Sheep Guarding Llama

Well I am now officially thirty four years old.  This is also my tenth birthday to have been announced on Sheep Guarding Llama.  I have been blogging for almost one third of my life.  I have been blogging for more than one third of my life during which I knew how to write.  Someday there will be a large percentage of the population who have been blogging for their entire lives but I was blogging before the term existed so for people of my generation this is a really impressive figure.

I got a good night’s sleep last night.  Went to bed nice and early and did not get interrupted too much.  I didn’t get up until a quarter till eight this morning.  Then it was off to work.  I walked again today.  The weather is pretty nice.  Still a little chilly but the sun is out and the day is gorgeous.  Great weather for walking to work.

This morning was pretty slow and I managed to get my latest article “In House Email for Small Businesses” posted on SMB IT Journal.

Dominica made lunch on the early side today so just before noon I left the office and walked home and joined the family for lunch.  Liesl was awake which was a nice change and we spent my entire lunch break hanging out together at home.  That made the walk home well worthwhile today.  That was a lot of time with my daughter that I do not often get and that is good as I am going to be out of town this weekend and not get to see her all that much other than Saturday morning and Sunday night.

Work was pretty slow this afternoon.  All of the guys who are here from New York and New Jersey are snows in today.  The weather is great in Texas but the northeast is getting blasted with a “snowicane” – tons of snow and incredibly high winds.  Not fun at all.

Dominica went shopping at Kroger this evening and picked me up from work just after six.  Then we went out to Rockfish for some dinner since it is my birthday.

After dinner we came home and just relaxed.  I played with Liesl and Dominica played some Dragon Age: Origins.  I often prefer watching her play video games rather than watching a show because it doesn’t require very much of my attention and I can easily go read with Liesl or clean around the house or do whatever task needs to be done.

Liesl asked to go to bed for the first time ever today.  I said “Do you want to go to bed?” and she emphatically said “Yes” and so I carried her in and put her in her pack and play and she curled right up without any complaints at all!  Now this is some serious progress.

Unfortunately Liesl woke back up fifteen minutes later and stayed up for another two hours.  But at least there is progress and she is starting to learn how to communicate her need to go to sleep to us.

For my birthday I got a gift certificate to Casual XL Male (I desperately need more work clothes after more than a year or working from home!!) and Dominica ordered me Final Fantasy XIII from Amazon which is due to arrive on release day which is March 9th.  We got the PS3 version of the game since no one has listed a reason to get the XBOX 360 version yet but the PS3 version fits all on one BluRay rather than three DVDs.

Today Akio Toyoda is sitting in front of Congress expected to explain and defend his and his namesake company’s actions involving the lack of safety and lack of responsiveness to customers and US safety commissions resulting in many American deaths.  As the cited article mentions, facing down a Congressional Oversight Committee likely means the end of Toyoda’s nepotistic career.  It likely means an end to Toyota’s reign as the master car maker as well (technically it was surpassed by VW in December anyway.)  It would take a very foolish person to buy a Toyota vehicle today now that so much is known about how Toyota treats its customers and how little they take safety into account.  Toyota’s are not cheap and they will not be a status symbol again for a very long time.  This is a blemish that hopefully the company will never live down (although the populace has legendary short memory retention so we will see.)

Toyoda is also facing questioning from the US government as to whether or not Toyota was treating American customers differently from their Japanese counterparts.  This is the same question that came to my mind.  Had deaths been occurring in Japan would Toyota have looked the other way and allowed the dangerous vehicles to remain on the road?  Is it only because the deaths are Americans that it does not matter to them?

Toyoda did admit that the company’s focus had become “confused” – since he claims that the focus was supposed to be safety he clearly admitted that safety was no longer the focus.  Not the same as not caring at all, but it is the first step.  Toyoda also belittled the deaths that have occurred by claiming that the “…vehicle can be controlled with firm and steady application to the brakes.”  Thanks, so he is placing the blame on the drivers rather than accepting responsibility.  Nice Toyoda, real classy.

At the end of the hearing, representative Marcy Kaptur said she was “disappointed” with Toyoda’s testimony and did not feel he had shown sufficient remorse or had taken enough note of the amount of complaints over the last decade.  The fact that Congress is pointing out that Toyota has a terrible safety record for a decade is extreme.  Toyota is definitely faced with having put Americans at risk and now has to face the music for getting caught selling us substandard, dangerous crap.

Yahoo! Finance ran a good story highlighting the cultural differences exposed in today’s hearing.  Toyoda, with his name on the company, failed to take responsibility for his and his company’s actions.  In Japan this is, we are told, acceptable.  In America, it is not.  Apparently in Japan no one has to take responsibility for corporate actions.  Corporations, perhaps, are considered to have greater rights than real people have.

What really came out of the hearing can be highlight thusly: Toyota and Toyoda just don’t seem to be too concerned about American lives (or possibly any lives) and they don’t see safety as a concern of their business, Toyota even today continues to claim that their cars are safe even when clearly they are not and Toyoda admits that they have no idea why the cars are killing people making his previous statement that some or all of their cars an obvious lie.  Bottom line is – don’t buy Toyota.  Ever.

It was super cold this morning so I drove to Jamba Juice and picked up the morning oatmeal.  Of course, they were not able to handle the order even though I do this every week, so it ended up taking an hour to get the oatmeal.  I’m thinking that it isn’t worth doing this any more.  The oatmeal might be really, really cheap but the effort necessary to get it is pretty extreme.

I dropped off oatmeal for Dominica and Liesl on the way to work and then went in to the office.  We have some people in from New Jersey today that I have not seen in quite a while.

For lunch today, as it is national tortilla day, John and I went to Mi Cocina and ate a large amount of tortilla chips.

Work wasn’t too bad today and I managed to head for home around five thirty which surprised Dominica as I am never home at that time.  Liesl was very excited to see me.

We did pretty much nothing tonight.  We ordered in sandwiches and watched a few movies via Netflix OnDemand and I played with Liesl all evening until she went to sleep around ten.  I was pretty tired and decided to turn in myself at ten thirty.  I need to catch up on some sleep.  Dominica stayed up for a while after I went to bed watching her Australian television show McLeod’s Daughters to which she is now addicted.

Spy at Harrington High is a really great, technical blog post that goes into many of the technical details and some of the background on the case in the Philadelphia area’s Lower Merion School District’s spying on minors.  The article details some of the important aspects of the case including that if students did not allow the spying or made any attempt to block the spying that they would be expelled from the school – meaning that the school was additionally threatening them with a loss of education rights in addition to their other crimes.  It also talks about how the software used posed additional security risks, how the software caused police to enter an innocent home looking for criminals, how students trying to use necessary educational tools would have their personal computers taken from them by force, etc.  The level of criminal and abusive behaviour being documented against this school district is unbelievable.  Fortunately the FBI is not investigating but as almost everyone discussing the case keeps mentioning – no one is doing the necessary digital forensics here to ensure that the school district is not destroying evidence to protect itself.

I worked from home this morning.  At ten I had my Virtualization webinar with CDW and SpiceWorks.  I was one of the presenters – not the main one but I did the bulk of the question and answer bit at the end.  It was fun and I think that the information presented was pretty useful for those in attendance.  I do wish that we had had more time for the Q&A though as there were many people with good questions who did not get a chance to have them asked and discussed on the call.

This was my second time doing an online webinar with SpiceWorks.  The last one was on backup and was a panel discussion.  Nice to do some different styles of talks.  Good experience and exposure for sure.

It is really cold today, there was a tiny bit of snow in the air now and then today but nothing on the ground.  Way too cold for Texas, though.  Ugh.  We didn’t sign up for this.  It was supposed to be warm!

Dominica made a late breakfast for me that I ate while I was on the webinar and we skipped eating lunch.  After the webinar was over I talked to dad on the phone for an hour or so and then drove over to the office to work for the rest of the day.

I got home this evening at a reasonable time, just a little after six, and we just stayed in and relaxed this evening.  We watched The Suite Life on Deck and I hung out with Liesl.  Dominica cooked dinner at home.

UPS delivered some new books for Liesl this evening.  We got two sets of Sandra Boynton books that she loves.  We also got the latest Wiggles DVD.  Liesl immediately wanted to watch that.  She is getting so much older – now she can pick out the Wiggles and decide that that is what she wants to watch even when it is a video that she has never seen before.

So the new DVD, Hot Poppin’ Popcorn, a circus themed video from the Wiggles is utter garbage.  We had high hopes as the last four videos from the Wiggles have been great.  Let’s face it, we bought the DVD on release day via Amazon PreOrder.  Dominica, using my account, was the very first (and currently only) review on Amazon too.  The video is actually painful to watch.  The Wiggles have gone backwards to their old, cheap sets and the entire video is all shot in one round set with all of the dancing being just the Wiggles walking in a circle.  Really?  How could the Wiggles make this garbage.

The music in Hot Poppin’ Popcorn is pathetic too.  The Wiggles used to be known for catchy tunes but even Liesl couldn’t stand this and wasn’t able to keep watching it at all.  The circus theme was not a smart one – who goes to or likes the circus today?  The circus is creepy as it is.  The special guest that they got for this video, Jamie Redfern, is super creepy looking too.  None of this is good for children.  This might be a new low for the Wiggles although much of their really old stuff was really bad too.  We couldn’t help but wonder if there is some lack of funds for the Wiggles and they are reduced to doing stuff like this rather than the quality stuff that they used to produce.

It was a very quiet evening.  Liesl stayed up very late and could not fall asleep.  Dominica and I were ready to pass out by the time that Liesl finally went to bed.

Has anyone else noticed that there is not a Kindle application available for the newer BlackBerries?

Tomorrow I will be speaking on a virtualization webinar being presented by SpiceWorks and CDW.

Oreo had a really restless night – he is having a really bad reaction to his grass allergy and he was up much of the night itching.  That, of course, made me have a restless night as well.  So around seven I decided to just get up even though I had not had enough sleep yet.  I gave Oreo a bath in the hopes that the soap and water would help to wash away the grass oils and make him less itchy.  He has been needing a bath anyway so it was good that I got it done.

I found out this morning that Final Fantasy XIII is due to release in North American on March 9th, just around the corner and just in time for me to put in as my birthday wish!  It will be a few weeks later for my actual birthday but I don’t have any spare time to play anything before March 9th anyway.  In fact, I don’t have a spare moment free until April!

I got ready and made it off to work before Dominica or Liesl got up this morning even though I was running fairly late.

Work isn’t so bad today.  Maybe it is just Monday.  It is colder today, though.  Yesterday it was seventy two degrees in Houston and rainy.  That is some nice weather.  When I walked out the door and got hit by “summer” air I was shocked.  Today, in Irving, it is barely hovering above freezing and tonight we are expected to have a little snow again.  So much for warm Texas weather.

We did get called from our real estate agent that someone is scheduled to look at our house in New York tomorrow.  We don’t expect anything since no one who has looked at it thus far has shown the slightest interest.  But at least someone is going through the house.  You have to have foot traffic if you are going to get a nibble.

Today Dominica assembled our new television stand for the living room.  The television has been on the coffee table since we got it and that is not the best use of our space or furniture.  So now we will have a real coffee table and will have a stand on which to put the television and inside of which we can hide the PlatStation 3.

Our project this evening is to go suit shopping for me.  I need a suit for Andy and Miranda’s wedding which is less than two weeks away in Las Vegas!  We went to Men’s Warehouse and ended up spending the entire evening there.  It was two hours or more of suit shopping.

In the end we ended up buying three new suits plus shoes, shirts, ties, etc.  It was a rather expensive evening.  But I really do need some suits so this is good.  Not a great time to be spending the money but with Andy’s wedding in less than two weeks and several meetings coming up in Philadelphia in the very near future it just needed to be done.

After our shopping was done we went to Boston’s for pizza and their “cactus cuts” which are chipotle spiced fresh potato chips – they are amazing.  I can’t believe that “chipotle” was not in Chrome’s dictionary.

After dinner we just went back to the apartment and watched a little bit of Primevil which in its third season continues to get weaker and weaker.  It is no wonder that the show was cancelled.  It is too bad as the idea in the first season was so good.  But throughout the third season they keep losing the main characters and the show becomes a completely different one and all of the characters become flat and boring and all of the meaningful character interaction and relationships come to an end and the show becomes a meaningless action show that doesn’t go anywhere at all.  Oh well.  The writing was never that good so the loss is only so great I guess.

I got up around eight this morning.  That was a ton of sleep.  I am feeling much better today.  That was really scary yesterday.  You don’t realize how terrifying it is to not be able to sleep until you are facing a massive stretch of time where dozing off could be fatal.  Suddenly the ability to safely fall asleep at any time because a rather important life feature.  The feeling is not completely unlike being held underwater.  You know that you are okay for a minute or two but knowing that if you don’t figure out how to get to the surface in that amount of time you will start to panic and eventually drown.  That’s the general feeling that you get not being able to get to a CPAP when you have central sleep apnea.  You know that you have to keep yourself awake “or else” and the difficulty staying awake goes up exponentially each hour.  Here are some interesting facts on sleep loss.

I worked this morning and then at ten I showered and got on the road around eleven to go to get Brian from Houston Hobby Airport.  His flight actually got in almost half an hour early so he had his luggage and was waiting for me when I got there.

We went out to Panera Bread for some lunch but I got paged out and we had to run back to the Grices’ so that I could work for a little bit.  It did not take too long, maybe half an hour.

After that we loaded up the X3 and drove up to north Houston to take Brian to his hotel.  The trip ended up taking much longer than we had expected.  We were hoping that it would be just forty-five minutes or so but traffic was horrible and we were creeping along very slowly once we passed downtown.

In addition to bad traffic we also got caught by the BMW’s GPS system not having the address to which we were headed and Brian’s iPhone pulling maps from Google Maps sent us miles past our destination and dropped us off in the middle of nowhere.  Luckily Jen knew the hotel and had found it without a problem and was able to direct us there easily.  We just lost about an hour due to traffic and bad directions.

The hotel, the Baymont, turned out to be really nice.  We could not believe how nice it was considering that it was only $39/night!  What a deal.  We were worried that it was not going to be very nice but this was great.

Brian, Jen and I talked at the hotel for a few hours and then decided that we were hungry and drove across the street to Waffle House to get some food.

After our late lunch or early dinner I dropped them off at the hotel and I drove back down to League City to pick up Dominica, Liesl and Oreo.  The drive back down was plagued with traffic congestion as well – I have no idea what was going on, there was nothing blocking traffic ever.  It just appeared to be lots of people driving really slowly.  So it took me an hour and a half to get back down to League City as well.

Dominica was mostly packed so we loaded up the car and left in around an hour to drive back up to Irving.  All in all I am driving about nine hours today.  Quite a significant amount of driving for one day – especially when I am so tired.  My weekend turned into a rather major loss in general, here are the stats: fourteen hours of driving (just me, another three hours of Dominica driving), another fourteen hours of attempting to get a CPAP so that I could sleep during which time I was pretty much delirious, fifteen hours of sleep.  That pretty much covered the entire weekend.  Add in the few hours that I spent working with Brian and Jen and that was it.

We got back to Irving around one in the morning.  We were really tired when we got back.  We pretty much got straight off to bed as soon as we arrived.