June 18, 2007: Just Another Monday

Today Scott Adams’ posted Dilbert’s “Best Story Ever“. And it really probably is. If you ever read a Scott Adams blog post, read this one. Good stuff.

I actually woke up at a quarter after six this morning with just five hours of sleep or less. I got up and went to the gym for forty minutes. I didn’t want to push it too much this morning after having skipped the last four day (oops.) I was worried that I would have relapsed a lot over the weekend with having skipped the gym so much and having eaten quite badly all weekend but I was only up to a negative 19.5 pounds which is much better than I was expecting so I am pretty happy. My negative 22 pounds from Thursday morning was probably a “swing” day and not a “stabilized” day so I figure that I am only up about one half to maybe one pound. But I am hopeful that this will be a good week and I should be able to keep on my gym regimen and I will be walking in Manhattan all week except for today but possibly including the weekend. So I have a lot of exercise to look forward to.

Today Dominica is attempting to take the BMW to Essex BMW in Newark on her lunch break. They are hopeful that they can get the car all fixed up just during lunch which would be a big relief for us. Today is the only day that we need both cars. The rest of the week I am not driving so Dominica can use the Mazda until next Monday.

We found out last night that the Toccos are planning on coming down to visit this weekend which is great because I was going to be staying down here and Dominica was going to travel up there to see them so this will save her a lot of driving and we will get to see each other this weekend too. We don’t know any real details yet.

The Consumerist ran an article today from a former Dell sales representative that gives a list of ways to get the best deals from Dell (hint: buy an HP – all of the deals are probably better.) Dell has already responded with a “take down order” from their lawyers but I think that they will have a hard time getting the story retracted as it will be difficult to prove that it violates any protected material and isn’t just a list of common sense items. I was happy to see, however, that the number one item on the list for getting the best deal was “buy commercial (small business) and not consumer.” I have been saying this for years and it certainly is not limited to Dell. Whether you are looking at Dell, HP, Lenovo (some of you call them IBM but they are NOT), Acer, Fujitsu, etc. you will consistently get better overall value by buying from the commercial product lines designed to be sold to discerning IT professionals and not flashing marketing driven garbage designed to lure people to BestBuy display racks. There is a reason why you don’t see consumer machines in big businesses with desktop engineers making careful purchasing decisions – because they are never the better choice. There are lots of reasons why the commercial grade equipment is better with build quality, reliability and support being at the top of the list. In case the Consumerist gets too much legal pressure – here is the Google cache of the same. Copies will probably appear all over the web soon enough. Take down notices just make everyone make a local copy to post again later.

Red Hat Linux has been certified to the highest US government standards for security putting it on par only with SUN Trusted Solaris platform. But, unlike Solaris, Red Hat Linux managed to pull off this certification on its general computing platform – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Solaris has to build a specific “trusted” version of their OS in order to earn the certification. And you can get this same level of protection, without the “official” US certification, from CentOS as well for free. I know that you like free.

Dominica called from Essex BMW to give me the news that there was a nail in the tire and that the tire was okay. Essex was awesome and patched it up for us FOR FREE and sent her on her way. They were great. They rushed her in at the last minute on her lunch break (which must be the busiest part of the day for them), checked the tire, patched it and put it back on the car for her. This is definitely a big selling point for getting a BMW. You really get treated so much differently that you do with other cars. Everything from sales to service is a completely different experience.

Today is the day that OfficeMax scheduled to deliver our new corner desk so we are expecting to have that to put together when we got home. We are very excited that we will be able to get it together and clean up the “computer area” significantly before her family comes to visit although it would have been nice to have it before the Ralstons came to visit.

I left work around six and made good time getting home.  In fact I ended up beating Dominica home by about forty-five minutes!  Our new desk from OfficeMax and Bush Furniture did arrive today and I got that moved up to the apartment.  I also discovered that our Internet access issues that were affecting us yesterday (Ralstons couldn’t get online, Dominica couldn’t do her homework) have continued today and there isn’t the slightest hint of Internet access today.  It turns out that it is the entire building and no one has Internet or cable and since a lot of people get their phones from Cablevision they have no phones either.  So the entire building is out of contact with the outside world today for the most part.

Dominica cooked dinner and we started putting the desk together but didn’t get too far.  I managed to go to the gym tonight for about forty minutes.  The Internet never came back on (figures just two days after I raved about how reliable Cablevision was – losing two whole days cuts into reliability figures quite significantly) so there wasn’t much that we could do from a work perspective.  We got to bed early because I have a busy day tomorrow going to a “new” office in Manhattan for the first time.  So I want plenty of time to be able to find it and to get in and everything.

Weight Lost So Far: 19.5 lbs