Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning we went to the Omega in Geneseo for a late breakfast.  After breakfast we went over to Walmart for a very quick stop just to pick up a few vital supplies and for me to hit the computer and electronic sections to see about finding an external hard drive that I can hook up to the laptop so that I can get some DVD archiving done.

I was very fortunate to find a two terabyte USB hard drive enclosure for around $139 which is very good.  It is just a cheap Western Digital but more than enough for my uses.  That is a very good price and it is a “rollback” currently so it is usually more expensive.  This will let me get started right away.  I am very hopeful that we can get the basement in dad’s house cleaned up, at least, on this long trip even if we can’t get a truck to haul all of our remaining stuff down to Texas.

I had to work for several hours this afternoon and into this evening for the office.  Once I had some free time I got the external hard drive hooked up and started the first DVD archiving to get up and running.  It may not be hard work but it is stuff that really needs to be done for everyone’s sanity and it makes me feel much better to know that real progress is being made on something very tangible.

I am hoping, if all goes well, that about four hundred DVDs can be archived during this trip.  That will represent a massive percentage of dad’s remaining store in the basement.  We have done hundred previously although much work was lost at one point requiring me to start over from the beginning but now we seem to be making some significant progress and my plan is to script a massive compression process that I can allow to just run on its own without any intervention given the volume of work that I will have for it to do all at once and to let the server do it without needing me to set up desktops to do the work.  That should be far, far better than it was before when I had to do everything by hand.

This evening we watched When in Rome on the AppleTV which was quite good.  It had a lot of people that I like in it and was a cute story.  Nothing too ground breaking and, of course, Dominica figured out the entire plot from the very beginning as she always does but it was still cute.

We spent an hour or more just looking through movies available on the AppleTV to see what was out there.  I was very interested to learn that it appears, at least according to some strong rumours, that the next generation AppleTV is about to debut.  Rather than being a direct descendent of the current AppleTV it looks like it is going to be based upon the iPhone and iPad platform and be effectively nothing more than an iPad without any screen with just HDMI output.  This will allow it to be extremely green using almost no power whatsoever and should lower the development cost from Apple’s perspective.  The rumour is that the new AppleTV will be absolutely tiny, use almost no power and output full 1080p instead of the ridiculously limited 720p of the current model.

The new AppleTV is said to have no hard drive, which was a huge mistake, in my opinion, of the current models.  The need to download content to the current unit is a huge pain and the connection to iTunes makes it almost worthless.  Competing systems rely on streaming nearly all content and the current AppleTV has moved in that direction slowly with Internet Radio features and podcast viewing being added since the original version that Dominica and I bought some years ago.

So we will see what all features exist in the new AppleTV when it finally releases, if it ever does, but the old AppleTV was so close to being an amazing idea that I think that Apple will really do itself and its customers a major disservice if they do not continue and upgrade the platform and, hopefully, take it in a new direction not involving local storage.  My primary concern is that they may not support that DLNA standard that all of the competing platforms are using.  If they fail to support DLNA then they will not be able to compete against the PS3 and XBOX 360 and many other devices, in my opinion, that already do this and do it so well.  People have large collections of music and video that they want to be able to listen to and view via their AppleTV that simply cannot do so in any reasonable way with the current system.  The new AppleTV will also need to support a slightly wider array of formats as well.

I had to be up early this morning, but as early as when we are in Texas, so that I could do the early morning deployments.  This seems to be happening more and more often these days.  It feels like it must be two out of every three Saturdays.  I was up around seven thirty this morning.  Dad had been up long before me and was gone to breakfast long before I got up.  Dominica and Liesl slept for several hours more.

In addition to my eight o’clock work I had other work scheduled for later in the morning so I had a busy morning until lunch time.  Then, for a change of pace, dad and I decided that we would go to the Chicken Coop in Pavilion to get lunch there and bring it home.  I haven’t eaten there more than once or twice and that was many, many years ago so that will make a nice change of pace.

Dad needed to run an errand in Batavia to go to the dry cleaners so we drove up to Batavia first.  That really took no time at all.  Then back to Pavilion to the Chicken Coop.  In reality we should have ordered our food as we went past the first time and picked it up as we went back past but that did not occur to us.

We ended up getting way too much food at the Chicken Coop.  I had skipped dinner last night and breakfast this morning so I was feeling way more hungry than I actually was.  I always order too much food in those circumstances.

While we were waiting for our food, we both got some ice cream.  I discovered a new flavour of Perry’s ice cream that is simply amazing – banana cream pie!  I’m going to be searching for as much of this as I can get while we are up in New York.

We brought lunch back for Dominica and Liesl and ate at the house.  The food was pretty good and we think that we will try the pizza from there again.  We got their white pizza today and want to try their regular pizza too.

This evening, Dad, Dominica and I watched Jackie Chan’s latest movie The Spy Next Door.  It was pretty good.  I would not call it a Jackie Chan classic but it is amazing that he can keep making these movies as he gets older and older.  He is fifty six now.  Not that old but very old for doing his own stunts in these types of movies.  After a lifetime of beating the crap out of himself he must be getting very tired.  He does so much work it is incredible that he is even still alive.

Dad was up and out early this morning to go to his breakfast club.  So no Omega for Dominica and I today.  I got up and started work while Liesl and Dominica slept in for a while.

We decided today that we need to get a two terabyte hard drive from Walmart that I can use to archive our movie collection.  That would be a very good use of the time while we are here at dad’s house.  Of course we were just at Walmart yesterday so now we need to wait until we are over there again.  So we are going to lose one day at least that could have been used for transfers.  Moving movies takes a very, very long time.  This part of the never ending process of getting our stuff cleaned up and out of the way at my father’s house.

Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo came over late morning today to see Liesl whom they have not seen in a long time.  We got lunch from York Landing (or whatever it is called now since they have been bought and sold so many times that I have no idea and just call them York Landing now for ease as no one knows their real name anymore.)

The original plan for this evening was that the Parker clan, Nate, Tammy and the kids, were going to come up and visit since they were getting into Perry today but they ended up having a very busy schedule and decided that it would be better if they could come tomorrow morning instead.  Our morning was free so we decided to just do that instead.

Our new plan for tonight was to have the Richardsons return later this evening and we were all going to watch Dear John on dad’s AppleTV.  That ended up not working out, though, as the AppleTV was unable to download the content from the iTunes Store.  I’m guessing that the Apple infrastructure is buckling under the load of the new iPhone OS 4 being released and just about everyone with an iPhone or iPhone-like device downloading it as quickly as they could.

So we had to give up on watching anything on the AppleTV tonight.  Instead, once work was finally done for me, we watching some of The Tigger Movie and then some of Hammy the Hamster until Liesl fell asleep.

We were all pretty tired and pretty much just called it a night at that point.  We are all working hard to catch up on some sleep.

Today is my first day actually getting a chance to spend time with my family in two weeks.  I can’t believe how this week has flown by – there has just been so much going on.  I haven’t had any time to just sit still for a few minutes.

This morning was Liesl and dad’s chance to get to know each other again.  Liesl has not seen her grandpa for seven months – which is a very, very long time to a nineteen month old.  She does remember him and being at his house seems to make it easier.  She warmed up from her shyness in no time and they spent the morning playing and playing.

For lunch we all went over to Geneseo to the Omega Grill.  Liesl had the grilled cheese.  She loves cheese now and grilled cheese is one of her favourite meals.  It is our current “go to” diner food for her.  She can pretty much eat an entire sandwich on her own already!

After lunch we ran across the street  to Walmart.  Dad, Liesl and I stayed in the car and Dominica went in and did some shopping.  That ended up taking much longer than we had anticipated.  No more letting Dominica shop on her own.  We saw Mary going into Walmart just as we were leaving but we did not have enough time to get her attention.

Dad brought out one of my very favourite childhood toys – my Fisher Price Magic Show set.  I can’t believe that that thing still exists and works perfectly – a testament to Fisher Price’s quality (and, as Dominica points out, to how well I treated everything that I owned as a child.)  I spoke to Jeremy a few days later and he can remember playing with this set as a child too and that means that likely Sara did as well.  So Liesl could easily be the fourth generation to be playing with this.  I looked it up on eBay and, much to my surprise, there are none for sale currently.  I guess this is one seriously unique item.

Liesl had tons of fun playing with the magic set.  By far her favourite thing to do was to take the magic wand and make the flower that is in it magically appear.  She learned how to do this in minutes and thought that it was great fun.  Every time that she would make the flower appear we would all go “Ta da!” and she would get all excited.  She could not make the flower disappear on her own so after every time that she make it appear she would say “Need help.” and give it to one of the adults to set it up for her again.

Dad also brought out other childhood favourite toys like my Fisher Price drill and workbench set and my little table top kitchen range set – nothing like the fancy kitchen toy set that Liesl has down in Texas.

I thought that it was pretty cool to see my old toys again.  I can’t believe that dad still has them, knew where they were and that they were in such good shape.  It is really neat seeing Liesl playing with them and enjoying them just like I did more than thirty years ago.  That was a lot of fun.  I’m going to try to get lots of pictures of Liesl and these toys.  Just seeing these really take me back.  I have not thought about these toys in decades.  It is amazing how seeing them suddenly takes you back and I can remember being two or three years old and playing with these (older with the magic set.)

Today I just worked from dad’s house on his computer in the office.  It was a very quiet day after so much excitement the last several days.

We did drive over to Geneseo for a late breakfast or early lunch at the Omega Grill.  Vicki, the owner, is in Greece for her wedding that is coming up in about a week so we did not get to see her.  There are two pictures of Liesl up on the milk cooler.  I got the Swiss patty melt with the veggie patty which I love there.  This is the only place that I can get anything like this.

After lunch we swung into Tim Hortons to grab some coffee, both ready made as well as grounds so that we can make coffee at the house.  We each got a donut as well.  I love Tim Horton’s donuts but after having lived in Texas for several months now they just don’t compare to what we can get down there.  I’ve become quite spoiled with Round Rock donuts and have little interest in eating any others.

Our big excitement this afternoon came in the middle of the afternoon when I was sitting at dad’s desk and he was working on the laptop desk and suddenly I could hear some serious creaking in the walls.  It sounded like a raccoon was trapped in the wall and wanted to get out.  Then the desktop started swaying and the monitors were moving back and forth.  It went on for so long that we were able to talk about it and look outside for large machinery to attempt to figure out what was happening.  It didn’t take long for us to guess that it was an earthquake.  We’ve had them before here but never this strong.  This was very, very noticeable and it probably lasted for about forty seconds.

The news, of course, cannot get earthquake data that quickly so I went straight to Twitter and, within seconds, had tons of information from people all over the northeast United States and Canada talking about the quake.  People were reporting having felt it from Michigan and Ohio up to Montreal.  Ever since that incident with the fake shooter and RIT and the complete lack of news coming from official channels I have learned that Twitter is the best resource for up-to-the-minute news reporting, especially on natural disasters like this.  Twitter worked awesomely today.

It was not long at all before the USGS had posted information on the quake.  It was epicentered just a little bit north northeast of Ottawa on the Quebec side of the line and had been a 5.5 on the Richter Scale.  Reports of people who had felt it were coming in from all over both countries including New Jersey, Thunder Bay and Long Island later on.  This is one of the biggest quakes to hit this part of the continent in a very long time.  One area registered aftershocks every few minutes for almost another hour.

I called Dominica and Francesca who were out shopping but they did not feel anything.  Dominica’s father’s office (or one of them) in Utica or Rome had some structural damage and had to evacuate the building until a structural engineer could verify the solidity of the structure.  So the quake was stronger than you might think.  Lots of office workers in Ottawa and Toronto evacuated their buildings and I saw a video of fish tank water splashing out from someone in Ottawa on YouTube.  They sure got it a lot more powerfully than we did.

My family in Ohio even called to see if we had felt it.  So the Canton Akron Metro area felt it enough to notice and feel that they needed to call to see where all it could be felt.  This was impressively big.  This is one of those events that people from here will mention over and over for years to come.  I’m very glad that I got to be here for it rather than just hearing about it on the news from Texas.

After work this evening, dad and I drove over to Livonia to Eric and Amanda’s house.  We dropped off four computers, a hard drive and a Windows XP installation CD.  That is a bit of stuff that needed to be moved and is now out of the way at dad’s house.  Less to worry about and their house was roughly on our way so that worked out pretty well.

From Livonia we drove straight out to Frankfort.  We did stop at McDonald’s in Canandaigua, up by the Thruway, to grab a quick dinner while we were on the road.  I have had more McDonald’s in the last several days than I have likely had it since moving to Texas!  I’m going to be all set with Mickey D’s fare for quite a while, I believe.

It was around ten when we got to the Tocco’s in Frankfort.  Liesl was so excited to see me when I came in the door that she tried to jump up and down and ended up just squatting on the floor and almost falling over!

Dominica loaded up dad’s car with he luggage and Liesl just clung to me while we sat on the couch in the living room.  She was not going to let go of me at all.  We were only at the Tocco’s for around fifteen minutes or maybe twenty.  Not much time at all.  We are all very tired and are looking forward to getting home and getting to bed.

I drove most of the way back from Frankfort.  Dad had driven to Canandaigua and I drove out the rest of the way east.  I drove back to Avon and had dad take over, after having gotten in a short nap, to drive the rest of the way home as I was completely exhausted and could not drive any further.

It was around one thirty when we managed to get home and get off to bed.  Very late but it is great to have my family back again.  Dominica and Liesl slept in the guest bedroom while Oreo came in to the television room with me and slept on the mattress on the floor.