Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is the three year anniversary of the Waste Watcher’s first contract. It was Jan. 13, 2000, early in the morning, when Loopy and I got the call from John, who was in Hawaii, telling us that Pittsburgh had decided to use us for their waste tracking solution. We were so excited. Me more than Loopy. He didn’t decide that he was going to work on the project for another month. But today was a big day in Waste Watcher history. It is exciting to see the project last this long. Hopefully, we will have a lot more time to work on it.

I managed to find cheap Internet access in Geneseo that might allow us to move the Waste Watcher system to New York and allow me to do a lot more work from home instead of having to drive to DC to work on the system. Having the system in my home would do a ton to make my life easier. So we are very excited about moving to Geneseo, which is much cheaper than Ithaca, even though none of us were really looking to move back home. Min will even have to live in the town that she went to college in. And I will be living practically within site of my parent’s house. Loopy will be just ten minutes or so from his parents (until they move to some place more interesting.) It will be nice to be back in the Rochester area, though, because we have so many friends back there (not that we don’t have a lot in Ithaca) and we know the area well and things are really cheap (REALLY CHEAP!) Plus, Loopy will be closer to his Miranda (by almost two hours) and Natalie will only be about two hours away.

I got my good computer moved over to its new case which seems to be working a little better than the old one. I think that it is quieter and I think that the processor is a little bit cooler. It is really hard to tell, though. Loopy agrees that it is at least quiet. The new case has two additional fans too!

I am planning on heading to DC tomorrow evening. We have a new KVM switch arriving that I need to get installed. That will allow us to do a bit of expansion there. We are currently limited to four servers running at a time but we already have seven in place and one more planned in the next two months. The KVM switch allows us to use multiple machines on a single keyboard, monitor and mouse. The old KVM only accommodated four devices but the new one will allow us to use sixteen. We don’t plan to use sixteen right away but if we move the operations to New York, we will definitely be expanding to take advantage of those capabilities. For now, however, seven machines in place is enough for me to be dealing with.

Dominica and I drove out to Rochester today to take a drive around some areas that we might be interested in moving to. Min has never seen much of the east side of Rochester so it was necessary for her to get the lay of the land. We did manage to find a number of areas that we might be interested in. Loopy’s grandmother is a realtor so we are going to talk to her to see what is available. We are also very interested in finding an area that has a lot of potential for me to be able to work from home most of the time and maybe even move our servers there. So, I will be doing a lot of looking into options along that line of thinking as well.

While we were in Rochester, I stopped by CompUSA and picked a massive new computer case for my main computer (the one that I am on now.) It is almost the same as Josh’s and it is way bigger than the one that I have had. I have been having problems with my computer overheadting so I am hoping that this new, bigger case with more fans will be able to make a difference. I am also going to add some of Loopy’s expensive silver thermal grease while I am switching everything else to see if that will make any difference. Something has to work to cool this thing down. I am going to move my current case down to the new PIII 866 that I just built and that case will go to a server that has just returned from DC.

We met my parents and my grandmother at Tom Wahl’s in Avon for dinner. Min wasn’t able to eat, though, because she had gotten a migrane and wasn’t feeling very well.

I did some technical work on the site this evening and we have made it as being totally XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS2 compliant. I am very excited because I take code compliance very seriously and neither of these things are all that easy to do. I had to do some minor changes to the site but we were most of the way there already when I started. But, you can now see our certifications listed at the bottom of the page. For those of you who know how I make web pages, you will know how excited I am. Currently, only our main page is validated but I will slowly be working my way through the pages trying to get them up to snuff.

Not much happening today. I am tired from spending the last couple of days in DC so I am spending the day resting. I have spent some time and cataloged my huge collection of computer based training modules that I have had for a couple of years now. I have almost 650 of them that I know work. I have only done about 40 of them myself. But I plan on using more of them in the near future. I have about 100 more that I haven’t figured out how to use yet. I also bought a collection of new CBTs off of eBay that I hope that I will be able to get on Monday.

We were hoping to be able to work and leave DC by noonish but that never happens. We didn’t end up leaving until after 7:00 pm (so we had dinner in town.) At least the A/C came back on in the middle of the afternoon so it wasn’t as unbearable being at the office all day. We ended up having a really productive trip (moreso than usual.) We hit some bad snow on the way back to Ithaca and Eric ended up staying at the Llama house to avoid driving back through the blizzard.

We worked all day in Washington, today. Nothing exciting happened really. So this update is really short. Our A/C system is broken at the hospital so our office has become so hot that it is off of the scale of the thermometer on the thermostat. It is rather uncomfortable. They say it should be fixed soon.