Sheep Guarding Llama

I slept in a little this morning. I was pretty tired and had a pretty good feeling of “nothing is going on this morning” so I decided not to make today an early day. I got up around 7:00 and was out the door at 8:20. A nice relaxing morning. I had to shave my head this morning. I have gotten pretty scruffy and fuzzy since I haven’t cut my hair since I interviewed down in New Jersey a month and a half ago. More than that probably. So it was getting long. So that took a while this morning. I hate doing it just because it takes so much time.

I listened to the first Learning German CD in the car during my commute in. We will see how this works. This is the first time in forever that I have had a regular commute and it is the first time for almost a decade that I have had a regular commute that I drive alone. I have almost never done that for any length of time.

I got into the office at 9:00. I got settled in and caught up on email (only a few hundred emails today – I have over 1,000 yesterday morning and about 1,500 on Monday morning!!) Then I went down to the cafeteria to get some breakfast. I had forgotton to drink a SlimFast before leaving the house so I was feeling peckish. I got my usual bagle with peanut butter (poppy seed today, they were out of sesame) and I also got a large container of fresh fruit. I decided that I have not been getting nearly enough fresh fruit so I decided to do something about that. I got over 3/4’s pound of canteloupe, honeydew and pineapple. That should help. I took it all back up to my office and ate it up there while writing this 😉

For those who do not know, Scott McNealy – the long time CEO and founder of SUN Microsystems, stepped down from the CEO job yesterday letting Jonathan Schwartz take over from him. McNealy was a visionary in the IT field and is one of the most important figures responsible for the modern IT landscape including the pervasive Internet, TCP/IP as the dominant world-wide communicatin protocol, powerful modern computing, business and home network architecture, etc. SUN under McNealy was a driving force in the dotcom bubble and possibly its greatest beneficiary. My career started in the SUN shop at GMI Engineering and Management Institute in 1994. I supported the big enterprise class SUN infrastructure that ran the hundreds of terminals all over campus as well as the SparcStation lab (32-bit, at the time) where the amazingly powerful graphical workstations lived. SunOS and the Sparc were my introduction to IT and cemented many of my ideas about the network environment. I first accessed the Internet from a SUN machine and I first ran Mosaic (the first graphical web browser) on a SUN SparcStation. To me, SUN is the Internet. I am now, after all of these years coming full circle, working at one of, if not the largest SUN shop in the world with tens of thousands of SUN servers as well as thousands of SparcStations. Jonathan Schwartz who writes a really influential blog wrote a really nice posting this morning about Scott McNealy. I think that Jonathan is a very capable leader and I look forward to seeing what he is going to do with SUN. SUN is living in a different era now and the focus of the company has to change. They have been doing this but with any large company it can be difficult. It will be very interesting to see where Jonathan takes the SUN legacy next. There is a lot of “living up to” to be done. Good luck Jonathan.

After all of the busyness yesterday this morning is quite slow. I had time to spend reading the news from Deutsche Welle in Simple, Conversational German. Die Nachrichten der Deutschen Welle! So macht Deutsch richtig Spaß! It is really nice that they offer a service of their regular news in a limited, simple vocabulary (you know, like the New York Times writes for third graders) along with MP3’s of their news read slowly and clearly for non-native speakers and for children. You can get the same thing called “Special English” from Voice of America. It is the perfect tool for people learning the language.

For lunch today two of us went over to the Thai House again. Their food is very good and inexpensive and very close so it is likely that I will be eating a lot of Pad Thai going forward. They are all ready recognizing me there.

If you have been paying close attention you will notice that today is the one month mark of me being in New Jersey. I came down on Sunday, 26 March and spent all day Monday in the hotel relaxing so that I would be ready to start on the 28th but didn’t actually start until the 29th. So it is a couple days yet until I hit my one month anniversary at work.

Dominica and I started talking today about her quitting and moving down here. It is costing us so much money driving back and forth that it is eating up her paycheck like crazy and we never get to see each other and the poor dog is constantly being bounced from house to house – about two locations a day on average. He doesn’t like that. We figure that if she gives up her position in Rochester and moves down here we might break even or we might even gain after the taxes, gas, mileage and everything else. That makes her staying in Rochester really not make much sense.

I had to call Verizon Wireless back today. Of course they never got back to me after our conversation a week ago. I hate dealing with this kind of stuff and it is especially bad when I have to do it from the office. And nothing was resolved today either. They are going to call me back tomorrow to follow up again. I will probably have to call them back and start the whole process over again. Everytime I call I have to go through the entire scenario and then get transferred to the correct department and no one wants to be the department responsible for anything. It is really not impressive. And all of this because of a communications problem that they were aware of in 1999 and haven’t done anything about after all of this time! Argh.

My afternoon actually ended up being busy. I had twenty things going on at once that I had to bounce back and forth between. The office was pretty quite in general so it was surprising that I had so much to do.

Dominica is trying to decide on classes to take this semester at Empire State College. The plan is for her to take two classes this semester and at least one more in the fall. She is looking at Database Systems 1 and Management Information Systems. That will be a bit of a load for her this summer. She is looking at the May semester which starts really soon. She will really need to work hard to get her CompTIA A+ out of the way before classes start or it is going to be that much worse of a load.

I stayed at work late again tonight. I came in on the late side so it isn’t bad at all. And there really isn’t too much reason to get home early. It is all the same whether I am at the office or at the apartment. Might as well be at the office. And by going home late the traffic is lighter. The biggest difference is on George Street in New Brunswick. If you go at the end of the normal day the students going into and out of the dorms causes all kinds of congestion but if you wait a little while the area is deserted and you can zip right through. That saves a lot of time and frustration.

Today was another beautiful day down here. I knew that the weather was going to be dramatically nicer once I came to New Jersey. You can’t feel the ocean though. That is too bad. To be so close to the water and not even know it. It isn’t like I have seen it once yet since I have been down here! Hard to believe, really.

I am having one of those evening where I feel that I really want to write to everyone and tell them all kinds of stuff but I just can’t think of anything to write about. How sucky is that?

I didn’t manage to wrap up at work until 8:30! Can you believe that? I was definitely the last person in the office area when I was done and they were vacuuming around me. I am going to post early and hit the road. I will fill you in on my boring evening post work in the morning.

Guten Nacht!

It is Tuesday and that means that Dominica and Oreo have to return home to Geneseo this afternoon. 🙁 She has decided that even with the extra driving on her part that the amount of time that we get to see each other when she comes down here is worth the drive. When she comes down here we see each other from Saturday night until Tuesday afternoon. That is a ton more than when I drive up there. So she might be coming down a bit more than half of the time now. Especially now that the apartment is a little bit more comfortable than it has been. Now that we have the futon she has a place to sit when I am in the apartment working. Yesterday was tough because I had the folding chair in use so that I could sit at the computer and that left her with no chair at all. That makes it tough. Oreo is happy anywhere there is a pillow, fleece blanket, binky and sunlight.

Our big expense that is going to hit us this week is Dominica’s tires. We have been holding off on dealing with them because it is such a big expense but it has to be dealt with. I need to figure out to deal with it from here this week. Luckily she has small, standard sized wheels so her tires should not cost anywhere near as much as mine did. Mine are a pretty rare size and that is a pain. Always some major expense. I can’t sneak through a week without something needing to drain the bank.

Today is a super busy day at the office. Yesterday ended up being so unproductive that there is a lot of stuff backed up and waiting for me this morning. I am still hoping to be able to get into Manhattan this afternoon to get to the Hewlett-Packard Blade show but that is still up in the air. It would be fun to go to but it will also be a logistical hassle as I don’t know the process for getting into the city from the office (we have a shuttle) and I don’t know my way around very well so there is a lot that I will have to figure out once I go. But it has to be done at some point so better sooner than later.

I thought that this morning was going to be busy but it ended up being REALLY busy. I was running ragged all morning. Boy was that fun. It is a real relief to be really useful and productiv and to be doing real work and not just “educational” work learning processes and stuff like that. Today I got to actually work like a part of the team doing the same kinds of stuff as everyone else. That was a really nice change.

There is an article in eWeek today about Red Hat’s use on Wall Street. I thought that this was perfect since this is exactly what I do.

I finally managed to get some Dr. Scholls insoles into my work shoes today. I have been meaning to do that for a month now and haven’t remembered to pick any up whenever I was at a store. My feet are thanking me all ready. They don’t hurt nearly as much today as they have been for the past month. They still hurt but far less. Maybe this will start me down the path to recovery. I only got a set for my work shoes which I wear the most and they have the least built in padding. I need to get a set for my sneakers as well.

I was so busy today that I had to cancel my trip into the city. 🙁 But I am happy to be able to get lunch with Dominica and to see Oreo before they go back to New York. Being able to do lunch on Tuesday on her way out of town really helps to make her coming down here a lot more valuable. And it is especially awesome that her coming out here is only barely out of her way so it is a great use of the time and mileage.

She got into Warren around 1:30 and I headed out of the office to meet her at the Thai House in the Warren Plaza. They have really good food there and the location is really convenient to work and quite easy for her to find. And Dominica never gets too much Thai food so it works out well to help curb her cravings.

We ate lunch and walked Oreo around the plaza’s small grassy area. He was glad to get out of the hot car. It is tough being a black dog. We said goodbye and went our separate ways. It was about 2:45 as Dominica headed home and I turned into the driveway of the office. It is nice that we drive together for about a mile after leaving the restaurant. Her entrance onto the highway is right next to the office.

My busy morning continued on to be a busy afternoon. In fact I didn’t even look at the clock until it was 5:00! Dominica was probably nearing Kirkwook (the southernmost suburb in the Binghamton metropolitan area) by the time I even thought of looking at the time. I bet that she has felt the time passing. The drive isn’t that bad but it isn’t fun. Especially once you have done it a few times and you have a good feel for the scenery. Then it starts to wear on you. Especially that stretch up US380 up to US81 and on up to Binghamton and then again once you pass Corning and push your way northward. Ugh. That northwest facing US86 and splitting off to US390 is torurous at best. It goes on forever and the scenery is so familiar to those of us who grew up along that corridor that it doesn’t do anything for you. And there is just nothing going on out there. No traffic. No towns. No lights. Nothing. Just boring.

The weather was really nice today and just perfect for Dominica’s drive home. Sunny and warm but cool enough to be comfortable. Perfect for driving. You can always open the window or do without. Nice and clear but not hot. Not too fatiguing. That will be over soon enough as we head towards summer.

I had a full day at work today. It was pretty much busy all day long and I was at the office for ten hours. But it feels good to be useful. For so long I was just a blob in the office. Now I am a semi-useful blog. Basically a limbre blob that can get out of the way quickly. It was almost 7:00 when I left the office to head for home.

On the way home I made a quick stop off at Barned and Nobles on Route 1. I picked up some books on learning German. I figured that I could use some “Learning German” CDs on my commute and in the office since I have headphones now. I grabbed a small English-German dictionary, a Berlitz learning German book, the 501 German Verbs book and a set of learning German on CDs.

It was a little after 8:00 when both Dominica and I got home – her to Geneseo and me to North Brunswick. She called around 8:30 to let me know that she was home safely and that she and the puppy were just going to spend the evening relaxing after their long drive.

I took the evening lightly as well. It was a short evening at home – just three hours from arrival to bed time – and I am pretty tired anyway. I spoke with Jeremy who is in the process of deciding on parts for building his own computer. He is building a fast AMD Athlon 64 machine with NVidia SLI using dual GeForce 7600GS cards. Or at least that is the plan. That will be a screaming machine! I am planning on buying his old machine off of him – an HP D325 commercial small form factor desktop with an AMD Athlon XP 2800+, 512MB, 160GB and an NVidia GeForce FX5200. I am planning on switching my main, 64-bit desktop over to Linux full time and using the slightly older, 32-bit machine for Windows XP Pro. That way I will have both at my disposal all of the time. Now that I work on Linux absolutely all of the time I don’t want to go home and switch back to Windows. I am sure that being on Linux full time will be much more valuable. Besides, SUSE 10.1 is due out in about a week and it is really supposed to be rockin’!

I went to bed around 11:00. I read a little in my Berlitz book in bed but not for very long. I was asleep in no time.

I slept in a lot later than I had intended to this morning. It was 7:30 by the time that I got out of bed. I had meant to have been up by 6:30 at the very latest. Not that it mattered much. After the long day on Saturday there is very likely to be very little going on at work this morning. Most everyone will be straggling in around 9:00 or so. Maybe later.

It is really awesome to be able to work from home sometimes. I think that this is the first job that I have ever had, except for when I actually worked from a home office but that was different, that allows me to work from home sometimes. High speed Internet access really has made a lot of things possible. Think about the incredible increase in quality of life because of good Internet access. If more companies were progressive about this stuff and more people willing to actually work from home and not just use the concept as a way to not go into work we could really increase productivity while combating rising fuel costs and shortages.

There was quite the thunderstorm going on when I first got up this morning and it went until around 9:00 when the birds starting coming back out. It was really loud and intense but we didn’t lose power at all. I was figuring that we were bound to lose power with how close it was. But not a flicker that I could see and the UPS unit never kicked over so we were probably good.

Today’s big project is to get the curtains hung in the living room so that we can start to use that room. The entire living room is completely empty still except for the two lawn chairs, one little metal stand with a printer on it and the cable “modem” that is sitting on the floor out there because that is the only place where it can be plugged in.

By 9:15 the sun was actually out and Dominica pulled herself out of bed. Oreo, however, decided that the entire bed was his and just stayed there. It was sunny from 9:30 until about 10:15 but then it got really dark and the rain started up again. Weird weather today. It isn’t too cold though. It isn’t warm but not too cold.

Dominica ran out to Panera bread to get us some breakfast. They had the amazing cinnamon crunch bagles that Andy and I got when we were in Pittsburgh a month ago. So she got us half a dozen of those. Boy are those ever good. It was pouring rain the entire time that she was gone but just as she got back the sun came out again and was really bright.

At noon Dominica went out to do some shopping for some much needed furniture for the house. I desperately need to have an office chair. I can only do so much when all I have is a folding chair. It is terrible for my back.

After breakfast Dominica headed back out to go shopping for much needed supplies while I worked. Oreo stayed with me. Min hit a bunch of places and came back in the early afternoon with a new office chair, a book shelf, a small rug for in front of the door so that we don’t track in so many cherry blossoms and a small area rug for the middle of the living room so Oreo has a place to lay. She spent the afternoon assembling things and together we hung the curtains in the living room so that that room can be useful to us. Oreo thought it was great once the sun started to stream in the windows so I moved his pillow out to the living room and he had a blast laying in front of the windows in the sunlight watching all of the neighborhood children playing in the parking lot.

I had some spare time since I was working at home and most of my job today involved coordinating with people via email. So I was able to do some firewall work and my new firewall is completely set up and in place now. That is a relief to have out of the way. It is nice to have the basics set up and working the way that they should.

I was busy working this afternoon so Dominica went out to the Omega Diner at 5:00 to get some take away. She discovered that the Omega is now open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. How awesome is that? I hadn’t realized that before. That is a major point of convenience. Especially when you live in a state where just about nothing is open at night. It is a big deal to be able to get food at night around here. While she was out I did some rearranging in the bedroom to prepare for moving the computer out into the living room. Now that there are curtains we can do that.

Dinner was awesome again. The Omega is really good. It was a huge meal and I have several meals of leftovers that are in the fridge now. I could eat almost all week just on what we didn’t manage to eat from tonight’s dinner!

After dinner I worked for about another hour and then we went out to do some shopping that Dominica wasn’t able to do without me. We went to Barnes and Nobles just to see if there was a convenient way to get there and there actually is. We didn’t stay there for long. Their computer and technology section was pretty lean and very poorly organized. Not surprisingly though as I have found very few Barnes and Nobles that really do a good job with that section. Then we went on to Walmart where we got some necessities like a hammer, screwdriver and a futon. The futon will be our sofa when we are using the living room to watch movies and, more importantly to many of you, it will be the guest bed because tons of people are planning on coming down to visit us down here. My proximity to the two cities makes my apartment an ideal launching pad for seeing the area.

Originally my plan was to go into Manhattan tomorrow to go to a trade show with Hewlett Packard but today ended up being so unproductive that that could easily not happen. If it does I will be going into the city for the first time since I first came down here a month ago. Two days after having gone to Philadelphia. Weird. I should know around mid-day whether or not I am heading downtown for the afternoon. I am hoping that I get to, it should be fun.

It was about 7:45 when we got back to the apartment and Dominica set to buiding furniture. First she built a small bookshelf for the bedroom. That will help a lot because I have been stacking books in the kitchen on the tiny built of counter space that I have and the few DVDs that I have are just scattered about with no place to call home.

A little after 8:00 we settled into the living room and set to building the futon and watching License to Drive. The futon took over two hours to build. The movie was crap. This is one of those late 80’s movies that I always wanted to see when I was younger but somehow never managed to see. Then, as I got older, seeing License to Drive was never a priority and it wasn’t one of those classic movies that everyone has in their collections or that any particular channel shows on television very frequently or, perhaps, ever. So it just fell by the wayside and I never got to see the movie. The movie probably became a much bigger thing in my memory than it should have been because of Billy Ocean’s awesome song “Get outa my dreams… Get into my car” which is the theme song to the movie. In reality it is the only good song in the entire movie and it only plays during the credits. What crap. The movie was mildly entertaining but nothing special and nothing nostalgic.

We didn’t manage to quite complete the futon while watching the movie and it wasn’t quite bedtime yet so we popped in more Remington Steele and watched one episode of that. It wasn’t the best episode ever but it was a lot better than License to Drive. We finished up the futon fairly early on and Dominica broke out the bread pudding from our dinner that we hadn’t been able to finish and we ate that while finishing the show.

With the computer moved into the corner of the living room and the printer stand along the wall and the futon set up the living room is actually starting to look a little bit like a living room. It is still pretty empty but the curtains and throw rug make a huge difference. It is noticeable that Oreo is a lot more comfortable now. We think that he was able to sense that the room was strange and it make him uncomfortable. Now he is perfectly happy to lay on his pillow in the living room while we watch DVDs on the laptop. We are still stuck watching them on the laptop as the desktop doesn’t have a DVD drive in it yet.

We went to bed at 11:00. A little later than I had wanted but not too bad. We got a lot accomplished today and shouldn’t need to spend any more money on furnishings for the apartment for a while. Hopefully now we can just spend time enjoying the apartment or whatever instead of working on it.

You know something that is free but can make you really happy? I know that you are thinking what I am thinking… awesome desktop wallpapers! If you want to take a little time to find some really awesome wallpaper for your desktop just head on over to KDE-Look where there is tons of amazingly beautiful stuff. They have images in just about any size you could want. Now the site is dedicated to making desktop stuff from the K Desktop Environment (KDE) but the wallpapers are just wallpapers and will work for any operating system. That is any except for SVG which are by far the highest quality and are not supported by the liked on Windows. Just another way that the Microsoft world is years behind everyone else.

Min and I slept in this morning. We were both pretty tired after having stayed up late last night. It was after 3:00 when we finally managed to get to bed. I had to get up this morning to help work remotely. There is always stuff that needs to be done. The life of an admin is never a restful one.

Before getting to bed last night I managed to hook up the new Netgear FVG318 firewall that I got. Now I can actually plug in multiple devices at once and I have wireless as well. First thing this morning I got my Grandstream IP Phone setup so that I can now make internal calls on that instead of using the headset on my computer. This will be much easier and I now have a speakerphone as well. And best of all it will actually ring like a real phone and I don’t have to be wearing the headset to hear if someone is trying to reach me. You don’t realize how important that is until you don’t have it.

I also unpacked my latest Amazon shipment. I got another book to study for the Solaris 10 certification exam. Plus two new movies: My Father the Hero which Min really loves and License To Drive which I have always wanted to see but somehow never managed to. I think that it was one of those movies that wasn’t very big at the time but I had wanted to see and missed and then by the time I could have seen it it was never around and everyone mostly forgot about it. Well now I have it. So there.

Today is awesome. The most relaxed day that I have had in over a month! My first day off in New Jersey. What a weird feeling it is to be here and not have to go to work. We started the day by going over to the Omega Diner on Route 1 and getting a late breakfast or early lunch. It was definitely lunch time and they were quite busy. I get the impression that they are always busy over there. The food was really good again. We are going to be very happy with that place.

After lunch we decided to run to the Pier One Outlet store because Dominica wanted to see if they had anything that we needed for the apartment. Of course they didn’t. That place is really crappy overall. I don’t like shopping there.

Then we decided that we wanted to see some areas where we were considering getting a future apartment or maybe property so we drove north east on Route 1 through Edison and up to Woodbridge. We managed to find a condominium complex that had an open house right next door to a Wegmans! So we stopped in. The place was a disaster. The condo was being sold way under market value because the person who had lived there had totally trashed the place and vanished – although there was a refridgerator in the apartment that couldn’t be opened so we had some suspicions. If you had seen the place you would draw the same conclusion. In fact, I didn’t tell you what we were thinking so you did just draw the same conclusion. Sicko. Stop watching morbid television like CSI!

We didn’t like the condo that we saw, obviously, but we did learn a lot about stuff in the area and got a good idea of how far it was to Woodbridge. It was a good use of our time. We came back to the apartment stopping quickly at Office Depot and Walmart on the way. We were only home for a little while before we had to get ready to drive south west down to Philadelphia to have dinner with Jenn.

This was our first time driving to Philadelphia from the apartment so I was very interested to see how long this would take. I timed the trip carefully. We left at exactly 6:40. It was 7:00 when we hit Princeton. 7:05 when we reached Trenton. And at 7:09 we were in Pennsylvania in the outskirts of Philly. So 29 minutes to the Pennsylvania portion of the Philadelphia metro area. Not bad at all.

It took longer to get to Jenn’s place in Norristown on the west of Philly than it did just to get to Philly itself. The Philadelphia metro area is wider than New Jersey is, I am pretty sure. But you can’t drive nearly as quickly through the city either. So the time can be misleading. It was about 7:45 or just a little after when we arrived at Jenn’s apartment.

We had a good time at dinner. One of Jenn’s friends came over and had dinner with us. We couldn’t stay very late because Jenn and I have work tomorrow and we hae a decent drive back to North Brunswick. It is weird that Jenn now lives almost as close to us as Josh does in Geneseo. It is just weird living down here in general.

We got home around midnight and pretty much went straight to bed. We were both really tired. Fortunately tomorrow is my first “Work from Home” day since starting work down here. So we will see how that goes. It is awesome that they have that kind of flexibility so that I can be at home working when Dominica is here. At least this week I can. Unfortunately my chair and desk and everything here isn’t up to par with what I have at the office yet so it is far less comfortable and I don’t have the triple LCDs, yet. Maybe I will break down tomorrow and get an office chair. Having nothing but folding chairs can really wear on you.

Saturday. My very first weekend day in New Jersey. After being here for almost an entire month it is hard to believe that this is my first weekend day here. It isn’t much like a weekend day, though, because I am going into work today. Today is much colder than it has been and it is dark and rainy. The perfect day to be in the office. I don’t like being in the office on sunny days because the bright sunlight streams in through the windows and makes it difficult to work. I do not sit directly by the windows so it isn’t all that bad for me but it is still nicer when it is overcast.

I slept in until 8:30 this morning. Boy did that ever feel good. My very first chance to sleep in in New Jersey. As you can see there are a lot of “firsts” this weekend. I took my time getting ready to leave the apartment and even did some email, shopping on eBay, etc. before heading into the office. I had a SlimFast for breakfast but figured that there would be something to eat at the office.

The drive in only took a little more than half an hour. It is nice going in without any traffic. Much more pleasant. I timed it perfectly and was into the office right at 11:00 which is when I was scheduled to arrive. We had donuts and bagles in the office today. I don’t know where they get the bagles from but they are awesome. I don’t know anyplace in Rochester with donuts like this. They aren’t as good as that cinnamon crunch bagle from Penera but they are still really good.

There wasn’t a lot for me to do at work today. The purpose of me being in the office was really more so that I would get a feel for how things work and, I guess, to be around just in case anyone needed a gopher or something. It was a really casual day. Most everyone was in jeans. It is a totally different world when you work on the weekends and only support is going on and no regular day to day projects.

I had guessed that I would only be in for two to three hours but I ended up being in quite a bit more. At 5:00 all of the office lights kicked off. With almost no internal light and the outside being very dark from the overcastness (is that a word) and from the rain it was really dark inside.

Around 2:00 or maybe a little later pizza and soda was delivered for everyone. That was really nice. With the cafeteria closed it is a bit of a pain to get food out here on the weekend. The pizza was good but really greasy. Much greasier than normal. Greasier than Mama Mia’s in Geneseo.

I got the chance to catch up on some odds and ends today. Like two weeks worth, or more, of The Jedi Council Speaks by Bob Crissman. Bob is getting hooked on the whole identity blogging thing and I think that that makes a blog a lot more interesting. I am really into indentity blogs. I think that is why I like reading Wil Wheaton in Exhile so much. I got a lot of SGL work done and posted. This week has been tough even with the good Internet access at the apartment. I lost two posting days with the site having issues but all of that seems to be fine now and there is plenty posted for everyone to read. I also got a chance to go back and finish up the post from April 15th that was pending completion all week long.

Dominica is working her regular Saturday early hours today. She is on a confusing schedule now that has her alternative regular Saturdays and really early Saturdays. The really early is not all that early but it is a bit earlier than what she does on a regular day. We are using that shifting schedule as the basis for when she comes down to New Jersey for the weekend and when I go to Geneseo for the weekend. This weekend worked out perfectly that I had to work all day today and she gets out of work a little early today so that she can pick up Oreo and run right down to New Jersey tonight and get to spend the entire weekend down here. If she wasn’t getting out of work early then she would need to sleep at home tonight and it would be far less practical for her to drive down. So that is our major deciding factor. It is nice that it works out fairly evenly that she will come down here about half of the time and I will go home about half of the time.

So Dominica gets out of work at 8:00 tonight. Not much later than I should get out of work. Then she will drive home and throw the last few items into the car and pick up Oreo. Oreo is spending the day with dad as usual but dad is driving him over to the house to meet Min so that she doesn’t have to drive so far out of her way before doing the long drive down here. It saves her about an hour.

When driving with the dog the trip takes almost exactly five and a half hours. So Dominica will probably be arriving in North Brunswick around 2:00 in the morning. That makes for a really late night of driving 🙁 Hopefully she will get a good jump on the trip and it is possible to make it by 1:00 but that is more theoretical than anything.

I ended up working until 6:00 and then heading home. The drive wasn’t bad on a Saturday evening. Just barely over half an hour from work to the apartment. Now for my first real evening at the apartment. In actuality it isn’t much more of an evening at home than any other night since it is so late. But still it is a cool feeling to not have anything in particular to do tomorrow. I need that. Monday I am going to be working from home so I get to see Dominica and Oreo twice as much as I have seen them in over a month. Tomorrow evening Min and I are going into Philadelphia to have dinner at Jenn’s place.

I finally managed to get my VoicePulse account turned on this evening. There is still a paperwork step that has to be done before I can actually try using the service but at least the process is starting. So maybe early next week we can have it working. Of course we have to do some decision making before the service actually gets turned on. Like whether to get a new number of to port the old one over to the new service. Hmmm…

I watched some more in2TV tonight. I just love the idea of Internet television. It is awesome. It is tough to really use it a lot because the service doesn’t work all that well yet. AOL definitely has a long way to go from an interface standpoint. Many of the episodes are impossible to watch just because the interface to them is faulty. You can select just about any episode of Head of the Class but only about half of them actually play. The other half just start playing the first half at random. But because the interface doesn’t tell you which episode is playing you have to wait through several minutes of introduction and commercial before you figure it out. And then you only figure it out when you know the episodes well enough to know that you have all ready seen that one. After watching several episodes of Head of the Class I discovered that I had seen them out of order and had missed many of them that I couldn’t get to play. It would be much easier if they let you skip around in the episodes but because they want to force the commercials to play they have made that feature fail as well and it ends up making you watch the same incorrect episode from the beginning again. So the technology is rockin’ but the implementation is not one that is going to make people come back over and over again if they don’t get that stuff figured out.

Since I had exhausted my Head of the Class options I decided to move onto Scarecrow and Mrs. King. I haven’t seen S&MK since it originally aired in the early 1980’s. I remember really liking this show. It is along the same lines as Remington Steele and Magnum P.I.. There was not a lot of variety during the 1980’s but the shows were pretty good. I used to watch S&MK with my parents when I was young.

Dominica called at 8:45 and was just about to leave Geneseo. So she is running on schedule. She got the mail before she left and my first paycheck finally arrived so we know that I am getting paid for real now. It is a relief to know that that aspect of things is ironed out.

I have decided that I don’t like S&MK as much as I thought that I would. The characters are much more annoying and pathetic than I remember. And the plot is such thick Cold War weirdness. I mean I realize that everything in the 1980’s was tainted by the insanity as every American and every Russian freaked out thinking that the opposite country was going to nuke them at any moment. And of course all of the media was playing on that. I am sure that all Soviet entertainment during the period was similar. Shows about how the KGB constantly managed to thwart CIA agents who an infiltrated their country and were killing operatives in their homes. I am sure that they, just like us, are more thrilled with the improved entertainment that with the reduced threat of mutually assured destruction.

I am very excited to have my new firewall / router coming this evening. I have really been needing it this past week. It will be nice to have the computer protected, obviously, but I need the additional ports and wireless to allow me to get the SparcStation and my laptop online – not to mention my PocketPC. Dominica is also bringing my drill so that we can put up the curtains in the living room. Finally we will be able to use the living room as a part of the apartment and not just an enclosed piece of the outdoors.

I did some apartment cleaning while I was waiting for my family to arrive. To say that “I did some cleaning” is a strange thing to say considering the apartment is completely empty. Basically I unfolded the folding chairs and set them up in the living room as if they were regular furniture. I moved the printer stand (a small metal baker’s rack thing) into the living room and set the old nasty HP LaserJet 4L on it. It is in a different room than the computer but never you mind about that. I unpacked some stuff from my plastic bin of stuff that I brought with me and set them around the apartment. That was about all that there was to do. Sad really. It did make a little difference. The apartment definitely looks slightly improved. Only slightly. But at least Min will notice that things have moved and feel like I have done something since she left. I want to make a run out to the trash bin but it is raining and I am in my pajamas so I don’t think that I will.

I tried installing Solaris 10 onto my SUN Ultra 5 workstation this evening but I can’t even begin to get the install to work. The very first screen that comes up says “Select Your Language” and asks you to press a number 0-9 but no matter what you do it just sits there. I can’t get any reaction out of it at all. Unfortunately I can’t test the mouse because I left the mouse at home thinking that I couldn’t possibly need it. And I should have had Dominica bring it down with her on this trip but I didn’t realize that I would need it potentially until she was several hours away from home. Bummer. I am going to continue to try some things but it looks as though that machine might just have to sit around and wait until I can figure out some other means of connecting to it. Maybe I will get lucky and manage to find a null modem cable tomorrow or maybe on Monday so that I can connect to it through the console port. That would actually be easier because I don’t have anyplace to really put the keyboard anyway and I wouldn’t have to keep switching the monitor back and forth between the two machines.

Dominica called from the Pennsylvania Welcome Center on Route 81. She was talking the dog for a walk in the rain. She all ready made one stop in Corning. She is really tired and having a hard time staying awake. While she was on the phone with me Eric called to let me know that the router was down, again. What a pain that thing is. I think that we picked a router model that is not very reliable. Unfortunately a lot of really important stuff relies on that router including the new phones. So, of course, they aren’t working now. Dad was in bed when I called him about the problem. This would have to happen the same night that Dominica was coming down here. Normally this wouldn’t be any problem at all. But when no one is home it becomes a pretty major issue. I am ordering some power management equipment to deal with it. Remote outlet stuff so that I can power cycle any piece of equipment from anywhere. Normally this isn’t too big of a deal but this is the third time this week and no less than the seventh time this month that I have had to have a piece of equipment forcibly restarted! How can so many unrelated items have so many problems? I tried to order the equipment needed tonight but, like every other site that I try to use and apparently like my own, the ordering site it down and you can’t place an order right now. Foiled again.

To make me feel even better, I did some line tests on the cable service that I am getting down here and discovered that I am only getting between 200Kb/s and 400Kb/s. Just great. All kinds of speed. That isn’t even as good as I was getting back home. It has been noticeable that web sites have not been very snappy. The connection appears to be solid enough but definitely nothing special in the least. I guess that explains why dad and I have noticed bandwidth issues on the VoIP system. It is my end of the connection having the problem. I am supposed to be getting something in the vicinity of 15Mb/s – that is 50 times the speed that I appear to actually be getting. Speed tests are very difficult but it is quite noticeable that lots of sites take a really long time just to load regular images. I did some of my first real downloading tonight and the speed problems were really obvious. Something tells me that it this doesn’t get corrected that Dominica and I will not be extending our six month lease here.

Actually I figure that it won’t be very likely for us to extend the lease here. Really the idea behind this place was just to give us a base of operation so that we could go out and find places where we really want to live. So expenditures here will be minimal. We really need a chair and a throw-rug for the large, hardwood living room where the sound echoes so horribly that you can barely use the phone but it is the only room in the apartment where the cell works. We have been kicking around the idea of Woodbridge or New Brunswick proper or maybe Edison. All three are closer to work and closer to New York City. It is much more likely that we will go to NYC more often than we will go to Philadelphia so that seems to make sense. Of course I say that and I have not yet gone to New York and we are going to Philadelphia tomorrow evening.

I just noticed that the thermostat in the house says that the house is fifty degrees. Just a little bit chilly. No wonder I was feeling cold even with my fleece on! I turned on the heater but it isn’t doing anything. I am not convinced that the thermostat portion of the HVAC system works properly. It never seems to kick on or off automatically. This will warrant some further investigation.

In case you haven’t noticed, I am writing a lot more these days. Being alone all of the time gives me a lot of need to talk to people and no one to actually talk to. So I unleash my thoughts on my poor, unsuspecting readers. That and I tend to have a lot of time during the day when writing is something that I am able to do easily. So write I do.

After having so many problems with the router at the house I decided that I needed to start seriously investigating a good alternative. Something that would work as a replacement, save money in the long run and hopefully not run into the same kinds of problems that we have been running into with the current router. So I started looking more seriously at IPCop tonight. It seems like a hardware router like we have been using would be the way to go but our experiences have been teaching us otherwise. Sure we could go for far more expensive hardware routers but that is a tough row to hoe. Not only would we have to upgrade ourselves (at about six different locations) but all of our connecting sites would have to do so as well and that would be a big problem. So an alternative solution is needed.

It didn’t take too long before I discovered that there is no heat in this poorly insulated apartment. Good thing that it is almost summer weather most of the time. But it did snow here just two weeks ago for a few hours. It didn’t last at all but it happened. It could get pretty chilly in here if that happened again. Dominica is not going to be happy when she gets here and finds out that there isn’t any heat. I ran the shower as hot as it would go and opened up the shower door and the bathroom door hoping that that would make a little bit of a difference. The only thing really generating any heat in this house is the computer that I am using. And it doesn’t generate very much.

The shower managed to bring the house up four degrees according to the thermostat. The sliding glass doors in the living room fogged up so it must have done something. Too bad there is only about fifteen minutes of warm water available from my little water heater or it might have actually been useful.

It has been raining here all day and poor Dominica has had to drive in rain all the way from New York. Rain makes a long drive like that at night exceptionally tough. It doesn’t help very much with keeping you awake either. Dominica has been listening to some of my books on CD while she has been driving and, believe it or not, she is now hooked on Simon Winchester who wrote books like “Krakatowa” and “The Professor and the Madman”. Many readers would consider his stuff to be very academic and exceptionally dry but I find his writing to be very entertaining and it is definitely some of my favourite stuff. Well now Dominica is hooked on him too. She has always made fun of me for reading his books. I have at least four of his books, the others being “The Meaning of Everything” and “The Map That Changed the World”.

It was 3:00 when Dominica and Oreo arrived. Min and I quickly unpacked the car and then it was off to bed. All three of us were very tired but we are happy to be a family for the weekend.