Sheep Guarding Llama

Not sure why but I am guessing that it is because of the heat but I am really looking forward to this weekend. I suppose that it could also be because we are not traveling and that makes it a lot more like a normal weekend rather than just working somewhere else. I am actually planning on not really working at all this weekend. By not working I mean that I won’t be doing any systems administration. I will be doing some programming instead (I call it programming as opposed to software development or some other term because what I can do could only loosely qualify under any definition of development.)

The horrible heat broke late last night around eleven o’clock. What a relief. We were able to sleep in peace last night. Boy have we been needing that. Thunderstorms rolled in and brought a small amount of rain. Not much but it made the difference that we need. Now we are back down to normal summer temperatures. Just in time for the weekend. That is awesome. Otherwise we would have been spending two whole days sitting in that hot apartment wonder how to stay cool. It is bad enough with just Dominica there but with both of us and both of our computers running it heats up even more.

I have been getting busier and busier at work recently. Today was a very triumphiant day as I finally managed to get full access to everything that I am aware of needing to have access to – which means that I now have full access to everything that I need to be working on even when I am at home. That was the final frontier of missing access up until this point. So I am quite relieved about that. Now I don’t have to plan my time at home based on the type of work that I am expected to have to perform on a particular day.

I was so nice to leave work this evening and not have to walk into a heat wave. It is still quite warm but not hot so much anymore. I didn’t have to stay late tonight either even though it is a Friday night. My work that would normally require me to stay late on Friday was pushed off until Monday so I get to go home and enjoy my weekend.

Dominica and I went to the Omega Diner for their Friday night dinner. They have a special on Friday’s that is really amazing: crab cakes with mac and cheese. Sounds weird but it is absolutely awesome. It is the best mac and cheese that I have ever had short of the Black and Tan Mac & Cheese that they do at The Heights in Ithaca. And they give you such a huge portion that you can easily take most of it home to have as leftovers and to sweeten the pot the whole thing reheats really well too! So it is a really good deal that shouldn’t be passed up on the rare occassion that we are not leaving town on a Friday night.

Dominica spent the evening as she did her day working on her homework for her classes at SUNY Empire. She is quite behind and has some huge projects to work on. Her database design class keeps her quite busy as she is doing far more than expected in an introductory class but it is really good for her and she is learning tons about database design as well as how to really use Microsoft Access 2003 although way too much of the learning has had to be about Access in particular instead of about serious database topics but it is a start. She is definitely getting more out of the class than the average student would. Lots of work but really valuable and she is, for the most part, really enjoying the database stuff that she is learning. Maybe she will decide to focus her career on the database side of things. We will see.

I spent the evening continuing to work on an asset tracking system using PHP and MySQL. That is going to keep me quite busy all weekend. It is a pretty large project for me to be doing alone.

Once Dominica had burned herself out on homework we watched the final three episodes for the first season of BallyKissAngel. It did turn out that I had seen the first season previously but I think that it must have been a really long time ago. The show first ran in 1996 and it must have been right about that time that I first saw it. 1996 was the very last time that I had regular access to television so it had to have been around that time for me to have seen the entire first season and not just a random episode here and there.

We ended up staying up very late working on our database projects. It was probably three in the morning when we finally headed off to bed.

It is supposed to be so incredibly hot today that Consolodated Edison (the big power company down here) asked our facility to go to diesel generators for the day to reduce the draw on the power grid so that people would be able to use air conditioners at home without risking the loss of the whole grid. So I took that as a sign that it would be good if I worked from home today. That way my computer(s) in the office are off along with my three monitors and I am not sitting there generating heat making the air conditioning work harder.

It was tough sleeping last night but after two nights of getting almost no sleep at all I managed to sleep tonight even though it was so hot. It was less than six hours of sleep but it was soarly needed.

Working from home means that there is a lot of things that I am not able to do or at least not do quickly so the load tends to be a little lighter. I spent a good portion of the day working on a PHP program that I started a few days ago. I did a bunch of data entry and got some basics working. It has a long way to go but it is nice to see a usable system taking shape.

Dominica had plenty of work to do today too. She did some more homework that she is still behind on and she did several Fedora Core Linux installs today and she attempts to learn more about Linux.

Lunch was just left-overs from Tuesday night’s dinner at Bertucci’s. For dinner we ordered from Tanjore and Dominica drove out to pick it up.

We watched the first three episodes of BallyKissAngel tonight. Dominica has never seen the series before. I have never seen that much of it but I have definitely seen all of the episodes that we watched so far. In fact, the first episode was so familiar to me that I am sure that this was the third or fourth time that I have seen it at the very least. I am wondering whether or not I have seen the whole first season or not. I could easily have many years ago and not realized how much of it I had seen. It has definitely been quite a while. That is a pretty good show. The village in which the show is set, Avoca, is most likely the namesake of Avoca, New York which is Exit 1 off of US 390 not that far from Geneseo.

Dominica had a lot of Microsoft Access 2003 homework that she needed to do and was very busy working on that until after midnight. She couldn’t stay up too late tonight since she has an interview with a consulting firm in Woodbridge tomorrow. I just have the usual day at the office. I expect to be home by eight as long as no emergencies occur.

This weekend, for once, Dominica and I get to simply relax in New Jersey. This is our first weekend together without traveling in a long time and it could easily be more than a month before we get to relax this much again. Next weekend is very busy and I don’t even know how I am going to squeeze everything in as it is.

I woke up at four thirty this morning with a bad tummy ache. It was eighty degrees in the house with the air conditioner running non-stop for days now which is probably not helping the way that I feel. So I decided that it was pointless to waste time just lying in bed knowing that I am not going to sleep and that there is plenty of work to be done so I just got up and went to the living room. I got no more than three hours of sleep and maybe less. That is two nights in a row now. I am going to be tired today.

Okay, so you are wondering about today’s headline. That was to get your attention. Here is the deal. It looks like we are going to be getting a very large number of 21″ Sony Trinitron CRT monitors in September and we are hoping to be able to give them away. We have places where we intend to use some of them but there are so many extra that we can give them away like crazy. If you are interested in getting one, let me know. They are free but require you to pick them up (like I was going to ship them for free) in Binghamton, New York. [There has all ready been a lot of response to this so don’t get too excited yet. We might have tons extra or not enough. We are hoping to have a good gauge of it soon.]

Today’s heat index is 120. ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DEGREES! AH! Wow is it ever hot. Hot and as humid as can be. Everything feels wet everywhere. It is awful. It is like living in a sauna down here. The haze is so thick that it is starting to get a little foggy.

For dinner tonight Dominica and I went over to the Omega Diner. Just something fast and simple. Dominica has decided to start really seriously working no becoming a systems administrator so she has a lot of work to do tonight in addition to a lot of homework that she needs to catch up on. She didn’t do much homework last week and is a bit behind.

After several months – and by several I mean like nine – I finally got an email response from Tristan. He and his fiancee are still living in Wyoming but are hoping to be able to move back to the east coast sometime soon. He shot me an email and had me call him so we talked for about fifteen minutes or so. He was at work so we couldn’t talk for very long. This past week has really been my week for finding people that I haven’t been able to talk to in quite some time.

Today is my niece Emily’s birthday.

The summer is just flying by. Can we, as humans, ever say this enough? Doesn’t it seem like after all of this time that we would be used to the fact that time passes more quickly than we think that it will. Won’t we ever just compensate to the point where the average person thinks that time passes at just the expected speed and those that deviate from the norm have an equal chance of being surprised by its rapidity as by its lassitude?

Today is a hot one – heat warning have been issued for the greater New York City Metro area. The heat index, as I write this, is 112 degrees and expected to climb over the next two to three hours. Raw temperatures are expected in the one hundreds both today and tomorrow and things are not supposed to become comfortable again until Friday. And, of course, it didn’t rain for Dominica driving down yesterday but it is expected to rain on Friday when we are driving back to Geneseo. Argh.

It is going to be a busy weekend coming up – Dominica and I have to get out to Syracuse on Saturday to work at TMobile on Erie Boulevard and then, if possible, need to work in Pittsford as well. But I doubt that we can do both. We will be headed up on Friday night and will be around, more or less, all weekend. Maybe we can get some more done with the house while we are there. At least it shouldn’t be so hot. That will give me a chance to get more stuff out of the apartment too. I am on a crusade to keep it as bare as possible.

I barely got any sleep last night. The heat is making it very difficult to get any quality sleep time in for me. I am very sensitive to it. I probably got two hours or less of real sleep last night.

My latest server, an HP DL380 G2 arrived today at dad’s house. I need a lot more time to work on all of this stuff.

It was a fairly quiet day at the office. No one wanted to go out for food at lunch because of the heat. In fact it makes you just not want to eat at all. I got some nasty food from the cafeteria but I threw most of it away. No big loss.

I got home and Dominica and I went out to Bertucci’s for dinner. Oreo got sick earlier today, probably from the heat. It is tough for little dogs. After dinner I got a call from Sarah Ross with whom I attended high school many, many years ago. She is organizing a class “reunion” picnic on September 2nd which I can’t make it to, unfortunately. That would have been cool since our class had no actual reunion. It was nice to get to talk to her. I have not spoken with her since graduation.

After dinner we just came home and I worked with Dominica on some IT training before we went to bed. We called my niece Emily in Houston several times to wish her a happy birthday but the phone was off so we were forced to just leave a message. She is not going to be happy.

I did some serious email maintenance on my own email account today. If I don’t do it every so often the email just sprawls out of control.

I slept in more than I meant to this morning but it was almost three when I finally managed to get to bed last night so I needed to stay in bed for a while to get enough sleep. I did some really quick cleaning this morning just in case Dominica managed to get home before me tonight – I don’t want her to think that I am a slob.

Today is my cubicle neighbour’s last day at the office. He stayed for a Monday because it is the last day of the month so he managed to round out the month while still being here. He starts at his new position tomorrow so he is not getting even a single day off.

For lunch today four of us from work went out to the Thai House. This was the first restaurant that I had gone to with my cubicle neighbour when I first started working in Warren so it was fitting to be the last place that we went for lunch as well.

Dominica managed to leave early this afternoon from Geneseo. She had to deal with the car’s insurance inspection this morning and then she had to do the final cleaning of the house before she could leave. Every time we go back to Geneseo to do some work on the house we have to do a major, last minute cleaning before we can leave it for a while. That is a real pain that we have to do so many complete overhauls. But we have to be getting close to the end out there. There can only be so much more for us to pack up and haul out. The upstairs has to be very, very close to being finished with the exception of the furniture that is mostly still there. All of the furniture that we are keeping is still there. Now the basement is a different story. All of the equipment is still located there because that has to get moved directly to Scranton and not to dad’s place and the theatre is being left in place until the very last second although I am beginning to consider tearing that down just so there is not so much to move at the last minute.

I think that Dominica and I are going to be going back home next weekend as well. I have a TMobile project in Syracuse that needs my immediate attention and I can’t really push it off for another week and if I did it would just end up conflicting with Bob Winan’s bachelour party in Syracuse (although it would be awfully handy to have two separate engagements in Syracuse on the same weekend.) Our summers are just way too busy! We say this every year and no matter how much we do to not schedule anything during the summer somehow every minute is just packed with stuff to do, people to see and places to be.

Our new Pfaltzgraff plates and dinner settings arrived today. I have a Midnight Sun collection that I bought when Josh and I first got our townhouse in Greece, New York but it was only a setting for four and one of the bowl was chipped and one of the plates went missing at some point. So Dominica ordered replacement pieces and, I think, settings for a lot more people. I am not sure exactly what she did get but it will be nice to have more of the same settings like normal people.

Dominica was running too late to be able to get dinner with me tonight so I went straight over to Tanjore on my way home and grabbed dinner. I had been hoping that Dominica would be able to meet me there and had gotten excited since I hadn’t had Tanjore in over a week but that didn’t work out so I ate alone.

I was home for about an hour before Dominica and Oreo arrived so I had a chance to do some cleaning before they got there. The place gets pretty messy when I am home alone – mostly from mail, magazines and packing material.

The evening was pretty slow. Dominica and Oreo ate and I did some light work on the computer. Dominica got a call about her car today from someone wanting a test drive. She called me and said that she thought that it was a friend of mine but she wasn’t positive that it was him. So I IM’d him tonight and found out that it really was him that drove that car today. The funniest part is that the car is being sold in Leicester and I work in Warren and the car was test driven by the only person that I know that used to work in the same facility that I work in. What are the chances? We laughed a lot about that.