Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 849 – Scott Alan Miller

April 13, 2008: Big Homework Day

Today is my big homework day. Homework and a bit of office work as well. I slept in quite a bit this morning which I really needed. Dominica was actually up a bit before me and was hungry and waiting to get lunch by the time that I woke up.

We decided to head down to the diner that we like in Elizabeth, NJ for lunch because we both really just needed something different for a change. We have become so bored with Newark food. Being vegetarians limits your food selection so much when you have almost nothing but quick lunch places around that it really wears on you.

Dominica took our print out of Flat Stanley from Iuka, Mississippi and we glued him onto cardboard and she coloured him in so that it would be easier to take him around sight-seeing. The weather is supposed to be nice tomorrow so Stanley is riding in on the train with me to New York City.

We called Ramona and she had just woken up and was ready for food too so the timing was perfect. We all got ready and then Min, Oreo and I drove over to the Ironbound and picked up Ramona and then drove down to Elizabeth.

It was nice to get lunch someplace different and the weather is pretty nice today too. We were really needing a change of pace.

Ramona had plans to hang out with some other friends from Eleven80 today so she rode back to there with us after lunch and hung out until she went to visit with them. While she was over I was stuck working on homework and other stuff – never any real time off. We did take the Flat Stanley that Dominica coloured this morning and shot some pics of him looking out onto Manhattan from our apartment. The Nikon D50 with its flash was able to capture both Stanley up close and Manhattan miles away.

My evening was, unfortunately, spent doing nothing but homework. I spent hours getting ready to hand in my project for the week just to discover that there was some ambiguity in the instructions and that everyone who had handed in already and taken them more literally than they were supposed to and we all had to do the work over again. So that took my busy night from “quite busy” to “homework panic.” I ended up doing homework and office work until one in the morning. I am going to be tired tomorrow.

OSNews has The Ten Most Beautiful Computers. Good reading. I don’t totally agree with the list – the Sony PlatStatin 2, Sun PizzaBox and the NextCube are all strange entries, in my opinion, and the Mac Mini’s absence seems strange. The Mac Mini, I think, should be ranked extra high for being the most mainstream of all of the truly impressively beautiful computers over the years. Many of the machines on the list are niche like the BeBox, just 1,800 units ever. But the Mac Mini is a strong seller and I know at least three people who have them personally and I am planning to buy my second quite soon. And, honestly, if the PlatStation 2 is going to be considered then the AppleTV should be considered as well. As far as game consoles go, the Nintendo Wii must be the best looking of all of the consoles over the years.

April 12, 2008: A Saturday Mostly Off

It was ten twenty five when I finally got home last night from the office. It is warm and humid and even though the temperature can’t be much about seventy I was really sweating by the time that I arrived back at Eleven80. There was a Jersey Devils versus New York Rangers hockey game at the Prudential Center tonight and there were crowds and crowds of people all over the Newark streets as I walked home.

I went to bed pretty much as quickly as I could after getting home. I was probably in bed around eleven or so. Our latest shipment from Amazon arrived with the first and fifth volumes of The Family Guy as well as classics Do Not Disturb with Doris Day and Come September with Rock Hudson.

It was a quarter ’till ten this morning when we finally got out of bed and raced to get ready to meet Ramona for breakfast. We were running a bit late so Ramona came up to meet us in the apartment. It is a busy day with Dominica having homework and a dentist appointment, Ramona has to go into Manhattan for work and I have work and homework to do so breakfast was pretty quick. I walked Oreo while the girls went to Airlie Cafe to pick up the food and bring it back to the apartment. We didn’t have a chance to actually go there to eat as I was scheduled for actual work between ten and eleven this morning and my accountant was looking for me. Ah the weekend. It really just flows into the week. It especially does on days when Dominica needs to go somewhere and I have several coworkers actually in the office working and there is constant support work going on. It feels just like a regular work from home day.

While I was out walking Oreo I ran into someone from Food for Life driving a new FFL vehicle. On the FFL vehicle was advertising mentioning the Newark and Harlem locations. So I stopped the guy as he was getting out of the car and asked about the Harlem location. Up until now I thought that I knew all of their locations (Kansas City, Dayton, Atlanta, Columbia and Newark.) It turns out that the Harlem location is slated to open in about a week and is supposed to be really nice. So I am going to have to go over there and check it out.

The weather is pleasant today but extremely hazy (read: smog) and taking pictures is not really feasible. Nothing will turn out well. So we are stuck holding out until tomorrow to try taking Flat Stanley around Newark.

I did a couple of hours of work today. There has been so much to do recently. I am really getting burned out.

Min and I took most of the day off and relaxed. I really needed to take some time off. I just couldn’t keep working so much this week. After doing a fifteen hour day yesterday I was just exhausted.

We watched a bit of the first two seasons of The Family Guy which arrived from Amazon yesterday.

Flat Stanley has a really cool Flickr map. Just two locations on it right now but soon there will be many more.

April 11, 2008: Flat Stanley Comes to Newark

Sheep Guarding Llama’s Flat Stan from Iuka, Mississippi Flickr Page

Before this morning I was not acquainted with Flat Stanley. Apparently I am out of the loop, but that is nothing new. I learned of Flat Stanley from a friend back home in Leicester, New York who needed a favour…

It seems that our Flat Stanley hails from Iuka, Mississippi. Iuka is located in the very northeastern corner of Mississippi in Tishomingo County where the state borders Alabama and Tennessee. My friends’ niece lives in Iuka and her class is involved in a Flat Stanley project. So she sent Flat Stanley to my friends in Leicester hoping that Flat Stanley could visit New York City and see the sights such as the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately she did not realize that her family in New York lived so far from the city, about 350 miles, so touring the city with Mr. Stanley was not really an option. This, as you can imagine, is where I come into the picture.

So this morning Stanley traveled down to Newark to visit me. The weather is bad for picture taking today, though, and Katie, who will be my co-tour guide in Manhattan, is out of work today. So we are planning to take Flat Stanley around with us on Monday to get pictures during lunch – with any luck there will actually be sunlight on Monday for us to work with.

Since I work with people from all over the world I decided that this was a perfect opportunity for Flat Stanley to see some exciting places. Other Flat Stanleys and his relatives have been to many exciting places. But I thought that it would be really nice if Mr. Stanley from Iuka, Mississippi could visit some neat places. So I made some “calls”.

Stanley’s first stop on his whirlwind tour was Belfast, Northern Ireland thanks to my friends Sean and Niall who jumped right onto the project immediatley. They got pictures of Flat Stanley at White Star House where the Titanic was built. They have pictures of Stanley in the windows overlooking the dry dock where the Titanic actually was assembled. I think that this is probably Stanley’s first trip to this particular location.

I have some more people in Belfast getting involved taking him to other important Northern Irish locations like the Giants’ Causeway and the word is that he is driving down to Dublin, Ireland tomorrow too. We are starting to get supporters all over the world. We should have a lot of pictures by early next week. If you don’t want to have to check back to the web site all the time you can subscribe through RSS: Flat Stanley SGL Flickr Feed. You can also point your AppleTV to the Flat Stanley set on SheepGuardingLlama on Flickr and AppleTV will connect it as a slideshow. How cool is that?

More Flat Stanley news over the weekend. Dominica and I will be showing him around Newark tomorrow.

It is Friday and that makes it my busy day. My morning was so busy that although I had planned to work from home until nine and then go into the office on Wall Street I didn’t actually manage to leave until one thirty. It may seem that after seven hours that it wasn’t worth going into the office when the day was just about over but, as this is Friday, the day was not even half way over yet. So off to the office I went.

I was pretty hungry as I hadn’t had a chance to eat all day so I stopped off at Newark Penn Station and grabbed some pizza from Triponi Pizza. Then it was on the PATH and into the city. I felt like reading today so I carried “Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager” which is small and easy to carry on the train.

I wanted to take Flat Stanley into Manhattan with me today but it is extremely overcast and foggy today and Manhattan gets exceptionally dark when there is no sunlight. There is no scenary out here. Just fog. And today is just way too busy for me to take a break to go do anything extra. So that will have to wait until Monday.

My afternoon was very busy and I was just bouncing from one thing to another as quickly as possible. I did the regular deployment work until almost seven. Then I settled in to do the “after hours” work that had to either be done tonight or over the weekend. I figured best to get a good bulk of stuff done tonight rather than wait until tomorrow or Sunday to be working on it.

I ended up working until well after nine at night making my day come out to fifteen hours. I was pretty worn out by the end of the day. I did manage to take care of a large volume of work that would not have been fun to have carried into my weekend though. Best to get that stuff over and done with before leaving the office. I really need my weekend time to do homework anyway.

It is good that I stayed in the office anyway, though. There was deployment work that ended up going until nine and a little around eight someone needed me to physically restart a computer here in the office that I could not have done had I left at a normal time and that would have made it quite hard for them to have worked over the weekend. So it worked out well.

Ramona wanted to get together this evening but we are pretty tired. It will be well after ten before I get home and I think that my walk home might be in the rain. So we are planning on breakfast at Airlie Cafe tomorrow morning. Flat Stanley can go with us.

Check out the world’s cheapest GPS.

April 10, 2008: Making Autumn Plans

Today was the most absolutely gorgeous day. More than seventy degrees, clear and sunny. I was actually just a touch too warm as I took Oreo out for his morning walk. We ran into far more dogs getting walked today than usual. Everyone was wanting to get outside and soak up the weather. It is clear too, not like yesterday. Yesterday the haze was so thick that I could not even make out the Manhattan skyline whereas tonight as I am writing this update I can make out the lights in every window of every building in uptown just to the left of the monitor that I am typing on.

I am really going to miss the constant presence of Manhattan being just outside the window when we move away from here. Even if we don’t get to spend all that much time actually in the city it is just so amazing having it sitting right there. I love all of the twinkling lights and the passing cars on the bridges leading in and out of the city. I have always liked cities at night. So many people yet so quiet and still. I need to get some pictures of Manhattan at night from our view here before we leave. It is rather unlikely that I will ever have a view quite like this again. This is very much a once in a lifetime kind of opportunity, I’m sure. Nevertheless, we have had it for a year and a half and it will be over two years when we actually leave and I have worked from home a lot during that time and my work area has always had this view so very few people anywhere have had the chance to take advantage of such a view as much as I have.

We turned down our lease renewal. The apartment building offered a deal to those who would renew in March. Personally I think that it was a foolish move asking us to renew so far in advance. We didn’t have enough time to really think about or make any plans to stay or go. So, since we couldn’t guarantee that we needed to stay we effectively guaranteed that we weren’t. Had they extended the offer to a point where we were really able to make a commitment then we might easily have decided that staying in Newark for one more year was going to make sense. But, now we know that the financials just aren’t going to make sense for us next year and this apartment isn’t really an option. The handy thing for us is that now we have seven months to make plans for moving knowing exactly when we are moving. I have never had so much warning on a move before. Our last day in Newark, or at least at Eleven80, is October 31st. Now we just need to figure out exactly to where we are moving come November.

Oreo was very, very happy to be home today. He was so exhausted. Dominica tells me that he played a lot more than usual at daycare yesterday because Lana, the little puppy that he loves to play with, was in playing with another dog and Oreo just couldn’t resist and he played all day. He was all worked up and being crazy last night when he got home. Today he is making up for it. Just sleeping and sleeping. Even on his walk when he saw other dogs he could do no more than take a quick sniff to acknowledge their existence and drag himself along until he was able to do his business and then get back home to go to bed.

At one point late this morning our silly dog was sitting on the loveseat in the living room and was itching the middle of his back with his head turned all the way around. He was in the sunlight and apparently quite comfortable as he just fell asleep right in the middle of itching himself. It was the craziest thing to see. I look over and there he is all passed out in what appeared to be the most uncomfortable position imaginable. He was so sleepy that I was able to take several pictures of him and walk about without him stirring at all.

Dominica came home and we watched the final two episodes of the 2006 season of Doctor Who. These were some seriously good but sad episodes. We are definitely looking forward to the next season as well as to checking out Torchwood the Doctor Who spinoff series. (For those in the know, “Torchwood” used to be a code name for “Doctor Who” used at the study. You will notice that the letters from Doctor Who can be used to form the word Torchwood.)

After dinner and the show it was time for bed. We “popped in” some What I Like About You that we watched while we cleaned in the bedroom. Dominica assembled her new shoe rack and got it put into the closet which cleared up a ton of space and now the closet doors can close. It also freed up some plastic bins that I need to organize other stuff around the house that has been sitting around waiting for a box into which to go.

I stayed up for a while after Dominica went to bed and did some web site work and Handbrake conversions. Nothing heavy just some light stuff that needed my attention and that I wanted to get out of the way. By a quarter after eleven, Oreo was getting quite insistent that I come to bed. He doesn’t like it when one of us goes to bed early and one stays up. It makes him nervous or something.

Dad is finally doing a rebuild of his Windows XP workstation today. It has been been rebuilt in many years – even possibly never although that seems to be a stretch. I generally recommend complete rebuilds every six to eighteen months with once a year being a pretty happy medium. I rebuild my Linux box every six months but that is because I want to use the very latest OpenSUSE release. My Windows machine probably sees a fresh install every nine months or so. Being in the habit of constantly rebuilding means that you are always keeping things cleaned and you are always prepared to start fresh at any moment.

This coming weekend is going to be busy with homework. Dominica is almost caught up in her class but still has a little bit that she needs to do plus the steady stream of new work. This is one of my busy homework weekends just in general. I am not behind at all but that doesn’t make it any easier.

April 9, 2008: Dominica Gets a Pink Phone

Today is Dominica’s new phone day. She is set to receive her BlackBerry Pearl in pink from Verizon which we ordered on Sunday. She is very excited to get to switch to a BlackBerry rather than to be stuck using the Palm Treo 700p that we have had. That thing has been nothing but a headache. It is completely unstable, the battery life is pathetic and the features don’t work very well even when they do work. It was a nice idea but BlackBerry just executes so much better and, most importantly, they really make their email system “just work” rather than the Treo where you have to add an email application and then have to manually manage it all of the time. If any of you are on SGL mail – BB service works great with that too.

It is a great relief to know that I am actually ahead of the game on my homework for a change and not having to pound it out at the very last minute. It has given me a little bit of a chance to do some reading in one of my Pragmatic Programmers books that I hope to be able to finish either today or tomorrow.

The sun is out today and while it is very hazy and Manhattan is all but obscured it is a really gorgeous day overall. Our plants are just thriving with all of this great sunlight that they have been getting recently. Here is something that few of you have probably ever considered about having plants in your home – with just these seven plants that we have here right now we are putting approximately the same amount of moisture into the air each day as our humidifier was doing running all day long. Granted it was a small humidifier but it requires electric and distilled water which was costing about two dollars per day. These plants have already paid for themselves as humidifier alternatives. I am hoping to have at least two more if not three and that will really take the numbers up. We need one more ivy for the living room to match the one that we have and we have talked about a spider plant for the bathroom. I would like a plant for our bedroom too because that window gets pretty good light as well but I am not sure if we can manage one in there or not.

I worked until about seven thirty. The first order of business once Dominica got home was to get her new BlackBerry activated and her email account linked to it so that she can check her mail that way now. Other than the weird keyboard system the unit is great. Much smaller than my 8830. Min and I ordered in a Sicilian pie from Nino’s, yes two nights in a row, and ate it while I talked to some people online.

We watched two episodes of Allo, Allo before going to bed. Oreo is very tired tonight but looking forward to his doggy-daddy day tomorrow. He will sleep all day I reckon.

I discovered tonight – I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before – that using Microsoft Maps Bird’s Eye view is really cool for following railroad tracks as they snake through the country. One of my favourite train locations is Silver Springs, New York near where I grew up (and where Mary and Jocelyn lived until pretty recently.) Silver Springs is the most train-oriented town that I know with several lines coming right through the dead center of town. The entire town is built around the tracks. If you start in downtown and follow the mainline as it works its way towards Buffalo you will see three or four trains running on the line in the photos even before you go more than one town away to the far side of Warsaw! The picture quality is really amazing. I continue to be amazed that there is still no call for some form of passenger service to exist over these lines. These small towns would have access to the big city center quickly, safely and easily. Maybe as petroleum fuels become more expensive it will start to make sense again. The lines are already there. We just have to use them.

While doing some browsing tonight I came across the most amazing image of the ATSF Sante Fe Super Chief in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1943 on 4×3 Kodachrome.