Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is the one day this week that I don’t have to go anywhere. What a relief.

I spent the morning working around the house. I had some paperwork to do for New Jersey along with plenty of work here that just needs to be completed before I can go. Plenty to keep me busy.

I scheduled my drug test for first thing on Monday morning. I have never done a drug test before so this should be interesting. I have to drive up to the city for that. No big deal. Dominica decided that she will go along with me and we will get breakfast and then go look at doggie daycare places for Oreo.

I also had to schedule my fingerprinting. Now this is going to be a problem. The paperwork says that I need to get to New York City to have it down. Um, what? That is a little ways away and not exactly something that is going to fit into my schedule over the next week since I only have five days left before moving (five business days that is) and they need me doing my drug test on Monday, I am lecturing at FLCC on Wednesday, flying to South Carolina on Wednesday night and returning on Friday night. That doesn’t leave much of a window for an unplanned trip down to New York – especially when I wanted to use that window to get new tires for my car before I have to do so much driving.

Fortunately someone in the Rochester office managed to work their magic and managed to get me fingerprinted in Rochester. But it absolutely had to be done today. So that is tough to do but way better than trying to deal with a trip to New York. Boy are things getting busy. Ugh. And I thought that today would be a nice, relaxing day at home.

While I was going through the paperwork for the job in New Jersey I noticed that my employment agreement was changed from what our verbal and email agreements had been and they were lowering my pay rate significantly. This was hidden in the form of us having agreed (verbally and in writing which I had kept) to an hourly rate but the contract was written for a hybrid salary system that involved me only getting paid for eight hours a day but being required to work up to ten (a professional daily rate is the term.) Well, since I am expected to be working long hours down in New Jersey I figured that this was a pretty big deal, 20% cut in my expected pay expected and possibly more. That wasn’t going to fly. So I called down to see what was up with that but my rep was on the other line and had to call me back.

I called up to the Rochester office to warn them that I probably didn’t need to do the fingerprinting today and to stop wasting time on my paperwork since I was definitely not going to be accepting the job given the drop in pay. We had actually been a little nervous about the low rate that I had taken in the first place but I have had a really good relationship with this consulting firm in the past and I felt that it was worth taking a much lower rate than I usually ask for. Also this position is an incredible experience for me. Tons of really great experience both from a technology side but also from a corporate culture and peer interaction perspective. The woman who does my paperwork was out to lunch but the receptionist asked what company the job was for and the world wide rep for the contract just happened to be in Rochester today! What are the chances? Actually they must have been pretty good since this had to be God watching over me. No way this was coincidence since it required that the world wide rep be in Rochester, not be on the phone, the person that I was calling to be out and the receptionist to decide to find someone to handle me instead of sending me to voicemail like any other time.

So the rep called down to New Jersey after talking to me. Then the rep in New Jersey called me back to explain what had happened and profusely appologized about the miscommunication. After he explained what had happened I could see how he had missed one step in the process and had thought I knew how they were doing their billing and payment systems. He admitted to having missed telling me that piece. I wasn’t too happy, though, and was definitely not going to be accepting the position whether the mistake was intentional or not. (It is important to note that my BASE rate, i.e. the amount that I would be paid should I work forty hours a week, had not changed – only the amount that I would get paid between forty and fifty hours a week. But we have been expecting me to be working long hours down there so this dramatically affected our expected pay.) So I turned the job down.

After I turned the position down they decided to raise my base rate (the “hourly rate” if you will which is difficult to explain because I am only hourly after ten hours a day.) Dominica and I talked about it and felt that the mistake was legitimate and that no one was trying to pull a fast one and that the raised base rate would probably be better for us in the long run. Here is the quick explanation:

Old System (what we had agreed to originally): Hourly at a set rate. Forty hours a week at flat rate and then overtime at time and a half. We are expecting that I will be working long hours and I will be on call almost all of the time. This is expected but not guaranteed. Any budgeting that we do would have to be based off of the “hourly rate times forty hours” equation.

New System (what we have now agreed to): Daily Professional Salary Rate. I am expected to work eight to ten hours a day at a fixed rate. If they need me less than eight hours I don’t have to stay but I get paid for eight hours anyway. Between eight and ten hours on a given day I get paid nothing, basically. Then, after the tenth hour I get time and a half overtime based on the higher hourly rate. So with the new rate I have over a ten percent pay increase in the base rate, the minimum that I would get in a week. But if I work a fifty hour week then I am getting less than before. So, under the new system I make out significantly if my day is less than ten hours long and very significantly if it is under eight hours long. I also make out if a single day is over seventeen hours long – but that isn’t very likely. I make out the best if I get called in on the weekend.

So the whole thing is a gamble because we don’t know how much I will be working or how it will be divided up. It is a very complex system and you would have to do some cool linear algebra using an awesome tool like Microsoft Excel (or, I suppose, a calculator and a piece of graph paper and a nice No. 2 Staedtler mechanical pencil) to show the comparison between hourly, daily professional and salary and to see how different base rates compare to different hours works. The thing that makes it so complex is that now my overtime is a day to day item and not a week to week item. Very strange. And hard to keep straight in your head.

The bottom line ends up being: We are still on for New Jersey and everyone is pretty much happy. After really looking at the numbers Dominica and I felt that this really ended up being to our advantage. We lessened the gamble on our end. We are less likely to make tons of money but more likely to make enough. This is the “safer” way to go. And is better for preventing burnout since I am not as encouraged to work insanely long hours.

I had to run to Rochester quite quickly after dealing with all of that because I still needed to be fingerprinted. I had to run to Bushnell’s Basin. It is almost a forty five minute drive. Then it took about forty five more minutes to do the fingerprinting and associated paperwork. Then I had to drive back home. Oreo was riding along with me. I got home and dropped off Oreo and changed so that I could go to the Castile Christian Academy’s Teacher Appreciation Dinner in Castile. But before I left I realized that our email server was effectively down (probably slow to the point of being down.) So I got stuck working on that trying to get it functional enough to make it through the evening. No rest for the weary… again.

I finally got down to Castile and walked in just as everyone was finishing their desserts. There was plenty of food for me, though. It was really good and I was really glad that I had gotten to eat because it was 7:00 in the evening at this point and I hadn’t had a chance to eat a single thing all day! Dinner was delicious and I was early enough that I got a chance to hear dad’s speach. He did the “sermon” portion of the evening talking about the importance of teachers and their role in a Godly education process. He did a really good job. Tonight was really hard for him because tomorrow would have been his and mom’s anniversary so being at the dinner tonight was on the anniversary of the rehearsal dinner in probably a very similar setting.

I drove back to Geneseo and stopped off at Pizza Paul’s to get dinner for Dominica and I for later. Yes I was just coming from dinner but remember it was my only meal of the day and I didn’t get all that much because I was so late. So I got the pizza for Min and I to share when she got home from work.

On the way home I talked to Josh and he said that Phil and Kate’s house warming party was this evening. We have been so out of touch recently it is just horrible. We haven’t talked to just about anyone in months. I have been so busy with work that I just never get a chance to do much of anything and Dominica’s schedule is just murder for seeing other people. She gets home late enough that we can’t even call people once she gets home and she works both Friday and Saturday nights so nobody is able to do things with us on nights when we are available. I called Min at work and we talked about meeting up in the city so that we could go to the party and see everyone but Friday nights are the worst night of the week for Min. She gets out the latest of any night (same as several nights) and Saturday is her early day and by Friday she is all ready exhausted and not looking forward to returning to work. So we decided to pass on the party even though we really wanted to get up there and see everyone. What a lonely life we live 🙁

Dominica got home a little before eleven as usual. We ate our pizza and watched an episode of Remington Steele before heading off to bed. I stayed up a little to keep doing some server work but not very long.

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.