Sheep Guarding Llama

Today I actually have off. I drove out to Rochester yesterday and Min and I are staying at Eric and Amanda’s new house. Dominica had to get up early and go to Rochester for her last day of real estate class. So I had much of the day to myself. I watched Spirited Away from Ghibli Studios in Japan. It is a really good movie. I am a pretty big fan of anime but this one is really gorgeous.

After spending a few hours at a meeting at the church, Min and I went up to LeRoy to pick up some Chinese food from Lucky House for Father’s Day. Then we headed down to my parent’s house for dinner. We ended up hanging out with my parents until about 1:30am. Then we headed back to Eric and Amanda’s house to get some sleep.

My mom’s new computer arrived this week. She got a new HP Compaq Evo. This is her first new computer since her old HP Pavilion Celeron 366 from years ago. What a huge jump it is going to be as she moves from a Celeron 366 to a Pentium IV 2400.

The market seems to be coming up a little bit. Andy is still working at Carrier up in Syracuse and I am working for Dell today at Wegman’s in Rochester (the corporate offices, not one of the grocery stores.) I had to get up early this morning and drive to Rochester so that I could start work at 8:30. It was supposed to be an easy installation, and for the most part it was, and was supposed to take less than eight hours, most likely six. But, as these things often do, everything went wrong and they were not prepared for me in the least and we ended up having to leave a lot of the work for them to perform because they just weren’t following their own directions or bothering to communicate with anyone. So, the good news is I got a full eight hours of work in which makes me happy. But it sucks to leave a site without everything being completely taken care of and wrapped up. It is nice to have that sense of closure at the end of a contract. But, we can’t have everything and I am happy to be able to make good money for a day. Plus, because they were running so far behind, I had an almost two hour lunch break with Eric while I waited for some of the backups to take place.

After work, I drove down to Livonia. Dominica is still taking her real estate class so we got out about the same time but she and Tammy were going to go and do some shopping prior to her coming over to Eric and Amanda’s house. Eric, Amanda and I went out to the Geneseo Family Restaurant where Dominica joined us for an early dinner. After dinner we went out to Walmart to do some shopping and picked up four new movies (I have to keep mentioning all of the new movies in here until Andy gets the new, amazing movie database up and running so that everyone can just check for new titles online.) We got, Dances with Wolves: Extended Edition (which I already had on LD but have never watched and will now be selling,) Spirited Away, Real Women Have Curves and Die Another Day, the latest James Bond film. We headed back to Eric and Amanda’s new house and watched the new Bond film. It was ok. I am very disappointed that Walmart is stocking the Full Frame crappy version of it and that is what I got but luckily it was a pretty bad movie and it will never really matter that it isn’t the ful aspect ratio version. A little disappointing but I will get over it. It is one of the weaker Bond films. I know that there have been a lot of really bad ones over the last few years and I won’t get into a debate over just how bad each one was but I will say that this one is weak but at least it isn’t Goldeneye.

What a long night. I ended up working until 5:00 in the morning. Today is my one and only day for a two week stretch that I get to be at home for the entire day. No need to travel what-so-ever. I am very happy about that. I am not happy that I have to go to bed so early tonight just so I can get up extra early tomorrow and drive to the west side of Rochester for an all day contract with Dell. I am glad for the contract but this was not the best week to have it on. Although, it is nice that Min is taking her class in Rochester this week so that the four days that I got caught working up there this week coincided with her schedule nicely. So even though we are both out of town for completely different reasons this week, we both managed to see each other for almost the entire week.

I did some cleaning around the house today. Not much but some stuff just had to be taken care of. Mostly today is just my day to be at home and take care of all of the random things that I need to do while I am at home. The biggest task is working on the three computers that need to be set up by the end of the week. Eric’s latop is good to go with Windows 2000 Pro and SuSE Linux 8.2. Eric also has a new Windows XP Pro machine ready for him to use at the office at the UofR. So he will be glad to have a dramatically faster and sleaker machine than he had before. I had to give up on installing SuSE Linux on that SuperMicro server. There is some hardware combination that just isn’t allowing SuSE to even begin to load on that machine. So last night I started the very long process of downloading Red Hat Linux 9.0. That takes a good six hours or more. I let the last of it run through the night. If anyone needs to borrow the install discs, especially those of you with dial-up connections, just let me know. It is three big CDs. Once I had the Red Hat discs, the install went as easy as could be. So that is up and running now and hopefully I can get that mostly together before the end of the weekend.

Ok, I have been out of town for an entire week so I am going to do all that I can to catch everyone up. I am sorry that I keep letting the dailies get away from me, I am really being run ragged here. It is hard to be able to sit down at a computer every day and write something. As I write this today, my bedroom is completely crawling in small insects (they might be gnats, I can’t really tell.) I don’t know what is going on. They are all over me and all over the monitor and I can see them flying all around me. I don’t know where they have come from. It is exceptionally hot in here, all of the windows are open and my fan is blowing but the room is so hot that I am sitting here in the middle of the night in nothing but boxers and I am sweating.

I got up early this morning at Eric and Amanada’s new house in Livonia and hit the road to head back to Ithaca around 7:00am. It is nice that Eric’s new house is a little bit closer to Ithaca than everything else that we do out in that area so the travel time isn’t quite as bad. Livonia saves about fifteen minutes or so over Geneseo and twenty or more over my parent’s house. During my drive here, I listened to the first of the three Father Gilbert mysteries that I have on CD. They aren’t technically books on CD since they are just CD versions of a radio drama, but it amounts to about the same thing. Mysteries are about the best format to listen to in the car when driving (or when just sitting there, I guess, too.) These mysteries are really short, just over an hour each. Which makes them handier for short trips of for filling in a little left over time at the tail end of a longer trip. I am still waiting on my complete collection of the Chronicles of Narnia to come in. They are abridged (significantly) but dramatized from Focus on the Family and are pretty decent. The CoN are some of my favorite books from my childhood. When I was very young, my mother read the entire series of books to me (around age 4-5) and recorded them onto cassette while she read them to me. So for years afterwards, I listened to them off of cassette. So, unlike other books that I have read once or twice, I have heard the complete, unabbridged CoN probably more than twenty times. I know those books really well. I even have the Ford Commentary on them kicking around somewhere.

On my way back to Ithaca, I stopped in at Steve’s house in T-Burg and we worked for an hour or two there. So I didn’t manage to get back to my home until almost 11:00. But boy was I glad to be home. I have been gone for almost a week and I appreciate getting to spend some time working at my own computers and sitting at my own chair and everything. Speaking of my own chair, my replacement chair back came today. Only instead of sending me just the back of the chair, they would appear to have sent me the entire thing again. So now I have two awesome office chairs instead of one. And the only problem with the first one is aesthetic. So I have two perfectly good chairs now. I am pretty happy about that. I don’t plan on assembling the second one until we move to Geneseo because that will just make it harder to move. But it will be really nice to have two office chairs in my new office (I still have my old “kneeling” chair too but only Phil likes that chair.)

Today was a really stressful day. I have just a ton of work to get done around here before I have to head back to Rochester on Friday, early in the morning. Dell has a full day of work for me to do out there so I get to go back right away. At least Min is already out there so it works out pretty well as far as that goes.

I am working hard trying to get Eric’s laptop fixed for him before I return to Rochester on Friday as well as get his new Waste Watcher Workstation prepared for him. I thought that I had it all ready to go but then it died on me so I am attempting to reinstall it now (but the computer might be shot.) In addition to those two computers, I am also trying to get Linux installed on a new SuperMicro server that we have for streaming Internet radio over. I tried to install SuSE on it and that doesn’t look like it is going to happen at all. So, I have downloaded Red Hat 9 and plan to give that a try in the very near future (but it is after midnight now so that will qualify for tomorrow’s news instead of today’s.)

We got a barrage of harassing telephone calls this evening from (518) 339-0804. I list that number here because I did a reverse lookup on it and got nothing. It isn’t listed as residential or business. And because it happened at night, I really couldn’t do much about it. They called about fifteen times in two hours or so and would never say a word. It was really irritating. So, if anyone else gets called by them and does a search to see who they are, they will most likely find this web site and at least know that this is something that has happened before. I even tried calling 518 339 0804 to see if someone would answer and they did pick up the phone and make some noise but no one would talk.

Dominica got her car back from John Holtz today. Luckily, the brakes were fixed under warranty so it didn’t cost her anything. They aren’t able to get pads for a little while so she has to bring her car back in a few weeks to have new pads installed – but at least she won’t be having brake problems now. I am really encouraged that both of our cars got fixed under warranty and without any real hassle.

At least no one can complain about my daily updates being short after not having been at them for a week:) Leanne also told me today that she thinks that she found an apartment in Gononda and she hopes to be moving there soon.

Andy got home and we headed out for some dinner. I didn’t eat anything but a little ice cream today, other than dinner. We went out to the Dryden Queen to get “breakfast” for me and the Fish fry for Andy (he is Fish fry man.)

Eric and I are going to be in Washington, DC almost all of next week. We have to leave early Monday morning and will be returning Thursday or later. We don’t know the exact schedule yet.

Today was a busy day of work in Rochester. John and I started the day off with breakfast at the Tip Top (after I ran into Joe Saul at the Wellesley this morning as I came out of my room – Joe is the last of the regular crowd that would appear to never be leaving that place!) and then we got over to the hospital so Eric and I could meet with the University of Rochester proper for a meeting about chemical inventory and tracking systems in the morning. After the meeting, we returned to the hospital and worked there for a little while. Then I had to get over to the Henrietta Regal 18 theatre for a Microsoft TechNet Briefing while Eric and John had a meeting at Rochester General in Irondiquoit.

The TechNet Briefing actually turned out to be a really good time. It is basically a four hour class that Microsoft offers for free. In fact, they give tons of stuff away there too. Everyone gets a nice software package to take home as well as free soda and popcorn to eat while they are giving some of the talks. And the give away some really good door prizes too (I was really hoping to win.) The class was interesting and I had a good time.

We got out of class early so I returned to the hospital to work with Eric a little more before going to meet Dominica at John Holtz where she dropped off her car to have her rear brakes worked on. John headed out to Goshen as soon as his meeting at RGH was over.

John Holtz explained that all of the Mazda’s PR5’s and some of the Protege’s with the all wheel disc brakes were having real issues after the hard winter that we had. Mazda is actually currently out of brake pads due to the unbelievable demand for them now.

After dropping off the car, Min and I headed down to my parent’s house where Min was expecting to spend the night before going to class tomorrow. But, mom wasn’t feeling well and they are going to go into the hospital tomorrow so we decided that it would be a lot less hassle if Min stayed over at Eric and Amanda’s house. That would be good, also, because Eric could take Min into her class and to get her car after her class was over. So, we stayed at my parent’s house until late and then went over to Eric and Amanda’s new house. The puppy, Sonny, has gotten very rambunctious and has very sharp teeth and loves to bite. I have the marks all over me to show for it too (as does Rachel.) Min had a lot of studying to do so Eric and I hung out for a while. Min eventually convinced me to spend the night there instead of driving back to Ithaca and just driving down early in the morning.

Andy has been putting some serious work into the online movies database (but, since by the time he is finished there will be more than 600 movies in the database – the work is well worth it) and has a ton of interface design to show for it. He is making a bunch of different interfaces to allow you to interact with a large database containing all kinds of cool information about my movie library. Of course, much of that informatin is available now in a spreadsheet, but it isn’t easy to use and takes forever to load up and search through. This new database will function much, much better as the collection pushes towards 1,000 movies and it will allow us to access the data easily from anywhere over the web.