Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 815 – Scott Alan Miller

September 17, 2008: So Much for the Market Recovery

65 Days to Baby Day! (30 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)

Dominica was really exhausted when she dragged herself from bed this morning. She barely got any sleep. Five hours at the very best and likely only a tiny fraction of that. Oreo and I had the luxury of sleeping in quite a bit. Now that I have my office BlackBerry working again I am able to check my email from bed which means I can often get an hour or two of additional rest! Just one more reason why having a BlackBerry does not necessitate additional work but can actually reduce it.

The weather was really great today. I opened up the windows first thing this morning and got some fresh air into the house. It was bright and sunny so Oreo headed right out to his favourite spot in the living room. We are really hoping that the new house has good sun spots in which he will be able to sleep.

Today was quite a busy work day. The plan was to do some work from home and then to head in to the office but I was so busy that I never got an opportunity to leave the apartment. I just ended up working all day. In fact, it was well after three when I finally had a chance to get some lunch but it was so late that I figured that it would interfere with dinner. So I skipped lunch and just worked through it.

I did manage to do some cleaning today and to take care of the dishes which have been backing up. It wasn’t much but it made a big improvement in the house. We are shipping out the DL385 G5 that has been sitting in the living room for several weeks this weekend and that will allow us to take down the table upon which it sits which will give us our living room back finally.

I had a real ordeal ordering drive trays for the DL385 G5 today. Who would have guessed that HP does not sell the Proliant 2.5″ hot swap trays separately from their hard drives so there is really no simple was to be able to use third party hard drives in a unit like the DL385. I think that I found a solution but it took quite a bit of time on instant messenger and on the phone with HP to figure it out. Once we had figured out what part was needed – and that required tech support, not sales support – then I was able to find the part from eBay even though HP themselves do not sell it.

This is a long weekend for Dominica and I as we are heading up to dad’s house on Friday night and staying until Tuesday night. This will be our longest stretch in Upstate New York since March, 2006, I believe. We are pretty sure that we are able to leave on Friday night because of the freeze on the environment at work making it so that teams are unable to do deployments so my night will likely end early.

I have been doing a bit of shopping on Amazon for their MP3 downloads recently. I’ve found several artists recently that I really like that I just have not been listening to previously. I really like Michael Buble, Azam Ali and Cheryl Bentyne neither of whom I was truly aware before auditioning them on Amazon. I’m finding great new music from artists that I used to listen to regularly but with which I have “lost contact” over the years giving me a wealth of great music to discover. Artists like Enya, Loreena McKennitt as well as Leonard Bernstein conduction Gustav Mahler’s Symphony Number 2 in C Minor, “Resurrection”.

Andy and I were talking about home theatre options for the new house in Peekskill this evening. Dominica and I had talked about putting a large LCD monitor down in the den in the basement but had kicked around the idea of getting a new projector as well. Optoma has a really nice sounding 1080p projector that we could ceiling mount in the den that might work out wonderfully.

Projectors have come a long way since we first installed the InFocus X1 into the basement theatre on Hawthorn Circle. That old projector was not widescreen and had a resolution of 800 by 600 and only output 650 or 700 lumens. We had it stretched out to a fourteen foot screen size which was really tough to do with that little light output.

In the new house we will have quite a bit less screen area; it will be close to six or seven feet which is just over one quarter the total screen area as we had in Geneseo. The Optoma has 1300 lumens. That means that this would be many times brights and higher resolution. The price is not far off from a nice 47″ LCD so it might be a good option for us, especially as the den area of the basement will be either partially or completely isolated from outside light.

On her way home from work Dominica swung into On the Border and picked up dinner which, as always, means chipotle fish tacos for me. Today Dominica opted for a salad. Last night we ate so late that she was not able to get to sleep and that made her really exhausted so we decided that we needed to eat as early as possible tonight so that she could get to bed really early.

I had Frasier all set up and ready to go when Dominica walked in the door with dinner. We watched three episodes or so while eating dinner. Then Andy called and we talked for a while. Dominica went to sleep around eight thrity or so. She will be feeling much better tomorrow.

The stock market really took a beating today. Our drop today was far worse than even Monday. This is really something. It will be interesting to watch over the next several days to see what happens.

I discovered that there is a bit of Silver Spoons on Hulu today. I don’t think that I have seen that show since it was new. I am really unsure if I have ever even seen it in early reruns. I definitely remember it but only so well.

I was not all that tired this evening. After having my hours shifted so much the last few days my schedule is off by a bit. So I attempted to do some work while I was up. I am a bit behind on a number of things so there is no end to the work that I need to do. That is especially true as we are traveling this weekend and it would be really nice if I could have my homework done before going to dad’s house as it will take a large chunk of time to work on that while we are there.

I worked until just after one in the morning. I did not really want to be up so late but it gave me a chance to do some really important catching up on the BrainBench work that I have been doing.

I also logged in to my class to make sure that I was keeping up and not missing anything important. I put in some comments and responded to people and got some stuff set up so that I can work on my week’s homework assignment tomorrow. So far, this class is only a tiny fraction of the work that I have had to do in other classes at RIT. That means that I am starting to be concerned that I am missing something that I am supposed to be doing. That happens to be a lot.

I looked carefully tonight before going to bed and I do have something rather large due in my class by Friday of next week so I do need to get looking into that right away. Can’t sit around on these things. I can’t wait until my degree is done.

Tomorrow I will be home with Oreo all day. Hopefully getting a chance to do some homework. My reading assignments at the very least.

September 16, 2008: Calm Before the Storm?

66 Days to Baby Day! (30 Weeks and Four Days Pregnant)

I woke up this morning to the sound of the fire alarm. Fortunately, Dominica had closed the bedroom door and Oreo was under some blankets and was not really disturbed by the alarm. It turned out later that something in the alarm system had shorted out causing it to go off. No damage was done.

I worked from home this morning. Oreo is stuck home all week so we are trying to figure out how to get him through his days without it being a big problem.

It was pretty late by the time that I finally got on my way to Manhattan. I headed straight down to South William Street and over to Pearl to meet Katie for lunch at Fraunce’s Tavern, an American landmark. The tavern is famous as the site where Washington officially retired from his post as general and disbanded the young army that had just recently won our freedom from England. We got to eat in the very room where it had taken place.

The tavern was also the first site of America’s Department of War. The building was rented by the government as the first capital was just a few blocks away on Wall Street. Many revolutionary meetings took place here, as well, prior to the outbreak of the wall. The building itself was a three story mansion dating from the very early eighteenth century.

For lunch I had the lobster roll which was lobster salad on brioche which was excellent. I am eager to try several different dining options at Fraunce’s. They have a really great seafood and fish menu.

The day really wasn’t very busy. Because of the market being the way that it is there is very little to do. We all are on pins and needles in case something goes wrong but there is no extra work being done for reasons of stability. It makes for a good week in administration.

It was rather late when I finally got home this evening. Dominica ordered in from Nino’s while I was on the PATH and we ate while watching some Frasier. We are now on to the final season. I am really enjoying the series. Most of it I have seen over the years but the last few seasons are almost completley new to me, especially the last two. I am pretty sure that I have never seen a single episode of the final season.

Overall Wall Street was pretty calm today. We actually made some gains back from the huge losses yesterday. No one knows if this is all over yet, or not. It is a good time to be saving for retirement, though, but a horrible time to be burning retirement resources. Not a really good time to be holding money to buy a house, either. 🙁

Dominica was suffering from insomnia this evening so we ended up staying up until after one in the morning in the hopes that watching some Frasier would tire her out. Tomorrow is going to be a really long day for her.

September 15, 2008: Wild Ride on Wall Street

67 Days to Baby Day! (30 Weeks and Three Days Pregnant)

One month until we close on the new house! We are in the home stretch now. Just six more weeks of life in Newark.

I got pretty much no sleep last night. Oreo needed me to walk him pretty late in the evening which, or course, got my heart rate up and I was not able to fall asleep until after midnight. Then Oreo got me up a few times during the night and I was finally unable to fall asleep again after three in the morning. So I got, at most, a total of two or two and a half hours of sleep, and that after having had a very long and trying weekend already.

I left the apartment around six to head into the office. I got outside and discovered that it was far warmer and more humid that I would have guessed. It was quite uncomfortable on my walk to the office. I was not expecting it to be hot after having had a nice week.

After having used Twitter now seriously for several weeks I have decided that I am really into the whole microblogging thing but am having reservations about continuing to use Twitter. Twitter is a closed microblogging service which does not archive my posts indefinitely. This is fine for day to day use. My usage pattern is a bit different and with the new house and the baby coming so soon I would really like to be in a position where my posts are going to be archived along with the SGL blog. I would also like to have my microblog accessible from my office which, like many social networking sites, Twitter is not.

Because of this need I am investigating the first major open-source microblogging platform: Laconica. Laconica is the platform that powers the popular Twitter competitor Identi.ca. By using Laconica I will have my posts being stored in my own database, just as I do with SGL, so that they will always be available. I think that having this legacy data will be a valuable addition to the information already being stored by SGL. Just in the last several weeks I have had well over four hundred and fifty posts to Twitter. That represents a lot of information to have lost someday.

Another advantage to Laconica is that my readers will have the option of using SGL as their microblogging platform instead of Twitter. Sites using Laconica can federate together making a large microblogging community rather than a single, monolithic site like Twitter. That means that users on Identi.ca, for example, can subscribe to feeds transparently from SGL should we get Laconica running and vice versa. I am excited and very hopeful that this will work on our web server.

I really like how Friday’s “day of pictures” turned out. I am going to make an attempt to do something similar today. I have to go home to Newark during my lunch break so that I can be with Oreo. Because I left early this morning he has been alone since Dominica went to work around seven. If I did not go home early today he would be alone for a very, very long time and he would be quite upset. This week is going to be hard enough on him as it is.

My morning was pretty busy. Not horrible like you may have expected but definitely busy. Fewer total tasks to do with but all of the market volatility there was a lot more communication demanded for every little thing.

At twelve thirty I had to take my lunch break as an opportunity to run back to Newark to check on Oreo. Dominica walked him at seven just before she left and I got to the apartment around one thirty. He was doing fine and perfectly happy. Definitely not the same dog that we had two years ago. He would never have been able to have handled having been left alone for so long. This week is going to push him to his limit. We will see how he holds up.

On my walk home I made a point of keeping my Kodak digicam in hand and snapping several pictures so that I could show you, my readers, what my walk is like from the office to home. Most everyone who reads SGL has never been to the area around where I work or live and I think that people have a difficult time visualizing what much of my day is like. In fact, Dominica has never been down to where I work and doesn’t even know quite where it is.

I got lunch from Airlie but was so busy that I had to take at least two calls while eating my salad plus answering emails. They tried to set up by new BlackBerry Curve today as well but were unable to get it to work. I am hopeful that we can do some troubleshooting tomorrow and get it working. I have been without BlackBerry access to the office for weeks and it is really annoying.

People often complain about how people with BlackBerrys always work and how the BB is responsible for people never have free time anymore. This is completely untrue. It is the BlackBerry that allows me to ever me untethered from my computer. Because my BlackBerry has been broken I have been forced to stay logged in to the office all hours and to physically go out to the living room office and sit down and go through my mail! Previously I just checked my BlackBerry from time to time while spending time with Dominica. This has tripled the workload necessary just to maintain basic communications and does not address issues like this Saturday when we were away from the apartment.

On her way home from work, Dominica stopped off at On the Border and grabbed me fish tacos for dinner. It worked out well since I was already home with Oreo and she was in no hurry to get back to him like she will be the next few days. I will not be going in to Warren this week because we will have no way to take care of Oreo during such a long day if I do that.

We put on Frasier and ate our dinners. We watched several episodes with me taking intermittent breaks to come out and check my mail and to make sure that I was not needed. This whole week is going to be very busy.

Today was a wild ride for the world financial markets. Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection this morning and Merrill-Lynch was acquired by Bank of America and American International Group announced that it was having difficulties and would need assistance. The scale of this disaster is so big that it really cannot be overstated. The major banks worked all weekend and today we saw one of the biggest market declines in memory. Really something to watch. Over the next week or two we will get a fair idea of just what the long term impact of these events will be. This is a very important day in financial history.

Today I got to install WordPress with Google Gear integration. This is the hot, new feature of the latest WordPress platform version. This should be very cool. It means that I can keep editing SGL even when the site goes down and that the effort that I put in to editing the site has a smaller impact on site performance. I am also very excited about WordPress’ built in Word Count functionality that tells me how much I have written right on the screen while I am writing.

Speaking of outages – SGL, along with my email, IM and everything else, was down for an hour or so today. The outage was not caused by us but by router configuration problems at the datacenter. I wonder if causing the outage myself wouldn’t make me feel better than having it caused by someone else who doesn’t take responsibility for it. Hmmm….

I worked until around midnight before heading off to bed. Tomorrow will be another long day. I have a long laundry list of things that need to be done over the next few days.

September 14, 2008: The Fall of Wall Street

68 Days to Baby Day! (30 Weeks and Two Days Pregnant)

It turned out to be a very good thing that we went to bed so early last night – I was paged out twice after having gone to bed and Oreo got me up once to take him out for a walk and once again for a house inspection. So my night was full of interruptions.

I slept in until a little after noon today. Dominica got up around ten thirty and tried to be quiet around the house knowing that I really needed the time to catch up on my rest. I was just exhausted. Oreo stayed with me almost all morning before moving to the living room for some sunlight.

Dominica spent the morning doing laundry. There was no opportunity to do any yesterday,

For lunch (breakfast?) I went down to the deli downstairs and got myself a big salad with tuna and Dominica an egg salad on a bagel.

I uploaded a handful of pictures that I took in Manhattan on Friday to Flickr this afternoon. I added several of them to Friday’s post. The post was so long with nothing to break it up so I figured that some pictures would help. I took pictures at lunch and on my walk to lunch. I would have gotten a lot more but it was raining and I did not feel like getting rain on the camera lens.

Today is my homework day. My homework is due today and cannot be pushed off any longer. I had hoped to have been able to have done it on Friday night, but quite obviously there was no way for me to have done any homework on Friday night. So I am stuck doing it today in a bit of a panic.

Dominica left to go up to West New York, New Jersey for Dunia’s baby shower today. Oreo and I stayed home. There was no way that Oreo could be left home alone again today. He would be very cross with us if we even though about that!

I spent the entire afternoon working on my homework – from around four in the afternoon until almost ten thirty at night. It was a long day, but I completed the work that I needed to do.

The big news this weekend is that Lehman Brothers, the giant American investment bank, has collapsed and is not being rescued. Wall Street opened the derivatives markets today so that the banks could start disconnecting themselves from Lehman before the general markets open tomorrow morning. The financial houses are working full steam all weekend so I was online all last evening, overnight and all day today until midnight helping to support production.

Because of market volatility I am going into the office early tomorrow. I have to be up around five in the morning so that I can get to the office. So we watched a little Frasier and were off to bed.

September 13, 2008: Lamaze Class

69 Days to Baby Day! (30 Weeks and One Day Pregnant)

There was no rest for me. Finally made it to bed at four thirty this morning and had to be up around seven thirty so that I could get ready to take Dominica to our all day Lamaze class at Hudson Valley Medical Center in Peekskill, New York in Westchester County.

I was really exhausted this morning. We hit the road at eight thirty. Poor Oreo is stuck home alone all day. Nadine walked him at lunch time so that he would not feel completely abandoned but that was his only company for the entire day.

It takes sixty to ninety minutes to go from Newark to Peekskill. A long drive when we were both so tired. Dominica didn’t get a lot of sleep last night as she never sleeps well when she is waiting for me to get home.

This morning I checked several times and continue to check on my BlackBerry and see that the new email system, Zimbra 5.0.9, is running smoothly without any issues thus far. (Now where is that proverbial wood…)

Nothing much to report from the class. Lamaze was a single, seven hour long class taught at HVMC which is located right around the corner from the new house. This is the facility that Dominica will be using, deus volente (you can thank dad for that), for having the baby.

We were hoping to be able to get a tour of the facility today, but there was only a single nurse on staff and a Ceasarean section was about to begin. (I learned today that Americans often mispell Ceasar in this type of reference calling it a cesarean section – also missing the obviously needed capitalization. Every single bit of material that we had in the class had it missplelled in this manner.)

I also learned that medical professionals often confuse lunar and solar months – the generic term “month” meaning solar month in English. Any use of the word “month” to mean something different requires the whole phrase like “lunar month”.

Our Lamaze trainer taught us that generally pregnancies are measured in lunar months which is extremely confusing because the simple way that everyone remembers the length of a pregnancy is in solar months – nine months – and when people speak to each other about their pregnancies they do so in solar months, but randomly doctors, nurses and some birthing guides will switch to lunar months without designation. So anything stating a number of months less than nine months has no means of accuracy without specification.

However, having thought that this would clear up the issue of birth schedule confusions that we have been having, we then learned that medical professionals think that lunar months are 28 days in length. They are not. The standard, accepted lunar month is correctly called a synodic month and is 29.5 days. The closest measurement to what medical professionals use is a sidereal month which is 27.3 days or the draconic month at 27.1 days. There is no lunar period that is 28 days or that rounds to 28 days. So the use of the lunar month term is also confusing.

Why do medical professionals insist, then, on using the term month when they do not mean it at all? Why not use weeks or fortnights like sensible, educated people? I continue to be baffeled by the ability of the medical profession to lack skills deemed critical to the advancement from elementary to middle school.

We also learned in the class that because of similar issues to the lack of ability between medical professionals to express time to one another that they also do not have the ability to express a repeating time period accurately.

In learning about contraction schedules we were taught about contractions happening “every five minutes” – this being the “interval” of the contractions. The term “interval” is technical, expressive and accurate. If something happens “every five minutes” then it has a five minute interval.

This is easily measured by going from the beginning of one contraction to the beginning of the next. If this time period is five minutes then the interval is five minutes. If a contraction has an interval of five minutes then the length of the contractions themselves do not matter. If the contraction lasts one second or four minutes but start every five minutes then the interval is five minutes.

This makes perfect sense and just to make sure we all understood how an “interval” worked this was explained by the Lamaze trainer as, apparently, it is common to misunderstand the term interval to be inclusive even though that is taught pretty solidly in high school. This seemed to make everything very clear and easy. That is until….

When we got to contractions happening more frequently the literature no longer made any sense. It would state that contraction would come at an interval (yes, they used the word again in a chart format to make sure that there could be no mistake in the meaning) of thirty seconds but would last one to one and a half minutes!!

That means that the average woman has two to three contractions at once as a sign that labor is pending. This is not the case. Women only have one contraction at a time. What they meant was that the interval was two minutes and that the time between contractions (the exclusionary term for the space in which no contraction exists) was thirty seconds.

Sure, that was easy to figure out. But what we now know for sure is: the literature that we have definitely does not use the term interval correctly – at least not all of the time, our Lamaze teacher either can’t do math or doesn’t understand interval even after explaining it correctly or thinks that women have three contactions at once without any break for hours at a time.

So now, knowing that the medical professionals involved don’t know what they are talking about I have no way to know what was meant by the original data set! Did they really mean interval like they said? Or did they mean time between like they meant on the later chart? Since the trainer made such a point of explaining what it meant for the first set we have such conflicting data that there is no way to know. So what we took away was – just make up the numbers because there is no means of communicating to your doctor or nurse any element of time.

In the end we had no way to know which set of material was right, which set was wrong. In fact, we don’t actually know if any of it was right. We only know that some of it was, at least, wrong as it conflicted with other information. Both can’t be right, but we could not figure out which.

Overall, we got about one hour or less worth of material spread out over seven hours which is exactly the wrong format to have people retain anything. The whole process was an antithesis to accepted pedogogical methods. I didn’t even learn anything about Lamaze breathing that I did not already know.

Dominica even admitted that there was no value to having a Lamaze class in person and that she would recommend to people just to get a DVD in the future. It is so much easier to learn from a good video than to do a class like that. Everyone was really nice and the instructor really cared about what she was teaching but she wasn’t a trained educator or presentor nor was she technical enough to have reviewed the material for accuracy. Even a poor video would do a better job.

As it was, at least two hours of the class was watching ancient 1970s videos about having babies on VHS – actually on VHS tapes on an old CRT monitor! We were in a room with a high definition projector, giant screen and DVD sources but we watched VHS tapes. Which is fine, the material doesn’t change. Although it was hard to see the screens. Funny enough, though, the main video that we watched, “Hello, Baby”, is one that I saw long ago – probably in health class in high school. So even that was just review and it was not really educational back then either.

During our lunch break we went down to the Beach Shopping Center very near to our new house and had lunch at the Pastel Cafe. The food was pretty decent and we could see ourselves eating here often once we are local.

We left Peekskill at just after five in the evening. What a long day. I was really struggling to stay awake the whole time as you can imagine. Had there been more information to internalize it would have been better. But nothing was going to make it easy.

We got home around six thirty. Oreo was very excited to see us! He slept all day, we think, and did not have an accident. This was the longest that we have left him alone in a year or maybe two! This had to be really hard for him.

We ordered in dinner from Nino’s and watched Frasier and then went to bed early. We were both completely exhausted.