Yes, twelve days since the last update. I only arrived back in Ithaca last night so be glad that I am back to the grind already today. It has been a very long week. Today’s update will be a little bit lacking but I hope to have more accomplished by tomorrow. I am feeling pretty lazy today. First a quick schedule update… I will be in Syracuse tomorrow afternoon so don’t look for me then. I will be in Rochester on Saturday. After that I will be home again.
The trip to DC (the first leg to South Carolina) was quite an adventure. I had to drive back home to my parent’s house where I picked Eric up so we could head out last Sunday afternoon. The first two hours of the trip went ok (of course, all we did is manage to get back to where I had started from so mark that, first four hours – no progress yet!) That is when the snow started. It was ok at first, until about Binghamton. Once we headed south on 81 towards Pennsylvania is when the storm let loose. The roads would have been ok if only I had tires that weren’t bald and if there were some plows out on the road. But alas, we can’t all be blessed with inspectable tires and snow plows. For some reason, it was too much effort for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to clear Rte. 81 so we drove through deeper and deeper snow. The trip from back home to Scranton, PA should take about four hours. Well, no such luck. It took us seven. Ouch. By the time we were near Scranton, we were happy that we were moving at 25Mph because it meant that we weren’t stuck in a snow bank. We almost managed to hit an SUV in front of us that lost control and spun out, blocking the road. We slid around it and the semi following us slid to a stop facing the driving of the SUV only a few feet away. That stopped everyone behind us. Needless to say, I was worn out by the time we got to Scranton so we stopped at Perkins (Yes! I hate Denny’s, Perkins rules.) We had some coffee and decided to call it a night. It was all we could do to get out of the Perkins’ parking lot. The cashier told us how to get to a hotel and we headed in that direction. By now, the unplowed roads have snow so deep that it is above the bottom of the doors. This makes driving very hard. A couple of times we almost came to a stop due to a loss of traction. Eventually we made it to the Red Roof Inn. There was no getting into the driveway, however, so we took a good run at it and left the car stuck in the entrance of the motel and checked in. This was about nine o’clock. I asked the desk clerk what to do with the car and they said to leave it where it was and when the plow came in a few minutes, they would call me to move it. Well, they finally called me at one in the morning to move the car. That made for a long night. It was so slippery that I almost couldn’t walk to the car.
The next morning, Eric and I waited for sunrise and started driving towards DC again. By this time the roads where finally getting plowed. We made it into Annapolis around one in the afternoon and met up with John and we started driving to Anderson, South Carolina. We decided to give up driving for the day around Kannapolis, North Carolina. We finally got to the hospital in Anderson around nine in the morning on Tuesday. What a long trip that ended up being.
That is my summation of my long journey south. Needless to say, I am glad to be home. It was nice, though, to have 68 degree weather while we were down there. That made life a lot nicer!
So, after another long evening of struggling with that stupid Mandrake 8.1 install, I finally got it to work. I was lucky enough to find another person online who had the same problem as me and was able to get it working. How frustrating that was. It still does not work completely but mostly it works and the Sims is up and running. In fact, Dominica is playing it right now. What a funny game that is. It plays elevator music all of the time. That is pretty hilarious. It is a weird game. I don’t think that I could get into it but Dominica is really excited about it. I am relieved that the system is FINALLY working. Stick with SuSE or maybe Red Hat. Stay away from Mandrake, it isn’t worth it, even with the Sims.
Ok, so Josh and I ordered the second parts of our new computers (Loopy is getting excited about making his own computer now too. Bob is considering it.) Josh went out and bought a case just like mine but black and with three additional drive bays. Also an Antech, though. Our next piece (ordered and not yet arrived) is our Soyo Dragon+ motherboards. These are awesome top ‘o the line boards with all the cool features and stuff. We are very excited. These are designed to support the newest, most awesome AMD AthlonXP processors. Plus they have built in smart card support, Dolby Digital surround processors, infrared port, USB, Ethernet, etc. Very nice. And pretty affordable. Soltek makes a board based on the same chipset that is cheaper but not quite as nice. John decided to run and out order his entire system already. Not all of the parts have arrived yet but I expect it to be all together sometime next week. He went with an all aluminum case with a large plexiglass window on the side with an “etched” biohazard symbol on the window and a red neon light inside the case for effect. It is going to be one sweet computer.
I have checked the logs and Sheep Guarding Llama is getting a lot of traffic! The site is getting checked every day from all over the place, even when we aren’t posting for a little while. That is very encouraging. I can always tell when Josh is looking at the site because he is the only person using Opera 6 out there. Someone is looking at us with a Macintosh too and I have a sneaking suspicion as to who it is. Oh, tech note, Mozilla 0.9.7 is out and it has fixed the mail bug that has been in the last two versions so we are able to use it to read mail again!
I have a new Anne update from Belgium but I have been unable to post it yet. I will do my best to get it online by tomorrow.
Has anyone noticed that my updates are getting longer and longer? This didn’t seem to be very long while I was writing it but now it looks huge. I guess this is to make up for not having posted anything for so long. Hmmm…