Sheep Guarding Llama

Boy do I feel old. 27! I have always thought of 27 as being the first year of middle age. And here it is. Wow.

Our offices that we are working for in Austin, TX got an ice storm today and one of them was unable to open for business at all. Eric is going to be doing a little work for us tomorrow but he unable to get any information about it until really late because no one was able to get into the office to get it to him. I wonder what is considered an ice storm in Texas anyway, hmmm.

Work was the same today. We are nearing the end of the work that they have for us in Rotterdam Junction and we probably have only one day left here before we switch to working in Nyskyuna. We don’t know where we are going to be working tomorrow. We have to hang loose and see in the morning.

After work, we all went to Walmart and got a few things that we needed. I picked up some movies for the week. We got back to the hotel and I decided that I wanted a cheap DVD player to take with me places so we returned to Walmart and picked one up for $53. But of course, when we got back to the hotel we realized that we couldn’t get it to work because there is no remote control in the hotel that can switch the television to its Video source setting. So we have to find a universal remote now. But we will save that for tomorrow.

John has been reading Harry Potter and he just finished book one and he picked up two at Walmart while we were there so he is starting that now.

Well, my birthday was pretty much uneventful. Thank you everyone who remembered to call me:) You know who you are.

One funny thing… not only did we get the restaurant that we eat at to give us food in exchange for us doing some work for them which works out great because we can’t cook for ourselves out here, but tonight the hotel that we are staying in expressed an interest in having us do some work for them to get them set up with high speed access available in part of the hotel. So, I am starting to design a wireless system for them to let them get up and running quickly. And people say that being out of town is just a waste of time when you aren’t actually working, LOL.

Leanne wanted me to note that the dates of the musical have changed but I don’t remember now what they changed to. Maybe she will email the details 🙂

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.