Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Rain, rain, rain. I am convinced that the car wash that Nate, Bob and Zach are working at this morning raising money for the Boynton music department trip. It has been raining all morning and now it is raining really hard. The guys were totally soaked after they got back from the car wash.

Dominica is still laid up this morning. She is a little better but not much. She is watching movies again today. Yesterday she watched Drop Dead Gorgeous and Miss Congeniality. Today she watched Never Been Kissed and The Wedding Singer.

Min wanted a book from Borders so Loopy and I headed out there to get it for her. We had dinner at Friendlys (Bob and Zach snuck off and tried Chariot in Collegetown) and then went to Borders. We both bought some books (made cheaper by our really cool corporate discount program) and we also discovered a magazing – “Life in the Finger Lakes”, published right here in Ithaca. So, I had to get a copy of that as well. Nate and Craig had to move some cars around so they spent the evening back in Perry.

Loopy’s video game is really coming along. He got a lot of good work done on that today. It is looking like it is going to be pretty cool.

Ah, Friday. What a great day. I am still working in Ithaca today. Boy has it been a weird and busy week.

Tim came out to lunch with Dominica and I to the Little Thai House over on Triphammer next to the mall. We have been really happy with their food. They were really excited (the owners of the restaurants) about me little yellow Mazda and they were asking how much it was and what year it was, etc. That was pretty funny.

Shortly after lunch, Dominica threw her back out at work and had to leave early. We had been planning on going down to the Clemens Center in Elmira to see Rebecca St. James’ Concert. Dominica won’t be going anywhere for the next couple of days though. We had a busy weekend planned too. We were having lunch with my parents and grandparents, then going to my cousin’s birthday party then going to hang with Josh, Joanna, Phil, Kate and some other people at Josh’s new place. Then we were going to go to the Hemlock Sheep and Wool festival on Sunday before heading back down to Ithaca. We are hoping that Min’s back will be good enough by Sunday to still make the festival but that is very unlikely. She will likely not be able to go to work on Monday.

Loopy has been working on his own video game. He has some cool animations done already. I can’t wait to be able to see some of the game. It is going to be really funny.

I need to stop writing daily updates and then forgetting that I wrote them and not posting them. The September 18 update sat on my computer for two days before I got around to actually putting it up.

Loopy and I are both trying out a software package called AGS (Adventure Game Studio) to make video games in the style of the old King’s Quest games from Sierra in the 80’s. The studio is really easy to use and we are actually getting some things done. I will make the games downloadable from the site once we get them done. They will just be simple silly things since this is our first time trying to make games like this.

Loopy and I hooked up the Commodore 64C in the dining room to Zach old 13″ RCA television that has been sitting down there on the computer desk. It is really funny because it really looks just like it would have if you would have walked into someone’s house in 1985 and saw a Commie computer really hooked up. It is really cool.

Loopy and I ran up to Syracuse this afternoon so that he could pick up a part for his computer’s water cooling system. He has finally managed to get the system to work pretty well. It is a lot more quiet than it was before and it is a little bit cooler.

Dominica’s new friend Jessica from Advion came over after work this evening and we watched O, the modern version of Shakespeare’s Othello. It was pretty good. I really liked it. The DVD wasn’t in the best of condition, which sucks. But it played all of the way through so it wasn’t the end of the world or anything.

Well, Loopy got the water cooling system working. It doesn’t keep the computer any cooler than it did before. In fact, it is just a little bit warmer – which is really too bad. It is much more quiet than it was but it can’t run as fast anymore. He decided that the other fans were doing very little to keep the temperature down so he removed them and now only has the super silent pump and one pretty quiet fan in the back of the case running. A big difference from the machines that Dominica and I have. My machine runs too hot as it is so I would not be able to use this water cooling system in my machine 🙁 Min could use it in hers if she wanted to.

Last night we went to the mall and got the RF adapter so that we could hook up the Commodore 128 for Dominica to be able to play. While we were out we also found a nice adapter for using a Sony Playstation controller (the best joystick ever made, IMHO) with the computer. So I got one of those because the only joystick that I have for the computer isn’t very good. Loopy had an adapter for the same thing but it is big and bulky and wasn’t a nice USB unit.

Still more music being moved over today. This is a major project. It takes about five minutes to rip one of the CDs and then as much as an hour to encode it as an Ogg Vorbis file. So the process is pretty long. Then, after all of that is done, it must be moved onto the final machine and that takes another minute with me sitting there to babysit it.