Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Well, yesterday was the biggest shopping day of the year so, as you can imagine, I was out shopping with everyone else. Normally I avoid shopping on the day after Thanksgiving but something compelled me to go out and shop yesterday. I did manage to find quite a number of video game bargains, though. I want to congratulate Microsoft on a decision that they made with Age of Empires I Gold Ed. It seems that if you purchase this game, you can install the game on any number of computers for use with multiplayer games as long as there is a purchased game CD for every three players. That means that three people in my house can play against each other online with only having bought one copy of the game. I thought that that was really nice. Plus the game was only $20 at EB anyway! I also managed to pick up the new game Nations at EB for only $10. I have been wanting to try that game out for a while. Eric and Dominica have both started playing AoE2 so we will be playing against each other very soon. Josh has promised to pick up a copy of the game this week.

So, AT&T has been calling the house so often that I finally just shut off all of the ringers on the phones here. No one ever calls for me and I am the only one home so I have stopped answering the phone. (So if you call here and only ever get the answering machine for the next week, you will know why.) I am pretty much home alone all week so I am (in Bob’s own words) “running around in everyone else’s rooms and farting on their clothes.”

I did manage to get quite a bit added to our Funny Email section, in fact, it is almost twice the size that it was before. Everything is expanding a little bit at a time.

Well, I hope that everyone had a happy Thanksgiving yesterday. I know that a lot of people are out there eating turkey today and tomorrow yet. Hope that you can all handle all of the turkey. We had eleven people manage to show up for our seventh annual Llama Thanksgiving dinner at Nick Tahou’s. Emily managed to come in from Denver and Mandy came in from Albany and Dominica and I drove straight in from Ohio so there was some serious effort put into getting everyone there.