Sheep Guarding Llama

First of all, congratulations to Wil Wheaton who totally just scored the voice job that he wanted on a new show at Nickelodian!! Go Wil. I will give everyone details when he releases what the project is.

It was around 9:30 when I finally rolled into the apartment last night. I think that Dominica and I are most definitely going to be doing some serious looking for a new apartment once the six months are up on this one. I am pretty happy with the apartment itself and I hate moving but this place is just too far from work. My commute is a major part of my day and it isn’t like I use the apartment for anything more than just sleeping. I don’t even eat there. I have a SlimFast dinner and go to bed. I haven’t ordered in food or gone out once on my own since I got down here. And it sure isn’t like I cook.

For dinner I had, you guessed it a SlimFast and a small salad. I got in to the apartment so late that I pretty much did nothing. I had a little support work that needed to be done and I wrapped that up quickly. Boy am I glad that I have the firewall with the solid VPN support. That makes such a difference to my sanity.

I talked to Mary over instant messenger last night for a little while. She is just wrapping up her semester at GCC in Batavia. Two more weeks. She doesn’t know what she is going to do after that. She has the summer off from school and has to get some work for the summer. She is hoping to get to be the student aid for the Army Corp of Engineers at the Mt. Morris Dam. That would be cool.

I went to bed at 11:30. It is hard to go to bed much before that when the evening is so short. It makes for a short night when the alarm goes off at 5:45 (I pushed it back a little.)

I fell back asleep after the alarm went off this morning. I didn’t feel like I did but I did. I got up around 6:30. I checked my mail before getting ready for work. Supporting Europe means that there is often stuff to do VERY early in the morning. Most of my work requests are generated in a time zone five hours ahead of where I am so that can be tough.

I got into the office at 8:00. It is another beautiful day in New Jersey. I am still (Day 2) listening to my German CDs in the car. I haven’t learned very much yet. I decided that I would take them into work today and convert them to Ogg Vorbis files so that I can listen to them during the day with Zinf without needing to take the CDs to and from the car every day. So I downloaded CDex and started converting. What a great program that is. So simple and useful.

I did my usual breakfast at the office. A bagle with peanut butter (George Washington Carver is my hero) and a big thing of fruit. I am trying really hard to add fruit to my diet. It has been terribly lacking in fresh fruit. Today I must have gotten about twice as much fruit as I did yesterday (they weigh it on a scale) because it was about $8 just for the fruit! But boy is it delicious.

Everyone told me when I started work down here that it would take about a month before things would get up to speed and that I would be pretty bored for the first four weeks then it would pick up. Well that appears to be pretty accurate. I am just hitting a month and this week is completely different than it has been. I am busy just about every day and I am actually being useful and not just sitting around asking questions. I still have to ask tons of questions but I can do more and more independantly. It is getting to be a lot more fun now that I am actually keeping busy a lot of the time. Not so busy as to not be able to keep up with SGL luckily so you all get to come along for the ride.

Today was the big day for getting Indian food in the office. We were going to go yesterday but it is too big of an event and they weren’t able to schedule it at the last minute. So it got held off until today. The place is in Morristown which is about twenty minutes or farther from the office. Nine of us went in two cars. I didn’t go with my team from work but with our sister team. I actually sit in the middle of our sister team as there was no space within my own team for my office. So we left around 12:30 to get lunch with everyone in tow. It was quite the undertaking to organize that many people. Two people from our sister team got stuck staying behind so that there was someone there in case something happened. It would be a bit dangerous to take absolutely everone. But I was excited as it was obvious that everyone really wanted to go and that this was a major event.

The place was really fancy considering it was a buffet. You really felt like you were being seated at a nice hotel restaurant. The food was amazing! This was definitely the best Indian food that I have ever had. It was absolutely, totally awesome. And, of course, I ate until I felt sick. I stopped after a reasonible amount but the guys all said that they weren’t proud of me and I wasn’t really well versed in Indian cuisine if I didn’t eat another round so I gave in and feel gorged now. But it was worth it. They tried to get me to eat dessert as well but I managed to resist that. I have been hearing about this restaurant for a long – almost since I first arrived here so this was quite the treat that I had been looking forward to.

It was almost 3:00 by the time we got back to the office. I couldn’t believe how much time it took just to get lunch. No wonder they were so concerned about leaving a few people behind for coverage. That really ate into the afternoon but boy was it ever worth it. It was a lot of fun going out and doing something social with so many of the people from the office.

I found out today that I am staying in the office that I have been in since I first arrived in New Jersey. Up until today it has just been a temporary office while they decided where to stick me but today I officially got assigned to the office so now I will be getting a telephone number of my very own that I can actually answer. that will be a change. Up until now there have been no calls for me so I never even have to react to the phone ringing. It was nice while it lasted. But it is good that it will be possible to call my desk in case of an emergency.

At this point in the day someone needed to use my computer and pushed my browser too hard and I didn’t have a chance to save what I had been writing and I lost everything that I wrote after lunch so hopefully I won’t miss anything as I go back and try to think of anything that I might have written. That kind of sucks because I really use SGL as a pensive (Harry Potter reference, go read the book) and once I put things in I don’t remember them. I only keep the feeling of having told people. I’m weird, okay, get over it.

Wil was able to write this afternoon about the new show that he is going to be working on over at Nickelodean. The show is called Kyle + Rosemary and Wil has scored the lead role of Kyle. How hawesome is that? I am looking forward to checking out the new show. I guess this is really good news for Wil not just because it is a cool project and looks like fun but also because it looks like it must be a pretty major, full time kinda gig. More or less. I don’t really know how these things work but it isn’t a small part or an occasional character. Pretty cool.

Things were really slow around the office this evening and so I decided to head for the hills around 6:30. (For those who don’t know, on the other side of the hills is my apartment so I have to head for them before heading for the apartment.) Last night was such a short night at home that I would like to have a little bit of time to myself this evening. Even if it does just involve sitting alone in front of the computer. There is always plenty to do at home. I haven’t even cleaned up any of the mess from putting all of the furniture together yet. I suppose I should do that sometime soon. Dominica will appreciate if it is gone when she gets there the day after tomorrow.

I actually got home at a reasonable time tonight. My project for the evening (I have had to reduce by intense “at home IT schedule” down to a single small project per evening to keep my sanity) was to get Asterisk working in conjunction with Free World Dialup. Free World Dialup or FWD is a free, open VoIP solution that uses both the big IP phone protocol SIP as well as the big VoIP PBX protocol IAX2. Unlike closed, casual users only solutions like Skype, FWD is open and enterprise friendly. One of the biggest deals is that FWD allows interconnects between different phone systems as well as PBX connections. PBX connections means that people running their own telephone systems at home (like me) can connect to FWD. I think that Skype users overlook the significance of this little feature. It means that any business anywhere who wants to have a VoIP connection to FWD can do it, for free AND have it just be another connection on their CURRENT phone system! Okay, follow me here. You want to call company X in Australia. You have a FWD account. They have an FWD account. You can place a call from your telephone and it rings their phones just as if you called on a regular old fashioned telephone line but for free. They don’t notice whether the calls are coming from FWD or from the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network.) This is a really big deal. Companies that want to use Skype HAVE to run a Skype client on one person’s desktop and have them answer that line seperately from their regular phones. No integration. No access to regular voicemail. Nothing. Companies are not going to do that. FWD is a real phone solution that can be managed by companies and used by people at home. It is a complete replacement to the traditional phone system that can run along side it at the same time. Go check it out. Get an account. Make some calls.

I got to talk to Min at work over IM a little before I went to bed. And I helped Jeremy a little. He is in the process of picking out the components to buy for a computer that he is building. He has never built a computer before and he is having a lot of fun picking out the components that he wants to buy. He is putting together the first NVidia SLI (that is a dual graphics card system) gaming machine that I know of. It should be something to see.

I was really tired and decided to go to bed really early. I hit the hay at just a little past 9:30!! Boy does that ever make me feel old. Tomorrow is Friday, which is the slowest day of the week and the shortest. Most everyone starts calling it a day around 5:00 instead of 6:30 – 7:00. And Monday is a bank holiday in the United Kingdom which is where I do most of my work (virtually, of course, I have never actually been in the UK.) So Monday is going to be a nice, quiet day as well. Unfortunately I will not get to work from home on Monday because of technical problems that keep me from being able to be productive remotely. Until we get that fixed I am stuck coming into the office for just about everything.

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.