Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.