January 8, 2003

Eric arrived in Ithaca around 8:30 this morning and we packed up and headed off to DC. We only made it to downtown, though, before we realized that my inspection sticker was expired and that we needed to get the car inspected before we left town. So we went and got the headlight fixed and then got the car inspected. So our early start turned into a late one by the time that we were done.

We managed to get to DC late in the afternoon after rush hour and we worked for an hour or two at the hospital before headed out to Annapolis for the evening. We ordered a pizza and watched the movie Big Trouble. It was short but pretty funny. We started watching the Pink Panther but we just ended up going to bed. Boy are we getting old.

January 7, 2003

I worked late last night on a machine that I want to take to DC with me tomorrow (mostly I want to have it out of the house because the house just fills up with spare computers everywhere if we don’t clear it out on a regular basis. So, I am installing Windows NT 4.0 Workstation for the first time in a very long time. I forget how much of a pain it is to get it installed because Microsoft does a bit to keep it from being able to use there update pages online. In fact, you have to own another machine, practically, to come with a way to get the files that you need because Microsoft blocks these old machines from getting to their files. Luckily, I have all of the resources that I need stored out on our in house network or else this would be a really big chore.

We lost power again this morning. This is four straight days of unreliable power. We are getting pretty tired of it. It isn’t like there is any bad weather or anything going on. They need to be informing us if they are planning on cutting power to us. It is especially annoying that they choose to do it early in the morning so that you can’t go back to sleep because you don’t know if you will have an alarm clock or not by morning.

I am working on getting ready to go down to Washington tomorrow. Eric and I are going down for three days. I need to reinstall Windows XP Pro on my laptop because it has been acting weird. For the longest time I couldn’t get the restore disks from Compaq but I finally have them and I am able to reinstall now which makes me feel a lot better. I am also getting another machine ready to head down to DC. We are hoping to install a new report server before the end of the week and I want to get it down there. So, I have a lot of work to do today and I hope that the power is good to me.

Min, Loop, Nate, Bob and I all ended up going out to dinner together to the State St. Diner this evening and then we all went to the mall afterwards (except for Loopy.) It was kind of an impromtu family outing.

January 6, 2003

The power went out again today. My cell phone woke me up at 6:00 am this morning beeping because the power in the house was going on and off. So, once again, we had to do the drill of running around the house pulling power from all of the computers to make sure that they would be okay when the power came back on again. I drove Dominica into work because my car was left there the other day (Friday) when I drove her home from work. When I got home the power was still off so I did some cleaning and organizing. Then I read some. The power would come back on sporadically throughout the day but never for more than a couple of seconds. Around 10:30 I headed out to do a little shopping at Borders and then I met Dominica at the food court in the mall for lunch. We ate at Wendy’s and then I dropped her off at work and drove down to Elmira to meet Eric who was working at Arnot-Ogden Medical Center down there. He worked at the hospital until around 3:00 and then we went to our regular place in Horseheads, the Original Italian Pizzeria which is really cheap and has really good pizza and we sat and drank coffee for a while and discussed our plans this week (we are scheduled to be heading down to Washington first thing on Wendesday morning. We should be heading back to New York on Friday.

I got back home after being in Elmira around 6:00 pm and apparently the power had come back on in the early afternoon so I was able to check my mail and write the daily. I did some work on my new PC that I just built the other day and I finally have it running approximately how I want it. It dual boots to both BeOS Developers Edition 1.1 (Vimba) and to Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server 2003 RC1 so that I can play with both of them. I am really happy with BeOS. After all these years they still have a lot of good stuff going for them. BeOS is the perfect OS for someone who just wants a really simple machine for checking email and surfing the web. It starts really fast and it is really easy to use and now that they have the most recent version of Mozilla available for it, what more can you ask for? (Ok, ok, I could ask for support for nVidia GeForce 4 graphics cards but that would be too picky.)

Internet.com reported today that the IT Gender gap is widening. This is hard to believe considering how few women I have ever come across working in IT over the years. Loopy and I were hoping to get a big contract for some work in Syracuse over the next few months but that fell through so we are back to looking for other ways of making some scratch. At least it is January and there is money to be had again.

January 5, 2003

The Canadians are leaving today. Loopy is going to the UofR to do some work on a scale that we have that isn’t working anymore. I did some work on the web site today. I removed the random banner from the top of the page because it was increasing load times a bit. Plus, most of the banners didn’t look so good on the page so I decided that it was better to go back to the old banner that matched better and loaded faster. This way your computer can cache the page and not have to reload that image a million times. I hope that this helps, I know the page takes a while for those of you on dial-up to load. In addition, new Ogg Vorbis version of most of the Evil Petting Zoo music has been added to the music download page so that you can check out EPZ in the best compressed format ever (be sure to go and download Zinf to listen to them on and then you can check out our SGL Radio station as well. SGL Radio has been down for the last three days because of the power outages. We had to shut down the computer that was serving it and after continued power problems, I decided to leave it off for a couple of days. We will be back up shortly, maybe even today, and the new link will be posted on here. I also did a lot of work removing the old navigation buttons from the left and replacing them with new CSS powered buttons (CSS is the Cascading Style Sheet that helps to define the way that a web page looks) that load tons faster and have that cool rollover effect. I think that everyone will really appreciate both the increased look of the site and the greatly increased load times. We now only have to load two button images instead of the sixteen that we had been loading before. And, I believe, the two that we have now are slightly smaller than any of the ones that we had before. It also cuts a huge chunk of excess code out of the header of the site that will affect every page as well. This new button strategy is a lot more manageable for me too and will make it so that I can change the look of the buttons and how many there are quickly and easily. Previously, doing this was quite a bit more of a nuisance. I have been teaching myself more CSS because it is a really useful technology for a lot of the things that I do. I think that it is a really good idea and am really glad that people are starting to switch to it. I have also been teaching myself XUL over the last few days and just got a book on it from Borders yesterday.

Everything before December 14 (and you all should have read that stuff because it was there forever) has been moved out to the archives. As you can see, it has been a really busy day here at SGL.

Today is mostly a relaxing day, the house is practically empty today after having been full all week. Only Bob, Min and I are home today. And most of the house telephones are still unplugged from the brown outs the last two days. Min is watching the movie “Pocketful of Miracles” while I am working on the site. There is still a ton of snow here and the trees are all hanging low still. The roads are clear, though, so travel is pretty easy. I am going to be happy if I just get to stay in all day and relax. I was originally going to go to Rochester with Loopy but the car is full and his suspension is bad and doesn’t need the extra weight on it.

Those of you watching the site carefully will also notice that Dec. 14 – Dec. 19 have gotten filled in. So there is plenty to read in addition to today’s update. Sorry that it took so long. Holidays are rough. I am uploading early today so more information on today’s goings on will be on tomorrow’s update. Everyone is back to work tomorrow.

January 4, 2003

The world was a winter wonderland this morning. Almost two feet of snow fell during the night and we are totally blanketed in snow. The trees are heavy laden with all of the accumulation that occurred last night. We still had no power this morning and we spent most of the day in a rapidly cooling house. Luckily, Bob discovered that the fireplace was still working even with the power out and that provided a little bit of heat (but not very much.) The whole house was only about an average of 57 degrees which is pretty cold (for our Canadian friends who aren’t familiar with what is and isn’t cold.)

Speaking of Canadians, they are obviously still here today and staying at least until tomorrow. The whole gang went out for lunch today at Ichabod’s down on South Meadow street and then we took Ryan to the bus station so that he could head back home to New York. Shortly after that, Nate headed off to Perry to get to someplace that has power. The rest of us went to the mall (except for Natalie who took a nap.) We did a little shopping and Natalie called to say that the power had turned back on.

We all came back home and tested out our computers. Luckily there was no damage and everything appears to be working just fine. We aren’t totally sure if the refrigerator has recovered yet or not but nothing else in the house appears to be having any sort of problems. We spent the evening playing a few hours of Quake III (Miranda and Dominica are getting really good at it.) After four player Quake, we moved on to a game of Taboo again.

The Canadians are leaving tomorrow afternoon and heading back to the frozen north (this would be the frozen south.)