Sheep Guarding Llama

I am finally home from Maine. I got my lazy butt out of bed at 3:30 this morning and jumped in the car and was on my way back to Ithaca by 4:30. The sun didn’t come up for hours. I drove a couple of hours before I decided to stop at a Burger King and get some breakfast.

I am spending a bit of time today attempting to build a new router / filewall for the house. The old Netgear RT-311 has served us well for a long time but we are looking to move to something meatier with more security and options (plus more opportunity to learn and experiment.) We are now trying out SmoothWall Firewall 2.0 Beta2. It installed really easily but getting it completely working seems to be another story.

Dominica is playing my Tropico video game that I got a few months ago. I have the Paradise Island expansion pack too. Eric looked at it a week or two ago and thought that it looked pretty interesting. It is a fun game but it doesn’t have a ton of replay value because it doesn’t have any multi-player functionality. The graphics and music are really good and the game play is different.

My second day in Maine. Today is much colder than it was yesterday. Yesterday, I was able to hike with just a fleece on but today I have to wear a coat. It was supposed to rain all day here but it ended up only raining in the evening. We went for a hike along Long Pond near Seal Harbor. There were some puppies on the trail that I got to play with.

I have had the hardest time finding any food here on the island. New Englanders are very unaccommodating for vegetarians. If you find a restaurant that says it has vegetarian, it normally means that they have a vegetable stir fry. Just whatever they have lying around they will through it a skillet and heat up for you and throw it on some rice. Most restaurants advertised having at least one vegetarian dish but a couple of places weren’t carrying it anymore for the season. There was a local beer that I wanted to try and every place that I ordered it said that they were out of it as well.

My first full day in Maine. I haven’t been to Bar Harbor at all since 1992 and then it was only for a day or two. In my youth, I would come here frequently. This was my family’s official vacation spot and this is my sixth trip and my parent’s tenth. Bar Harbor practically defines vacation to me. Between the mountains of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Virginia – I saw little else. Family vacations always meant hiking in the mountains. It is beautiful up here. I am surprised that I still know my way around. It has been so long and I have never driven on the island before. It feels really weird to be driving here. Both Nugget and Buffer (two of our three dogs that we had while I was growing up) came to Mount Desert Island a number of times.

Today my parents and I started off with some hiking up to Beech and Canada Cliffs on Beech Mountain on the west side of the island. My mom is able to climb the mountain, just very slowly now but she is fine on level or descending ground. She is still in better shape than either dad or I.

After doing a little light mountain hiking we took to the island’s Azalea gardens near Northeast Harbor. There are two exquisite private gardens there that you can go see. They are really something. If I ever stay on the island again, I will likely stay in Northeast Harbor. It is more pleasent and less touristy.

I am heading to Maine this morning. I am meeting my parents in Bar Harbor and will be there over the weekend. I will try to fill in the updates as soon as I get back but there will not likely be anything until then. Have a good weekend everyone. I am hitting the road at about 7:30 this morning so call my cell if you need me. I will be on the road until 8pm. I believe that I will be returning on Sunday.

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.