Sheep Guarding Llama

Happy Easter! Today was an exciting day for Nate. Nate, Bob and Zach drove down to NYC over the last weekend as I had mentioned, and on their way back this afternoon, Nate’s car started smoking and then caught fire. Everyone is ok but the car is completely burned. We will bring you pictures of the wreak as soon as I am able to get the Polaroids back from Nate. He had the tow truck driver take some pictures before they took the car away. So now, with my car STILL stuck in DC and Nate’s burnt to a crisp, we are short two cars. Tim had to drive from Syracuse down to Liberty, NY to pick the guys up and bring them home.

I managed to get a ton of work done on the site yesterday. The 2001 Archive page (by far our largest page right now) was gone through and thoroughly modified to work with our new CSS scheme and as much of the unnecessary HTML was stripped out to reduce the size of the page. The page should download signigicantly faster now. The 2002 Archive page was updated this morning.

In addition to updating the pages, I forgot to mention yesterday that Anne’s Bio entry number thirteen is now available from her Bio page. Anne is, by far, the second largest contributor to Sheep Guarding Llama with 14 pages of content devoted just to her! A large number of our readership come here just to read her updates, I think.

So Eric made it here yesterday and we had a chance to play another game of four player AoE2 with Loopy and Bob. That game is so much fun with a large number of players. Eric and I won very quickly – collecting all the relics early on in the game. We tried to play another round later but Eric had to leave and we weren’t able to complete the game 🙁

I should also mention that all content from before March has been moved off into the appropriate archive. I am going to try to keep this main page a little smaller so that it loads faster as many people are looking at the site over a slow phone connection and we just have an absolute ton of content on here. Not significant content, mind you, but lots of it. Over the last year, this site has really grown and it is just huge now. We definitely did more with this site than we ever expected to. Everyone I know goes to this site on a regular basis (except for the guys who actually live in this house – go figure.) But once we all move away I expect that they will come to this site too to see what is going on.

Nate, Zach and Bob headed down to New York City last night to spend the weekend. I guess they don’t feel that they should be at home with their families over Easter! Just kidding. Dominica and I are going to visit my family tomorrow and her family on Sunday. Tonight we are headed to Rochester after work to hang with Josh and Phil. We are planning on going to see Panic Room tonight. That will be fun, we seldomly get to see Josh and we never get to see Phil. And, we have yet to get to meet Josh’s new woman! So maybe we will get to see her tonight – but we won’t hold our breath.

The weather is wonderful here today. The sun is shining, the snow is gone, the windows are open! I even went and turned off the thermostat in the house to be sure the heater would not kick on and I started opening windows all over the house. Spring is definitely here. The stream in the gulley behind the house is gurgeling so loudely that I can here it in the house. This is one of those days when I am very glad that I am able to work from home.

I am having one of my reading spurts again. It isn’t very often that I get a change to read fiction but I have been reading a little bit recently. I just finished David Edding’s Pawn of Prophecy which is book one of the Belgariad that Dominica got me for Christmas (five books in total.) I finished book one while I was in DC – I read it all in one day and now I am working on book two, Queen of Sorcery. I am a big fan of fantasy and science-fiction. I am glad that I am getting a chance to read a little bit. It is so seldom that I get to that I really enjoy it when the chance comes along.

I actually had a brief moment to chat with Natalie this morning. She has been working a lot at her new position at the Air Canada Center and hasn’t been able to get online to talk. Eric is the only one who has been able to find her (lazy bastard – sitting at his computer all day long.)

Anne informed me that Miranda’s birthday should have been her Golden Birthday not her Champagne Birthday. Personally, I have no idea what either of them are so I am not getting into the middle of it.

When I copied over the Archive files, Archives 2001 went from 167KB of text down to 141KB which is a pretty significant decrease and Archives 2002 went from 24KB to 25KB but included the month of February that had been moved to there.

For purposes of testing the web site here at the Llama house, we are now running an Apache web server on the same machine that I use to create the web site. It is very handy to be able to see the site running on an actual server before sending it up to be hosted on the web.

I am back from Washington, I arrived home around 1:00am this morning. I have come to be very addicted to listening to Books on CD while in the car. I normally am unable to do so because my old Buick does not have a CD player in it but I have been using Dominica’s car all week and it has both so I have been listening to quite a number of recordings. So far, my favorite has been “The Lord of the Rings” from the BBC Radio broadcasts of 1981. It is a theatrical performance so it is quite exciting. Much like watching the movie but without the ridiculous video game computer graphics!

For all of you looking for a cool web site… try out Miranda’s very own MyMiranda.Net. Loopy has been keeping some hilarious content up there… changing almost daily! So keep checking back. Whoo-hoo.

Eric is coming down to Ithaca to work today. He should be arriving shortly so I am trying to finish this update before he arrives. I have gotten positive feedback on the new look of the site – using the new CSS. It is a lot more fun to work with this way too. I am currently getting the site validated by the W3C (the World Wide Web consortium that sets the web standards) for compliance with both HTML and CSS standards. You will see the validation icons appear at the bottom of the menu area when I finally get that done.

I want to say hi to Joe who has been watching the site religiously as of late. We are going to be adding a Bio section for him (with a huge yellow button just like the rest of us have) and we will have pictures of his new house in Greece.

I have new updates from Anne but have not had a chance to get them up on the site yet. I hope to do so sometime today.

Loopy, Bob, Dominica and I had the chance to sit down and play some Age of Empires 2 with four players – two on two – the other day. What a blast that was. We had a great time. Dominica and I won but only by a very small margin. We are hoping that Josh and Eric will come down sometime soon so that we can try out playing with six players, two on two on two and really see some cool action. We might also try putting Josh on Loopy and Bob’s team and Eric on mine to even things out a little bit. What a great game that is. For anyone who hasn’t tried it – I suggest that you get out and play it. It is starting to come down in price so it is no longer all that expensive. If you have a fast computer and really think that you will get into that kind of game – I suggest jumping straight to Sierra’s Empire Earth which is mostly a high powered sequel to AoE2.

Ok, well, Eric just arrived so I have to go. Have a fun Llama day!

Today is Miranda’s Birthday. This is her Champagne Birthday (for those of you who don’t know what that is, that is when your age is equal to the date – Dominica had to explain it to me too.) So to celebrate, we are using a semi-party themed site today. We will try to change the site on a regular basis now to keep everyone paying attention.

At 10:15 this morning I am going in for my first regular doctor’s appointment in ten years! Yup, 10. I haven’t had a checkup since I was sixteen. How exciting.

Today is Nate’s 26th Birthday! We took him out to dinner at Viva Taqueria downtown.

I managed to get a bit of work done on the site yesterday. A couple of mistakes and out of date things have been updated. A bit more exciting is that I managed to get a whole bunch of code updated today. I am in the process of updating the site from old, plain, boring HTML 3.2 to new, exciting XHTML1 using CSS2. I am working on it slowly and you should see changes happening one page at a time. We will have much greater control over the look of the site now and can change some look and feel features of it very easily. This was very hard for us to do before. Until we are all finished migrated the changes throughout the site, you will notice some differences in appearence between pages. Just hang tight and eventually all of the pages will look even more uniform that before. You may also notice that the new things like the Bios button is appearing on the newly redone pages.

In addition to making the pages easier to manage and update, the new system should make downloads a little bit faster as well. We have managed to reduce the total size of our files which makes them faster to download and easier to parse in your web browser. So let us know if things are running a little bit faster.

Eric was able to stop by today. This is his second time coming to the house. It was also his first chance to play a round of AoE2 against me. I won, of course, but we had a good time. It has been quite a while since I have had the chance to play AoE2. I had started to forget how much fun it was.

Dominica has borrowed a copy of her father’s BBC Radio’s Lord of the Rings on cassette and I have been listening to it in the car. It is really cool. I have to drive out west to Batavia tomorrow (yes, in the nasty weather) which will give me five or more hours in the car to listen to more of the story. I am not too into the books but the tapes are excellent. I liked the movie a lot but it was altered a bit from the original story. I started listening to books in the car last year in the RX-7 while commuting to DC. I really like Sue Grafton’s “‘A’ Is For Alibi” and that got me hooked. It is a nice way to pass the time while you are driving. You get most of the advantages of reading but you can do it at times when you wouldn’t have been able to anything else. I enjoy it.