Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is even more beautiful than yesterday. It is over seventy degrees out! I can’t believe it.

I managed to sleep in well today. Not because people didn’t call but because I kept the phone out of my bedroom. I didn’t miss anything important anyway. I think one call was a wrong number and one was Eric forgetting to read SGL before he called my house.

I slept until 12:30 which was decently close to eight hours of sleep. I had taken the garbage out at 4:00 this morning and the weather was so nice that I decided that I had to take a walk and enjoy it. So I walked for about half an hour. Not a long walk because my ankle was bothering me but it was a little bit of excercise anyway. Every little bit helps.

Dad came over at 2:00 to install some white boards that he had picked up for me from Home Depot. We got four of them but we he only put up two because we don’t really have a good spot for the other two yet. I am hoping that having them will help keep me a little bit more organized than I have been.

Eric found a nice computer in the trash at the hospital and is going to be replacing his dying desktop with it. He managed to find a PIII-1GHz machine that will be much nicer than what he has now. And, cooler yet, it comes with Windows 2000 Pro installed on it so that is really nice too. We are hopeful that it will work to connect to our corporate VPN and let him do a bit more work remotely. Right now he is really disconnected from the company since he is in a remote location, doesn’t control his Internet access and runs a different operating system than the rest of the company. He also found a nice looking laser printer in the trash yesterday could, potentially, be something nice for his office too. He is stuck with a super cheap deskjet right now. What a pain that must be.

Dad took off around 4:00 – he has a lot to do today. My day was pretty slow. I try not to do too much before going into Wegmans. I am working the overnight again tonight. No idea where the project is going yet but I know that, at very least, this week is all set. I don’t work next week so I don’t have to worry about it for two whole weeks. Then we will see where things are at that point.

Either I have caught a cold or I have allergies. I have never had allergies before, as far as I know, so this is new. It seems to hit me whenever it is warm outside so that would appear to be allergy related. I am feeling fine, just congested.

I have already started using my white board. That is nice to have. Art, Danielle and Michael came over for a little while this evening. Art is borrowing a firewall and wanted to look at our refridgerator to see about installing a water line so that our fridge will start making ice cubes (we have never bothered to have that installed.)

After the Ralstons left, Min and I ran over to Burger King and got some dinner. Tonight is my super short evening because I am working the overnight. We got back from dinner and I pretty much just got my laptop and everything packed up and ready to head into work. I am in Perinton tonight.

Another awesome day today. Sixty degrees and sunny. What a change! It is a really great day to be having casual meetings in the city so that I can get out and enjoy this weather a little bit.

I got a couple of calls this morning and had to leap out of bed and take care of a few things before starting the day. But that is okay, the weather is awesome.

I managed to get out of the door at 9:30 on the dot and headed for downtown. I got to “The Spot” at 10:10 and met Craig for coffee. We only stayed inside for about an hour. After that we just stood in front of the coffee shop because the weather was so nice. We hung out until 1:00 or so and decided that we should stop loitering in downtown Rochester and move on to some lunch. Craig only pencilled me in for two hours. I have no idea what he was thinking. Like anyone can talk to me for only two hours. HA!

We called Eric and swung by the hospital to pick him up. The three of us went over to Aja Noodle at Twelve Corners in Brighton. That place is great. I have never been up there before – I don’t usually hang out in that part of town. I am glad that we went there because the food was amazing and not expensive at all. They do a variety of upscale Asian cuisine from all over the place. Good lunch menu. The three of us hung out there until around 4:00. Eric had to “get back to work” so we took off.

After work, Eric and Amanda met Min and I over at the Omega Grill for some dinner. Rachel actually got to come along. We never managed to get to visit with them when Rachel is around. I won’t bore you with food details 😉

Min and I watched an episode of Angel before she had to head off to work. She is training another auditor tonight. The other main auditor quit recently and Min is stuck as the trainer for part of the time. She hates training.

I wanted to stay up late tonight so that I would sleep in late tomorrow so that it would be easier to work late tomorrow night. We will see. I have yet to be able to sleep in in the least after doing this same thing for three weeks. At least this week I remembered to take the trash out before going to bed instead of having to jump out of bed and run out there with the trash like an idiot. There is a lot of it too since I kept forgetting to take it out for so long.

I poked my head out of the door around 7:30 this morning and let me tell you, it is looking like it is going to be a beautiful day. The Weather Channel says that it is only 36 degrees right now and that it is only supposed to hit 44 as a high today but I think that they must be mistaken. Tomorrow is due to be near 60, though. I am looking forward to that.

Min just got home, it is 8:00, and even though it is so gorgeous out here, she said that the thruway is closed to the west due to extreme blizzard conditions. There are people trapped in cars south of Buffalo that can only be reached by snowmobile at this point. And Rochester didn’t get touched. She had a ton of people cancel their reservations last night because they either got stuck in their cars or they decided not to leave Pennsylvania. It is weird to have such radically different weather so close in proximity to us. I guess New York is really like that.

Dad picked us up for breakfast at 8:15 and we headed over to the Omega Grill. We hung out there until about 9:30 then Min and I headed home to get some sleep. We were both totally exhausted.

I was up and moving by 2:30 this afternoon. I can’t believe that I managed to just wake up after that little sleep and being awake for so long before hand. But my stomach was bothering me a little and sleep wasn’t helping it so that was a contributing factor.

I managed to get a hold of Craig today, he is actually still alive but had a really busy weekend. We are doing coffee tomorrow morning. We say tomorrow morning, but it will probably go into the afternoon significantly.

Today was tax day for me. I got all of the paperwork together for my taxes last night and Min got them together this morning. This afternoon I had to go through all of my electric bills and figure out what my power consumption was this year. Power is really expensive. I know that everyone things that I spend a fortune on my utilities but I want to know how people are getting away much more cheaply than I am. We average $205 per month, that is electric and gas together. The gas is between 25% and 30% of the total utility bill, on average. The house is totally lighted by florescent lights except for a few stray lights here and there that are still incadescent – but I am still working on getting rid of those too. The bedrooms each have one incadescent bulb and the basement has one in my office – but not my main light. Speaking of which, we have at least one spare halogen lamp and maybe two, if anyone would like one. We aren’t using them and they are just in the way here. Plus I use a low power Mac and a laptop for all of my computing which are both like a quarter of the power consumption of regular computers and we have all LCD monitors in the house which are just a fraction compared to CRTs as well. Plus my computers and Min’s are off at night. Min’s is off almost all of the time. She only has it on maybe three or four times in a week.

I had one last test to take this afternoon to qualify for the big Brainbench Certified .NET Programmer, the Web Services Application Engineering exam. So I took that while Min was cooking dinner. I thought that I was going to do really poorly (okay, I know that everyone is getting sick of hearing that one) but I pulled off a really half decent score. Enough that I am quite happy with it.

As soon as Min went to leave for work, I can down to the basement and discovered the mouse that had been lured into the mouse cube. With any luck, that will be the only one that is in the house. I am sure that that is not the case, but at least we caught the one. So, of course, that meant that I had to take a walk to take our little friend far, far away from the house. Mice seem to be really good and finding their way back to the house so we can’t let that happen. He was very cute and looked very sad to have been caught and yet quite thrilled with all of the peanut butter that he got to eat.

Well, I went walking for about half an hour. It was good that I caught the mouse so that I had to get out and get a little exercise. I got back and updated What Scott Ate Today and SGL2 but, of course, Blogger lost my post to SGL2. They lose about 50% of what I upload to them. They are really having serious issues there and they are going to be losing customers quickly if they don’t do something about it. I did end up getting the info posted. So you can go read my short tidbit over there. I have noticed that almost none of you out there in the blogosphere have been writing anything for me to read. Tony is about the only person who has been writing anything at all. Min and Jeremy have been silent for a week and Danielle for two or more. C’mon people, I need stuff to read too, you know!

After I got back from my walk I took one last test. I took the C++ Programming test. I skimmed by. Just barely passing but hey, good enough for us non-programmers. That got me not just my BCP in C++ but also my Job Role Cert as a C++ Programmer. I am now heavily certified on every major programming language group (C++, Java and .NET) so I could compete for jobs just about anywhere. Not that I am looking to do that. But it is nice to have options these days.

I am not really tired and would really like to stay up late tonight but I am meeting Craig for coffee tomorrow morning downtown so I have to get some sleep tonight. Hopefully by tomorrow I will have something to talk about other than my test taking. Sorry to be doing that so much but I can hardly change my lifestyle just to make my blog more interesting to read.

Spring ahead. Man I hate daylight savings time. I think that that is the dumbest thing in the world. What idiot ever thought of that? Okay, I looked it up and it was Benjamin Franklin. We didn’t implement the ruling until 1966, however, when we enacted the Uniform Time Act. This act didn’t actually force us to change the clocks, it just required that people be uniform about whatever they do. Now if that isn’t confusing. Usually I think that old Ben Franklin is a pretty bright guy, but has no one ever noticed that the effects of Daylight Savings Time would simply be redundant if people did things at a logical time of day anyway? All we are doing is making idiots more likely to do things at a certain time because the television schedule changes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the US government didn’t make some deal with big broadcast media conglomerates to be sure that they were going to honor DST. If I owned Time Warner or Cox Cable, let me tell you, I would keep the schedule rock steady all year long and let the world try to change around me. Maybe I would move all of the programming to a more logical time if that is the real issue. But I wouldn’t go changing it forward and back every six months like a looney. Apparently, the purpose of the whole deal (as originally stated by old BF himself and reiterated later by the feds) is that DST is used to reduce the total electricity consumed by 1%. Okay. So what they are saying is that the time of day that people choose to do certain activities is inappropriate but since Americans are generally idiots, they can just shift the official clocks and we will shift right along with them and solve the issues. Seems to me that the real issue here is a poor education system if people are having that much of a problem doing activities during daylight if that is what they really prefer. Me, I prefer to do a lot of work at night. I also prefer, most of the time, not to have a whole bunch of extra lights on for no reason. And just to save electricity, I make sure that all of my house lights are florescent (of course, then they are full of mercury – I guess we can’t win, can we?) If we were just teaching our kids how to use less power or how to do activities at logical times, none of this would be necessary at all. But since schools HAVE to run on a certain schedule (classes begin at 7:45am) we figure that we can just set our clocks to make 7:45 at the most convenient “time” and the education system will never figure out what hit it. Now teachers are teaching home room at what is actually 8:45 but apparently, they don’t realize that. And all of those businesses that keep making people come to work too early – they will never notice that the overseas contacts that they are trying to call are not available when they used to be. No, that doesn’t have an impact on anyone. Hello Mr. Congressman, we live in a global economy, we work with people from all over the world. DST makes us look like idiots. I have tried to explain DST to a friend in Singapore and she honestly thought I was off my rocker. She couldn’t believe that our country would be so backward. It is amazing that we use time zones at all, really. Why not run the whole world on GMT and have everyone know what everyone else is talking about all of the time. Sure there are downsides, but not many. Most everything would be REALLY straightforward – all of the time.

Tony went with Min and I to church this morning. It was his first time going down to LaGrange. He seem to have a good time and enjoy the service. Pastor Dan wasn’t speaking today. That has happened to us almost every time that someone comes with us to visit the church. I think that our friends all think that we make him up.

As we were leaving church, Dave Marsh stopped me and told me that he had been doing a search on the web for information about finding a good Indian restaurant in Rochester. In doing his search he found, you guessed it, Sheep Guarding Llama! He read the site for a little while because it was SO interesting (I am paraphrasing there) and eventually figured out that he knew who I was. How funny is that. Imagine how many people must read this site and not know who I am. There must be millions of people reading SGL. Okay, but over a hundred at least.

After church was lunch in Perry. No surprises there. Then Min was off to work and Tony took some more tests. I did some reading and Andy worked on his video game engine some more. Only four more weeks until he is done with work.

Tony hung around for a little while this afternoon taking more tests. Eventually I ran out of reading to do and set up a computer to do a test myself. Might as well take advantage of the quiet in the house. After my test I ran Tony home to Avon. He has school tomorrow. I stopped at Walmart on the way home and picked up Mulholland Falls, Once Upon A Time in the West, Roxanne and Closer which just released with Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law and Clive Owen. I have been wanting to see that.

Like all Sunday evenings, I reclused to me office to get some “me” time. I did some catching up no the blog(s) since the earlier part of the weekend is always rough. Earlier I had discovered what I thought might have been a mouse dropping in the other room. “Oh great” I thought. “Just what I need.” But it wasn’t enough to convince me that that was what it was. Every so often I think that I might see something or hear something moving in the basement but I always manage to convince myself that it is just my imagination. Well, tonight, while sitting quietly and writing the daily, some animal in the piles on the other side of the office decided to move stuff around. Maybe it is a mouse. I hope that it is a mouse. It made so much noise that I am afraid that it could be something larger. It was a lot of noise. Not like a raccoon or anything. But maybe a rat. The dropping really was tiny, though, much smaller than a hamster dropping. I guess that it is time to put out the mouse cubes again. I hope that this eventually comes to an end. Of course, I was supposed to have put cement into the holes around the house and didn’t do that. So that is going to be one of my tasks the moment that the weather is remotely warm again.

Well, I put out two mouse cubes tonight with peanut butter on crackers in them. Hopefully the mice will go for them right away. Hopefully they will be little cute mice like before and not huge rats that don’t fit into the cubes. That would be bad.

I wasn’t tired at all tonight so I decided to try my hand at the Brainbench VB.NET certification. Andy is ranked No. 2 in New York on that one and Tony had given it a shot yesterday. Having never written anything more than a simple Hello World in VB.NET and only having used VB6 a tiny bit some five or six years ago, I figured that I would have a pretty tough time with this one. It was really hard but I passed with a 3.24. Not bad for my first time going after that exam. I ranked number 28 in New York.

I really must not have been tired because at 4:00 in the morning I was still playing with the hamster. And dad is coming at 8:00 for breakfast. Min actually signed off at work and I was still up. Around 5:30 I decided that I wasn’t going to get the chance to get any sleep and since I would be working the overnight (presumably) in two nights, I might as well stay up all night and be able to sleep in with Min in the morning. That seemed like a plan.

Aroung a quarter till six I decided to take another Brainbench to keep myself awake. There can only be so many worth taking so I figure that I will get as many out of the way as possible. There are a bunch of really dumb ones that I have to take because they are part of the bigger job roles. Things like spelling, vocabulary and written English. I decided to try the .Net Framework exam. That one was pretty tough. And I had an especially hard time taking it because I kept nodding off while I was taking it. I fell asleep completely at least twice but luckily woke up quickly enough to be able to answer the questions. I made number 31 in New York. Of course, it is a really weird test to ranked on but at least I am on the list.

I am afraid that I am getting a little bit delirious at this point in the morning and I am probably not making very much sense. I have been up for almost twenty-four hours at this point. Of course, Min does this every week and I am starting to do it on Wednesday nights now and will be doing it more soon – but still. Well, it is 7:00am. Anything that happens after this point should be considered tomorrow anyway. The sun is up and streaming into my basement office. I might as well go upstairs and get my shower out of the way so that Andy can take his later and have hot water.

Good morning, everyone!

The big news today is that Nate and Tammy had their baby! Annalee Ruth was born at 2:53am. Six pounds, seven ounces and 19.5 inches long.

We didn’t stay up all that late last night but we got up pretty late today? I guess that we had some sleep to catch up on. Min and I got up somewhere around 11:00. But I feel much better. I have been losing a lot of sleep all week and I needed to do some catching up.

Min was knitting and watching Angel: Season One in our room so I decided to watch a little of it with her. I normally take Saturdays off since I pretty much have to work on Sundays and so does she so it just works out to make Saturday our day off (imagine that, taking the Sabbath off, what a bizarre concept.) So, after wrapping up the episode that we were watching upstairs on her 17″ computer monitor, we moved down to the theatre so that we could really watch it and she started from the beginning of the series so that I would know what is going on. We made it through about two episodes.

Tony called just a little after we had gotten up because he wanted to come over and work on taking some of the Brainbench exams while they were still free – which is only until Monday.

Andy was just about to head out the door to get Tony when his pager went off and he had to head into Wegmans. It is so much fun being on call. Actually it isn’t too bad. He gets paid quite a bit to do very little while on call. I would actually much prefer it to not being on call if I had the choice and the price was decent. I like spontenaity. Or however that is spelled. So I headed out to pick up Tony and bring him down to do his certifications.

So Tony did a couple of tests while Min and I continued watching Angel. I have never been a fan of the “Buffy” shows but Angel isn’t too bad. It isn’t awesome or anything but pretty decent. It is entertaining. Mostly just an action television show.

After his tests, Tony came along with Min and I to do some shopping in the city. Min and I both needed new shoes so we stopped by the shoe store in the South Town Plaza and managed to get four pairs at buy one get one half off (I am pretty sure that they always have that sale.) I got one pair of sneakers, they are exactly like the pair that I already had but new (duh!) and a 10 1/2 Wide instead of 11 1/2 Normal. When I was a young teen, I used to wear size 13’s! Now that I have figured out the shape of my feet, I can wear shoes far smaller than I used to be able to wear. Min got one new pair of Adidas and two pairs of dress shoes. Then the three of us headed off to the Pakistan House, Rochester’s most awesome Indian restaurant. I am pretty sure that the cuisine is actually Pakistani but they call it Indian when you are there but I think they are just dumbing it down for the Rochester crowd. I think that Pakistani cuisine and Northern Indian is extremely similar. I talked to one of the owners as we were leaving and he was really excited that we were driving all of the way from Geneseo to eat there on a regular basis. It was a great meal as always and Tony really like it to – it being his first even Indian meal.

We went to Borders after dinner. I wanted to look for a couple things. I found a really nice reference to the Microsoft Windows command line from MSPress that was 40% off so I got that. And I found a good book for learning J2EE and with all of the Java testing that I have been doing I decided that I needed to learn more about that.

We got home and Tony did some more tests and Min and I went to bed.