Sheep Guarding Llama

I am extremely happy to be able to announce that the SGL Podcast is rolling once again. It has been some time since I was able to work on the show and it feels good to be able to post another episode. I will try to keep the show rolling now that I am, hopefully, moving into my apartment and can actually get set up and stable.

Nothing too exciting to report today. I went to work as usual. I had lunch with some of the guys over at a diner very near the office. It wasn’t as good as the Omega Grill back home in Geneseo. But you can’t have everything.

Tonight is a relaxing night at the hotel. I ordered my final Domino’s pizza. After today, in theory, I will be able to actually keep food in the apartment and maybe I will actually eat a little more healthy. Probably not. But at least it won’t always be pizza.

I forgot to bring my Protonix along with me and my heartburn is beginning to kick in. I walked over to the drug store, Drug Fair, across the street from the hotel and picked up some Prilosec OTC to see if that would work at all. So far it seems to be working pretty well. I wonder how long it will last.

I am really excited that this is supposed to be my final night in the hotel. It probably won’t be but it is nice to dream. I am heading back to Geneseo tomorrow afternoon.

I may not have gotten to bed until way too late last night but I was out of bed all by myself at 5:30 this morning. I didn’t get the best night of sleep because the BlackBerry that I am not used to yet kept going off and it would wake me up. I need to figure out the settings on that thing. This is my first night with it actually working.

I managed to leave for work just after 7:15 and discovered that if you go early enough in the morning there is almost no traffic at all and the drive only takes about 15 – 20 minutes! That isn’t bad at all. I couldn’t believe how quickly I showed up at work. It was just barely after 7:30. I really need to get up and get out the door by 7:00 everyday, apparently. Doing that will make my day a lot more pleasant. In the long term the plan is for me to work starting at 6:30 or possibly earlier every day. If that does end up being my schedule then the drive is going to be great. From North Brunswick to here is only 18 miles.

The weather is absolutely phenominal today. It is that warm and sunny summer style day that is just cool enough that you want to wear full length pants and stand in the sunlight but the shadows are still warm.

Today was a very busy day at the office. I didn’t get a chance to eat lunch until 3:30. Dominica had to run up to Rochester today to get certified checks for me to take to the lease signing on Thursday. Hopefully FedEx will get them to the hotel tomorrow. What a pain it is to have to deal with any large amount of money when the company does not accept credit cards! So much running around and fees and cash transfers to deal with. Ugh. It is a good thing that I have Min able to do that stuff. Heaven only knows how I would be able to deal with it all by myself.

Cool Tech News Today: KDE 1.5 released with a major update to KOffice. KOffice now supports the Open Document Format (ODF) natively making it the second major office suite to use ODF as its default format. To quote the KDE 1.5 release announcement: “KOffice was the first to support, and now with 1.5 the second office suite to announce full support for OpenDocument (ODF) as the default file format. With two independent implementations of ODF now available it is now a true industry standard. KOffice 1.5 is therefore the version that lets enterprises and organisations all over the world choose the office suite that fits their needs best.” Personally I have always been a fan of KOffice and I am really excited to see what they have done with their most recent release.

I actually had a lot of work to do today and ended up putting in a little over time by the end of the day. I was assuming that I wouldn’t even be approaching any overtime until I had been here for a while but there is a little bit starting to creep in here and there. I got to do some harder and more advanced stuff at work today and that was a lot more enjoyable. I actually had a good time learning new stuff today.

I got an email from a recruiter trying to get me to apply for… my own job. Yes, someone actually sent me my own identical job desciption for this little, middle-of-nowhere town specifically in the industry that I am working in. Hmmm… where could that be for? I had to respond and let him know that he was too late but did a good job picking me out of the stack of resumes that he had found online since I had successfully gotten that position. I wonder how often that happens to people in IT. Normally it is really hard to tell when someone is trying to submit you for a job that you have all ready been to an interview for or maybe all ready have. I know that the multiple submittle thing is and has always been a major issue because just about every contractor AND every contractee works with all of the big recruiting firms so everyone submits the entire list of qualified people to all of the same jobs. It is a really sad system.

I was pretty tired when I got into the hotel this evening and it was pretty late. I forget what it is like to get back from the office and only have three to four hours before it is time to go to bed. 🙁 But I have a long weekend coming up and I am going to enjoy that. Five entire days (sort of) with my wife and my dog!

No television this evening. I spent the whole night on the computer working. I wasn’t too productive but I did manage to build my first production wiki. That is at least interesting.

I slept in until 6:30 this morning – the latest that I have slept in yet down here in New Jersey. I am really adapting to this “early to bed, early to rise” thing. Ol’ Ben would be proud of me. I was in to work at 8:30 which is just about average for where I work. The place is pretty emtpy until 8:30 and people are still filing in until around 10:00 or so.

Bagels and coffee for breakfast from the cafeterria. Yummy! Their coffee is really good.

I spoke with the apartment complex in North Brunswick today and we are all set for me to move in this Thursday! We hadn’t been expecting to be able to get in until next week. The Lord is watching over us. The logistics of not being able to get the keys until next week were going to be really terrible. We hadn’t figured out how we were going to deal with that. Now the plan is that I am going to go down there on Thursday afternoon, sign the lease and pick up the keys. I will check the place out and maybe even drop some stuff off so that I don’t have to cart it back and forth to New York anymore. Then I will be heading for home since I have Friday, but not Monday, off from work. I am really looking forward to the long weekend. I need the time to just relax a little. And I am really looking forward to getting to see Dominica and Oreo for five days!

For lunch today, Prashant and I went to a sushi place just down the street from the office. The food was really good and really cheap. It is looking like it is going to be really easy to eat well and healthy around here.

My BlackBerry finally got set up today so I am much more able to work remotely. Now I have to remember to always keep it with me. That will take some getting used to.

I managed to get my Cablevision Optimum Internet access ordered today as well. They were actually going to be able to install it tomorrow but I had them wait until Tuesday because Dominica will be there. They are coming between 8:00 and 11:00 in the morning. So I only have to go for one day without Internet access – in theory. It looks as though Internet access down here might really awesome. Speeds that are completely unheard of in the Rochester or Ithaca areas at the same prices. And down the road I might even be able to get those speeds doubled. Supposedly my new line will be 15Mb/s down and maybe as fast as 2Mb/s up. That is awesome! I am excited to try it out.

I ordered my computer supplies for the apartment today. Now that we know that I am going to be moved in and will have Internet access I figured that it was pretty important to have something to hook to that access. I ordered the same computer that Dominica has, the HP dx5150 with the AMD Athlon 64 3200+, but she has the mini-tower so that she can put a high end graphics card in hers and I want to save space so went for the Small Form Factor. I think that the SFF units are so much more attractive. I also ordered a Samsung 204B black 20.1″ LCD with 800:1 contrast and 1600×1200 resolution. I know that you are all jealous now. I figured that I would have a lot of desktop stuff in one spot so I got a bigger than usual APC Back-UPS ES 500 to power it all. Normally I just use the smaller ES 350 models. I needed a new firewall for North Brunswick as well. Netgear has a new model out that is really interesting. It is an upgrade, really, to the FWG114P that I have used so much over the last few years. That is taking longer to ship so I won’t have that for an additional week. But once it is in I will have wireless access again for my laptop as well. I also got a set of headphones for the office. I often have to listen to things at the office from the computer but I have a cubicle and the computer is under my desk so it has to be pretty loud before I can understand anything that is being said and by that point it is so loud as to be a pretty significant problem in the office area. I tried just using my earbuds but that really doesn’t work. They pull out of my ears every time that I move.

I went home at 5:30 – back to the hotel. I have been in the hotel so much it is really starting to feel like home. Everyone knows me when I walk in the door. I ordered some pizza for my dinner. I didn’t get to eat a lot yesterday and I was pretty hungry after just some light meals today. I watched most of an episode of Will & Grace while I ate my pizza. They always say that it will take forty minutes but it generally comes in twenty. The episode is one of those “I have only ever seen this show a handful of times but each time I see this episode” episodes.

Tonight we had the major breakthrough of having made the first outside to inside phone call of the new phone system. Using the softphone on my laptop and my headphones I was able to place a call to the telephone in the living in Geneseo over a secured VPN channel. The call sounded great and the latency was almost nothing. It sounded way better than a regular telephone call, a mobile call or Vonage’s VoIP system. And we haven’t even started tweaking anything yet. Next we will attempt to place a call without having to have the VPN connected. That should, in theory, make the sound quality even better yet and make it a lot more useful. I am really happy that it actually worked. This is a major relief.

I tried to install the VPN software that I have from work onto my laptop so that I can try to work from home (home meaning the hotel, of course.) But as soon as I installed it I ended up having no Internet access at all (hence the lateness of this daily update.) It took me a while to figure out what was wrong and I went up to the front lobby to see if it was a problem with the hotel’s wireless. I eventually figured out that it was the VPN software so I had to remove that and Tah Dah… it started working again. What a pain.

I ended up spending an hour or two talking to the guy working at the desk of the hotel. He really reminded me of me working at the hotel all of those years ago. He is about the same age that I was when I started. He has only been at the hotel for about six weeks. So I have been living in the hotel for half of the time that he has been there. Unlike poor me he gets to have a laptop with him at work. Working in a hotel these days is a completely different experience than it was when Andy and I worked in the hotels. We didn’t even have the slightest hint of Internet access until right at the end of our time at the Wellesley and then it was just dial-up or maybe a 56K leased line that was only connected to the useless Windows 95 or 98 “management” machine. I wouldn’t mind working a hotel front desk if I could spend my time surfing the web, emailing people, writing the SGL updates, instant messaging, etc.

I went back to my hotel room and had to wrap up some work that I hadn’t been able to complete without my Internet access. I ended up not getting a chance to get to bed until almost midnight. I had meant to go to bed by 10:30 at the latest and more likely a bit before that.

Today is the only day that Dominica and I get together. And it isn’t even a full day. This schedule really sucks. We barely get to see each other at all.

Eric called first thing this morning to let us know that he plans for the day had fallen through and that he would be available to help out with the T-Mobile project that we are working on today. Dominica and I had decided that doing more locations today made more sense than me doing one yesterday and then doing one today. Dominica would appreciate having me there for more stores and I would appreciate not having to do one all by myself since that is a very lonely job and lonely is something I have plenty of these days.

Min and I were up and moving pretty early. Dominica went to Walmart and got some clipboards and supplies that we needed for the day. She also stopped at Burger King and picked us all up some breakfast. Eric came over to the house around 10:30.

It was almost 11:30 when we got up to Marketplace to get started on our first location. The work ended up going about as planned. It was definitely handy having three of us there. We got done plenty early and were able to move right on to the second store up at Greece-Ridge Mall. We were really happy to be able to get those two stores taken care of today. Sundays are very slow days and we were able to move right along. The second store went much faster as we now knew what we were doing. The work is straightforward and pretty simple.

We ended up running early enough that we were able to stop at Abbot’s in the mall and get some frozen custard before heading out to go to the Eastview Mall location. Three locations in our first day! This is going well. We arrived at Eastview and discovered that that store is being moved in a week. So we called and found out that we take that store off of our list. Maybe we will be coming back to it once the new store is in place.

Dominica has been really upset that I don’t have enough pairs of pants (I think that I have plenty.) And so she took the opportunity to go to the S&K in the mall and do some trouser shopping for me. We ended up buying three new pairs of trousers. Two of those have to be hemmed and cuffed and Dominica is going to have to stop back at the mall sometime later in the week to pick them up for me.

We got back to Geneseo and Amanda and Julia came over and met Dominica, Eric and I at the Omega Grill. I have to get at least ONE meal a week at the Omega or I will waste away (or something like that.) We couldn’t hang out long because Dominica and I have a lot to do yet tonight. We decided that I really needed to not wait until morning to drive down to New Jersey so I am going to leave tonight. I really wanted to spend another night at home but I really do not want to have to get up at 3:00 in the morning just to rush to get to work by 9:00.

So Dominica and I came back to the house and got me packed up and ready to go. It ended up being after 8:30 before I actually got to leave. That is really late and I am going to be really tired tomorrow but I am feeling much better about the project that we have been working on. This past week I have been worried that there was going to be so much work to do and that we would not have a chance to get it done. It really helped that Eric was able to work with us today. And he is doing one more location this week which helps a lot. Andy called while we were at dinner and decided that he was going to help Dominica tomorrow when she does the Buffalo locations. That means that she has a decent shot at completely all of the Buffalo locations tomorrow. She will be very happy about that.

The drive was long and boring and my tummy was hurting for about half of the drive. I remembered to have my Samsung MP3 player full of podcasts. I wasn’t in a tech seminar mood so I spent most of the drive listening to back episodes of “The Daily Breakfast with Father Roderick”. That is a really great podcast. You should all check it out.

It was close to 3:00 in the morning by the time I rolled into South Bound Brook, New Jersey. I was totally exhausted and really looking forward to getting some sleep. I have managed to get the same hotel room for all three weeks that I have been here. I am pretty sure that there has been no one in the room over the weekends. It is kind of neat having a private room. At this point I would be really confused if I was to be put into a different room. I would keep forgetting and go back to the room that I have been in.