Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

No news scheduled for today.  We are, in theory, supposed to hear something tomorrow although I am hardly holding my breath at this point.  We are past anxious and just trying to ignore the situation for now.  I guess when people are ready for us to start planning we will hear something.

I finally gave in and installed Tweetdeck the other day to ease the management of my Twitter feed.  I tried it once before but had some issues getting it installed or maybe had an issue with Adobe AIR, the RAI platform on which Tweetdeck runs.  Today it installed just fine and I was up and running in no time with Twitter although it was unable to connect to Facebook or MySpace so there is still something unstable about it.

Using Tweetdeck is definitely already making my communications life easier.  I don’t need to use that buggy Twitter webpage anymore and I get updates automatically without having to go refresh the page just to find out that there is nothing there.  I am able to post much fast and keep up with everyone better.  I am very glad that I gave it a try.

Today I played with it some more and finally got FaceBook to connect and start working.  This is making things even easier yet.  Now I don’t have to check in to FaceBook during the day either.

Today was pretty busy with work and I really did not get any chance to hang out with Liesl during the day.  She was apparently really tired – she did cut a new tooth yesterday and got very little sleep – and she was falling asleep before seven this evening!

Dominica IM’s me to tell me that Liesl was falling asleep and that I had better cut out of work early if I wanted to see her.  I did but Liesl was pretty much out by the time that I made it up the stairs.  So no real time together today 🙁

We just watched some of Newhart on Hulu tonight and I worked from my laptop in the living room.  I tried out Digsby this evening which people have been telling me to try instead of Tweetdeck but it appears to have some dependency and incompatibility with Internet Explorer and I could not get it to even work.  Even on a clean install of Vista with a newly updated IE8 it just threw one JScript error after another and would not function at all.  So I call that a fail and I am back to Tweetdeck.

Maybe some news tomorrow.  Fingers crossed.

Up early and working by seven thirty or so.  I was up long before Dominica and Liesl were so I got some time to sit in the basement and do research.  I did some learning about Oracle Beehive today which I have never seen before.  I looked interesting but my verdict at the end was that I would likely lean toward SharePoint over Beehive.

It started raining last night just before midnight.  That was rather unexpected.  It had not felt like rain all day.  It felt mostly like summer yet yesterday morning but by last night and clearly today it feels as though autumn has arrived.  I have a feeling that summer is over.  I am looking forward to the cooler weather.  Overall it was a very good year with tons of rain.  But now it is just starting to get a little crisp outside which is how I like it.  It should be fleece weather in no time.

I set up and tested out Hamachi VPN from LogMeIn today.  I have used it before but it was years ago.  I have not seen it in many generations and LogMeIn has done a lot of interesting stuff with it.  Hamachi is very cool and I think that I am going to be using it a lot more in the near future.  I am just figuring out all of the cool stuff that I can do with it now.  Having three different architectural options makes it a lot more complex to use.

Today I also discovered PeepCode.  PeepCode is a programming screencast company that makes screencasts that teach programming and other IT concepts.  I looked through their catalogue and found lots of stuff in which I am interested.  They aren’t too expensive so I bought one of their Ruby on Rails videos to give them a try.  Unfortunately I am unable to get it to play on the PS3 so we can’t watch them upstairs.  I have to sit at a computer to watch the screencast.

Today, Liesl said her very first sentence!  Early this afternoon I came up the stairs from the basement and Liesl was on the loveseat with Dominica.  When I popped out of the basement Liesl looked at me and said “Hi, dada!”  It was very exciting!  She has said both words before but has never strung words together like this.  She is growing up so fast.

We also discovered that Liesl has cut her third tooth today.  This is her first tooth on the top.  Two exciting developments in one day.  Liesl is very happy to have the tooth as well.  She slept very badly last night.

Liesl turns ten months old today.  Hard to believe that we have had our little girl for so long and yet, in many ways, it seems as if we have always had her here.  It is impossible to imagine life without her.

I worked until seven this evening.  I had tried to get away from the office earlier but I got paged out several times in succession.  So no getting away early for me.

We have our final price for our Walt Disney World trip coming up in late November.  We are staying, on property, and going to the park for less than $200 per day which is amazing as that includes the hotel, park admission and all of the food that we will eat while we are there.  Quite a good deal.  This is actually a very cost effective trip that we are taking.

I got the old G4 Mac Mini hooked up tonight in the living room in an attempt to get it working with the television so that Dominica and I can watch computer based training (CBT) programs there instead of having to watch them alone on a laptop – more a television replacement than anything.  We have a DVI to HDMI cable to try out but we ran into some snags and were unable to hook it up.  I got it working but it would only last for a minute or two before it would drop the signal to the television and be useless.  I think that it is a hardware problem with the Mac Mini.

I have not used the Mini in years.  Probably not since 2005 and certainly not since 2006 when it went into a plastic bin and into dad’s barn for storage.  We only got it down to Peekskill recently and today was the first time plugging it in again.  It is running Mac OSX 10.3 (Panther) which is completely ancient at this point.  Snow Leopard, which is OSX 10.6, is now out.  Unfortunately this hardware, being a PowerPC, cannot run anything newer than Tiger OSX 10.4 which I do not have so the machine is left being rather out of date which is unfortunate as I never really got that much use out of it.  My plan is to set it up down on my desk to use as a terminal workstation to use to connect to UNIX machines when I work on them.