Sheep Guarding Llama

I got my critical tasks done for the weekend yesterday but there was plenty of work to keep me busy today. I got an IP phone all set up and ready to go for Josh. I am delivering that to him this afternoon. Fortunately setting up the phones takes no time at all and is really easy.

Dad came over at 11:30 and we went over to the Omega for some lunch. I won’t get a chance to see him again for two weeks. I get very little chance to see anyone these days.

I spent the afternoon working frantically around the house. I got most of one large car load packed up and moved out to the garage for dad to pick up during the week and move to the farm. Every load helps – a lot. It is surprisingly easy to pack up your house when you do it in small increments like this. It is the driving back and forth between Geneseo and North Brunswick constantly that makes it all so hard and not being able to do any of the work during the week.

I had been planning on leaving Geneseo around 3:30 but I was being so productive that I decided to wait at least another hour. I had the car all packed and ready to go at 2:30 but when I finally tried to leave the neighbours kept grabbing me and I didn’t manage to get out of Geneseo until ten after five!

I drove east out to Canandaigua and met the Relyea’s at McGreggor’s on Canandaigua Lake. It was a bright and warm Sunday afternoon and the slight breeze off of the lake was perfect. We had dinner and hung out for a little bit. It was nice to get to visit. I also dropped off Josh’s new IP phone so that he could take it home and get it hooked up.

It was after seven when I finally left Canandaigua to drive to New Jersey. At least Canandaigua was somewhat on the way so it wasn’t too bad going over there. I took the route using the New York Thruway out to Syracuse and then south on US81 to pick up my normal route. There was sun as I drove east but once I turned onto US81 everything grew dark and ominous and the lightning could be seen in the distance over Cortland County and to the south.

The rain started around Cortland or a little to the north and continues all through the evening as I drove. The electrical storm was intense and there was a lot of warnings on the radio about it. The rain wasn’t so hard as to impare driving until I reached Pennsylvania then it really started. From Scranton until I got to Wind Gap or so the rain was unbelievable. Some of the hardest rain that I have ever been in. Once I was in New Jersey it let up and the rest of the drive wasn’t too bad. But by that point I was almost home. Once again, you will notice, it rained on a day when I was driving to or from New Jersey.

It was late – after midnight – when Oreo and I finally got home to North Brunswick. Boy were we tired. We mostly unpacked the car and then went right to bed. I am very glad that tomorrow is a “work from home” day. But not as happy as Oreo is about it.

Today is my day to build servers in Geneseo to get ready for the move to Scranton that is coming up very soon. It is going to take a lot of prep time to be ready and today is one of those days.

Dominica and I slept in a little this morning having gotten in rather late last night and not being able to fall asleep as soon as we had gotten home. The drive up from New Jersey was mostly uneventful. We stopped and ate a quick dinner at the Burger King on Livingston Avenue in New Brunswick before we left town. That seemed to work out well because it caused us to hit traffic a little later and eliminated the need to stop for dinner on the road. We didn’t get started until later than we had hoped because I had to go from Warren down to North Brunswick to get Dominica after work and then had to drive back again so we lose a good hour and a half if not more when we have to do it that way. But traffic was great and we made good time the whole way home. We arrived just a little after midnight but didn’t go to bed until after one and maybe closer to two in the morning.

Dad came over at nine this morning and the three of us went over to the Omega Grill for some breakfast. It is funny that Dominica and I are still such good customers of a restaurant in a town where we haven’t lived in months. It is nice getting to go back and just relax and visit.

When we got back to the house the Ralstons had all ready arrived to help for the day and had let themselves into the garage and had loaded their pickup truck full of deck furntiture that they were buying from us. That big truck load did a lot to clean out the garage. Now we have a lot more space to work with in there which we need to deal with all of the stuff that is going in and out of the house. The Ralstons also took the Otis Spunkmeyer oven that I had bought for Dominica a few years ago. She had wanted one and I got it for her for her birthday or something like that but she had never had a freezer large enough to hold a full order of Otis Spunkmeyer cookie dough so she had never even taken the oven out of the box that it had come in. That was kind of depressing but we are very unlikely to ever have enough room to justify having a convection oven designed just for cookies around. So it is one of those items that we really need to just let go of and move on. We are starting to get better with that stuff.

Dad hung around for just a little bit. He took one car load of stuff (during the week he had taken load after load and the garage was all but empty when we got back last night) which really got a ton of stuff moved out of the house. Dominica finished up the laundry that she had started last night and we were off to a really good start on the weekend.

It wasn’t long at all before Francesca, Madeline and Emily arrived to pick up Dominica on their way to Houston. They have a long day of driving ahead of them. They only stayed for a few minutes as they wanted to get right onto the road as quickly as possible.

My goal for the weekend is to get two servers built and ready for production and to get an IP phone set up and ready for Josh whom I expect to see tomorrow afternoon on my way back to New Jersey. I tried to keep my work for the weekend from becoming overly ambitious. Piling up too much stuff is a sure way to fail at everything.

I managed to get the first server mostly built and ready before the Ralstons returned after lunch. I had ordered a pizza from Mama Mia’s but it didn’t arrive before they got back. Once they were back we loaded the futon into their truck and then the air hockey table and Dominica’s old office chair. The futon and the office chair are going to my cousin Sara who is going to need them for college. The air hockey table is going to Art and Danielle’s basement for now.

After the Ralstons took off with their second truck load I set to work prepping the second server for the day. The first server that I built was an HP DL145 G2 running CentOS 4.3 for AMD64. This second one is an HP DL360 running Windows Server 2003 Web Edition. When I started working on this server I got the pleasant surprise of discovering that they had shipped it with 15,000 RPM hard drives instead of the 10,000 RPM drives that I had been expecting. They hadn’t specified which it was coming with but I never imagined that they would ship 15K drives without making a big deal about it. Very cool.

I was extremely happy to have been able to have gotten both servers built today. That was quite the relief. At seven in the evening I drove down to Leicester and picked up Jeremy so that we could go see Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man’s Chest at the Silver Lake Drive-In. We ran up to dad’s house because there were a couple of bins that had gotten moved that needed to be picked up and this was my one good window of time to get them. Dad was busy working on his lawn mower.

It was eight o’clock when we got to Perry. The Ralstons were arriving at the same time as us so that we could all watch the movie together. Unfortunately the show had sold out and we were unable to get in. The Ralstons headed back home and Jeremy and I drove down to Silver Springs to visit with Mary and Jocelyn who were going to go to the movie at nine to meet us because Jocelyn had to work until after eight. Believe it or not after all of the years that Mary has lived in Silver Springs this was the very first time that I had ever seen her apartment! I haven’t seen an apartment of Mary’s since she lived in Lima which was several years ago. In between she lived in Wellsville, New York for a while.

It took too long for people to decide what they wanted to do that we lost any hope we had of seeing the movie someplace else. Everyone was hungry so we drove back up to Perry and got hot subs at the Silver Lake Country Market – everyone, that is, except for Jeremy who as usual just got onion rings. Two orders of them. Then for dessert we walked across the street to the video rental shop that sells ice cream. Weird combination, I know.

I dropped Jeremy off on the way back home. Mary and Jocelyn came over and hung out for a little while. The house in Geneseo is really bare at this point and it is weird trying to sit in the living room as there are no seats that face each other.

Another travel day. Wouldn’t it be nice to just spend a nice, relaxing weekend at home? I wouldn’t really know.

The plan is to leave this evening as soon as I am able to get out of the office and head for Geneseo (getting dinner at the Waffle House in Clarke’s Summit, of course.) Then tomorrow morning Dominica will leave to go to Texas with her sister and I will spend the weekend getting servers ready to move out of Geneseo and packing up whatever I can to get moved out during the week. Art and Danielle plan on coming over to help sometime on Saturday and maybe with their truck we can get the futon out of the house. That is going to my cousin Sara to take to college with her. Then Sunday I am having an early dinner with Josh after a morning of continued prep and packing and then it is time to return to New Jersey. On Monday night I have to get Dominica from the airport in Newark very, very late. Technicaly Tuesday morning. 🙁

It is a beautiful day today. The temperature has finally broken and it is a comfortable high seventies or low eighties out there instead of the mid to high nineties that we faced earlier in the week. It looks to be a good day for traveling, for a change.

Work was quite busy today. Now that I have access to just about everything that I need to do my job I found that I actually have a lot of work to do! It is quite a relief as I have been mostly idle for quite some time. I have been working but not nearly as much as it feels that I should have been. But lots of people told me that it would take at least two months before I had access to the stuff that I needed and that was mostly correct. I have been here for three and a half months at this point, if you can believe that? I started in late March, moved to the current apartment in mid-April and it is now the end of the first week of July! Boy how time flies.

While I was quite busy I did manage to get some more magazine reading done while I was in the office. eWeek, InfoWorld and Windows IT Pro are my magazines of the day. I try to get through eWeek and InfoWorld quickly so that I can pass them on to Dominica who is now attempting to read them on a regular basis for the classes that she is taking from Empire.

I forgot to mention yesterday that Andy has been layed off from his current contract after having been there just about a month or less there. He had been hired for a full year contract but they hadn’t planned any budget for the project and they are unable to keep him on. This is real common, unfortunately, and he had even mentioned to Dominica last Friday that he got the same feeling at this position that he had gotten when we were at IBM in 2001 and knew that the project that we were on was dying. Everyone told us, right up until the day before we were layed off, that everything was fine and that we were imagining things but we were the only ones prepared for the layoffs when they came. It wasn’t just us but about one hundred and fifty contractors at the site were all let go within fourty eight hours. So he is winding down his work there now. He is working yet today and for all of next week but he is done one week from today. He didn’t even get to work this past Tuesday because it was a “holiday” (a.k.a. a day when they don’t have enough work for hourly workers to do so they don’t let them come into work and don’t pay them) and they didn’t have enough money in the budget for him to come in that day. Of course, they could have let him work on Tuesday and only kept him until next Thursday instead of next Friday but that would be less advantageous to them – it is generally to an employer’s advantage to spread your worktime out as much as possible because they are able to be better prepared for you to be there. That is why so many companies with low paid hourly workers are so happy about the state mandated unpaid breaks during the day (in New York it is two fifteen minutes breaks and one thirty minute break each eight hour day.) They are so short that you can’t possibly leave or think about anything other than work but they don’t have to pay you. And not only do they get to keep you at work without paying you but the state enforces the process so that they can act like it is the employees fault for being overprotected by the state even though it lowers the employee’s wage potential.

Here is the math on that (I have thought about this a lot over the years): Wage = $7.00, Work Day = 8 hours, Breaks = 1 hour. Employee only gets paid $6.22 per hour! Now of course the company doesn’t get as much benefit out of the break time that they do out of normal paid time but they do get many benefits including spreading out the work day which is a major benefit to businesses open longer than just a single shift which includes restaurants, hotels, etc. Now if you are an employee who only works that one job, doesn’t have anything to do when they get home and really likes just relaxing at their job then this isn’t the worst thing for you. But I am sure not that person. If you are a normal person working a low wage job like I used to be (remember Pizza Hut, Burger King, the nursing facility, Station 42, Tops Unfriendly Markets, The Days Inn, The Wellesley Inn, etc.) then you will most likely have to work more than one job and have to cram all of your life’s interests into a very short span of time between those jobs. The same would go for a college student or high school student who works while they are in school. The last thing that you want to do is spend an hour a day (or for people working two full time jobs TWO hours a day!) just sitting around at work not getting paid but unable to do anything else productive, relaxing or fun because you don’t have time to change your clothes, leave or switch mental gears into thinking about something else.

I found out today, although apparently I am way behind the curve on this one, that Mr. T likes two graham crackers, covered in chocolate and espresso from Starbucks. Check out Paul Davidson’s awesome impromtu interview with the Hollywood star at his local coffee shop.

Unlike a usual day at the office, the morning was busy and the afternoon was slow. That is not always good even though it is nice to get the hard stuff out of the way early (like eating your vegetables first and saving the good stuff for last) because being busy towards the end of the day helps to pass the time.

I finally got around to calling Verizon Wireless this afternoon to find out options for getting myself one of the Motorola Q Windows Mobile PDAs. I have been looking into getting one for about a week but haven’t actually called yet to get any information. The new Motorola Q is really hot. It was formally known as the Razrberry. It is super thin but runs Windows Mobile 5.0 which is what I am looking for. It has the keyboard and dial on the side that I like from my Blackberry but it runs Windows which I prefer since I want to use it as a full featured PDA with web browsing, wireless Internet for my laptop, email, instant messaging, etc.

Verizon was able to give me a second line as a data line just for my new PDA so I decided to go ahead and get it. I ordered the new Motorola Q with the unlimited data plan from Verizon so that I can use it all of the time wherever I am. It is a little pricey but it should prove to be a really nice tool to have. I will have full time access to email, web, instant messaging, etc. I am not sure how well this device will work for my particular needs but Verizon lets me try it out for fifteen days and then determine if I want to keep that or go with a different device so I am going to give it a try. It has a limited feature set compared to some of the more complete PDAs but it might meet my needs. We will see. It is very small and easy to use which is the major draw for me. I am not looking for a device that will replace my laptop – just something that will keep me in contact and I think that it might fit the bill. I don’t want to get carried away trying to do tons of stuff from my handheld. I have a PDA now and I never do that stuff. It isn’t really practical most of the time. I really just need some basic features for normal day to day activities.

The afternoon went from slow to molasses. Of course, Friday afternoons are always slow as as many people as possible attempt to sneak out early to start their weekend. So there are hardly any people doing anything to generate work requests. At least it gives me plenty of time to do things like order a Q.

I easily managed to get through all four magazines that I had brought with me. I should remember to bring more reading material with me on Fridays. There is less tech news on Fridays as well because everyone working at the news sites want to get started on their weekends too.

My cube neighbour, who is also a tech gadget junkie, and I spent a lot of the afternoon searching for cool tools for the Q and other Windows Mobile 5.0 for Smartphone devices. We found tons of cool stuff like PocketPutty for SSH access, Opera for good web browsing instead of IE, a port of OpenVPN, and the iMov Jabber client. I should be in good shape if all of this stuff really works. This means that, in theory, I will be on the Jabber IM system now all of the time. Sweet.

Five o’clock rolled around and everything was still calm and serene so I took advantage of the moment and stole myself away from the office. There is a lot of driving to be done this evening so I wanted to get moving.

Knowing that I am going to be very tired when I finally arrive in Geneseo I am taking the time now, while I am still in the office, to go ahead and post the daily. I will update everyone as to anything that happens eventful this evening tomorrow.

Have a good night and enjoy your weekends. Scott out.

I was up nice and early this morning – because we had a router down in Geneseo. What a pain that router is. I have to find a good way around that if this is going to continue to be such a major problem. I was up around seven thirty to deal with that. It required dad to drive out to Geneseo to manually restart it again. At least it gives him an excuse to get breakfast at the Omega. Today is his usual breakfast day with his sister anyway so I am assuming that that worked out well.

Dominica had to get up with me this morning because she is catching a ride with me when I go into work to pick up her car at the Mazda dealer on route 22. Fortunately it is very close to where I work. Oreo rode along too since Dominica is doing some shopping after getting her car back.

It rained either last night or early this morning. Couldn’t have been much but everything is wet again. I can’t believe how much it rains here. We are in July and the rains just keep coming and coming.

It really sucks having to spend almost $650 on a car that we are planning on selling as quickly as possible. We put over $1,000 into new tires for that car so far this year all ready! After picking up her car, Dominica made it down to Edison where she was shopping for dog food and goggles for him when her hatchback broke! Can you believe that? One of the bolts that holds the hydraulics for the truck snapped and left her with a hatchback door that she can’t close. Now we can’t really lock the car and we have to spend a bit of money getting that fixed before we can sell it or even let it sit at the apartment. Just what we need. Hopefully we can get it right back into the shop this afternoon. She could drop it off when I leave work. Argh.

I managed to get two lessons completed on the class that I have left open with HP. There is one lesson left for each class that has not opened up yet. I should be done with those classes by next week.

Today turned out to be a really good day at work. It was a breakthrough day in which I actually managed to get access to just about everything that I could need to do my job and I am now, believe it or not, able to be productive and useful at work. That is a great feeling. After two months of being here and not being useful and really just being in peoples’ ways I am now a valuable team member able to do my own work without needing someone to help me all of the time. This is a major stress reliever for me.

I left work at six and picked Min up from the apartment and we went to the Omega for dinner. For some reason I was starving when I got home so I was really looking forward to eating. I haven’t been eating much fried food since coming down to New Jersey. I am not sure why but it has been good for me. Tonight I decided to diverge from that and I got the fried seafood dinner. Big mistake.

I spent the evening feeling really sick. I got nothing done other than reading through several magazines that I have gotten backed up on reading. It takes a lot of work to get through all of the reading that I try to do.

For those who were left wondering what day I would possibly consider to be America’s birthday if not the Fourth of July. My answer in September 3, 1783 – the day that the Treaty of Paris was signed and the world recognized a new nation. The American Revolutionary War ran officially from 1775 until 1783 but skirmishes began as early as 1770 with the Boston Massacre.

Another fairly legitamate birthday for our country could be October 19, 1781 when Cornwallis surrendered to Hamilton at Yorktown, Virginia bringing the actual core fighting of the war to an end.

However, my personal favourite American birthday is March 4, 1789 – the day of the formal creation of the Federal Government of the United States of America when nine states ratified the US Constitution. This was the beginning of a totally new and still functioning government and the formation of America in the form that we know it today. Residents of the United States up until 1783 would really have thought of themselves as being inside of England, from 1783 until 1789 they would have thought of themselves as citizens of their given state or commonwealth but in 1789 all of that changed and the concept of “American citizenship” took place and for the first time we were Americans, in this great venture together as a single, coherent nation and not simply an economic confederation of tax free trading states. The Confederation years were closer to the current “North America Free Trade Agreement” than to any form of centralized government and no one today thinks of the US, Canada and Mexico as a single country. Canada is officially a confederation but their unity is much more formal and is under the British Commonwealth so their are unified by a force outside of their own internal government structure which makes their nationhood quite a different style than the American style even though on a day to day basis they mostly function with the same overarching centralized government with regional sub-governments.

Last night the rain returned. It was a light rain but anything that adds water to the system right now is probably pretty bad. Bob Crissman just reported that Broome County and eleven other New York counties (I assume that Herkimer is most likely included in that list) have been declared a national disaster area and are going to be receiving federal assistance. From what I have seen of Broome and Tioga counties it is desperately needed. This morning when I went out to the car it was a steady light to moderate rain, much heavier than it was when I went to bed. As I drove up Jersey Avenue I discovered that it must have been raining all night because everything was flooding and Jersey Avenue itself was half underwater. As I continued to work the rain increased to heavy or maybe even to pouring status making it hard to drive and difficult to see. Just what we need right now. I hope that it isn’t raining in New York. New Jersey has more rivers and coastline to take the excess water than New York and Pennsylvania do.

For anyone needing federal flood assistance information you can go directly to FEMA’s information page about the Upstate New York Flood listed as July 1, 2006 – incident 6485.

In New Jersey news today the state began to shut down all none essential services due to the Democrat controlled legislature being unwilling to pass the governor’s budget. Unlike most states this includes a complete shutdown of the casinos in Atlantic City which is going to completely cripple one of the state’s largest cities and send a tremendous number of low wage earners onto the dole. Nothing like widespread unemployment to bolster your tax base in a time of budget crisis. According to the casinos there was no reason for the shutdown as the workers that the state is not allowing to work in Atlantic City are paid for by the casinos and not by the state even though they are state workers so any decision to not allow them to go to work was one of malice toward the city and the state and not one of financial necesity. For anyone considering taking a vacation to Atlantic City, this is the time. No casinos operating, hardly anyone in town and a whole city full of resorts looking to do anything to attract visitors.

Today was bill paying day. I hate paying bills. Especially when they are so big. Ugh.

For breakfast today I had a Balance bar courtesy of Hewlett-Packard. They sent out the Balance bars as a promotional item showcasing their AMD Opteron and Athlon based products stating that they were the perfect balance of power and price. It was really handy today because I didn’t have anything else that I could grab quickly as I headed out of the door. It was a good promotional item though because obviously I thought about it and now you are thinking about it too. Now you will remember AMD processors from HP! (Unfortunately for HP that is all that I buy anyway so they weren’t getting any additional purchases from me – my desktop, laptop and all new servers are HP AMD machines.)

I had some additional time available to me again today so I decided to enroll for HP’s “Wireless Security In Depth” class. I am getting as much out of HP’s classes as possible.

I had lunch at the office today. Finally there was a vegetarian special on: arepas with Mexican corn and fried plantains. The arepas were awesome. I hope that they have those more often. They almost never have real vegetarian selections so I am stuck getting just a sandwich most days and the selection of sandwiches isn’t very broad so things get boring quickly.

At 2:30 we discovered a problem that resulted in me becoming buried beneath a mountain of paperwork. This will take several days for me to complete, I am sure. Always something fun going on. At least it wasn’t my fault so it is just work, not stress. Paperwork is only so bad. It isn’t fun and it is annoying but I don’t find it to be stressful or anything like that. So that is fine.

I managed to complete the entire Wireless Security class long before the end of the day so I enrolled for HP’s “Security for IT Professionals” class – which I thought was available now but does not open until the next “section”. I am probably getting more out of HP’s classes than anyone! I am very glad that HP offers them. There is a lot of good stuff in there. Maybe if more people take them HP will offer a wide assortment in the future. I looked through their current classes carefully but there was nothing more that I thought would be useful to me left for me to take this “semester” except for an introduction to Microsoft Publisher 2003 but i don’t want to take that class unless I have time to do it when I am able to sit down with my copy of Publisher 2003 and try out the stuff that I am learning. I would like to get through that class if possible because there is a Publisher 2003 Advanced class available directly following it.

On July 3rd I forgot to include the very funny story of running out of gas while test driving the BMW 330 so everyone who has all ready read the daily from Monday will need to go back and read that entry. I can’t believe that I forgot to include such a memorable experience.

Towards the end of the day, as often happens, things slowed down and I managed to have a nice, relaxing but productive day. And there are only two days of work left this week. Hardly feels like the week has even gotten started. Things were going smoothly so I was able to get out of work at six and head for home.

I got home in good time and we went immediately out to Tanjore for some dinner. The weather wasn’t bad so Oreo got to ride along and stay in the car. He is so much happier when he doesn’t get left behind. I got the hottest item on the menu. They have learned that I can handle hot foot and they are finally letting me have it. This was HOT. Not as hot as hot Buffalo wings or the vindalu that Bob got that one time in Ithaca but it was hot nonetheless. After dinner we went next door for some ice cream which was very much needed.

I spent the evening at home working on the movie database system. Now when a “view” is entered it records the fact that a particular film was viewed, by whom, when and increments the total number of views for that particular film which, in turn, updates the statistics for the total number of views of the collection and the cost per view. This little update does a lot to make the system more usable for me on a day to day basis. I have to maintain a separate “times watched” total for each video separate from the “views” table because of legacy data coming from the spreadsheet that I have been using for years. I don’t like having it that way but the alternatives aren’t pretty. I might switch it at some point but I am not sure. The system will only ever get so big. It is a movie database system, after all. But then again, it would be nice if it was really cool and solid and good for other people to use if I make it open source software. That would be awfully neat.

I have been struggling to get enough sleep and with the changing schedule it has been extra tough. So we targetted going to bed at ten thirty. We didn’t quite make it but we were close. Dominica spent the evening working on her Linux 101 class from HP, reviewing her SUNY Empire classes and studying for her A+ exam.