February 23, 2001: Eating at the Boatyard Grill

Sorry gang, it has been a busy and eventful week and it has kept me from being able to do much on the site. This weekend isn’t going to be any better. I will try to be back on top of things by the beginning of next week.

Nate and I had the opportunity to return to the Boatyard Grill in the West End last night. Last time that we were there with Bob and Tim, we all decided that we were going to be going there at least every other Thursday night because the place was so kickin’. Well, last night was just as good, the food is still incredible and the service was the best. We were very pleased again. They are definitely living up to their “Four Llamas” rating! I suggest that everyone goes there and checks the place out, you will be impressed.

February 20, 2001

Well, today was a busy day for our site! Now that we are back up and running faster than ever with our new look, we seam to be attracting a crowd. It is nice to see people checking us out, we hope that you like what you see. Not much news for the day. More new stuff coming soon, we promise. Loopy has agreed to putting the e.p.z. library up here for you all to enjoy. So, hopefully the conversion to MP3 will happen soon.

February 19, 2001: Web Design

Ok llamas, I decided that after having had our servers down for part of the weekend, we should go to the new format that I have been working on. You llamas out there will have to let us know whether or not you think that it is cool. Loopy and I think that the new look of the site totally rocks! Nate and Bob haven’t had a chance to see it yet, it will be a surprise. We have a brand new digital camera so don’t be surprised if cool new images start coming soon. I don’t get too much opportunity to do web design so this was kind of fun. Most of my personal work on the web includes compliance issues and server administration. It is fun to do design sometimes.

You can check out one of the pages that Loopy and I have made at www.WasteWatcher.org. This was our first commercial site and we still administer it today. In addition to the new look of our site, we are hoping that our new format allows for easier navigation of the site. We have noticed that many of our surfers never noticed that we had links going to more pages. So now, everything is in text over there on the left so that you can find it easily. And, the average download time of this page should be screaming fast compared to the old graphic one. We have a fast connection here in our Ithaca office and sometimes we forget that many of you are still using dial-up connections to get to the internet 🙁  So, this should make visiting our site more enjoyable for many of you. Plus, new upgrades were added to our web servers this weekend and there should be a slight reduction in latency from our new drive subsystem (in case you were wondering what gets done around here on the weekends.) For you gear-heads out there, we added a new RAID 5 subsystem to our main web server as well as eased back on our bandwidth throttling for BITS [Later, SGL]  so that our users get a more pleasent surfing experience. For you high-bandwidth users, you should notice a significant increase in speed on the site and everyone should notice a little bit of reduced latency (the time it takes from the time you ask for the page until the time that you start to get it.) Plus, our new page design loads much, much faster than the old one.

Another exciting weekend for Loopy, Joey Llama (Bob Winans) and I as we drove down to Washington, DC to work. Loopy and Bob got introduced to my favorite bar tender, JJ, who works at Island Jim’s in Brookland. If you are ever in DC and have a hankering for unusual seafood dishes, that is the place to try. Tell JJ that Scott from “Sheep Guarding Llama” sent you! JJ is there on Tuesday through Saturday evening after about 5:00 pm. Island Jim’s is closed on Mondays. Most of our weekend was spent working at the office at Washington Hospital Center. The servers that run our lovely site are located there.

February 19, 2001

The current big house movies are still Coyote Ugly and Bring It On. Neither of these movies have anything but cuties galore as redeeming qualities. Bad plots, directing, everything…but so much fun to watch. Of course, Coyote Ugly has Leann Rimes dancing on the bar so I have to be addicted to it! I have the single of “Can’t Fight the Moonlight ” sitting on my desk and I listen to it all the time. Leann rules!

We have a new section now! Thanks to Loopy, we now have a downloads section. Right now there is only one thing to download. For those of you who stay up late enough to watch Conan, you will be familiar with Triumph, the poop on dog. Well, one year ago today, DJ Loopy wrote a tribute song to Triumph because he is so cool. The song has become a staple of all parties thrown by SGL. It was first played, Feb. 20th last year at Loopy and my “Empty Apartment” party that we threw the day before we moved out of our townhouse in Rochester to move down here to beautiful Ithaca. The song was a huge hit and everyone has been requesting copies of it. Well, now you can finally listen to it. If you don’t understand the song, I suggest watching Conan until you see Triumph once or twice and then it will be obvious. Or, go on the web (obviously you can get to the web) and look up some clips using words like, “Triumph, Conan, poop, Westminster.” And as always, the best search engine is www.Google.com, who run their shop completely on Linux servers.

Soon, we hope to be bringing you more and more cool stuff to download. Mostly it will be music, I am sure. I will see what I can do about convincing Loopy to let our band, “Evil Petting Zoo” release some of their catalog onto MP3 format so that all of you llamas can listen to our music. We have been played on 90.5 WBER in Rochester so we must be pretty awesome. But no matter, I am sure that Bob and Nate will be happy to grace us with some tunage at some point, regardless.

There is also a rumor that the Loopmeister might be whipping up some gaming excitement for you all. I have already had the opportunity to play some of the crap, err I mean cool stuff that he has made. I will see what I can do about getting some online and downloadable stuff for you guys.