Sheep Guarding Llama

Tonight is the big New Year’s Eve Party!  This is the party that Sheep Guarding Llama was originally created to announce.  Strangely, I didn’t update the site with any information about the party tonight until a full seven years later!  (Post created on December 28, 2007.)

Andy, Bob, Nate and I are all living in the house at 8-1 Sanctuary Drive, Ithaca, New York.  This is our first (and only) holiday season that will be spent here in this house.  It is also the first time that anyone of any of our friends has their own place that qualifies as a real “entertaining” house.  So we decided that we needed to through a real, blow-out holiday party.

The party tonight set the tone for the next several years.  The party was semi-formal and everyone was really dressed up.  The house members had just gone together and purchased a small, round hot tub that we placed in the garage and had all heated up and ready to go for the party.

We had been hoping to be able to get some digital pictures of the party and I bought a $99 digital camera at Walmart that turned out to not be any good and we took it back.  We weren’t expecting much of the camera but we got even less out of it.  It’s 640×480 resolution was horrible and it couldn’t take a picture even at that resolution worth anything.

The most famous moment of the evening was Matt Hoch playing piano and singing several of his own tunes for us like “Look at my Ass”.  Once he had had enough to drink, Andy joined Matt and sang along with some impromptu piano tunes making up the words as he went.

By the end of the night the hot tub was full.  It sounded silly at the time but a lot of the late partiers went for it.  The garage at Sanctuary was pretty small and we didn’t have much space for much else in it.  All we used it for was the hot tub and additional storage.  We didn’t have as much storage in the basement as you would expect since my bedroom was down there.

By late in the evening we had people running out into the cold, New York night making snow angels in the front yard.  There was a lot of snow out there.

So who made it out for the party tonight?  I wish that I could remember more clearly.  A lot of people made it and I hope that people who know that they made it can email me and let me know to add them to the list.  I know that Nate, Bob, Andy and I were there as we were the hosts.  Matt Hoch clearly made it.  Ryan Cloud was there – he was in the hot tub and making snow angels.  Nate’s cousin Mandy came back from Connecticut for the party.  Carrie was there – I can remember her getting tackled into the deep snow in the ditch out front.  I assume that Eric and Amanda made it although the weather may have kept them away as I can’t picture them being there.  Josh definitely made it as he always did.  I am pretty sure that Joe Howlett made it as well.  There were probably a dozen or more people that I just can’t picture for sure.

Cinco de Mayo!

Today was a huge day for Andy and I.  When we first came to Pittsburgh in March our schedule for getting the Waste Watcher project up and running and “live” was May 1st.  That day was insanely ambitious and it was not realistic at all for the project to move that quickly.  But we did all that we could.  May 1st was Monday.  Today is Friday.
Since March 20th we have been working around the clock on this project.  Everything that we have done has been eating, sleeping and breathing this project.  Sixteen hour days, seven days a week has been almost constant.  We have been going completely crazy – barely taking time out to eat and neither of us has so much as seen a single television show, movie or anything else since we were here (except for that first weekend with my parents.)

We did not manage to “flip the switch” on the Waste Watcher as we had hoping on the first but we did flip it today and the first “production” data started flowing into the Waste Watcher system this morning.  The project is far from done but just getting to this phase and already replacing the paper processes at the first hospital location is a really big deal.  Today is a major celebratory day.

The new machines that are being used for the production tracking stations are Compaq iPaq Celeron 533 black and silver small form factor units with 64MB.  These are the first machines that we have worked with that run Windows 2000 Professional.  We had originally chosen these machines because of their low air-flow and forward looking design.  But quickly we discovered that RS232 serial communications was a critical piece of the system and that these units, needing USB to Serial adapters, were overly complex and error prone.

Today is our first real day of doing work in Pittsburgh.  We don’t have much time to “settle into a groove”.  We are going from “zero to one hundred” practically overnight.  Today we got set up with an office in the bowels of UPMC Shadyside from which we will be working for the next several months.

We don’t have Internet access from the hospitals but we do have phone lines in the office that will allow us to dial up to our AOL account to get Internet access.  This makes doing our work extremely cumbersome.  But that is just the beginning.

We are equipped with a limited amount of physical computing equipment while in Pittsburgh.  We have two Compaq Proliant 800 servers (each a Pentium III 500) that are being used for all development and we have two Hewlett-Packard Brio desktops (Celeron 433, 64MB, Windows NT 4 Workstation) that we have to use for all of our non-server work.  This wouldn’t be bad but we have only two monitors which leaves us in a pretty tight situation.  Andy will be stuck carrying a monitor back and forth from the apartment to the office many times over the next several months.

My parents left in the morning to head back home. For dinner Andy and I drove downtown and walked around for a little while to learn where we were and what Pittsburgh had to offer. We stopped at a small pizza shop near the confluence of the rivers to eat our first real meal of the project in Pittsburgh.

This morning Andy and my job is to move into the Amberson Apartments on the Carnegie-Mellon campus in Shadyside, Pennsylvania. My parents came down to Pittsburgh to help us with the move-in process. We got a two bedroom, one bath apartment on the seventh floor (seventh floor facing the circle and ninth facing Amberson) of the apartment building at the top of the circle on Bayard. It wasn’t a great apartment but it was serviceable.

I took the northern bedroom that had a view of UPMC Shadyside Hospital and Andy took the southern bedroom which had the views of the Bayard Circle. We had almost nothing to move in. It was very sad. Our only piece of actual furniture was an old, broken computer office chair from my parents’ house. Our kitchen was stocked with a single, old pot and one old, large (but very dull) knife that we used to still things with in the pot. Our only flatware was two Styrofoam cereal bowls and all we had to eat with were some disposable plastic forks and spoons that we probably got from a fast food restaurant on the way down.

Neither of us bothered to bring down beds and we both slept on blankets on the floor. It was a rather ascetic existence but it did serve to help us focus on work rather than on leisure.

We spent most of the day taking care of getting into the apartment, getting what we needed set up and dealing with the parking situation.

As of today we have no telephone which is a bit of a problem. I have had a Rochester mobile phone through Frontier since 1992. Many of you may remember: (716) 737-3461. Back when Rochester and Buffalo shared the 716 area code. But when I moved to Pittsburgh Frontier was unable to transfer my phone to that region to allow us to make affordable calls. Even though Frontier had already been bought out by Bell Atlantic they hadn’t figured out how to transfer phones between regions yet and that left us with a problem. So that is a top priority.

My parents took Andy and I out to dinner down on Walnut to a Thai restaurant there.  Tomorrow will be another busy day so no one wanted to stay out late.

Just to make it clear: our apartment has no radio, no television, no telephone line, no Internet access.  This is early 2000 – high speed Internet access is a rarity and almost no one has that yet.  Dial up is the only real option at this point and we can’t get that here at this time.  Nicklin Associates provided us with an AOL Dial Up account to use when we were in a location that had a telephone line but that does not include our apartment!

Good thing that we at least have books.

Today is the big day.  One month ago today Andy and I packed up and left Rochester to come to Ithaca to begin “phase one” of our Waste Watcher project adventure.  Today begins the second phase.  The 1992 Buick Regal GS was loaded to the hilt with sleeping bags, blankets, two Compaq Proliant 800 Servers, two HP Brio Celeron 433 desktops, some Symbol barcode scanners and enough clothes to get us through.  Andy and I barely fit into the front seats of the mid-sized sedan so weighted down it was with every last thing that we could fit into it.  Moving in nothing but a car is very tough work indeed.

Andy and I set off rather late at night hoping that it would only take four hours to get down to Pittsburgh where we were to be living for the next indefinite amount of time.  I remember leaving Ithaca and getting down on to Interstate 86 and traveling west thinking what an incredibly boring drive it was.

It wasn’t long before we needed to stop off in Friendship, New York to locate a restroom which we did at the local grocery store.  It was probably eight in evening or a little later at this point.

It took around six hours or just a little less before we reached Pittsburgh.  This was only my second time as an adult or in my memory coming into the city and my first time driving and it was Andy’s first time in Pittsburgh.  The nighttime view of the city as you enter on Internet 279 will always stick in my memory.  One moment you are driving through steep hills and residential neighbourhoods clinging to steeply tilted ground all seemingly in a very rural or mildly suburban setting and then, suddenly, a looming city of steel and glass swings into view directly ahead of you and impossibly close.

The northern approach to Pittsburgh must be one of the most impressive entrances to any city in the United States.  It is absolutely breathtaking.  It made it all that much more exciting as this would be my first time living in a city of any considerable size.  Ithaca being extremely tiny and Rochester feeling like it isn’t even a city at all (especially when you live outside of it in Greece.)  But in Pittsburgh we were to be living in a tall apartment building well inside the city limits in one of the center boroughs and it was to be very exciting.

Of course the southern approach to Pittsburgh, entering the city through the mountainside via the Fort Pitt Tunnel is one of the most impressive city entrances anywhere as well.  Pittsburgh is blessed with amazing vistas in a very tiny amount of geographic space.

We headed over to the AmeriSuites where we spent the night.  Tomorrow was the “moving in” day.