Sheep Guarding Llama

For some bizarre reason, this photograph of mine on Flickr of Polar Bears at the Buffalo Zoo has become incredibly popular.  If you look at the photo you will notice that it is not, in any way, a great photo.  It’s not even a good photo.  Mediocre “for its time” is about the best that you can say.  And that’s a stretch.  Mediocre “for its time” considering it was taken by a kid is a better take on it.  And yet, for a relatively few number of views it has an astounding number of people adding it as a favourite.  I don’t understand this at all.  If you count the number of views versus the number of favourites you see that something like one in twelve people who have seen the photo consider it a favourite.  That makes no sense whatsoever.  No picture should have that percentage of people mark it as a favourite.  At best, one in one hundred people, perhaps.  I bet only about one percent of all people even use the favourite system let alone use it regularly.  And why this photo?

Again, not much to report today.  I was in the office for work.  I had to come home from work at lunch today to do a conference call to prepared for my webinar that I am presenting next week, one week from today.

There has been a tiny, but only a tiny, bit of progress made on the house this week.  The garage is a little closer but still not there at all.  At the current rate it could be a month yet, believe it or not, before the work is completed.  Why no one is interested in getting this project over and done with I have no idea.  It seems, to me, that getting it all over and done with would be best for everyone.  At this point the room is basically completed structurally.  We’ve picked out the paint and we hope to see the garage painted soon.

Tomorrow, Jenn is coming to visit us for the long holiday weekend.

Very little to report today.  A busy work day followed by a ton of work on OpenFiler and DRBD.  This week has been extremely busy and I am very far behind on work and on SGL.  So I am keeping this one very short.  I’ll be struggling to keep up with work between everyone visiting and the scheduled travels over the next two weeks.  I’ll do my best to keep up but it will not be easy.

I drove in to work this morning.  I was not able to wear my new glasses last night as they are so different from my old ones that I was unable to see.  This morning I am trying to work only from the new glasses after having slept all night and gone straight to the new ones.  It is quite a struggle, though, as they new ones are not only different in prescription strength but also in alignment.

For lunch today I was meeting Souder and Souder at La Cima.  So I went over there at noon and just had a large salad for lunch.

After work I stayed in Irving and met up with Souder at the apartment and we drove over to Microsoft’s Las Colinas offices for the monthly DFW SharePoint users group meeting.  It turned out to be a really good meeting.  There is an amazing SharePoint community here in the DFW, the largest in the nation I am told, and they put on a good users’ group.  We were all very happy that we went.  This will likely become a regular thing for us.  Five of us went, it was a bit of a SharePoint party.  The topic tonight was a bit advanced for those of us who have barely worked with SharePoint before (even though technically I have used it for eight years, I have done so only lightly) but it was quite informative to see what the greater community was doing.

I declined to go out for drinks with the SharePoint group tonight and went home as quickly as I could after the meeting to spend some time with Dominica and Liesl.  Liesl had been asking about me during the meeting so I couldn’t resist going home and spending time with her.

Back to work today and the start of a busy week.  I am working from home this morning, though, because Dominica is doing the big, three hour long glucose test to see if she has gestational diabetes since she did poorly on her blood work from her last doctor’s visit.  This is the test that is no fun at all.  So I am home this morning taking care of Liesl while Dominica is gone.

It turned out that it was a good thing that I was home this morning since Liesl destroyed my glasses last night.  The glue that I put on last night appears to be holding so I am able to work this morning as long as I am careful.  I do not want to do any driving because it is possible that they will just fall apart on my at any second and having that happen while driving would be very bad.  I would still have one eye with the glasses and I can drive without my glasses in a pinch but I sure don’t want to half to do that.

Dominica came home at lunch and in the middle of the afternoon I was able to get in to Walmart to get a new prescription for my glasses made.  After work, Dominica, Liesl and I went to the mall in Plano where we were able to go to Lens Crafters to get glasses made in a panic.  We made it just in time to get them made tonight.

While we were waiting we went to the foodcourt and got dinner at the smoothie place there.  Liesl had great fun playing in the fountain.  We found a good play area there as well where Dominica hopes to bring Liesl in the future.

We got my new glasses just as the mall was getting ready to close.  These are my first new glasses in about six years.  I have not gotten new glasses since Andy was rooming with us in Geneseo around 2004 or 2005.  Back when Andy and I managed to accidentally both get the same glasses.

Katie was up super early this morning, around six!  She had to get up so that she could get on to the road no later than seven thirty to drive down to Austin so that she could turn in her rental car and get to her flight to Los Angeles which leaves around one this afternoon.  So I got up early around seven so that I could see her before she was off.  This was a very short visit, we really only got to see her for one day.  She has a very busy itinerary.

Dominica was asleep and we both knew that she really needed her sleep so we just let her stay sleeping.  Katie was off at seven thirty and down to Austin without any problem.  Dominica was sad that she missed getting to say goodbye but we are pretty sure that Katie will be back down to visit in the near future.

My day was busily spent working on projects.  There is tons of work that needs my attention and the next two weeks are going to be extremely busy.

With the garage work continuing, it is a struggle to get anything done and the house is a total disaster.  It is awful that all of our house guests had to come in the middle of the garage work so our house was both messy and there was no new office to see either nor extra space in which they could stay.  We were not expecting the garage work to take this long at all.

This evening, while hanging out with Liesl, my glasses got broken.  Liesl barely touched them, her pigtails (a new addition to her set of “looks”) hit them and apparently her hair had enough force to break the rim of the glasses.  It broke in the worst possible place to try to fix too.

There is pretty much nothing that I can do without glasses, at least nothing that I can do effectively, so Dominica ran to Walmart to see if she could locate some super glue.

The super gluing did not go well.  We made several attempts at it and the final attempt was left to sit over night.  Fingers crossed that I have enough eyesight to get me through the morning tomorrow.