Sheep Guarding Llama

I wanted to get a lot done today but I have a bad sinus headache. Min is still hurting pretty bad and taking a lot of medicine to keep the pain under control. Today ended up being mostly just a resting day. I really didn’t feel that I could handle thinking about very much so I didn’t. Loopy actually got up at a normal time today and worked during the day instead of at night. How weird. I spent most of the day online trying to be productive but mostly failing at it. I did get some work done so don’t think that I was totally slacking off but not a whole lot was done. At least I got the updates for the site posted for my loyal readers who notice whenever I fall behind. I kept calling people today but couldn’t find anyone that I needed to do work so that help give me a pretty good excuse.

Loopy spent the day working on LoopyOS, his new operating system. It is really coming along. I can’t believe how much he has managed to get done on it. You can’t play Quake or run the Apache web server yet but he is getting there. One step at a time. It is a big undertaking trying to make an operating system so give him some time.

I noticed today that my Brainbench subscription got renewed automatically so I am wondering where that money came from because I wasn’t aware of it happening? Hmmm… Blink and your money is gone.

I am trying Mozilla 1.3b and so far it seems to be pretty crash happy. I have been online a bit this evening but it has crashed on me two or three times tonight alone. So I am not too impressed so far. It isn’t a final release so I can’t be too critical.

Late tonight Min decided to give up on the narcotic based pain killer that the hospital gave her because it is making her really not feel well and she switched to Alleve (or the generic equivalent.) Hopefully she will start feeling better once she manages to get that stuff out of her system.

I am wearing my new $12 jeans from Walmart and they are pretty nice. Loopy likes his too. I can’t believe how nice they are for how cheap they were. Well worth the money, I think. I was really happy with the polo shirts that I got from there cheap too. I really need to shop at Walmart more often. It is amazing how much money you can save that you just didn’t realize you could. I could easily save $100 a year on clothes alone there.

Well, it has been an uneventful day and there just isn’t much to say about it so I will call it a night. Have a good weekend. Don’t forget that Monday is President’s Day and you might not have to go to work.

Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Birthday Madeline! Francesca’s (our September Llama of the Month’s) daughter Madeline turns a big 3 in Webster, Texas today. We would have called to wish her a happy birthday but Min was a little preoccupied with the events of the day. I wrote the update yesterday but somehow I didn’t remember to post it so for all of you who have been following along and think that I forgot to do it, it isn’t true. I just forgot to post it. Well, today started off good but didn’t end up being so good in the long run. Actually, maybe it was all bad. The day started off with the alarm not going off, apparently it had gotten turned off at some point. So instead of jumping out of bed at 5:15, we started moving at 6:45. So we were in a pretty major rush from the moment go. We have to be out the door by 7:40 to make it to work on time. And there are three of us to get ready in one bathroom. And on top of that, we had to pack and check out of the hotel and then load the car. So it was a bit much for first thing in the morning. Then, the car was out of windshield wiper fluid and we had to get some before we could go anywhere because I couldn’t see. And we were out of gas. So a quick pit stop to refill both items had to be done and that takes a little while. But, since we were in such a hurry, I tried taking a short-cut that we had heard about and we ended up making it to work right on time. In fact, we pulled in in front of the other team. So it ended up being okay.

Our day went pretty smoothly after that. It was different from the rest of the week. Today was our first day in a shop instead of in offices. So the environment was much more casual. The day ended up going really fast. We took a late lunch and headed over to Anthony’s for a free lunch. It was awesome and today they had us go over to the full service dining room instead of the fast side. We had an amazing lunch. After lunch, we had very little to do and we just finished up and hit the road by 2:30. Pretty good deal for St. Valentine’s Day.

Since we were on the road so early and the weather was good, I got on the phone and managed to convince Turback’s in Ithaca to give me a reservation for 9:00 pm. I knew that Min wanted to go there and I was hoping that we could get in. I had been calling her since 11:00 am (because I knew that I was going to be getting out early by then) trying to make sure that she didn’t make any plans or anything because I would be home early enough to have dinner. But I was never able to track her down. I left messages at the house, at her office and on her cell. I finally talked to the receptionist at Advion and she told me that she had left for the day. We stopped in Herkimer on the way home to see if the Super Walmart there had any more copies of My Big Fat Greek Wedding because the one in Schenectady was sold out. They did have a few so I picked one up (Min wanted to watch that for Valentine’s Day.)

Right after we left Herkimer, Gibran called to say that Min had been taken from work to Cayuga Medical Center because her back had gone out on her at work and she had collapsed. She is the first person to ever have been taken out of Advion on a stretcher. However, Advion didn’t call me or anyone else to tell them that she had gone to the hospital and everyone with a local phone number was out of town. So she was stuck there and had no way to tell anyone where she was or anything. Luckily, Min was able to get a hold of Ingrid who was able to get a hold of Gibran who drove up to the hospital to take care of her and was able to call me to let me know what was going on. We were about ten minutes east of Syracuse when we found out where she was so we rushed straight back to the house to meet them there. Min and Gibran were able to convince the hospital to let her come home for the weekend to recover here.

They gave Min a lot of drugs at the hospital so she wasn’t in so much pain and she barely knew where she was. I went out and got McDonalds for dinner (Min didn’t get to eat all day because she went to the hospital before lunch time) and got her prescriptions filled because she will need more pain killers before the ones that are in her wear off because her back is really bad. She ended up sleeping most of the evening. At least she doesn’t feel her back too much. So that is Valentine’s Day here. Hope that everyone managed to have a good one.

Day Four in Schenectady. Today went well. So far we are really happy with this job. Nothing has seriously gone wrong yet (other than not having internet access the first night.) We had lunch at Anthony’s again and they asked me if I could work with them next Tuesday. So, I will be working over there after work on Tuesday. They paid for our lunches, which were awesome again. Since we are really short of funds right now, getting free meals is pretty valuable. Because we are in a state of heightened terrorism alert and because we are working in a chemical plant, we have to go through more extreme security measures now. The plant is at Code Orange and we have to be sure to log in and out of the plant everytime we come and go. It isn’t too inconvenient but it is noticeable.

I talked to Eric this evening and he has been working on teaching himself PHP programming. I went out to his test web site and took a look at the programs that he has loaded up there. He said that he is enjoying it. We will see, maybe we will have another programmer 🙂

John had never heard “For Me To Poop On” before so we had to download it from here and listen to it in the hotel room. He was laughing pretty hard at that. We also fired up SGL Radio to see how things were going on the server. It is so weird to be in a hotel room and be able to listen to the radio playing off of your desk in your bedroom.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day but we don’t think that we will be able to get back to Ithaca in time to be able to make it to dinner:( I wanted to but because of the weather, I am unable to guarantee that I will be home before 10:00 pm or so and that is awfully late to be going out for dinner. So I am hoping that Dominica will let me wait until Saturday to take her out. I was looking at some of the site this evening and noticed that there was a typo in the Bios section so that no one has ever been able to check out Loopy’s web site. I went to the site and corrected it so you can all go to his site now. I am sure that that will help with the overall hits on Loopy’s site. We will have to see how me being away for most of the month will affect our hits on SGL. John is a semi-regular reader and he is away from his computer all this time so that is hurting us a little bit. But after such an amazing showing last month, it would be nice to see at least 80 hits a day.

There is a new patch out for Trillian today. You can download it for free from www.Trillian.cc. This is a patch for AIM users. Trillian is a free instant messaging client that allows you to IM using AOL’s AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ and IRC all at the same time. Very handy for those of us with friends everywhere. I am on AIM (itsallaboutscott), Yahoo! (scottalanmiller) and MSN ([email protected]). So you should all add me and IM me.

It is beginning to look like the IT spending freeze that has been killing us might be over. Analysts have been saying that IT spending can’t stop forever and companies have been holding onto their IT funds waiting for the economy to pick back up (which it won’t do until the IT spending continues again.) Well, we are starting to see that these companies are starting to spend again. This job is the first clue. Three of us working at good rates for three weeks. How long has it been since that happened. On top of that, we have each been called about multiple jobs this week. John has two interviews this weekend, Loopy has been contacted about three jobs and has an interview on Monday and I have been contacted about three jobs and I have an interview on Saturday! They told us that the Dell work would pick up shortly into the new year and it appears to have done so. Maybe this year won’t be so bad yet. I am not holding my breathe yet, but things are definitely looking a whole lot better.

I did a little work on the web site this evening and I reworked the Bios page to work a little bit better. That page used to be loaded with huge graphics that took forever to download. Now the page is really bare but it loads fast and has working links. Better than what it was before.

The official quote of the week from the PC Tech in Schenectady is “Everybody dance, in the Walmart in my pants.” You will have to ask Loopy about that one.

Day Three in Schenectady. I am very tired again today. We got up a little bit late this morning and had to rush to make it to work on time. But, Kevin, who is supervising us, had a meeting this morning so we managed to get the truck loaded and still have to wait for him so we just went to the company cafeteria and got ourselves some breakfast. Around 10am, we headed over to Rotterdam to work again. Today we heard about a great little Italian place nearby where we could get some lunch. So, we headed over to Anthony’s and had an amazing lunch. We ended up talking to the owners for a long time and I am expected to be doing a little bit of work for them in the next couple of weeks since I am in town already and don’t have a lot else to do.

Work went well today and we managed to get out pretty early. After work we headed home and watched “Who’s Harry Crumb” and then we went out to Friendlys from dinner. We went to bed really early (around 10pm) shortly after that.

Jennifer Middleton emailed me a pic from the Kelley’s Heroes trip to Toronto in November. From left to right it is, Josh, Leanne, Jennifer, me and Jamie. I hope that I am able to buy a scanner soon. Since this job is paying me in about two weeks, I might be able to get one then. I am thinking about getting one of the new tiny HP scanners that is only $50 and is designed to scan 5×7 photos. It isn’t as useful as a larger scanner would be but it is smaller and would fit on my desk better and it is very inexpensive. So I am thinking that that might be the way to go.

Our first full day in Schenectady. Last night the thermostat started shorting out in the room so that really helped make us uncomfortable staying there. But the final straw was the fact that our telephone line was so bad that we were unable to get online but had to pay $1 for the phone calls anyway. So we packed early in the morning and took off for work. We arrived at work on time and started the day by loading the truck with all of the computers that we were going to need during the day. We drove from Nyskayuna where we start in the morning out to Rotterdam Junction around 10am. We spent the rest of the day out there.

The day went really smoothly. We are really enjoying the job here. The people are really friendly and the work is very low stress. We get to hang out with a lot of really nice people. The work isn’t exciting in any way but it isn’t going to last all that long either. For lunch we took off and tried to find some fast food. We ended up driving out to Amsterdam before we were able to find anything at all. So we won’t be trying to do that again.

After work we went out looking for hotels again. We heard that we could get into the Days Inn for the same price that we had at the Econolodge so we headed there. We looked at the rooms and decided to give it a try. Of course, our first room had no working heat so we had to change rooms before we could stay. We had discovered that we were going to be working in the plant for the next couple of weeks and we don’t really have any clothes that we can ruin with us so Loopy and I went out to Walmart to find some cheap clothes. There is a Super Walmart just 2 miles away from the hotel (there is also a Friendlys diagonally across the street and a Stewarts right across the street.) We picked up some cheap jeans and shirts and we even managed to get two pairs of matching Sponge Bob Square Pants pajamas! We also picked up some water and Hawain Punch so that we would have something in our room to drink.

John and I ran out to Prima Pizza again to get another pizza. We just couldn’t resist after last evenings dinner was so delicious. We got a large pizza and headed back to the hotel to share it with Loopy.

Last night, Loopy and I eneded up staying up until 1:30 in the morning talking about file systems. So I am very tired today. I was hoping to get some sleep when we got back from work but between shopping at Walmart and going out for dinner I didn’t get a chance to. The Days Inn does have an phone lines that our allowing us to get online (with AOL at less than 28.8!)