Sheep Guarding Llama

I finally got a copy of PNGCrush today and gave it a try on some of the images on the site. We should notice a little bit faster load times now as many of the images used on SGL have been reduced by 5% – 35%. That should do a lot for download times, especially for the dial-up users, as usual. We are slowly pushing the content of this site to the absolute maximum in performance and compliance ever! Maybe people come to look at this site to see how well we make everything work. No, I didn’t think so.

I worked around the house in the morning and then had a lunch meeting with Steve and Pat Lucente at noon. The meeting went really well and we are supposed to be getting back together on Wednesday.

Min made me buy Father Ted Series II on DVD. Series 2 is even better than series one (and twice as long.) We watched the first of the two disks this evening.

Min decided that she wanted to get out and do something fun in the great weather we are having so we called Josh and Joanna to see if they wanted to hit the Seneca Lake wineries today. Turns out that Joanna was already in Dresden so Josh had to drive down seperately to meet us down that way. This will be the first time for Min and I on the west side of Seneca Lake. There are a ton of wineries over there that I want to hit so this is really exciting.

Min and I had lunch at Wendy’s for a quick lunch and then went to Wegman’s to stock up on picnic supplies like goat and sheep cheeses, a baguette, olive oil, mozarrella cheese, tomatoes and balsamic vinegar. We packed up the wine and cheese picnic kit and headed west to Watkins Glen.

We went north on Route 14 and started our tour at Lakewood on Seneca Lake West. I have had some of their wines before but their entire collection was excellent. I think that Lakewood is one of our favorite wineries now. We bought almost a full case of wine while we were there including some amazing port and ice wines.

After Lakewood, we headed north to Glenora where we met up with Josh and Joanna. Joanna grew up in Dresden, just minutes away from there so this was her old stomping ground. Glenora was really good too and we bought more wine there. They have a really large selection there.

Our next stop to the north was the Anthony Road Winery which has done very well for itself in the past year. So well, in fact, that more than half of their entire line of wines had sold out and wasn’t available. So we had very little to try there. It made for a quick stop. Josh and I each bought two bottle there.

Our last stop of the day was Fox Run a little farther north on the lake. Fox Run had a nice cafe where we got a little bite to eat before we drank anymore. Then we tried the wines. We were not very impressed. The people there were really nice but the wines left a lot to be desired. They were okay but nothing special at all. We bought a little bit because we felt bad. They let us use their picnic tables to have our dinner.

The wine, cheese and bread was wonderful. I am so glad that we went out for the day and had a picnic. The weather was so beautiful and the drive was great.

After a day driving through the Finger Lakes, we decided to just head home and relax. Min and I got back to Ithaca around 7:30.

I got up at 5:30 this morning and got moving right away because I wanted to be ready for the interview that I am having this morning. I have put more effort into this interview than I ever have before (they probably won’t be interested in me in the least now, ha ha.) I spent all day yesterday cramming to beef up my resume to get ready for today. I took five exams on Brainbench and managed to pull off new certifications in Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 Administration, Cisco Network Support, Network Monitoring, Web Server Administration and Apache Administration. And, some of these fulfilled additional requirements and I got one of the new, and much harder to obtain, BCIP (Brainbench Certified Internet Professional) certs as well. That makes two.

Mozilla 1.3 Final released yesterday. I haven’t had a chance to get it yet and I won’t install in until after I go to Windows XP but I thought that I should let you all know that it is out there now. So go get it and try it out. In addition, Opera has just released Opera 7.03 so there are all kinds of new web browsers to get out there and give a try. If you are going to purchase Opera, be sure to do so from our Links page because we receive funding from them to help support Sheep Guarding Llama.

My interview is this morning at 8:30 down at Wegmans. I have a second interview at 9:00 and a third at 10:00. Busy morning. I am meeting with the Director of MIS and then a senior DBA.

I think that the meeting went well; although it is hard to say. They were hoping to be able to contact me today to let me know one way or the other but that didn’t end up happening. So I ended up sitting by the phone for much of the day to no avail.

Craig and Emily (that is Craig Lizar and Emily Lizar – now Google will search their names, ha) stopped by around 3:00 and surprised us all. Luckily, everyone was home (except Min who actually had to go to work today) so we all got to hang out. That was really cool. We decided to go out to dinner at Maxie’s and get some hot Cajun food. So Craig, Emily, Min, Me and Bob all headed out there and had a really good dinner and a few drinks. Then we came back to the house and Bob watched the ‘Cuse – UConn game while Min and Emily talked and Craig and I shared two bottles of Keuka Overlook wine.

We got approved for the purchase of a new Dell PowerEdge server to go into our Washington, DC facility so I get to deal with purchasing that this week. I am excited, we have not ordered a completely new server since January, 2000. We did purchase the IBM Netfinity system in 2001 but it was a clearance item (best investment ever) and was still a long time ago. It was a screaming fast machine with a Pentium III 667. The new Dell will be a Pentium IV 2.4 GHz. So, the difference should be rather noticeable.

Tomorrow morning, Min and I are driving down to Corning to meet up with Eric and Amanda because we are going to go to the Corning Museum of Glass. I haven’t been there since I was really young and they have done a lot to really get the place modernized, I hear, so I am pretty excited. Nate is performing with the Cayuga Vocal Ensemble at the Statler Hotel tomorrow evening for anyone who is interested.

I got up nice and early this morning because part of our network in DC went offline and I had to help troubleshoot that. It was a good morning to have to do it, though, since I had woked up at 5:30 and had been lying awake for quite a while. By 7:30, we had the problem in DC fixed. It was nice to have something get me up in the morning, though. Kind of handy. Now I am up and moving already.

Today is my one day without something big on the calendar. Tomorrow is my interview with Axiohm, here in Ithaca. I will most likely be involved with that all morning – maybe into the afternoon.

For all you SuSE Linux users out there, SuSE has announced the latest version of their product, 8.2, will be made available on April 14. I doubt that 8.2 will be a huge change from their already awesome 8.1 product, but a few new features have been announced (the big one being remote desktop sharing to compete with Microsoft Windows XP desktop sharing) and updates to lots of packages will be included of course. I am excited, I can’t wait to upgrade to the latest version. It is like Christmas almost.

Loopy is working down at Lifestyle Properties today, supposedly. He has been trying to work with them for almost a month now and they just keep cancelling and rescheduling on him. What a pain that has become.

Well, I spent most of the day attempting to beef up my resume for the big interview tomorrow. I managed to pass four new Brainbench Certifications (and managed to not pass one as well) and additionally received a fifth certification for all of the work that I did. So, it was a long and exhausting day but at least I managed to make something out of it. If I am lucky, maybe I will be able to work in some more preparation early in the morning. I am going to bed really early tonight because I am exhausted from all of this testing and I want to be fresh for the interview. I am meeting at 8:30am and will be interviewing all morning.

I looked at the web server reports for SGL the other day. In February we managed to maintain the exact same number of average daily views of the site as we had in January, 75 visits a day. That is pretty good considering that two of our biggest readers (Min and I) were out of commission and pretty much couldn’t look at the site all month. So, hopefully March will be our big growth month. Let’s shoot for 85 views a day again! I did a little bit of work the other day to reoganize some of the XHTML code that was used for the site to cut down on download times a little bit. We are slowly making this site faster and faster. I still need to run PNG Crush to get some more compression into the images. That should help a bit too. Good news, Loopy bought a scanner so we can start to put up pics again. So, look for new stuff soon.

Eric and I drove down to Binghamton this afternoon and gave a presentation to Lourdes Hospital. It went fine but most of the people that we were supposed to be presenting to weren’t there so it didn’t do us a whole lot of good. After the meeting, we stopped by Senator Schumer’s office at the Federal Building. Amanda, who works there, was too busy to join us for coffee. So Eric and I went next door to the Lost Dog Cafe to get some late lunch and coffee.

Loopy has his new professional web site up and running. You can check it out at AndrewTWest.com. This is the twenty-fifth web site being hosted by Niagara Telecom/Ithaca Portal. We are still waiting for me to return to DC in order to install our newest web server with all the newest features and stuff. But that will come soon enough. It seems like forever to me since I am so anxious to get it into place. I am interested in installing a new database server down in DC. Dell has a great deal on a new machine that would really help us out a lot since our current database server is limping along and approaching a slow death. I am working on getting a PowerPoint presentation together to show why we need to spend money on a new machine. It has been a long time (two years at least) since I made a slideshow like this.

Min is finally playing her game, Kingdom Hearts, again. If she is able to keep playing it, she will probably have it beaten in a week or so.