no big deal for him.

Eric said that Access-4-Free’s Windows Dialing program is no good anymore and it can damage your computer. As far as I can tell from the web site, they still allow direct dialing without having to use that program. If so, they are still fine to use, just don’t download the program. If not, though, you will have to avoid them just like everyone else. Why can’t anyone make a good service and just leave well enough alone?

I was looking around at some of our websites today and it looks like NYSED.net has disappeared. Tim must have decided that it just wasn’t worth maintaining that site any longer. It hadn’t been updated in forever. None of us have heard from Tim in a while. Maybe he will email us soon as let us know how things are going.

By midday, Andy, Min and I were running around like mad trying to get everything taken care of for the wedding. It wouldn’t have been nearly so hectic if this wasn’t the first weekend of the students being back at Geneseo. The streets were packed with traffic going in every direction. We had to drive way out of the way to go anywhere.

We made it to the wedding just in time. It was everything that we could do just to be able to be there. We were really lucky that we didn’t miss it altogether.

The wedding was really nice. They did it outside by the village park in Warsaw. The weather was perfect – cool and bright.

They did an informal reception at the fireman’s pavilion by the park. They had a ton of food. It was nice to have a less formal reception because it really gave you the chance to walk around and talk to everyone.

THE AUGUST LLAMA OF THE MONTH IS ERIC MILLEN IN CELEBRATION OF HIS WEDDING TOMORROW!!

Just one more day to go until Eric and Amanda’s Wedding! Tomorrow at 3:00 PM for those of you who don’t know when it is. I know I am terrible at remembering these things.

Arti, Danielle and Michael came by this morning with bagels from Dunkin’ Donuts. Michael had a blast last night playing video games on Andy’s Nintendo Game Cube while the adults all hung out. Danielle and I had some work to do this morning because she is coming to work for Niagara Telecom as an Account Manager in the western Livingston County area. While we were working, Eric showed up with a computer that I needed to work on. So Eric, Min and Arti hung out for a little while and then we decided that we should all go to lunch at Tom Wahl’s together. So we drove up to Avon (Arti took the opportunity to drive my Mazda 6) and got some lunch. Min and I were the only ones who got to go home afterwards because everyone else had to go up to the city. Eric had wedding stuff to do and Art and Danielle were getting Michael a telescope so that we could look at Mars (Mars is currently the closest that it is ever likely to be to the Earth.) I have always wanted to get a telescope, a nice one with computer tracking, but have never really had a good place to put one. They take up a lot of space and heaven knows I have too much stuff that takes up too much space.

Min, Eric and Amanda went over to Warsaw this afternoon to work on decorations for the wedding. Min was working on Amanda’s wedding sneakers (apparently this is a normal wedding thing that I have never heard of before) this afternoon. Tonight, Min is going over to hang out with Amanda while Eric and his brother Peter are coming over here. We might go out to some bars or we might just hang out here. We are too old to do too much exciting stuff.

It didn’t take very long before the phone was ringing trying to get me to come down to Warsaw to help out with the setting up and everything. So I wrapped up some work and drove on down to Warsaw. They had barely gotten started by the time I got there (just running a little bit late, the original schedule was to start working at 3:00 and it was now 7:00.) I got there and worked for about half an hour but Min and I hadn’t had dinner yet and there was no vegetarian there so we drove over to the Silver Lake Family Restaurant in Warsaw, just up the street, and had dinner there. I got the EggPlant Rollettes and it was really good. I was really impressed. I haven’t been to the SLFR in Warsaw for ten years or more, I am sure. After dinner we returned and worked until 9:20. Then, Eric, Pete, Drew and I took off to hit the liquor store (the one in Warsaw by Allen St. is open until 10:00 on the weekends!!) and then drove back to my place in Geneseo. Andy was already home so we all sat around and talked until almost 2:00. Almost everyone had to be up really early in the morning so we didn’t go to late.

Well, I guess that everyone can tell that I have an Internet connection again. I hadn’t realized how long of an update I had written until I got online this morning and saw it. Wow, that just might be a record for a single day. August has been kind of slow with the move and all and I guess I have decided that I have some making up to do. Emily emailed me yesterday about it and I didn’t know what she meant because I didn’t know that the update was so long. Well, I got it now.

I got up to a phone call from our Washington office this morning as I have done every morning this week. I used to sleep in until almost 8:00 every morning but now I am getting up at 7:00 everyday to the phone ringing with some little thing in DC or another. Yesterday was the big union vote down there so everyone was really on pins and needles. Well, it went through and the DC office is now a part of the teamster’s union. The vote was 19 to 1 in favor of the union. So the office down there isn’t too happy, I would imagine. I haven’t heard how things are going yet but I am imagining not well. We are guessing that now most of the employees will just quit because they all lost their senority and they all have to start over again. In a few weeks, there probably won’t be a single employee left that voted for the union. We aren’t such a big shop that we can’t handle turning over the entire organization. In fact, we do on a regular basis.

Min has the day more or less off of work but she is still going to go into the Youngs and Linfoot office for a little bit to take care of a few things. If anyone knows anyone who is looking to buy and/or sell a house in the Rochester region (including Wyoming, Livingston, Genesee, Orleans, Wayne and Ontario counties, at very least) then please let them know that Min is available and can handle anything that they need.

I am taking the day more or less off too so that Min and I can hang out some before her party tonight. We never get much time to actually do things together so that will be nice.

Min has been trying to get a local bank account but has been finding that all of the banks have just totally ridiculous minimum balances and fees. So she finally broke down yesterday and drove up to Rochester and opened an account with ESL. They don’t have a branch in town but they have one in Henrietta on Brighton-Henrietta Townline Road and they are supposedly opening a new one in Scotsville which my parents say is closer to us than Henrietta but I think that 390 makes that not really true. We are much closer to Scotville than I had imagined we were, though. It is really close. But there are no good roads between there and here.

Eric and I are working this morning on all kinds of stupid problems down in DC. We are trying to get them to use their computers systems the way that they are supposed to but we are having terrible luck with it. No one pays attention and does what they are supposed to and no one is very literate on computers which makes it that much worse.

Some quick news on the “good software front.” If you are an OpenOffice user and are using an older version, OpenOffice 1.1 RC3 is now available and a big improvement over the 1.0 series. If you haven’t used OO yet, you should. But wait until the final release of 1.1 is out. OpenOffice is a totally free alternative (and a good one) to Microsoft Office and other office suites. OO is a full suite with spreadsheet and presentation software too. Totally worth taking the time to look at. It can even save straight to its own XML format, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe PDF and Macromedia Flash. All in all it is a pretty rockin’ program. That is what Min, me, Andy, Eric, Lifestyle Properties, Wards Auto Damage and Nicklin Associates all use for our office suites. Mozilla now has its stable version 1.4, 1.5 alpha and Firebird (its stripped down browser version) at 0.6.1. So go update your Mozilla copy as well.

I have the house phone number set up to forward to my cell phone now so those of you who have our new, Geneseo, “991” number can start calling us on that locally and not have to pay long distance anymore. It only affects a couple of people but now you can start to memorize that number.

Min decided that she wanted to try out the Rochester Museum and Science Center today because she has never done anything in Rochester. And it is her birthday so we are going to do that.

Well, we went up to Rochester and met Eric at Jay’s Diner for a quick lunch and then we went to the museum. We had a really good time, especially playing with all of the hands on science displays for the kids. I found the Indian History section to be pretty good. That was always one of the famous parts of the RMSC. I remember seeing it all when I was very young but it has been a really long time since I was there last. It has changed a lot. There is also a ton of new stuff being worked on right now. I did learn some interesting things about Rochester’s history. Rochester was the first American Boom Town from the explosion of work created from the early flour mills and the Erie Canal. Rochester used to be a big button manufacturing town as well with three big button companies. And don’t forget that Perry used to have a button factory as well. And Irondiquoit Bay in Rochester was the first place where the Europeans had contact with the Indians of Upstate New York.

On the way back from the city, I got called by the Volunteers of America. They want me to be their technical advisor up in Rochester. They found my resume because Kate had put it on file a year or more ago. They finally got around to calling me and I am going to be meeting with them next week to see what I can do for them.

We got back from the museum and I did a little bit of work in the basement before running out to Wegmans to do some last minute shopping for the party. I got Min a Spongebob Squarepants birthday cake with whipped cream frosting and custard in it. She really liked that.

Arti and Danielle and their son Michael where the first to arrive at the party getting there just before I managed to get back from the grocery store. Kate Ayers arrived shortly thereafter while I was still carrying things into the house. Josh, Joanna, Phil, Eric and Amanda all made it too. And for a special surprise (Min didn’t know she knew where we lived) Sara Ruger and her roomate Robbie showed up. Sara and Robbie recently moved from Ithaca to Penfield. They hadn’t made it down to see the house yet so we got to show them around. It is cool that one of the few people that we knew in Ithaca moved up to Rochester at the same time that we did. We partied until about 10:30 and then being the old people that we are we had to call it a night.

Well, today is a big day for me. Not only am I sitting around the house all day waiting for Frontier to arrive and connect my telephone (I am assuming that after they connect the telephone there will be some wiring that needs to be done and I will have to run to the city and pick up some hardware to do that with) but also today is the Teamsters Union Vote down at our office in Washington, DC. So that is going to make for a pretty stressful day down there. They have been trying to convince everyone that they don’t want to go union for two months now but we figure it is rather unlikely that they won’t vote for the union.

Dominica’s boss at the hotel called late last night and told her that she didn’t need to work this week because they are training the other new auditor. So she is excited to have some time off so that she can get some things done around here. She is also very excited because tomorrow is her birthday and she doesn’t have to work on it like she originally had to. So that is extra good since everyone is coming down for her birthday party tomorrow night and she won’t have to go straight from there to work. So we can party all night long. 🙂

Andy is getting very frustrated with his job out in Buffalo. It has really turned out to not be what they presented it as at all. They claimed that they were in a hurry to get a project moving and fix problems and that he would be spending all of his time programming and not having to deal with customers. But the very opposite has happened. He was sent to Puerto Rico to be in front of a customer for an entire week and not programming. Now he is stuck just sitting at his desk all day staring at the wall. He isn’t allowed to do any work and he isn’t allowed to do anything that isn’t work so he is not allowed to read or anything which is extra awful because he doesn’t have his own computer or an Internet connection (of course, it would be weird to have an Internet connection without having a computer.) They have even hired a new guy who is supposed to be doing the same job as Andy and HE is in the same boat, just staring at the wall without a computer of his own and no Internet connection and no work. Not a very good environment. Andy is going nuts.

I removed Natalie from the email list at the bottom of the page because I don’t think that she checks her email anymore. I also filled in a few missing days so that August is complete now. I am stuck working in the living room while I wait for Frontier because I don’t know if I will be able to hear them from the basement if they come. I haven’t been in the basement when the door bell has rung before so I don’t know how loud it would be.

Frontier arrived at 10:15 this morning which works out very nicely for me. There was no box on the outside of the house like there was “supposed” to have been, the wire was just sitting out there ready to be installed. At least that wire was there, it would have been really sucky (or total suck, as they say in Canada) if the wire hadn’t been here already. Luckily for me, my neighbor Linda already went through the six month ordeal of getting phone service run into the complex that we are in and the rest of us don’t really have to worry about it so much because of her. She had such a bad time getting phone service installed that the phone company had to give her a cell phone to use for a long time so that she could make calls. She is planning on buying Internet access off of us through our wireless system as soon as our SDSL gets installed. Hopefully that will be soon because we have a lot of stuff waiting on that big Internet line. It would be nice to get our equipment moved up from Washington sooner than later.

It turns out that I was right about the telephone in the house not having all of the stuff that I need to be able to hook up the phone. There is a hole in the wall were I can run the wires out of the house but I don’t really know anything about telephone wiring and it would be nice to know that it actually works before the telephone technician leaves. It costs $60/hour to have the telephone technician do work for you around the house. That is probably better than I would have guessed but it is depressing that it is so expensive! We only charge $45/hour for PC and Desktop Technicians (but we charge a 2 hour minimum and Frontier only charges for half an hour.)

So I was inputting Bringing Down the House and Chicago into the master movie list today and noticed that Buena Vista Pictures (the distributor of Disney, Miramax, Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures) has finally starting putting the year of release on their movies. Up until now, there has been no dates on any of their movies, not a copyright date or anything. Now, they are the only company that explicitely puts “2003 Release” right on the box. For those of use that always want to know what year a movie is from, that is really helpful. Chicago also came with a coupon for $6 off the purchase of a couple different movies includes Gangs of New York which I have been wanting to get so maybe I will stop by Walmart today and pick that up as well. It is a mail in rebate so I will probably never send it in, but maybe I will get around to it.

The other day I picked up another book on the CompTIA Security+ exam so I have been reading that a lot today. The tests from them are really expensive so you don’t really want to risk failing one of them if you can at all help it. I am also waiting to find out if Niagara Telecom is now a CompTIA member because, if it is, I get a big discount on the test.

Well, Frontier got the phone in and I did the inside wiring enough so that I could hook up my laptop and dial-up to AOL. We are getting a 53.333kb/s connection which is like the fastest dial-up I have ever seen. So, whoo-hoo. I am finally able to check my email at home. Only five days short of a month in the new house and I can finally get my email! Still no mailbox out front, though. Ok, I am going to upload early just so everyone knows that I am online now.

Borders in Bowie, Maryland called today. They finally have my replacement copy of “The Map That Changed the World.” It sucks, though, that to get a replacement to a defective product that I already purchased, I have to place a special order and then drive down to Bowie in the next ten days to get it. They make the replacement system much more complicated than it needs to be. I suppose they do this to discourage people from returning things. Mostly, though, it just makes me want to shop at Barned and Noble and Amazon.com a bit more. Now that we finally have the house all taken care of, I can use my credit cards again and I can now shop online like I used to. That will make life a lot better since it is so much cheaper to buy stuff online most of the time.