Sheep Guarding Llama

I did a little work on the site last night so there are some more pages that are now validated and looking a little smoother. I can’t wait until the new server is in and we can have all of this stuff totally automated. That will make my life so much easier!

So yesterday I decided that I was finally going to hook up the HP Deskjet 722 printer that I have had for years and years and have never used. Two weeks ago I went out and bought some ink for it. Today I set it up and then I realized that I had to idea where I have a printer cable or the power supply for it. So now it is sitting on my desk staring at me mockingly.

I spent some time shopping around on Amazon last night (after the whole Borders affair…) and am beginning to realize that I own SO many books that it is actually hard to find things that I really want that I don’t already have. There is a lot of stuff that I don’t have, but most of the stuff that I should own, I already do. Which is good – but I like to buy books. Amazon’s DVD suggestion system insists that I need to buy Amelie. I will probably buy it soon. Everyone says that it is really, really good. As Time Goes By Series 5 is out next week and Red Dwarf releases later this month (on my birthday – hint hint.) And don’t forget that My Big Fat Greek Wedding is out a week from today too! Lots of awesome stuff. February is a great month for DVDs.

Dominica was very excited when she discovered that she was the Llama of the Month. She has the site set as her default web page on her web browser at work. Min came home for lunch today but made me drive her back because she thought that the roads would be bad later. Loopy had to run some errands this afternoon so he went out and picked her up from work. Miranda managed to call moments after he drove away. Timing is everything.

The wind is ridiculous here today. It is so loud that it is hard to get anything done. It isn’t too cold though. At least the temps are warmer than they have been. The blinds have been blowing wildly around my room all day. It was hard to sleep last night, I kept waking up from all of the noise.

I am still working hard on getting the new web server ready to go to DC. I have learned tons about Apache2 and PHP and today I am learning how to update and install OpenSSL so that we can run encryption on the web server. I am learning new tasks on the new machine one at a time. The new server should be able to compress HTML files on the fly which will help to speed up downloads, especially for those who are looking at the pages over dial-up. Compressing the files so that they are smaller will really help with pages like SGL that are just loaded with text.

Min spent the evening playing Kingdom Hearts and I spent most of the night playing Dark Age of Camelot and getting SSL installed on my new server (SSL is up and working now. I am learning lots.) I also spent a lot of time surfing and looking at new technologies. Nate came home early from school because he wasn’t feeling well and spent most of the evening sleeping. Bob and Zach played racketball and Loopy continued to work on his game which is really coming along well. He has gotten tons done on it and it should be playable very soon.

THE FEBRUARY LLAMA OF THE MONTH IS DOMINICA TOCCO!!

Min wins our ninth LotM competition because she has done so much to stear new Ithacans to IthacaPortal.com which has managed to garner 65 web page requests a day – which still isn’t a lot but it is a start. The site is really starting to mature and with the new server going online very, very soon there will be many new enhancements coming down the line in the near future – much like there will be for SGL.

The work week starts again. Well, it is another month and time to look at the web site statistics for all of our web sites (Niagara Telecom and Ithaca Portal have twenty managed web sites that we host.) The statistics for SGL show huge growth for the month of January – even with the dailies being posted so late for much of the month, we managed to grow from an average of 65 pages served per day to 75 pages served per day! That is a 15% increase in just one month. We are also serving out, on average, an additional .7 MB more each day. Total, SGL uploads close to .2 GB every month. That is a lot of Scott Ramblings!

I attempted to return that movie to Borders this evening. That was an adventure. I started by going to the check out counter but no one was there. So I went to the Service desk and the guy that was there just left without so much as looking at me or acknowledging my existance in any way. Then I went and got into the other line at the service desk and when the person got done showing someone around the store she informed me that I had to take the movie to the counter to get it returned. So she sent me to the other counter (the one by the entrance that was closing instead of the one that was staying open – silly me) and the person working there informed me that I could only exchange the movie for a copy of the same movie – which of course the store didn’t have and in fact had -1 one of (of course – the person BEFORE me had bought the last copy.) Then he told me that only the service desk could order the replacement. So I returned to service where they gave me a hard time about coming back and why didn’t the front desk take care of it and then finally decided to order me the movie. Now, I have to take the one that doesn’t work home and hang on to it for 2 – 6 weeks until the other one comes in and I can go and exchange it. All of this is, of course, illegal since they sold me a defective piece of merchandise and refused to do anything about it. This is the second time that I have had a really bad customer service issue at Borders. You would think that I would have learned my lesson from the last time that I went to the one in Eastgate in Victor but no, I kept going back. I guess I will definitely not be buying DVDs there anymore, though. I don’t get a discount on them so they are super expensive and if they are defective – I’m just screwed. Amazon would have been able to get me the original disc in a day for the same price I got it at Borders or less and I could have returned it and gotten my money back the same day. Not six weeks later. Lesson learned. If I get burned by Borders a third time, we will know who the idiot is. All because I am lazy and want a movie the same day and don’t want to have to wait for it to ship to me.

Dominica is still playing Kingdom Hearts. She has put in about eight hours on that game. She rushed home from work to be able to play it. She says that on average it takes 40-50 hours of playing to be able to complete the game. She should have it done in a week or two. We are talking about getting some excercise equipment (who us – we don’t need that) and setting up a TV and some video games so that we can play and excercise at the same time. Loopy has a Game Cube and a few games and we have a Playstation and a Nintendo 64. We might have to come up with something else to make it really interesting (no, don’t even talk to me about the XBox!) We might buy a new monitor for my main computer and move my 20″ monitor to the excercise room to use instead of a television and then be able to play computer games on it (which are generally much more exciting anyway.)

Happy Anniversary to Arti and Danielle Ralston! This is nine years!

Min and I slept in this morning till after 10:00am. I have been doing a ton of reading the last three days and have finished two books and am half way through a third. I am teaching myself everything there is to know about making dynamic web pages using Apache2, PHP and MySQL. It is all very exciting. I also did some work on a computer for Bob, fixed Josh’s computer and have been continuing to play Dark Age of Camelot. DAoC is getting to be more exciting. I have learned most of the important parts of the interface and am now able to do things easily enough that it is starting to be enjoyable to play. It takes a bit to be able to find all of the different settings and commands that you need in the game and it doesn’t have built in support for Anti-Aliasing so you have to force that on manually. Once I did that, the game REALLY looked good. I think that I have just enough processing power between the CPU and the graphics card that I am able to have the AA cranked up and have the game still run ok. I am on level 6, now, which is about the point when you are supposed to be able to really start doing things in the game. So, I will keep you all posted. I still have to send away for the free hint book and atlas that come with the game. It should be a bit easier once I have some materieal to look things up in. For now, I keep exploring and ending up going places where I really shouldn’t have been going and getting my but kicked before I even knew what was going on. But I am learning.

Most of the day I just worked on learning more about PHP. It was a lazy day and I needed it. Min hooked up the PS2 that she borrowed from Phil and Kate and has been playing Kingdom Hearts (Final Fantasy with Disney characters in it.) She played it for four hours this evening. Loopy and I watched the second French and Saunders DVD. But, the DVD is bad and we were only able to watch half of it. Luckily, it wasn’t very good and I have the receipt so I am going to take it back and get something a bit more interesting. After that disc died, Loopy and I watched the bonus material on the Goldmember disc. There was a lot of stuff on there but all it really showed was that the people making the movie were as stupid as the movie made them appear that they must be. The entire cast was completely unable to do intelligent interviews at all. Everyone raved about the dumbest parts of the movie – just going on and on about it. It is no wonder that this was the worst of the three movies if these were the people working on it. They really shouldn’t have done the extra footage – it just made them all look worse than they already did.

I went to write the update today and I noticed that we had half of December still kicking around on the main page here and it had already been in the archives as well. So I got rid of that so the page takes a little less time to load now. Somebody should have told me, I meant to do that a long time ago. I moved early January while I was at it to clean things up a little. Boy do we have a ton of stuff in the archives. It must take people hours who are reading through that stuff.

Nate called this morning and woke me up with the news that the NASA Space Shuttle Columbia burned up on re-entry over Dallas, Texas. I was five when the Columbia first went into service in 1981 and I remember getting up really early before kindergarten to watch the first shuttle lunch on the news. It was very special to me as a small child. That was the beginning of the new era for the US in Space. Prior to the shuttles, we had done very little since the Apollo missions and space exploration had not been very exciting since the moon missions of the late 1960’s. The Columbia has always been something special to me – and now it and its crew are gone.

Josh and Joanna are still here this morning. We watched the news for about an hour this morning before showering and heading out to Stella’s for some brunch. We had a good time at Stella’s, the food is always incredible, but Josh wasn’t feeling very well so we ended up coming back to the house instead of going out wine tasting. Josh took a nap for a couple of hours and then he and Joanna headed back to Rochester. At least we think that we managed to get Josh’s computer fixed before he left. Hopefully he will be able to use it now for the games that he bought it for.

I spent most of the evening working on teaching myself PHP and MySQL. I have been learning quite a bit and my Multimedia DataBase (i.e. movie and CD listings) is coming along really well and I hope to have it fully online very soon. It is online right now but it is still in the test stages so I am not releasing the address for it yet. Maybe in a week or so, I will have it done enough for you to check out. I am very proud of the work that I have been doing, I have been learning tons about making web based applications.

Loopy is still out of work but is hopefully about a position in Rochester. He has been putting in tons of work on a couple of video game projects. He has gotten an amazing amount of work done (since he rarely has to leave the house) and has been learning tons and tons about how to program video games. His main project right now is making a Metroid clone for the Game Boy Advance. He has already written a game for the Game Boy Color.

Opera has finally released version 7 for Windows so everyone should go to our links page and download it. I noticed that they even have a sale going on right now so that you can get Opera at half price which makes it pretty cheap. Not bad – especially for those of you who are still using dial-up. Opera will really speed up a dial-up connection.

Ok, enough of shameless plugs. SGL Radio is running again after a few weeks of silence. We had those terrible power outages right after the first of the year and we never restarted the station since then for fear of having to constantly restart it over and over again. My main machine has a new battery backup system on it that will help quite a bit and the power seems to have improved overall. The station can be heard by clicking the station button on the left. If that doesn’t work, open up a copy of Zinf, Winamp, Sonique or other Ogg Vorbis streaming radio player and tune into http://24.59.101.50:8000/ – we are live and rockin’. I will try to keep the button at left updated with the correct address in case it changes. There still isn’t much good on the station but it would be cool if people started tuning in and letting me know how it was working. I have heard rumors that a new version of Icecast (the radio software that we use) is in the works and may be coming in the near future.

Bob has been home sick from work all week. I am not even sure that his car has left the driveway yet this week. Josh and Joanna are coming up to visit this evening so I need to do a little cleaning – this place is a bit of a mess. Lots of boxes and I think that a sweater exploded in here. They are just staying until tomorrow. Josh’s computer isn’t working so well so we are going to have a look at it and see what we can do.

I had a bunch of CDs sitting around my room so I decided that I had better get the ones that aren’t converted to Ogg Vorbis already converted and then to get them all down to the basement with the rest of the CDs. The latest update of my CD database says that there are 924 CDs in the collection. That is a bit more than I thought that there were. Boy that is a lot of music. And last time that I did a search, I found some 30 CDs that I didn’t even know that I had. So there are bound to be a couple surprises in there still as well. I am hoping to have my online movie database up soon so that I can really keep track of those. They are really hard to keep track of because I also track their usage and they get used a lot.

Josh and Joanna arrived around 6:30 and we all went out for an awesome dinner at Turback’s just south of Ithaca. We had a really great time there. That is a wonderful restaurant and I think that everyone should get out and try it. After dinner we went out to Madelleine’s on the Commons for dessert, coffee and drinks. We got back around midnight and Josh and I worked on his computer (that has been crashing for a while) until 3:30am. But we think that we got it fixed finally so that is good. Maybe now he can play games on it again.