Sheep Guarding Llama

I was up this morning of my own volition at 5:30! You know you are getting old when you finally take a regular “day job” and start waking up on your own early, early in the morning. Who am I turning into?

Today is my last full day down here this week. I will be checking out of the hotel in the morning so that I can head for home directly from the office. I am hoping that everyone leaves early on Friday which they definitely gave me the impression of yesterday. If I can leave by 5:30 then I should be able to get home about the same time that Dominica rolls in.

I talked to Dominica until almost 11:00 last night – until she got to dad’s house to pick up the puppy. It is a lot of extra driving for her each day to take care of the dog when I am out of town.

I managed to get breakfast in the hotel this morning and watch the news before going to work. That is something I don’t normally do.

I managed to get to work in just half an hour this morning. I am starting to learn my way around in this area. I am pretty confident driving now.

I got to work at 8:00 and managed to get right into the office and found my desk, logged right onto my computer and checked my email. I almost feel like I actually work there. Neat. I still don’t have very much to do during the day so I spent most of the day sitting at my desk reading documentation. I did actually get some real work today, though, and that made me very happy. I was actually able to help out and be productive for a little while. The time period when I was really working passed very quickly. If I was actually working all day I think that the time would fly by. But most of the day was idle so it dragged on forever. I am really looking forward to having work to do to keep me hopping.

I did receive my BlackBerry today although it is such a cumbersome device to configure that even after two days no one was able to get it working nor does anyone know the process for setting it up. It comes with directions but heaven only knows to whom those pertain. Certainly not us. I tried following the directions and it doesn’t work at all. The BlackBerry device itself is a very silly thing. Just a super cheap email device. The keyboard is kind of nice but overall the device is really just a two way pager. I can’t believe that so many people get excited over these things. My PocketPC is way cooler and I am pretty sure that it is cheaper too. I just don’t see the appeal. BlackBerries are pretty expensive from a management perspective as far as I understand. Lots of additional expertise necessary to get less from your system than what you probably paid for in the first place. But hey, its free. I get more technology than I had before and that makes me happy.

I got to meet more people at the office today. Both people from the team that I am on as well as our “sister” team. We are out of office space in our own area so I actually sit with the other team until my own desk and computer get set up for me somewhere.

I left work at 5:00 and drove as quickly as I could down to North Brunswick to look at those apartments that Dominica and I looked at two weeks ago. Unfortunately I got all of the way there and discovered that they close the office at 5:00. I was an hour late and I have no idea how I can ever get down there when they are open. What a pain. Why do so many rental companies only want to rent to people who don’t have jobs? Wouldn’t it make more sense to cater to people who actually work? Wouldn’t that raise the quality of your tenants? So anyway, my plan is to call them in the morning and see if I can set something up in the middle of the day. Maybe I can run down there during lunch. If I can’t make it during the day tomorrow then I will miss their March promotion which was really good AND I will be stuck spending another night in the hotel instead of going home so that I can go down there on Saturday to get the apartment. What a pain. I will not be happy if I have to stay here another day, drive back to Geneseo on Saturday and turn right around and drive back down on Sunday. That is not the kind of relaxing weekend that I need to have. I had a very busy and stressful week and of all of the weekend that I need to relax, this is the one.

It was 6:30 when I got back to the hotel. The last thing that I wanted to do was to leave the hotel again so, you guessed it, I ordered in some pizza and just ate in the hotel room. If I get stuck here tomorrow night I will do something else, I promise. But I really hope that it doesn’t come to that. I am so looking forward to going home. I don’t mind hotel life but this week has gotten to be really, really long. There has just been way too much going on from every angle.

I will feel a lot better once we get an apartment down here. Well, an apartment AND Internet access. I will be in really tough shape during the period when I have the apartment but don’t yet have the Internet access.

I managed to post the two part videos from me driving in the car yesterday morning. They are Quicktime videos and really should be a single video and not two separate ones but I don’t have a video editor with me and I didn’t want to go through all of the effort of getting one just to splice those two short videos together. They are easier to download this way anyway. So check them out and enjoy.

By 10:00 I was totally exhausted. Mostly mentally but my body was really tired of constantly sitting all day. I have gotten used to being able to move around and playing with the dog on a regular basis. Now fighting through the afternoon sleepies is almost impossible and my back is really wishing that the chair that I had at the office would recline a little. Not being able to lean back all day long is killing me.

I need to get to bed on the early side tonight because I have to get up in the morning and get the hotel room packed up before I head in to the office. The plan is that I will head home straight after work tomorrow evening. I am shooting to be home at about the same time that Dominica gets home but that will be tough. All of this hinges on being able to get out and get the apartment during my lunch break. I can just sense a really long day coming on. I am not sure that I have enough content on my MP3 player to get me through the day. There is a lot of potential driving going on throughout the day.

Well today is the day. I was up at 5:50 this morning to be sure that I had plenty of time to get ready and fight my way through traffic up to my very first day at my new job here in New Jersey. We had a little scare there two days ago and we were concerned that the job might not really come to fruition but, for the moment, everything is looking good.

I hit the breakfast buffet in the hotel just long enough to get an apple juice and a yogurt before I headed to the car to head out into traffic. Traffic near the hotel was completely nuts. It took fifteen minutes or so just to get out onto the expressway that the hotel sits right on. But after that the drive wasn’t bad at all and I managed to get to work just a little after 8:00. I wasn’t due to report in until 8:30 so I got some time to just sit and relax and to talk on the cell before actually going in and starting the day.

Unlike most jobs of this nature that seem to be completely unprepared for you to actually start working for several weeks after you first arrive (I think that there may be some bizarre inverse relationship between the expected length of your professional engagement with the amount of time it takes to get you to the point where you can actually perform useful functions in an organization… but I digress) I actually got my own office cubicle by mid-day, my email was turned on and ready, my network logon worked, my telephone was turned on and I had not one, but two computers and three LCD monitors ready for me. Yes, I have two 19″ LCDs on one computer (Windows) and one 17″ LCD on my SUN workstation. Yeah baby (or, if you are Bob, “Yeah Dude!”) I even got a pen, a notepad and a “Welcome to New Jersey” booklet. My security badge is even all taken care of and I can walk right into work now without having to call anyone. So far I am really impressed. This never happens. Even when I was at IBM things didn’t go nearly this smoothly. And my computers are even decently modern. Not old junk that they just had lying around. I do actually have a newer computer on its way but it got shipped to the wrong location so this is my temp that I am using right now. I guess that I am getting a newer one.

Mostly my first day was pretty slow. I spent my time learning my way around, getting to know people as best as I could, I had one meeting, lunch, orientation stuff, etc. I took off at 5:00. First days never hold much interest in reality. It was actually pretty hard to stay awake through all of the orientation videos, presentations, audio things, etc. Boring. But at least a lot of it is out of the way now. There is some hope that I will be doing some serious classroom work in the next several weeks while there is time. Soon I will be pretty bogged down with “responsibility” and won’t be nearly as available for educational pursuits. I suppose actual work has to be done at some point. Oh yes, tomorrow I get a BlackBerry as well. I have never had one so it will be of interest to me to see what all of the hype and hoopla is all about.

Everyone at work was really nice. I think that I am really going to enjoy my time there. I think that I have a lot to learn from this environment and I hope that I am able to bring them some serious intellectual value but it will be some time before we can determine that. Everyone is definitely approaching the situation with an eye towards this being a permanent arrangement which is encouraging.

I got back to hotel at 5:30 and promptly ordered in some dinner. I had little food all day and was pretty hungry. I needed some protein. Lunch was at Quiznos but I didn’t get that much food. It was my first time at Quiznos. Everyone back in New York is always joking about how many Quiznos commercials we see while never being able to really find one of the stores. Well I finally managed to eat at one and the verdict is… they aren’t very likely to survive in New York. Sure they are better than Subway but that doesn’t mean very much in my book. They sure aren’t Cooks Gas Station, Aunt Cookies, Wegmans, Dibella’s, etc. New York just does food better than most places and cookie cutter sub shops just don’t cookie cut it in the Upstate. Too bad more Americans weren’t more culinarily demanding!

Danielle will appreciate this: I found out at lunch today that I am working in the building right next to the building where Devin Richards used to work when he lived in New Jersey. The company that I am working for bought the entire campus from the company that he had worked for and I am in building B and he was in building C which is right out of my window. How funny is that! He is the only person that I have ever known that worked or lived in New Jersey.

In additional good Scott news today, my degree program at Empire State College (SUNY Empire) got its first round of approval finally today and the paperwork has been sent on to the regional whomever to get the ball rolling. With any luck I might even have a degree by the end of the year. Not bad for someone who finished all of his classes in 2004. Oh wait, isn’t that how it is supposed to work? Maybe my impression of graduation is skewed after having completed my Associates degree in 1997 but not finding out about it until 1999! Yeah, these things actually happen to me.

Other than that my life is pretty boring here in my lonely New Jersey hotel room. There is nothing on the television – there are only a few channels here. All I have is my laptop and a few books and a two liter of Diet Coke. I uploaded a number of awesome Oreo pictures to Flickr this evening. They were stored on the card that I brought down with me. They were all taken with the Nikon D50. I think that they turned out really well. Be sure to actually go to Flickr and check them out since only the last three show up on my little Flickr badge there and there are a few of them. I uploaded my Flickr limit for the month so don’t expect anything new to be showing up until April (which is just around the corner!) Maybe you will even get treated to some New Jersey pics!

I really miss my puppy. It would be awesome if we could find out that this job was really likely to go long term soon because it would make it a lot easier for Dominica and Oreo to look into moving down here. Commuting back and forth is going to get really awful really quickly. Although my boss thinks that there is a really possibility of me working Saturdays so that I can make Sunday – Monday my weekend which would mean that Dominica and I could see each other for a whole two days instead of just one. That is going to be a real problem if we don’t figure something out. But I am also expected to be able to usually work from home one day a week (20% of the time is a TON) which will make things even easier. It really sounds like the flexibility down here is going to be awesome.

Tomorrow night is my final night in the hotel for the week. I am looking forward to getting home. Unfortunately next week will be a day longer down here without getting to go back home. My plan is to go see about that apartment tomorrow night. I was hoping to not have to do that after just two days of work but it looks like I am going to have to. Originally I was going to have three days of work before I had to talk to them but you can’t win them all. But if I wait at all on the apartment I will lose their free one month promotion and that will lower the cost significantly. And every two weeks in the hotel pays for another month in the apartment so it pays to get it pretty quickly. And once I get an apartment then Dominica and Oreo can come down and visit me sometimes and keep me from having to drive home every weekend. Not to mention being able to actually leave some stuff behind and actually be set up. Setting up and breaking down a hotel room every few days is exhausting. I am looking forward to having a comfortable computer office chair again, a desktop to call my own, a nice monitor with some contrast and a bookshelf to store my books on. Of course, I will be without a bed or an Internet connection so that will be a bit of a pain until I get that all figured out. This stuff can never be easy, can it?

Dominica called at 10:00 so that we could talk before going to bed. She had to drive down to Pavilion to dad’s house so that she can pick up Oreo.

I was up a little after 7:30 this morning after a restless night of sleep. I haven’t managed to get very much good sleep recently. By 8:15 I was on the phone with just about everyone getting everything sorted out. That ended up being an all morning excercise. The consulting office in Rochester got my messages from last night when they got into the office this morning and were scrambling like mad to get everything into place.

By 11:00, when I had to decide whether or not to check out of the hotel, the answer was that they didn’t think that they were going to be able to get everything straightened out by tomorrow but that everyone was really sorry and the hotel was going to be taken care of and because I had so much on my plate they were going to have me go back to New York and we would schedule my start for next Monday. The last thing that I wanted to have happen was for me to get stuck just sitting in the hotel day after day racking up bills while getting practically no work done except for some reading and keeping up with SGL. We all decided that it would be best if we didn’t risk me just sitting idle all week because if I didn’t manage to start tomorrow morning then the week would be mostly lost and there would be a really good chance of me not starting at all.

So at 11:00 I checked out of the hotel and started driving back to Geneseo. I stopped at the Dunkin Donuts in the plaze right next to the hotel and got some late breakfast since I didn’t go down to the complimentary continental breakfast in the hotel so that I could be on the phone all of that time. Verizon is loving me this month.

I am getting good at getting around in New Jersey. Last night I was able to drive all the way to the hotel without ever looking at a map and managed to not make a wrong turn the entire way here. This morning I managed to get all of the way back without missing a turn. Pretty impressive if I do say so myself. It is good because if I am going to be working down here I sure don’t want to have to worry about getting lost. I have plenty of things to worry about and that doesn’t need to be one of them.

I made it through Easton, Pennsylvania and was heading west on US80 and was at Exit 299 when my manager from Rochester called to tell me that it really looked like everything was going to go through and that it would be best if I pulled over and waited ten minutes. So I pulled into the Sunoco station at Exit 299 and got a drink and some chips. It wasn’t nearly ten minutes later that she called back to let me know that everything had cleared and that they would be ready for me at 8:30 tomorrow morning. Pheww. Everyone is going to be really relived about that.

So I got back onto the highway going east and headed back down towards New Jersey. What a crazy day! I decided to go by way of US80 into New Jersey through the Delaware Water Gap instead of going south to Easton and into New Jersey over the route 22 bridge. The DWG has the best views going into the state and I got treated to a very enjoyable drive through some very rural parts of New Jersey. I find that New Jersey can be a very surprising state at times.

It was about 1:30 when I made it back to the hotel on the Raritan River. I got checked back into the room that I just checked out of just a few hours before and I got myself unpacked and settled into the room. Now I can enjoy my time in the hotel and just relax and get myself mentally prepared for work tomorrow morning.

I just happened to check the website last night and again today and DesktopBSD 1.0 has just released. I played with this product a few months ago in a release candidate or late beta form and was pretty impressed. I am downloading the CD ISO now at the hotel so that I can try out the final product.

Dominica took her car into the shop this morning to have her break clips replaced. Now her car won’t rattle like it is falling apart when she drives. Dad took his car into the shop in Geneseo this afternoon. It turned out that his car was going to take quite a while to get fixed so he called Dominica to have her come pick him up so that he didn’t have to sit at the shop all afternoon. She forgot what shop he was at and drove all of the way to Pavilion to pick him up at his normal mechanic’s shop there. It ended up taking her more than half an hour just to get through York because the school buses were all just coming out of the school. She didn’t realize what she had done until after she got all of the way to Pavilion. Almost a twenty mile trip! So she turned around and drove all of the way back to Geneseo to get dad right there in town.

I didn’t get any dinner last night after having grabbed some McDonalds on the way to Ithaca in Ovid at the Fastrac and my breakfast/lunch at Dunkin Donuts was pretty small this morning so at 4:30 I did my usual hotel dinner and ordered a thin crust Domino’s pizza with onions and green peppers and some cheesy bread. John Nicklin got me hooked on the Domino’s thin crust back when we used to live in the condo on the Broadneck in Maryland.

I spent the entire afternoon and evening in the hotel room. I went out at one point to go for a walk but I discovered that the hotel is on a decently busy road without any sidewalk on either side. So I came right back in and sat, lonely, in my hotel room.

Pretty much nothing happened the rest of the evening. I did a lot of research on my laptop. I watched a tiny bit of television, Home Improvement, which I haven’t watched in forever. That really wasn’t that good of a show but it is nostalgic at this point. I have never seen any of the last several seasons. I might only have ever seen the first few. It feels like the type of show that I must have watched all of but that definitely is not the case. I watched it in high school but by 1994 I probably never saw it again or maybe just one or two more episodes. I didn’t have television at college nor did I watch it much at home ever during the nineties. I have no idea when it finally went off of the air, actually. It ran much longer than I remembered. Today I saw the next to last episode – one of the stupid looking back clips episodes where they save money by having the entire episode take place in a car with people talking and just show old shows. What a horrible way to end the series!

I was pretty tired after two nights of very little sleep and wanted to be well rested for tomorrow so around 9:00 I decided to turn in for the night.