Sheep Guarding Llama

After staying up so late last night we had to sleep in some this morning. Today is a big project day with a lot of work to be done. Both Dominica and I got right to work this morning on our weekend projects and worked busily into the afternoon. For lunch we just had our leftovers from the Omega Diner last night which were almost as good today as they were last night.

Early this afternoon we decided to take Oreo for a drive in the convertible and go up to Hunterdon County and look at the house and the area around it. Dominica has not been there since we went for the tour several weeks ago and has never had a chance to drive around the area at all. So we drove out to Lebanon and took some quick pictures in the village so that people could see what the place looks like and then we took a few pictures up at the house so that we could show you the house and the view. Then we zipped back around back of the house to the lake since no one is going to believe what that lake looks like. I am looking forward to being able to go for walks back there. The big downside to the lake is that it is a resevoir and it is fenced off near our house so we can see it but we can walk down to the shore. Instead we have to go around to the park entrance which isn’t very far but it is a bit long for a casual walk. But there is a boat launch very close to the house so we could easily use it quite often so, of course, we are kicking around the idea of getting kayaks. The lake is very still and perfect for small watercraft like that. Nothing like the Finger Lakes where a large boat is a much better idea.

We drove over to Clinton so that we could see what the nearest “big” town was like. We were hoping that there would be some shopping there as Lebanon has nothing at all. Fortunately Clinton has a Walmart and a ShopRite and a few other things so we will be able to get most of our supplies there. Clinton is only a few minutes away on the highway so it won’t be bad getting things there even though we have to leave town to do all of our shopping.

We came home and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening hard at work on our respective projects. For dinner we just ordered some pizza from Domino’s. I wasn’t really hungry but Dominica wanted pizza.

Dominica is starting to get eye strain from working on the computer all day long and so had to take a break to do a little reading and then to watch a movie. She watched The Perfect Score which I saw last week on the train from Rochester to New York City. It really isn’t that good of a movie. Watching it again pointed out even more how it was written by illiterate losers who probably did really poorly on the test, for obvious reasons, and set out to make a movie attacking it. It was quite clear from the movie’s dialogue that the writers were quite unaware of the mechanics of the test and did not even do the most basic research into the test that I would expect from any high schooler or parent of a high school who may be taking the test. Things like the fact that the minimum score is a 400 with a minimum of 200 points given for either half and that you final SAT score is the highest cumulative of your best English portion and your best Math portion. That and the absurd notion that you have to have some insanely high SAT score to get into any good college. The numbers in the real world simply do not bear that out. People often claim that you have to have a 1400+ SAT score to get into many “good” schools and that this is a hard fact and that no one has ever gotten in with less than that but when you actually look at that particular school you discover that its AVERAGE SAT score for its students is generally hundreds of points below the “number you have to have to get in.” For all of you who failed elementary math – that means that only a handful of students ever had those really high scores and that just as many students were probably admitted with really low scores to average out the high ones! When I was looking at colleges many years ago the highest average SAT score of any school in the nation was only 1280 and the next was 1240 and the rest were in the 1100’s or below. Now that was some years ago and the numbers have changed over time but the basics are still there. People claim that some schools like Harvard only accept people with perfect scores. Think about that. If Harvard accepts 6,000 freshman each year (which is approximately correct) and there are only twenty perfect scores each year (which is approximatley correct – I researched both numbers) then it takes 300 years of SAT takers to turn out a single freshman class at Harvard assuming that every perfect scorer lived at least 318 years and waited until Harvard was ready to accept them all at once and that they new that Harvard was going to exist and that the SAT’s existed in 1706 since if those people waited to take the SAT’s by even a single year it would throw off the averages again messing up the whole thing. And that also assumes that Harvard has never had a freshman class until 2006.

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.