Sheep Guarding Llama

Cleaning and organizing have been the main topics yesterday and today. I took all three of the computers in my room down and moved them around. That was quite the undertaking. Now I am trying to get the last bits of things in the room put away so that all of the desk space is clear. I love clear desktops. I can’t even begin to tell you how happy it makes me. And how much more productive! I am getting so much more work done. Dominica is too. She really likes being able to make a mess in her own space and not have me get on her case about it.

Loopy and I both worked contract jobs today and they were entertaining, as usual, out of shear incompetance. First, Loopy’s job was in Rochester. They called him to ask him to work late last night and didn’t feel like sending him the job info until this morning. That would have been fine but they are in Austin, TX in a different time zone and took neither that nor Loopy’s travel time into account and barely managed to get the info to him before he had to leave. Then, it turns out that they had him go up a day early so the site wasn’t ready for him. They didn’t have anyone there to meet him at all and someone had to come in specifically for it. Then it turned out that the site didn’t have the expected network connection or cables and was unable to provide Loopy with anything to do expect take computers out of boxes and set them on the desk. Which he did. And that took three hours because the job was at the airport and scanning in and out took forever. Then my job at Senator Schumer’s office in Binghamton was equally exciting. First, none of the docs matched what I was doing. Second, the entire install was scheduled to take only two hours. But, I needed one single password to be able to finish the installation. I finish in one hour. But had to sit there waiting for someone in Wahington to get me the password – which they never did. I got paid four hours for a one hour job and didn’t even get to finish. Oh well, it wasn’t my money (but it is now.) This is pretty typical for these kinds of jobs.

Monday again. My project today is to completely rearrange the room. We have finally decided that it doesn’t work having Min’s computer on the main desk because she has a tendency to make a mess and even though it isn’t my mess it keeps me from being able to work and causes stress. So, as much as I love my closet office, she is moving her computer into the closet and I am getting the main desk all to myself. Now I have the ability to work at two computers and set up a laptop all within access from a single chair. That makes life a lot easier. It also makes the room a lot quieter since the room is colder than the closet and I no longer have to run my computer with the case open and a fan blowing into it. On top of that the computer is in a much more quiet location now and everything is just so much more peaceful. It will take a few days to get everything sorted out but already the room is really taking a turn for the better. So much junk is being thrown away or stored in a more logical way. It is really doing me a lot of good to have the room so neat. Now I just have to get some office supplies from OfficeMax to really do something with this room. I need some of those InBox / OutBox things to get totally organized. But I am getting there.

It hasn’t really been a very eventful week. Today Eric came over and we worked on his new laptop all day long and didn’t get very far. It is quite the undertaking to get this thing working. It is a total POS Sony Vaio (don’t ever buy a Sony) and it is totally worthless.

Another snowy day in Ithaca. I actually got ahold of Salisa, my friend from Singapore, who is getting married on December 22. I haven’t gotten to speak to her in a few months now – she has been all busy with the wedding plans and her new job at Hewlett-Packard and Compaq.

Eric is coming over tomorrow to do some work here. He has a new laptop that we need to get Windows 2000 and SuSE Linux installed on. He has been waiting for so long to get this laptop that he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He is also getting one of our old Celeron 333 machines that will have Linux on it.

Lots of snow today. Loopy and I worked down at the Lifestyle Properties office this morning. Min didn’t manage to come home for lunch because Loopy and I were so hungry that we ate early and the snow was really bad so she just stayed at work.

I did moved some of the site to the archives pages. Look for any back info there.

Don’t forget, the SGL New Year’s Bash at the SGL House is still on for this year. Same as the last two years. New Year’s Eve, arrived around 7:30. Plan to pass out. Breakfast in the morning. We will be dressing the same as usual – suits and dresses.

Lots of people have been checking out the radio station. We are really excited to have it working. Loopy and I hope to have some cool content for it in the near future. Right now, we are still playing random crap while we test it out and make sure that everything is working.

The roads are really bad today and it took Min half an hour to make it home from where she works over on Triphammer. She sent Loopy and I out to pick up two more DVDs of “Are You Being Served?” – she is totally addicted to them now. We watched one of the disks tonight and have another for tomorrow. I have a total of 514 movies now that I am aware of in the collection. Boy is that a lot of movies. I am sure that there are a few that are still not into the list yet.

Well, the radio station has been up and running for a week of testing now so we are going to announce how to listen here on the site so that you can all log into our SGL radio and take a listen. First of all, you need a streaming radio application like Zinf (Zinf Is Not Freeamp), Sonique, XMMS or Winamp (2.x, version 3 is buggy and does not work yet.) We at SGL recommend the use of Zinf because it is totally free, has good support, has lots of neat skins, works on Windows and Linux and supports streaming song titles which is a really handy feature. So, head on over to www.Zinf.org and download yourself a copy (maybe pick up some cool skins while you are there too.) After you get Zinf installed, you will have to open the radio stream. Go to Files and enter http://24.59.101.50:8000 into the line designated for URL’s. Then Zinf should start buffering and will begin playing shortly.

Currently, SGL Radio is playing about 38 songs in a random rotation. A few of these songs are from Evil Petting Zoo (epz), the rest of the music is from a mix of different artists who have made their music available for redistribution on Ogg Vorbis.

Technical Info for Radio Station: SGL Radio is currently playing from 38 Ogg Vorbis music files being read and randomized through ICES and fed into the IceCast Internet Radio server located at the Llama house and sitting behind a SmoothWall Linux firewall before going onto the Road Runner network and being made available to you. The host machine is a Pentium III 600 with 512MB of PC-133 memory. ICES is compiled with Vorbis and LAME support allowing us to re-encode the Ogg Vorbis files on the fly to 32kbs allowing for adequate sound quality over the Internet. Our streams are low enough bandwidth that they can be heard over most dial-up connections. Our filewall is a Pentium 200MMX.