Sheep Guarding Llama

Our first day back in Schenectady on our third week of work. We (John, Loopy and I) got up very early and hit the road by 4am as usual and got to work right on time. We have made this a science already. Our day was slow, the work that we are doing is very boring and there really isn’t anything to tell. Everyone is really nice and the place isn’t really ready for us so we spend a lot of time on lunch and standing around waiting for people or carrying computer boxes around.

After work we checked into the hotel and just crashed. Loopy and John went to bed a little before 5pm and pretty much slept until after 10pm. Then they were up for just a little while and went to bed again. Neither of them got much sleep last night. But by now they both have had way more sleep than me, that is for sure.

The funniest thing today was that on the way to Schenectady, John slipped on some ice and reffered to himself as a Surfing IT Wizard. So, Loopy and I are not letting it go and we have been telling everyone that John would now like to be referred to as the Surfing IT Wizard. We are even signing him up in the security logs that way and we have added the email address… (Update from June, 2006: Email address has been removed to stop harvesters using it for spam.) Everyone should email him there.

My last day at home before heading back to Schenectady again. We are getting used to the routine but it is a long week again. The three day last week was really nice and I really appreciated only having to spend two nights in the hotel. Now that we know where everything is located up there and are able to get around pretty easily it isn’t nearly as bad as it was the first couple of nights when finding food was practically impossible.

Not a lot happening today. Trying to relax some before going to Schenectady tomorrow. Min and I watched a couple of movies before I had to get to bed. We tried watching Iron Monkey 2 but it was horrible compared to the first one so we gave up on it and watched Hanging Up instead. Loopy spent the entire weekend trying to get Windows 2000 and SuSE Linux 8.1 intalled on his computer. He finally got it working just before he had to go to bed. At least it will be working when we get back.

I put in some time adding new pages to our Funnies section. I have heard good things about how many people really enjoy reading that section so I thought that I would dedicate a little time this weekend to beefing it up a little bit. I am thinking about doing something to add a “Funny Pictures” section because Loopy and I used to find some of the funniest stuff ever – now if I can only track it all down again.

Loopy is attempting to reinstall his computer with Windows 2000 Pro and SuSE Linux 8.1. This is his first time dual booting his new machine. Linux has not had support for the RAID array on that computer until recently so we will see how well it works. That has been a stumbling block that hopefully will be overcome. He is excited to be able to have a nice Linux machine to use again. I am trying to order a copy of Windows XP Pro for myself. I plan on reinstalling my computer with XP Pro and 8.1 next weekend. As usual, the installation did not go smoothly. It never does.

While we were away last week, I discovered that my Compaq laptop that was supposed to be so fast is running at half the speed that it is supposed to run at. I need to contact Compaq support.

Min and I watched Iron Monkey tonight. We were planning on watching Iron Monkey 2 as well but Loopy’s computer dies on him so I went upstairs to help out with that.

Our last day of our second week in Schenectady. After having fallen to only being able to install six computers yesterday (that is two each, down from 3+ each that we were able to do for the first week,) we are looking forward to a slow day in Rotterdam Junction. The elevator was still broken today so we had to move computers up and down the stairs again manually for the third day in a row. But boy are we getting our exercise. However, they now know that we aren’t able to do as many machines as we used to be able to so we are only taking four computers (down from ten) over to the new site because we have extras already over there. We are only scheduled to do six computers today so it should be a short day.

The installs went quickly and more or less smoothly and we were ablet to escape by 1:00 pm and grab some lunch before hitting the road to head back to Ithaca. We got back to Ithaca at 5:30 and managed to have an entire evening at home.

Min is feeling much better. Her back still hurts a lot and she is still on medication. She is able to get around, now, which is a huge improvement. We were able to go down to the theatre and watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding and most of Amelie. I hope to be able to finish watching Amelie tomorrow. So far, it is really good.

I forgot to tell the story about going to Borders on Tuesday. On Tuesday morning I got a call from Borders saying that my special order had arrived. You will remember this special order, the one that they illegally told me that I had to make because they were unwilling to refund my money for a defective product that I was then later able to cancel because the special order item arrived and they hadn’t told me about it and put it on a shelf for someone else to buy. So I had to go in an explain for the fifth time what had happened. At least they didn’t already have my money this time so I was in control. But what an incredible pain. It took such an obscene number of screw ups to get to where we were at that point. Totally frustrating. It is amazing that they are able to functin day to day at all.

The rest of the January Dailies have been moved over to the Archives. Loopy has discovered a new program called PNGCrush that is supposed to do a really good job of reducing the sizes of PNG images so I am anxious to give it a try and see what we can do with the site to get some faster downloads (since I have been working from a laptop over dialup in a hotel room for two weeks, I am even more into reducing the time it takes to bring up these pages.) I have also been out trying to find a scanner so that we can input more images to put up on the site. I know that there aren’t all that many right now but I am working on it. My last scanner was really nice and only cost me about $30 but now I can’t find one that I want for less that $200. That really sucks. I want one that is nice and has specific support for scanning slides and negatives because normal scanners don’t do that very well.

Week 2, Day 2 in Schenectady. The IT team that we are working with here is falling way behind us and is actually making it so that we are going to be working out here much longer than we originally intended. Normally, I am able to install 3-4 computers per day. Today, I installed only 1! Loopy and John each managed to get two done. So, we will be doing this installation for a while. We found out that the other site is barely ahead of us and they will be losing one of their techs in the middle of next week. So that is good news too. We ended up getting finished before they had any more computers for us to work on today so we headed out early (after taking an extra long lunch to kill some time) and went to CompUSA to do some shopping.

After a little shopping, we all got back to the hotel around 6:00 and I think that we all pretty much decided that it was going to be an early night. I was in my pajamas by 7:30 and had already napped a little. Loopy slept for a couple of hours as usual (I don’t think that he has missed a day yet.) I wish that there was more news to write about but as we are out of town, not much is happening that is worth telling about.

Min is still stuck in bed for at least another day. She has to get a bone scan tomorrow so hopefully she has found someone that will be able to take her to the two appointments for it. My mom is getting a bone scan tomorrow as well. I will be home tomorrow night to take care of Min for two days before we head back to Schenectady for a regular length week. It was nice only having to work for three days. It hardly felt like we were out here at all.

I am still trying to schedule a phone interview that I have been trying to have since late last week. It is for a position that I am really interested in out in the Cleveland area. Loopy talked to the people about the interview that he had on Saturday in Rochester that took like four hours and it turns out that funding for the project has been dropped but they hope to secure some soon.