Sheep Guarding Llama

Ok, the big news for the day is the huge updates to the Pictures section. Nine more pictures have been added to the New Year’s Eve pics and a new page of pics from the Canadian’s trip to New York City has been added. I am still waiting for more pictures from both of these events from people. I am hoping to get some more this weekend.

I am playing at home with a new laptop and wireless internet access. It is really cool. I can work on the site from anywhere now. I am having a lot of fun with that.

Another piece of the Mandrake installation sage. Even though I managed to get the Sims installed and working on Dominica’s computer, I was never able to get 3D graphics acceleration to work – even though she has a $200 GeForce 3 Ti 200 card in her machine, just like Mandrake suggests having. So I finally had enough and I installed SuSE Linux 7.3 and was able to, in just one evening, install the entire operating system, get the Sims installed AND make the graphics card work. Whoo-hoo. No more Mandrake for me!

I passed my Server+ exam. One more thing to add to the old resume. Whoo-hoo! After taking the Server+ exam, I was all pumped so I took an additional exam and passed that as well. All in all, a pretty successful day.

I have finally reached that point in my life when it is easier to just not bother taking things back that don’t work. I have a video game that I purchased not too long ago that I had sitting around my room so that I could take it back. After it sat for a few weeks, I decided that I might as well just put it on the shelf because I was never really going to return it. So now it sits on my shelf with the rest of my video game collection. I have no idea what I will ever do with it. But at least I have it.

I don’t think that people who work near where they live ever come to appreciate how nice it can be to know that you don’t have to be away from home. It is a cold winter day, today, and I am so glad that I only have to leave the house for one small trip to Syracuse. That seems like it wouldn’t be all that important, but just knowing that I get to sleep in my own bed and site on my own chair and relax in front of my own computer is really important sometimes.

Ok, in addition to local news, Anne’s tenth Bio update is now available and her Bio page has been updated so you can connect to her last two bios entries now as well. Also, since Anne has had such a terrible time with her Hotmail account (and just because we hate Hotmail), Sheep Guarding Llama is giving Anne her own email account. You can now reach Anne at (email address removed in 2005).

This evening, Loopy and I are taking Bob and Dominica down to Binghamton to see the Lord of the Rings. This will be my third time seeing it.

I posted today’s update a little early on in the day to be sure that everyone is aware that I am back and actively working on the page. I moved the last of the 2001 material out to the archives page which is now a “complete” record of Sheep Guarding Llama in 2001 minus the month and a half that was accidentally erased at the beginning of the year. Be warned, going to the archive page will take a little time to load. Frontpage estimates a 406 second download time on a 28.8Kps modem. What can I say, it was an eventful year.

Yes, twelve days since the last update. I only arrived back in Ithaca last night so be glad that I am back to the grind already today. It has been a very long week. Today’s update will be a little bit lacking but I hope to have more accomplished by tomorrow. I am feeling pretty lazy today. First a quick schedule update… I will be in Syracuse tomorrow afternoon so don’t look for me then. I will be in Rochester on Saturday. After that I will be home again.

The trip to DC (the first leg to South Carolina) was quite an adventure. I had to drive back home to my parent’s house where I picked Eric up so we could head out last Sunday afternoon. The first two hours of the trip went ok (of course, all we did is manage to get back to where I had started from so mark that, first four hours – no progress yet!) That is when the snow started. It was ok at first, until about Binghamton. Once we headed south on 81 towards Pennsylvania is when the storm let loose. The roads would have been ok if only I had tires that weren’t bald and if there were some plows out on the road. But alas, we can’t all be blessed with inspectable tires and snow plows. For some reason, it was too much effort for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to clear Rte. 81 so we drove through deeper and deeper snow. The trip from back home to Scranton, PA should take about four hours. Well, no such luck. It took us seven. Ouch. By the time we were near Scranton, we were happy that we were moving at 25Mph because it meant that we weren’t stuck in a snow bank. We almost managed to hit an SUV in front of us that lost control and spun out, blocking the road. We slid around it and the semi following us slid to a stop facing the driving of the SUV only a few feet away. That stopped everyone behind us. Needless to say, I was worn out by the time we got to Scranton so we stopped at Perkins (Yes! I hate Denny’s, Perkins rules.) We had some coffee and decided to call it a night. It was all we could do to get out of the Perkins’ parking lot. The cashier told us how to get to a hotel and we headed in that direction. By now, the unplowed roads have snow so deep that it is above the bottom of the doors. This makes driving very hard. A couple of times we almost came to a stop due to a loss of traction. Eventually we made it to the Red Roof Inn. There was no getting into the driveway, however, so we took a good run at it and left the car stuck in the entrance of the motel and checked in. This was about nine o’clock. I asked the desk clerk what to do with the car and they said to leave it where it was and when the plow came in a few minutes, they would call me to move it. Well, they finally called me at one in the morning to move the car. That made for a long night. It was so slippery that I almost couldn’t walk to the car.

The next morning, Eric and I waited for sunrise and started driving towards DC again. By this time the roads where finally getting plowed. We made it into Annapolis around one in the afternoon and met up with John and we started driving to Anderson, South Carolina. We decided to give up driving for the day around Kannapolis, North Carolina. We finally got to the hospital in Anderson around nine in the morning on Tuesday. What a long trip that ended up being.

That is my summation of my long journey south. Needless to say, I am glad to be home. It was nice, though, to have 68 degree weather while we were down there. That made life a lot nicer!

So, after another long evening of struggling with that stupid Mandrake 8.1 install, I finally got it to work. I was lucky enough to find another person online who had the same problem as me and was able to get it working. How frustrating that was. It still does not work completely but mostly it works and the Sims is up and running. In fact, Dominica is playing it right now. What a funny game that is. It plays elevator music all of the time. That is pretty hilarious. It is a weird game. I don’t think that I could get into it but Dominica is really excited about it. I am relieved that the system is FINALLY working. Stick with SuSE or maybe Red Hat. Stay away from Mandrake, it isn’t worth it, even with the Sims.

Ok, so Josh and I ordered the second parts of our new computers (Loopy is getting excited about making his own computer now too. Bob is considering it.) Josh went out and bought a case just like mine but black and with three additional drive bays. Also an Antech, though. Our next piece (ordered and not yet arrived) is our Soyo Dragon+ motherboards. These are awesome top ‘o the line boards with all the cool features and stuff. We are very excited. These are designed to support the newest, most awesome AMD AthlonXP processors. Plus they have built in smart card support, Dolby Digital surround processors, infrared port, USB, Ethernet, etc. Very nice. And pretty affordable. Soltek makes a board based on the same chipset that is cheaper but not quite as nice. John decided to run and out order his entire system already. Not all of the parts have arrived yet but I expect it to be all together sometime next week. He went with an all aluminum case with a large plexiglass window on the side with an “etched” biohazard symbol on the window and a red neon light inside the case for effect. It is going to be one sweet computer.

I have checked the logs and Sheep Guarding Llama is getting a lot of traffic! The site is getting checked every day from all over the place, even when we aren’t posting for a little while. That is very encouraging. I can always tell when Josh is looking at the site because he is the only person using Opera 6 out there. Someone is looking at us with a Macintosh too and I have a sneaking suspicion as to who it is. Oh, tech note, Mozilla 0.9.7 is out and it has fixed the mail bug that has been in the last two versions so we are able to use it to read mail again!

I have a new Anne update from Belgium but I have been unable to post it yet. I will do my best to get it online by tomorrow.

Has anyone noticed that my updates are getting longer and longer? This didn’t seem to be very long while I was writing it but now it looks huge. I guess this is to make up for not having posted anything for so long. Hmmm…

Well, we are all back from New York City, been to our bands year end party in Caledonia and are back home in our respective countries now. I wrote the January 2nd update and didn’t get a chance to post it so here it is now. I am going to be away in South Carolina for a week at least (no definite plans yet) so don’t be looking for any updates for a little while. Sorry but it is really hard to get an update written when you are out of town.

We are happy that our Canadian contingency was able to spend the entire last week hanging with the Llamas. Miranda and Natalie have both arrived safely back in Canada today after an exciting week in New York. The Canadians, Loopy, Josh and myself went to New York City on January 3rd and 4th. Natalie has gotten impatient about me getting the Bios section up and running so she has made her own page to use until then. So now you can look her up here. I will make up a special page to tell all about our trip to NYC and show all of our pictures when I make it back home. I am in a hurry to get this done tonight since it is already 1:00 am and I have ten hours of driving tomorrow in addition to having to pack and then work all night after driving and then drive another nine hours after that. It is going to be a long week, let me tell you!

Last night, Loopy, Josh, Natalie, Dominica, Miranda and I all made it out to the Kelley’s Heroes annual end of year party. We had a good time. Josh was lucky enough to be able to crash out there back home. The rest of us had to cut the evening short and drive long distances home. Too bad we are all getting so old! I haven’t heard from Anne in Belgium recently. She has been pretty busy, I am sure, with the holidays and changing host families and all. Hopefully we will get an update from her soon.

Dominica’s back has been hurting her again so she has been working her way through my movie collection again. The highlights of the day include The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain, Charade and Chocolate. Definitely the worst thing watched was Down to You, truly a pathetic movie. The rest are great. This was my first time seeing Chocolate and it was really good. There are a lot of really good people in it.

I should warn everyone that I decided to shave my head last weekend so all of the pictures taken of me this week have me without any hair. I was staying over at Josh’s place in Rochester and we were bored so we shaved my head. Everyone seems to like the look, though, so maybe I will stick with it for a while. That wasn’t the original idea but I kind of like the look too. I wasn’t going to mention anything before the New Year’s Party so that I could surprise everyone. But I have started to forget about it and it is such a drastically different look for me that it really catches everyone by surprise. Eric was laughing hysterically at me the other day at Jay’s Dinner in Rochester so I thought that I would mention it here to warn everyone.

I did get a chance to scan in a number on pictures from the party. The NYC pics will have to follow later; I don’t have that much time. I didn’t have a chance to get all of the party pics in either but there are some here so that everyone can be sure that they really are coming. Last year we had only a hand full of pictures by the time we put stuff up on the site. This year we did much better. Tim and I got pics with our digital cameras that I have not even had a chance to check out yet. Miranda has some pics that she is going to mail to me soon. All of the pictures that we have right now are all thanks to Natalie. These are our house copies that Natalie was nice enough to get for me from the one hour photo place in Rochester before she left town. So, be sure to spend some time coming back to visit to keep looking for new pictures. I know that these are a highlight for everyone to get to see what is happening out here. Also, I managed to get a new addition into the Funny section a week ago and I forgot to mention it. So take a look there too.

Look for a big update when I return from the South. Whenever that might be. One week. Two weeks. Who knows.