Sheep Guarding Llama

Day two of class. I didn’t have to leave the apartment until 8:45. Boy did that ever feel great. I got some serious sleep last night and didn’t have to jump out of bed when I woke up this morning.

The day was spent in the VMWare class. Fortunately the air conditioning was on today and it was only in the high seventies all day. It felt positively chilly compared to what we were used to.

On the way home I stopped by the Omega Diner and got the amazing French toast for dinner. Then it was on to my apartment. I got home and discovered that the air conditioning in the apartment was fixed too. It was the thermostat that wasn’t working and there was a new one installed when I got in. It was running when I got in and the apartment was sort of cool Not really cool. But a little. A lot more than yesterday.

I watched some more Magnum P.I. and worked on getting a working Zimbra server running for some testing. I started listening to J.M. Robert’s Unabridged “History of the World” that is about sixty five hours long.

Today is the first day of my super early shifts. My alarm went off at 2:45 and I left from bed and jumped into the shower. I felt like crap but that’s what you get for getting up that early when you are not used to it. Sleeping covered in sweat because the house in eighty degrees doesn’t help much either. I am very sensitive to sleeping in the heat. I can handle it fine when I am awake but when I am sleeping I need to be cool.

I was out the door at 3:30. There were no cars on the roads. It took only three minutes to get to Route 18. Three minutes! I was at my desk at 4:04 am. Now comes the rough part. The office air conditioning was turned off over the weekend and the office was dramatically hotter than the apartment. It might have been ninty degrees. Probably not quite that much but it had to be close. It was unbelievable. I was very fortunate to have purchased a small desk fan last week at Walmart and all ready had that on my desk. It had only been a convenience last week but now it was an absolute necessity. I kept in aimed at my head and kept a wet paper towel and just wiped my head continuously. This is not what I need on a morning after having worked all weekend in a steamy apartment and got practically no sleep and now sit dying in the office at my desk at four in the morning heading into a thirteen hour shift.

I am scheduled to be here all day today. I am covering the “desk” early in the morning before anyone else arrives and then I am going to the first day of my “VMWare ESX” class which will go until 5:00. I don’t think anyone thought about the fact that I had class this week when I got scheduled to come in so early. I didn’t or I might have said something. I didn’t realize that I had class this week either until Friday evening.

I listened to Garrison Keelor’s “The Book of Guys” while I sat in my burning cubicle all alone. It is far from his best work but it helps me get through the morning.

At 6:30 I walked past a guy in the office who was standing with the refridgerator door trying to keep himself cool. He said that at 6:00 it was eighty nine degrees in the office and it was at that point that I was happy with how cool it had gotten. If that was eighty nine then I would guess that the office was well over a hundred when I first got in. I have no idea how they could let the office get that hot. That can’t be practical – to make the entire office building unusable for the entire weekend and into the regular work week.

I finished the first book and decided to get started on Roberts’ Updated “History of the World” which is a gigantic work attempting to cover the entirety of human history. I listened to that book until the battery gave out on me.

At 8:00 I went down to the cafeteria and got myself some breakfast. I was glad to get the break and it was nice to think that I was all ready four hours into my day. My class starts at 11:30 so I have just three more hours to go at the time that I am writing this. Originally this was going to be my super easy week. Nothing but class but it turned into a really crazy week with long days and class just being added on top of my regular work.

I read an issue of “Invention & Technology” that dad had sent down in a bundle of mail a week or two ago. There was an article in there about radio communications with the early US satelillites. I thought that it was interesting that in 1962 the Mariner 2 (which did the first successful fly-by of another planet – Venus) transmitted back just eleven million bit (or eleven megabits) which is equal to the one second raw capacity of modern 802.11b WiFi. One second! That isn’t very much data to collect from such a huge mission. Funny to think of those missions as being hugely successful sending back one second’s worth a data. And 802.11b is not considered fast at all these days.

At 9:30 it is still eighty degrees in the office and everyone is talking about the heat but I know better. This is nothing. They are all just wusses. Wusses! (Is that how you spell that?)

I wrapped up the Linux Systems Administration 301 class from HP that I have been taking. It was a six lesson class spread out over three weeks. I got that completed just in time to not have it overlap with my VMWare class.

Just to show that absolutely anyone can get published by the “government IT trades” here is an article on the US Marshall Service switching to Red Hat Linux. I was so pissed about the blatant lies that it told that I wrote to the author and then, when his email responded as out of office (hopefully out of a job) I wrote to his editor with this:

To the Editor:

I read with interest the article by Michael Arnone which spoke about the US Marshal Service’s move to Red Hat Linux. However, I have to question the reliability of this article. In the tag line it is started that the agency is moving to Linux but when you read the article it states that Linux was the previous operating system and that only the vendor is being changed.

This would be a minor point but the article states, in several spots, that the previous operating system was SUN SCO Linux. There are several issues with this. The first is that SUN and SCO are not affiliated but are, in fact, competitors. SUN is the maker of the Solaris operating system and makes no Linux product of their own. SCO is the new name of the company formally known as Caldera who, once upon a time, made a product known as OpenLinux. SCO, several years ago, ceased all Linux activity and decided to sue Linux vendors and users claiming that Linux was an illegal product containing code stolen from them. This is the highest profile legal battle in the IT world and inconceivable that your publication is not aware of this. SCO has never made a Linux product under its own name and certainly not in association with SUN.

Also the article states that the agency is switching to Red Hat Linux in order to allow them to migrate away from proprietary platforms that they have used in the past BUT you then state that their choice of their previous operating system was based on its ability to run on the standard Intel Pentium architecture. SCO’s product line is indeed aimed at the x86 architecture.

It is also stated that SCO’s Linux was one of the first operating systems to run on the x86 platform but, of all commercial server OSs, it is one of the later being a latecomer to the Linux game being far behind Windows, OS/2, Netware, UnixWare, Xenix, etc. Is this only in comparison to hobby and research operating systems?

It is stated that Red Hat’s Linux product is less expensive than the SUN alternative (I will use it as there is no SCO alternative to consider.) But SUN’s Solaris product is free while Red Hat’s product requires an expensive support license. Red Hat is more expensive that Novell’s SUSE Linux, what once was Caldera’s OpenLinx and, in fact, any other Linux competitor that I am aware of today or ever.

Unlike many other Linux variants it is not easy to download an evaluation copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can easily obtain a copy of Fedora Linux for free but this is a separate product that would be the equivalent of using a copy of Windows XP to evaluate Windows Server 2003.

It is blatantly obvious that this article is a complete fabrication by a person who is not even familiar with the cursorily of the IT field.

… and then for good measure I included it here. Just for the record. But come on people, just because you write for poorly educated goverment vendors should not give you license to just make up the entire article. I doubt that they even spoke with the US Marshal service. Not one verifiable portion of this article was not fabricated so it is extremely unlikely that the unverifiable portions are true. Why research the parts that people can’t check on when you have all ready blown all of your integrity on the stuff that the average person knows the first day on the job? I also posted the letter into the comments on LinuxToday who had linked to the article. This type of yellow journalism will not be tolerated. I can only imagine that they were paid to write the article but a concerned party and they thought that they could just make up all of the details that they needed.

Here is a point of interest: In is common for those seeking to become lawyers to obtain a JD degree. A JD is a Juris Doctor but is only a first level professional degree. So the personal obtaining the degree is a doctor BUT the degree is below the LL.M. degree – Master of Laws. So the legal profession’s typical degree ascention is doctor – master and then doctor again. Weird. Once again showing how bizarre and non-obvious academia can be.

At 11:15 I and two of the guys that work near me went over to the other building to go to the VMWare ESX class. I was in class until 5:00. The first day was pretty good. I learned some about VMWare and virtualization. It is hard to tell at this point but I think that the class will probably be valuable.

The classroom had the same problem this afternoon that my office had this morning. They had left the air conditioning off all night and they weren’t able to cool down the classroom. The hallways where the cooling was working much better and had thermometers on all of the walls were in the mid eighties. The classroom itself was in the nineties. It was awful. It was all that anyone could talk about all day was how hot it was everywhere.

After work I decided to go over to the Omega Diner and get some dinner even though I am all alone. I got the stuffed salmon dinner that is so good. Then it was back to the apartment. I called about getting the air conditioning fixed in the apartment but they can’t do it until tomorrow because I “overlocked” the door today.

I spent the evening relaxing. Mostly I watched Magnum P.I.. I am quickly wrapping up the first season. I need to get the second season to fill in the gaps now.

My schedule was changed for the week. I am no longer working the super early shift. I am only going to class the rest of the week. That is from 9:30 to 5:00 each day. That will make for a much more relaxing week. I am looking forward to that.

Today is Memorial Day and I am spending it alone in the the hot apartment with no air conditioning. My goal for today is to do just about nothing. I seriously need a day off. This weekend has been brutal. I am exhausted and just want to relax. I just wish that it wasn’t so hot.

I slept in nice and late today. It was probably 9:00 when I finally got up but I had been checking my email since 8:00 or earlier. I couldn’t sleep in too late today because I have to go to bed and get up quite early tonight. That and it gets hot once the sun comes out and it isn’t easy to sleep anymore.

I decided to play a bit of “Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind” today. Several hours worth. I managed to level once. I am impressed by the non-linear nature of the game. I won’t go so far as to say that it is “deep” but it does give you a better feeling of living in the world rather than just walking around in it. The graphics are really good, not amazing anymore but good. I liked walking around and exploring the world. I didn’t get too far but it is neat that you can just meander and explore. I think that this game has more of the “wide open you are there” feeling than any game that I have ever played before. The game really does not funnel you into the place where you are supposed to be. You can just explore and explore.

For lunch/dinner I just ordered in from Domino’s because I didn’t want to leave the house at all. I was happy to just stay in. I watched some Magnum P.I. – there wasn’t much else to watch. I didn’t watch too much but my day was pretty short.

I put in a little time doing some work today but not too much and not too strenuously. Just some database design. I find that relaxing and rewarding.

I finished listening to Garrison Keelor’s “Lake Wobegon Days” which I have heard in parts previously and this one was the abridged version which is different than the unabridged version with actually different material, just a tiny bit but a little. It is an awesome book though. Everyone should read it.

I have to be up at 2:45 tomorrow morning so I went to bed at 9:00 hoping that I would get enough sleep. I couldn’t go to bed before that because it was too hot but at least it was cooling down. I finished up the book while I was lying in bed hoping to get sleepy. It probably took a couple of hours before I actually fell asleep.

I got my six hours of sleep in last night and then it was time to get up and get back to work. The apartment was very warm today and I am not very happy that I have no air conditioning.

I worked for a few hours today getting things wrapped up from yesterday as best as possible. What a way to spend the weekend. A long three day weekend with nothing planned at all and I end up working until midnight on Friday, putting in a full day on Saturday and then having to work some on Sunday too. We will see how tomorrow goes but since I support the UK and since they do not have a holiday tomorrow there is a really good chance that I will be working at least a little tomorrow too.

I didn’t bother to go out for food today at all. I just ate whatever was in the house which amounted to pretty much just Slim Fast, PB&J and chips. There has been so much going on to keep me busy that I just haven’t wanted to go anywhere. I should probably go to the Omega tomorrow and get some real food. My last real meal was my lunch there on Friday.

I had to spend a lot of time sitting in the yard today using the cell phone because it doesn’t work from inside of the apartment. That was really annoying. At one point when I was coming back into the house to use my email a pack of small boys (in the four or five year old range) who were playing in front of the apartment barged in as I came in. It took me completely by surprise. I think that they are so used to just going into any of their neighours’ houses (they were all kids from different neighbours) that they didn’t know that they couldn’t just do that. They had been coming up to me and talking to me when I was on the cell in the yard too. They came in and starting asking for juice and complaining that the living room was messy. One kid grabbed Oreo’s half dead stuffed monkey and took it. I said that he couldn’t have it and he turned around on the sidewalk in front of the apartment and gave me the “boo boo kitty” face and I said that he could keep it. But then fifteen minutes later he brought it back complaining that it was all ripped up. I am not sure if that was why he brought it back or if that was the excuse after his parents realized that he had come home with a strange stuffed animal and sent him back with it. It was all quite surreal. I couldn’t believe that any of it happened. I was so in shock I didn’t know what to do.

My Internet connection cut out at 2:00 leaving me with no way to do anything. My lifestyle is very Internet oriented and having no Internet connection leaves me with very little that I can do. There is little as awful as being an IT professional without an Internet connection. To make matters worse my cell and my Blackberry died around the same time. So I really lost my ability to communicate. I hate that.

It was another really warm day today and I was too busy working all day to be able to worry about the air conditioning although I am sweating horribly. I had to spend a lot of the day sitting in the yard trying to talk on the cell. There just isn’t any reception on the cell when I am in the apartment so the only way to carry on any kind of reasonable telephone call is to go outside. At least there is a shade tree right in front of the apartment that I can sit under and keep myself cool.

I watched some of Magnum P.I. Season One today. I love the first season. It is really good. And I also watched Ranma 1/2 the movie. That wasn’t so good. I don’t think that it lived up to the series and a movie should be better than the regular television episodes in my opinion. That was all that I watched today. I restrained myself considerably.

I ran out to Walmart early this evening and did some quick shopping. There are no new DVDs out that I am interested in except maybe for Disney’s made for television musical High School Musical. I thought about getting that but decided against it. At least not today. It seems like it will be the kind of thing that will be available dirt cheap in a few months. The real reason that I was at Walmart was because I was pretty sure that they would have a low cost copy of the video game “Elder Scrolls III” and I was right. They had the Game of the Year edition which game with the original game “Morrowind” and the two expansion packs as well. It was only $20 for the box so I splurged. I really don’t need a new video game but I haven’t gotten a nice RPG in a long time and every so often when I have lots of time to myself I like to sit down and play one. I decided that I needed to have a single player game like “Elder Scrolls III” today when my Internet access went out and I was left with no connection to the outside world. I needed some to do while it was out and that seemed like the way to go.

I installed “Elder Scrolls III” on Dominica’s desktop when I got back to the apartment as her desktop is the only one with any kind of serious 3D acceleration. Fortunately the game is a few years old at this point and her machine is able to handle it just fine. The only monitor setting that we have is 1600×1200 and that pushes the graphics cards pretty hard still. It installed fine and I played it for an hour or maybe two at the most. I managed to get a decent way into the game – enough to be into the real gameplay and not in the “learning” stages anymore. The graphics and sound are good and the game seems like it is going to be fun. I am happy with it so far. I would really like to the play the sequel but I am going to wait for that to come down in price. “Elder Scrolls IV” is currently $40 on sale and $50 regular. That is too rich for my blood.

At 10:00 I took a short walk and called Dominica to see how she was doing in Frankfort. She is having fun with her family and Oreo is having a blast having Dexter to play with all day long. It is good that he has friends to play with. He is a very social dog and needs a lot of interaction.

I finally got around to actually firing up the D325 desktop (my own Windows XP machine – not Min’s) since I added the additional 512MB of memory. It seems to run a lot faster now (the upgrade not only doubled the memory on the machine but it also upgraded it from a single memory channel to dual so that it is a lot of performance gain.) I got my new Sandisk C150 MP3 player installed onto that machine and working with Audible. In order to use the Sandisk Sansa player I needed to download the latest version of the Audible Manager which is in the 5.x series. I have only used the 4.x series previously. I am hoping that 5.x will still allow the conversion to MP3 from the AA format. It will probably be a while before I actually check. It is very important to me to be able to convert because I am spending a lot of money on these files and I want to be able to maintain an archival copy even though I much prefer using the AA (Audible Audio) format because the quality and features are awesome.

Once I got my Sandisk Sansa C150 setup and connected to Audible I set to downloading tons of stuff to put onto it. That is the whole idea behind having such a big, dedicated Audible device. Tons of books ready to go at any time. Hopefully tomorrow I will have a chance to get enough downloaded to at least fill the device. I have learned that it is important to always have enough books handy that you should be able to read as much as you want at any time without ever having to worry about having to go and buy one. There should always be a buffer. I have learned this from many times traveling and needing to have a book for the journey. This device should solve that issue for me. That and my subscription to Audible being an annual subscription that I pay for up front so my entire year’s worth of reading is made available to me on the first day of my annual cycle.

One book that I am particularly excited about listening to on my new MP3 player is Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Men”. “Little Men” is one of those works of literature that really made reading come alive for me when I was a child. I don’t remember how old I was when I read it but I have only ever read it once and I was quite young. At the time I didn’t know that it was the sequel to “Little Women” and was a little confused by the way that the story picked up without a lot of introduction. But still the book’s title still conjures up vivid images from its pages now probably more than twenty years later. I am really looking forward to being able to go back and enjoy it all over again as an adult. I am sad, though, that Audible does not have an unabridged reading of “Little Women” as well. They have a dramatization of it but that is not the same. Some people enjoy those but I do not. I prefer to hear the author coming through and not the director. I didn’t read “Little Women” until I was probably in my twenties or near to it and so that book is a lot more vivid to me.

I was in a book kind of mood so I did a little online shopping and got myself four new Garrison Keillor novels as well as a recently discovered Mark Twain novel from 1876 – “A Murder, a Mystery and a Marriage”.

I managed to get myself to bed before midnight tonight. I need to get ready because tonight is the last night before I have to start being at the office at 4:00 in the morning. That will require some preparation.

I didn’t get to bed until probably two in the morning so I slept in until around ten. It was way too warm out and I haven’t turned on the air conditioning yet so I was pretty drowsy and didn’t sleep all that well. It is really humid too. That doesn’t help unless it is quite cold.

I set up in the living room for a long weekend of computing and put in the DVD of Cocoon. Cocoon was Ron Howard’s “redemption” film. Probably his last chance to atone for the slew of trash that he made in the 1970’s. Just a year before he had made Splash which was enough to keep his career lingering but Cocoon is the movie that actually saved him. Not that it saved him for much. He made a few really good movies like Backdraft, Willow and Apollo 13 but then his career petered out and the movies began to decline. Then in 2000 he made How the Grinch Stole Christmas and everyone remembered him as the director of Grand Theft Auto – possibly the worst movie of all time. I realize that Last Resort and The Blair Witch Project give it some serious competition but Grand Theft Auto most likely takes the prize.

I spoke to Dominica first thing this morning and she and Francesca were near Memphis and very tired. They were thinking of calling it a day pretty soon. They were both really exhausted. They have come to realize that they are not as young as they used to be. They just can’t drive that far without sleeping anymore. It is tough getting old.

I had left over mac and cheese and rice pudding for lunch. It was still good.

I had more work to do today from last night. But I get paid for working weekends so it is cool.

As I continue to work my way through the unwatched portions of my DVD collection I watched Cool World with Brad Pitt, Gabriel Byrne and Kim Bassinger from 1992. I have never seen Cool World before but Dominica talks about it sometimes and I found it cheap at Walmart so I picked it up. It turned out to be a pretty crappy movie. The plot was impossible to follow and practically none existant. The whole thing was just dumb.

My cell phone not working in or near the apartment is really getting to be a problem. I had so many dropped called today it was ridiculous. The Vonage doesn’t work very well overlapping with the other VoIP phone so I can’t use that until I get that problem figured out. I am not totally convinced that the Vonage works at all anymore. I can’t get its light to come on at all. Just another thing that I have to deal with now. Argh.

Work wasn’t about to end so I decided to take the opportunity to watch Hudson Hawk which is one of Eric’s favourite movies. I only know of this movie because Eric always talks about it. But it is a Bruce Willis movie so it can’t be bad.

Hudson Hawk wasn’t that bad but it wasn’t a classic either. It was cute and enjoyable but definitely nothing special. I ended up working all day. This has been one busy week and next week is set to be incredibly busy too. I am starting every day at 4:00 am and I just realized that I am in class all week as well that will go until 5:00 in the afternoon. That is a thirteen hour day every day all week. I will be really tired by the end of the week. That means that I won’t get my “starting early commuting bonus” by getting to come home when there isn’t any traffic. I will be going home during rush hour 🙁 Somehow this stuff never pans out when you hope that it will.

I am rapidly running out of stuff to watch on DVD. I only brought so many DVDs with me thinking that it would take me forever to go through them but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Working remotely doesn’t give me a lot of chance to do other things so watching DVDs allows me to stay at the desk and watch my email and to be ready to answer the phone because people keep calling me too. I am hoping to be able to run to Best Buy to grab some additional DVDs and to check on some Audible compatible mp3 players that they might have but time is running out. I am pushing 7:00 and they probably close at 9:00 and I am still working and haven’t had a chance to shower yet!

Just to show how bored I am at this point, I am watching To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar. Now you know that I am bored. Dominica says that she likes this movie but I don’t find cross dressing entertaining. I have never figured out why people like drag shows. It is just weird to me. It is a show where the only entertainment is men putting on makeup. Weird.

I worked for way too long today and it was incredibly warm in the house all day too. I finally have up on the fresh air idea and tried turning on the air conditioning. That didn’t seem to do much of anything. I am going to have to investigate that tomorrow. I ran the air conditioning for tilt for hours and I was still way too warm. I had learned previously that the a/c never kicked on if I set it to auto. I was just hoping that it would work when I forced it on. But apparently not.

I worked until 8:20 and then told the people that I was working with that I was going out to get much needed supplies and took off before the stores closed. I ran out to East Brunswick and discovered a whole shopping area out there that Dominica is going to be very glad that I found. East Brunswick is like the Henrietta of Central Jersey (for those of you who are familiar with Rochester or Erie Boulevard for those from ‘Cuse.) There is a Borders and a Best Buy there and tons of other stuff. I went to Best Buy and treated myself to a Sandisk Sansa C150 2GB MP3 player. I didn’t get it for MP3’s though. I got it because it is one of the best Audible compatible units that I could find in a store nearby. I love my Audible subscription and this will make it a lot easier to take advantage of it. I also picked up some new DVDs to help kill some time over the weekend. I got EuroTrip, The Dukes of Hazard, Magnum P.I. Season One, the entire Once Upon A Time in China trilogy, both Ranma 1/2 movies and finally the widescreen version of The Mummy cheap after we have been looking for it for forever. Quite a haul. I know that dad will like The Mummy and I have only ever seen it once.

While I was out I ran into the grocery store and grabbed a couple of snack items for the evening along with AAA batteries for the Sandisk. While I was out the email server at work went down for maintenance and I was no longer able to get a hold of anyone that I needed to complete the work that I was doing. That isn’t good.

I got back and found that there was nothing that I was able to do without email. I wasn’t tired at all after having been up late last night and the house was way to warm to go to sleep anyway so I watched both EuroTrip and The Dukes of Hazard. Both were pretty good. Neither was really good but both were okay.

I discovered another centipede this evening. That is number five I believe. It was high on the wall and very easy to kill. Well, no centipede is easy to kill but it was easier than most. I really wish that they would seal the door but I don’t really think that that is the problem. I think that it climbed out of the venting because I was running the furnace fan.

Dominica called just before I went to bed to let me know that they had arrived safely in Frankfort.