Sheep Guarding Llama

We slept in some this morning. We didn’t set an alarm and we were both really worn out from all of the driving last night. We got up just after 9:30. I decided to start getting ready and Dominica decided that she was going to go down to the breakfast buffet and see if they had “make your own waffles” which she loves. I didn’t think that there was going to be any chance of that but what do I know. They did, of course, have “make your own waffles” and so she was pretty happy.

We were out of the hotel at a quarter to eleven and on our way into New Jersey. We started by driving straight east on US78 out to exit 36 where I will be working so Dominica got a chance to see the general area and to see the office itself. It took about forty five minutes as I had thought. Not a bad trip at all. We got off at Exit 36 so that she could see the office itself. It is really cool that the office is visible from the exit ramp and from King George Highway. So she actually got to see the building even though it is inside of a guarded complex.

We drove around the area of the office for about half an hour. We took a lot of smaller side streets and actually got a little feel for the area. The basic feel was that we could never possibly afford a home out here 🙂 Then we decided to try driving farther afield and go down to Bridgewater and that area. That took a while because we got lost a little. Then we finally got down to NJ206 and we drove south on that all of the way down to Princeton. We aren’t really considering any apartments or anything that far south but I had been there last year and really liked the area and wanted Dominica to get a chance to see what the area was like. It also gave us a chance to stop at the Wegmans down on US1 and get an apartment guide. Of course, we finally made it down to the Wegmans and found that they didn’t have any apartment guides. They hadn’t seen any in months. So that ended up being a pretty big waste of time.

We travelled northeast on US1 up to North Brunswick. We had decided to make a giant loop around so that we could hit a lot of areas along the larger roads and see what areas were like what. As we were coming up the highway Dominica saw a sign for an apartment complex. It was the only lead that we had so we talked about it a little bit. It turned out that we drove right past the place as we came through North Brunswick. It was called North Brunswick Manor. We decided that since we had no reference for apartments in New Jersey that it would behoove us to stop in and to take a look at the place. We ended up getting stuck there talking to the apartment guy for about an hour but we definitely discovered that this place is a very serious possibility. The price isn’t bad. The location is decently ideal and they will allow Oreo to live there. So we are really going to be considering it.

From there we tried going up to US287. Of course, this turns out to be the exact same location that I tried to do this very same thing back last autumn when I was attempting to return home from Woodbridge. The same problem happened then too. I looked at the map that I have of the area and the roads are just close enough together that none of them are labeled. So we had to do some guess work. We worked our way through New Brunswick and discovered that it is a really nice place (the home of Rutgers University) and would be an ideal place to hang out if living at that apartment. We found an Applebee’s and decided to stop. We had been looking for food for hours and having a terrible time finding something that we could stop at without turning around on the highway. We ate quite a bit. It was my only meal of the day.

We tried finding our way back to 287 by following the signs. No luck. The signs in this area actually completely keep you away from 287. It is ridiculous. For about half an hour or so we drove parellel to 287 in the wrong direction. Instead of taking us straight to the highway so that we could go west the signs lead us due east along the highway as far out of the way as possible. Argh. We ended up doing the exact same path that I did months ago because the map didn’t give us anyway to do anything else.

We finally got back to the highway and worked out way up to US78. Then we headed west and took a look at a couple of communities to the west of the office to see if there was anything that would interest us out there. We stopped in Clinton and Annondale. It wouldn’t be a bad area but we didn’t find any interesting apartments. We did find some nice looking condos at Union Gap and Union Hill but we are afraid that they don’t accept dogs and that just won’t do.

It was about 6:00 when we finally headed back towards home. I was exhausted from having driven all day yesterday and all day today so Dominica drove for about an hour from Annondale up to the Hickory Run Rest Stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike fifteen miles north of the Lehigh Valley Tunnel. Then I drove the rest of the way home.

We went straight to dad’s house and visited for about half an hour. Dad was watching Oreo and we had to pick him up. As we approached home the fog got to be so awful we could barely move. There had been fog most of the way back but it was rarely all that bad. But near dad’s house it was really terrible.

As we came back through Geneseo we decided that we were hungry, having only eaten one meal all day, so we swung quickly into Pizza Paul’s on Main Street and grabbed some slices just like we did two nights ago just before going to New Jersey. They have the most amazing giant chocolate fudge brownies there with tons of icing. Oh are they good. And oh so moist. MMmmm.

It was pretty late by the time we actually got home and got to bed. We were both really exhausted. Oreo was tired too but very glad to be home with us.

It is really hard to believe that in just two weeks I will be moving to Somerset County, New Jersey and starting a new job. It has been so long since I have done the “new job” thing with it being anything more than just a short project that I don’t quite know how to react. Dominica has never known me with a regular job. IBM layed off all of the contractors and consultants in the beginning of June, 2001 and we only met on June 9th – just days after IBM. I have been full time with Niagara ever since then so life has been strange. This will be a major adjustment for us. Andy might be the most excited person of all since this new job also guarantees (as much as anything does) his position with Niagara so he now knows that he is not going to be job hunting for a while. Hopefully a really long while.

I was up at 7:00 this morning. I took a little time out of my morning routine to try some additional ideas out on that server but still nothing. Hopefully I will have some time to get to that tonight. But probably not. It is going to be a long day.

I was ready and out of the house by 9:00. Off on my drive to Ithaca. Dad is coming over to pick up Oreo sometime around 9:30 or 10:00. Oreo will have fun playing on the farm. He loves chasing after tennis balls that dad hits with a tennis racket. He really wears him out for us so that he just comes home and sleeps for two days. He will probably only have so much energy today from having done the same thing a few days ago.

Today is a really beautiful day. The sun is shining and it is really, really warm. Today is a winter day in Western New York that does not require a jacket. Now that is weather that I can appreciate. I am really looking forward to New Jersey weather. New Jersey is dramatically more mild than New York. That is a change that I am definitely ready for.

I got to Ithaca just a little after 11:00. John Stephens came up from Endicott at noon to meet me so that he could see what we do with this client and so that I could introduce him to them. There is a lot of that kind of preparation that I have to take care of over the next two weeks. There is going to be a ton of stuff that gets forgotten.

The guy that John and I were working with today had to leave the site for a little while. He ended up only making it a mile or two down the road before he got into an accident and ended up getting towed back to the shop. He is fine and no one was hurt but there was some car damage. He is not exaclty having a good day.

The work in Ithaca took about as long as I had imagined that it would. These things always end up taking a really long time. Most people think that a computer install is a short process but it really isn’t. The CD based portion of an XP install takes at least an hour. The updates that you really need to do immediately after an install really take several hours even with a really fast connection. Then there are all of the different software packages that need to be installed. User preferences. Automated maintenance to set up. Permissions, security, etc. There is just a lot involved in getting a business desktop ready for someone. None of the work is really intensive and there is a lot of just waiting around for things but still it takes a lot of your day.

I got done working around 5:30 and ran over to Borders at Triphammer Mall to do some quick shopping. There has been some items that I have wanted to find and haven’t been able to recently so I wanted to check there. I did find two books that I wasn’t able to get in Rochester and picked those up. Then I went down to downtown Ithaca and met Bob at the State Street Diner and we got some dinner.

On the way back to Geneseo I decided that I wasn’t very tired and that I wanted to get the trip to New Jersey out of the way so I called Dominica at work and convinced her to come home, pack quickly and to leave for New Jersey tonight. It will make for a really long day but it will let us come back on Sunday night instead of on Monday and I will get a day at home to prepare for things which will be really important. I have just been so busy and with spending the entire day today in Ithaca I just need time to get ready for Pittsburgh.

I got home at about 9:45 and Dominica had been home a few minutes before me. She was in process of packing and moving along quite well. I threw a few things together – we are only spending one night in a hotel – and we were out the door, in the car and pulling out of the driveway here in Geneseo at 10:01 pm. Pretty late at night to be starting a drive down to New Jersey but I was wide awake and anxious to get moving on things. I think that this is the best option overall. Still, this week is just nuts.

The drive went really well. The weather was great and we made really good time. We had to stop in Dansville at the McDonald’s so that Dominica could grab some dinner, we stopped at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center on route 81 for a restroom break and we stopped once for gas and we managed to arrive at the Comfort Inn in Easton, Pennsylvania right on the New Jersey border at 2:30 in the morning. Boy were we tired but we were so relived to have that part of the drive over and done with so that we don’t have to worry about it tomorrow.

Today is another of those insanely windy New York days. It is simply amazing how much wind whips through this part of the state.

I was up at eight this morning after having been up until two working on that blasted server. It just keeps going and going. I wanted to get another test started early so I was on top of that first thing. Tonight my cousins Sara and Jeremy are coming over to watch Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle or with its original title as we will be watching the subtitled version Hauru no ugoku shiro that just released this past Tuesday.

I forgot to mention on Tuesday’s post that I got a chance on my way to Ithaca to stop at Walmart and I picked up the new releases of Howl’s Moving Castle and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. So now you know.

I had my second round interview today for that position in New Jersey at 10:30. I interviewed three times last Wednesday and today I had a single interview with two people. One technical manager and one senior technical person. I think that it went really well. I got a really good feeling about it. But that is always dangerous. But the two guys that I talked with today sounded really nice and definitely made me feel more like I would like the position. The one person would be directly my team lead so I would be spending a lot of time dealing directly with him.

It is so insanely windy here today. A neighbour that lives several doors down to the left of us [looking out from the office] had their recycle bins blow all the way down here and into our neighbour’s driveway on the other side. The lamppost in front of the house is shaking and it is so noisy. That is the worst part. Even when you are just sitting in the house the noise of the wind never stops. It just keeps going and going. Half of the sidewalk lights that we have are blown half over from the wind. It takes a severe amount of wind to blow over a twelve inch high light post that is buried in the soil and almost directly against the wall of the garage on the leeward side with large bushes hanging over it!

More server work today. It seems like it will never end. I did actually manage to make some actual progress today for a change. But boy has it been a lot of work to get to this point. Way more than it should have been.

Today was a very nerve racking day as both Dominica and I spent most of the day just waiting for some feedback on this morning’s interview. Dominica actually managed to make herself almost sick because she was worrying about it so much.

One of my customers down in Ithaca had a viral disaster on their main office workstation this afternoon and I put in a bit of time dealing with that. It is a really bad new virus that none of the anti-virus companies have a removal tool for yet. What a pain. We put in a couple of hours working on it remotely and decided that it wasn’t worth this kind of effort. The virus is bad enough that the machine is pretty much unusable so we decided that it would be a more efficient use of time to just reinstall the machine. So I am scheduled to be down in Ithaca first thing tomorrow morning to deal with this.

I got the call at just a little after four o’clock this afternoon. I have been offered the position. Dominica is really excited. She spent a lot of the day looking at property down in New Jersey trying to find something that looked good. My start date is March 28th. Just two weeks away. Boy is there a ton to be done before I go down there. Sure, I will be home on weekends quite a bit. Especially at the beginning but still there is a lot that has to be done that I won’t be able to squeeze into the weekend times when I am home.

I called around to tons of people to let them know that I had gotten the job. Lots of people were praying for us. Times have been tough and this will help a lot. I haven’t had a traditional job since I was at IBM in 2001 and even that wasn’t that normal. My last really normal job was in 1999! This will be quite the change for me.

So the schedule stands as: Ithaca tomorrow for me. Then first thing on Sunday morning Dominica and I are driving to New Jersey. We will stay over the night and get a feel for the place and do some searching for apartments. We will be home sometime late on Monday evening. Then early Tuesday morning Andy and I are driving to Pittsburgh. We will be spending the night there and driving back to Geneseo on Wednesday evening. Thursday is the Symantec and Microsoft shows in Rochester. Friday is the teacher appreciation dinner for Castile Christian Academy. Saturday and Sunday will be crazy work days for me. My only real window to get anything done before going to Jersey. Monday I am scheduled to teach my UNIX and Linux Architecture lecture at Finger Lakes Community College. Then I have a little time during the later part of that week to get some stuff taken care of but I need to get a lot done before then. Only a few spare days before going to Jersey. I expect that I will be going down there on either the 26th or 27th. I will want to be settled in a little and comfortable before going to my first day of work.

Dad came over and picked me up at 5:30. We went over to the Omega and got our usual Friday night dinner. We both got Mac and Cheese tonight. Our regular waitresses were there and they were very sad to hear that I was moving to New Jersey.

Jeremy came over around 7:00 and played some Call of Duty 2 online while I worked in the basement trying to get that terrible server working. No luck. I am having some hardware issue now that I think I have the software issue solved. It just never ends. Sara came over at 8:45 and the three of us cousins watched Miyazaki’s latest movie Howl’s Moving Castle that just released this past Tuesday. It was pretty good. Not my favourite film by Miyazaki but definitely a really good movie.

Dominica got home just as the movie was ending. I needed to borrow an installation CD from Jeremy so Dominica, Oreo and I rode drove down to Leicester and got that so that I would not have to deal with it in the morning. Then we came back to Geneseo and went to Pizza Paul’s and got some slices for dinner. The students are on spring break (only educational institutions have spring break in the winter) and so the place was closing early. We were the last people there and we got all but the last slice of pizza. We got a gigantic and really delicious fudge brownie and split it. Then it was home and off to bed. Tomorrow is going to be a really busy day.

Oreo and I slept in a little this morning. We are both snuggle deprived so we had to catch up a little. We didn’t stay in bed for too long. But it felt really good to get a whole night’s sleep again. We went to bed last night as soon as Dominica got home. We were all really tired. Oreo was exhausted from having been at my dad’s house playing outside in the “big backyard” all day. He had a really great time.

Oreo was totally beat today and spent the entire day sleeping on his pillow in the office. He never wanted to play or to do anything. He just slept. Dad must have really worn him out.

Sheep Guarding Llama is back up and running today and I am finally getting a chance to catch everyone up on the last few days. Sorry that I have been too busy to get anything posted but I haven’t even had much time to check on my email or anything. I have been really out of touch. The site came back online last night at 8:00 or so after having been down since Tuesday. I posted some new pics to Flickr today. I know that everyone is sick of the same old ones that haven’t changed in a while. Sometimes I just forget to post them there. The pics posted today are some of the first ones from my new Nikon D50. The last two, views from the Office and Deck are taken with the new lens that Dominica bought for me for my birthday.

Today ended up being a really busy day. There was a lot to be done with me having been gone for two days. It is amazing how quickly things pile up. I got some feedback on my interview by late this morning. The consulting firm said that the company was really happy with me and that they liked me and that their primary concern was that I might not be willing to commit to the position being permanent. This would be, of course, because they are hiring me as a contractor so perm doesn’t really enter into the equation. I think that the real problem might be that they are going about hiring perm employees in a really poor manner. So we talked about that and we will have to see what they think. I have an additional telephone interview scheduled for tomorrow morning at 10:30. That should be the final interview so it is possible that we might know something by late tomorrow but I think that that is probably pretty unlikely. Much more likely that we will hear something the middle of next week which is a real pain.

So it turns out, apparently, that this job is a lot more serious than I had anticipated. We didn’t really think that there was much of any possibility for this to be a real option and the whole point of me going down to Warren was really to make contacts, keep my interviewing skillz in shape, etc. But it is looking like they are pretty serious about me actually coming down there to work. That is totally not what I was expecting at all. So I called Dominica at work and we talked about what we thought of me actually working down there. We decided that if the interview tomorrow goes well and we get some positive feedback that she and I will drive down to New Jersey on Saturday night and stay through Monday and get a really good feel for the area. Dominica has really never been to New Jersey at all except to go to the Jersey Shore which is quite some ways away and in a very different area. We spent some time this afternoon looking at condo and townhouse options around the area. Oh boy is Jersey expensive! Really, really expensive. I have no idea how anyone can live there.

Michael and Danielle came over at 1:30 to borrow the SD card reader on my laptop for a few minutes. Neither Danielle nor I had eaten yet so we ran over to the Omega and got some lunch.

I did some additional server work today. Yes I am still trying to get that server working. I can’t believe how many headaches I am getting on this one piece of hardware. I am not happy anymore, let me tell you. This just keeps going and going. I am really at a point where I just need it to work so that I can get on with all of the work that I need to get done.

Fortunately the work that I did today again let me work down in the basement for a while and I was able to finish watching Urban Cowboy that I started a few nights ago and then I watched Saturday Night Fever. Neither movie do I find good or enjoyable. In fact John Travolta really is a terrible actor and those movies are just super poor movies about the worst of white trash in the later 1970’s. Now really the kind of movies that I would want to subject myself to again. Travolta is hardly the only bad actor in either of these films. Both movies are just loaded with bargain basement actors who aren’t taking these movies seriously at all. But then again, read the script and decide for yourself whether or not you would bother taking them seriously if it was your career. Probably not.

Dominica did some grocery shopping on the way home. She got in and we watched at episode of Remington Steele and headed for bed. I ended up needing to do some additional server work before actually heading off to bed so I stayed up much later than Dominica did.

I woke up this morning at 6:20 – forty minutes before my wake up call. Not bad for having gone to bed at 2:00 and having barely gotten any sleep the night before. I was very proud of myself. I got right out of bed, showered, shaved (beard and head,) packed and was out of the hotel right at 8:00. Plenty of time to get out to Warren, New Jersey where my interview was this morning.

The sun was bright and shining and it was a truly beautiful day. It was almost forty miles from Easton, Pennsylvania where I was staying in the hotel to Warren. I thought that traffic would be awful and that it would take forever but almost all of the trip was very lightly trafficed and the trip was great. I was in Warren quite a bit before 9:00. Interview was at 10:00.

I ended up spending a lot of my spare time driving around looking for the address that I had been given. It turned out that the address doesn’t really exist at all and that I actually had to be on a different road than I was told. But fortunately the directions got me close enough that I was able to find the place without any additional help anyway. I was into the parking garage by 9:30 and had some time to kill.

I met my consulting firm contact at 9:45 and he got me signed in and past security. I went up to the interview at 10:00. I had three separate interviews by noon. Then I was done and able to head out of town. The facility sits directly on US 78 and I was right back onto the highway in no time at all. I called in to the consulting firm and gave them the overview of how it went and headed for home.

The state of New Jersey provides Google with awesome satellite photos of the entire state. It is really handy. I guess of any state it makes the most sense for New Jersey to do it since they are our most densely populated state. Here is the satellite photo of the building that I was interviewing in. On the left is the parking garage and on the right is the actual office building. That is Building B. If you zoom out just a tiny bit you can see that that building actually sites directly on the side of the on ramp to US78. It doesn’t get any handier than that.

So how did it go? I know that everyone is wondering that. Well, it is an interview. It is impossible to tell how well it went. It didn’t go horribly. That much I know. I felt pretty good about the whole thing. Dominica and I are really not thinking much about me getting this position. It is very unlikely and I haven’t been job hunting so it isn’t like we are dependant on it in any way. In fact we aren’t really convinced that we even want it. Sure the money would be great but there are a lot of factors. The interview did reinforce the fact, though, that this is a massively enterprise environment and there is a lot of great educational opportunity to be had.

It only took half an hour before I was back into Pennsylvania. It was a great day for traveling. I called around and let everyone know how the interview had gone. I stopped at the Delaware Water Gap rest station on US78 just as you enter Pennsylvania and headed for New York. I grapped a quick lunch at the one service center on the turnpike headed north so that I wouldn’t have to make a major stop and get off of the highway again until I got to Geneseo. It took only five and a half hours for me to go from Warren to Geneseo and that included two bathroom stops, one lunch stop and at least fifteen minutes lost because I missed a turn and had to figure out how to get back onto the highway going the direction that I wanted to go. So I figure that the drive itself is only about five hours flat. Not bad at all. At least when there isn’t any traffic. I hit almost none the entire way.

It is really positive that the commute to and from Warren is only five hours. We had been assuming that it was more like seven hours. Seven hours would make the job a lot more prohibitive. It would mean driving home on a Friday night just to go straight to bed. But five hours means that the drive itself would not be completely exhausting and that there would be time left to do things once I got back. It I left Warren at 5:00 on a Friday evening I could easily beat Dominica home from work.

I was home at 5:30 and dad was over shortly thereafter to drop off Oreo. Oreo was very excited that I was home and gave me lots of kisses. He really hates me being away. If I end up getting this job, which I won’t, it will be really tough dealing with him. Dominica has started looking into doggie day care options because he can’t possibly be left home alone all day.

Dad and I did dinner at the Omega. We didn’t hang out too long. I was pretty tired between just having had so much to do and not having gotten very much sleep the last several days. I really needed to just get home and relax for a little while.

Dominica’s USB powered desktop aquarium finally arrived today. I ordered it for her so that I could give it to her for Christmas and it only just arrived today. How ridiculous is that? She will be very excited to finally have that. She told everyone at work that she was getting one and I don’t think that they believe her anymore.