Sheep Guarding Llama

John Stephens came up again today and bought one of my computers off of me. The black IBM Intellistation that Bob had been thinking of buying a while back. That computer has been here for so long that I am constantly forgetting that it even exists. Well, if finally is gone. And John’s friend Tom is eyeballing the HP Vectra 2-Way that has been sitting idle for some time now as well. It would be nice to not have to deal with trying to get rid of it on eBay. I have one last computer then – Gordon – that needs to go. Gordon has been our house server for a long time now but his time to go has come. He has been a faithful machine but he is just too large and redundant. And redundancy means more power consumption than necessary. So, no more Gordon then. He should be gone soon. John’s friend Paul might be interested in him.

Dominica finished watching the last of season two of As Time Goes By and she made me run out and buy the third season. She watched quite a bit of that as well this evening. She is really addicted to that show. It has been my favorite for a very long time now. I am so glad that I finally own it on DVD. It is so nice to be able to watch it whenever I feel like. They don’t have it on television in this area so I have been missing it for a long time now.

I bought an Ogg Vorbis player for my Sharp Zaurus today. It was only $10. This will allow me to use the Zaurus as a jukebox like one of those MP3 players that they sell everywhere now only because of the power of the unit and the quality of the file type, I can get four times as much music on it as the best of those MP3 players and it will sound quite a bit better – and be easy to use with all of the files that I already have on my computer. The Kompany (where I bought it from) also has a free Ogg Vorbis radio station tuner that will allow me to use the Zaurus as a walkman – able to listen to Internet radio stations. I am very excited to try that out but I won’t be able to look at it until after I return on Monday from my little vacation.

Well, Loopy, Bob and Dominica decided to try ganging up on me last night and they finally managed to beat me. They learned a lot about working together.

Congratulations to John Stephens who passed the CompTIA A+, his first industry certification exam. John came up here to Ithaca this afternoon for dinner and so that we could all look over a job prospect that we had in Vermont. It is too bad that Vermont is so far away and not a very nice place or we might have done it. But, as it is, it takes a lot of money to make doing anything in Vermont worthwhile.

Dominica is totally addicted to As Time Goes By now. We have watched all but the last hour of the first two seasons.

Happy Columbus Day to all of our US readers and Happy Thankgiving to all of our Canadian ones!

Well, we are back online today. I have approximately 200 emails stored up that I have to go through today. What a pain. Almost all of it is SPAM! It is such a relief to be online again. You have no idea how disconnected we all feel when we have no access for so long. No email, no news. It is awful. We don’t know what to do. It is especially bad when we can’t play some video games because we need patches that we don’t have!

The Blender is now free. Blender is big time 3D rendering software. It is available at www.blender.org.

Today is going to be short because I want to post after having been down for so long. Look for more news tomorrow.

When you have no Internet access and no one is home, the house is pretty quiet. Plus it is overcast and drizzly outside adding to the whole effect. For those of you following the site everyday, you probably noticed that I posted the last three days all at once. That is because I have to dial-up to get online and it is a pain to get any work done that way so updates are being written and trasfered to the site in bulk. The next level cable technician is due out here tomorrow to work on the line so there is a chance that our service will be back up and running tomorrow (but don’t count on it.) They have known about the problem since we first moved into the house and it has always been an issue and they have never managed to really deal with it so it is unlikely that they will have much luck tomorrow but we remain hopeful. Since there are no other options for high speed Internet access out here in the sticks (no, ADSL from Verizon does not stretch this far out – nor does SDSL from Clarity – and neither does wireless make it this low on the hill!!) So, we are pretty much stuck with the current situation until we move next summer.

Dominica and I hit the road early this morning and headed out to Herkimer. We managed to get there about 9:45 and I practiced with the trombone choir for a little bit before the wedding. I am sounding surprisingly not bad after all of this time not having been playing. The choir sounded pretty good. We had three tenor and two bass trombones. It has been a long time since I had the chance to play in a trombone group like that.

After the wedding, Min and I went to her parent’s house, just five minutes up the road. We did a bunch of laundry and watched a lot of television. It is about the only time that I see tv is when I am out there. So we watched the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet all day.

Loopy stayed at home today waiting for the cable technician to come out to our house to see what was wrong with the cable. They did actually come out this time and the girl managed to discover some problems with the line between our house and the outside cable connection at the road. Of course, she played with our lines in the house and took away one of our splitters and did some rewiring so now we have to Road Runner Hish Speed Onlin OR cable television. But, she said that we would be getting reimbursed for the days that we were without service and since no one is home that watches any television anyway, it isn’t all that bad (although we are REALLY missing the Internet connection considering how long we have been without it.)

Loopy took the opportunity to play some Age of Empires 2 and has managed to beat it on hard. That makes three of us now that are all around the same level. Min started playing moderate today (the level above standard) so she is getting a bit better now too. Pretty soon, they will be able to beat me again.