Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and that means that the markets are closed and I don’t have to go to work. Yay! Dominica does not have the day off, though, so it is only a holiday for me and Oreo. Oreo wishes that he could go to daycare, though, because he has way too much energy and wishes that he had an opportunity to burn some of it off.
When Dominica got ready to go to work this morning Oreo jumped out of bed and tried to go with her. But she told him to go back to bed and to snuggle with me so he did, reluctantly.
I took my “day off” seriously and did pretty much nothing. Over the weekend my Ruby script doing the massive migration of Netgear firewall log data from IMAP based email to a MySQL database finally wrapped up at around one million one hundred thousand rows of data. There is still more being generated every day and I have a bit of old, archived data that I need to figure out how to move as well. But I have made a good start on it at least. My email mail box has gone from 195MB to 17MB.
I got to play some Bard’s Tale today but not as much as you might have guessed. I read some magazines. Did a tiny bit of cleaning. Hung out with Oreo quite a bit. He was very needy today as far as attention went. He isn’t tired at all and even when he was laying around today he was almost never sleeping.
I tried to have lunch with Susan and Kevin today but Susan got stuck in a meeting and Kevin didn’t wake up until after two in the afternoon. So I just had lunch alone at Food for Life.
Dominica got home early and I had to spend my evening taking a midterm exam for my class on project management. I had to wait for Dominica to get home so that she could handle incoming phone calls (there were two) and deal with the needs of the dog (he ended up needing to be walked again, fed twice, played with once or twice and more just during the test even though I had walked him just before starting it.) Dominica got home around five thirty and I started the test, all loaded up with caffeine, at almost exactly six o’clock. The test was to run up to three hours to answer six questions. So this was to be the majority of my evening.
One topic that we have discussed at length in my project management class and that has come up on this exam (I can mention this now as the exam closed at midnight) is the topic of Measurable Organizational Value. I decided that I wanted to seriously address the concept of MOV as the book that we are using as our class textbook is based around it and research online seems to suggest that the term only exists for this class even though it is taught as if it was a standard industry concept. I think that MOV is an important “academia” mistake made by managers who learn management from a book and never work in an actual business and I think that the author really leads people astray. So I decided to post online my overview of Measurable Organization Value. It took less than five hours from the time that I posted it until I was on the front page of Google as a top hit for the term and the very top hit for anything less than a three word definition or a link to a review or place to buy the book with that title.
About two hours into the test Oreo got very upset that I was unable to spend time with him. He kept trying to talk to me but I kept deferring him to Dominica. He was very upset and didn’t know how to tell us what he needed and he ended up going into a panic and having an accident that involved peeing not just on the floor but onto my chair that I was sitting in while taking the test. It was obvious that he was really scared.
So I had to take time out of my test to deal with that cleanup! What a mess. Poor little Oreo. He had a really rough night. I had to take him for yet another walk immediately after finishing my test as well.
After wrapping up my test Dominica, Oreo and I just watched a few episodes of the first season of <em>The Fresh Prince of Bell Air</em>. I haven’t seen that show in a very long time.
Back to work tomorrow.