June 4, 2007: Happy Birthday Dad

Today is my father’s birthday! Happy birthday to Thomas Alan Miller!

Even though we got to bed quite late last night I was naturally awake by three forty-five this morning! I lay in bed for just a little while and decided to get out of bed and get moving on the day by a quarter past four or so. I always have more than enough that needs to be done so it isn’t like getting up early means that I will be bored.

I took the opportunity to finally shave my head which I have been needing to do for quite some time now. I have been letting my hair get pretty shaggy which really does not work now that I am so bald. So I did that and took a shower to get the loose hair off of me. By the time that I was done with all that it was a little after five.

I went down to the health club and worked out for an hour. It was a really good workout this morning. I felt great doing it and really pushed for the entire hour. I burned about seven hundred and fifty calories according to the elliptical machine! That is a good way to start the day.

I ran up to the apartment and showered quickly and was only barely in Dominica’s way as she started to get ready for work. I fed Oreo his breakfast and was off to work before seven thirty. After a productive weekend we are off to a good start on the week.

Dominica called me shortly after I had gotten to work to tell me that she had discovered that someone had been joyriding in the BMW over the weekend. We don’t know much but we know that the top was taken down and the dog’s seat was moved in the back (presumably to make room for more people.) So we can hypothesize that three people went driving with the top down at some point over the weekend. We know this because the pillow that we use for his seat in that car was not put back into position (so whoever it was had no concern for getting caught) and the pillow was left in a dangerous position and was caught in the roof mechanism when they put it back down. So we were really lucky that there was not any damage to the car. Now it is somewhat possible that the top was taken down and the car was used just to transport a couple of people between 1180 Raymond and the parking garage which is not a big deal (except that we had asked them not to operate the roof anymore after having left it halfway up TWICE and totally draining the battery TWICE) but undoing the dog’s seat and leaving it undone and then getting it caught in the roof is pretty much. Dominica had to take extra time this morning while trying to get to work just getting Oreo’s seat re-attached to the car and ready for him. The problems are never going to end!

Before switching over to WordPress 2.2 my Akismet Blog Spam (Blam) filter listed itself as having caught over 18,000 pieces of blog spam. Just over the past weekend Akismet is listing as having caught 1,800! The pace appears to be picking up.

Now here is an interesting article about transferring heat energy into electricity! What an awesome project. In the article they mention that they are so confident about the technology that they feel that it will be displacing photo-voltaic cells in solar panels in two years. This could potentially be a big breakthrough in power conservation.

Today was totally crazy at work. I am really glad that I had a really productive weekend because that helps keep me calm and relaxed. It is also good that I was up early this morning because I had plenty of time to get to work very early and knock out a lot of stuff before things got really crazy. I had pretty much no chance to just stop and sit still for a minute all day long. We have a lot of people out of the office this week and those of us that are left have rather a heavy load to deal with.

I figured out today that I am drinking around three gallons of water a day! I had no idea that I was drinking that much. It didn’t occur to me as being possible until Dominica bought herself a .75 gallon drinking container and is trying to go through two of them a day. I drink so much more than her that I decided to measure out the containers that I drink from all day and they are much larger than I had realized. I go through about 1.5 – 2.0 liters of water before leaving the apartment in the morning mostly due to going to the gym. Then at work I drink about 4 – 6 liters every day while sitting at my desk. Then at home I drink several liters are least before going to bed and if I go to the gym at night I drink at least half a liter more if not an entire liter. It is a LOT of water. I am worried that I might be getting electrolyte depletion so Dominica is going to look to see if she can find a supplement for me to add to my water to replenish some of my body’s lost salts.

I was planning on leaving the office a little after four today as I had been in so early but I ended up getting stuck on a production call from just after two until around five! What a crazy day. I was pretty worn out by the end of it all. Dominica must have had a really busy day as well as she was unable to email me pretty much all day.

I ended up not being able to leave the office until after six. I actually topped a ten hour day! I did finally get around to calling Verizon and getting my mobile phone changed. I am doing an early upgrade and melding my old Motorola Q line and my regular mobile line that has been on an LG VX8100 into a single combined voice and data plan on a Palm Treo 700p. I choose the 700p which uses PalmOS instead of Windows Mobile because everyone that I have talked to with the PalmOS version was really happy with it, the Q was not very useful with Windows and because the screen resolution on the 700p is more than double the resolution of the 700wx. PalmOS is also supposed to have much better SSH software compared to the Windows versions. I tried the only SSH that I could find on Windows and it did not work at all. People tell me that it works on their Palm machines. We will see. I will be happy to have a single device that I can use for everything.

As always, Verizon’s national call center was extremely helpful and got me into the phone/PDA that I wanted and got me into a cost saving combined voice and data plan.  They also, once again, managed to get me into an upgraded phone before be actual plan time was up which has saved me a couple of times now!  I should have my new Palm Treo 700p on Thursday.

Weight Lost So Far: 13.5 lbs

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