Sheep Guarding Llama

Happy May Day. Today begins what is expected to be the busiest month of 2008 for us (we think.) Although we know that there is a LOT going on in November as well. We don’t know exactly what is happening in November but a lot, for sure. For example, on November 1st we will be living somewhere. We just have no idea where. We don’t even know which state or metro area.

Today is a Thursday so it is Oreo and my regular doggy – daddy day. There was some nice sun this morning so Oreo got a chance to do his lounge thing for a couple of hours before the drear set in a little after lunch.

The spider mites have all but killed my awesome ivy plant that I loved so much. It was so alive and vibrant when we first got it. It was the shining star of our houseplants and now it is brown and almost dead. It is very sad. I am doing what I can to save it but so far my progress as been one step forward and five steps back.

I continued my Handbrake conversion frenzy today keeping all three machines working throughout the day. I am sure that this amount of continuous conversions is going to show up on my next electric bill. I am almost to the point where I need to invest in a dedicated, screaming fast quad-core machine just to do this all of the time. Something with multiple hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration to handle the massive I/O load that I am putting on all of these machines. As it is I am using five spindles between the three machines to even out the I/O as much as possible. I really wish that the x264 library had code to offload floating point processing to a GPU like the CUDA libraries can do with nVidia GPUs. Then i would just get a nice nVidia GPU and have one machine that ate VOBs for breakfast. (And poops MP4s to carry the analogy to its fullest extent.)

Today was another crazy day for me. One of those days where I was really feeling extremely worn out by the end of the day and just really want to collapse. But I don’t get to do that because I have homework and other stuff that needs to be done tonight so I am stuck awake until midnight at the very earliest.

Dominica wanted food from the deli downstairs again so we ordered from there and watched a little What I Like About You. Then she was off to bed and I was off to do homework.

Dominica keeps getting linked from an online directory because they think that she is an island nation in the Caribbean Sea.  It is pretty funny that we get tons of incoming links here because the bots have no idea when someone is talking about a tourist destination or just a person.  They don’t put much thought into these things.  What really amazes me is that so many people will go to just any website and read anything there that this actually is a financial viable thing to do.

My morning was pretty slow.  The walk into Wall Street was pretty nice.  It was cool and overcast.  A little before noon work started getting really busy and I ended up having an incredibly crazy day.

Katie and I decided to do lunch today and I wasn’t able to get out of the office until after three in the afternoon.  At least by the time we were able to go for lunch the sun had come out and it was very nice outside.  So we decided to walk up to the Southside Sea Port on the East River in Lower Manhattan.  We ate at the Pacific Grill on Pier 17.  Lunch was very good.  Lobster bisque, lobster ravioli with honey chipotle sauce, grilled sea bass, coconut creme brulee… it was all quite tasty and the weather was perfect.  I really needed the long lunch away from the office after how busy it had been.  And there is a ton of work for me to do later after-hours so this is my one chance to really just relax.

The afternoon continued to be very busy and I didn’t manage to get home until seven.  I spent the next hour and a half cleaning as quickly as I could as we have the Dungeons and Dragons game at our apartment tonight.  The apartment was quite a mess and there was a lot of work to be done.

We played D&D with Kevin, Pam and Ramona from eight thirty until just after eleven.  After everyone left and Dominica went to bed I stayed up until three in the morning doing the after-hours work that got held over from today.  That made for a long night.  I was really exhausted when I finally managed to get to bed.  But I got a lot of work done that needed to be completed so it was good that I had stayed up.  Getting this type of work done during the day is nearly impossible – especially when there hasn’t been time to schedule it ahead of time.

Today Dominica and my first nephew, Garrett Grice, was born!  We haven’t heard a lot of details yet but as far as we know everyone is doing well.  We have already seen a picture of him and he looks to be very healthy and happy.

It is dreary and drizzly in New Jersey today.

My big surprise came this morning when I was contacted by a marketing firm representing Prudential.  They had discovered some of my Newark Branch Brook Park Cherry Blossom pictures on Flickr and wanted to purchase several of them for Prudential.  Prudential is interested in using them to make gifts for Japanese clientele.  It is very cool to have my pictures noticed!

After Dominica got home this evening, she made us dinner which was Frito pie.  Frito pie is like Fritos and vegetarian chili.  It is really good.  We are very excited that Dominica discovered new low-sodium Fritos which are much better than regular “super salty” Fritos.

After we ate we spent forty or fifty minutes playing Mario Kart on the Wii.  This was Min’s first time playing the new game.  Francesca was using being in labor all day today as an excuse to not run out and pick up her own copy so that she can race against us.  She will be sorry when we have mastered all of the courses!

We tried playing a bit online again but quickly realized that we really aren’t ready to face the online players until we have played through all of the maps and learned them pretty well.  You can’t go into the online play blindly or you are going to get destroyed.  A lot of the online maps are very difficult and if you don’t know what to expect you are at a pretty significant disadvantage.  A lot of those maps are based on you having memorized them to be able to get through them at all.

Today is my first day writing the site using WordPress 2.5.1 which is just awesome.  The admin interface is so much smoother and easier to use than the old one.  It really makes my job easier.  And the site really does appear to load quite a bit faster too which is nice.  I am really happy about the new “widgets” function that allows me to turn on cool functionality like the “tag cloud” that you can now see on the left.  That makes it much easier to track down topics.

Tonight was a fairly relaxing night.   I did a little web work and did a little homework reading and spent a bit of time managing a troublesome bit of Handbraking.  Obviously the SGL changes were a bit of an evening project as well.  I woke Dominica up at half till midnight so that she could come out to the living room and see the first picture of Garrett that had been sent through.  She had spent the evening text messaging her sister and everyone in Houston.

I will be on Wall Street tomorrow.  Hopefully it won’t be raining on my as I walk.