Sheep Guarding Llama

No rest for the weary. I had to get up this morning and get out the door pretty quickly. I had a bunch of paperwork that had to be done for New Jersey before I left the house. How annoying to take a job with a technology consultancy just to find out that they don’t even have the capability to work without using legacy fax machines.

I had some Slim Fast and headed for Rochester. First thing today is the Symantec data protection seminar being held at the Microsoft offices up at Corporate Woods in Brighton. That started at 9:00 and went until noon. Fortunately they actually got out quite early and I had enough time to run up to the hospital and pick up Eric and we got a quick lunch at Jay’s Diner. Neither of us had very much time.

I took Eric back to the hospital and headed on over to the Regal Cinema on Marketplace Drive to go to the Microsoft partner show that is this afternoon. Two shows on the same day at two different locations. Not very good planning if you ask me. But they did allow enough time to get between the locations and eat so it wasn’t too bad. I suppose that the theory is that if you are all ready taking time off of work you are better off taking one entire day rather than two half days.

After the Microsoft show I ran over to Verizon Wireless and picked up a car charger and a bluetooth headset for Dominica. Since she is going to be doing a lot of traveling soon as well and since we get free mobile to mobile minutes it seemed like a good investment for her to have. Plus New York does not allow cell phones in cars so it will allow her to use her phone while she is driving. And she can call her family on Verizon for free too so it works out well.

Dad came over just a little after I got home and we went over to the Omega to get dinner. He had been watching little Oreo today and so that gave us a chance to get him back to Geneseo too. Dad had picked Oreo up at the house just a few minutes after Dominica had left for work.

I spent the evening working on a couple of server projects. Nothing could possibly be as bad as that last one. What a pain that was. I can’t even tell you how relived I am to have that over and done with. Now I am working on building another replacement server that needs to be ready before I leave for New Jersey. Projects, projects.

Dominica got home and we went down to the basement and watched an episode of Remington Steele. We are still on the first season. We watched one episode while I worked on the server and then we headed to bed.

I woke up at 5:30 this morning but knowing that I had so little to do in the hotel I decided that it would be best if I just rested for a little while. So I stayed in bed until 6:30. Then I got up and showered and got ready for the day. Including posting SGL for yesterday. So I am completely up to date again.

Last night when we went to bed the heater in the room was going completely overboard and it was terribly hot in the room. In attempting to turn it down aparently we broke it. So when we woke up this morning it was completely freezing in the room. We have a corner room (516) with a broken balcony door so there is some air coming in from the outside. So this room is really, really cold. And the bathroom walls are so cold that even a hot shower will begin to warm them up.

Andy slept until almost 8:00 this morning. Over thirteen hours of total sleep. He should be well rested for the day. Over-rested, in fact. He will probably be tired all day from sleep so much. I got about nine and a half hours of sleep which isn’t too bad considering how little I have been getting. I am feeling pretty good at the moment.

I found out this morning when I went to do some remote server work that this hotel, apparently, does not allow anything but web surfing and email. My VPN does not work from here nor does my SSH connections. And I have plenty of them to try so it isn’t like just a single one isn’t responding. And I know that the servers are up because, for example, I am working on this one. So I didn’t get the chance to do the work that I had hoped to get done this morning. Instead I listened to some podcasts like the Daily Breakfast with Father Vonhogen.

For breakfast Andy and I went down to the Panera Bread that is located in the hotel. Breakfast was awesome. I got a cinnamon crunch bagel and it was the best bagel that I have ever had. We both had spinach artichoke souffles that were awesome as well. I am definitely going to be trying Panera for breakfast more often.

We timed our breakfast just perfectly so that we were able to get up to the hotel room, get our suits on (we are the matching Men in Black today although Andy didn’t wear his matching glasses this morning) and we headed out the door to drive over to Shadyside. For Andy, who hasn’t been back in Pittsburgh since 2001, it was a trip down memory lane to drive into Shadyside and to see the route that we used to walk or shuttle between the hospitals and to see the apartment building where we used to live and the places that we used to eat. I can’t believe that he hasn’t been back here for all of this time. It is crazy to have lived someplace and to not have really returned ever. I have been in Pittsburgh every few months ever since 1999 so it is hard for me to imagine what it must be like not being back for so long.

Our meeting today went pretty well and we are very happy with the current results of it. We were pretty apprehentious about our meeting today and what it would mean for the long term financial stability of the company but, at the moment, things are looking very good. Everyone at the meeting was quite excited to get to see Andy. Last time they saw him he was a young, struggling programmer. A lot has changed since then. Andy and I were just 22 and 23 when we started the project in Pittsburgh. I came down with John Nicklin at the end of 1999 and the project got the green light on January 13th of 2000. Andy didn’t sign on until mid March of that year.

We were anxious to get out of Dodge as soon as the meeting was over. All of the traveling has really been wearing on me and I wanted to me home ASAP. So we hit the road and were out of the city right at noon. The trip went really fast. At least it felt like it did. We made good time and the weather wasn’t nearly as bad today as it was yesterday. Still really windy but not as bad as it was and at least the sun was out today and there was barely any snow.

As we came through Buffalo Andy and I decided to get some dinner. We had been planning on going on for Boy’s Night tonight but Craig is on the road to Boston so no Boy’s Night tonight. We got dinner at Cracker Barrel. It was good. Buttermilk Fried Shrimp. Yum.

We went to dad’s house on the way home and picked up Oreo. We stayed for about half an hour or so visiting. Then it was back to Geneseo. I spent the evening continuing to work on the new server which is now working and you are currently reading the site on the new server. What a relief that is. One major bit of work that I can check off now. Pheww.

Dominica got home from work and pretty much we went straight to bed. I am really tired and I have another busy day tomorrow. Symantec show in the morning and the Microsoft show in the afternoon. Dad is going to watch Oreo until I get back.

For anyone who gets stuck seeing SGL with all of the dates set to 2005… there was a glitch on the server and the web accelerator cached something bad. Everything is and has been fine. I have no simple means of flushing the cache so you saw the glitch for a little while. Oh well. Off to bed.

Min and I got up early this morning and headed south to Corning to visit the glass museum with Eric and Amanda. We met at 11:00am and we headed out to Market Street looking for someplace to eat lunch. We stumbled upon the London Underground on the north side of Market Street. The meal was tremendous. Min, Amanda and I all got the special of the day, a spinach pasta in a creamy mushroom sauce. Boy was that good. We all also got some chocolate creme brulee. After lunch we went to the museum for the afternoon. We had a really good time. The museum was a lot of fun. At the end of the day, Min and Amanda went and did a little glass blowing themselves at the workshop. So on Monday or Tuesday, Eric has to swing through Corning to pick up the pieces that they made after they have annealed.

After the museum, we all headed up to Ithaca where we had some dinner at The Greek House in Collegetown. After dinner we came back to the house and watched The Enemy at the Gates. Boy that was a good movie. I have had it on DVD for quite some time but I can never find anyone who wants to watch it with me so I was excited to finally get to see it. Eric and Amanda had both seen it before. Min thought that it was okay. I was really impressed. It was a different view of the war (World War II from the Soviet defense of Stalingrad.) I really appreciate seeing the war from that perspective.

After the movie, Min and I went to bed early and Eric and Amanda headed back to Groveland. Nate, Bob and Zach had a bunch of friends over from school but we didn’t get to see them because we turned in.

Loopy left for Canada early this morning. We will be seeing him again in about a week, I would estimate. He will probably be reading SGL to be able to keep up on all the goings on here.

I woke up completely on my own this morning at 3:45! Only two and a half hours of sleep. I hate how this always happens whenever I have to get up early and get moving. Argh! My alarm wasn’t set until 5:15 but I knew that if I fell back asleep it would do me more harm than good so I decided against that course of action although Oreo attempted to convince me otherwise. I got up and got showered and shaved. The extra time let me get the car packed and then to get to work on the server while I waited for Andy to arrive at the house at 6:00. I actually managed to have a very productive morning. The server is continuing to work and should be back into production as early as on Thursday. Boy will that ever be a relief. I didn’t know what I was going to do if I didn’t manage to get that machine back up before going to New Jersey.

Andy got to the house at 6:10. We put his car into the garage (so that the neighbours can’t complain about us stealing all of the visitor parking spaces even though the neighbour who complains may use the most visitor night’s of parking of any single person in the entire complex) and got all of his stuff loaded into the Mazda 6. We were on the road by 6:20 or so. Not too shabby.

It is bitter cold today and the wind is incredible. The drive was just awful. I could barely hold the car on the road the whole way and at times we were approaching white out conditions. I can’t even explain how fatiguing it was and to do that on top of having almost no sleep. Ugh.

We stopped at a McDonalds along the route and got breakfast around 7:30. It is weird to be traveling this early in the day. The trip took a lot longer and used a lot more gas than we had anticipated. Fighting against the wind is really taking a toll on us. I was having trouble staying awake for a lot of the way.

Andy drove for about half an hour on US79 south of Erie, Pennsylvania to help me stay awake. Of course the weather broke during his portion of the drive and when I took back over it was awful again. 🙁

We arrived in Pittsburgh at noon. We had allowed an hour of buffer time and so we were doing really well. Our meeting is in Oakland at 1:00 so we had plenty of time. Andy has not been back to Pittsburgh, he thinks, since 2001! That is so hard to believe since he lived here longer than I did in 2000. But after all of this time I have come pretty close to having been here, in total, more than he has. I have definitely spent tons more time driving around the city since he didn’t have a car back when he was here.

We hung out in the lobby at the hospital while we waiting for our meeting. That didn’t do much to help us keep ourselves awake. The meeting lasted for a couple of hours and we were both completely exhausted as well as starving by the time that it was over.

After the meeting we ran over to the hotel. We are staying in the Quality Inn University Center which is just down the road from the hospitals. I didn’t realize this when I made the reservation but this hotel is the old Best Western that my parents stayed in the weekend that they came down to help Andy and I move into Pittsburgh in March of 2000. The hotel was old back then and time has not been kind to it. The room was okay but the balcony door was in sad shape and the heater and air conditioning units were a total joke. The was a manual switch on the wall that you had the switch in order to change which unit would get power and that switch was shorted out so that nothing worked reliably. With the hotel change over there is now a Panera Bread in the first floor of the hotel which makes it a more convenient place to stay.

Andy and I drove out to South Side to get some dinner. We ended up settling on a place called PapparaZZi. Andy got a veal meatball burger thing and I got a veggie calzone. It was a ton of food. We didn’t hang out for long because we were so tired. We ate, had a drink and got back to the hotel. It was 5:30 when we both decided to take naps. I slept for about forty five minutes and then took a shower and worked on SGL getting everything caught back up. Andy slept for three hours!

We both went to bed at 8:30 in the hopes of catching up on some sleep and being ready for a long day tomorrow.

Today is catch up day. The day to panic and get as much done as possible between trips. Both Dominica and I slept in a little this morning. I am SO glad that I am not driving today. I really needed to have a day that didn’t involve me sitting in the car all day long. The original plan would have had me driving all day yesterday and today before my trip to Pittsburgh tomorrow and I don’t think that that would have made me very happy. I really needed to have a day at home when I could get some rest between boughts of driving as well as get caught up on some of the myriad things that need to be done before I go to Jersey.

I got a chance to sleep in a little but hardly get rested. It will be a while before I am able to catch up on sleep. Right now that is looking to be a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. I worked around the house this morning. I did some miscellaneous stuff in the office. There was tons and tons of emails and phone calls to get caught up on.

The weather is beautiful this morning. We have some rain but the air is really warm. It is so warm that Dominica went around and opened up a lot of the windows and we are getting some of the first fresh air in months. Boy does that feel good.

By 10:00 this morning I had gotten a call from a partner company of ours saying that they needed me to go up to Rochester to a client site to do some work this afternoon. That was not something that I was prepared for today. So I had to jump in the shower and get ready to go. Things never quiet down around here for a minute.

I was really fortunate today. The client in Rochester that needed me had a major disaster but we ended up being able to fix their problems in just an hour so I wasn’t stuck working there all day. That could have been really bad and really left me exhausted. I was actually done by just after 2:00 and was able to go down to the hospital and meet Eric for a cup of coffee.

We had about an hour to drink some coffee before Eric had to get to an interview. It was good timing because I really didn’t have any spare time anyway. I took the opportunity while being in the city to run to the Verizon Wireless store and get some much needed supplies for my cell phone. I picked up the top Jabra Bluetooth headset that they had which has a seven hour talk time and a two hundred hour stand-by time. It also has a vibrate feature so that you don’t make any noise when your phone rings and you don’t have to have the cell phone on you to be able to answer it. That is going to make travelling a lot easier. I need to be able to place calls all of the time and wired headsets just don’t work. I am going to have to get one of these for Dominica as well now that I know how awesome it is. I also got a much needed car charger and a second battery for my phone. I got the super extended life battery that is supposed to last for a week and a half or more.

I hit Borders quickly on the way home. It probably took me less than ten minutes. I am in the process of collecting books that I think that I should have before going to New Jersey next week. It is hard to guess what books will relate most closely to the processes that they are using so I am doing my best to be reasonably prepared. That is not an easy thing to do.

On the drive home the rain went from moderate which is what it has been all day long to torential downpour. It was so heavy that I could barely hold the road at times and visibility was almost nill. NY15 just south of US390 Exit 9 where it goes under the train bridge was completely flooded and there was enough water to come part way up the floor pan of my car. That was almost a disaster as I crashed into it. Lima Road coming into Geneseo had water flowing across it as well. This is the most water that I have seen since moving to Geneseo.

It was just a little before 5:00 when I got back to the house. I scheduled dinner with dad. He is coming to meet us at 6:00 to go to the Omega. There isn’t a lot of chance for me to see him before I have to move. Boy things are going to be busy.

While I was at the house I noticed that there was so much water that the back yard was starting to sink a little bit and that there was standing water in a newly formed ditch back there. So I decided that I needed to do some investigating since at the last home owners association meeting everyone had been complaining about the pond behind some of the houses and how it wasn’t flowing out into the stream like it was supposed to and was instead being used as an overflow for the stream. So I took a walk around and it was really amazing. The entire area between us and Walmart was flooded. The stream was so high that it was just inches from crashing over the banks into the pond. The water was flowing backward through the drain pipes at a impetuous pace. The pond was filling rapidly and would soon have no place to go other that right into the houses that are only feet away from it. The marsh that is supposed to be an overflow for the stream was full and was spilling out into the lawns of the houses and going into the road. The whole woods was underwater. This is definitely a really dangerous situation.

While I was investigating the pond one of the neighbours on that side by the pond came out onto the deck and we spent fifteen minutes or so talking about the water situation and how bad it was. This is a new neighbour, Dave, that I have not yet met at any of the homeowners functions. There are a lot of new people coming in that we have not been introduced to yet. It is starting to be a little weird living in a little community with so many members and not knowing everyone. Maybe this summer Dominica and I will have a chance to get to know some more of them. We are all finally getting a little more settled into the community now that the houses are all almost full. That will be so nice to finally have construction completed this year and we can get down to the business of getting the lawns growing and everything cared for and looking nice. That will be a big change. All of this time, three years now that we have lived in Geneseo, the townhouses that we live in have been under construction. I can’t wait to have that over and done with.

Dad picked us up at 6:00 and we went over to the Omega Grill. On the way there we went through a small lake that had formed at Denny’s. The Denny’s parking lot was completely under water and it had flown out over the lawn and was now flowing pretty deep over the road. I have never seen water like this in Geneseo. This is really bad.

After dinner I set to working on getting ready for the trip to Pittsburgh tomorrow. I had to get the cell phone ready and learn how to use the new headset. I got most everything except for clothing items packed and ready to go. Then Dominica and I went down to the basement to relax for a little bit before going to bed.

We watched a couple episodes of Remington Steele while I continued to work on that server. It took several hours of working but I finally made some progress and by 1:00 this morning the server is finally installed and in very good shape. It will still take a bit of work to get it ready to go back into service but it would appear that I am past the real hurdles and I just need a few hours to be able to work on it now and things will be good. I really didn’t want to stay up late like this but I just couldn’t stop working on the server once things were moving forward. I knew that the feeling that I would get from having the server actually working would far out weigh the lack of sleep that I will have tomorrow.

Dad also dropped off our new HP Proliant server that just arrived today when he brought us back from dinner. I managed to get it out of the box and look at it but I didn’t even have a chance to plug it in tonight. That is very sad. It looks awesome and I am really looking forward to having an opportunity to play with it but that is going to have to wait for Thursday or Friday, I am afraid. Too much to do and just not enough time.

While I finished working on the server Dominica worked on getting my clothes and sundry items packed and ready for tomorrow’s trip. She is so much better at packing than I am and almost never forgets important items. I have such a hard time getting things together when I am leaving the house.