Sheep Guarding Llama

A fun day of working in Washington. We had a slight problem with our email server over the weekend that I had to fix yesterday but everything seems to be ok today.

Anyone interested in a new computer but on a tight budget should look to Walmart.com. Walmart Online is now selling a Lindows (Linux) computer complete with memory, hard drive, ethernet, etc. for only $199. It is a VIA C3 based unit at 800MHz. Nothing to knock your socks off but at $199 with the OS installed, all you need is the monitor, keyboard, mouse (optical from Walmart only $18.88) and a cable or DSL connection and you are good to go. It is hard to go wrong at that price. This would make a great second computer or Linux learning system for someone just getting started.

The weather is beautiful here today. John and I took the 35th Anniversary Camaro Convertible with the top down into the city this morning. Traffic was heavy the day after the holiday but it wasn’t all that bad.

And for the month of September…

THE OFFICIAL LLAMA OF THE MONTH AWARD GOES TO FRANCESCA GRICE!!! Francesca lives in Houston, Texas and reads SGL everyday. She has been bugging Dominica to put in her name for the SGL Llama of the Month for about three months now but I have been lazy and we haven’t had a LotM since May.

Min and I went out for breakfast this morning at the Double T Diner in Annapolis. After breakfast we headed out to Best Buy to see if they had any movies that we wanted to see. It is raining pretty hard today. We had originally planned to go to the Maryland Renaissance Festival with John, Michelle, Rob and Trish today but the weather isn’t exactly the best for that sort of thing. So we decided to stay in. I worked on my homework for a while and Dominica watched the movie Emma based on the book by the same name which was also the story used for the movie Clueless, believe it or not. She said that it was pretty good. Maybe I will watch it tomorrow.

After killing the afternoon, I had to head into the city (Washington) to fix something at the office. That ended up only taking a few minutes so I took Min on a tour of the northwest side of the city down Embassy Row through Adams-Morgan and into Georgetown. We parked on a side street in G-Town (she got to see a number of our hospitals along the way) and we walked around M Street where all of the upscale food and shops are in DC. We had a really good time. We did a little shopping and Min bought herself a knitting book at Barnes and Noble and then we went to Miss Saigon for dinner. It was my first time eating Vietnamese. It was really good. After that, it was pretty late and we decided to call it a day. We drove back out to Annapolis and went straight to bed. We just aren’t the party animals that we used to be.

Dominica will be leaving for Ithaca tomorrow morning after breakfast. I still have some homework to do so I will have a chance to get it done while it is still a holiday and not officially the next week of school yet.

I did catch the error on the page that was making the entire month of August show up in Italics. People, you need to email me when weird stuff like that happens. I don’t always notive it for a couple of days.

The trip went well last night and we made it down to Maryland in pretty good time. Of course, John forgot that I didn’t have a key to the house yet so when Min and I arrived we were locked out of the house. We arrived at 11pm and slept in the car until 1am. At that time I decided to try picking the lock on the door since I was still awake in the car and didn’t have anything else to do at the time. As luck would have it, we got right in. John didn’t get home until 4am so it was a good thing that I decided to try my luck with the lock.

I worked at the hospital today for about five hours. Dominica was pretty bored while she was stuck there with me. But, I managed to get a lot of work done and the time was well spent. We are trying hard to get a truck mounted computer system to be working the way we want it to and it has just been an uphill battle forever. We have had so many different and stupid problems, it has really been ridiculous.

After working a the hospital, Min and I returned to the house and I worked on homework that I needed to get done and Min took a nap. That took us up until pretty late and we ordered in a pizza and that was pretty much the end of the day for us. I got almost all of my homework done while she was napping.

During the trip down to Annapolis last night, I listening to the biography of Dietrick Bonnhoeffer [sp] who was a Lutheran minister in Germany prior to World War II. It was really interesting. My parents gave it to me to listen to. Min has it now.

I am trying to get as much work done today as possible before heading off to Maryland. I was scheduled to be leaving last night but not everything was ready for me down there so I held of travelling until today. Min is driving down tonight as well. She will be returning on Monday and I will be returning on Wednesday.

I picked up some new DVDs last night (big surprise.) I got Hurly Burly, Mickey Blue Eyes, Gorgeous and O. Gorgeous was in pretty awful shape so I am going to have to return that one. Last night, we watched Hurly Burly with Kevin Spacey, Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, Anna Paquin, Chez Palmiteri and Meg Ryan but it was pretty bad even with that incredible cast. It was two hours long but it seemed like four. That movie dragged on forever.

Well, today starting off with a bang – our Internet access is down. Road Runner is generally pretty reliable but it does go down for a half day at a time from time to time but then stays up for a month or two. It is pretty weird the problems that they have. It is annoying though, because they are always down during the times when I am really needing to be online. And they are often down for very long periods of time which is really ridiculous. I don’t know what they have going on that they should ever be down for 8-12 hours at a stretch.

More home work today. The semester is over this weekend and I need to finish up everything that I have gotten behind on. And of course, having no Internet access this close is not helping matter any. I am heading for Washington, D.C. tonight. I plan on working at the hospital for a while tonight and then sleeping in at the house in Annapolis in the morning. Now that we have the servers moved down there, life is so much better. It is cool in that office and much cleaner. The rack we are using for the computers is much better and we can move it around to get behind the computers and work on things.

Dominica is going to be coming down to Maryland to spend the weekend with me tomorrow night. We are hoping to be able to go to the Renaissance Festival down there over the weekend. Don’t forget that Monday is Labor Day. (You know, from the people who brought you the weekend.) And for our Canadian friends who are surprised that we have that holiday too, it is a British holiday.)

Currently, Gordon is our house server. It was selected because it had multiple hot swappable hard drives and a smart array adapter. But, Gordon is getting old. In fact, Gordon was a pretty old machine when we first purchased it while living in the Gaslight Apartment in Ithaca. That would have been in the Spring of 2000. (Speaking of the Spring of 2000, Loopy – do you remember what we spray painted (with window frosting) onto Josh’s bedroom window on Feb. 19, 2000, well, it’s still there.) So Gordon is getting on and is becoming less and less useful in the house as we need more and more disk space and would like to have more and more features on our server. We are looking for a good home for Gordon in the near future. He has been a good machine for us but he needs to go do some good work for someone else. He is a Compaq Proliant 2000 upgraded to a Pentium 100. I have two more Pentium 100 boards and processors and an ourboard drive array so he could be almost tripled in speed by a loving family. He has room for a couple more identical hard drives as well that would speed him up and give him more disk space to work with. All of his parts are pretty cheap on eBay. He has 86MB of memory but could be upgraded. Our new machine is a rack mount Compaq Proliant 6500 with larger drives, 128MB of memory and four Intel Pentium Pro 200 processors (roughly the equivalent to a 1GHz Celeron machine.) It isn’t the fastest machine on the block anymore either but it is a super high reliability machine like Gordon was and will hopefully last us just as long. Gordon has been running Windows NT 4 Server but we want to move to Red Hat Linux for the house server. That will make the new machine even faster yet.

I just got off the phone with Road Runner. It would appear that they forgot to process my last payment and they shut off the cable service. This is not the first time that they have screwed up the billing and shut us off even when we were paid in full. But they don’t inform us that that is why it is being shut off so it is impossible to tell the difference between their regular network problems and a billing problem. I wouldn’t have even called had today not been two days after the end of the billing cycle. But it is long enough after that I thought for sure that it wasn’t a billing issue. You would think that a Fortune 10 company like that would have its act a little bit more together than that.