Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my last day home alone without my family.  Dominica and the girls are planning on driving up from Houston tomorrow since Dominica needs to be in the office on the second.

I spent the day quietly at the office today.  It was completely dead.  There was both nothing to do as well as no one physically in the office.  There were just two of us.  A total ghost town.  It felt like we were in the office on a weekend.  Very strange.

At lunch we decided to just work from home as it was pretty silly to be in the office alone.  Just a waste of time to be sitting there.

I managed to do a bit more cleaning this afternoon around the house.  I worked on the garage and really got a ton of stuff done.  It is looking great now.  There is some floor cleaning, mostly sweeping, that needs to be done but I’ll wait until tomorrow on that so that I have daylight.  We can totally move around and find stuff in the garage now.  It is awesome.  This makes me very happy.

I had originally been invited out to a private party in Stephensville tonight but decided that I did not have the energy for five hours of driving for New Year’s Eve.  That is way more than I care about celebrating.  So tonight, around ten thirty, I went over to Redneck and hung out there.  I was hungry anyway so I got dinner, had a beer, watched the ball drop in New York and then watched it become midnight in Texas and went home.  That was my exciting night.  I treated myself to calorie-rich Shocktop.  I know, what a party animal.  It was pretty depressing being there alone on New Year’s Eve.

I ran home and grabbed my copy of Mass Effect for the XBOX 360 and ran back to Redneck with it because Nicki had wanted to borrow it and she was there and I keep forgetting to get it to her.  Since I had nothing else to do tonight, it seemed like a good use of the time.

Got home and went to bed.

Today was actually a productive day for me.  I went no where, which helped a lot, and just stayed home trying to actually get things done.

I managed to finish up all of the dishes so the kitchen isn’t looking too badly.  Would have been nice if I would have done that two weeks ago, then I could have had a clean kitchen all of this time.  But whatever, it isn’t like a single person, other than myself, has been to this house since Dominica and the girls left.  So whatever.

I got the rest of the house Rug Doctored today.  That was the hallway and both of the girls’ rooms.  Neither of them was really dirty at all, even Liesl’s, but since I was doing the cleaning anyway and clean carpets do make for healthy rooms.  The bleach in the cleaning fluid must kill a lot of things living in the carpets so I see it as a good thing no matter what.  The process also forces me to get everything off of their floors and clean up their rooms – not a big deal for Luciana’s room but a decent undertaking for Liesl’s room – the toy disaster area.  It probably took half an hour just to clean up Liesl’s floor.  So I did a full pass of normal Rug Doctor cleaning, including a quick pass into the entry of Dominica and my room which sees the most traffic, and then a full pass of just hot water to rinse afterwards.  Most people skip rinsing and that really makes a difference for getting the carpets clean.

I watched Tomorrow Never Dies this afternoon and put in The World is Not Enough but never finished it, I never even made it very far into it.

I got super productive this evening and went out into the garage and worked like crazy.  I got several loads of things moved up to the attic, threw out a lot of stuff and got some stuff sorted and moved into the house, like two additional boxes of books, which were hiding in the garage.  I can’t believe that more books were hiding out there.  The number of books in this house is just crazy.

Going through the garage and attic is always very sobering.  Whether it is realizing all of the stuff that we own that we never, ever use or have any need to have purchased or finding things like a large box containing nothing except for Oreo’s old bedding or finding his original blood work that we had done in 2006 when we were trying to find the source of his seizures.  I did find a lot of things that were just “missing” like movies that we had been looking for.  The garage has become such a mess that we are really losing things in it.  We just don’t have enough space for our garage to become a pile of stuff.  I had to resort to moving things like our back porch screen door and two strollers into the attic.  That stuff can go six months to a year or more without being needed and having it in the way all of the time just doesn’t work.  And, with the strollers, as Liesl gets older there is less and less chance that she will ever need to use a stroller again and Luciana almost never uses one as it is.  So having a single stroller as well as a double stroller taking up valuable garage space doesn’t work out well as they take a lot of garage space.

I found one entire bin just of Dominica’s Vera Bradley purses and bags.  She needs to figure out where these things are going to go.  Storing them in bins to find a decade later seems like a bad idea.

There are bins of sweaters and coats and all kinds of weird things in the garage.  I found two bins of kitchen supplies and two more of just glass and stemware.

By the time that I was done I would guess that easily half of the garage floor space had been cleared.  Whether by emptying boxes, throwing things out, moving stuff to the attic or just consolidating onto shelves the garage is now usable and you can move around and look for things that you need.  What a relief.  The mess in the garage has been driving me crazy for a long time.  Now I need to get inside and focus on my office again which I managed to get cleaned up and then had explode again as I tore apart the bins and drawers that I have in there.

I have the shelf in Dominica and my bedroom closet cleared off now too.  We could theoretically actually use that for storage now.  Now to decide what goes up there.

We need to install a shelf into Luciana’s room that will hold the Lego Harry Potter sets that Dominica is building for her to display in there.  That will help a bit as there are Lego boxes and sets sitting on the buffet behind Dominica’s desk making it impossible to use that space in any way.

I stayed up way too late cleaning and writing stuff on Spiceworks.  I have done an immense amount of work cleaning up threads in there this week.  Normally there are around two hundred and ten pages of unresolved threads and I have that down to about one hundred and forty three at the moment.  That is something that I have never seen before.

It was actually after four in the morning when I finally got off to bed.  I was energized from all of the work that I was getting done in the garage and I just did not want to stop.  So I kept going and going.  The house is still a huge disaster but Dominica should be happy with the fact that it is a mess because so much work that desperately needed to be done is getting done.  Once she is here and able to help me go through boxes together and determine what is actually needed and what is not it will be that much better.  Now that there is space to actually work on things we should be able to rocket through a lot of this stuff.  And she can help left things for me so that I can move them up to the attic as well.

I am in the office tomorrow for New Year’s Eve.  I will be home on Tuesday as it is a holiday.  Dominica and the girls will be driving on on New Year’s as Dominica needs to work in town on the second and will be staying home with the girls that day.

After about seven years, I have a MUD up and running again as of this morning.  I am excited.  I started playing MUDs (multi-user dungeons) in 1994 when I helped to run one for the University of Iowa.  It remains, after all of these years, probably the best video game experience I have ever had.  I loved playing that MUD for the two or three years that I managed to do so.  That MUD, way back then, was CircleMUD which was not exactly new even then.

When I started getting into running my own UNIX systems around 1997 or 1998 while living in the house in Greece, New York with Josh one of the first things that I did was acquire CircleMUD myself and run it inside of the house.  It was pretty useless since you had to be inside of the house to play it but we had the three Intel 486-based Linux 1.3 systems on the metal folding table down in the basement where you could set up and log in.  Some people did that and I learned how to run my own MUD.  It was a great learning experience and I learned how to do a lot of things on UNIX because of that.  It just wasn’t very good as a gaming experience.  It is funny looking back now because that felt like it was so long after my early MUD experiences that I had while living in Michigan but, in reality, it was only a year or two later that I was running my own at home.

In 2004 and 2005 I built and ran a CircleMUD server myself.  It was good fun and we had a decent number of people using it including my cousin Jeremy who thought that it was awesome.  This was the first MUD that I ran that had any number of players.  We probably never hit twenty people at once and normally were lucky to have three, but it was a start and it was fun.  Being CircleMUD it was showing its age and lacked a lot of features that one would think would have been added by that point.  So it was fun but it would have been nice to have seen someone pick up the old CircleMUD code and improve on it.  But it was so ancient and based on older DikuMUD code that I am sure that no one wanted to touch it, especially as it was written in C and that had lost all favour as a MUD platform by that point.

So our CircleMUD system only ran for a year or two.  Basically we used it during the little more than a year that I consulted with Wegman’s in Rochester – having the MUD up and running allowed me to log in while I was out of town, on the road doing overnight systems administration work and stay connected with everyone back home needing nothing more than a telnet session that I could use from the server room while waiting for system upgrades and Robocopy scripts to complete.  It was perfect at the time but I didn’t have time to keep dealing with it after moving to New Jersey a few months after the Wegman’s contract had completed.

So now I have discovered CoffeeMUD which is Java-based and vastly more advanced than CircleMUD.  I got it installed and up and running on one of our servers is Mississauga where it can actually run indefinitely and has, effectively, unlimited resources.  Getting the game up and running is only a beginning, though, unlike CircleMUD which came with a huge amount of pre-built game world, CoffeeMUD is a blank slate and “requires” that I build the entire game world myself.  So this will be a lot more interesting because I am actually designing and building the game myself but it also means that I can’t just press “go” and have a game for people to play.  This is going to take some work.  So I am setting myself a goal of making, approximately, ten new rooms every day so that the game grows regularly but nothing crazy.  It will take a few weeks before it is ready for people to start playing but when they do it will be my game, designed by me, that they are playing and not just some game that I am running.  CoffeeMUD is a lot more advanced than CircleMUD, there is a lot of learning for me to do.

I did some general work today but not nearly as much as I should have done.  Being home alone for two days makes me really productive.  Being home alone for a few weeks makes me melancholy and makes it hard for me to do anything.

I got the first batch of dishes done, finally, at least.

Watson wanted to get out of the house this evening so around seven I drove down to Addison and picked him up and we drove to Irving to hit Fry’s.  I have been needing some power strips.  Pretty basic stuff, but I need them so, whatever, worth a trip I guess.  I need one just for Liesl’s room so that I can get her little television and Nintendo Wii hooked up, along with the AppleTV.  We never use the Wii so figured that having it set up in her room would allow her to play her Dora the Explorer game and hopefully get her hooked on some other games too.  We don’t have a lot for the Wii but she doesn’t go through that many games anyway.  What is funny is that the television that we have in there isn’t much bigger (or maybe isn’t bigger at all) that the iPad!

While we were at Fry’s I managed to find a nice graphics card that appears to be better for Dominica’s desktop than what I have been seeing online.  I was pretty excited to find something to get today.  So for $99 I got her a really nice Nvidia GT 640 with 2GB of RAM to upgrade her desktop.  This does three big things for her.  First it frees up a big chunk of her system memory that no longer has to be shared with the graphics card giving her, effectively, a pretty big memory upgrade – plus, of course, the graphics memory is way faster than the system memory anyway.  The second thing is that it moves her from the cheap, ancient on-board graphics cards to this amazing powerful, new one.  And the third is that it takes her from needing to use the onboard, low-end GPU to drive one analogue monitor and a USB adapter to VGA dongle to drive a second analogue monitor and instead gives her dual digital output plus one analogue output from a single card so that she will have a triple monitor setup and all from one card!  Very nice update indeed.

After Fry’s we went to Taco Bueno and grabbed a bite to eat.  Then I drove him back to Addison, it was only nine thirty and he was falling asleep in the car, and then went back home.

I wrapped up the last twenty minutes of Harold and Kumar’s Christmas which I had watched most of at some point prior to going down to Houston for Christmas and then I finished watching Goldeneye which Dominica and I had started weeks ago in our march through the James Bond movies.

I hooked up Dominica’s new graphics card and got all three monitors working while watching the movies.  Her desktop situation is so much better now.  Having three monitors is going to be awesome for her and having them all match will be wonderous as well.  Overall it was a tiny amount of money for an incredible amount of desktop improvement.  She should be very happy and quite surprised when she gets home on Tuesday afternoon.

I am fully back home in Dallas now.  Slept in my own bed last night and will be here until the girls return home next week.

I went into the office this morning.  Boy was it empty.  There was hardly anyone there at all and absolutely nothing happened all day.  I mean I got a few package installation requests, but maybe five or ten minutes worth of work.  It was crazy how slow it was.

I skipped lunch today, no real reason to need to go anywhere.  Best to stay in the office and not be tempted to go eat something that I shouldn’t eat or spend money that does not need to be spent.

Went home after work.  Left a little early as there were no deployments tonight.  I do love the freeze but hate needing to be in the office when nothing at all is happening.  This is pretty silly.  I could be getting a lot done at home rather than being in the office doing nothing all day.

Watson was bored again this evening so talked me into going out.  After being in the office I don’t tend to be all that productive anyway so, whatever.

Again, not a late night for us.  We are getting old.

We played more of “Ticket to Ride” in the kitchen this morning and I had my last of the holiday junk food before going onto a strict diet to try to recoup the ground that I have lost over the holiday of binge eating all of the desserts that are all over the house.  I spent a bit of time with Liesl and Luciana this morning.  I am leaving today to go back to Dallas and will not see them for a week!  This is going to be one long week.  Dominica and the girls are driving back up to Dallas on the first of January because Dominica needs to be in the office on the second.  So I will hopefully get to see the girls at home one afternoon as soon as they get back since I will be off from work that day as it is a holiday and then I will stay home with them on Thursday while Dominica is at work.  But it is a long weekend between now and then.

We had the car packed and ready to go so that as soon as noon hit I was able to get on the road and drive north.  It was just a few minutes after noon when I pulled out.  It is a cool and drizzly day in Texas.  It drizzled on me the entire drive from Houston to Dallas.

There were some traffic issues so it took me forever to make the trek.  I had to stop along the way too to hit a McDonald’s so that I could use the WiFi and do some work for the office.  I have my BlackBerry in the car so that I can make sure that no one is looking for me in between stops.  It was a very light afternoon so I was able to make the whole trip with only the two stops to work.

It was after five thirty when I got into Dallas.  I did a little work and got the car emptied out and around eight or so Watson came by and picked me up and we went to Redneck to hang out for a while.  Normally we go on Friday and/or Sunday nights but neither of those nights work out for us this week and we were both available tonight so we decided to just go there tonight instead.  That worked out well for me since I am still eating food today and can get my favourite thing there, the avocado veggie wrap (sounds boring and looks terrible when you read it on the menu but it is actually amazing) tonight and really should not after tonight as I am going strictly on my diet again.

We were back home before midnight.  A very early night for us, but we both have to work tomorrow.  I will be physically in the office although I suspect that there will be very little need for me.