Sheep Guarding Llama

Another exciting Llama day. Commodore 64 emulation was popular again today. Barbie and Below the Root are the popular games. Loopy bought a used Sega Dreamcast today. It only cost him $40. So now we have two Game Boy Colors, one Game Boy Advance (but I have one on my Christmas list too), one Atari 2600, two Playstations, one Nintendo 64, one Super NES and one Nintendo Game Cube. That is pretty amazing considering we almost never play console video games in the house.

I did a bit of work on the new Bios section of the site today. Hopefully we will have a link to the Bios section here sometime within a week (maybe before I have to go down to DC.) In the meantime, you can check out the work in progress on Anne Koplinka-Loehr’s Bio page. She tells me that she will be sending me pictures from Belgium very soon so everyone can see where she is. Anne is one of our most faithful readers and she also got her first entry into the Funny Stuff section entered just yesterday.

The weather is unbelievably warm for a December in New York. Pretty much no one is needing to wear a coat yet. Has anyone watched their copy of White Christmas yet? I am betting on there being no snow for Christmas but probably a bit for New Year’s as there always is.

I have a DVD player working in my bedroom now so we can say “Goodbye!” to any productivity that I might have had previously 🙂 Maybe now, with a player in my room, I can finally watch all of those DVDs that Josh and Phil have been lending to me. They have been piling up on my shelf. I never have the time to go sit in the den and watch a movie so this should help. I already watched one movie in here which is as much as I have watched movies in the house since we moved in!

The good news of the weekend is that I finally have possession of my Mazda PR5! It is so nice to finally have my new car. Of course, I only have it until today. Today I have to drive the new PR5 back to Rochester to put it into storage for the winter. My old Buick runs fine to get my through the winter and then I can bring out the new Mazda once the snow has melted. It is going to be rough giving up my baby so soon though. The RX-7 is done in the shop although they weren’t able to fix any of the things that they broke the last time that it was in there. Never, ever use Ontario Mazda and Honda. What a horrible dealership. They refused to sell me a car and broke my RX-7. I am terribly unimpressed.

Opera 6 is now available for a free download. Opera and Mozilla are the best ways to look at Sheep Guarding Llama. Please help us so NO to Microsoft browsing technology. Well over three million downloads of Opera have taken place from one of their American mirrors alone. This is amazing considering Opera is a Finnish Norwegian company. I would also like to commend our own, local Rochester Gas & Electric (RG&E) for providing one of the free FTP servers for Opera.

Kelley’s Heroes had our last parade on Saturday afternoon. It was a little cold but not too bad. We had snow and ice last year for the same parade so we were happy. No more marching until next season now.

Not much other news for three days without a Llama update. Look for our news Bios section coming soon.

[Editor’s note from 2007: In 2007 dad went back to his archive of video and converted the parade video from this weekend to Xvid and I posted it to OurMedia to make it available.  You can now get video information about that video from SGL’s 2001 Christmas in Caledonia Parade with Kelley’s Heroes page.  The video also includes a little footage of the PR5 immediately after it was picked up from the showroom.]

Last night was one of those rare times (three times in the last year) when I went to bed without the sound of whirring computers around me. It was raining outside and I wanted to be able to listen to the rain so I shut down the entire office that is in my bedroom. A total shut down has only happened two other times that I can remember since we first moved into the house on Sanctuary Drive more than a year ago. I have become so accustomed to the sounds of fans and disk drives that I expect it when I sleep. Even when I stay at Josh’s apartment, I sleep next to his computer that stays on all night. The sound has become quite comforting to me. But last night I just wanted silence so I walked around the room and shut down all three computers that were running. The only lights that were left were four activity indicators in bright green from my switch, one power light on my phone, the soft blue glow from my cheap Aiwa stereo that I turned against a wall in make as dark as possible and the tiniest light from my alarm clock that I covered with a magazine. It was kind of eerie. I noticed that I laid in bed awake for a long time, the sounds of the rain outside on the trees in the woods behind my house was refreshing and it didn’t lull my to sleep like the computers do. It was like listening to one of those nature tapes where they record rain falling in a park. Only it was live and had the added bonus of the feel of cool mist blowing on my face through the open window. I slept well, though, once I fell asleep. Very relaxed and calm.

So, today I am going to talk to a surgeon about having my wisdom teeth removed. Leanne thinks it is funny since I always bragged about not having to get them out. Now they are taking all four of them out, now that I am older. So they are probably going to have to knock me out because it is going to be a big deal. I should find out the details of everything today. I am not too excited about all of that.

Last night, Loopy, Dominica and I had an in house Age of Empires 2 match up. It was pretty exciting. I won, of course. It is a really cool game to play with other people. It did last over 4.5 hours, though. That is a little bit long for a single game. What a great way to waste away an evening!

I have a question for the community at large… Why is the Arial font so much larger than Times Roman? Shouldn’t they all be about the same size? Wouldn’t that make more sense?

The following is brought to you by Natalie, or non-resident Canadian…

“I’m not a lumberjack or a fur trader. I don’t live in an igloo or eat blubber or own a dog sled. And I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada, although I’m certain they’re really, really nice. I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it about, not aboot. I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack. I believe in peacekeeping, not policing. Diversity, not assimilation. And that the beaver is a truly proud and noble animal. A toque is a hat, a chesterfield is a couch. And it is pronounced zed, not zee, zed. Canada is the second largest landmass, the first nation of hockey and the best part of North America. My name is Natalie, and I am Canadian!” – Molson Canadian commercial.

Natalie has supplied me with a bio and some pictures so we will try to have some of that up for you by the end of the weekend.

Anne wanted me to point out that she reads the site everyday in Europe and that she represents our Flemish contingency even though she does not speak Flemish. What is Flemish anyway? Shouldn’t they speak Belgish or something? Belgiumese perhaps. Anyway, we don’t wont to alienate our Old World audience by focusing too much on the “World Next Door”.

I really like the new flag graphics. They add a lot of ZING to the site! I moved the first five days of November over into the archives early because it has been a busy month and with so much text and pictures on the page, it was getting cumbersome to download for a lot of people. Of course, now the archive is positively huge. It takes 371 seconds to download the 2001 archive currently with a 28.8kb/s connection. But, this page is moving along much better now.

The Mazda PR5 that I have had on order since August is now in the shop. I am really excited but all I am going to do is pick it up on Saturday morning and drive it straight to my parent’s house and winterize it. So 50 miles tops with it. How depressing. The RX-7 is still in the shop and it is never getting fixed, I fear. At least I got the PR5 that I wanted, 2002 Vivid Yellow, 5-Speed, Sunroof, CD & Cassette, all of the options. Costing a fortune but it is supposed to be pretty much a one of a kind deal since I am getting a demo that they don’t even know whether or not they are going to make.

If anyone is interested in purchasing a CD of the music played by Nate, Josh, Joe and I, I was told that you can find information on it at www.cal-mum.com. So check us out and pick up a copy of our CD! What a great Christmas gift for someone.

So, my friend Natalie, the blonde Canadian, told me that she has been showing our web site to her friends in Canada. Maybe we have managed to start a Canadian contingency to replace the Horseheads one that seems to have disappeared some time ago (at least they never email us anymore 🙁 ) I suppose that we will have to start including more Canadian friendly content like things spelled colour, theatre, blonde, etc. Or maybe have the site available in French, eh? If you would like to get a hold of Natalie and make fun of her for being Canadian, you can email her at (email address removed as inactive in 2005.) I am also trying to talk her into writing up a bio for us so that we can start our new Bio section that Anne (who is hiding from us in Belgium) suggested some time ago.

Notice that I moved everything older that November over to the archives page. The month of November takes more than three times as long as the entire year’s archive to download because of the pictures that we have started using so liberally. I guess that we figure that almost our entire audience is connecting using a high speed connection at this point and will be doing okay with our really cool content.

Loopy is now officially addicted to Age of Empires II. He is the fifth one to get addicted. He has been staying up until six in the morning the last two days playing it.

Today is another, “Scott hates computers” day. I spent the entire day attempting to install Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Red Hat 7.2 onto the same computer. What a pain. The Win98 sort of worked, the Red Hat was good to go and the Win2K was completely useless and killed the Win98 install in the process. So, I had to rethink my strategy and now the machine is going to be just Win98 and Red Hat. Plus I attempted a hard drive install yesterday that is driving me nuts and another one today that went much better. Altogether, though, about fifteen hours in the last two days and not very much to show for it. I did buy another computer desk today and that makes me happy. I also ordered six new computer books and that makes me happy too. Loopy and I finally convinced Dominica to switch to Linux instead of Win98 and so she is starting to make that transition (after reading Neil Stephenson – I think that he actually convinced her) and that is very cool. I will manage to convert everyone even if I have to do it one person at a time.

In addition to all of the problems that I have had at home (and Loopy too, his computer has intercepted two viruses in the last few days) some of you may have noticed that not all of the pages on our web site here are working properly. Some of the pages are displaying incorrectly all of a sudden so I am looking into that as well. Always something happening, just when you think that you finally have things under control.

If you were in Ithaca today, you would have seen some of the most beautiful and unusual weather ever. Sunset this evening was during a light rain with a heavy haze but the sun managed to squeeze some yellow and orange rays into the mist very brightly making for an amazing orange glow to the entire world. The view from my room out into the woods of Varna was really amazing. Loopy and I spent twenty minutes just looking at how cool it was.

Well, I hope that you are all enjoying your turkey leftovers. Nate and Bob are away in Rochester at a conference so all is quiet here in Ithaca. Loopy and I are pretty much left to our own geek devices. Ha ha. And our bad puns.

Well, it would appear that I have successfully managed to fix the errors on the web pages. They were, as Loopy expected, caused by poor code generation by Frontpage 2000. So I had to edit the pages by hand. I checked them all in Mozilla. If anyone notices any pages not working properly, let me know.