Sheep Guarding Llama

Eric and I worked at the hospital center today. Not a whole lot of excitement going on. We dealt with some basic issues and got a little bit of new stuff up and running that had not been being used in the past at that site. Mostly it was just a work day. After work we got home around 8:00 pm and had some pizza and then worked with John on some business issues from 9:00 pm until about 2:00 am. After that we played some Hydro Thunder on the Playstation (yes, an original) and headed off to bed at about 4:00 am.

Last night while I was sleeping, there was some extremely loud pounding on the outside wall of my bedroom. I woke up and realized that it was the middle of the night and I thought that someone was trying to break into the house. So I got up to investigate. I found two young racoons on the front porch eating the cat’s food and fighting. It was really funny to see. It isn’t often that you get to see any wild animals up this close and personal. So I sat down on the front mat just inside the door and watched them out through the glass windows that were right at their level. They were so cute. They would through the dry cat good all over the place and then pick it up with their paws and eat it. They weren’t scared of me at all. I even put my finger up to a window to see what they would do and one of them actually walked over and put its nose up to the glass as if to sniff my finger. I don’t think they had the slightest bit of apprehension about me sitting there. I decided that it was best to not go outside and try to scare them aware and kept a very frightened Nila by my side to make sure that she didn’t venture outside while they were there.

The Canadian contingency have emailed me a picture to put up for everyone just so that we wouldn’t forget that we had Canadians in the audience.

Min and I tried a new church this morning. We are looking for a church to go to somewhere around Ithaca. No luck yet, though. The place we went today was nice but not quite what we are looking for. To many churches in town cater to the college transient crowd and we are part of that crowd so we don’t fit in very well.

This evening, Eric and I are heading back to DC. We are leaving at 6pm and should be arriving close to midnight. We are returning on Wednesday night so that we can get up in the morning and make it to all of the Thanksgiving festivities (Reminder – Tahou’s is still on for everyone who knows what I am talking about. Don’t forget.)

For anyone who wants to get ready to listen to the radio station when I finally get it up and running, you should download the really cool Ogg Vorbis player for Windows called Zinf. You can get it for free by downloading it from Zinf.org. It is a really cool program. It used to be called FreeAMP but they got sued by Nullsoft and had to change their name. The software isn’t perfect but it is pretty good. I suggest trying it out.

Today was a nice relaxing day. I did some more work on the radio station and it is working much better now, however, there is some problem that it stops playing and I need to work on that. But the sound is much better than it was before. One thing at a time, I guess.

Loopy, Min and I finally sat down and watched the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time. It is pretty long but not nearly as long as everyone claims it to be. This extended version is different than many extended versions in that it really doesn’t have many extra scenes but many scenes are just a little bit longer. I think that overall it has better development but the beginning is a bit overdone with too much back story from The Hobbit. But overall I think that the additional material was excellent and it was integrated into the film really well. It was practically impossible to see where new material had been thrown in.

Eric and Dad came down to Ithaca to work on Waste Watcher today and my mom came along to visit. Min came home for lunch and we all headed out to the Nines to get some really good pizza. Eric and Dad were really impressed with how good our pizza is here. We managed to get a lot done today, we were really productive.

Dominica is working on Unlisted Side Effects’ web site but hasn’t gotten very far yet. She takes after Loopy and is super resistant to doing anything that you think is a good idea for her to do. Passive resistance she would say. I mention it here to try to motivate her. We’ve managed to get the first page of the site up already. The can see it at UnlistedSideEffects.com. (Unother unfortunate website gone by the time this page was updated in June, 2006.)

Late tonight, while Loopy and I were watching Dumb and Dumber, I finally got the radio station able to both re-encode music at a constant stream rate (so that the quality is roughly always the same – instead of jumping all over the place like it was before) and able to stream Ogg Vorbis files as well as MP3’s. Vorbis is a format that allows for higher quality sound at a lower bitrate than MP3 and it is totally free and legal to use. So we definitely want to use that as our prefferred radio format. Hopefully we will be able to get ourselves listed on IceCast’s server list. Right now, most of the stuff we have was MP3 encoded a long time ago and we when it gets modified to work with the re-encoder, the music gets sped WAY up and sounds really weird. It is pretty weird that it does that. That should be fixed soon, though. I should have the jumping volume fixed tomorrow as well.

Today I am working in Binghamton for US Senator Schumer’s office. Nothing exciting, just bland tech work but the pay is good and the environment is extremely casual. I had a pretty good time working there. The Federal Building in Binghamton is right next door to the Lost Dog Cafe so I went there to get some lunch. It was really good.

The day would have been a lot less stressful if so many problems weren’t erupting all over the place with our Waste Watcher system. I ended up having a really busy day dealing with that.