February 10, 2008: Oreo Isn’t Feeling Well

Dominica decided that she was so close to finishing the entire first season of Dexter in a single sitting that she decided to just make a run for it and wrapped up around two in the morning.

Oreo got me up in the middle of the night, as expected, for a walk. This always happens anytime that he has dry food. Dry food doesn’t sit well on his tummy. So I walked him from three thirty until four in the morning. Then it was back to bed. But only until ten this morning when he needed to walk again. We really shouldn’t let him have dry food. It is no more fair to him to make him have to go outside in the cold in the middle of the night than it is to us. And he takes a risk of not being able to wake us up as well. Although I think that he is normally able to do that.

After walking him I started working on the workstation for CCA that I was working on last night. I also worked on changing our router to handle a large set of IP addresses as we have simply exhausted everything in the subnet that we had been using up until now. We had assigned ourselves just fourteen IP addresses and this was working fine until recently when we added the Netgear SC101 SAN device which uses, in our configuration, six IP addresses of its own. It was right around that time that we hooked back up our Cisco ATA unit that works with our Vonage phone system. That was another IP address permanently assigned and taken out of the pool. We went from plenty to being short more or less overnight. So now we have thirty and anticipate that this will hold us for a while. Although the list of machines in the house that use IP addresses isn’t short – the desktops and laptops include the OLPC, the Wii and the AppleTV, the SC101 (6), the three IP phones, the firewall, etc. It is no wonder the world is running out of IP space. Luckily these are all on a private address scheme or we would have real problems.

I joined Linked In today. So anyone looking for me on there, look again. There I am.

Rochester suffered a thirty-six car pile-up by the Rochester International Airport tonight. The region was hit by white-out conditions and wind speeds in the high forty miles per hour range.

Oreo is feeling pretty sick today and has needed to go outside much more often than usual.  We were really lucky that he decided that he needed to take a walk while it was bright and sunny and relatively warm.  Right after we got back from working him it turned into crazy winds and total white out conditions.  He didn’t need to go back out again until after that had stopped.  But for the rest of the evening he had to go out about every twenty to thirty minutes and it was bitterly cold.  We ended up just leaving his harness and sweater on so that we could take him out more quickly.

The Spice Girls, for those few of you who can remember who they are, played the Prudential Center tonight.  What a cold night to go out to a concert.  Later in the evening when I was walking Oreo one time I noticed a small group of women pounding on the doors of Catholic Health Care’s car garage which is used heavily for these events.  The show, Dominica thought, ran late tonight and I am guessing that these were stragglers who were now locked out of the garage because the garage closes early and were in insanely cold temperatures – most likely drunk – trying to figure out how to get their car.  They definitely were not getting into their car tonight.  One of the issues with concerts in Newark – if they run late you have few options.  All of the garages close early.  Even the ones, like that one, that cater to the late night events.

We went to bed at eleven after Oreo’s last “late night” walk.  We are assuming that there is going to be little to no sleep tonight as he has been going out far too frequently.  We tried watching a little of the new Doctor Who series from 2005 via Netflix online download service.  The show was pretty good and the Netflix service works really well.  No technical problems at all once we got the player installed.  We only managed to watch two episodes, though, with Oreo needing to go out so frequently.  We are going to be loving this Netflix service though.  That is so cheap and handy.  Netflix is definitely the “cable killer” with unlimited “on demand”, over the Internet viewing for just a tiny fraction of the cost of cable.  And no commercials either!  They are really demonstrating just how much money their is in the cable system.

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