Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.