Sheep Guarding Llama

There were emails waiting for me when I woke up this morning so work began early for me. A bit before 6:30 actually. I worked solidly until after 8:00 when I finally made an attempt to get into the shower and really start the day.

This morning ended up being completely crazy and I didn’t get a chance to leave the house until after 1:30 in the afternoon! I hadn’t gotten a chance to have breakfast or lunch so I stopped at the Omega Diner on my way to work and grabbed a very late lunch. They had a crab cakes with baked mac and cheese lunch special so I got that. It came with seafood bisque and was quite the meal. It was so much of a meal that I was able to take half of it home with me. It came with rice pudding too. Quite the meal. That should suffice for my dinner as well.

I thought that traffic was going to be great by the time that I actually got on the road to go into the office. But what do I know? The weekend traffic had started and it was crazy trying to get to work. I can’t believe how many people travel on holiday weekends. What is wrong with people? Anytime is better to travel than a holiday weekend.

It was after three when I finally got into the office in Warren. I had done so much work this morning that there really wasn’t that much to do once I got there. But I have projects that are going on after hours and I didn’t want to try to do them from home so that is why I still came in after having worked from home all morning.

I talked to Dominica tonight and she said that she and Francesca decided to leave tonight instead of tomorrow. She thought that they might be on the road as early as 8:00 but would probably not be leaving until closer to 10:00. That will make for a really long drive. At least there are two of them.

I am in a “want to play a video game” mood. And I mean really play a realy good game. The kind of game that you can really get engrossed in. I haven’t found one of those in a really long time. Since I don’t have any games with me I am not very likely to take that course of action but it is what I want to do. I might convince myself to swing into Walmart and see if they have a cheap copy of Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. It is the only good looking RPG to come out over the last few years that interested me in the least. Jeremy had it and played it and liked it. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is out now and I have heard nothing but rave reviews about it but it is is still $50 and I am sure not going to be paying that. I am hoping that Morrowind might be closer to $10 or maybe $15. That wouldn’t be so bad. I know that I won’t play it all that much. I have learned that lesson. But sometimes I just need a game to play.

Maybe I will just play something free. Free is always good. I like free. In fact, I think that I may love free. Can anyone tell that I am exhausted? It is all I can do to stay awake. The whole day was just so busy then I had a big lunch and now I sit in a warm office with nothing going on. Ugh.

Speaking of free games: Anyone interested in a completely off the wall old-school style graphical adventure game should check out Five Days A Stranger by Ben Croshaw. I played that one a year or two ago and was very happy with it. It isn’t so big of a game that you get overwhelmed by it and it has some really good puzzles and stuff too. Very well done for a single person game team. Ben made several other games as well but I have not played any of them yet. Maybe that will be a project for this weekend. There is a sequel to Five Days called Seven Days A Skeptic and I want to play through that one some day.

PCWorld has compiled their list of the twenty five worst tech products of all time (also known as The Apple Store catalogue!) It is always fun to go through and reminisce about horrible products. Especially when you know so many people who bought them and didn’t buy any yourself. I checked the entire list and I have never purchased any item in the entire list including the (dis)honorable mentions. I have owned Internet Explorer 6 but only because it came with other products that I bought but has always been immediatly replaced with Firefox or Opera or something safer. But I know a lot of people who have bought a lot of these products. If you pay close attention I think that you will find that it is generally the same people who guy most of these products.

At 7:00 most of the lights turned off in the office and it became a lot more pleasant place to work. I have my new assignment now. Starting on Tuesday of next week (which is the next bank working day) I am starting work at 4:00 am for the indefinite future. Now sure, you may think that starting at 4:00 in the morning is awfully early, but I will be driving with practically no traffic at all and I will be able to have lunch with Dominica almost every day. Of course, she isn’t going to be here all next week so I will be doing the early shift alone. But I think that I am going to enjoy the early shift a lot more than my current shift. I will get out of work and still have a day to look forward to. And the office will be dark and quiet for half of my day. I am looking forward to the change.

I had hoped that I just might manage to get wrapped up at the office before it got too late but that didn’t end up panning out. (Has anyone ever thought about the etymology of “panning out”? It obviously refers to the process of panning for gold and when you didn’t get any the gold didn’t “pan out”.) I did a quick search on pan out and the first thing that I found supported my theory. The online etymology dictionary backed me up as well. And you all think I am crazy when I say where words come from.

Speaking of me being crazy – everyone made fun of me for reading books like “The Professor and the Madman” and “The Meaning of Everything” both of which are histories of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Well Dominica got hooked on them and borrowed them both from me. So there. She also borrowed my “Brave New World”. Who would have guessed?

I managed to read all of the magazines that I had with me while I was stranded at work this evening. Did you know that the modern verb “to strand” was not used in English until 1837? It comes from the German meaning shore or occassionaly river bank. So the Strand in London is the road on the river bank.

I treated myself to some chips to keep my going. I ended up being at work very late. At 10:00, I discovered, still more lights turn off. It is by no means dark; you would never walk into anything on accident. But it is definitely not bright by any means. Just a little before 10:00 we got a thunderstorm out here in Northern Jersey. Dad said that it was raining in Pavilion several hours ago so this must be that storm moved on.

I was the last systems admin left in the building as far as I could tell. I think the last person besides me left around 8:30 or maybe 9:00. This place gets pretty lonely after that. There is still security and housekeeping but they aren’t very lively.

It was 10:15 when I finally got the chance to call for the check out of my work. Once everything gets checked out then I can go home. That is sixteen hours from when I first started working this morning. That is what we used to call a “double”. Now it is just the way it is.

I called Dominica while I was waiting for my check out at almost 10:30 and they were still busy packing the truck! So much for leaving nice and early. Boy are they going to be tired. Packing really takes the energy right out of you. I had packing just before having to drive. So much better to be packed ahead of time so that you can leave whenever you have the energy to be on the road.

For those who didn’t catch the news today: after years of Andy and I telling everyone that Norton’s Systemworks tools were as bad as a virus we were finally proved right. It has been reveiled that Systemworks itself has been installing rootkits (one of the most severe and unetherical forms of malicious software) in order to get control of the computer beyond the level that it would normally be allowed. Systemworks has been listed by a number of security agencies finally. None of this would have happened if anyone would have just listened to us!

It was midnight by the time we wrapped up at the office and I still have to work on this more tomorrow. Not likely much tomorrow but some. I am going to go ahead and post to SGL before I leave the office so that I don’t have to keep editing when I get home and so I don’t forget to do it tomorrow morning because I know that I will. Thus begins my three day lonely weekend.

I woke up before my alarm again today. I must be getting enough sleep, somehow. I checked in with work, checked the Netgear wireless to make sure that it was still working and got myself ready to go to the office. Even starting the day leisurely I managed to get in before eight. Not too shabby. The office is still pretty empty at that time.

I found out this morning that we have Monday off from work! It is cool working for a bank, let me tell you. So now I am wondering what I am going to do on Monday. I might drive up to Frankfort and pick up Dominica and Oreo so that I get to spend the week with them. That will make me very happy. It is really cool getting regular three day weekends. I only found out about it because someone from another department was standing next to me at the “water cooler” and mentioned something about getting ready for the holiday weekend.

Dominica is really lucky that she managed to get down to Houston yesterday. This morning Amtrak announced that it had lost power and the electric rail lines running from New York City to Washington, D.C. were shut down from lack of power. These lines include the electrically powered New Jersey Transit lines which includes the North East Corridor line that Dominica takes from Jersey Ave. Station. Had she flown today instead of yesterday she would have gotten trapped on the train!

Mostly the day was pretty quiet at the office. I got plenty of time to do my own things and was about to leave by 5:30. Tomorrow is going to be a really long day – I have an after hours deployment that needs to be done and that means that I will be starting the bulk of my work after 6:00. Maybe closer to 7:00. That kind of sucks. It is the long holiday weekend and I am stuck at the office really, really late working on a server build. Maybe I will come home and work on it once it gets to a certain point. That might be the smart thing to do.

I got home and finished watching Magnum P.I. and I finished the leftover Dominos’ from last night. I did some work and was mildly productive. No particulary exciting new developments but I did get some work done so I feel pretty good about the night. I won another Compaq DL360 server on eBay. I got an amazing deal on this one. I also won four Integrated Lights Out Management cards for my DL360’s that let me work on them remotely easily. Pretty cool.

I wasn’t tired yet when I finished Magnum P.I. so I watched Blackball that I had gotten dirt cheap at Walmart. I can’t classify it as a great movie but I can say that it was much better than I thought that it was going to be and it might even make it into the “watchable” category. But just barely. You know you are in rough shape when you have to highlight Vince Vaughn. Talk about a nobody cast. There were some smaller actors in the film that gans of British television and film will recognize. The movie is about the game of bowls which is insanely boring on its own. And then the movie goes way over the top and is just dumb about it. Like a really low budget Happy Gilmore without the funny parts.

I went to bed at 11:30 and wasn’t tired at all. I ended up checking email and stuff from bed.

Even though I got almost no sleep the night before last and even after going to bed much later than I had wanted to I was still awake at 5:40 this morning and responding to emails from work from my Blackberry while I was in bed. I didn’t fall back asleep and I kept on top of my emails until we finally got out of bed at a little past eight.

We ended up being ready to leave the apartment earlier than we had anticipated so we decided to run over to the Omega and get a nice breakfast together before Dominica leaves for her trip to Texas. We ate (she got her usual – the egg and pepper bagle sandwich – and I got my usual – French toast) but didn’t have any extra time to relax. Then I drove her over to the Jersey Avenue Train Station near our apartment and sat and waited to make sure that she was able to get a ticket and on to the train. It is amazingly handy to have the train run right from where we live over to the airport!

Since I was in a different spot than I normally am in the morning I drove right into downtown New Brunswich as I went to work. As I pulled into town the NJ Transit train pulled into the station as I went under the Albany Street Bridge right at went over. Then it went over my head again as I went under the George Street Bridge. I doubt that Dominica noticed me driving underneath either time though. I was hard to see being under the bridge and all.

Dominica is taking the train to Newark Airport where she is catching the Airtran flight to Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas. Her sister, Francesca, is picking her up at the airport and Dominica will be hanging out in Houston until Saturday when they will all be driving up to Frankfort. Dominica and Oreo are then planning on spending the week at her parents’ house there and somehow getting home the next weekend but we haven’t figured out all of the plans for that yet.

I didn’t get into the office until 10:40. It was a bright sunny day. A nice day for going in late and taking it easy. The first work for me had just gotten to me at 10:28 so there wasn’t even a backlog of stuff to take care of which made for a happy morning.

I discovered a very interesting looking “company” called Infamous Adventures who are busy completing a full-blown remake of Sierra’s classic graphical adventure title King’s Quest III. I was really happy with the Anonymous Game Developer’s remakes of King’s Quest I and King’s Quest II so I am really looking forward to KQIII and hope that it is just as good as those were. IA has a lot of “living up” to do but their screenshots look amazing and their forums lead me to believe that there is some decent activity going on there unlike over at AGDI where they seem to have ceased development on their remake of Quest for Glory II after two or three years of work. I will be very sad if they don’t manage to complete that.

Unfortunately, King’s Quest III is the weakest member of the King’s Quest family. (Okay, KQ VIII is awful because they tried to make it three dimensional back when you just couldn’t do that sort of thing and it came out so poorly that the series died with it. But KQ I-VII, except for III, were amazing games with great writing, graphics (for the time), sound, etc.) I own all of the originals but am really excited to see awesome remakes that take advantage of updated graphics, tweaks, sound and voice acting.

IA also has their own, original game in the works called “Quest for Infamy” which looks to be interesting. That is slated to released after King’s Quest III but I will keep you updated. You know I can’t resist a good graphical adventure game.

I really wish that someone who remake King’s Quest IV. It is the transitional game as Sierra attempted to update the graphics of the older games. The later titles, V and VI, were gorgeous but IV left a lot to be desired. KQ IV seems to be the forgotten title of the series, caught in the middle between the three classic title and the three later ones. KQ IV kept much of the old style but with slightly improved graphics, a larger team working on it and a whole lot more gameplay than KQ players were used to. I have never played through the game and don’t want to invest the time to do so until someone does a rockin’ remake for me to get immersed in.

If any of you are interested in making your own Sierra styled graphic adventure games (or Lucasarts styled for you Monkey Island fans out there) you can check out the Adventure Game Studio for Windows. It only works on Windows but the games that it produces can be played on Linux of Macintosh so it is only so bad. If you check out the AGS site you will also discover that there are tons of game links that you can try so that you can play some awesome games made using AGS. Thank goodness that the age of the amateur video game maker is finally here.

When I was younger, way back in 1987, I used to play with Electronic Arts’ Adventure Game Construction Kit. What a lot of fun that was for a kid of eleven. There was very little choice in graphical adventure games back then and being able to make your own was really cool. AGCK came with a built in game called “Rivers of Light” that I can still remember playing. AGCK was originally designed for the Commodore 64 and the Apple ][ and its heritage showed on my Amiga version. The whole game system fit on a single 880KB floppy disk. I spent many, many hours attempting to make my own games with that system. The big downside was that you had to own AGCK to be able to play the games and I was the only person that I knew who owned AGKC or an Amiga computer so I was out of luck as far as sharing games so it lost a lot of its excitement there. Sharing games that you have made is where the real fun is. Or at least knowing that someone might play them after you make them.

Looking at the screenshot of AGKC on Wikipedia really brings back memories. It is hard to believe that video games used to look like that. Another game of that era that came from the old 8-bit systems that I used to play on my 16-bit Commodore Amiga 1000 was Electronic Arts’ Tales of the Unknown: The Bard’s Tale. Most people just know the game as “The Bard’s Tale”. It was a ground breaking role playing game and practically the entire first person perspective RPG genre owes its origins to “The Bard’s Tale”. I put so many hours into that game! Now the Bard’s Tales games should be big contenders to be remade.

[In 2004 inXile – the company founded by one of the original creators of the Bard’s Tale series – made a new game called The Bard’s Tale but he did not have the rights to the original games, characters or stories so the new game is a Bard’s Tale game in title only. Andy and I both have this newer game. I didn’t like it much. Dominica played it some. Jeremy is borrowing it now. Andy likes it but he also likes Dungeon Siege which is practically identical to The Bard’s Tale as a top-down, three dimension, action-RPG hack and slash.]

Coming in late really helps make the day fly by. It was 2:30 before I even realized. And somehow I managed not to get super sleepy this afternoon. Maybe it was that full six hours of sleep that I got last night 😉

I stepped out of the office for a few minutes today to make a couple telephone calls on my mobile and discovered that it was a pretty incredibly beautiful day. It is warm and sunny and quiet. Just awesome. I haven’t had much opportunity to be outside since coming down to New Jersey. I spend all day in the office and all the other daylight hours driving to and from the office. The weekends I have either been away, busy or by myself and none of those conditions make going outside very good.

I tried calling Mary and Jocelyn today but their phone is turned off again. They are very hard to get a hold of on a regular basis. Recently their telephone has been on and off but it just rings and rings so it is hard to tell what is going on.

I have been having problems with my Netgear router in the apartment. Fortunately I have two of them there so I am able to fall back to the other one when the first one has problems. I have never gotten the wireless working in the apartment and I am getting suspicious that it might be an antenna problem or, less likely, some weird effect caused by the walls or the rack that I put the units on top of. I worked on that for quite some time last night and it is going to be a bit of a continuing project tonight. One of the most annoying things to work on is your router because the moment you do anything you lose the ability to get online.

At 5:15 it was time to leave the office. My week has been pretty slow so far and I don’t think that it is necessary for me to just hang around the office. Nothing ever comes through for me after 5:00 anyway. Most of my work happens early in the morning so it makes more sense for me to be available at that time instead of in the evening. It is easy to stay late at work, though, because there is so much driving between the office and the apartment that it makes it easy to not want to face it. So there is actually a procrastination issue with going home!

My email was almost totally silent today. I don’t think I got more than three or four actual emails all day. That is quite the change. Normally I get many. Dad, my Aunt Sharon and Andy each emailed me once and that was about it. That makes for a boring day. I rely on my email to keep me entertained. So everyone needs to email me tomorrow.

I got home and spent the evening working on little things at the apartment. I am very happy that I managed to get the Netgear router working with its wireless now. I am not really sure what I did. I tried tons of things and I don’t know which one caused it to work but it seems to be fine now. I am happy because it means that I can now check my email from my HP iPAQ handheld Pocket PC device. I don’t have to fire up a computer every morning just to see what is going on. That will save me a lot of time and effort every day.

I also managed to build a FreeNX remote access proxy server. I only just thought of needing one about a week ago and I have never worked with NX or FreeNX so I was worried that it would be quite the challenge but it turned out to not be bad at all. I got a chance to really use it tonight for a number of things and so far it is working really well and I can see that it is going to be really useful for me. It is a really neat technology.

I watched a few episodes of Magnum P.I. while I had the apartment to myself. Dominica isn’t into it all that much so it is a good “background” show for me to have on when I am home alone working.

Dominica’s flight arrived in Houston ten minutes early. Francesca picked her up and everything went fine. Francesca called me on her way to the airport to let me know that Dominica had arrived and then Min called me once they got back to the house. Francesca said that Houston is one hundred and four degrees Farenheit this evening! Dominica is not going to be happy about that.

I ordered dinner from Domino’s. Now that I haven’t had it for two weeks I started to miss it. Although once I got it I remembered how tired of it I was.

Dad emailed me to let me know that two more computers arrived at his house today. There is just a constant flow of them these days.

I worked until 11:30 and then headed off to bed. It was later than I had wanted to be up but that seems to be the norm these days. I never seem to manage to get to bed by 10:30 which is really when I should be getting to bed.

I woke up at 2:30 this morning and decided to get out of bed. I was wide awake in no time and figured that it would be a waste of a perfectly good morning to go back to bed after being so wide awake so I decided that it would be better to be productive.

I started off the morning by reading the latest issue of CSO (Chief Secuirty Officer) magazine. Then I moved to the living room and fired up the ol’ workstation. I managed to install FreeNX on a couple of machines and learn how to use it. FreeNX is an open souce implementation of the No Machine protocol which is a remote access system designed for accelerating access to an X Client such as used by Linux or Solaris. I only got so much time to play with it but so far it looks to be really interesting.

Dominica woke up when I was getting ready to go to work and decided to get up and go to breakfast with me. It was 5:50 when she woke up and she was very confused as to why I was awake. We managed to get over to the Omega at 6:00 am, eat and I was able to get to the office by 7:20. Traffic is so awesome at that time of the morning.

I did great this morning but by the end of lunch, at 2:00 for me, I was dragging pretty badly and it seemed like 4:00 was impossible to reach. Getting up at 2:30 in the morning can be rough. But I always have a bad time trying to stay awake and alert after lunch. Something about my body processing food just causes me to fall asleep after I eat. It isn’t like I had a huge meal. Just a tuna salad sandwich on wheat bread, a little pasta salad and some dried pineapple.

I managed to get a hold of my insurance agent to deal with my insurance stuff. Or to at least talk about it. Apparently I don’t really qualify as anything right now. I can’t be insured in New Jersey because I don’t really live here and my official address is New York. Even my rent bill gets sent to New York. What a huge hassle this is going to turn into. My plan had been to keep the house in Geneseo and to maintain that as my residence. But apparently I now have to come up with an address in New Jersey, deal with the bizarre, ongoing tax situation (I pay income tax in both New York and New Jersey,) get a New Jersey licence, etc. Way too much effort. Maybe I should have stayed in the hotel. Who knows what they do when you do that? Maybe you are not allowed to exist if you attempt to live in a hotel without an address.

Dealing with my insurance woke me up a little bit and I was able to get back to being a functional human being again. I hate that mid-afternoon funk. I really just need to lie down and take a nap when that happens. I am totally useless as long as it is going on.

I am beginning to think more seriously about moving the “company” in this direction. It really looks like Dominica and I are going to be locked into the Northern New Jersey / New York Metro Area for the long term and having the company located so far away just doesn’t make any sense. But where to locate it is a big question. No place is particularly good.

Special thanks to Wil Wheaton who has managed to officially Christen America’s northern neighbour Canuckistan. We will be using that term from here on in. I believe Canuckistan is the official Turkish term for “Land of the Canadians”.

Min was waiting for me when I got home and we ran right off to On The Border for some Mexican for dinner. We were not very impressed by On The Border. The food was okay but nothing special. The place was loud, obnoxious and like so many restaurants in New Jersey, the service was SLOW. It tooks three or four times as long to get out of there as it took to eat our dinners. I don’t like spending my evening sitting in a cheap Mexican knock-off restaurant where I can’t even talk to my wife at the table over the noise just waiting for a check. It doesn’t make for a nice, relaxing evening after being at work all day.

We finally got back to the apartment and watched a couple of epsidoes of That 70’s Show while Dominica worked on stuff for her classes at Empire State College. She is all ready writing articles and stuff and it is only the first week and she only has two classes. I think that she is starting to learn a bit all ready so that is encouraging. Since she has her degree prior to starting at Empire this time around is really just about the learning opportunities that the college provides.

I had a little work that I had to do and then it was off to bed around 11:30. I was pretty tired by the time we got to bed.

Last night when I went to go to bed I discovered that the trip had been hard on my CPAP and the facemask had broken. Dominica helped me and we managed to tape it back together with packing tape enough to hold the pressure in for the night and let me sleep. That sucks. The facemask alone on those things costs close to two hundred dollars! I guess that I need to call the CPAP company and see what we can do. It will be really awful if it gets any worse and we can’t continue to fix it and keep it working. But my facemask is a full nine or ten months past its normal end of life so I really can’t complain much.

I slept in a little this morning and got into work just after nine. It was a slow morning at the office which was great because Mondays are always tough – although my weekend was so busy that I don’t feel like I stopped working at all. Today is my last day with my “partner” at work for two weeks. He is going to the UK for a conference and then training. So I am being left alone to tend to the shop all by myself. That is pretty scary. I am supposed to be at training myself next week but it looks like that is going to be cancelled. I don’t know for sure yet but there is a very good chance because I will be the only one left around. I should know later today.

Dominica got an offer from FujiFilm Edison today. Or, rather, she received her welcome kit without ever having been contacted to see if she would even want the position! I am not sure if that was a mistake or what but we were a little surprised. We have no idea why they thought that she would want to take the position when it has terrible hours and the exact same pay in New Jersey as it did in Rochester which is the equivalent of much, much less. She knew during her interview that she really wasn’t interested in the position. I mean we are appreciative of the fact that the company really wanted to keep her and was willing to hire her down here even when there have been so many layoffs there but it seems a little cheeky to just send out a welcome packet given the situation. We had decided that it would be better for her not to work at all than to have that job. We would see each other less with her living in New Jersey than we had with her living in New York only down here Oreo would have to go to doggie daycare every day instead of going to dad’s house which would cost even more than the gas had cost driving to and from Rochester every weekend.

My afternoon ended up being even more uneventful than my morning was. My cubicle was completely silent all day. It gave me a chance to do some reading, catch up on the news, catch up on the SGL Dailies, do a bunch of email, etc.

I called to get some new CPAP equipment like a new facemask, tubing and filters today. That was when I discovered that Dominica’s health insurance had been cancelled in April! Oops. So I called her and she called the HR department at her last job to find out what was going on. We paid for the health insurace. We paid through May or maybe June. She didn’t leave her job until May so even if we had decided to cancel it shouldn’t have cancelled yet. Hopefully she will be able to get that straightened out today so that I can get a new facemask quickly. It is not going to be long before sleeping is pretty tough. And it takes extra time to do anything because I have to have the stuff shipped to my dad’s house and pick it up on some weekend when I am in the area.

We did discover that because we are now AAA members (since both of our cars are now out of warranty – Min’s turned 76,000 miles on the way to Ohio) that we get a 10% discount on Amtrak travel. So it is really inexpensive now. Only $45 to go from Penn Station in Manhattan all the way to Rochester. That is a lot less than the price of gas. Only $65 to go to Alliance, Ohio.

Dad got home this afternoon from Ohio. He had a good time on Sunday visiting with everyone but I am sure that he was ready to get back home. His classes in Castile wrapped up on Friday so this is his chance to actually just sit back and relax a little – no classes to teach, nowhere to travel to and no dog to dog sit. Now he can go out and enjoy is ten acre frisbee golf course.

Wil managed to come up with a shot from the cut scene for Star Trek X: Nemesis where he plays Wesley Crusher returning to Star Fleet after many years away. Here you can see this rare photograph of Former Acting Captain Wesley Crusher (the original image link appears to have gone stale, even though it is on Wil’s own site, so here is another link to the same picture.) in the latest Star Fleet uniform. Oh yeah. Geek power: activate!

My afternoon continued into the vortex of uneventfulness. Just absolutely nothing happened. Funny how days get to be like this. Like the whole world just forgot about me and I am able to just sit quietly in my cubicle isolated from outside influences.

I did some database design work on paper. That was kind of exciting. Not for work, just for me. Since there was no work to do at all. I managed to get to page 78 of the AJAX book that I was reading before leaving for the day. If tomorrow is anything like today I might even manage to finish it. I decided to leave work at 6:00. if no one has needed me up until 6:00 it is very unlikely that they are going to need me after 6:00. Maybe no one knows that I am here today. Maybe I smell funny.

No rain today. This is the first day in some time that I have really noticed that there was no rain at all. I was enjoying the rain. I like it to be dark out most of the time.

I got home and Dominica was waiting outside so that she could hop right into the car. We went right over to the Omega Diner for some dinner. It isn’t bad going out to eat as long as we can do it like that. If I have to park the car, go into the house, wait around until she is ready to go and then head back out again I have gotten tired and don’t want to leave again but if we do it quickly I am willing to go out on a work night.

We came home and watched That 70’s Show. I tried to do some work on the computer but found that I was kind of out of it and mostly just sat starring at the screen. That was a waste of time.

We went to bed around 11:00. Before falling asleep I read an issue of Windows IT Pro. It is a constant challenge to keep up with my magazines.