Sheep Guarding Llama

I was really exhausted when I got up this morning.  I had to work way too late last night and I did not get a very good night’s rest because I was so exhausted when I finally got to bed.  I woke up with the sinus problem that I get that, as far as I can tell, is caused by being over exhausted when I go to bed and is somehow connected to my CPAP although I have never managed to figure out exactly what causes the problem so I am unable to avoid it.  So I spent the day with what seems like a sinus affection which does not make me happy.

There was quite a bit of work to do today but nothing that had to be done first thing so I was able to sleep in until well after ten.  Then it was time to log into the office and spend the day working.

I put in several hours today working until into the evening.  It was a lot more work today than I had been planning to be doing.  But I can’t complain about the hours these days although the number of hours that I have been logging the last few weeks are really taking their toll on me.

After working quite a bit today I spent the evening hanging out with the family. Before we could just relax, Dominica went out and did a bit of shopping.  Liesl was, for a change, completely obliging and slept for me the entire time that Dominica was away and Oreo did not ask to go out.  This never happens when I am left home alone with the children.

We relaxed for a while and then watched Blades of Glory on BluRay which Dominica has seen previously but I have not.  It was silly but entertaining.

We got to bed just a little after midnight.  It is a short night tonight.  Daylight Savings Time starts tomorrow.

I tried to go to bed last night but Oreo was in a bizarre mood or maybe just was not feeling well.  He got up twice and made me take him outside.  Then he just moved to the nursery and kept bugging me to get out of bed.  Finally I went downstairs and we played fetch for a while.  He was still acting strangely, though, as he would get extremely excited to play but only play for a few minutes and then lay down.  Then he would get excited and want to play again.  He was panting a bit more than usual as well.

Oreo played really hard this afternoon and then slept through the entire evening and didn’t get his supper until many hours after he would normally have eaten.  It is possible that his schedule is out of kilter and that he was just confused as to the time or something.  We played until three thirty in the morning when I was finally able to convince him to try going back to bed. He was still rather restless for a while but eventually we managed to get some sleep.

At least while I was stuck awake taking care of Oreo I was able to figure out what was wrong with the netbook and I was able to get Fedora 10 (with XFCE) to boot up from the USB stick so that I could try it out.  From what little bit I had a chance to see it is looking pretty good.  I will try to do more experimenting tomorrow and possibly even replace the existing OS with this one.

I got up at ten after eight this morning.  I had to be on the early morning employment numbers call for the bank to support the trading load that could happen.  The numbers were just as expected so there was pretty much nothing to do.

This morning I decided to start an Oreo twitter feed.  Having a Twitter page for your pet is just cool.

Work was pretty busy but not too crazy considering that it is a Friday.  I got a chance to do a full Fedora 10 install onto the Acer Aspire One in the hopes of making it into the netbook that I am hoping that it will be.  I have just about everything working except for the audio which I did not get any chance to look at today.  I have all of the main packages that want installed and the netbook will do all of the things that I need it to do to be productive include flawlessly playing h.264 movies of which I have tons of to play upon it.  The high quality screen, while small, makes for very nice viewing, especially as I can see it without needing to wear my glasses.

Work ended up running really late this evening.  By late afternoon I was really dragging from lack of sleep.

I got a little bit of time to hang out with Dominica and Liesl this evening but work never wrapped up so I was constantly going between the living room and the basement or just working from the living room on the laptop or the netbook.  I barely got to see Liesl at all today because I skipped lunch as well.  It feels like we didn’t even get to hang out today.

We did get a bit of a break this evening around eight when we were able to go out to the mailbox, get the new BluRay of Blades of Glory that arrived in the mail today and watch that on the PS3 in the living room.  That was nice.  That was a very silly but quite entertaining movie with a lot of people that I like in it.  Dominica had seen it already which I did not know.  She has seen a ton more movies in the last few years than I have had a chance to see.

Other than that one reprieve, and even that was not a solid break, I was stuck working until after two in the morning.  We are doing a lot of hardware maintenance work at the office and the only good time in which to do it is extremely late on Friday nights so this is the result of that.

I was painfully tired by the time that things were wrapping up at work.  Luckily the type of work that we do really late at night like this is not very complicated.  All I really do is coordinate with some people, shut boxes down, turn monitoring on and off at appropriate times, bring boxes back up and check them out.  Nothing dangerous like I might break something.  Good thing too because I have no decision making skills at this point in the morning.

We got a chance to talk to Ramona tonight and she is planning to come up to Peekskill to visit on Sunday late in the morning or early in the afternoon and will stay here until Monday.  The my cousin Sara is kicking around the idea of coming down to visit next week but we do not have a schedule from her yet so we have no idea if that is going to work or not.  Then next weekend Dominica’s parents are coming to visit.  I expect that they will arrive late on Saturday morning and leave on Sunday afternoon.  Then my family – dad, aunt Sharon and uncle Leo – are thinking about coming down some time shortly after that during the week.  Apparently I need to get to work on some cleaning.

Tomorrow (Saturday) morning I am going to be sleeping in something fierce.  Once I wake up I have a bit of work that needs to be done for the office.  Then there is nothing else planned for the day except, of course, for cleaning of which we will be doing a lot.  I will definitley be doing some relaxing as well as some playing with the new netbook.  I am really loving that unit.  It is so nice to use for so many tasks.  Now that I have it loaded with Fedora 10 it will be so much more useful.  It is no longer running a toy operating system but something serious with which I can really work.

I really wish that we had the funding to get these Acer Aspire One netbooks for the school in Castile.  These are so much nicer than the OLPCs and at approximately the same price!  These would be perfect for so many kids.  Easily portable to take to and from school but powerful enough to really use for work processing, educational programs, programming, some games, web surfing, email, etc.  It will be a long time before we can do anything like that, I am afraid.

I found out today that SGL was linked via Yahoo! Answers for the question on how to download the song 16 Going On 17 from Statefarm.  I also found one of my pictures being used on Realtor.com.  I believe that I have linked to this one before but here is the Cocker Spaniel guide page from HubPages with a picture of my childhood dog, Buffer, in a picture taken by my mother.  Here is one of my pictures used by a student at Lee’s Summit Highschool in Missouri.  Thanks also to Flat Mountain for their link to us.

The sun was out in force today and the air temperature was up into the forties for most of the day.  It was really a gorgeous day.  Oreo was very happy to be able to go out for his daily walk without having to face snow wherever he went.

Today was another day with several hours of telephone time.  That seems to be the way of things recently.  I don’t normally get stuck on the phone all that much but the past few weeks it seems that the headset never really comes off as I go from one conference call to another throughout the day.

We were quite hungry and so had an early lunch today.  Dominica made vegetarian BLT sandwiches around eleven thirty which were really good as we have not had that in quite a while and it is one of my favourite foods.  I did not get very much time for lunch today.  I got stuck on calls and my food was cold, as usual, by the time that I actually got a chance to eat and I had to head back to work shortly after finishing my food.  I did get a little bit of a chance to see Liesl, though, whom I held during lunch and she fell asleep on my chest for a while.

The afternoon was pretty busy but I was able to come upstairs at a pretty decent time and hang out with everyone.  Somehow the evening just flew by and before I knew it it was very, very late.  I really did not manage to get anything done this evening.  I can’t figure out where the day went.

I did manage to hang out with Liesl a bit today.  She was in a good mood for me much of the day and at one point, while Dominica was cooking dinner, I was carrying Liesl around as I often do with her dangling at my side which is her favourite place to be and while I was checking in with work she fell asleep.  So I go stuck with her sleeping with me holding her in the basement for quite a while.

Dominica has been on a kick watching Extreme Engineering or something like that so we watched some shows about building tunnels, bridges, airports and dams.  It is all interesting but if you watch very much of that stuff you really get to see just how dumbed down they make those programs and how massively repetitive they are as if they were being filmed for little kids.  You can miss half of the show and not miss a single word.  At one point I was actually confused that the show had started over but they were just reading the script again but showing different images.  Writers must be more expensive than the film crew.

Dominica wasn’t feeling all that well this evening so she, Liesl and Oreo went to bed around eleven or maybe even a little bit before.  I stayed up until after one.  I did some work for the office, wrote some emails and did some work on the Acer Aspire trying to test out alternative operating systems running from the USB stick (which I never got to work at all) and wrapping up writing Sheep Guarding Llama for the day.

Tomorrow is Friday and the new employment numbers are being announced in the morning so I need to be up early so that I can be on the conference call to support the trading floors when those numbers are announced.  There is a potential for a big increase in trading traffic when any new set of numbers are announced because if the numbers announced are dramatically different than those that were anticipated then there is heavy trading in one direction or the other.  Tomorrow is going to be a very busy day.

We have no plans for this weekend.  Dominica’s parents are thinking about coming down to visit next weekend.  My family is thinking about coming down later in the month but no date is set yet for that and my cousin Sara is talking about coming down next week as she has not had a chance to see Liesl at all yet.

The big news for today came late this evening – the Ralstons have managed to rent their home out which pretty much sets them up to be able to go to the Congo at any moment.  We don’t know the details yet on when they are going to travel to Africa but the only major barrier left has been removed.  In theory they could leave in as little as a month.

After working until after three thirty in the morning I slept in a bit today.  Oreo was very snugly and stayed in bed late with me.  I had to get up and work for a little over an hour, which was pretty busy as most of my morning’s work was condensed into a pretty short period of time.

Liesl was super-ultra sleepy girl today.  She slept all night solidly, had her morning snack around seven, and then slept again until we woke her up to put her into the car.  She was a very happy baby today with all of that sleep.

At eleven we took Liesl to her doctor’s appoint.  She has not had one in quite a while.  She did very well.  Her doctor said that she is looking really good and all of her stats are right where they are supposed to be.  She is up to twelve pounds and two ounces according to the official scale and is twenty-four and one half inches long.  She turns three months and one week old tomorrow.

We had some concerns about Liesl having an ear infection because she has been touching her ear a lot recently.  The doctor checked and there is nothing wrong with her ear.  It would appear that she has just recently discovered her right ear and enjoys playing with it and nothing more.  That was our only indicator so we are happy to find out that that is all that is wrong.

We were talking to Liesl’s doctor about her progress with rolling over.  He was expecting that she would start rolling over very soon as three months is the common mark for that but she started flipping from front to back two entire months ago over Christmas break.  She has not yet flipped from back to front – until today.  While we were talking to the doctor about her rolling over she decided to do her very first back to front roll right in front of us while all of us were talking about that very thing.  So she now has all forms of rolling solidly under her belt.

Liesl started her vaccinations today.  She is a little bit behind on them because of the scheduling issues so she has six vaccinations that she is ready to get.  We want to avoid her getting them all at once because that seems very unhealthy and unwise – especially when we are neither traveling anywhere nor is she exposed to any number of people as she is home all of the time.  But we don’t want to avoid the vaccinations either even though neither of us has much faith in them and tend to think that they are just more medical nonesense to get more money from people who cannot afford to do their own research into them.

We talked to the doctor and he was perfectly happy having us spread out the shots so that Liesl will get one every month for the next five months.  This seemed like a good comprimise.  So she got her first shot today which she was extremely unhappy about.  At least her first one is out of the way and there are just five more to do.

We came home and I skipped my lunch break so that I could get back to work as there was a bit of work backed up from me having been gone for an hour.  It was a very busy afternoon.

Around four o’clock this afternoon, UPS arrived with a box from Amazon – my birthday present from Dominica.  It is my white Acer Aspire One running Linpus Linux.  It was a few hours before I had an opportunity to take it out of the box and test it out.

My first impression of the Acer Aspire One running Linux is that it is totally awesome.  It is absolutely tiny for starters.  I knew that it was small but actually getting it into my hands really brings home just how small and portable this unit is.  The construction is really solid and this feels like a serious device which is what you expect from Acer which is one of the big commercial computer makers along with HP, Dell, Apple and Lenovo (technically Apple is not a commercial vendor – they make consumer gear – but they build their equipment like they are.)

The Linpus Linux OS that comes with the Aspire One works pretty well for many things.  It is a modification of Fedora 8 which is a good Linux system but is not exactly current.  Fedora 10 is current and Fedora 11 Alpha is already out there.  Linpus on the Aspire One uses OpenOffice 2.3 and FireFox 2.0 both of which are sorely out of date.  I think that having an up to date Fedora installation would be much better than the limited Linpus even if it uses more system resources.  Linpus Linux does not have any type of traditional desktop or application menu system which makes its use rather awkward.

The Linpus OS that is included is functional and might work well for a lot of users who do not want to have to worry about managing their own operating system although it leaves them with a rather antiquated system.  My plan is to try installing Fedora 10 onto the Aspire One to see if that will meet my needs better.  I would love to see OpenSUSE 11.1 working on it as well.  I will be doing some experimentation.

I have a 16GB SD card added to the Aspire One which expands its operating system space to 24GB.  That is so much space for a netbook with no hard drive.  The Aspire is the first machine that I have purchased with an Intel processor in a very long time.  In this case the Intel Atom.  This model has the N270 processor which is not quite as nice as the lower-power consumption and slightly faster N280 processor available in some other Windows-based Aspire One models.

I did not get to play with my new NetBook for very much of the evening as there was a lot of other work to do so I worked on the HP nx6125 which is my Windows XP workhorse laptop and Dominica played with the Aspire One.

We watched a mix of Murder She Wrote, Kate & Allie and Extreme Engineering from the Discovery Channel.  We watched a show about building subways and one about the making of the Panama Canal.

Dominica was able to do some more work on her class today and was able to wrap up the second of the four classes necessary to complete her Linux System Administrator program.  So at the end of the day she is now officially at the half-way point through the program.

We stayed up until around one thirty in the morning then it was time for bed.  Dominica was working on putting together Liesl’s jumper which she is about ready to start using.

The snow is still everywhere quite thick but the sun was out in total brilliance this morning.  So even though the ground was white and the air was below twenty degrees it was still a gorgeous day.  Oreo spent the entire morning laying in the sun panting.  The furnace did not have to run all day from all of the wonderful sunshine that we had pouring into the house.

Work was quite busy today.  I got started earlier than usual and it was good because I was needed all day long.  I was so busy, in fact, that I only took about fifteen minutes, or less, for lunch.  I came upstairs and ate with Dominica but I had to do so many things during the time that I was attempting to eat that my food was cold anyway.  This often happens to me.

My 16GB SD card arrived from Amazon today.  That is going to be my operating system expansion card for my Acer Aspire One netbook which is scheduled to arrive tomorrow.  I am really looking forward to having that system with which to play.  I am thinking that I will probably use it quite a lot.

Dominica was able to get a little bit of time to work on her course work today.  She is now up to ten elevenths of the way through her second class at the UofI.  I am expecting that tomorrow she will probably be able to finish that one and then she will officially be halfway through her program.  Very exciting.  She is making very good progress.

Katie reported via Twitter today that Duds’ surgery on his leg went well.  He has arthritis which is no surprise and his ligament in his legs was torn halfway through.  Poor doggy.  He must have been in so much pain.  He is doing well last I heard.  Katie is very excited to have him back home after his surgery.

Tomorrow is cardboard recycling day in Peekskill and luckily Dominica remembered about it today so we were able to take out our cardboard this evening.  Boy is it nice to have two months of cardboard out of the house.  We don’t have any spare space and all of those boxes just pile up all over the place.

This evening Dominica got a chance to go out and do some grocery shopping.  Tonight was her night to go to Stop and Shop.  She tries to alternate between our two local grocery stores so that we can get some additional variety.  That meant that I was home alone with Liesl and Oreo for about two hours.  Liesl was, of course, asleep when Dominica decided to go but woke up as she was going on of the door and did not start to get sleepy again until Dominica returned.

We watched very little “television” this evening.  I was content to have the TV turned off while Dominica was out shopping and she did not turn it on right away after getting home.  Then I talked to Andy on the phone for a while this evening.  We ended up just watching an hour and a half of Murder She Wrote before Dominica fell asleep and went to bed.

We are trying to start limiting the amount of time that the television is on because Liesl is beginning to watch it.  It is very hard for Dominica as it is so tempting to have the television on all during the day since it is right in the middle of the house where she takes care of Liesl.  Everytime that Liesl isn’t completely demanding her attention it is natural to just turn it on because there is not enough time to really do anything else.  Now that Liesl is television aware we have to change our patterns.  We are trying to only have it on while she is asleep or in situations where she cannot see it.

I did some more work with SpiceWorks tonight.  I am getting to know that software pretty well.  It is very useful for me and I am enjoying using it.  It has a lot of really neat features that I am just now beginning to delve into.  There are still quite a number of areas where it is not doing what I want or expect it to do so I am not sure if it is having a problem of if I am unaware of how to set everything up properly.  There is all kinds of support for it so I suppose that I should start taking advantage of some of that to get it really tuned and running smoothly.

I had quite a bit of work that I needed to do late tonight so I did what I could before Dominica went to bed but she fell asleep around half past midnight.  I got stuck working at my laptop in the living room until after three in the morning.  It seems that late at night is the only time that I am really able to get very much done.  Whenever the television is on it is very distracting and it slows me to a crawl.  I am not good at being efficient when there is something going on grabbing my attention.

Boy was I tired by the time that I was heading off to bed.  Tomorrow morning at eleven Liesl has a doctor’s appointment as well.  This is her first appointment in a really long time because of a scheduling mess up by the doctor’s office.  They kept playing games of telling us how long we should go between visits and then “misscheduling” us way too early and then saying “oh, that’s far too early” and then later saying “oh, its not worth changing the date” even though it was half the time that it should have been between visits.  We were not very happy with them trying to make extra money that way.  Then they scheduled us twice as long or more than they suggested.  It is a total mess.