Sheep Guarding Llama

I have been working hard trying not to let the web site get away from me. Once I take one day off it all seems to just slide out of control from there. I know that many of you rely on SGL to provide you with accurate, up to the minute, information about what is going on in Scott’s World so I apologize again for the slack of the last two months.

After work yesterday, Min came home and we went out for a walk. Yes, we actually got excercise. Not a lot of excercise but at least we are taking a little bit of initiative to do something:)

I decided that I just have to have a new office chair because the one that I have now is one of those kneeling backless deals. I really liked it when I first got it but I have worn out the pads on it and now it causes severe pain in my ankles and shins. So, time for it to go, I guess. I will miss it. So, Andy, Min and I drove down to Office Max (after dinner at Taco Bell) and spent some time picking out a new chair for me. We ended up getting the most expensive chair in the store (hey, I am in this thing for 10-12 hours a day at least) at $220. It is leather and reclines and has nice lumbar support (I am getting old, you know.) It fit nicely in the box into the back of Min’s PR5 and we headed home. It ended up being quite the ordeal to assemble this thing. It says “easy assembly” on the box but that is far from the truth. Many of the screw holes are not lined up and the pressure needed to align them is outside the ability of many people to provide – especially while attempting to assemble the chair as well. Min helped out and we finally got the whole thing together. No sooner than we got it all together (like an hour or more of painful assembly time) than I noticed that the shipping box had been punctured and the leather of the back of the chair was punctured as well and the wood in the back of the chair was even broken! So needless to say, I am already lamenting the purchase of this thing. So far, I like sitting in it but I haven’t tried to get the part replaced yet and I will not be happy if I have to take this apart and return it to the store and put another one together. My carpal tunnel is already killing me from the force that I had to exert the first time. So it is another rough day for me. Ho hum.

I found out from my mom that she has tarsal tunnel syndrome and that I am showing common signs of it (oh great, like the carpal tunnel wasn’t enough.) But hopefully this new chair will help. I was really hoping that I wasn’t going to have to return it to the store. I called the company, FDL, and they were really nice and gave me no hassle at all and my new chair back is already on its way. I should have it in about a week. So that is really positive. I was pretty disappointed last night but now I think that I might buy another one of these chairs. Already sitting in it is making my day a lot better. The lumbar support really makes a difference for me and sitting at my computer and typing is so much easier.

So Microsoft’s new real time strategy game, Rise of Nations, released this week. This is their fourth, big, history based RTS (Age of Empires 1 and 2, Mythology and now…) It released earlier this week and I had to run out and get it. I am quite the RTS fanatic. RoN is neat and takes a very different approach from EE, trying to squeeze everything into the shortest time from possible instead of the longest (where is the happy medium?) Games of RoN normally take just about one hour. So the game feels really rushed to me and not as intense as previous games. It almost seems like Microsoft decided that AoE2 was just too hard and has been dumbing down its games since then. But AoE2 was the greatest game ever:( But maybe this will get better, I never like new games at first. They have to grow on me. It took a long time for EE to grow on my. I still hate it in one player mode but it is multiplayer that really makes a game shine. AoE2 just had both.

Congratulations to Leanne, today was her first day at her new job in Rochester (Brighton – Corporate Woods.) She said that the first day went well and she likes where she is working.

I ended up going out with Steve for lunch today at Rulloff’s in Collegetown so my day was short. I did get a new Funny added. It isn’t very often that I add one, most of the stuff that I get sent isn’t really appropriate so I have to filter out 90% of it all before it gets posted.

Well, everyone should be happy that updates are flowing again. No LOTM the last couple of months, but updates is the first step. Plus that really cool Llama page that I added yesterday.

Last night, Min and I watched “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, the famous Studio Gibli film from Japan and recently distributed by Disney here in the states. It is really good. I really enjoy that film style and can’t wait to get some of the other films from that studio (they made “Princess Mononoke”, which I love, “Castle in the Sky” and “Spirited Away” – to mention a few that are popular here in the states. The guys watched “Drop Dead Gorgeous” in the living room while we watched that. The guys are still here today, they were supposed to be in the Big Apple for a Yankees game but the impending rain made them decide to just stay home and not risk wasting the long trip. Susan still drove down and Zach has been there for days already.

I played some more Empire Earth yesterday and made an amazing discovery: the computer cheats! No, I am not just being paranoid. We always accused the computer of doing that in Age of Empires 2 until we really learned how to play and were able to out perform the computer. But with EE, I was sure that the computer was able to do things faster than I was able to but couldn’t figure out how to prove it… until (and I know for those of you who aren’t into RTS game this will get confusing and oh so boring) I realized that the computer was building more troops than his resource gathering should have allowed. In EE, it takes 30 Iron to build a club man. The computer gathered 807 Iron. The computer built 29 club men. In addition to building all of those club men, it also trained them using hundreds more Iron. Do the math and you will see that the computer was playing outside of the bounds of the game that we all play. I looked at the time line and am pretty sure that it is doing the same thing with wood but will have a harder time proving it. I can’t believe that it is so blatant that I could see in the stats screen that it had cheated me. After that, I went online and found a site where someone else had been convinced that Empire Earth had been cheating all along and he managed to make a test to see what it was doing and proved that the computer was able to gather resources with a population of zero. And not only gather resources, but do it faster that a fully maxed out population at max gathering capacity. Apparently, building in the logic (the AI) to beat human players proved to be too much effort and so the makers of EE decided to just up the computers resource use capability to make it easier on them. That, combined with the dumb “prophets” in the game, make EE only a so-so RTS game at best. Age of Mythology may be too easy and Age of Empires 2 may be showing its age but I think, in the long run, I will stick with these two, more balanced games. Thanks, Microsoft, for at least making the best RTS games around. Rise of Nations has been announced and is coming soon. I think I will hold out for that. EE is still pretty good in multiplayer mode without the computer getting involved, but that severly limits the usefullness of the game.

This morning turned out to be pretty busy. I spent the first couple hours of the day working down at Lifestyle Properties trying to get their computer set up that I was working on over the weekend. And then, while I was there, I had to get a bunch of printers set up for them. And of course, they weren’t ready with their wiring when I got there so that took some time too. After working down there, Min and I went out to Collegetown for some lunch. We went to Sangam and got some Indian buffet. When I got back, there was a big spider crawling on my keyboard (he must have thought that he had found Andy’s room!)

Most of my work today will be attempting to install a Visual Basic application onto that horrible laptop. As soon as this is installed, I get to ship this thing out and hopefully not have to deal with it again for a while (I am the king of wishful thinking.)

I had meant to bid, the other day, on 512MB of memory for a server that I have. But I accidentally forgot to bid – and no one else bid either. So I emailed the guy and told him that if he relisted, I would definitely bid at least the lowest amount. He emailed me back and said he was tired of listing the item and offered to sell me 1GB of memory for just a little more and he would eat the shipping. So, that was a good deal. So I have a full GB of memory coming for one of my servers (of course, I haven’t gotten it in hand yet so I won’t count any chickens, But…) So I am hoping that this turns out to be a really good deal. It seldom does, though. But I needed a full 1 GB so this will be a really good deal if it works out, saving me at least $100.

Happy Memorial Day!

Today I managed to add a new “Llama Page” to the site. Just a little information (mostly advertising) about llamas. This is from a hand-out that Nate and I were given at the Erie County Fair years ago in Buffalo. We have been hooked on llamas ever since and this is the hand-out that began the SGL odyssey so long ago.

Bob, Loopy, Min and I all did lunch at the State St. Diner this morning and stopped by Borders on the way home. Min and I picked up some tour books on Belize, Central America and Dominica. We are thinking about maybe going to Belize on our honeymoon because it is cool, exotic and far cheaper than going to Disney World (and no one ever does it so that makes us extra cool if we actually do it.) The books make it sound really interesting. Belize is known for its great abundance of wildlife and Mayan ruins. The country speaks English and is a member of the commonwealth so there is little fear of dangerous political turmoil (this small entry on SGL will probably double Belize’s tourism this year.) We got Lonely Planet’s Central America on a Shoestring which tells us that you really can’t get below an inclusive cost of $15 a day in Belize. Darn, I was hoping for someplace cheap.

Kelley’s Heroes had a parade in Caledonia this morning but I didn’t make it. It was just too early in the morning for me to get up and drive all the way out there. It has been an exhausting week and I wanted some time to relax. Min didn’t like the idea of getting up a 6:00am to go watch a parade either. (I am explaining this here so that Josh and Leanne know why I wasn’t there and don’t have to ask me later.) Josh got me the details about the parade last night.

We think that mom has pneumonia now. She is having a terrible time breathing and dad had to run out to get anti-biotics. She is going to see the doctor tomorrow to verify that it really is pneumonia.

At 32 years old, my last hourse died today. Melody has been my horse since I was five years old. She was ten years old when we got her. Over the years, we had six horses on the farm (two mares that each had two children) and Melody was the eldest and the last living. Cleo was the second oldest and died about two years ago. Dad found Melody collapsed in a mud puddle when he got home last night. My aunt and uncle came up to help him try to hoist her up with ropes but she ended up throwing my dad and kicking him in the head and neck. He is ok, though, but really soar. Melody was just too exhausted to get up and they called the vet who came out late this evening and put her down. So, for about the first time in my life that I can remember, the farm has no animals living on it. The three dogs, countless cats, two hamsters, three raccoons and six horses that have all called the farm home over the years have all passed away. Growing up on a farm can be a really sad thing. So many friends have died there. It is especially hard when it is a friend who has watched me grow up all these years.

Min and I slept in late today and got up just in time to shower and head south to Spencer to have lunch with Craig and Emily (and Ellie!) This is the first time that either Min or I have been down to their new house now that they live less than thirty minutes away! Of course, we live so far away for so long and they finally move closer and now Min, Andy and I are headed back Rochester way, figures. We had a really good time at lunch and Craig and Emily decided that they would come up to Ithaca to hang out after some commitments that they had in the afternoon. Craig has never played Quake or any other computer based first person shooter so he was intrigued by the idea of playing with everyone in a seperate room and a full screen to yourself.

Bob picked up the ingredients (99 Blackberries and Mountain Dew) to Dewberry Juice and we mixed up some and prepared for a serious Quake II fest. Bob has been jonsin’ for some Quake action ever since he was reading the SGL Archives the other day and he is all excited that we are going to get to play tonight. Loopy only got the parts to put his computer back together this morning so her is really excited just to have a computer to use again. We got Quake II installed on all of the computers (Loopy just rebuilt his, Bob has a ‘new’ graphics card – VooDoo 4 and Craig is playing on Min’s computer in the closet) and then decided that we really wanted to try being able to hear each other so we all installed Microsoft’s Sidewinder Game Voice (Min and I have the GameVoice hardware, the others just use the software version) and got that working. Craig and Emily showed up (Min, Emily and Tammy hung out in my room with the kids, Ellie and Tess, while the men kicked each other’s butts,) we served out some Dewberry Juice and the games began. We played for hours, until about 1:00am (so probably five hours total gaming time.) With four players (we normally only ever get three) and the game voice, this was probably the best Quake matches we ever played. Bob totally kicked butt. It is really cool to be able to rip on each other while the game is going, though. The GameVoice really adds a new dimension to the game. I can’t wait to use it with lots of people when we play AoE2 or EE! Rise of Nations is coming soon and I am really looking forward to that as well.