Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was super busy. Eric and I jumped out of bed way too early in the morning and headed out to drive around looking for the parts that we needed to get the work done that we have come down to do. There is a lot of stuff that we need and it isn’t easy to find. We started by driving up to Baltimore and picking up things like CAT5 ethernet cabling, ethernet construction tools and similar items. It took us a long time to track down the basic things that we needed. We started around 8am and we ended up going to the Double T Diner for lunch around 11am. After lunch, we headed back to the house to get some things from John and them we headed into the city. So it was close to 12:30 by the time we got to the hospital. At that point we reassessed the parts and tools that we were going to need and started mapping out our project for later.

What we are working on is connecting our Washington Hospital Center Operations and IT Office with our processing center here which requires a total of four cables to be run from our office, through the hospital walls and into the processing area. It isn’t very complicated but the actuallity of it can be a little daunting.

After looking carefully at the tools that we had and having Phil point out that we had way too little cable (according to measurements taken by hospital engineering), Eric and I decided to head out to Alexandria, Va to get some more cable and some tools that could not be located in the office. The drive out to Virginia (since rush hour was rapidly approaching) took a total of two hours. Luckily we were able to find almost everything that we needed at the CompUSA in Alexandria. We were able to run across the street to Sears and get the last tool necessary. We ate dinner at Ruby Tuesdays (on the company card, of course) and then faced traffic again and drove back to the hospital. By this time it was late – probably around 7:30 or 8:00 pm. Now the real work begins. Eric and I spent the rest of the night running the cabling from one room to the other and making a huge mess in the process. It took 4-5 hours but we eventually got the cables run into the other room, equipment moved in the main office and cables run through its ceiling. By the end of the night, all of the cables for networking were in place and working properly and the office was a lot easier to move around in with all of the wires that had previously been strewn across the floor now running through the ceiling.

By the time that we managed to get back out to the house in Annapolis, we were both totally exhausted.

Today begins Eric and my long week in DC/Maryland. I spent the morning cleaning and packing while Eric ran to Rochester and worked early in the morning. He arrived in Ithaca around 1pm so that we could car pool to DC. Min wasn’t feeling well when she came home for lunch so she took the afternoon off of work. She convinced Eric and Bob to hang around so that we could all play a round of AoE2. We gave it a go, twice, but both times one of the computers crashed out. We have had really good luck, so far, with Age of Empires 2 being really stable but today it just wasn’t meant to be played. Min and I were doing really well too. We really had Eric and Bob on the run during the second game. Hopefully these problems won’t continue. It isn’t fun to put an hour of preperation into a game like that and just before it gets exciting have it crash and die on you.

This was the first time that Min and I tried using our Microsoft Sidewinder GameVoices. They worked really well in the game and they really give you an advantage since you can share information and strategy so quickly without interfering with other parts of the game. It is a lot of fun to play that way too. I can’t wait to try using the GameVoice over the Internet. That will be really cool.

Eric and I arrived in DC pretty late in the evening, about 10pm and headed straight on in to the hospital center. We worked until midnight or so and then headed on out to the house in Annapolis to get some sleep before starting our busy day tomorrow. John and Michelle were up drinking when we got there and we ended up drinking with them until after 4 in the morning.

Tomorrow, Eric and I are heading down to Maryland. We are going to be spending the entire week there working out of the DC office. It is going to be a really busy week for us.

Dominica and I headed on out to go to church with my parents and then I went and practiced marching with Kelley’s Heroes. Leanne (whom I haven’t seen in two years and was last month’s Llama of the Month) was marching and so we got to visit and catch up. Leanne stopped by at my parent’s house after practice and got to finally meet Min. Then we headed on down to my grandmother’s and then out to dinner in Perry. After dinner, Min and I stopped by at Scott and Leanne’s new house in Perry and got the grand tour. The house is a really nice 1890’s Victorian right in town. They have a lot of space there.

Miranda arrived late this afternoon. She will be staying all week. She and Loopy are planning on watching the first four seasons of As Time Goes By on the projector while she and the projector are still here. Loopy had to cancel his upcoming trip to Hawaii because of the current financial situation. That is really sad.

Dominica and I are planning on giving each other a trip to Las Vegas for Christmas this year. We are thinking about going in January.

Laundry day. Min and I have a lot of laundry that needs to be done. And we have a lot of video games that need to be played. So those tasks will take up most of the day. Min started off the day playing AoM (Age of Mythology, see the write up from yesterday) but she quickly decided that it wasn’t fun enough to really keep her interest so she switched back to Age of Empires 2 which has been consistently fun for an entire year (now that AoE3 is out, everyone better run out and snatch up a used copy of AoE2 so we can all play in one big huge LAN hosted showdown!) Bob has been playing AoE2 a bit now and is starting to get a lot better.

I finally got around to installing Min and my Microsoft Sidewinder Game Voices on our computers. These are the really cool headsets with base untis that allow you to talk to other gamers in the middle of a game. It is a really neat idea. The base unit lets you select who you want to talk to (players 1-4, everyone or just your team) which is really handy because the game doesn’t handle that ability. It is especially neat because you can use it in Internet games as well (and it saves on telephone costs.) We tried it in AoE2 and it seemed to work pretty well. The sound quality isn’t the best but it sure beats having nothing at all. And you can understand what is being said, it is just very crackily.

Miranda is due to arrive in New York tomorrow afternoon. She is staying for an indefinite amount of time. Maybe a week, maybe a month. No one really knows.

Today is the official release date of Microsoft’s long awaited sequal to Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings, Age of Mythology. So, for lunch today Domincia and I went out to the mall and stopped by Electronics Boutique to see about picking up the new game. They had a large pile of them sitting on the floor so we gave it a try. The graphics in the new game are pretty amazing, especially the water scenes. It is done in the same style as Empire Earth but without the changing camera zooms like EE had. Overall, though, the game just doesn’t live up to its predecessor. AoE2 was just too good of a game and we all agree that they should have focused on bringing out a really good expansion pack to AoE2 rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. EE had already covered a lot of this ground and basically they have managed to make easy and hard versions of very similar games. Overall, I think I prefer to play EE over AoM even though AoM definitely has better graphics and sound (however, it is newer and EE has a new expansion pack out that I have not had a chance to see yet.) AoM is easier to play than AoE2 from a total game complexity stand point which is the opposite of what I had been hoping for. Instead of making the next big thing for hardcore AoE and AoE2 players, they simply managed to make a good beginners RTS. Definitely not what we were looking for. And all of the mythology stuff is just really silly and not impressive at all. At least to those of us who have tried it, the mythology just doesn’t work that well in game play. It is such a hard to understand and silly thing that it isn’t really all that much fun.

In addition to playing AoM today, I also downloaded the demo disk from Gentoo of Unreal Tournament 2003. The demo disk is really neat because it boots off of a CD just like a console (or older computer a la Commodore 64, Amiga 1000, etc.) so you don’t have to worry about whether or not your software is compatabile, just your hardware. Anyway, the game came right up and it looks totally amazing. This has to be the best 3D graphics that I have ever seen in a game. You could see individual blades of grass. This game is going to be really popular.

After playing a number of games this evening, Dominica and I sat down and watched Paint Your Wagon. What a great movie. My parents were huge fans of the musical and I grew up with the music from it always playing so the movie is very reminiscent for me. I have only seen the movie a couple of times but I know the music really well. Especially because I used a couple of the songs for audition pieces back in my college days.