Sheep Guarding Llama

Boy was I glad to have been able to get a full night’s sleep last night, I really needed it. I checked out of the hotel this morning and said my goodbyes since this is the last day that I will be staying at the hotel – I have been practically living there for over a month now. The hotel has really come to feel like my home away from home already. I went to work but we really didn’t have anything that we needed to do today so I managed to spend most of the day just surfing on the web. I managed to get a lot of research in and got to send out a ton of emails. It was nice to get to spend my last day just relaxing. I think we only installed one computer between the three of us all day.

At lunch, Eugene drove me out to Pep Boys and I got the headlight fixed on my car and inspected. So that is at least taken care of. That was a bit of a pain.

After finishing up at Schenectady Int’l, I drove over to Tony and Sharon’s and worked for an hour or two over there on the computer before hitting the road to head for home. On the ride to Ithaca I listened to most of the rest of Sue Grafton’s “P is for Peril.” I listened to “N is for Noose” last week while driving to and from Schenectady. N was okay but not one of the highlights of the series. P is really good so far. I am almost done, only about thirty minutes left to go out of six hours. So I am anxious to get it finished.

When I arrived home I had lots of stuff that had come in the mail. I got a package from my aunt that I was waiting for, I received the latest issue of Linux Magazine (my favorite rag) and I got my own copy of Windows XP Professional. I am really excited about getting a copy of XP Pro, not because I really like XP (it is ok, probably better than Windows 2000 but not really very much different,) but because this represents the last piece of illegal software that I have. As of now, all of my software is totally legal which is more than pretty much anyone I have ever met can say. I have always felt bad that I had illegal copies of software and I have been trying hard for a long time to get away from that. It is hard because you get used to having it and not having to pay for it (for those of you who think you aren’t doing this… ask yourself if you actually bought the operating system you are running or the office suite that you use or the games that you play… I bet you will think of something. Most likely it will be the music you downloaded.) The best solution is to switch to software that somebody made for free so that you don’t have to steal software from other people. That is what I did for most of everything that I had. I am running Linux or something else free on every computer except my laptop (which has Windows XP Pro pre-installed on it) and now my main desktop which dual-boots to both Linux and XP. Because of the work that I do, I just can’t totally get away from having a Windows machine around for testing and learning.

So, I will be spending a lot of time this week getting my computer running as I move from Windows 2000 Pro to Windows XP Pro and from Suse 8.0 to 8.1. I have it easier than Loopy did a few weeks ago, though, because of the hardware setup that I have.

This coming Friday, I have an interview with a company here in Ithaca. How funny that I get an interview here in Ithaca finally after all this time right when we are pretty sure that we are going to try moving back to the Rochester area. It is like there is a big huge joke going on about us trying to decide where to live. As soon as we think we know what we are going to do, something new happens pushing us towards either Rochester or Ithaca. Ha ha. I’m not laughing.

Tomorrow, Eric and I have a meeting in Binghamton with Lourdes Hospital at 1:00pm. So, Eric is headed up this way and will be here around 10am so that we can get ready for the meeting. We have to have a strategy session with John on the phone before the meeting and we have to get all dressed up again. We have been trying to have this meeting with them since something like October and just one thing or another has come up and it has been pushed off for forever. So we are really glad to finally be having it. I really need to pick up a pair of suspenders for my suit that match. I have been forgetting about doing that for forever now. I will probably run out this morning to get some. Loopy is working today in Auburn (he worked in Ithaca yesterday) and needs to borrow Min’s car because his might have bad wheel bearings. So, I am driving Min to work and Loopy is picking her up from work later and he is taking her car to Auburn.

Loopy had a rockin’ interview with IBM in Rochester just yesterday and it is looking really positive for him to be working up there very soon doing Crystal Reports development. Not the most exciting work in the world but at this point, any work is pretty exciting.

What a long day. I got up early this morning after only two hours of sleep and drove out to Schenectady. It was a long day of work (even though I managed to get out early) and then I had two hours off before I headed out to help out at the restaurant (I have been teaching the owners how to use their computers.) So it was a long, twelve hour work day after four hours of driving. I was definitely ready for bed by the time I was able to lie down. I went to bed early, by ten o’clock. Ah, eight whole hours of sleep, there is something that I never get.

On the way out to Schenectady, I got pulled over by a trooper on the thruway and got a ticket for having a headlight out. So that is going to be a lot of fun since I have to have it fixed by sundown tomorrow. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t know where anything is in Schenectady.

My one full day in Ithaca. Min, Loop and I went to Taco Bell for some lunch today and then went to Barnes and Nobles to do some shopping for some movies to watch (as you all have heard, I no longer an buying DVDs at Borders so a special trip has to be made if I am to be the one buying the movies.) So we stopped off and picked up: Are You Being Served? The Movie, Father Ted: Series One (BBC), Kama Sutra and Salaam Bombay. After having watched Monsoon Wedding, Min and I are really into Indian Cinema and wanted to get more films by Mira Nair. We now have three. Mississippi Masala also looks pretty good (even though I will whine because I hate watching films with Denzel Washington in them or supporting his career in any way – but at least it is an independant film so it isn’t quite as bad.)

John Stephens, our Llama of the Month and Surfing IT Wizard, stopped by today to purchase Gordon off of me. Gordon put in a long run as the house server but he has seen better days and was replaced by Big Bird some time ago so we decided that it was best it we parted ways. John got a lot of equipment with Gordon including that huge outboard SCSI box that has been cluttering up the laundry room plus lots of spare parts (some of which I am still looking for.) Hopefully John will have a lot of fun playing with Gordon.

After we got in from shopping, we pretty much made a day of watching movies. Loop and Bob joined us for the first two shows that we watched. First we watched a couple episodes of Father Ted. We didn’t think that it was going to be the best television show ever but it looked like it might be funny and it was. Nothing classic but worth watching sometimes when you just need something light and short. At least the disc was cheap. We ended up watching about half of the first season today. We really do enjoy British television over American television. The style is just so different. After that we watcher Are You Being Served? which was just awful. The television show’s format just didn’t translate into the big screen. The missing laugh track was painfully obvious. It was just like watching the show only the camera work was weird, the colors were bright, the sound was bad and the premise went on too long. For hard core fans fo the series (like me,) the movie is worth the time. But for casual watchers, I would avoid it. Min did figure out exactly where the movie fits into the serial so that you can watch the entire show in order and have it make a little but extra sense.

After watching our British television, we also watched Windtalkers (with Nicholas Cage about the Navajo code talkers during World War II in the Pacific.) It was pretty good – better than a lot of the reviews that we had heard about it. It wasn’t the most classic war movie ever and didn’t live up to the directing of John Woo but it was good and I think a lot of our readers would enjoy it. I did notice in the movie that in one scene at Pearl Harbor, they made a point of shooting a shot of the 48 star flag (the Pearl Harbor flag was later flown at the White House in DC during the Japanese surrender.) But only minutes later in the film they made the mistake of doing a full screen shot of a 50 star flag flying over Arizona. This is especially weird because Arizona was the 48 star so residents would have been knowledgable that the 50 star flag wasn’t used until 1960 after Alaska and Hawaii were added to the Union. How they managed to take a full screen shot of the wrong flag, I will never know. It was quite the glaring error only minutes after they had gotten it right. The is a really interesting site that details the History of the American Flag that you should check out. During the 1900’s, the U.S. had only four different flags and only two after 1912. So most Americans are very familiar with our 48 and 50 star flags that are seen in almost all photographs and movies. But during the 1800’s, we had a new flag every couple of years. Flag making must have become a booming industry as everyone had to replace their flags long before they would normally wear out. (Update: Once again, a great web page that has not been kept up and is now missing.)

Our final movie of the evening was Mira Nair’s (the director of Monsoon Wedding) Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. It was a well shot film telling about the life of a courtesan in sixteenth century India. It is, as the name implies, inappropriate for children and was quite sad. Mira’s director was very good and the movie was quite enjoyable. And for those afraid of independant and foreign films, it was shot totally in English.

I got to work late today because they had issues checking me out of the hotel but no one really noticed so it wasn’t a big deal. We took lunch at the Albany IHOP because we wanted to try the new cream cheese stuffed French toast which was pretty good but only because they told us were we able to tell that there was any cream cheese in the toast. There was so little cheese that even looking for it specifically didn’t prove to be effective. We managed to get done with work by 3:30 and hit the road for home. On the way back, I stopped off at Carousel Center and picked up the KVM cables from CompUSA that I needed so that I can hook up the KVM switch at home. I need to be able to work on multiple computers at once and don’t have the space to have tons of keyboards, mice and monitors all over the place.

I got home around 7:00 and Min and I watched the rest of Monsoon Wedding which I had started last night. That movie is really awesome (hint, hint, for all of you who borrow movies from me!) Mira Nair’s directing is incredible and it really shows you a glimpse of Indian life that you almost never see. And the music was really incredible.

My last full day in Schenectady this week. After work, I came back to the hotel and watched Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective which I haven’t seen since it was in theatres in the late 1980’s. It was the first movie that I had ever seen at a drive-in. I remember my parents taking me to see it at the Silver Lake Drive In in Perry and it just rained and rained. After that, I watched the first half of Monsoon Wedding. By the time I was halfway through, I was just too tired and decided that I would watch the rest of it tomorrow at home.