Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Many of you may have noticed that the site has been very slow over the past couple of days and that by today the site was only available sporadically throughout the day. We have a memory leak on one of the applications on the server and it caused it to quickly begin thrashing. So we were down or nearly down for almost the entire day. My apologies. Unfortunately I am unable to deal with blog issues during the day directly and even there I can only work on the server remotely. So if anything physically has to be done with the box I have to wait until Dominica gets home from work, which is late at night after I would normally go to bed, and have her be my remote hands and eyes.

Last night I decided that I needed it to be colder so that I could sleep better so I tried turning on the air conditioning. I figured that this would be a good idea anyway since we needed to know whether or not it actually worked. Fortunately it does work quite well although it is very noisy like all of the applicances in this apartment. The refridgerator is very loud and runs almost all of the time. The water heater makes a lot of noise as well. So there is always something making noise between those three things.

I was up at normal time this morning and managed to make it out the door early enough to avoid the bulk of the rush hour traffic. The drive isn’t too bad when there aren’t too many cars on the road. The trip is actually kind of scenic and only eighteen miles long. But it isn’t fast no matter what I do. I noticed this morning that my Jabra BlueTooth headset is making a weird sound. There is some piece that has broken loose inside of it and is rolling around when you move your head from side to side. It isn’t very irritating as long as the unit still works. I haven’t felt it vibrate in a while and I am wondering if its vibrate feature is now broken. That would be very sad.

I had the fish fry at work today. How cool is it that I can get a fish fry from the cafeteria at work? No one in my department is working very late tonight if they can help it because we are all in tomorrow. So around 5:00 the place started clearing out pretty quickly. There are a few people who have late night work but for the most part the place was a ghost town by 5:30. I appreciated the chance to head out a little early and to have a relaxing night before working the weekend.

I used the Internet phone system to call both dad and Dominica before going to bed. Boy is that ever handy. It works so much better than my cell phone. The cell has almost no reception in the complex where I am living. If I walk outside or stand in the very echoey living room right by the sliding glass doors I can generally stay on a call but if I am anywhere else in the house the calls won’t even hold for more than a minute or two and often the phone doesn’t even ring. So the timing has been perfect for getting the internal Internet based phone system working. It is extra nice because it doesn’t use batteries or wireless so it is pretty reliable. Nice to know that I can make high quality phone calls easily whenever I need to.

I actually made myself dinner in the apartment tonight. Okay, “made myself dinner” might be an overstatement. I heated up the leftover crab stuffed salmon from the Omega Grill from last week. It was the only real food in the apartment other than SlimFast drinks and mean bars. I wanted to get it eaten before Dominica came down to visit and tonight is my final meal in the apartment before that happens. But it is the closest thing to cooking that I have done yet.

I tried to sign up for a telephone account with VoicePulse tonight but their web application that does that stuff isn’t working and instead it feeds back ASP.NET errors about its database connections. I gave it several hours but got a different but related ASP.NET error. Maybe tomorrow it will be working. I am looking forward to the idea of being able to make regular, outgoing phone calls from the new phone system. That will be REALLY handy. People would actually be able to call me, from anywhere, anytime that they needed me. Nice.

I stayed up a little late tonight. I am pretty excited. Tonight is the very first evening that I have had in New Jersey when I haven’t had to get up early the next morning to go to work. Now, I do have to go to work tomorrow. But I don’t have to be there until 11:00 so it is almost like having a day off. At least to me. It is just about the most leaisurely day that I will have had in the past month and a half. This is the first Friday night that doesn’t include working a full ten hour day and then immediately driving five hours back to Geneseo. The first time that I just get to relax in the apartment. It is a nice change. I really needed a break, even if just a little one.

I tried out in2TV a little more tonight. I watched three more episodes of the 1986 premier season of Head of the Class. I can’t believe how long it has been. Twenty years! Twenty years ago I was ten years old and watching these very episodes new in my parents’ unfinished basement television/family room/den thing on a 19″ Sylvania colour tube television. Sylvania!! Remember when they actually made televisions? No, I didn’t think so. But they did. They were a part of the Philips, Magnavox (what a horrible name), Sylvaniz, Marantz family. Sylvania used to have a large tube factory in Batavia but that closed down many years ago and is mostly empty space these days.

Anyway, in2TV managed to work a little more than half of the time. It is very finicky and it is clear that AOL has not nailed down the technical aspects of the system yet but it is coming along. The compression and delivery mechanisms are excellent. I mean truly impressive. To be able to stream almost broadcast quality original television programming with an almost “instant on” startup time and smooth play for an entire half hour program is something to be proud of. Now I have not tried the system on anything less than Cablevision’s cable Internet service so maybe DSL and Road Runner customers aren’t getting the same quality that I am so I will look into that. But definitely for me it is a great service. I just wish that they would correct some of the issues that crop up between browsers and Windows security. The system really needs to be designed to be ablet o work easily and quickly for people who are not advanced users but who do not run their systems wide open as administrators all of the time. They still have a ways to go in that area.

The thing that in2TV is, at least at this early phase, is a sign of things to come. in2TV shows, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the current television paradigm cannot last against current network technology. AOL is delivering television shows, on demand, over the Internet for free. Now sure, currently those shows are only back catalogue items of lower than usual value (i.e. being considered for DVD but don’t quite make the cut.) But those items are the perfect place to start proving this delivery methodology. Once this system hits critical mass you will see television shows from farther up the stack starting to be released bringing more and more people to this system.

I tried watching the lower quality stream of Head of the Class while lying in bed (aka on the floor – I will try to get some pictures soon) and even in the lower quality version, in full screen mode, it really looks just like regular 1980’s television when you are that far away. Awesome. It is funny that I watch it on my 20.1″ LCD monitor which is roughly the same as a 22″ traditional television because that is only barely larger than I would have watched this show when it first aired twenty years ago. I am feeling very nostalgic.

When Dominica got home from work and from picking up Oreo she packed and restarted the SGL server. The site was back up just a little before midnight. Sorry for the disruption. I am running pmWiki and I am pretty sure that that is the application that was having a problem but it might have been the email server, Postfix. A number of people had registered so that they could leave comments (sorry guys) and the emails didn’t go through until after the server restarted. Some of them were in the queue for several days. Oops. I had no idea. I knew that the server had successfully restarted when I received all of the backed up notification email.

It was a little after midnight by the time that I got to bed and I fell right asleep. Right asleep, in fact, forgetting my CPAP. I woke up in the middle of the night with a terribly soar throat which is always what happens when I forget the CPAP so I put it right on and went back to sleep. So I didn’t sleep as well as I could have but I am fine.

I slept in until 6:30 again this morning. I guess that I need to be getting to bed earlier than I have been. Or maybe I need to open the windows at night or something. It was way too warm when I woke up this morning and that was making it hard for me to wake up. I really don’t sleep well when it is too warm.

I had breakfast at work this morning. My $.65 bagel with peanut butter. I am acclimating and eating poppy seed bagels now on a regular basis. It is hard to believe in this day and age that you can sell a delicious, toasted bagel topped with peanut butter and pay the person to take your money for just $.65. It seems like you must use more electricity than that while you are in the process of preparing the bagel.

I discovered yesterday that New Brunswick is known as “The HealthCare City.” How cool is that? John would be proud.

Bob Wegmans, the aged founder of the Rochester grocery store chain, died today at Strong Memorial Hospital. Mr. Wegman was a staple of the Rochester community and most likely second only to George Eastman in his level of local fame. He will be missed. I am fortunate enough to at least have been able, along with Andy, to have worked at Wegmans while he was still alive although he never visited the offices during my time there and we never crossed paths at any of the stores.

I had a busy morning today for a change. That was nice. Kept me hopping until lunch time. It was really warm in the office today which, of course, makes me really sleepy. It is hard to keep looking at the computer monitor when you are way too warm.

Tonight I managed to make the first real over the Internet phone call between sites. I called dad in his home office. I am using the XTen X-Lite softphone and he is using a GrandStream IP hardphone and the sound is pretty good. The whole thing works great. Right now we have extension to extension calling, voicemail and caller ID working. Over the weekend I will be attempting to roll out a few more features.

This evening Dominica turned me on to the in2TV service from AOL. in2TV is an on demand Internet “television” system. I use the term “television” loosely because technically this is not a television replacement technology. Here is the quick explanation:

Traditional television whether you are referring to terrestrial broadcast, cable or satellite (aka cellestial broadcast) is, fundamentally, a streaming not-on-demand system. Even cable providers with “on demand” do some tricky and very limiting things to mimick non-television technology to appear to be on demand. When using television, if you want to be able to pick you programming you needed to traditionally add a video cassette recorder or more recently a digital video recorder that would be required to be on and recording at the precise moment that the program that you wanted was being streamed and then you could watch it whenever you wanted. This system is not technically “on demand” but is more accurately referred to as Time Shifting because you must be connected and prepared ahead of time. On demand means that you can get the program whenever you want once it is created. You don’t have to wait for a “program air time” nor do you have to decide that you want to see it the moment that it is aired. You can learn about it later and get it whenever you want. So these are different animals. But traditional television doesn’t have bidrectional communications necessary for true on demand services. Now that we have the ability to put traditional television programming onto the Internet we, of course, have the option of doing so in a traditional, pre-programmed way but users are not happy with this paradigm for obvious reasons. So with the Internet we are now beginning to see television programming actually available “on demand”! Yay!

AOL is providing its programming through two different mechanisms. The first one and likely to be the most popular is a fairly straightforward “streaming on demand” style. What this means is that you open a web page for the show that you are interested in, select the episode that you want to watch and the AOL in2TV servers begin streaming that show to you right at that moment. Nothing weird. Just what you would expect. The thing that is really amazing is how quickly they have made the shows start up and how well the image looks. Now they are only providing a very small image but traditional, legacy television’s image is miniscual compared to what we are used to with computers so it could very easily be the same size or nearly the same size as the original shows were. In any case, the shows are quite watchable in this format. What I like is shrinking the window that the show is in and putting it in the corner of my monitor so that I can still do everything as normal but while watching a television show. In fact, I think that the image looks a bit better than it does when dad does the exact same thing using an actual televisin tuner! You are able to maximize the image and make it into a full screen image so that you can use your computer just like a television. In this mode you can really see the problems with the image but you have to keep in mind that the original show would look terrible on a high quality computer monitor today if you were to sit very close to it. So it is very unfair to compare it in this way. If I back up and watch the show from across the room it looks very similar to regular television. The place that it is noticably different is when there is a scene change – you can see the scene start off blurry and then become sharper as the movement slows. This is typical for many key frame based video compression schemes. DVDs using MPEG2 do this as well but not as dramatically.

The second method that you can use to get programs is through what AOL terms “Hi-Q” which is actually just a proprietary video podcast player and aggregator. So the system is pretty simple. You simply install the software and subscribe to shows or channels that you are interested in. Then the aggregator will download programs from your subscription choices in the background while you do other things. Once a program has been downloaded you store it on your computer and can watch it at any time that you like. This method takes longer to get you the program but the programs are of higher quality and it shows if you are going to watch the programming in full screen mode. Although for a lot of the kinds of programming that they have on in2TV right now I don’t think that this method is particularly worth it unless you are planning on watching the same show multiple times. If you have a lot of disk storage space you could download a lot of programming and just keep it stored on your computer so that you can watch it at any time. So there are some real upsides to this method. But it uses a lot of disk space and it will be some time before we see how well you will be able to manage, backup and move this data around. Hopefully AOL will make this process simple so that this programming will be really valuable and not just a higher quality version of their streaming service. But in either case, the system is pretty nice.

Right now there is not the widest selection of programming available but there are a few really good shows well worth your time like Growing Pains, Head of the Class, Bablyon 5 and Scarecrow and Mrs. King. AOL/Time Warner is using their old catelogue of classic shows as a proving ground for the system and they have a lot of really good stuff to put out there. Unlike most companies interested in doing this type of thing who would have to purchase content or create new, AOL is able to go into their vaults and pull out material that is costing them money to store and earning them nominal amounts of income and put it to good use. Even if they get nothing but PR it could be of good value to them. But they are getting advertisers in the form of Intel and others so there must be some positive cash flow involved. Maybe AOL has discovered a sustainable business model. Perhaps not a cash cow but a revenue stream that generates income from idle assets. Good idea, if you ask me. And for the chance to be remembered as a leader in the television to Internet transition it is a really good deal.

Mary called just before I went to bed and we talked for a while. It is hard for us to make contact because she is busy with school during the day and then she has been working part time at Dee’s Deli in Silver Springs and doesn’t get home until almost 10:00 at night which is pretty close to when I go to bed. It is a rough life being old and responsible. Well, old at any rate.

It was close to 11:30 by the time that I got to bed.

I slept in this morning until 6:20 to give myself a little extra time with Dominica and Oreo. It was a lot better to sleep in today rather than yesterday while sleeping on the floor. The new bed is pretty soft for me though and my back is soar this morning. It is made mostly out of that Swedish memory foam and that stuff does not support my back very well. It just lets you sink in wherever there is pressure which makes for a very unsupported situation. Even worse is that it has “memory” and does not spring right back which them makes moving around in bed very difficult since the bed is shaped to the position that you were in and not the position that you are trying to get into which I find causes a lot of strain as well. But boy is it a lot better than sleeping on the floor.

I managed to get ready quite quickly this morning and was out the door around 7:15. Leaving that early allowed me to still drive the slow route to work and get there in just 45 minutes. Quite an improvement over yesteray. I figure it I leave at 6:30 that that could shave another fifteen minutes from that time.

I got to work at 8:00. It was really warm at the office this morning. It makes it difficult to be productive when you are being lulled into sleep with the mumbled office sounds and the warm air.

Dominica is stuck waiting around the apartment this morning waiting for Cablevision to come in and hook up the Internet access. They are scheduled to arrive between 8:00 and 11:00. Then the plan is that Min is going to do a little more shopping for me and then she is going to pack herself up and drive up to Warren and we are going to get lunch together at the Thai House right in town.

Dominica called at 10:30 and let me know that Cablevision had been there and had hooked up the Internet access and that it was working. She said that the install guy was really nice and friendly and that Oreo kept trying to play with him. The tech’s girlfriend’s family apparently has three Boston Terriers. How awesome would that be? So another interaction with Cablevision and we are still really happy with them. Cool. Wouldn’t it be awesome to just have a really nice Internet provider for a change? I think that I am due for a change in that direction. I am excited to get home this evening and see how fast the connection is. I also want to see how well the VoIP phone system that I finally got working over the weekend sounds over it.

I got my taxes done today. Nothing like the eleventh hour, huh? Unfortunately we had thought that we were going to be getting a significant amount back this year but ended up, after the accounting fees, getting only $9 back. 🙁

Before leaving the area of the apartment Dominica managed to do some additional shopping for me. There are some basics that I still need around the apartment and it is really difficult for me to do my own shopping. The biggest thing is that I need bottled water. Now I am pretty resilient to the quality of tap water but the tap water in North Brunswick is so awful that it makes me gag.

Dominica left North Brunswick at 11:45 to come up to Warren to get lunch at the Thai House. She made good time coming up (thanks to my awesome directions) taking only about half an hour to get up here from North Brunswick. I guess that the drive isn’t too bad in the middle of the day. Maybe today I will try going home a different way to see if I can cut any additional time off of my drive. Even if I can’t save time I might still save mileage and that is a big deal with gas prices pushing $3.00 a gallon. I actually saw gas all over the place at $2.999 a gallon on the way down here on Sunday and that is as close to $3.00 as it gets.

We got lunch at the Thai House and hung out there for a little while. We got tofu in a spicy curry peanut sauce and some sticky rice for dessert. Very yummy. If I can just cut out the pizza I might manage to eat really healthily down here. But pizza is awfully tempting. After we ate I went out to the car and spent ten or fifteen minutes with Oreo. It was pretty warm out today and he was hiding on the floor of the car to stay cool.

Min was on the road towards Geneseo a little before 2:00. This is her first trip back home on her own. She is going to stop in Endicott to drop off something for the Surfing IT Wizard before she goes all of the way back to Geneseo.

Today was another one of those days with an afternoon that I can barely manage to make it through. I was so tired after lunch that I just needed to take a nap but you don’t get to do that in your cubicle when you snore as loud as I do. I hate drowsy afternoons. They drag on forever and you just can’t get anything done no matter how hard you try.

Dominica got to Endicott at 5:00 but had problems finding the Surfing IT Wizard’s house. It took her fifteen or twenty minutes to finally find it. I headed for home at 5:30. I tried the back way through all of the small towns and I think that it did cut ten minutes at least but it is really hard to tell. I will have to try it for a while before I have a good feel for how efficient it is.

Dominica got home a little after 8:00 but she stopped in Endicott for a while to deal with The Wiz and she went to Walmart to get dinner. So she didn’t really make too bad of time for her first time driving from Warren to Geneseo.

I got back to the apartment and spent the evening all by myself. It is weird. This is actually the first that I have ever lived alone. I have never had an apartment to myself before. I have spent a lot of time alone in hotels before. Tons of time, in fact. But having an apartment to myself is kind of weird. I don’t know how Andy does it. I can all ready tell that this is a really lonely experience. I am really missing Dominica and Oreo. I think that it is a lot more dramatic because not only am I alone in the apartment but I am also physically very far removed from everyone back home. There is no one that I know living anywhere around here. It is a really feeling of isolation being in a lonely apartment with no regular telephone, no radio, no television and no way for anyone to show up at the door and surprise you. No one can just run over if you need anything. Weird. Lonely.

I spent the evening trying to get the telephone system working to no avail. I can connect the VPN and have the phones work just fine. But once I try to do it without the VPN it stops working. I can’t figure out why it would do that when it seemed to be working fine when I had tested it before. The only factor that is really different is that I am working from the Cablevision network now instead of from Road Runner. Hard to believe that that would make the difference but you never can tell. I really need to get this working. I can’t believe what a pain this has been. One road block after another. Always something.

I kept working until 11:00 and decided that I really needed to call it a night. I could work on this forever and not get anywhere. I am really convinced that there is something wrong with the Internet provider here but I don’t want to jump to conclusions. It will be a really huge pain if that is really the case. It is hard to believe that that is the problem. It seems like it must just be something that I am overlooking because there are so many people using this Internet provider in this area that there is no way that they could be blocking these commnunications. Especially because it would affect so many other services like Vonage. I will look into it further tomorrow.