Sheep Guarding Llama

THE MARCH LLAMA OF THE MONTH IS THE SURFING IT WIZARD

John Stephens aka The Surfing IT Wizard wins the LOTM award just because he managed to get himself nicknamed the Surfing IT Wizard. In addition to the nickname, he also has the mail address [email protected] and everyone should send him a note congratulating him on his achievement.

Min and I did a little cleaning this morning before her family arrived.

I really need to get a lot of work done this weekend before I go back to Schenectady on Monday morning. You don’t realize how much you love your weekends until you only get to be at home for exactly 48 hours between work weeks for more than a month. I need to get laundry done before I head back because it is almost impossible to get any done while I am out there and Schenectady isn’t really the kind of town where you would want to be in a place like a laundry mat alone in the evening. So far, the people that we have met out there have been great but the town really is a giant slum. The poor section of Albany basically. You feel a little uncomfortable just driving around much of the town.

So, Dominica’s dog, Dexter, which is a small Boston Terrier, has apparently made friends with an opossum that lives under their porch. Min did some research and apparently opossums are one the least aggressive wild animals in North America and they are very resistant to rabies. So apparently, they make pretty good pets. The main problem is that they are just not so much attractive.

Min’s parents got here around 2pm and we went out to lunch at The Nines in College Town. They told us that Dexter’s new friend got hit by a car last night. So, that was a short lived story. Dominica’s mother made me a birthday cake made out of candy bars. It is really cool. Min made me a pan of brownies (chocolate and peanut butter) with peanut butter cup ice cream.

Min and I watched The Tuxedo with Jackie Chan, it is okay. Pretty funny. It is cute. Jennifer Love Hewett isn’t terrible. I worked on some new additions to the funnies sections. There are three new entries now. I am trying to slowly work up a big funnies section. I keep hearing about how funny people think that they section is.

Ok, so there isn’t reall a February 29th but since it is Eric’s Birthday we thought that we would add it in.

TGIF. We are working this morning at the Nyskayuna site to the east of Schenectady. That sucks a little because our travel time to home is an extra half an hour longer than it would be if we were leaving straight from Rotterdam like we had been previously.

I tried loading the main SGL page last night over the 26Kbs AOL dial-up connection that we had in our room and it took roughly 33 seconds for the page to totally load. That is so awful. And there are only like seven images on the entire page. And they are all really small. Dial-up is awful. I can’t believe that many of you use this all of the time.

John has decided to buy our old house server, Gordon, from us. Gordon has put in a good long run but he has been replaced by Big Bird and is no longer in service. John will be cleaning out space for Gordon once he gets back home this weekend and he will be coming up on Sunday to pick him up and take him to his new home. John has already gone on eBay and purchased new drives for Gordon and a new processor. Gordon will be quite happy with all of the improvements. We will be happy to finally have all of that equipment moved out of the house. Gordon and his drive system take up a lot of space and I have been storing extra parts for him in boxes everywhere. It will be easier for me to find things once we get him out of here.

Today was mostly a nothing day at Schenectady International. Loop, John and I spent most of the day taking out the garbage, cleaning the staging area and filling out paperwork so that we could finish up. We managed to leave around 3:30 and headed back to Ithaca.

Min is feeling much better today. Her back is not hurting nearly as much as it has been and she is able to get around pretty well. She baked me brownies for my birthday which we are celebrating tomorrow.

My “new” HP portable computer was in my room when I got home. It is really neat. It runs a rare version of UNIX called HP-UX and it runs on an old Motorola 680×0 processor like the old Macs, Amigas and the Atari 512/ST. It has a monochrome amber screen and a detachable keyboard (the H doesn’t work) and a built in dot-matrix printer. It is the weirdest portable computer that I have ever seen. It is even weirder than the laptop that I have with a built in thermal printer. I don’t think that I will ever get any real use out of this machine (I was originally planning on trying to learn HP-UX from it) but it sure makes an awesome addition to my antique computer collection. It is a real reminder of the late 1980’s when Motorola was a dominant force in the processor market and Intel really had to spend a lot of time playing catch-up. In a world where Intel has been the big processor maker for so long, it is hard to remember a time when they were not. With AMD doing such a good job recently, maybe those days will come again.

We arrived home around 7:00 pm. I was totally tired and decided to go to bed really early. Like by 9:30. So, very little news today as I am sleeping.

Dominica’s parents and her brother Joe and coming down to Ithaca to visit tomorrow and to celebrate by birthday. We are planning on going to the Nines for lunch so that we can get Cheese Deluxe sandwiches. Yum!

We started work back at Rotterdam Junction this morning and by 1pm, we had finished the site. This was our last time to Rotterdam where we have been working for the last three weeks. We will miss it (however we will not miss the biting cold that we have had to work in.) After lunch we headed over to Nyskayuna and did some cleaning of all of the trash that has been generated by the unpacking of hundreds of computers over the last few weeks. Tomorrow is going to be a really boring day as we really don’t have anything to do when we are at work. There are just too many of us and we are all in each other’s way.

Very boring evening. The three of us headed straight back to the hotel room and did pretty much nothing. It is our last night here. John ordered in a pizza and we just ate a little here. We watched a little television and I talked on the phone a little and that was about the whole evening. No attempt to get the DVD to work tonight, it just isn’t worth it.

Dominica went to see the doctor again today (the bone specialist) but he didn’t have much of anything to tell her. Maybe he will be able to tell her something useful when he gets around to actually looking at the tests that he had done in two weeks when she will see him again.

Another fun day setting up computers. Eric did some work today too in Syracuse. But his went really shitty. John and Andy got cut from our project today. They will still be working until Friday but only I will be returning on next Monday. So I will be living in the Days Inn all by myself for an entire week or more. I am happy to, though, because I really need the money – but it will be really expensive paying for a hotel with me being the only one in it. I don’t want to but I have to.

We went and bought a universal remote to try to get the television to accept the DVD input today but that didn’t work either. So, we are just going to give up and I will bring an RF converter with me next week while I am here and I will watch all kinds of movies while I am all by myself. John and I also made a run to CompUSA this evening because he needed some stuff from there. I have looked and CompUSA does have a scanner that I would like so I might splurge after doing this project and get it for myself. It is pretty expensive but it has the options that I really want and I will be able to get a ton of pics put up onto the site that have needed to go up for a while. Being without a scanner for the last few months has been a pretty big pain.

Min was back to work today. Her first day. They waiting on a computer sale that they were having and she managed to get me an old 1988 Hewlett-Packard UNIX laptop with built in printer. Now, for most people a 1988 laptop wouldn’t be very exciting. But for me, it is a really good opportunity to get a little HP-UX experience. Anything for the old resume, you know. I don’t know much about the machine but I am sure that I will manage to get a little use out of it and when I am done with that, it will be a neat addition to my collection of weird machines. Min is going to the doctor’s tomorrow to have her bone scan read. So maybe she will have more info then.

Other than that, there just really isn’t much news today. Maybe something exciting will happen tomorrow. Tomorrow night, the three of us our going to do some work with Anthony’s restaurant.