Sheep Guarding Llama

Tuesday. The week is creeping by. I am exhausted. I worked in DC all day today at the hospital. I had a fairly successful meeting with Providence Hospital but have a lot of follow up work to do because of that plus I still have a lot of class work that needs to be done. One of our servers (the one serving this web site, in fact) was hacked yesterday and I had to deal with that today. That added a lot of stress and didn’t help make for a fun day. I also had to work on that awful truck mounted scale today. I hate that thing so much. We finally made the decision to remove it from the truck today completely so that is the end of that. We had determined that we couldn’t make the scale work nor when it was working was it accurate. So that made the decision a bit easier.

Dominica found a white 1988 Mazda RX-7 Convertible on eBay. She is thinking that we should have another pair of matching cars. I am totally ok with idea of having another convertible around.

I am really looking forward to going home today. Just too much has been going on. The office is way to hot and the new office has been pushed off until July 15th.

Loopy emailed me to tell me that he finally got a nice Belkin KVM switch to allow him to really utilize his secondary computers. He had been using a crappy old cheap KVM before that really didn’t work very well and made his other machines not very useful. I hope that I can get a KVM soon.

Speaking of older computers. Nate is trying out Dominica’s older computer to see if he is interested in purchasing that from her. His current computer has been crashing on a regular basis. Dominica’s old computer will also be quite a bit faster than his current machine. He doesn’t really use his computer all that much but any computer that crashes on a regular basis is a pretty big pain.

The weather is finally in the 90’s here in DC. It has been so hot for the last week. The condo with the A/C running nonstop has only been able to stay down at 76 in the coolest part of the condo and maybe 85 in the main part of it. It is pretty hard to sleep there. I am missing my well cooled home in New York right about now.

In my “spare” time, I have been working on a “Intro to HTML” text to use with a class that I hope to be teaching soon. I will try to post a working copy of the text up here in the near future so that I can get some feedback from it. I taught a class more than a year ago when Loopy and I were working at CTG and I would really like to teach another one. I really enjoyed teaching the class that I did. It was a lot of fun. I am trying to convince Dominica to teach the class with me in a “tag team” kind of format.

Over the weekend, we had a large amount of smoke here in the DC Metro area. In fact, it was so much smoke that smoke detectors were going off all over eastern Maryland. The sun was orange all day and the whole world smelled like smoke. It was really eerie. I don’t think that I have ever been somewhere with so much smoke. It turns out that the smoke was originating in Canada a few hours north of Montreal. The smoke was covering much of the Eastern US Seaboard. The newspaper here in the capital district had the front page headline this morning “Blame Canada!” I thought that it was appropriate to mention this on the website. Everyone sing along… “Blame Canada, blame Canada… its not a real country anyway.” Hee hee. Apparently, people were calling the Maryland fire departments and asking if they could put out the fire or do something to suppress the smoke. As you can tell, the population of Maryland is not the brightest population in the world. The fire departments here were getting in excess of forty calls per hour about the smoke. They finally had to put out an emergency message on cable to let everyone know what was going on. It is really amazing how much smoke that forest fire was able to produce.

Monday. I am working out of the condo today. It is good to have a day to oneself. I was lucky enough to have “As Time Goes By” come on MPT at 2:30 pm. That is my favorite TV show ever.

Our ever popular girl in Belgium returns home today. Anne has been away for so long that is just seems natural to have her living in Europe. Now we only have her for a couple of weeks before she is off to go to school in Wisconsin. What a change from Europe that will be.

I am writing today while waiting for an incredible long download to happen over AOL dial-up which is all I am to use here at the condo. Once we move to the house, we will have high-speed Verizon ADSL service with wireless access from all over the house. That will be such an improvement. I am downloading some tools that I need to do some work for my Systems Analysis and Design class. I have to make some diagrams and they are pretty hard to make if you don’t have the right tools. So, I am downloading some trials of some different tools that will get me through the class. I think that they are going to be fun to work with.

Dominica headed back to New York today. It was nice having her come down and visit for four days. She arrived home around 10:00 pm. She listened to Sue Grafton’s “F is for Fugitive” on the way down and “G is for Gumshoe” on the way up. Before she left, we spent most of the day doing some more painting around John’s new house.

We spent most of the day painting John’s new house on Deep Creek. After painting all day, John, Michelle, Dominica and I headed out to Copelands for dinner and then went to see Men in Black 2. MIB2 was pretty good but it was really short and it lacked a lot of the involving storyline from the first film. A lot of the plot explanation was breezed over and just commented on. I think that some more development there would have really made for a better film. Only one line of dialogue spoke to the fate of Linda Fiorintino’s character. I was hoping that she would have been a primary character in this one. Lara Flynn Boyle returned from obscurity to play the hot chic in this film. I don’t think that she has done anything good ever and nothing at all recently. The only big movies that I can mention her being in are Threesome with a bunch of other has-been’s or almost-were’s and The Temp starring Timothy Hutton. Who? Exactly. But I own both of them. Sad but true. At least Threesome had an interesting story line.

TGIF. I am looking forward to a relaxing weekend of not writing any papers. And also of not needing to work on the truck mounted system. We just got the call from the office saying that the system was working at we had fixed it. That is a big relief. I am tired of problem cropping up with that system. John is happy with the system. Having the computer stolen earlier this week was a real setback but it did result in one big problem being solved so I am sort of happy about that. Of course, Eric is short a computer now and that doesn’t help anything. One thing at a time, I guess.

The weather has finally broken and it is now bearable to go outside. It is still early and it is really warm but it is comfortable and you don’t break out into a sweat just by looking out the window. The air conditioning still can’t keep up but it is a few degrees cooler now than it was last night. Down to a warm, but acceptable, room temperature.

John got his 35th Anniversary Camera SS Convertible out of storage yesterday and has been driving it around. His younger brother Adam was in town and hung out with us for a little while yesterday while we were out looking at John’s new house that he just bought down on the Chesapeake Bay. I am trying to talk him into getting a Conrad-Johnson stereo system with B+W 805 Monitors. I think that that would look and sound good in that house. Nothing like nice, warm tubes.

Dominica fell asleep while watching Evil Dead 2 last night so she is starting to watch it again this morning and is eating cold Dominos Pizza. We always order Domino’s Thin Crust with onion and green peppers and a side of the cinnamon sticks when we are down here.

My favorite line from ED2 is when Bruce Campbell sticks a knife through his own hand and says “That’s right, whose laughing now?” But it really doesn’t compare to some of the great lines that he delivers in ED3:AoD. The “Farewell to Arms” reference is pretty bad, look for it. Ok, Dominica loved ED 1 and 2 so much that she decided to move onto watching Army of Darkness as well. ED3 is definitely the best of the movies. Did anyone notice that Bridget Fonda is in ED3? Just for a minute. I hope that someday, Raimi will take the thee Evil Dead movies and edit them together with a new DTS sound track and make a single awesome movie. Without access to the original sound, it is hard to put them together because in ED3, Campbell talks over a bit of the movie. FYI: The actual title of ED3 is Bruce Campbell vs. The Army of Darkness. They finally put that title on the latest DVD release of the movie.