Sheep Guarding Llama

One year. Can you believe that it has been a year? Eric called me that morning. About five or six minutes after it had happened. I was still in bed. I ran upstairs (this was in the house on Sanctuary) and turned on the television to CNN. I got the overview of what had happened and then I ran upstairs to wake up Loopy. He couldn’t believe me. We both ran back downstairs to watch CNN again. We got there just in time to just see the second tower get hit. What a day that was.

That same morning, Nolan called me from Lucente Homes to tell me that the company was splitting and that they needed my help in getting a new office and company set up. So today is the one year anniversary of Lifestyle Properties.

I ended up spending most of the day on the phone with Time-Warner’s Road Runner service trying to get them to fix their services. They were down from 11:30am until sometime during the night. They gave me a huge run around on the phone. I had to call them twelve times. I have never had any company be so obnoxious on the phone. They really treated me awfully. I can’t believe how incompetent they are. Their repairman never showed up after I waited all day for him and their manager never called back even after I got many reassurances that she was going to before 10:00 pm. All in all, it was a pretty bad experience.

I got a chance to talk to Tim today on Yahoo Messenger – yes Tim, the roomate who dissappeared ever since his wedding. We had started to think that maybe Becky was actually an ax murder and had killed him and hidden the body in the woods. It turns out that right after the wedding, Becky’s apartment (where Tim had just moved into) had a leak coming from the apartment above. So, as usual, the landlords dragged their feet and soon Tim and Becky had to move out for a while while it was being repaired and just managed to get moved back in recently. So after thinking that they would just stay at Becky’s old apartment instead of having to move again, they had to move, TWICE!

Another web site has joined the Ithaca Portal family of sites. It should have something there in a day or two. PCHProject.org is the new home of Pioneer Hospital that is being built in the Republic of the Congo. BoyntonMusic.com is up now as well. It took forever but it is finally there. We are hosting more and more websites all of the time. I think we are around twenty right now that are up on our one server – plus we have the Waste Watcher application that is its own web site without a name (and it is our busiest site by far) and we have our eMail server that has its own web server. We are busier than I normally think that we are.

Today is a laundry day. I want to get everything done so it isn’t sitting around the room while I am gone. I have a lot of laundry to do so I will probably be doing it all day.

Dominica’s computer is still having some problems while playing The Sims. We are going to try reinstalling it to see if that makes any difference.

I was on Register.com today getting a new web site address when I realized that it is costing me $1000 every two years for all of the web addresses that I have under my own name. That is getting to be a little bit expensive. One of them, Niatel.com that has not really been used yet is going to be dropped in two weeks. I got it because I wasn’t sure if I was going to want to have it or not. Not, seems to have been the answer to that question. I am also going to drop BarbarianEmpire.com. It just make any sense to have a website dedicated to a book that is going to take me twenty years to write. I will just add the site as an extension of my resume page at scottalanmiller.com. That will save a bit of money right there.

Tonight has been the night of broken computers. I have spent a lot of time trying to fix one thing or another. We are now hosting a web site from the house using the Roxen 2.2.295 Web Server running on Windows 2000 Professional. I will share the connect info with you was I get it all set. I am excited that it is working. It is our first time using Roxen and using the router to pass connections into the house. I wonder what kind of speed we are able to get from here. Nate’s computer is completely dead. First his OS was having probelms, then his motherboard fried and now his OS is unbootable. Just one thing after another. Loopy and I both had our Windows 2000 machines crash tonight too.

I spent a lot of time today cleaning my room and it is looking a million times better than it did before. Min and I went shopping at Walmart and got a ton of Rubbermaid storage bins. Those will help out a lot with the huge mess of things that need to be stored. The neighbor who gave me the piano a few months ago moved in one house away and decided that he wanted the piano back. So that will be out of the garage soon too.

Miranda is coming up to visit us tomorrow. So Loopy is driving out to Avon to meet her. I might go to Rochester in the morning but I haven’t decided yet. It is so much driving to go out there that I am probably not going to go out.

Loopy worked on the projector more tonight and managed to get a major picture enhancement by changing the picture to true wide screen. The only drawback is that laserdiscs and full frame DVDs are not really watchable anymore. That means that about 2/3rds of the entire movie collection is no longer watchable. That is pretty rough. It just occured to me how many movies that really is that don’t really have any place to be watched anymore. I guess that it will be time to move the laserdisc player to the living room television upstairs since it will be at least a little bit useful there.

Min and I went out for brunch at Rogue’s Harbor today, out in Lansing. After that, the day was pretty slow. Min spent most of the day knitting and then she tried playing the Sims because I had worked on her computer and we hoped that it would be working by now. I spent the whole day setting up more computers for work and getting things ready to go down to Maryland with me. Loopy spent the day getting about twenty items ready to go up on eBay. We are selling everything from uneeded stereo components to computers to video games to laserdiscs. Everything must go! I hope that we can get it down to just the things that we really use. It will make moving a lot easier. And we have to move in just 9-10 months. Where to is anyone’s guess. Hopefully a brand new house of our own right here in Ithaca.

Loopy, Bob and I played Quake II for the first time in forever tonight. I was awful. Min is playing the Sims because the Sims Unleashed is just out and she wants to be sure that her computer is working ok before she buys it. The Sims Online is due out very soon as well.

This morning Dominica made me go shopping for yarn. She has really gotten into knitting recently. We had breakfast at State Street Dinner – garbage plates. Dominica has been spending most of the day knitting and napping. I am buiding a Celeron 333 Windows 98SE machine for a friend of ours, Tricia. Loopy has donated a computer and monitor to her and I am busy getting the machine together. There are so many spare computers in this house, Loopy and I are frantically clearing them out so that we have a bit more room around here. Loopy had five extra computers in his room two days ago. Bob bought the Pentium III 500 off of him and is using that in the basement now. Bob needed another machine because a tech who worked for the school vandalized his PPro200 machine at school. So Bob is going to take his Celeron 433 machine to school once he gets the new one up and running. I bought the Pentium III 600 off of Loopy to use as a server in Washington (so it is leaving the house.) Loopy also had an old Pentium 200 MMX that we couldn’t figure out what to do with so I am making that into a simple Waste Watcher Reporting station to be used in Anderson, SC. So that will be out of the house soon as well. The Celeron 333 I already mentioned. The last machine was a Celeron 500 Compaq iPaq unit that belows to the company and is being prepared to be returned to Washington to be installed somewhere. I had an IBM Intellistation PIII 600 that Loopy is putting up on eBay for me because I just haven’t been using it. I bought it thinking that I would need another machine but the reality is that now I don’t use the huge number of multiple machines like I used to (the highest I ever got was 40 computers!) and if I don’t use them right away, they get old quickly. So I am selling it. Brand new, even. I have a Pentium III 500 in the garage that I finally got around to canibalizing today. Hopefully it won’t be around for too much longer. I need its processor in DC. I also have a couple of older machines in the garage that I keep stumbling across and wondering what to do with. I think that I am going to either find someone who wants them or toss them. Two might be useful and I am pretty sure that one of them is useless. Eric and I are collecting older computers to ship to needy hospitals.

Nate is out today. He left yesterday to go to his sister Rachel’s wedding back home. Bob and Zach are around but we have barely heard a peep out of them all day. Michelle was in town today for a violin lesson and she stopped by for a little while.

I woke up at Josh’s this morning and headed on into the UofR to give a tour to Rochester General Hospital. The tour was at 9am and Eric and I felt that it went really well. We worked at the UofR until mid afternoon and then I headed back out to Ithaca.

I have been out of town and traveling so much this week that I really haven’t had any time to do any updates. So there are just a few quick notes as to where I was each day. Sorry about the lack of updates.

After working in the city today, I picked up my new black suit from Men’s Warehouse and went over to MCC to get my medical records faxed over to Empire State so that I can go back to school for the fall semester. I am hoping to at least take a class on Oracle Database Design. That will be a lot of fun. MCC is adding two huge new buildings since I was last there in 1998. When I started there in 1996, MCC had a total enrollment of 14,000. Last year they had 20,000 and they have 22,000 this year. They are expecting 2,000 more next year! MCC is getting huge. At this rate, they will be the largest school in New York State in about five years. They are adding dorms this year and everyone is sure that they are going to be a full blown State University Center in just a couple of years. They are just too big to be anything else. They are only two years away from passing UB (Buffalo) as the largest school in the SUNY system.