Sheep Guarding Llama

It was hard to get back onto the normal work week schedule this morning. I got to work around 9:00. Dominica left Frankfort around 9:30 and decided to go east to US 87 and to come south down past NYC and to come into New Jersey from the North East. This was the first time that either of us was attemting that route.

I had a busy day at work and didn’t manage to get lunch until quite late. That ended up working out really well as Min made it to the office just as I was ready for lunch so she and Oreo picked me up at the office and we went into Warren to eat at the Thai House.

I got home at 7:30 and we decided that we really needed to get out the door and make an attempt at getting into Manhattan tonight so that Dominica would be able to see what she needs to do to get to her interview there on Wednesday. She is really nervous about riding the trains and wanted me to walk her through it before she had to do it on her own. So we drove out to New Brunswick to catch the train. We learned that the station really close to us, Jersey Avenue, only allows boarding during commuting hours in the morning for going into the city so it is useful for work but not useful for going in in the evenings. So we had to drive into our local city to catch the train.

It took us about forty five minutes by the time we figured out where we needed to go, how to park, how to get tickets, etc. We just missed the 8:21 train and ended up having to take the 8:54 which was running a few minutes late. The ride into Penn Station was about 55 minutes or maybe a little longer. The train stops in Newark and at the airport along the way which is really handy.

We got into Penn Station and had to figure out how to get to the subway. It is a little confusing but not too bad. We finally figured out how to get onto the A Train Express to Downtown. We hopped that and road to Canal Street. That took another twenty minutes or so. Not too bad but not great either.

The subway dropped us off on Canal and it was only about a ten or maybe a fifteen minute walk westwardly over to Greenwich and then down to the office where Min will be interviewing on Wednesday. It was pretty late, just coming up on 11:00, and everything in the area was closed. People can say all that they want about New York and specifically Manhattan being the “City That Never Sleeps” but the reality is that NYC is an absurdly early closing city. For a city its size there should be fifty times the late night ammenities that there are. So we decided just to walk right back to the subway and ride back up to Penn Station and maybe eat there.

We got to Penn Station right as they were boarding the train for New Brunswick and the next one wasn’t going to come along for another hour so we ran for it and got right on foregoing dinner. It was another hour back out to New Brunswick and then we had to drive home. It was really late but we were both pretty hungry.

We stopped at the Omega Diner on Route 1 since they are open twenty-four hours a day. The place was packed with college kids. Rutgers is very close. We ate dinner and then got back to the apartment. Oreo had been alone for a very long time at this point and was very glad when we got in. But he was a good boy and hadn’t made any mess in the house while we were gone. At least none that we found.

I got to bed at 4:00 in the morning last night and even then didn’t manage to fall asleep probably until close to 6:00 Then I was up at 10:00. Not a long night of sleep. I am looking forward to getting my CPAP back.

Dominica left Geneseo around 10:30 this morning to head out to her parents’ house. I went out to the living room, the only real room in the apartment, and got to work on the computer again. I continued off with the episode of Magnum P.I. that I left off with last night. What a great, classic show that is. This is wonderful stuff. I wonder what my kids will think of shows like this and Remington Steele. The 1980’s were such a bizarre time in history.

Today was another day dedicated to just relaxing for me. I spent most of the day casually working on the MyVid video collection system that I have been working on. I didn’t make a ton of progress today but I learned new stuff and got some additional functionality added in. It was a good educational day. I learned a bit, watched a bit and managed to unwind a little.

I watched a couple of movies before calling it a night. I watched one of, if not the, worst movie I have ever seen: National Lampoon’s Last Resort with the pathetic “Coreys”. I should have known better but it was cheap and I always enjoyed the National Lampoon “Vacation” films so I thought that I would give it a chance. What a dumb move that was. Do NOT waste time on this movie.

I had to wash the taste of that out of my mouth so I watched Detonator with Pierce Brosnan, Patrick Stewart and Christopher Lee. It was another bargain bin film but it wasn’t bad at all. It was one of the better bargain bin values that I have gotten in a while. Nothing outrageously awesome but an enjoyable film that I will watch again someday and I am sure that some of you will borrow and enjoy as well.

I got to bed around 11:30. Back to work tomorrow. Dominica leaves Utica in the morning to head down this way. She is finally moving to New Jersey.

Today is my first day posting the SGL updates from my new SUSE Linux workstation. So far so good. I am really liking my high powered Linux desktop. Since Linux has had full 64 bit support for a while I can really take advantage of my hardware as opposed to running Windows in scaled down 32 bit mode.

I slept in until 10:00 this morning. Boy did that feel good. John called me from Ithaca. He was working there and needed my assistance. That kept me busy for several hours. I finished watching Once Upon A Time in the West this morning. I kind of feel like I may have seen it or have seen part of it long ago but it is just a vague memory.

I ended up putting in six hours working today. Not much of a day off. I finished watching Once Upon A Time in the West and then moved on to watching Marlene Dietrich in Morrocco which is a really awful movie from 1930 with no plot whatsoever. It was massively boring. The character development was so poor that it was impossible to follow. The film quality was really low.

I ordered in some lunch from Pizza Plus Cluck U. What a stupid name. I got an eggplant parm sub, corn nuggets and mozzarella sticks. Nothing special but at least it wasn’t pizza. I worked until 4:30. I started watching Blonde Venus with Marlene from 1932. It had Cary Grant in one of his earliest roles but even he couldn’t save this movie. I turned it off. Not a happy movie. Just a poor movie about rotten people. I decided that I needed happier things to watch so I headed out to Walmart and Pathmark to do some shopping.

At Walmart I managed to pick up some DVDs. Mostly bargain bin stuff. I got super cheap Grease 2 replacing my old laserdisc for Dominica even though I totally hate the movie, Dead & Breakfast, Cool World with a young Brad Pitt, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express with Sean Connery and Ingrid Berman, Black Ball, Detonator with Pierce Brosnan and Patrick Stewart, Last Resort with the awful Coreys and Season Three (it was all that they had) of Magnum P.I.. Not the best selection ever but the Walmarts here have very little to be desired. There is little reason to go back there now. I cleaned them out. They don’t have any television shows left that I want to see and they only have a few full priced movies that are sort of tempting. Nothing that really calls to me.

I hit Pathmark and picked up some basic supplies. Water and chips. Can’t drink the tap water here. It is so bad. I made a cool discovery though. I discovered that down here they stock the shelves with Diet Cherry Pepsi in two liter bottles!! That is so awesome. So I grabbed two bottles of it.

I came back to my lonely apartment and watched Magnum P.I. It isn’t an exciting life but it’s what I have. I watched several episodes while I worked on the computer. Since it was my day off I worked on my pet video collection project. Dominica wanted me to get more of it done so that she could use it this week to enter some data into the system since she will have a lot of time alone (with the dog) at the apartment. She has two interviews this week and other than that her week consists of studying for the second A+ examination.

Tomorrow is another lazy day at home. I will have to figure out food again. The house is still completely devoid of anything but the chips that I bought today. At least I have something to drink now.

I was up at 3:30 this morning working with clients in the United Kingdom. They are five hours ahead of us so it is mid-morning there. I had originally thought that I was going to work for maybe half an hour at most and then go back to sleep for two hours or so and then go in to work as usual. But instead I ended up supporting the call until 7:30 and then getting a short break before having to go to a second call at 8:00! Talk about a busy morning. Four hours of work by the time most people are just getting up. The really awesome thing is that because the call was so early I just worked from home and its Friday so I am likely to work from home all day, have no commute, be done around 1:30 and have a nice lead on the weekend. Unfortunately it is a weekend without Dominica at all 🙁 She isn’t coming down until Monday. But I will get, it looks like, two and a half very relaxing days all to myself. I could do with that level of relaxation.

I managed to get in some much needed purchasing work while I was stuck on the phone for so long. I can’t do technical work while I am listening to a conference call but i can do some simple paperwork. I managed to order Andy’s new workstation. His old one died on Sunday or Monday. That machine has been nothing but problems for him and it finally crapped out completely. So we just bit the bullet and got him an entirely new, 64-bit workstation. I think that he will be pretty impressed with the upgrade. It is a much faster unit than he is working with currently and it has three times the memory of his old unit. And instead of being a big, loud machine it is an almost silent small form factor desktop.

I ordered Dominica a USB headset for her laptop. That is the laptop that doesn’t have a working internal sound card. We figured out that the USB headsets have their own build in sound card so that they can work with machines that may not have a sound card of their own. What a neat feature. I got myself 2GB more memory for my desktop so it will be 3GB total when I am done. That puts me at three times the memory of anyone else that I know. I also got a memory upgrade for my new Windows desktop. It has only 512MB of single channel memory the way that Jeremy was running it. I am doubling the memory with a matching stick so that it will go to dual channel as well. That should speed it up a bit. I also got myself a new 250GB hard drive for my main desktop. I am going to be installing SUSE Linux on this machine very soon and I want a lot of storage capacity for running virtual machines. Hence all the memory as well. But I am excited about going to an all Linux, fully 64-bit screaming system. I have tried this in the past but ended up falling back to Windows. So we will see how it goes this time. I think that I will stick with it for my main machine.

The new insanely huge Seagate 750GB harddrives are available now. I saw one at Newegg this morning for just $499! That is an amazing price for that drive. That drive is the largest drive on the market and it is getting really good performance as well. I wish that I could get one but that will just have to wait. That means that the terabyte drives are right around the corner. I would guess in one to two months we should be seeing them. You know that everyone is pushing like mad to be the first to have one available on the market.

My morning project wrapped up around 8:15. What a long morning that made. I am feeling pretty good still. Hardly any sleep all week and practically none last night. I can’t believe that I am almost done with the work day! I need to find a Target or someplace that is selling the fourth season of That 70’s Show so that I will have stuff to watch. I have a few movies with me but not very many. I am forcing myself to go through all of the things that I haven’t seen yet by having nothing else in the apartment. It works out pretty well having the laptop just sitting beside me. I can easily have something on and just kind of pay attention to it.

I talked to my boss and he thought that I should wrap up the day working from home. Works for me. I don’t really enjoy commuting so I am more than happy to spend the day enjoying the comforts of my living room. It is a great weather day too. All of that rain all night was awesome. At 10:30 the sun came out and it was really nice and sunny. I opened up all of the windows and blinds to get some natural light in here.

I thought that today was going to be a light day at work. Boy was I ever wrong. I was swamped with work once the New York day began. I had been planning on going over to the Omega Diner for breakfast but that didn’t pan out. I never even came close to having a chance to do that. Noon rolled around and I had been going crazy all morning.

Things started to slow down a bit by 1:00 – probably because people were out at lunch. I ended up getting a pretty solid break in the afternoon from 1:30 until 5:00 when things started back up again. It has sure been a busy phone day for me. During my little afternoon break I took a short half hour nap which I desperately needed and I watch Pleasantville with Paul Walker, Reese Witherspoon, Tobey Maguire and William H. Macy which I have not seen since it was in theatres. That is a good movie. Very original and well done. They had some really good, creative ideas that they put in there.

I continued to work on my Grandsteam Budgetone 101 IP phone today that I have been having problems with. I figured out why it was failing. Well, I should say that I figured out what I can do to make it fail. If you set the QoS settings too high then DHCP stops working which is really quirky but at least I know what it is now. I managed to get it reset. I am pretty sure that I finally discovered the problem this evening. I will have to do further investigation. But it looks as if Netgear, from whom I buy all of my networking hardware, has a new IP telephony application gateway in their equipment – which is brand new and only The Surfing IT Wizard and I have brand new Netgear routers – and that is interfering with the VoIP. What a relief. I knew that it had to be related to the routers but I couldn’t figure out how.

I managed to finally wrap up working for the day at 6:30. A fifteen hour day. That’s a fifteen and a nineteen in the same week. I am worn out. I decided to take the evening to work on installing the newly released SUSE 10.1 which I spent the day downloading. It is a six compact disc download. But Novell has really figured out the mirror system this time and you were really able to get all of the discs quickly even on the first day of availability.

I watched Rock Hudson in Man’s Favorite Sport. Dominica didn’t like the movie very much but Rock Hudson is one of those actors that just managed to turn out tons of really “happy” movies. Not classics but movies that you enjoy just watching. This one was most definitely not one of his better films but it was okay. I can see why Dominica didn’t like the movie and it is surprising that I liked it. The female lead is a character that you really come to hate. That makes it tough to care about the romantic development of the film. But the storyline is mildly entertaining and the mood is light.

After the light interlude I watched How the West Was Won which I haven’t seen for many years. I last saw it squeezed onto a 4:3 television when I was a kid. Strangely enough, watching it now I can remember just about every moment of it. It is hard to remember it as a cohesive film because it is really sectioned off into several barely associated sections. The whole movie does focus on the adventures of a single family but it is focused on different family members over such a long period of time that your brain isn’t very likely to put it all together. And boy is it a long movie. There really isn’t very much action and there really isn’t very much drama. It really drags on. But it is an incredible selection of who’s who actors from the 1960’s. And not just real actors but John Wayne too. How the West Was Won stands as the most important CinemaScope movie ever made. The only truly famous triple projector movie. Unfortunately the system that made the movie famous is also the system that has made it not stand up well to time as even the DVD was unable to composite the three images together well. They do a good job with the DVD and at times you forget about the seems but at other times there are sharp angles in the scene caused by the cameras having pointed at different angles than the projectors do.

It was only midnight when I wrapped up How the West Was Won and somehow I wasn’t really all that tired yet. SUSE 10.1 wasn’t completely done installing the way that I wanted it yet so I stayed up and popped in Once Upon A Time in the West by Sergio Leone from 1969 which I have never seen. It is funny to see the transition between the two films. The really show the incredible degree of advancement that happened to the cinema during the mid-1960’s. How the West Was Won is from 1962 and the film quality and style is very reminicent of an earlier age while just seven year later the second film looks and feels like movies into the 1990’s.

I placed an Amazon order today. There doesn’t appear to be any good way to buy DVDs down here so we have turned to Amazon to get everything. It isn’t nearly as convenient but we have found ourselves getting better stuff instead of just getting whatever is available in the bargain bin. I got some good stuff like Red Dwarf seasons VII and VIII, the first season of The Piglet Files that I am hoping that Dominica will really like, Major League, The Thrill of It All, If A Man Answers and The Thing Called Love which just recently released onto DVD. It was one of my early great laserdisc finds long, long ago.

I managed to actually place the first call through the phone system over to John Stephens tonight. He was the one person that I haven’t been able to call. And this was our first chance to actually test it. So that was very exciting.

I went to bed just a little after 1:00. What a long day. I have to be up by 10:00 tomorrow morning because John is workingin Ithaca and I am doing the remote support.

I slept in a little this morning getting an actual eight hours of sleep. That is something that I don’t manage to do very often. Boy did I need it though. I have been pretty tired all week. It is going to be a long haul getting through until Dominica can come down with my CPAP on for Monday night.

Dominica is on her home stretch at work. Just three days left to go including today. At the end of the day today she will be halfway through her final week. I am sure that she is starting to get that “winding down” feeling at work. No more stress. The final days are never too bad.

Dominica also found out this morning that she is getting scheduled for an interview with the company that I am working for down here in New Jersey. The position that she will be looking at is a position that is based in Manhattan. It is a really exciting opportunity and it is a direct, not contract, position which would mean full benefits and the works.

Dad managed to get over to Wegmans in Geneseo today while he was picking up Oreo and pick up my pictures that have been there for about two months or more. That is one less thing that I have to worry about now. I can’t remember at all what those pictures would be. I think that they are all recent but I have no idea. Now I can stop carrying around the claim tickets as well. My wallet gets awfully full awfully quickly these days. Junk papers collect very quickly if you don’t keep a close eye on them.

I was able to leave the office at 5:45 because I have been scheduled to work the super early shift tomorrow. I am supporting London clients super early in the morning at 4:00 am our time so I have to be up at 3:30. I figured I would take off a little on the early side so that I could get a little bit of an evening in prior to having to go to bed.

On the way home I stopped by Barned & Nobles on Route 1. I picked up a Spanish dictionary to keep in the car with me because I listen to Spanish radio all of the time. I also got a travel guide to New York City. I wanted to get one to Philadelphia but they didn’t have a single one. How weird is that?

I stopped by at Walmart in the adjacent plaza and looked to see what new DVD releases they had. They really didn’t have anything interesting. I was hoping that they would have at least had the recent release of season four of That 70’s Show but no luck. I was tempted to get a few things but I managed to resist. I am doing much better these days doing some more serious shopping on Amazon and getting movies that we really want and not just whatever is available when we go to the store. I grabbed dinner at the McDonald’s inside of the Walmart and went to the apartment to eat.

I took it easy this evening working on installing software on my “new” Windows XP desktop and watching some movies. I watched Fletch Lives with Chevy Chase. I don’t think that I have seen that one since it was in theatres. I am not positive but I think that I saw it at the Silver Lake Drive In many a moon ago. I also watched the first half of the 1962 remake of State Fair with Pat Boone, Bobby Darrin and Ann-Margaret. Dominica and I were wondering why they did a remake of the 1945 original just 17 years later but it is a major rewrite. It isn’t very good but it is very different. It is fine but I would never recommend it over the classis earlier film. The original is definitely a lot more meaningful to today’s audience than the quirky 1960’s remake. And the acting and music were a lot better in the older film too. I think that over time we will see more and more often that remakes of films fade away and the originals are most often the ones that remain classics. Growing up I never even knew that there was a 60’s version of this film it had all ready faded away.

I only made it through half of the film because I needed to get to bed. It is a heavy rainstorm here so I opened up the windows before bedding down for the night. The rain turned into a massive thunderstorm that lasted for hours. I never really slept all night. I got a good rest in but I was awake almost the entire night. But just laying listening to the rain is awfully relaxing. I dozed off now and again but never for very long. The downside of not having my CPAP. With the CPAP once I am out, I am out. I sleep quite deeply. But without it sleep is just a form of resting with my eyes closed. Weird that I did this for so long and was able to still function. Surprisingly I don’t feel much more tired now than I would if I had been sleeping with the CPAP all week. I wonder what makes that work that way. My sleep patterns are so bizarre compared to anyone else.

I was up at 3:30 to get my computer set up and ready to work. I ended up putting in over an hour and a half on the international conference call. I had figured that I would only have been working for a few minutes but if I would have really thought about it I would have realized that that was not going to be the case. Had I really thought about it I would have gotten up a little earlier and gone into the office to work and just started my day at 4:00 instead of breaking it up doing a few hours now and then the rest of the day later on. In case you are wondering, I am writing the update while I am on the call.

Well my morning call ended up going much later than I had expected. I finished watching State Fair and it is now just after 6:30 and I am still on the line. I can’t believe that it could go too much longer than it all ready has but who knows. I haven’t done one of these before. So I am going to post and move on to “tomorrow”.