Sheep Guarding Llama

Liesl came into our room in the middle of the night and slept with us.  This morning she explained to me that she had bad dreams about robots and lobsters and that is why she didn’t want to sleep by herself.  Robots and lobsters?

Today concludes my blow off weekend of doing no, or as little as possible, work.  It felt great.  We slept in this morning and spent the later part of the morning hanging out with the girls.  In the middle of the afternoon suddenly Dominica announced that the final episode of Dr. Who season seven part two, the big finale “Name of the Doctor” episode had finally released to Amazon VOD so we immediately made some snacks, took over the living room viewing center and watched the final episode.

I’ve been checking every few hours to see if my grades had posted yet for my last class.  As far as I know, I literally have only one assignment left to get graded on in my entire RIT academic career and that is the one that I submitted on Friday evening.  I know that grades are due very soon so I’m expecting to see the grade post much more quickly than normal.  Finally early the afternoon it showed up – my final project and assignment came in at a one hundred percent. By my calculations I am far and away above an A in both of this semesters classes and unless I am terribly mistaken that then means that I have actually completed a straight A, 4.0 GPA for my entire graduate program!  To further extrapolate, I think that that means Summa Cum Laude.  We’ll have to see if I am correct on that as RIT does not seem to have any obvious information about how the academic rankings actually work.

This evening Liesl and I settled into my office at her request to play The Book of Unwritten Tales which she discovered yesterday.  We had just played the tiniest bit yesterday and she probably missed the first fifteen or twenty minutes but had watched a bit of, enough to know that she liked it.  Today she made me play many hours of the game.  Maybe even five or six hours of game play time!  She loves it.  It is a point and click adventure game.  She sits on a kitchen chair that she places next to my desk and watches me play.  She will alternative onto my lap from time to time.  She brought in another kitchen chair and put its back to her space to make a “cage” that she was trapped in.  Later she brought blankets and her and Luciana’s small armchairs and made a bit of a prison system.  It was very odd.

The Book of Unwritten Tales, which I picked up from Steam, is pretty cute.  Great music and nice graphics it takes me back to my King’s Quest and Monkey Island days.  Very old school for me, I haven’t played this kind of game to any degree for quite a long time.  It is a nice departure and I really enjoy showing Liesl was games were like when I was younger.  It’s really cool that I can share this with her already.  That all of the dialogue is narrated makes it work really well for her.

Dominica had to pack tonight.  She works tomorrow morning and the girls are going to daycare and then she is leaving right after work to drive down to Houston.  We aren’t sure who is going to pick up the girls yet.  Probably me so that she can get out the door and on the road as quickly as she can.  She wants to be able to beat traffic or the drive will be awful.  She has to have all of her packing done tonight as there won’t be any time for her to do it tomorrow.

We were heading to bed, she was actually in bed already, when our daycare provider cancelled on us for tomorrow.  That caused a little panic.  I guess I will be staying home with the girls tomorrow.  No way around that.  The good part of that is that it makes it much easier for Dominica to get to work and get out the door.

I got to sleep in a bit this morning. No need to get up, for a change.  No classes needing my attention and no work scheduled for this weekend.  It has been so long that this feels amazing.  We did pretty much nothing all morning.  We watched the two remaining Doctor Who episodes that were available to us in Season 7 and we have one more to go that airs tonight on the BBC and, in theory, we will have available to watch on Amazon VOD by sometime tomorrow.

Mid-afternoon I went out to Redneck with Watson.  I’m on wingman duty today so Dominica didn’t mind.  We weren’t out for long.  Got home and relaxed all evening.  I did some investigating of video games that looked interesting on Steam and found The Book of Unwritten Tales  which is much like a modern take on a Monkey Island style game – object use and dialogue based puzzles in a story-driven adventure setting.  Cute, easy, not stressful.

I played it only for a little bit before Liesl decided to come in and check out the game.  We probably played it together for an hour this evening.  She loved it.  She didn’t play at all, she just watched me play.  She is able to follow it very easily, though, and the art work is very kid friendly being rather cartoony and cute and the puzzles are easy enough that she understands what is happening.  So she is having a good time with it.  It’s fun to be able to play a game with her hanging out with me.

It is Friday and I was in the office today.  I did a little work on my project during the day but mostly saved it for this evening.  For lunch several of us went to Redneck.

I actually got out of work at a good time tonight and got home and was able to work on my final project at home.  I put in a few hours and actually managed to turn in the project a few hours before the final minute.  This made Dominica very happy because she really wanted to start watching the current season of Doctor Who which we have been holding off on watching until my classes were done because we knew that once we started watching it that that would be the end and that we would watch all of it that was available.

So around eight this evening we set up the PS3 so that we could watch Amazon VOD in the living room on the big screen and set to watching it until the wee hours of the morning.  We made it through most of the season tonight.  Liesl stayed up watching most of it with us as she loves Doctor Who.

We have a few episodes to watch yet tomorrow and one that releases, in theory, tomorrow night.  So Sunday we should be done with the season.

I am so glad to finally be done with all of my class stuff.  I still have my thesis or capstone left to go but that is it, nothing else.  No more classes at all.  This weekend is going to be a complete relaxation one now that I have turned in my project.  I’ve been needing this for a while.

It is Thursday.  Classes for RIT will be done in every way, shape and form by tomorrow night.  So today is my lat full day to work on my final project.  This is it, no stopping now.

I was in the office today and actually did pretty little course work.  I still have tonight and tomorrow to work on that and I needed a little downtime for my brain.

Uneventful day. Came home and hung out with the family since we really didn’t get to spend any time together the last two days.  The girls have missed me and I’ll likely be stuck at work until late tomorrow.

So tonight we mostly just watched some of Rules of Engagement.

Spiceworks Tech Talk Live! To IT Service and Protect

Got up at seven this morning.  Showered, packed up and got out of the hotel in about forty-five minutes.  That worked well. It is only about ten minutes to Spiceworks from there although I had a little bit of a tough time navigating because of the heavy traffic so it was not as fast as it might have been although I did learn my way around the Northwest hills a bit and am much more comfortable driving them now.  It is amazing how much that region of Austin reminds me of Silicon Valley.

We had a light breakfast, got espresso and then set up for our live broadcast this morning.  We did several run throughs this morning.  The live broadcast started at ten and went pretty well.  We got very positive feedback.  A recording of the session is supposed to be posted tomorrow online.

After our show was done I got a tour of the new Spiceworks facility.  They have only been in the new office space for a few weeks.  The new digs are huge.  I got my first tour when they had just twenty people or so.  Now they have way over two hundred.  They are taking up a huge amount of space over two floors.  They have what is meant to be office space for four companies in use for their one and they are rapidly outgrowing that.

We did a group lunch in a large conference room.

I got set up in a small conference room to use for the day.  One of those two to three person little rooms with a little round table.  I got set up in there and was able to work from there for the day, nice and private.  That actually worked really well as it was very quiet and no one bothered me at all.

I did about an hour of solo video shooting today for promotional materials.

I left Spiceworks as early as I could, just a little after four, but I got turned around trying to get on the road so it took me an extra hour fighting traffic before I was really on the road north towards the DFW.

I got home around eight and spent the rest of the evening working on class work.  Only one thing left after tonight.  My project for my last class is due Friday night.  That’s it.  Just tomorrow to work on it and I will be completely done with classes at RIT.