Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Eric and I started off the day with a meeting in Rochester with Rochester General Hospital in Irodiquoit. That actually went surprisingly well. We then went suit shopping at Men’s Warehouse because I needed a plain black suit. I have shopped there before but this time was so bad I intend to never even consider shopping there ever again. The salesmen were so greasy and obnoxious. It was like being at the worst used car deal you have ever seen. You tell them you don’t want anything and they bring things for you to see and try to add things to your bill you never even thought that they were trying to sell you, they kept asking me what they could do to make the prices good enough for me and then would offer me a higher price and act like it was lower. I don’t like to haggle at a men’s clothing store. It was embarrassing. They wouldn’t let it go. If I didn’t want another suit then they would bring me a sport coat. I kept telling them I didn’t want anything and they wouldn’t stop. They wouldn’t let me out of the store. My mother was with me and she got so mad that she said something to them about it. And that didn’t stop them. It was such an awful experience that I will never go there again. They even lied to me about the prices on the suits I was looking at (the tags said $300 and $220) and the jerk told me if I bought the two it would save me money and he would let them go at $550 and said that the one alone was $400. I don’t have Internet access this morning to look up their customer service number but I intend to get a hold of them and explain to them why Wagi (Assistant Manager) and Vincent (the salesmen) managed to make me no longer willing to be a customer of their chain.

After being harrassed at Men’s Warehouse, I went up to Greece and helped Josh and Joanna move into their new apartment. They moved just around the corner from where Josh was living before and from where Josh, Loopy and I used to live once upon a time. It was weird helping Josh move because the townhouse that they are moving into is identical to the one that we all used to live in. It was eerie.

Loopy bought a new pair of small Paradigm Atoms for his bedroom because his old speakers were just way too big for that little room. This is more practical for him. His old Monitor 7’s were sold on eBay.

Today was a work around the house day. Tons of homework to do. I managed to get some of it done. Not enough though. I will be working on it for the rest of the week for sure.