Sheep Guarding Llama

After yesterday I was worried that work was going to be completely nuts again today.

Some time ago Dominica sent me this link to the Queens County Farm Museum from GoCityKids that she thought looked interesting. The Queens County Farm Museum is the only working historical farm in the city and it 47 acres which is a huge tract of land for New York City. I would like to go to the museum sometime. It would probably be quite interesting. Dominica had pointed it out because my family had the oldest European farm on Long Island and this is the oldest one existing in the vicinity. She thought that maybe this was my family farm but this one is in Queens County and my family’s farm was in Kings County just to the south.

Need a good reason not to buy Apple products? Read about Apple’s likely cover-up of a major security hole in its system that is widely known about but Apple, like Cisco, is able to keep the actual announcement of it under wraps through probably legal pressure. Isn’t it funny that the US legal system will happily fight against the truth as long as it hurts consumers. It is unethical behaviour like this that keeps me from buying Apple and, coincidentally, Cisco equipment. Cisco lost my vote in any buying decision with its clear anti-secure tactics from last year’s Black Hat conference. If Cisco, and apparently Apple, care so little about the safety of their customers then why would their customers care to give them their money?

Today ended up being busy but not quite as busy as yesterday. Enough work to keep me hopping though. Yesterday was a little too busy for my taste but it doesn’t seem to happen too often.

I got home from work in good time. It was about 6:30 which isn’t bad at all. Dominica cooked dinner and we just ate at home. It was a fairly uneventful and relaxing evening. Dominica worked on her homework on data mining and I worked to build a quick and dirty new web site for my high school class. You can check out my progress at York94.

My high school class reunion picnic (which is at twelve years instead of ten – go figure) is coming up soon but I can’t make it to it which is very sad. At least I get to be involved with the web site.

I talked to dad tonight. He is planning on coming down to New Jersey the weekend after next (August 18th – 22nd.) He hasn’t been down to see where we live or where I work yet. He has never been to this area so I am sure that it will be neat to see what New Jersey is actually like.

Is it just me or do Monday morning elicit memories of the Bangles and the Mamas and the Papas?

Today started off with me jumping out of bed and working in the living room trying to catch up on work that had piled up throughout the night. I ended up getting to be so busy that I had to stay at home to work until lunchtime! It was quite the busy morning.

Since I was home, Dominica and I went over to the Omega Diner to get lunch before I headed up to the office. It was a nice change of pace for the day. Dominica took the laundry with her so that she could head straight to the laundromat to do that since we were out of the house. There was a lot of laundry to do. It has been over two weeks, I think, since it has been done. She took her database textbook along with her so that she could read about data mining. Oh the excitement.

My afternoon at the office ended up being super crazy just like my morning was. I barely got a breather all day. I ended up working quite a bit later than I had anticipated and didn’t manage to leave the office until after 6:30. Then, even after I had left, I got stuck in the parking garage on the phone until after 7:00. I got a chance to talk to just about everyone though. I talked to Joe in South Carolina, Eric in Rochester, my cubicle neighbour who left the company that I am at now last week and even Jonathan Stagno in Los Angeles. I haven’t talked to Stagno since last fall – just before my cell phone was smashed in Florida with his numbers in it. He was married on December 18th of last year!

Dominica and I had planned on just eating at home tonight but I was so burnt out on my way home that I decided that we needed to go somewhere for dinner so that I could get a break and relax so she met me out at Tanjore. It works out well to go there on Monday nights since they are closed on Tuesdays.

I managed to talk to Nate tonight and make plans for this upcoming weekend. Dominica and I are staying in New Jersey on Friday night which is a nice change from having to pack up and take off straight after work on Friday night. Then on Saturday morning we are driving up to Ithaca and meeting the Parkers for lunch. From Ithaca Nate and I are going to drive together up to Syracuse for golfing with Bob’s bachelour party. Dominica will catch a ride out to Geneseo with Tammy who is going to Perry. Then, after the party, Nate and I will drive from Syracuse out to Geneseo. Complicated but it works out. Then, on Sunday, Dominica and I are working in Pittsford for a few hours before heading back down to New Jersey. It is going to be a really busy weekend.

Bob Crissman taught a blogging and podcasting class today in Binghamton.

It was very late by the time that we got back from dinner so we just did some light work and relaxing around the house. I spent the biggest part of the evening entertaining the dog who had been left home alone for a large portion of the day. He really missed his daddy and wanted to play a lot.

We stayed up working last night until close to four in the morning. We probably should not have done that as we didn’t get out of bed until after noon. Oops. That will make going to work tomorrow that much harder.

I did the SGL updates for Friday and Saturday and then worked to get some of the pictures that we took yesterday in Lebanon ready to post to Flickr so that you could all share in our new little town. I posted the first three pictures today as only three are visible at a time on the main page here. Click on the pictures to go to the Flickr page so that you can see all of the pictures. I will try to get more up tomorrow as I have almost a dozen that I want to post. But at least people can get the first glimpses of our house being built. It is scheduled for completion in mid-November although I doubt that they will actually finish on time. We are planning on it being closer to December.

Dominica had a big homework day today and managed to get a ton done with her database class project that was due by midnight tonight. This class is producing a lot of work for her but she is learning a lot from it. It is really quite a valuable class.

I spent the day working on my asset tracking system project that I have been doing for the last several days. I ended up working on it until after midnight but I managed to finally get it into a working state that I am pretty happy with. It is far from finished but I did a bunch of redesign and refactoring of it and I am pretty happy with here it is at after just a few days. It is ready to be used lightly this week and, with any luck, I will have enough time to work on it some more this week.

We went over to the Omega Diner for dinner tonight. We just were not in the mood to sit home after having worked all day. We needed the break. After dinner we went over to Barnes & Nobles and did some book shopping. I ended up getting a new PHP book: PHP in Practice. I also picked up a few other miscellaneous titles. It has been a good book week.

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.