Sheep Guarding Llama

I would say that by today things are starting to settle into a routine but with this being the first morning living in my own apartment I guess I can’t really say that. I got up at 5:30 this morning and got ready for work. Nothing much to report. Its a new apartment but nothing interesting happened. Dominica and Oreo stayed in bed as uncomfortable as it is. I took my time getting ready and was out the door around 7:30 to try my first commute from North Brunswick.

It took about 45 minutes to get to work leaving as late as I did. I figure that it should be no more than half an hour once I start leaving earlier and once I figure out the best route to travel. My plan is to do some route research today at the office and see if I can’t get home faster than I got here.

I noticed that when I check SGL from the office I am only seeing the dailies from several days ago even though several more recent ones have been posted. If I go to the Dailies specific listing I find that those days then show up. I am not sure why this is happening. It might be a local cache here and nothing more or it might be a date issue somewhere in the chain that is causing confusion. If anyone else is having this problem, let me know so that I can look into it. But I think that it is probably just me.

It is a beautiful morning. Perfect weather for Dominica as she spends her first day alone in New Jersey shopping. Her job today is to find something to sleep on – most likely a futon mattress from Walmart. I am really happy. On my way out of the apartment this morning I paid close attention to what businesses are directly across the street from me and they include PathMark, A&P, Walmart, TGI Friday’s, Chili’s, Dunkin Donuts and Barnes and Nobles.

I am extra happy this morning because I got to bring my new headphones into the office today. I got some nice Logitech headphones over the weekend so that I could have some to keep at work. I can listen to podcasts or music or training material while I am at work and it really helps to pass the time. It also helps me to filter out the sound of so many people talking around me all day long. It gets to be especially bad when there are a number of people on the same conference call all using their speakerphones so that when one person says something you can hear their original voice as well as the echo of them over the speakers all over the office. It is very hard to concentrate when this is constantly going on.

Now that I have the nice headphones at the office (which did get comments, by the way) I managed to listen to this recent episode of TechNation which is about management but I think a lot of my readers who are teachers will enjoy listening to it because they talk about the problems with performance based pay for teachers and how it is destroying the Chicago school system along with others. (Was that a run-on sentance? I think that it was.) Basically they discuss how any job where you are paid based on performance other than your own causes a major disaster. With teachers, pay is not based upon how much the teacher improve the students but by the raw performance of how their particular students do on some form of standardized test. But the teachers are not allowed to vary their curriculum, materials or to affect the students upbringings, backgrounds, etc. So instead they found that teachers were changing what students were allowed into and out of their classrooms by putting large numbers of kids into special education classes to get them out of the “performance” based pay environment and not allowing advanced students to move on so that they would keep up the mean average. Something that they didn’t mention but that is common in educational environments for IT certifications is that teachers teach to the test and not to the subject matter. This can cause students to score very high and have no knowledge of the material whatsoever. A complaint of any educational system that stressing memorizing over learning. Unfortunately it is very difficult to test knowledge as opposed to memorization. In Chicago teachers and school administration were known to the cheating by actually adjusting student’s grades! I thought that the interview was interesting. Teacher’s pay scales being based on performance definitely sounds awesome on the surface but public school teachers are paid to work with what they are given, not to adjust the situation to produce the best paper based results possible. Well, at least thats what they are paid for in New York. Apparently Illinois doesn’t see things the same way.

Lots of stuff to deal with today. Email and IM outages. Taxes. (You did remember to take care of your taxes, right?) Dominica managed to find the makings of a bed at Walmart and got that to the house around 10:30. That will be so much better tonigh to actually get to sleep on something comfortable. I don’t think that I am bruised this morning but I am definitely soar in general from having slept on the floor all night. Soar and not very well rested. We didn’t have much in the way of blankets to cover up with so it was a pretty cold night as well. I am feeling very drowsy today.

Dominica thought about coming out to Warren so that we could get lunch but then decided that we should wait until tomorrow. She had problems getting online today from the apartment and did not have a way to produce a map or directions for getting up to Warren so thought that that was probably a bad idea today although she really wanted some Thai cuisine. So I printed directions from the office so that we can have lunch tomorrow. Having lunch tomorrow makes more sense anyway since Warren is more or less on her way back home and definitely much less out of her way.

I ended up getting a ton of cell phone calls this morning. About one every fifteen minutes! It was totally out of control. Just so everyone knows, it is really important to keep the calls to be at work to a minimum. I can take calls when I need to but anything extra is not a good idea. When I talk on the phone it isn’t just audible to other people around me but ends up interupting their work. That is why I bought the headphones – so that I can listen to my training material and not interupt other people around me. Even that light sound coming from my computer is a big issue.

The day actually passed pretty quickly today. Not coming in super early in the morning definitely helps. Those first few hours go by pretty quickly but they really are just extras tacked on to the beginning of the day. Most all of my work comes in the afternoon right now so being here early doesn’t really help me to be able to leave early.

There wasn’t a lot of real work today so I continued working on my training materials for the Solaris Administrator’s certification from SUN. I am onto the second portion of the training now. So I am roughly halfway through it. I don’t get a lot of time to put into it on any particular day so it takes a while to work through and a lot of it is really boring and not very well put together so that doesn’t encourage me to plough through it with any intensity.

By late afternoon time started to drag significantly. I am always amazed by how quickly the morning can seem to just fly by even when there is no one to talk to at all. And then by afternoon everything just grinds to a halt and the day seems to last forever. Today isn’t that bad but the afternoon seems to be many times longer than the morning was. I think a lot of it has to do with me eating lunch. I get lunch (today it was wood fired cheese pizza from the in house cafeteria) and then the rest of the day I am fighting to stay conscious. Once I get into that state time slows to a crawl and nothing gets accomplished. It makes me so unproductive. I start waking up again very near the end of the day. It seems to me that the work day, nine to five or whatever, is a really unproductive system since everyone gets so tired at some point during the day and needs to break things up. The siesta idea isn’t too bad. If you know you are useless in the middle of the afternoon why not at least do the one really productive thing that you can do – sleep. And then maybe you will be productive again later.

Dominica managed to go out this afternoon and do some additional shopping for the apartment. She got the next most important item that we need after the bed: the curtains. Until now the sliding glass doors in the front of the apartment have made the entire apartment completely visible to the outside with only a few inches here and there not completely visible to any passerby since we are located at ground level. It has been pretty much like living directly in the parking lot. I am not a highly private person (hence the world’s largest identity blog) but this was a bit much. We were worried about sitting anything within site of the front of the house. It was quite a pain. Just walking around the house felt a little weird. You are totally on display in there.

I was able to leave the office at 5:30. Unfortunately I hit really bad traffic on the way home. Apparently there was an accident in South Bound Brook because the highway was completely blocked somewhere to the south and the traffic was backed up into Bound Brook when I got there and was backing up quickly. I was close enough to the front to be able to see that there was no movement whatsoever going over the bridge so I turned around and did some exploring to find US287. It ended up only taking me about an hour to get home which wasn’t too bad considering that I had to stop for that accident and that had to have cost me at least ten minutes.

I was at the apartment for about fifteen minutes before we decided to get some dinner. Neither of us really wanted to face any traffic hassles so we decided that tonight would be a good night to try out the Omega Diner and Cafe that is right across Route 1 from the apartment. It is in a really handy location. Before we left the apartment I discovered another centipede in the “hallway” area of the apartment. Just great. Not what I need to have in the apartment, of all things. At least this one was not nearly as large as the last one. But still. Ewww.

We both decided on the most incredibly delicious crab stuffed salmon for dinner. Dinner came with baked potato, Mexican corn, house salad and Yankee bean soup. What a meal. We were really impressed and we will definitely be returning to the Omega frequently. How apropos. The Omega Diner is very reminiscent of the Doube T diners in Annapolis but more upscale. It is really more of a mid-end family restaurant than a diner. The decor is very nice and pleasant. High ceilings, comfy boothes and the whole place is really bright and clean but not in the stark white or stainless of traditional diners. Dinner was amazing. Min couldn’t even begin to finish hers and so she brought half of her salmon and her entire baked potato home.

After dinner we decided that Dominica needed to see how to get back out of North Brunswick so we drove north on Route 1 so that she could see how to get onto Route 18 north and how that would get her back to NJ527/Easton Avenue. That took us about twenty minutes or so. It is a really tough route if you are not familiar with it and in heavy traffic it is almost impossible to navigate.

After dinner and our little trip we decided on a relaxing evening at the apartment watching a movie. I tried to get online but the wireless really wasn’t working at all so I gave up on the idea. I hooked the LCD monitor up to the laptop so that we could watch a larger and brighter screen. The LCD is great because it angles down slightly which is something that none of my other LCDs will do. That makes it far superior for watching movies from bed because you can actually look straight onto the screen. What a great idea. Go Samsung.

We decided to watch Gidget Goes to Rome – what a completely awful movie. You really feel embarrassed for the poor kids who were so happy to finally get a chance to be in a movie and then they got stuck making that movie. There was nothing redeeming about the movie at all. No plot, no good characters and, let’s face it, Rome is a terrible movie location because the entire city is colourless and drab – so there isn’t even scenery to look at. The characters were flat and annoying. This movie makes that cardinal mistake that I always say: Make sure you have a protagonist!! If there isn’t a single character that you like or care about then you won’t care about the movie. And that is exactly what happened. The Gidget character was jerky and annoying. The Moondoggie character was rotten but only so bad since he was being rotten to Gidget whom you don’t care about. And the other characters are just flat one liner losers that only barely suffice to qualify as plot devices. Dominica watched Gidget Goes to Hawaii last night and said that it wasn’t very good either. All three Gidget movies use different actresses as Gidget and apparently they get progressively worse and worse until they give up on the annoying blonde/redhead thing and get butt-kicking actress Sally Field to play Gidget in the television series many years later.

By the time that the movie was coming to a close I was getting into bed and calling it a night. I was pretty tired and the movie was not helping. It was 11:30 when I got into bed. Hopefully I will be able to post this update tomorrow when the Internet access get turned on but we will have to see. What are the chances that it will actually work? But then again, this isn’t Time Warner and Road Runner that we are talking about (or Frontier – just ask the Ralstons about how reliable they are) so maybe everything will be fine.

Today is moving day. And Easter as well. Happy Easter Moving Day! Min and I got to sleep in a bit this morning which we really appreciated. Oreo appreciated it as well.

We had plenty of packing left to do this morning. Packing and preparing. There is so much that needs to be done before we go. I hate moving. Even little, simple moves like this are a big pain. There is so much to think about because you have absolutely nothing when you first arrive. Little things like cups, plates, paper products, utensils, lamps, pillows, etc. become really big deals. Fortunately Dominica is really good at remembering all of the different things that we will need so I leave most of that stuff up to her.

I managed to quickly post a few pictures of the Mazda 6 today. After its wheel swap, new tires, oil change and bath yesterday I thought that it really needed to have its picture taken. So I ran out and took a few quick pictures while the car still looked pretty good.

Originally we had hoped to be able to leave early this morning leaving us plenty of time to do some shopping for the things that we need once we arrived. But then we realized that there are no Super Walmarts in New Jersey and everything that we need is going to be closed and there will be nothing at all to do once we unload the cars. So we decided to pack at a more relaxed pace and not try to leave as early as we had planned. So we got mostly packed and then went over to the Omega Grill to get some lunch.

We ended up leaving around 2:00 or so. The weather was great for the drive. The whole trip went really well. My car drives really great after all of the work that I did yesterday on it. I am really glad that I had enough time to get that taken care of yesterday. I am going to be in New Jersey for the next two weeks straight at least and I didn’t want to be stuck with a car that still had its winter tires on it and needed to have an oil change.

We made the mistake of trying the Google suggested route which involved taking US80 into New Jersey and coming down NJ206 down to US287 instead of coming in on US78 direct to US287. That added a bit of time to the trip. That was really dumb. I knew better than to go that way.

It was around 8:00 by the time we finally pulled into the apartment complex. Oreo and I arrived just a little bit ahead of Dominica but she was very close behind us. When she started getting close to the apartment she recognized where she was.

It didn’t take us very long to get the cars unpacked and everything into the apartment. We really didn’t bring very much with us. Each of us had a suitcase. Two computers (my Windows XP desktop and the “new” SUN SparcStation that I just got from eBay), my laptop bag, one monitor, one tiny desk, one small printer stand, a printer, two plastic bins, one hamper full of stuff, one traditional folding chairs and two of those modern folding lawn chairs and two bean bag Ottoman things. And that is about the entire contents of the apartment. Not very exciting.

The really exciting news is that there are some available wireless networks in the area and I am able to check my mail tonight and email people to let everyone know that we arrived safely. The really bad news is that my cell phone functions like total crap in the apartment and is barely usable. People can call me, at least, but holding down a conversation is really tough. That is going to pose a serious problem down the road. Pretty quickly, in fact.

We are really happy with the overall condition of the apartment. Everything has been recently painted and the bathroom and kitchen are brand new. Everything was redone including the floor tires, new shower, etc. Brand new appliances as well. And the kitchen is quite large. Not that I need it. In fact the apartment is only barely smaller than the house in Geneseo! The bathroom and kitchen are definitely a bit larger.

We were only in the apartment for a few minutes before I discovered a giant centipede hanging out on a wall in the middle of the apartment. Both Dominica and I have serious problems with centipedes – much moreso than our fear of spiders. For those who don’t know: The fear of centipedes is known as Chilopodophobia. It is an extremely rare term that may not have been picked up by the Oxford English Dictionary yet but it will be there soon.

It didn’t take very long at all to get everything set up. I set the laptop up on the little desk in the bedroom and got online as best as we could. The connection isn’t very good but it only needs to get us through until Tuesday morning when Cablevision comes in with the real Internet access. We were tired and didn’t want to go out, partially because of Oreo who was somewhat upset by being in a new location and just wanted to lay down on his pillow, and so we just ordered out some Domino’s pizza for dinner. It was not the same Domino’s that I had been using from the hotel.

Dominica set up the “bed” for us to sleep on tonight. There is no carpetting in the apartment just hard wood floors throughout. That isn’t very good for people who have to sleep on the floor. Not very good at all. We had almost nothing that we could bring with us to make our makeshift bed out of so we are stuck sleeping on just four thin blankets on the hard wood floor tonight. It was extremely hard and uncomfortable, but it is all that we have for tonight. Ugh. Four thin blankets to sleep on and just one small blanket to keep warm with. At least we had our pillows.

There was just about nothing for us to do in the apartment but we did think to bring along a couple of DVDs so there would at least be something to do. Unfortunately my new desktop does not have a DVD player in it so we were stuck with only the laptop to watch them on. Not the best platform for watching movies.

We popped in the original Gidget with Sandra Dee from 1959. Min and I both love those old “feel good’ movies of the 50s and 60s. There was a style of movie made back then that just doesn’t exist today. We didn’t manage to watch the entire movie before I needed to get to bed. I have to be up at 5:30 so staying up late is not a good idea.

Happy Good Friday.

I got up with Min this morning and we had breakfast with dad before Dominica had to go to work. There was some confusion about the timing of breakfast so dad and I ended up going to the Omega Grill at 8:40 and Dominica joined us about half an hour later. We ate breakfast and then Dominica headed up to the city for work. No holidays in the photo business.

Dad and I went up to the city to look at a 1988 Chevy Cavalier Z24 convertible that dad had seen at a dealer there. Dominica has really been on a convertible kick and has been looking at quite a few of them. We wanted to check this one out so dad went up with me to look at it and to run some errands. We looked at the car and thought that it looked interesting so we called Dominica at work and let her know that she should come down on her lunch break and take it for a test drive.

Dad and I swung by the hospital and picked up Eric and the three of us went over to Jay’s Diner to get some lunch. Eric had an older laser printer for me to take to New Jersey to use as my printer down there. That works out really well because I didn’t have any printer earmarked to go down there with me and now I will have a decent, high volume laser printer that won’t cost me a fortune to use. Not that I have any printing plans while I am there but things always come up.

After lunch Dad, Eric and I all went down to the dealer and met Dominica. We took the car for a drive and looked it over carefully. The price was pretty good but we decided that with the amount of rust that it had in bad locations and with the condition of the engine that it just wasn’t going to be a safe purchase so we decided against it.

Min returned to work as did Eric. Dad and I ran around running errands here and there. It was pretty late in the afternoon, around 4:00, when he got down to Geneseo to drop me off. At least Oreo got to have a fun day riding around in the car.

Asterisk@Home 2.8 was released today. I have been waiting for this most recent version to be announced as I am in the process of working on my Asterisk server and wanted some of the features, such as FreePBX, that are available in this latest version. Asterisk@Home is an amazing VoIP product that anyone looking to build their own telephone system should seriously consider. It is the perfect product for a lot of smaller or even decently sized businesses. Very few smaller businesses that I work with have a phone system that even begins to touch the power of Asterisk@Home. It is such a great product that I think that a lot of people should run it at home too. That probably explains its name. But since it is free and so easy to work with (relatively speaking, of course) there are a lot of techie people out there that could use this at home and have an awesome multi-extension phone system with really great and useful features.

Finally the commuting video that I made on April 4th has made it onto OurMedia and you can now check it out. It ended up getting posted twice, after all of that effort, and so I had to delete one. It is unforunate when that happens because the one that I deleted had been watched thirteen times so far. That means that about thirty five people had watched the video before I was even aware that it had been posted or had posted a link to it. Not too bad.

I spent most of the evening working on setting up my new desktop so that it will be ready for the apartment. I have been working from a laptop and Dominica’s desktop for the last several months or maybe over a year now and I will most definitely need my own desktop down in New Jersey. I got the same model that Dominica has but mine is the small form factor which is much more attractive. I am really excited about my new 20.1″ LCD monitor. The 1600×1200 resolution is awesome.

Besides setting up the desktop I also worked hard on the Asterisk server – the same one that has been such a pain for such a long time. I made some real progress tonight but basically I have discovered that the latest version of AAH, Asterisk@Home, which is 2.8 doesn’t set up extensions correctly and just nothing works with it. I tried working with it for quite a while and finally decided that I just needed to fall back to the last version, 2.7. The older version works like a charm. I had been hoping to have gotten some of the features from the latest edition but I guess that I will just have to wait for those until a future version is releases.

Dominica got home and we watched an episode of Remington Steele before going to bed. We are over halfway through the second season now.

I had to get up this morning and pack up the hotel. Hopefully for the very last time. I don’t mind being in hotels that much but constantly having to pack and unpack everything really wears on you. I like knowing that my computer is in place and working and that all of the necessities of life are available and not having to worry about having forgotten them over and over again every few days.

I got all checked out and into the car by 7:30 and headed into work. Today was busy but not hectic. Everyone, or just about everyone, has tomorrow off from work as it is a bank holiday so today is like Friday and everything is winding down. A lot of people took today off or are working from home so the whole place is pretty quiet.

I got breakfast at the office and ate at my desk as usual. I decided that I am skipping lunch today as I have a really busy day and don’t want to waste time at work eating lunch when it is bound to be a short day one way or another.

I ended up leaving the office at 2:45 so that I could drive down to North Brunswick to deal with the apartment. Traffic was terrible and it took about an hour to get to the apartment. I got all of the paperwork taken care of and got the keys and went to check the place out.

I think that the apartment is a bit nicer than I was actually expecting. That was a nice surprise. I have a full size sliding glass door in my living room that lets in plenty of light. It is a pretty pleasent room. The bathroom is brand new. New tiles, new shower, new toilet. That is the best surprise of all. I had specifically decided not to pay for the apartments with the newer ammenities and getting a newly redone kitchen wouldn’t have mattered too much to me but having a new bathroom is really nice. Moving into an apartment with an old, nasty bathroom can be pretty disgusting.

I didn’t linger long as every moment in the apartment meant worse holiday traffic to fight my way through and I had a much longer trip back than I have had over the past few weeks because the apartment is significantly farther away from home than the hotel is. So it was a little before 4:30 when I managed to get on the road heading for home.

I got stuck in really bad traffic all of the way from New Brunswick to Easton, Pennsylvania! That managed to make the trip take an hour or two longer than it should have had it been a normal day. I stopped a little north of Easton at the Wegmans and grabbed myself a quick bite of pizza before driving the rest of the way home. I haven’t had Wegmans pizza in a while although I have had more than my fair share of pizza in general.

I ate quickly and got back onto the road. The drive was uneventful. I listened to my MP3 player most of the way home. I have been listening to SQPN’s Daily Breakfast regularly now and am really enjoying the show.

It was about 10:30 when I finally pulled into Geneseo. I managed to get in about twenty minutes before Dominica got home with Oreo whom she had picked up at dad’s house on her way home from work. Oreo was very excited to see his daddy. We all hung out for just a little while before going to bed. All three of us were pretty tired and Dominica has to work two more days yet this week.