Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Another day with Time Warner Cable / Road Runner and no service. Heaven only knows what is wrong today. We have had so many problems recently that I don’t know what to expect at all with them. We have had everything from shutoffs due to billing mistakes to glitches in the system to just the network going down and a bad local connection. They are terribly incompetent and won’t even let you explain what is wrong over the phone without torturing you with stupid questions so I have pretty much given up on that line altogether. Just play stupid and act busy and they will probably leave you alone.

Hey, everyone go on out to Epitaph and vote a “5” for the song “Lost and Found” by Unlisted Side Effects. U.S.E. is Dominica’s brother Joe’s band from Frankfort and they are currently at the top of the list at Epitaph but we need everyone to vote to keep them up there. They started lower on the list today and have worked their way up throughout the day. Whoo-hoo. Unlisted Side Effects is about to become the newest member of the SGL family as their new website has been pointed to our servers and should be up in the next couple of days. I will post the link when they are up. We will also let you know how you can buy the latest album from U.S.E. that just went on sale two weeks ago.

I am (supposedly) working for the Senate in Binghamton tomorrow. This job has been postponed I don’t know how many times and this is the closest that I have gotten to it without being told that it would be cancelled (well, except for the first time when they had me show up and then told me it had been cancelled after I had waited around for a little while.)

Loopy is on the road to Georgia today. He has a lot of driving to do and he should be back home sometime tomorrow or Friday. It is hard to say. The trip is 12-16 hours each way and he is going to take a nap at the Sun Suites in Cumming, GA before heading back. He was going to borrow a couple books on CD from me to listen to on the way down but I don’t really notice any of them missing so he can’t have more than three hours or so of stuff to listen to with him. That will really suck. I always listen to 8-10 hours of books on just one leg of a trip like that.

Road Runner came back up after not too long and I am able to upload again. Thank goodness. A day without Internet access is agonizing.