Sheep Guarding Llama

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 A couple of mistakes and out of date things have been updated.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.

What a struggle it has been to be able to keep the site up to date! We had a major emergency with our web server this past weekend while I was working in DC and we are no longer able to connect to it to work the way that we have in the past. We used to use a Microsoft technology called Routing and Remote Access Server that allowed us to work (very slowly) with files on our web server as if they were on our local machines. But that died and we were not able to recover it so I spent the weekend coming up with another viable solution.

As it turns out, it was all for the best and we are now using an open software package called OpenSSH on Windows that allows us to do many of the functions that we could before even faster. So we are now learning how to use that effectively. It allows us to work faster than we did before but it is a little different so we just have to get used to it. This new technology will also allow Josh to be able to connect here and he might even be convinced to do some updates.

I should also mention, for those who actually take an interest in our web server, that in making the switch from the MS VPN to the OpenSSH system, we have gone from an average processor load at about 12% to a little less than 1%. That should help a little with response time since the system isn’t so busy. We are also hoping (but not counting any chickens yet) that we will be able to add a second processor to the system sometime in the next six months. It won’t make too big of a difference but it will be noticeable sometimes.

I got tired of the slow download times on this main page so I have added, finally, the 2002 Archives page now so you can go look at January hiding there. February was pretty slow so I will keep it around for a little while. Also, I know that there is a bad link in the Bios section to my website – I will get to it as soon as I can. And yes, I know that the buttons look funny, that was the idea.

The Llamas would like to wish a happy birthday to Amanda who turns the big 24 today. And, don’t forget, that Nate turns 26 tomorrow. And of course, last but not least, Miranda is turning 22 on the 22nd. So don’t forget about her either. (For those wondering – Josh is next up on the birthday list in early April.) He is pushin’ thirty now! We are hoping that Mary and Jocelyn will be coming down this week to hang out with us. We haven’t seen them in over a year (which means that they have practically been able to escape from being mentioned on here!)

Not a lot of Llama news. I have been working in DC a lot and Dominica was nice enough to spend the weekend with me this past weekend. We had a really good time and even got to go out for St. Patrick’s day in Annapolis.

Eric is due to be in town tomorrow after working at Arnott-Ogden hospital in Elmira.

Loopy is doing a little web design work on the side (contact him if you need a site made) and you can see his latest creation at www.lifestylepropertiesithaca.com. He is also working at Cornell for the next while (3-6 months) working on a SQL Server/Access web application for them. Not very interesting but work is work and the market is better but not good yet.

I am going to start a new thing of having weird websites that you never would have thought to have gone to if I hadn’t told you to. Today’s web site is www.pez.com.

Today is also going to be the first day that I attempt to run this page through an HTML optimizer to speed up the download time a little bit. We will see if it makes any difference.

Today is the two year anniversary of Loopy and I moving to Pittsburgh to begin the Waste Watcher project there at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

[Ed. – The server stayed online, to some capacity, until it was finally replaced in 2007.  And the second processor was never added.]

You are never going to believe this but there is actually a Bios button over there on the left now! I haven’t made the effort to propagate the button onto other pages yet so it is only accessible from this main page right now. In the future I hope to me making changes that make the pages load faster as well as have the buttons be identical on every page. But until then, you can just keep going there from this page. Also, I have begun adding the new Tech Info page which is just boring info about the technical side of the web site for anyone who actually cares.

Dominica is working on having her own web page very, very soon and I will let you all know when it is finally up and running.

Sorry about falling behind again with the site, it is hard to keep up when I am out of town and then back for just a couple of days. I am leaving for Schenectady again first thing in the morning but this time I am only going for one or two nights at most so I will be back in Ithaca no later than Wednesday. I am looking forward to wrapping up this project. It has really been going on for quite some time. I am happy for the work, though, it has really beed a life saver for all of us. Today I put some work into my computer setup at home… I have added the four port KVM switch in so that I can have more computer running at the same time without taking up any additional space. I didn’t have great luck when connecting to my flat panel monitor, though, so I am going to re-do the entire setup to use my traditional Compaq CRT that is sitting behind me. In the long run, that will probably be a better system anyway. I just hating setting everything up and then taking it all down again.

In addition to my regular work in Schenectady, I am working for Anthony’s Canal Side Restaurant both tomorrow and Tuesday nights – so I will be really busy while I am out there. But, at least there is more free food in store for me.

Dominica is seriously considering entering the accelerated Nursing program at the University of Rochester Med Center in a year. This pretty much means that Min, Loop and I will be relocating back to Rochester – but who really knows.

Min and I went out to brunch today at Stella’s in Collegetown. They have the most amazing brunch and today they had a really good specialty menu. We both got the Mushroom and Acorn Squash Bisque and Portobello Fries for starters and our main meals were French Toast with Brie and Pear Sauce. It was the most amazing meal. We had so much food that we couldn’t even begin to eat it all. Min ended up bring quite a bit of it home with her.

Min, Loopy and I finished watching the first season of Father Ted today. The last two episodes were a big improvement over the earlier ones. Loopy left after that and Min and I watched The Tailor of Panama with Geoffery Rush and Pierce Brosnan. Do not watch that movie. It was awful. After that Bob and Loopy watched Empire Strikes Back downstairs while Min and I finished watching Shipping News after months of having been halfway through it.