Sheep Guarding Llama

For the first time since I returned from my trip to Germany, SGL is now up to date again.  It is really tough catching up once you call behind at all.  The last few days have been a major push to get SGL back up to date.  Once I am up to date it is pretty easy to keep it that way.  Once things get a little bit old it starts becoming very challenging to figure out what happened when and all of the details start to get really fuzzy really quickly.

I was up early hanging out with Liesl.  Dominica wanted breakfast this morning so I went out at seven to the Maple Ave Deli around the corner.  I got there and they were closed.  Seems like being closed at seven thirty on a Saturday morning would cut pretty heavily into their breakfast business.  So no delicious egg and cheese on croissant sandwiches for us today.  Fail.

Off to work in the basement at eight this morning.  Deployments for Bahrain like I often do on Saturday mornings.  That was several hours of work plus some other miscellaneous management tasks that needed my attention.

Mid-morning Dominica kicked off the installation of Windows 7 Business 64bit on her laptop.  That went pretty smoothly and she was up and running on Windows 7 in no time.  Her laptop was running much more smoothly, we both felt, with 7 rather than Vista.  It is not a fair comparison, however, as one was 64bit and one was 32bit.

Around lunch time today I decided to get a trial of Rackspace Email to see how that worked.  I pointed SGL’s email domain to Rackspace and contacted them for my two week free trial.  I have been running email on a self-hosted Zimbra system for the last several years.  I have to say, Zimbra has been awesome.  Best email system that I have ever used.  Everyone just loved using it.  The web interface is still years ahead of the competition and constantly improving and it has a lot of really advanced features that no one else has yet.  It is far and away the most usable web interface for email that I have ever seen.  It makes systems like Outlook Web Access look positively archaic.

I managed to knock off of work a little bit after noon.  Then I spent the rest of the day hanging out in the living room with Liesl!  We had a really good day just spending time together.  This is how Saturdays are supposed to be.

I slept in late this morning and didn’t start work until almost eight.  Today ended up being one of the slowest days that I can remember at work.  I have no idea what happened to make it so incredibly slow.  I guess a number of development and release cycles just all hit their low ebb today and left me with almost nothing to do.  It was awesome.  The day just flew by.

Dominica and I tried to go out to Charlie Brown’s today for lunch as we have coupons for their all you can eat lunch salad bar.  Liesl was not cooperative, though, she skipped her morning nap and took a really long nap right during lunch time so we were unable to go anywhere.  So we are going to try tomorrow instead.  So we just had a late lunch at the house.

I am getting a new laptop, yay!  It has been forever since I got a new laptop.  My current laptop, which Dominica uses almost constantly up in the living room, is an older HP Compaq unit with a 1024×768 display running Windows XP.  It was the first generation of AMD Turion 64bit latops.  A great unit.  It just keeps chugging along doing its job without complaining at all.  Quite the workhorse. It has seen a lot of abuse and just keeps going.  Not a single problem with it.  Even now it feels rather new except for the fact that it is all so outdated.  I mean serious, only a single core?  I think that it might be from around late 2004 but I am not really sure anymore.  It is the nx6125.  That laptop really solidified my faith in HP laptops.  I’ve never seen anyone’s laptop last so long and perform so well.  If it had a bit more memory I would be loathe to give it up but with a total of 768MB it is really not powerful enough for me to use for anything serious.

When I was in Germany I took Dominica’s laptop instead of my own because I needed some of the power and features that just are not available for mine.  Hers is dual core and has 3GB (we bought 4GB but need to get a memory stick replaced) and has a higher resolution monitor while being slightly smaller and lighter.  Much better for working remotely.  So getting a laptop more like hers will make a lot of sense for me, especially with all of the traveling that we are going to be doing in the near future.  Austin, Houston and Dallas all this month and then ten days in Orlando next month and then Houston for Christmas!  I need a mobile platform that really performs.

So tonight I spent some time getting Dominica’s laptop all cleaned off and prepped so that tomorrow morning she can do a Windows 7 install on it.  We have a copy of Windows 7 Business 64bit now and she has been eager to get off of Vista.  I still had a lot of my Germany pictures on that laptop so I got the last of them (mostly just pictures from the Botanical Gardens in Osnabruck) edited and posted up to Flickr.  The gardens are not too exciting for people looking to see what my trip or Germany is like but I do think that I got a nice “photo map” of the gardens for people interested in it and I do think that I pulled off a few decent shots there including one or two shots of yellow flowers and one abstract pink tree that I am really happy with.  The day was incredibly overcast with no fear of rain giving me some wonderful mid-afternoon light in the high latitudes for shooting flowers.

Speaking of Germany, Katie sent me a link from the BBC today talking about the Varusschlacht (the Battle of Teutoburg Forest) and the Kalkriese site that I was over in Germany to see for the anniversary.  Strangely the BBC ran the article two weeks after the actual anniversary and never included the date.

I have to work at eight in the morning tomorrow so the plan is that I will get up and get to work right away and Dominica will spend the morning installing Windows 7 on her laptop.

This week is really just flying by.  I can’t believe that it is already Thursday.  In fact, I didn’t believe it until four in the afternoon when I suddenly realized that it was not Tuesday.  This is what happens when I fall behind on Sheep Guarding Llama, I completely lose track of the passage of time as if it doesn’t even happen until I have written about it.  So by the time that I realized that the work week was really underway it was almost finished.  Just Friday left to go!

I felt pretty sick this morning.  Last night we had junk food, mostly, for dinner and I had some chips and dip having not had any in a really long time.  I was really craving them last night and was really excited to get some.  I was halfway through eating them when I read the bag from this little, never seen it before chip place and realized that the claim to fame of this nasty little chip company is that they don’t do any of that “alternative oils” stuff and they only use genuine lard in their chips!

Oh crap.  I’ve been a vegetarian for about eight years now.  The last time that I had any measurable amount of pork fat I was insanely sick as my body long ago lost the enzymes necessary to deal with that type of food.  So now I was both sick from the lard and sick from having ingested pig fat.  It seriously grossed me out.  It is still making me feel sick today.

All morning I had a stomach ache and the sweats.  At least I know what is wrong and just need my body to pass the lard.  That is so nasty.  I can’t believe that someone would intentionally cook with that.

We got a little news about Texas today.  Apparently my rate on the back end has been fixed and approved and we just need to figure out what that means to us now.  Unfortunately there are too many parties involved in anything involving my pay or rates just making the entire process far too complex.  So we got as much information as we could and things are looking pretty decent at the moment.  We have a meeting set up for early Monday morning to get things finalized – I hope.

After work this evening, Dominica and I watched the movie 17 Again which came from Netflix.  I had not wanted to see it because of who was starring in it having been seriously turned off after seeing the last half of High School Musical 3: Senior Year which was horribly disastrous.  17 Again was actually quite enjoyable.  Silly, of course, but cute and fun.  We both really liked it.  Definitely good, light hearted entertainment with a lot of supporting cast that I really like.

After the movie I ended up having quite a bit more work to do so I spent the evening down in the office working while Dominica played Rock Band 2 on the PS3.

Just normal work day today.  Nothing to report from the day.  No news yet.  Ho hum.  I can’t believe that September is over today.  Having a baby makes life just fly by.  If you blink you miss it all!

I’ve been doing a bit of work on SharePoint this week.  I have a lot to learn and I am inching forward.  I get very little chance to work on it so I don’t get to really focus.  I just look at it a little bit now and again.

One of my students, whom dad taught Logo programming using KTurtle and who took my XHTML/CSS class years ago at Castile, talked to me today and bought himself a copy of “Learn to Program” by Chris Pine which is an excellent book to get you started in real programming.  It teaches programming with Ruby.  I have the first edition of the book and really like it although I am not necessarily a big fan of learning Ruby as a first programming language.

This afternoon Dominica and Liesl went out to do some shopping.  While they were out a shipment of Tofurkey Jerky arrived as well as the massive shipment of t-shirts that Dominica ordered that we are going to be using in Walt Disney World in late November.  That is going to be a major project.  Dominica has to print out and iron on almost fifty t-shirt iron ons!

Dominica picked me up a new DVI cable that I used to hook up my Mac Mini down in the basement.  I have been short a cable so my one monitor has been sitting idle for a very long time – even since I moved away from the dual dx5150 setup that I had when we first moved to Peekskill.  It is nice to have both that monitor and the Mac Mini in use again even if it is just a G4 running Mac OSX 10.3 Panther.  At least I am getting use out of it.

I wrapped up work before seven this evening and hung out with Dominica and Liesl.  We watched more of Newhart and relaxed.  I really like that show.  I have not seen it since I was very young and watching it really takes me back.

My learning project for the day was figuring out how to configure Google’s Postini email filtering service.  That is one of the most convoluted and overly complex things that I have ever seen.  I had originally assumed that this was going to be extremely easy.  Then I saw the roughly six hundred and fifty page manual!  This is crazy.  So that is not getting figured out today.  This is going to take some time.

My big project today was to get my email inbox down to absolute zero and I actually did it.  What an awesome accomplishment!  Zero emails.  I feel so liberated.  It has been forever since I got my inbox completely clean.  I feel massively productive now.  I can deal with each item as it comes in and I can keep it empty so I don’t look at it and suddenly feel overwhelmed.

Today there was supposed to be some news from work to give us at least some indication of how things are going for the move to Texas.  But there is no news today.  Not a peep.  So the waiting continues.  Considering how badly they seem to want people to move down to Dallas the process of getting approved to go seems to drag on forever.  I have been pushing really hard to get this process moving along and we just can’t find out anything.  They act like they are in a hurry but I just can’t get any to commit to a plan.

A friend of mine from SpiceCorps NY started at my office yesterday down at the Fort Lauderdale location.  I managed to email him even before they had given him and email login.  Nice to see people finding work again.  The market has been tough recently.

Today I downloaded and installed Yahoo’s new Browser Plus application which extends your web browser to make it a bit more robust. I was interested in trying it because of its integration with the Zimbra email system (which Yahoo also makes and sells.)  I have been using Zimbra for years now and this is definitely a nice update.  Now when someone is trying to talk to you Zimbra is able to do a much better job of alerting you to that fact.  I like it.

After work, Katie came up to our place to celebrate her birthday.  She took the train up from Grand Central Terminal and we met her at the Peekskill Brewery which is right by the Peekskill train station.  It is a really handy place to meet because she is able to take the train straight there and we can drive just a few minutes to get there.

Katie was already at the bar when we got there and she had the table in the front window facing the trains.  The brewery is perfect for Liesl because it is a little louder than a normal restaurant so even if she makes a bit of noise it doesn’t bother anyone.

We all got some brewery beer and we got pretzels to share as an appetizer.  Dominica and I have eaten the fish and chips from the brewery before and really like them.  Their chips are sprinkled with lemon zest which goes awesomely with the fish.

While we were at dinner Liesl tried her first taste of fish!  So the Peekskill Brewery has the distinction of cooker Liesl’s very first fish.  Very exciting.  She really liked it.  Hopefully this is a good indication that she is not going to be a picky eater.  So far she has been good about eating all kinds of things so we are hopeful although it is impossible to tell anything at this age.

We got dessert at the brewery and the staff came out with Katie’s cupcake and say Happy Birthday to her.  After dessert we went back up to the house for about an hour or so before I drove Katie back home to Nyack.