Sheep Guarding Llama

I have been neglecting my duties and am five days behind on updates. I know that Joe (our Llama of the month) has been out of town for the last week so he won’t notice until he gets back. Dominica and I traveled to DC on Friday and returned on Saturday morning in time to visit with some of her relatives in Elmira on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday, Josh came down from Rochester and looked at a house in Groton with Min, Loopy and I. It had a lot of potential but we decided against it. It was just too small and run down.

My bright yellow Mazda PR5 is back on the road, finally. I can barely remember how to drive standard after all this time! My Buick is at my parents place and will be gone in a week or so. If no one decides to buy it by then, it will be donated to the VOA or something for the tax write off. If anyone is interested, $700 and it is yours.

Last week, new parts for my computer came in and I have been working hard to get everything to work but it just isn’t going to. I have already burned up one processor playing with it and have to send all kinds of parts back that are bad. It is all very frustrating. I have some new parts on order already. We will see if that helps anything.

Nate, Zach and Bob are out in Boston today. I guess that the school has Spring Break or something now. I thought that that was just two weeks ago. But what do I know. I don’t understand this school calendar at all.

I am finally doing something about my degree. I am going to my first mentoring session at Empire State College on Monday. Hopefully I can start some classes right away. I want to finish up as soon as possible. No point in waiting. It has been way too long already.

Eric is off to Anderson, SC today. He flew out of Rochester at 4:55 and will arrive late this evening in Atlanta and drive to Anderson. He is just working there for one day. He is supervising the programming of a scale. Very exciting stuff. He is travel man the next two weeks. Next week he and I are traveling all over the south.

This week I am working a super exciting job in Owego where I am installing Windows 2000 on desktops or something for Compaq. It is really easy stuff that is supposed to last all week but I am expecting will only last for two days or so. If they don’t cancel it before I even get there. That is the way that it normally works. If I get to actually do the work, this will be my third time working for a fortune 500 company. Good for the old resume. Not very exciting, however.

Well, it has been busy as I said so I will keep it short. Talk to you all soon.

Dominica’s interview went really well and they offered her a position yesterday. She is very excited. It is a big relief to know that she has a job all set. She is very excited about the job since everyone seems so nice and the environment seems to professional.

Miranda made us all (ok, she made them for Loopy but we all grab them before he can eat them) some cookies – oatmeal chocalte chip. The great thing about oatmeal cookies is, since they are made with real oatmeal, then it is okay to eat them for breakfast! So I did. Thanks Miranda!

My replacement laptop arrived yesterday and I have it all set up now. I am quite happy with it. I tried installing two operating systems on it before but the restore disks from Compaq were bad and I couldn’t get Windows XP back onto the computer. Compaq had such a hard time getting the disks to work that they decided to just send me a replacement computer. I thought that that was pretty funny. Whatever. I have it now and it works just fine. So good deal.

Dominica is interviewing all day today. She has an eight hour interview so that should be fun. Loopy made it home from North Bay around 1:30am after driving for thirteen hours in terrible weather. Eric is working out of Ithaca today. My new laptop is in today and will hopefully work as expected (oh boy.) It is going to be used a presentations when Eric and I head south in a couple of weeks. I am going to try to get my Mazda PR-5 registered today and on the road later this week. It needs to be taken into the shop before I can really drive it anywhere. Maybe by the weekend it will be ready. Dominica is really hoping that it will be ready soon since she is so tired of carting me around everywhere.

I have been playing Tropico a little bit. It is fun. Nothing like AoE2 or anything but it is nice to have a one player game to play sometimes too. It is funny, when I was younger I was so into video games yet I never found any that I really liked. Now that I am older – I am not as into them but I am able to pick out fun games easily and find ones that I really enjoy. It is easier, I am sure, because games are of much higher quality now than they used to be. They now have teams of developers, artists, musicians and writers who put these things together. Not just one guy who has to fit everything that he can write onto a floppy disk.

Today is pretty light on new content. It has been a pretty busy day. There is a new Bio update from the ever popular Anne available from her Bio page as usual. Tomorrow, be sure to look for her first ever “Letter to the Editor” which I hope to have posted sometime in the morning. It is nice to have someone writing a real letter to us again. It has been a long time. Of course, once again, we must resort to harrassing the poor editor who has so little time to work on this page. (Everyone feel sorry for the editor here.) I try my best, you know.

Ok, take care. I will write to all of you Llamas tomorrow.

Another faithful update. You guys are going to become spoiled with me doing these huge updates everyday. No one is going to know what to do once I head off to DC and don’t do any updates for a couple of days. I actually find it much easier to do the updates now that I am using WinSCP and Chami’s HTML-Kit because I just work on a copy of the site that is on my computer that is in my closet and I don’t have to use that super slow Frontpage and connect to the web server and work on it there. Of course, I have to daily sync the two so that you guys actually get the update but that isn’t much hassle. This system allows me to easily add stuff to the site all throughout the day whenever I am thinking of it instead of taking the time to open the copy on the web server each time that I want to do anything. This is definitly the better solution.

Ok, today’s website of the day is pretty cool. I think that you are all going to really like this one. It is here. But it is too funny so I am not going to tell you what it is and will just let you go there. You can find out on your own.

The new version (Build 292 Alpha 3) of HTML-Kit came out today so for all of you web developers out there…it is time to go and get it.

Dominica made me go shopping with her all day yesterday in Syracuse because she has her third interview tomorrow and she needed a new outfit. So, she bought me the video game Tropico as a treat for having to have shopped all day. It is a pretty cool game. You play a dictator on a small tropical island. It is single player only though. There is a new expansion pack out now but I haven’t tried that yet. We also picked up the Microsoft Sidewinder Game Voice that allows you to talk to other people through the computer while you are playing a video game (it only works on Microsoft systems) but it is pretty cool and it is now buy one get one free. So it is a good deal now. It is $50 but if you get two then it is cool. It comes with a nice set of head phones with a microphone and a base unit that allows you to just press a button to talk to different people. It is pretty neat. I think that Loopy and Josh will probably split on a pair of them so that we can all talk while we are playing AoE2 or Quake.

Eric is planning on being up here tomorrow. He has been working out this way quite a bit recently. Loopy is driving back from North Bay today. Miranda’s computer is now dead (in Intel Heaven – or something like that is how Loopy put it.) Always something. Computers suck don’t they?

Well, pretty short update today since I was pretty busy yesterday. Hopefully tomorrow’s update will be up to par:)

I am going to start right off today with the web site of the day. This one isn’t so much weird as just a nice funny site. Tedd Goff is a cartoonist who makes cartoons that kinds of cross the gap between Dilbert and the Far Side. His stuff isn’t as funny as either of those but it is pretty good. You can find his work at www.TedGoff.com. You can also buy his work there to add to your company newsletter or whatever. I found him because he is associated with the Opera Web browser.

Speaking of the Opera web browser. You will most likely notice that we have added some advertising for Opera to our web page. We aren’t getting paid for it, we are just trying to increase our readers awareness to alternative browsers. Opera is free and now with version 6.01 (yes, Josh, you need to go and get the most recent one now) it is even better than before. This latest version includes some updates to the overall look and feel. Opera is very functional and extrememly fast. For those of you working over a phone connection, you really need to switch to a fast browser like Opera or Mozilla as thier performance blows Internet Explorer away. Over cable or DSL it isn’t as noticeble. But it is still faster. I have been using Opera since verion 4 and have always been happy with it. I use Mozilla mostly now but I use everything from time to time. I also use Konqueror a lot but that is only available on UNIX platforms that use the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Which, by the way, just went to version 3.0 this week.

Dominica is addicted to the Sims again. She has added the first three expansion packs and will probably install Vacation today. We have noticed, however, that as you add expansion packs the game really begins to slow down. It is unfortunate that they designed the game to not use the graphics card in the computer to help in rendering the environment so the main processor is stuck doing everything. It really takes a toll on the system – even though it is nice that you can play this game on every machine everywhere because of it – it also means that you have to have a totally amazing machine to get it to run well. Dominica is currently running a PIII 866/133 with 256MB of memory and the game is still having a hard time keeping up. With Vacation added, it will most likely be even slower. With the new expansion packs added, especially Hot Date, The Sims is a little less for children – if you catch my drift. The game is completely a computerized soap opera.

Nate and Bob were expecting to have company this weekend but noboday came up so it is a quiet weekend here. Josh is thinking of coming down to visit and my Aunt and Uncle’s family is expected to be here this afternoon. Loopy is in North Bay today. We won’t see him again until Monday night. He has been working at Cornell and they let him work for only an hour yesterday so that he could drive up to Canada earlier in the day.

I want to get this site to having at least 100 people looking at it on a single day. And I don’t want that to just be a couple of us going to it a million times each (ok, I guess that that would just be ten of us at ten times each…) I need you guys to help me come up with some ideas to get people to come to our site here. Somebody email me with something – ok?

Dominica’s computer has started acting up and it appears to be a dying DVD-ROM drive so she is now in the process of installing a new 16x DVD-ROM drive and a new TDK CD-RW drive that she bought today. This is her first venture into the world of tearing apart a computer.