Sheep Guarding Llama

Boy was I tired when I got into New Jersey last night. I was totally exhausted. Even so I only slept about four hours. I don’t think that the wake up call at the hotel has actually woken me up once since I started working down here. I am consistently awake on my own at least half an hour before I have to be up. But that is better than waking up to the alarm. I hate waking up to alarms.

I was up at 5:30 this morning, got ready for work and wrapped up yesterday’s post to SGL. I left the hotel at 7:30 and went to work. I decided that I probably didn’t have to be there before 9:00 but I don’t want to get into the habit of coming in that late so I am trying to always be there by 8:00 even though almost everyone else straggles in quite a bit later than that.

I got to work and discovered that there was just about nobody there this morning. I was quite surprised when this continued for the rest of the day. In fact, I sat alone in my cubicle without any cubicle neighbours even showing up for the entire day. Once, during the entire day, one guy from my team came by to tell me that the mail room called and needed to know my cube number. And late in the day the UPS guy stopped by to drop off an envelope. But that was it. That was my day. My whole day! It was nice having the peace and quiet but it can be maddening when you have to just sit there in the silence all day long. There were other people in the office but they were few and far between.

I did lunch alone. There was almost nothing vegetarian in the cafeteria today so I got pizza. Yes, I finally don’t get pizza in the hotel and I end up getting it at work. And I had pizza last night too. I need to cut back on the pizza. The pizza at work is wood fired and really awesome. I also had some wild shitake mushroom bisque and a cookie. We have a pretty rockin’ cafeteria.

Right at the end of the day my boss’ boss came by to say hi and acknowledge that I really exist and to explain why the place was a ghosttown. Then I figured it was probably time to go home as there was no chance of me being productive at that point whatsoever.

On the way back to my hotel room I decided to stop at Taco Bell and pick up some dinner to eat in the hotel. It is a lonely life, let me tell you. I ate my seven layer burritos and watched the end of Home Improvement.

I spent the evening working on a couple of projects in the hotel. I have been putting in a ton of work trying to get an Asterisk server working and it is driving me nuts. I finally gave up on it this evening and had Dominica run an in depth memory test on it to see if that might be the problem.

I was hungry and so Min told me to go down and try the vending machine. I tried it but it was broken. So I walked across the street to the drug store. But they closed just before I got there. So I went on to Dunkin Donuts and got some donuts.

Overall I would say that today ranks as: uneventful.

It was freezing in our bedroom and I had to work hard to keep Oreo warm. He isn’t very good at getting under the covers and taking care of himself. We assume that this is some sort of problem that developed from having lived in Texas and never having been cold enough to have figured out the theory of blankets.

I was awake around 7:30 this morning and finally got out of bed at 8:00. That is only six hours of sleep since the clocks got moved forward last night. I hate daylight saving time. What a stupid idea. This is one thing that really makes me think Banjamin Franklin was a loon. No one has ever managed to explain to me how changing the clocks makes there be more or less sunlight. As if all humans are tied to some strange atomic internal clock that makes them get up at a particular time as dictated by congress and not by having enough sleep, the way the sunlight is, etc. I think that everyone should run on UTC (aka Greenwich Mean Time) and just refer to everything in that way. Life would be so much easier. Sure noon wouldn’t be the time that the sun was highest in the sky but it isn’t now either. Okay, maybe it is now and not during the winter, I can’t tell which is normal and which is adjusted. But you understand. Under our current system it means that half of the time and the other half is total random. So once we have lost our connection to what the time means why do we use such a pointless, arbitrary system at all? Wouldn’t it be great if you could tell someone anywhere that you want to talk to them at 3:00 and it meant 3:00 and you didn’t have to adjust for each other’s time zones and daylight savings issues? In today’s global economy it makes no sense at all to have twenty four separate time zones with multiple countries in each deciding independantly whether or not they will honor daylight savings. And to make things more complicated, now America is considering changing WHEN they use daylight savings. Imagine the issues that that will cause. Now there will be multiple daylight savings systems. Computers will use one. Canada will us probably the same one as the existing computers. Atomic clocks will use the new ones and people in Singapore that have to work with us won’t be able to figure it out at all. As it is they laugh at us for changing our clocks twice a year on a set schedule. Come on people… we should be downright embarassed that our country does this. It is totally ridiculous.

So SGL topped three quarters of a million words this week! Whoo-hoo.

I spent the morning while Dominica was sleeping working on that server that was giving me problems last night. It continued giving me problems this morning but I managed to show it who was boss around 11:00 or so. It is a server that I am working on to be my new VoIP PBX system. I want to have all of the telephone calls come through that single point and have voicemail, extensions, a receptionist, hold music, etc. It is not a small project and I have been working on it for a while. I hope that I now know enough to actually be able to do something useful with it. With me being back and forth between New York and New Jersey all of the time it seems like now is a really good time to have a really powerful and robust telephone system. As it is we can see how the Lord was really watching over us to make sure that dad, Dominica and I all had brand new cell phones with unlimited calling between us. We didn’t have that before and now it really makes a difference. And having Vonage as our main telephone service is a blessing as well as I can make it send the voicemail to multiple people so that I know that at least someone is getting a copy of the messages while I am away.

Dominica didn’t get up until after 11:00 today. It is a beautiful, sunny day today. It reminds me of, well, New Jersey. Tee hee. I have managed to have been in New Jersey for almost every nice day this Spring and I am starting to get the feeling that Jersey is just a lot nicer, weather wise, than New York is.

Dad came over after church to get lunch with us at the Omega. This is my last Omega meal for another week 🙁 I have gotten used to this routine.

After lunch Dominica and I came home and spent the afternoon at the house. There was a lot to be done before I left like packing and preparing the server that I had been working on so that it would be running all week so that I can work on it remotely from the hotel room. This ended up not turning out so well because the server has turned out to be unstable and I can’t get it to keep running. So all of that time was wasted. I am guessing that the server has bad memory in it but it will take time to be able to determine that for sure and time is one thing that I just don’t have any of at this point. So I guess that the big plans I had for being really productive this week are mostly shot. Oh well.

Just before I left Dominica and I went to Pizza Paul’s in downtown Geneseo and got some slices and a big chocolate brownie. Those are the best brownies! Then it was time to say goodbye and to start my drive.

My drive to New Jersey was uneventful. I was on the road out of Geneseo at 7:30 in the evening. I stopped in Dansville to get some gas and was on my way. My stomach was bothering me a little and I ended up having to make a stop in Campbell for a few minutes and I stopped again just south of Kirkwood to pick up a diet soda to get some caffeine into my system. After those three stops I still managed to arrive at the hotel in just four hours and fifty minutes. Not bad at all. The route through Easton really does appear to be the fastest way through even though Google Maps says otherwise. If I was to be going straight to work instead of to the hotel it might shave another fifteen minutes or so from my time as long as the traffic was the same. Sunday night traffic is really great along that entire route.

I was checked into the hotel a little after 12:30 and was in bed a little after 1:00. I got my hotel room set up before going to bed. I set up the laptop and hopped online and didn’t even have to sign into the Internet access again as it was still on from Friday. I am in the same room as well. It feels just like I never left. Ho hum.

Here is my commute video from Friday night. I started recording Friday morning but my batteries died and I had to wait until evening to record again. I actually managed to edit this one together a little bit with QuickTime Pro now that I am back at home so you get just a single video to watch. Much nicer.

These videos are taken with my little Kodak camera so please excuse the fact that they are all QuickTimes.

Scott Alan Miller’s Friday Night Drive Home in New Jersey

Dominica had to get up and go to work this morning. With as little as we get to see each other her working on Saturdays is a killer. It is half of the time that we get together.

I watched Rocketboom this morning (it was Friday’s show but I am a day behind.) They did a show on webcams and showed a cool website called Opentopia. So I decided to check it out for myself. It is pretty cool. Funny enough, I first tried out webcams in Canada and the very first web cam that I tried was a live feed of North Bay, Ontario! Andy and Miranda will get a kick out of that. Now we can see exactly what is going on in North Bay. Well, we can see how much snow has accumulated on those rooftops that we can see. The view isn’t really all that interesting. Actually, it is downright boring. But whatever. It is hilarious that the little town of North Bay was the very first web cam that I found. I did some more seaching and found a better live view of North Bay.

Here is a mistake on Google Maps. This is two small islands off of the coast of Newfoundland. These islands belong to France. On the satellite view you can plainly see them. But switch to the map view and you will notice that they disappear completely. Oops. The names show up but just floating out in the ocean.

Oreo spent the entire day right by my side. He was determined not to let me out of his sight for a minute. He has really missed me while I have been in New Jersey. This whole transition is going to be really tough on him. He has had such a hard time since we got him from the Bay Area SPCA between living in Houston with Francesca, then the transition to New York during which he was at several houses for only a few days each. Then he lived with dad for a while. Then with us with Andy. Now without Andy. Then I am gone so much that he spends half of his time with dad. Poor little boy. We are really hoping that we know soon how things are going in New Jersey so that we can make the decision for Dominica and Oreo to move down there too. Part of that will be dependant upon Dominica’s finding work down there but currently it looks like that isn’t likely to be very much of an issue. There is so much of an IT worker shortage down there that there is work for anyone and everyone. It is the perfect time for her to be looking to go down because moving up can happen extremely quickly these days. We are into another boom period. Not like the big dot com boom but definitely a large upsurge in the IT field.

An Amazon shipment came in today for Dominica. She bought herself The Gilmore Girls Season Four as a reward for having passed her first A+ exam. She is taking a week off before studying for the second exam. I don’t like multiple exam certifications because you have to put in so much work to get through a test and then it is meaningless if you don’t make it through the rest of them. I like single, longer, harder tests myself as compared to many, smaller, easier tests for the same material. I had a book that I had ordered two weeks ago arrived as well – my study guide for the Red Hat Certified Technician exam. I figure as long as I am at this job I really should focus on these exams. I will never have an opportunity like this to focus on just one thing for so long.

At 1:00 I drove up to the city to take Dominica out to lunch. I have been home for almost a day now and we have only seen each other for maybe thirty minutes. This weekend thing is tough. With the way that our schedules are we don’t get a single full day together. She works on Saturdays and I have to return to New Jersey on Sunday. We get almost twenty four hours starting from Saturday evening at 10:00 when she gets in from work until Sunday evening at 7:00 when I have to drive back to South Bound Brook. Twenty one hours including the night that she needs to use to catch up on her sleep. So we have to do what we can to see each other as much as possible. So I took her to lunch at the Olympia Diner on Lyle Ave. across the street from Wegmans. The food there is okay. It isn’t the Omega but that is way too far to drive.

I took Min back to work and she gave me a quick tour. Saturdays are really slow there and there are only about five people working – mostly in her department. I had seen the building before when I was interviewing there but had never seen the Customer Service department so I didn’t have a good idea of what her office looked like.

After lunch I stopped at Dunn Tire in Henrietta and ordered the new tires for my Mazda 6. If I am really lucky they will arrive by next weekend so that I can stop driving on my winter wheels and I can get my summer wheels back on. My summer wheels get better gas mileage, handle better and don’t wear as quickly. I don’t want to burn out my expensive snow tires on these warm roads. That set me back $750. That is no fun.

I came home and Oreo and I spent the afternoon down in the basement working. I popped in That Funny Feeling with Sandra Dee and Bobby Darrin. Yeah, that is good stuff. I love those old movies. They are just easy and enjoyable to watch. By the way, for those of you who have tried to use the SGL Movie Database recently and discovered that it wasn’t reachable through the site – thanks for not telling me. I only just discovered the problem this morning. It is working fine now. It isn’t exactly up to date as I have fallen pretty far behind on things like that over the last several weeks but I will be getting caught up on it soon. I promise.

Dad came over and we went to the Omega Grill for dinner. This is one of my only chances to eat there for the week. I have to take what I can get so that I don’t go into withdrawl. I expect that we will eat there tomorrow as well. Vickie, the owner, bought us our dinner as a congratulations on my new job.

I got home from dinner just fifteen minutes or so before Dominica got home from work. We spent the evening hanging out and watching two episodes of Remington Steele Season Two. While we watched the show I continued working on the server that I have been working on all day. It is giving me problems but nothing like the problems that I was having a few weeks ago. Building a new server from scratch is always a challenge. There are so many variables. I didn’t end up getting anywhere but decided that I needed to call it a night. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day and I can’t be exhausted. It was just after midnight when we managed to get to bed.

Don’t forget that tonight is when we set our clocks forward. Wouldn’t it just figure that THIS would be the short weekend?

I was awake at 4:00 this morning but didn’t get myself out of bed until around 5:30. Not a lot of fun stuff to do in a hotel room all by yourself. And to think that I probably have weeks of this left to go. Ugh.

I had to get moving and pack up the hotel room this morning. The plan is to deal with my apartment during the day today so that I don’t have to stay down here over the weekend dealing with it. But the rental office is only open during the middle of the day so there isn’t much chance for me to get there except for the weekends unless I take some time off from work. So I am hoping that I can run down there during my lunch break today.

Check out this video of a skateboarding dog.

I was out of the hotel at 8:00 and off to work. I am pretty consistently getting to work in about half an hour. Not bad for taking the long way around (I am worried that I will get lost.)

Today actually passed by relatively quickly. I had some business to do for the consulting firm this morning and that ate up a bit of my morning along with breaking it up significantly. Having anything to do makes me feel a lot better. After that I spent several hours working one on one with the guy who is “training me”. That got me into the afternoon.

At 12:45 I left the office to take my extended lunch and drove down to North Brunswick to attempt to deal with getting an apartment. I don’t know my way around the area at all yet so I took a really long, round about route to get there. It was 1:30 when I got to the apartment. Once I learn my way around the area I hear that it should take less than half an hour to get from work to the apartment. Hopefully that is true. The way I go is terrible.

I didn’t have any of the paperwork that they needed for the apartment. I have never rented an apartment that required a copy of my social security card before. Seems kind of fishy to me. Unfortunately I don’t even know where it is for sure. But I have a copy of it in my email that I can get faxed easily enough. I had to run out to a grocery store to get money orders as well but that didn’t take too long and I got the initial deposits made for the apartment. Hopefully that will be enough to get the ball rolling. If everything goes well I will be moving in on April 15th. I am really looking forward to getting out of the hotel. Nintey dollars a night is a bit rough.

On the way back to work I stopped off really quickly at Taco Bell and grabbed a quick bite to eat. I had some cold pizza for breakfast before leaving the hotel and had nothing yet for lunch so I was getting pretty hungry. It was just about 3:00 when I got back to the office. That sure broke up the day and made things go really quickly. I hate having to be out so much in my first week but I sure did appreciate the break and the opportunity to get important business taken care of.

I was able to leave the office at 5:30. I found out quickly how bad New Jersey traffic can get. Apparently Friday evening is the worst of it. It took forever to get west on US78. I was in stop and go traffic all of the way to Phillipsburg on the Pennsylvania border. That made the trip a lot longer. Once I crossed into Easton, Pennsylvania I managed to make good time all of the rest of the way home. The weather was pretty good for driving. I hit some moderate rain in the Elmira/Corning area but nothing too bad.

Dad brought Oreo over to Denny’s in Geneseo at 10:45 and Dominica came down straight from work to meet him there. I got there right about on schedule. Even with all of that traffic in New Jersey it still only took five and a quarter hours to go from the office parking lot to Geneseo. Not too shabby. We are pretty confident that taking US380 through Pennsylvania is the way to go as opposed to the Turnpike, US476. It is amazing how much time you lose going through three or four toll booths. They are a major travel disruption and cause the entire highway to be extra congested. Plus taking the smaller roads is less expensive. Saving five dollars and traveling faster is a nice way to go.

We had dinner at Denny’s but didn’t stay very late. I was exhausted and really needed to get home so that I could get some sleep. Oreo was so excited to see me he couldn’t contain himself. He ran all over the house freaking out. I am very glad to be home but very sad that I only get one full day before I have to return to the hotel life. Weekends really aren’t long enough when the commute on either end is so long. I will most likely have to return to New Jersey on Sunday evening at 7:00. 🙁