Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is a busy day. Min and I had to clean much of the day to prepare for Eric and Amanda who are visiting us this evening. Eric is at the house all of the time but this will be the first time that Amanda has made it to the new house. There is a lot of cleaning to be done so we will be getting as much done as possible.

I drove out to my parent’s house this afternoon because my cousins Bill and Carol were in from Ohio to visit. I managed to spend a couple of hours out there and pick up my copy of the new Macromedia Studio MX including the newest version of Dreamweaver. However, I am still editing this page in HTML-Kit because Dreamweaver just isn’t as powerful for code editing (how sad is that – Chami HTML-Kit is free and Dreamweaver is $400 and HTML-Kit is FAR better for regular coding that Dreamweaver!) Dreamweaver does look like it is going to be really good for a lot of things, though. I am going to have to spend some serious time getting used to it. Plus there are all those other parts of the studio that I need to learn how to work with like Flash and Fireworks. I am pretty excited, the new MX Studio looks to be worlds beyond the old version 4 that I have been working with.

Eric and Amanda met Min and I out at the Lost Dog Cafe for dinner at 9:45. They have the most amazing Sundried Tomato Dip and there Caprese croissant is awesome. Dinner was really good. It was amazing how busy they were that late at night. We actually had to wait a little while for a table and we weren’t able to sit at the bar because it was so busy. They are making a killing down there, I am sure.

After dinner we came back to the house and did some drinking. It has been a while since we have had a chance to all sit down and drink together so that was nice. Min didn’t join us, though, because it was late and she was so tired. So she just went to bed.

Bob went up to Syracuse this evening as he is expected to become an uncle tonight.

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.

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.

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.

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.