September 26, 2002

Today is my “day off”. It is the only day that I don’t really have to go anywhere. I am taking the chance to just relax a little bit. It is going to be a busy weekend so today is my only day to do nothing.

This evening, Min and Loopy decided to team up and try their hands at beating me at Age of Empires 2. We played for four hours and eventually called it a draw. They put up a good fight but they just weren’t able to beat me. In fact, I never even had to leave my original village (which is rare for me.) It was a rough game because I had run out of resources so early in the game – I had to play a really slow defensive game for a really long time in an attempt to wear them down. After four hours, no one had really made any progress and so we decided that it wasn’t worth continuing as we could tell the game would potentially take forever. Our combined scores were basically a tie as well. So it was really close. Eric remains the only person to have ever beaten me. He is out there giving hope to all of the other AoE2 players out there. I do need to play Josh again to see how he has improved. In fact, we need to have a day where everyone comes down here and plays a massive game of AoE2! That would be awesome. Set aside a whole day and order in some pizza and stuff. We have four machines in my room alone that can play it, Loopy has his own, Bob has his own, Josh could bring one, someone could play on Nate’s machine… That is enough for all eight players (I think that that is the max that you can have.) That would be so cool.

September 25, 2002

Two new headers were added today. For now, the new headers are only showing up on the home page but eventually they will be on all of the pages. There are six headers in total right now for anyone who is looking carefully for them.

Dominica was back at work today for the first time since Friday afternoon. Her back is killing her now, though. Zach stayed home sick as well today. I had to travel out to Penn Yan to do some work at the Sheriff’s Office out there. I ended up having a very busy day today.

My new copy of Dreamweaver MX, Freehand 10, Coldfusion MX, Fireworks MX and Flash MX are due to arrive tomorrow. I bought Macromedia Studio which includes them all. I won’t be able to play with them until at least the weekend. But at least I will know that I have them. I also have a demo of Windows Server .NET that I haven’t even been able to take out of the plastic yet. I am excited, though, to try out all of this new software designed to make really cool web pages. I wonder what new things I can do 🙂

Dominica is playing for Age of Empires 2 today. Maybe she will play enough this week that when Eric is here we can have a five way game with Eric, Loopy, Min, Bob and myself! That would be so cool. I have never played with more than four players and I have only gotten to play with that many once.

Loopy does not have to work tomorrow. He was originally scheduled to be doing some work in Syracuse and Jordan tomorrow but that has been pushed off until Monday. He does not now have to work in New Hartford like was originally planned.

September 24, 2002

Added a new link today. Orinsal – it is a site to show off some Flash MX web design. There are a bunch of fun games and some really good Flash demos (some of the best that I have ever seen.) Be prepared to wait a bit as this site requires both a fast Internet connection and a fast computer for some of the animations. A lot of work went into this “resume” page but boy – I bet this guy (Ferry Halim) gets a lot of calls from people who have seen his work on this page. This guy is truly an artist. I wish that I had someone making stuff like that for Sheep Guarding Llama! (Hint, hint.) I picked this one up from the Blog of Jessica Lee, a Cornell student here in Ithaca. Her Blog is pretty good and quite a bit more typical than mine. There is quite a popularity explosion around Blogs now and a couple of books have been written about them (I don’t think that anyone is mentioning this one yet but soon, I am sure…) SGL is actually pretty old in the Blog world and has a pretty big readership.

SGL was originally designed to be an opportunity for me to learn and hoan my HTML/XHTML web skills (because the entire site is hand coded.) Later, I started using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and learned how to use those effectively before using them in other sites that I work on. Now, I am starting to teach myself PHP (originally standing for Personal Home Page but now is commonly used as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.) When the new web server goes into place (running Apache2) then I hope to be able to start implementing some PHP features into the site. Until then, you will all just have to wait patiently.

Eric and Amanda finally have a weekend free and will be coming down on Friday to visit the Llamas (this is the first time that Amanda will have seen the newest Llama house – two weeks shy of a full year after we moved in here! But that is ok since Phil and Kate still haven’t seen it!) Eric and I spent the day working in Binghamton today. We had a meeting at Lourdes Hospital and before that I had a teeth cleaning.

Anyone who was watching SGL closely tonight would have seen it changing constantly throughout the evening. I have been editing the CSS that formats the page trying to get the title PNG and the navigation bar on the left to lign up properly. I think that I finally have it. All three main browsers (IE, Mozilla/Netscape and Opera) showed it properly. Konqueror has been showing some weird boxes around the paragraphs. If anyone knows what is causing this, let me know, plz. Getting the alignment right is pretty minor but I think that everyone will agree that it really does make the page look a lot better. It was only off by two pixels before but it has been bothering me.

I spent some time learning a little JavaScript this evening and have added a tiny bit of dynamic content to this page. Some of you may notice the new page headers that are showing up. There will most likely be more of those in the future. For now, enjoy. There are only a couple so far. I hope that there will be many in the future. And more that are designed to look right in the context of the rest of the page. It took me all night to learn the JavaScript that I needed to make it do this so you had better all be impressed.

Dominica played King’s Quest I until she beat it today and then she played AoE2 again. Loopy tried his hand at KQ3 but, a I had warned him, it was really tedious and not worth playing at all. KQ3 is the unfortunate failure of the King’s Quest family. It was obviously rushed to get into production due to the popularity of the first two installments but it shows and the gameplay is not fun at all. KQ4 was made with great care and it shows. The series was good until KQ8: Mask of Eternity really sucked and the series ended in flames.

September 23, 2002

Min’s back is still hurting and she couldn’t go to work today. She spent the day playing video games, knitting and watching movies. She played Age of Empires 2 (Eric would be proud) and King’s Quest I VGA from Tierra (check out our links page.)

Loopy and I headed out to do some shopping today in the midst of his hectic schedule of packing up things that sold on eBay over the weekend. We stopped by Borders and picked up a couple of books at the latest issue of Life in the Finger Lakes.

I did some additional work on the site today and the Links page has been drastically updated. In addition to updating the page, SGL has also partnered with Opera.com to help promote their web browser. If you are interested in trying out the fastest web browser around (especially nice if you are a dial-up surfer) then go to our links page and download Opera for free. The free version has some ads but you can purchase Opera at any time and the ads will go away making your browser even faster and giving you more screen real estate.

September 22, 2002

Min’s back is still bad today. She thought that she was going to be good enough to go to the Sheep and Wool festival and we tried to go but we only made it to Triphammer before she realized that she was in too much pain to be able to go so we just stopped at Collegetown Bagels and got some breakfast before heading back. Now she is back in her lazyboy knitting. It is probably best that we didn’t go to the show since she would have spent outrageous amounts of money on yarn that she doesn’t need (she has only finished a scarf for her and one for La Mutt – her stuffed dog.) She currently has more yarn than she knows what do to with.

I am reading the book “Absolute BSD” from No Starch Press in preperation for our migrating our web server from IIS on Windows NT to Apache on FreeBSD. I am hoping to be able to migrate shortly after FreeBSD 4.7 is released next week. (FreeBSD is currently on 4.6.2 – FreeBSD is the operating system beneath Mac OS X.) Once we migrate, we are hoping to see an increase in response time from the server as well as having a much easier time of updating the many web sites that are active on the server.

I did some maintenance work on SGL today. The huge August Dailies have been moved over to the Archives and the Archives have been split into Quarterly Groupings instead of annual ones because this year was already becoming completely unwieldy for slower computers and slower Internet connections. The new format should be considerably easier to use. The archives for Quarter 3 of 2002 (which only currently include July and August since we are still in September) is already the biggest quarter – equal in size to all of 2001!

Little Wisconsin Flag I am running a little behind but two additional Anne Updates are posted. Anne is no longer touring around Europe but has returned to Ithaca and then moved on out to go to college in beautiful, sunny Wisconsin. You will also notice that Anne is now being represented by a Wisconsin flag instead of a Belgian one. I know it is hard to tell that it is a Wisconsin flag but believe me, it really is one.

I did some calculations last night and discovered that with the current number of songs that I have put into my Ogg Vorbis radio system on Linux – I can listen to music without a single repeat for five and a half days! And that is considering me staying awake and listening to music all of that time.

Dominica has spent most of the day napping. Hopefully the rest will help her back. Loopy decided to try another air cooling fan for his computer instead of the water cooling system and is getting better results with it. So much for cool water cooling. Loopy and I had a bunch of stuff sell on eBay yesterday. He sold his new, high refresh monitor, I sold my SSi-720 Surround Decoder. I am going to miss it. We sold some random stuff as well – including the scanner that we bought years ago and only works with Windows 98 (ha ha, when is the last time I owned a system that ran that?)

Nate returned from Perry around 3:30. He has been gone all day.