Sheep Guarding Llama

TGIF 🙂 Today was a very long day. I started the day by getting my butt out of bed incredibly early and driving from Annapolis, MD to Crystal City, VA in order to get John from Reagen National Airport. Then we drove to DC and worked for a while before driving back out to Annapolis. From Annapolis, I headed for Ithaca. Four hours of driving in the morning. Then six back to Ithaca. As soon as I arrived in Ithaca, I ran downstairs to see the new projector for a second – it is AWESOME! And then I grabbed Dominica and Dexter and headed for my parents’ house where Min and I will be dog sitting this weekend. Two more hours of driving out to Perry. That is twelve hours total driving today. Pretty crazy for not really getting anywhere.

To add to my wonderful day, I accidentally placed three laserdiscs on the top of my car as I went to head out to my parents’ house and forgot about them and they blew away at some point down the road. I lost Anne of Green Gables that was going to my parents and LA Confidential and Army of Darkness that were going to Josh. What a day.

On the way to my parents’ house (but after the LDs flew away) Min and I stopped at Taco Bell in Ithaca to grab a quick dinner before it got too late. Min tripped as she got out of the car and twisted her ankle pretty bad. So we had to ice it all the way to my folks’ house.

The Ides of August. Well, the favicon that I tried out worked well on my Mozilla browser and ok on Internet Explorer. I have not totally learned how to implement them, I guess, so I will have to look into it a little bit more thoroughly. Yesterday’s update alone was 8KB! That is huge. But, I am guessing that anyone who read it noticed how long it was. What can I say, it was an interesting day.

AOL today has a Hip Hop name generator that takes your real name and translates it into a ebonic musical name. I did it for a couple of people that I know. Here are the results… I am “The Diggity Young’n” unless you add my middle name then you get “The Flossin’ Dawg”. Dominica is “The Tricky Ice”, Loopy is “The Young Scratch”, Nate is “The Diggity MC”, Bob is “The Def Scratch”, Zach is “The Baby Dawg”, Eric is “The Freaky MC”, Francesca (whom I know will read the site) is “The Blingin’ Ice”, Natalie is “The Undefined Mack” and lastly, Josh is (after using his full name) “The Stanky Daddy.” I managed to save the best for last and I didn’t even try. Maybe The Stanky Daddy will read the site while he and Montana Bob are teaching band camp (yup, really) and give me a call.

Not much to report today. Slight change of plans and I have to be to the airport in Crystal City, Virginia at 8:30 in the morning to get John from the airport. That is really early considering that I will have to drive eighty miles or so in heavy rush hour through all of Maryland and DC and some of Virginia to get to Reagan National. It is going to be a long drive in the morning. And Crystal City isn’t the easiest place to get around in either.

I heard a really cool rendition of Bryan Adams’ Heaven on the radio today and I spent an hour at Borders in Bowie tracking it down. I also managed to find two computer books for $1 each which is pretty amazing. Both books retail at $40.

I did more work on Ithaca Portal today and for those of you who use it regularly should notice that it looks a little bit different and the font sizes now match on Opera, IE and Mozilla. Mozilla was really small before. We have really been trying to get Ithaca Portal up to speed before next week when all of the students return to Ithaca.

I will be driving to Ithaca tomorrow (Friday) night and will be going to Geneseo to a friend of Min’s’ wedding on Saturday. Min and I will be spending Saturday and Sunday at my parents’ house dog sitting Dominica’s parents’ dog Dexter. Isn’t that complicated? I will then be home in Ithaca Monday through Wednesday (this is all very tentative) and then returning to Annapolis on Thursday morning to complete the office move. It would be much better for me if I could come down to DC on Monday and do the move then because TEKsystems wants me to be a team lead on a project in Endicott over the weekend and it will overlap times if I can’t move the move. Oh boy, what a day. Oh yeah, a rock hit John’s windshield and cracked it too!

I have been doing a ton of work everyday and am not even close to getting caught up. We now have another web site being hosted on our server, NicklinAssociates.com that I have to get set up tomorrow as well. Eric has been working on something for the new site but he is on vacation until Monday so he won’t be of any help. This week is just too busy. And on top of it all, someone has to be at the house to let Mickey in and out on a regular basis because he is still unable to use the cat door without someone holding it open for him. He won’t even push on it. I can’t figure out if he is just so weak that he can’t use it or if he is just too dumb to use it. He is the weakest and the dumbest cat I have ever known so it is hard to say for sure. Nila thinks he is a wimp.

Wednesday. John is driving to South Carolina today to give a presentation so I have the house and the cats to myself until Friday afternoon. Now I can work online all day and get a ton of work done. I have upgraded to HTML-Kit Beta 4. HKit just keeps getting better and better. I definitely suggest that any aspiring web designers out there try it out. It is free now with a commercial version coming in the future.

The lack of furniture in the house is getting to be a bit of a drag, though. Without a chair or desk to sit in, I am forced to work while lying on the floor which isn’t the most ergonomic situation imaginable. I am working on adding a favicon to the site and I have the code in place already. What I am looking for now is an artist out there who is interested in coming up with a small icon to add to the site. Email me if you are interested. I am looking for a small llama head to have in the icon. Nothing fancy. And it is really tiny so there isn’t much that you can do anyway. The details are 16x16x16, that is the image is a 16×16 pixel square in 16 colours. It may be so small that we aren’t able to do a Llama head and will have to resort to something else creative. Until we come up with something unique to our site, I managed to find a free patriotic ribbon to use. I figured it was pretty appropriate since we have our flags for our foreign constituents. So if the icon doesn’t work in your browser, let me know. Today is the first day with it.

Dominica finally has her homepage up now. Take a wuick trip over to DominicaTocco.com and see what she is doing over there. Min is doing a “Thought of the Day” thing similar to the format that I have here.

It is 1:30 and John is still sleeping. I just discovered that the cat pissed in my bed as well (I am writing this on the 13th after yesterday’s posting) so now I have even more laundry to do. Ok Dominica, I do not want a cat anymore. Actually, I still want Nila, she would never do that. Min says that I should have told Mickey, “NO! Not for you to poop on!!”

Since I lack decent Internet access today, I am doing extensive work on IthacaPortal.com. I am updating it to take Style Sheets which will make working on it so much easier. I hope to be able to really push IP in the fall when the student start returning to college. I am going to try to get some brochures and business cards with the address on them to help get the word out about our awesome site. I managed to update almost everything with IP today from the look to download time and compatability to new links. I did discover a new link that I was really excited about, www.Ithacan.org which offers free classifieds for Ithaca locals. What a great idea. There wasn’t much on there (they have spots for classifieds and job listings as well as personals) but as they said on their site, if I tell five people and the five people that I tell tell five people and so forth, it will be pretty popular pretty quickly. Kind of like IP itself. So, the Ithacan is now linked from here and from IP. I figure that I told more than five people that way.

Even later in the day, John discovered that Mickey took a crap on the brand new (as in 5 days or so) upstairs carpet. It had to have happened last night because I have had Mickey locked outside all day. Technically he could come in but he won’t even come close to the cat door. He is spending his nine lives very quickly and frivolously.

I am writing this final part of the daily as I wait for my last load of laundry to dry so that I can make my bed and get some sleep. I don’t have anything pressing in the morning so I am pretty flexible. I have taken a dryer sheet and attached it to the back side of my room fan (that I am very thankful that Min and I went shopping for) to suck air through it to remove the cat poop smell that has perpeated the room.

To even more to an already incredibly good day, John’s car got hit and now has a dent in the driver’s side door.

Loopy’s new projector did, in fact, arrive today and he and Bob have been spending the afternoon getting it up and running. They have determined that it is most likely only going to work really well in the basement so they are going to try to get it set up down there and then relocate the new surround sound theatre system down to the basement as well. Bob and Loopy said that the new projector is really amazing and that the new system is going to be really cool.

Nila and I are just hanging out and chillin’ waiting for the laundry to finish. I think that Mickey is wearing thin his welcome with Nila as well. She has to put up with him a lot of the time when we aren’t home and I am sure he isn’t much fun for her either. The fountain that Min and I made a few days ago is still bubbling away on the counter. I like the sound that it adds to the room. It is very relaxing.

Dominica’s Birthday is one week from today. I was actually smart enough to onto Ithaca Portal and make reservations for Banfi’s at the Statler Hotel today so that I don’t have to worry about it in a week when I will be busy. It is so nice that Banfi’s uses OpenTable for online reservations. It makes it so much more convenient. Let me tell you, I am so glad that I made Ithaca Portal, it really does make my life easier.

We bug bombed the house here in Annapolis about two weeks ago and already there are ants and everything else all over the house again. It is really annoying because I am really getting bitten just all of the time. There are lots of crickets and katydids and grasshoppers too. And spiders. The spiders are everywhere. Somehow they manage to make the longest webs you have ever seen. They make them between the cars, the fence and the cars, the house and the pool, the house and the deck. Sometimes there just seems to be spider webs hanging in midair with no explanation whatsoever. The humidity doesn’t help any either, even with the windows and doors all shut and the AC running non-stop, the bed still feels damp when you go to climb into it.

I noticed a bit of a hickup in the system this evening when I went to do the update. I think that we were down for a couple of minutes. At least I lost access from here for a minute of two. Hard to determine whose network is having a problem that quickly.

I did some basic maintanence stuff with today’s update like adding some hidden links to our other webpages for the robots to find and adding some cataloging information for this page as well. I never really do searches for us so I don’t know how easy it is to come across us on a web search. Wouldn’t that be funny if tons of people came here all of the time wondering what it could possibly be? I have actually been doing a ton of work on all of our web sites getting them to all link to each other to increase our search status across the board.

BTW, I do have an online calendar for people wondering where I am and what is going on so be sure to check that if you want to know when I am planning on being somewhere. You can go to it by clicking here Scott’s Calendar. I will be adding a button for it on the side eventually. Now that Eric and I have so many meetings all of the time it is getting more and more important to have everything that is going on on the calendar. If you are expecting me to be somewhere and you don’t see it on the calendar, remind me about it.

So today is going to be a long day. John and I went out until late last night so we ended up sleeping in accidentally. Then, my Alarm Cat went off at 9:30 this morning when Mickey took a huge dump on my pillow just inches from my face. He also crapped and puked all over the house in addition to just my pillow. That cat is retarded. Nila goes in and out the cat door all day long and has since the first day that we got it but not Mickey, oh no. He is too dainty to be able to push on anything to open it. I have a fan running in my room trying to air it out now.

HTML-Kit Beta 4 is out and even better than Beta 3. I used it all day yesterday and am downloading it today for the laptop so all of the updates after today will be written with the newer version. Dominica claimed that she was going to send me her new page to post today but I didn’t get it. So, we are still waiting for that. I am still waiting for Nate and Bob to get their page posted as well.

Well, the original plan was to head into Washington today and work at the hospital but it is so late now that I think that I am going to forgo that idea and maybe work there tonight if I come up with enough stuff to do. I have enough here to keep me busy forever anyway.

Since I am getting more and more responsibility all of the time, I now have a Nextel radio phone. I hate the two way radio stuff but I need it to stay in contact with the drivers at night.

We have actually been getting some responses about names for our mascot Llama. I am going to make the target cutoff September 5 for new ideas because I am working in Rochester that day and will be around to choose. Ok, enough for today. Maybe I will get around to installing the wireless ethernet system here today. It is going to be a pain because Verizon uses PPPoE dial-up and it is really annoying to setup on a router. Have a good one everyone.

Monday morning. Back to the grind in DC! I had some problems getting online yesterday so I had to wait until today to post all of the updates from the last few days. I needed a DSL filter for the phone line and I didn’t have one handy. So look back over the last few days to find all of the updates that have been waiting for me to get online again.

Dominica and I have really gotten addicted to the Game Boy Advance adventure game Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars. We both have been playing a ton for the last two weeks. We are most of the way through the game now – only a couple more days of play before we should be done. The game is really great and will definitely be the top pick for an adventure game on a hand held platform for you hard core King’s Quest and Monkey Islanders out there. Dominica is not able to play starting today because the GBA is mine and is down here in Annapolis with me so she has to wait until a week from today when I come back to New York to be able to play it again. Her birthday is next Wednesday and she is going to ask for a GBA for her birthday from her parents so that she can play it too. I have four games total for the GBA right now but will probably get a couple more right away if Min gets a GBA as well. Loopy has a backlit one on order from Hong Kong and is waiting patiently for that to arrive since he broke his regular one a few months ago. I am hoping to get the Nancy Drew game as soon as I finish playing Broken Sword since it should be relatively similar and that is my favorite type of one player game. I wish that they would make a port of Age or Empires for the GBA, that would be really cool. But I am sure that the platform can’t handle something that massive of anything close to it.

Phil, our director of operations down here in DC, has been on vacation as well for the last week and he returns to work this morning too. So today will be a big day for getting things done in DC. We still haven’t moved the office here since the hospital failed to be ready before Phil and I went on vacation. It had better get done this week or it is going to be really hard to schedule it. We are all getting tired of sitting around waiting for the new office anyway. The hospital had been holding us up for six weeks at least now.

I spent some time writing the new Audiophile section of SGL that will hopefully be put up soon. It is getting pretty long already but there is a lot of information that I wanted to get in there so I am being lengthy. Eventually I would like to refine it into a really good beginner’s resource for getting into High End Audio. I know that there are lots of people who have questions about how things work and need someplace to get basic answers to things.

Dominica arrived home just before 10pm last night. She will be awfully tired today as she heads back to work as well. She has been listening to the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the car and is probably just about done with it. She had already made it through two of the five CDs before she left Annapolis yesterday.

I can’t believe that we managed to make it for an entire week without there being a major catastrophe at one of the offices. I didn’t get a single call all week about work except for one from Eric panicing about a scale not working but then he called back and said that it was ok before I even had gotten the first message. So, at least I didn’t have that to worry about.

Nila has figured the cat door out, I am pretty sure. She made it back into the house all by herself. Mickey isn’t getting the hang of it and refuses to go near the thing. I guess he will just be crossing his legs and dancing around until he gets over how stubborn he is and just pushes on the door. It is so nice to finally be in the house here instead of the condo. After being in the condo for over a year, this is a real change. The AC is able to keep the place cold now. In fact it is very cold. Extremely cold. There is a lot of space here. But no TV. I think that this is the first place that I have ever lived in that didn’t have a television except for when Loopy and I lived in Pittsburgh in the Winter and Spring of 2000. We had much less then. Here at least there is radio if you need to hear the news and you can get online. The condo never had high speed Internet access so that is a huge jump. Many times more important than a television. And two bathrooms, that makes a difference too! But the space is the big thing. There is just so much space. Especially right now since there isn’t any furniture anywhere. I have a nice big bed spread out on the floor plus plenty of room for all of the books and DVDs and stuff to sit around. I even have a hamper now. That makes life a lot easier. Of course, the lack of furniture means that I am using the kitchen island to put the laptop on to type today’s update:) Dominica did buy one of those new folding chairs from Target the other day and I have moved that into my bedroom so that I have some sort of furniture in it. It is all the decor that I have. I actually put it there so that it wouldn’t walk off of the back porch. We had a fern storlen off of the front porch already two weeks ago.