Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today is moving day! I can’t believe that we are actually to this point and nothing has gone wrong yet. At least nothing major, serious and/or show stopping.

Dominica and I stayed up kind of late studying last night. We didn’t go to bed until well after midnight. She made it to bed before I did but only by fifteen minutes or so.

Oreo decided that I didn’t need sleep on my last morning at home and got me out of bed at 4:00 am to take him outside. Of course, at that point I was pretty much unable to go back to sleep. Too much to do and to think about. So I ended up only managing to get three and a half hours of sleep all night. Great way to start the week. Actually it could be a lot worse. This will help me to shift my schedule for the rest of the week. I have to be up early tomorrow morning to go to work like normal people again!

Andy called just minutes after 6:00. He has the same abdominal pain that he had two days ago. We had thought that it must be something related to the food that we had eaten at the airport in Georgia but that isn’t very likely now. He decided that the pain was so great and the risk high enough that he really needed to go to the hospital. We are almost forty minutes away from him down here and I was not even dressed yet so he decided that he needed to go in the ambulance since he was in too much pain to drive safely. I would assume that he was in the hospital around 6:30.

Andy called at 7:10 from the hospital to let us know that he had arrived in the hospital and that he was doing okay. It will obviously be a while before they have any additional information and he will be really lucky if they manage to have any diagnosis today anyway. They had him on an IV to make sure that he was not dehydrated and that was probably making him feel a little better, that and not panicing from being home alone with the pain, and he definitely sounded a bit better on the phone. He had called his parents and had let them know what was going on. They are planning on getting him from the hospital later today whenever he is done up there. It is anyone’s guess how long that will take or if they will even let him come home today – but that seems pretty likely. He had me call Miranda so that she would know what was happening.

This morning I had to do the last minute packing of things like my CPAP. I really hate that I can’t pack that ahead of time. Of all of the things to not be able to guarantee that you have ready! Beyond that there really wasn’t much to get ready. I set my laptop up last night so that that would be ready to go. I had to install some software on there just in case since I have the new laptop and have never taken the time to get it loaded up with all of the software that I use on a regular basis. So that took some time. I packed my USB headphones so don’t be surprised if just maybe I manage to squeeze out a podcast from my hotel room in New Jersey. I am staying at the Clarion near the beltway. It isn’t too far from work and it should be a nice hotel. And I can keep racking up my reward points this way. I am really glad that I am a gold club member now because I get an extra 10% reward points for every night that I stay so Dominica and I will be able to get some free hotel stays pretty soon. I have over twenty thousands points (whatever that means) so far.

Dominica and I went to a late breakfast with dad at 10:00 at the Omega Grill. This is my last meal at home in Geneseo before venturing off to New Jersey. We ate and then Dominica and I left directly from there to go to Canandaigua to take our certification tests. Dad went over to our house to spend some time with Oreo while we were out.

Dominica and I took our tests at FLCC at 12:30. Mine took only fifteen or twenty minutes to complete. I took the CompTIA Security+ and passed. It was a much easier test than I had anticipated although they did have some completely off of the wall questions that were related to nothing I have ever seen. Really random stuff. Dominica took a bit longer but she also passed her hardware portion of the A+ exam. The A+ is a two part exam so she has one more test to take before she gets her certification. Let me tell you, she is really relived. This is her first IT test and she was really stressing out about it. She gets test anxiety and that makes these types of tests really hard since everything comes down to a single one hour session sitting at a computer taking one single test. She is very happy.

I left from Canandaigua and drove down to Ithaca to do a couple of minutes of quick work and to check my email to make sure that everything was set for New Jersey. I had told everyone that they needed to contact me by 11:00 this morning or it would be too late to catch me before I left in case anything went wrong. But I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any bad news hiding in my email before I invested too much driving time. So I made sure that at 2:00 everything was kosher and that I could keep driving east. I was a little worried since they hadn’t responded as to when I was meeting with whom yet.

At 5:00 I spoke with my consulting manager in New Jersey and everything was fine but they had to find out exactly what time I should be showing up to work tomorrow morning. At 6:00 he called me back to tell me that I was not starting tomorrow because there was some problem with my fingerprints. With my fingerprints?!? How could it possibly be that there was a fingerprinting issue and that they didn’t do anything about it until AFTER BUSINESS HOURS the day before I was supposed to be arriving for work? It is passed the point of cancelling my hotel reservation at this point plus I am close to the New Jersey border and it is too late for me to be driving back to New York at this point. I am tired and looking forward to getting out of the car. I only got 3.5 hours of sleep last night and had a very busy day prior to doing all of this driving. So I decided to continue on to New Jersey and my hotel even though there isn’t any work for me to do tomorrow.

I got to the hotel at 7:30 – pretty much right on schedule since I left at 2:00 and spent a little time in Ithaca and went through Ithaca which isn’t on the way exactly. I unpacked and set up my laptop and made some calls and sent some emails trying to get something happening. Of course, they can cancel work after hours but you can’t reach anyone to find out what is going on. So much for a restful evening. That is the last thing that is going to happen at this point. 🙁

I did some reading and tried to relax. Once I was so agitated I started getting a little sleepy. I am ready an Exam Cram book that I grabbed at Borders on Saturday on the Linux Professional Institute exams. Now that the Security+ is finally out of the way I can actually focus on getting some more certs. I have put certification onto the back burner for the last few years and kind of let the Security+ get in my way of getting a lot of certs since I had started working on it but it had a lot of material that I had to learn and I just never got around to actually taking the test. So my goal is to get through as much of the LPI material as possible now while I really have nothing else to do. Being in the hotel is a perfect opportunity to get a lot done. I ordered a bunch of certification materials from Amazon but they have not arrived yet so I wanted something to get started on. Once the stuff from Amazon comes I plan to start work on my Red Hat certifications.

I finally got to bed around midnight or so. Maybe a little after. It took a while before I fell asleep but it wasn’t too late.

Today I managed to post the two parts of the Operating System Architecture lecture that I gave at Finger Lakes Community College on Wednesday morning. You can check out Lecture Part One and Lecture Part Two hosted at OurMedia. Sorry but I didn’t have time to do anything but turn the files in Windows Media videos so what if you can’t use those there isn’t anything that I can do right now. I have been way too busy to worry about getting these into a better format. I am hoping that whatever the college makes will be better than these but it could easily not be. These are pretty decently large videos since they are 640×480. I think that they turned out really well, though, and look good and you can hear them decently well.

Dominica and I both slept in this morning. We needed it. Min is always exhausted after having been working all week and needs her Sunday mornings to catch up. I haven’t had much sleep and this was my first full night in my own bed so I was appreciating the time.

Dad came over after church and picked us up and we went over to the Omega Grill for lunch. We have to get in all of the Omega time that we can because I am going to be deprived of it starting tomorrow. We got back from lunch and discovered that Oreo had had an accident again. We figured that this would happen. He didn’t get enough time to go outside three times before we left and he really needs that to happen each and every day. At least we have learned that that is what it takes.

Dominica and I spent the afternoon studying and packing. I have a plastic bin in the living room that I am placing books, magazines, electronics and everything else non-clothing related into so that I can just carry it out to the car tomorrow. Dominica packed all of my clothes and stuff so that I wouldn’t forget anything. I always end up forgetting stuff that I need or panicing and thinking that I forgot something that I need.

Dominica did a lot of studying too. Tomorrow is her first ever certification exam and she is pretty nervous. She doesn’t have a really good idea of what to expect and she is a nervous test taker anyway. I needed to spend more time studying for my exam than I did but I have so many other things to do that I couldn’t focus on it as much as I wanted to. I am feeling confident enough that I am not really worried. And given everything else that is going on it isn’t the biggest deal in the world if I don’t pass it. At some point you just have to take these tests and learn what they are like whether you pass them or not. I am at that point so at 1:00 tomorrow afternoon I am taking the Security+ test ready or not.

At 5:30 Dominica and I went over to the Omega, again, and met dad and the Richardsons for dinner. This is my last chance to see everyone before I go to New Jersey. We ended up hanging out at the restaurant for two hours. Min and I were both planning on going to bed early but that did not end up happening. We were both still studying at 12:30 in the morning. So much for being well rested.