November 15, 2002

I put in a lot of work today trying to get an Internet Radio Station to work in the house. I am using Icecast as the radio server and Ices to make the stream. I finally got it up and running late today and we are just broadcasting around the house to test it out. So far so good, you can listen to Evil Petting Zoo from anywhere in the house at any time! Pretty soon we will have a real working radio station – or so we hope. Loopy and I are planning on doing our own radio show called Geek Week that cover topics from the past week that are important to geeks everywhere.

November 14, 2002

Boy it is a struggle to keep up with SGL. Today was a travel day for me. I drove from Annapolis back to Ithaca first thing this morning and arrived around 4:30. Today is Miranda’s last day among the Americans. She is driving back to North Bay tomorrow.

Little Canadian FlagLoopy and Miranda went out yesterday and bought Simpson’s Road Rage for the Game Cube. Apparently they have been playing it all day. Bob played it once last night and got the second highest score – he missed first place, 10,000, by only one point! The game is very similar to Crazy Taxi, which Loopy used to have for the Dreamcast. Miranda is completely addicted to the game. The graphics are really good. It is too bad that Loopy has taken the projector down already so we are stuck using the Game Cube on the half resolution television.

Loopy, Miranda, Min and I went out to Collegetown Bagels for some “Hippy” dinner. After dinner, we went out to see the newly refurbished Triphammer Liquors. We picked up some gin and mudslide mix and made some drinks when we got home and played some more Road Rage.

I am going to bed early tonight. I am tired after driving all day.

November 13, 2002

Lots of cool software was released today. Opera 7 Beta is in beta finally and can be downloaded. I am downloading my copy now. 7.0 is supposed to be faster and cooler than the older Opera 4-6 series were. Considering how fast Opera has been, even faster will be pretty amazing. I have been waiting to see how good 7 was going to be before buying my own copy of it. Microsoft announced the public beta of Direct X 9 today as well. And TrollTech released QT 3.1. QT is the base software on which the Zaurus and KDE ate based on. So that is good to hear.

In addition to new software rolling out today, Sharp made a major announcement with their new top end PDAs! I have been waiting for these to get released ever since Compaq and Toshiba released faster PDAs a few months ago. Dominica will be really happy that she waited to get a Zaurus. The new ones are expected to be $500-$600 and have microphone and speaker in addition to being twice as fast as the older model. I am pretty excited. I can’t wait to get a new one. Of course, now Dominica will have a cooler one than either Loopy or I. 🙁

No sooner do we link to Tonya’s LiveJournal page then it gets deleted. Figures, only our most avid readers who were on top of things yesterday got to read it.

Our server facility in DC has expanded and we have outgrown our KVM Switch. (A KVM is a keyboard, video, mouse switch used to connect multiple computer to a single set of these devices. It saves a lot of space and money over buying a ton of monitors and stuff and having them all over the place for machines that are rarely sat at.) We currently have a 4 port switch (i.e. it can handle four computers at once) and we have six computers. We were looking at installing an eight port switch but John thought that we should go higher so we are looking at sixteen port switches. That would allow for a lot more expansion.

I am working in the office again today. I plan on coming into the office again tomorrow morning early before I drive back to New York. That probably won’t actually happen but that is what I want to do. John and I were supposed to come into the office at 6am but that didn’t happen today either. We actually made it in closer to noon.

The weather has been beautiful down here. It is will be a shame to go home and to be away from it all. It has been overcast and rainy all week but no snow. It hasn’t been all that cold.

November 12, 2002

Today is the first day that I am writing the updates using the final build of HTML-Kit. It seems to be pretty nice although I haven’t really noticed anything different from the beta versions that I have been using for a long time now.

Little Canadian FlagIn Canadian news, Natalie and Miranda will be flying to Cuba for their holiday! Josh will be jealous because he loves cigars. Miranda is still in town for one more day but I have left and am in DC so I won’t get to see her. It has become our ritual that she comes to visit the day before I drive down to DC and that I return the day after she leaves to go back to the great white north.

We had more issues with getting the truck system working here in DC so I am working on fixing that again today. I am so tired of that system. I can’t begin to explain all of the things that have gone wrong with that over the past year. It has become a real stumbling block for me. Loopy is going to be working on some new software to try to fix some issues with that in the coming weeks. He is happy since he has been out of work for a while and could use the work.

This coming weekend is Kelley’s Heroes annual parade in Toronto. Natalie is working on Saturday night but will be hanging out with us after she manages to get out of work. I haven’t seen Nat since we went up to Toronto which must have been almost nine months ago! Boy time does fly. I could probably look up when we went up there somewhere in the archives here but I am too lazy today.

So the other day I was doing a search on Google looking for some information on how to install Age of Empires 2 on Linux and the search brought up a link to Sheep Guarding Llama’s archives. Not only did it find a link but the link was ranked high enough to be on the bottom of the very first page! Don’t let anyone tell you that we haven’t become a popular site. There must be hundreds of people coming to this site everyday who have no idea what this site is about. I wish that there was a weblog popularity meter somewhere so we could see how popular we were. We must be in the very top couple percents. I was pretty excited when I saw SGL come up. Loopy thought that it was hilarious.

Ok, weird site of the day is Loopy.ca , nothing like a little Canadian Loopy.

I am at the office right now and was about to head out when I realized that it was 5pm and is the beginning of rush hour. I think that I will be waiting for a little while before I decide to get out of here. It is totally not worth the effort of driving out in rush hour. I can stay here and be productive for a long time and get back just a few minutes later than I would have been otherwise. So maybe I will get something done here. That is better than nothing. I was hoping to be able to meet John for dinner but that might not happen. We did manage to have lunch together before coming in this morning after he had some meetings up in Baltimore.

I am trying to get a new web / application server installed down here but I am having an awful time of getting Windows NT to recognize the network card and the version of Windows NT that I am using will not install without finding the card. How annoying is that? So I am trying to figure out how I am going to get this to work. Not likely, is my guess, but we will see.

I did some serious cleaning out of my email accounts today. It is unbelievable how much stuff piles up in there when you don’t think about it. I must get and send 200 – 300 messages a day and all of those messages build up whether in my sent mail or trash folders. I went through and cleaned out all kinds of stuff. I need to get my total messages down enough so that I can check my messages on my Zaurus. It doesn’t currently have enough memory to be able to check my messages because I have so many of them that just the titles of the messages fill up all of the memory! That is a lot of messages. I need to get more memory for the Zaurus.

While working on the new server that I am trying to get setup, I had to track down a floppy disk to use in order to get some of the drivers that I needed to the new server. You have no idea how hard it is to track down a floppy disk these days. Nobody has one anywhere. They are so obsolete and yet you still need them for the silliest things. I think that it is time that everyone realized that floopy disks are no longer in use and just move on with life. Many computers (especially business machines and laptops) don’t even have floppy drives anymore. Luckily the laptop that I am working on now does or I would have been up a creek.

Apparently I am writing a ton for today’s update to make up for not having been keeping up to date for the last week. This week I am spending most of my time working alone instead of with Eric all week and that makes it a lot easier to write updates. I have my laptop on my desk all day long and I just jot things down whenever I think of them.

John Stephens went to finish that rack server install for Dell that I had gone to do two weeks ago but couldn’t finish because the wrong parts had been sent – but when he got there he discovered that the job had already been completed. Isn’t that typical. It actually worked out kind of well for him since he wouldn’t have had more work to do than his minimum hours would have provided for anywhere so it was kind of convenient that he got to just drive up to Ithaca and get paid for the drive.

Well, the floppy that I came up with did the trick and I am moving along with the server install now. It makes me happy to be productive. Of course, John called just a little bit ago to tell me that there is no phone service at the house for some reason so I am imagining that we are unable to get online using dial-up or ADSL. That will really suck if that is the case.

I found another interesting person with a weblog that everyone should check out. Her name is Tonya and she is from the Houston area. You can see her weblog at LiveJournal . She hasn’t been weblogging for very long but then again, who has. SGL is a really old blog. (This blog was removed at some point after this post. I checked it when updating the site information in June, 2006 and it was deleted.)

Ok, well it is getting pretty late here in the office and I want to get home (or at least away from here.) So I am going to start shutting down and getting going. I am going to upload to the site now before I leave because if I wait then I may not be able to upload from the house.

November 11, 2002

Boy have I gotten behind on updates! I am sorry, since I have been out of town it has been really hard to get any updates completed and loaded onto the site. I am trying hard to keep up with the news this week while I am in DC.

HTML-Kit has finally moved past its Alpha and Beta stages and is in final release. It has taken years but we are finally there. My copy of the final release is downloading in the background while I am working on the site.

I am in DC today. I drove down this afternoon and am working at the hospital during the night (which is when I usually work since it allows me to get the most work done in a timely fashion.) The drive was nice and it gave me a chance to listen to “L is for Lawless” which is the 12th book in Sue Grafton’s Alphabet Murders. I love those books. I have listened to 36 hours of them in the car now. Most of that has been on trips to and from Washington. I also picked up and have started listening to “Lake Wobegon, Summer 1956” by Garrison Keiler. That is six hours long and isn’t incredibly gripping so I listened to the Sue Grafton novel in the middle of it.