Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 850 – Scott Alan Miller

April 8, 2008: Dunecat and Homework

Today’s post is brought to you by Frank Herbert’s DuneCat.

I am starting to get into the early morning groove again. I have been doing it for three weeks now. One of those weeks was on accident.

Oreo stayed home with me today. He was confused about being home on a Tuesday but happy to have extra time in the sun. His ideal week would be going to daycare on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and sleeping the rest of the time. He is on a little bit of a diet these days as he has been putting on some extra weight recently due to all of the cookies that he has been convincing people to give him and the extra meal that he has been getting from us. So we are cutting back. We expect that he will slim right down again.

Here is how to cut costs when there is an energy crisis, it isn’t just about public transportation but about getting the maximum amount of people moved around for the least amount of power spent. Super Efficient Trains.

Dominica got home and we ordered in from Nino’s which we haven’t had in a while. We watched one episode of Doctor Who which we have from Netflix while we ate.

I spent the rest of the evening working on homework. It isn’t officially due until tomorrow but I never know how much free time I am going to have and it is always possible that I will lose an entire evening without warning so I can’t really let homework go until the last minute without taking risks. So I stayed up until midnight getting my homework completed and submitted. I was really tired when I finally got the chance to head off to bed.

Today Dominica found a house in Amhert, New York that she really likes and is very excited about. It would take a lot for us to be able to get it, though, so it seems incredibly unlikely at this point. But we will see.

April 7, 2008: Tax Day

Oreo was really restless last night and that, of course, means that I got a broken night of sleep as well since every time he moves around I wake up. I had to be up at six thirty as I am doing the early morning coverage at the office this week – and potentially for several weeks going forward. The future early mornings haven’t been decided but this week definitely I am on early all week.

Today is a big “get stuff done around the house” day. I did the dishes and got the kitchen cleaned up which had turned into a mess in the last few weeks as lots of groceries which don’t fit into our incredibly limited cupboard space arrived and as we had chair parts and mail to deal with all piling up. I felt much better after the kitchen was clean and accessible again.

I did the bill paying today as well as the tax prep. My taxes are sent off to the accountant so hopeful that will be the end of that. I hate doing taxes even when I don’t do them myself. There is just so much paperwork involved, and so little of it that you are supposed to have seems to show up.

I had a relatively uneventful day at the office. I worked until six thirty when a project that had asked me to work until five thirty decided that we were done for the night. Then I went out to Food for Life and got dinner for Dominica and I. She was already watching Wedding Crashers on the AppleTV and so I finished that out with her before heading back out to the living room to spend the evening doing homework for my Object Technologies class.

Eleven80 had their NCAA basketball game party in the basement for the residents tonight. I wanted to go as it is free food and beer but I just don’t have that kind of time to spend this week. It is nice to get to hang out with the neighbours but, unfortunately, there isn’t much I can do with homework looming over me right now. I talked to Pam and I know that Kevin couldn’t go until late if he even goes at all and I didn’t hear from Ryan tonight so there is a good chance that they weren’t there anyway.

Oreo has started a diet today. He has been putting on some chub recently and he has been asking for more and more food and he has been convincing the Eleven80 staff that he needs just rafts and rafts of cookies every time that they see him. It has all added up to our little boy being a little less little and we need to trim him down. He isn’t very happy about the cut down in food but we need to keep him healthy.

April 6, 2008: Finishing That 70s Show

Dominica was up long before me today and hard at work on her backlog of GPS and the New Geography homework. It isn’t very often that she is up significantly before I am and especially not on the weekends.

I have a bit of a migraine today so I am spending the morning relaxing and hoping that it will go away so that I can actually get some work done tonight. I hate losing so much of my precious work time to something so pointless 🙁 I don’t have enough time to get things done as it is.

I picked up breakfast from the Market Cafe downstairs and Dominica took a break from her work so that we could watch the final three episodes of the final season of That 70s Show. It was only about an hour and ten minutes of shows so it wasn’t too much of a break and we ate while watching it so it wasn’t a horrible use of our time. I’ve been waiting for ten years to see how the show would end and I was really anxious to watch the final episodes. That 70s Show is one of those really great character driven shows where the writing and actors really came together and developed deep characters and relationships that continued to grow and evolve over the course of the shows eight years and by the end you are really attached to them. I think that the final “home stretch” episodes were really well done and that overall the story was really wrapped up nicely. Unlike a lot of sit-coms that kind of just wind down and fizzle out leaving the audience with no closure this show really made a concerted effort to wrap up storylines and leave the viewers satisfied, and it had a lot of opportunity to fail at that too. The end of That 70s Show was definitely planned and well thought out. I was quite happy even though I hated to see the show end. It is amazing how much work went into the over two hundred episodes that the team produced over the years.

We managed to finally get Dominica phone number ported over from the family share plan that she has had with everyone back up in Rochester and onto the family share plan with me. We have been procrastinating on that for forever. For the moment Dominica is now on my old Palm Treo 700p with voice and unlimited data (so she gets email and can surf the web) but we also ordered her a new phone. So on Wednesday she will be receiving a new BlackBerry Pearl 8130 in pink. The BlackBerry works just so much better as both an email device and as a phone than the Palm that it was well worth the extra money, and seeing as it is available in pink there really was not going to be any convincing Dominica that she wasn’t going to get it. So now, in theory, she will be “on email” all of the time like I am and will be communicating through it much, much more often.

I started reading “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great” today as I have gotten ahead on my textbook reading for my Object Technologies class.

Dominica worked very hard all day on her homework. She also did laundry and cooked the week’s food for little Oreo. She didn’t really get any break all day. But by ten at night when she turned in for the night she had completely all of her homework both the backlog and what was due tonight. So she will feel much better heading off to sleep knowing that all of that is behind her now.

I didn’t have that much homework actually due today but it was enough to keep me pretty busy considering how crappy I felt and with all of the interruptions like taking Oreo out for his regular walks. I did get my homework done and turned it in a little before eleven. I was off to bed well before midnight.

Because of an “emergency” at the office I am going to be doing the early shift again this coming week. It is going to be a long week.

Ignite Realtime Spark IM Can’t Open Web Links in Linux

In the latest version of the Java based Jabber/XMPP Instant Messaging client Spark by Ignite Realtime / Jive Software (Spark 2.5.8) there is a “bug” that keeps Spark from being able to open hyperlinks properly. According to AGomez in the Spark discussion group the client is hardcoded to point to Netscape which is, of course, a deprecated and minimally used web browser highly unlikely to be found on any modern computer. While this is annoying and keeps Spark from working out of the box with most Linux desktops it is not insurmountable. Since Ignite Realtime has stated that they do not expect to be releasing a new version of the Spark client on Java due to their work on a different platform for IM clients we will need to work around this issue until the community decides to pick up the Spark code and release a new version on their own. At the very least a hard-coded browser should be Firefox is browser detection is not going to be used.

To fix this issue you can simple run one of the following commands as the root user and, in my experience, Spark will be able to open the hyperlink just fine. I have tested this on OpenSUSE 10.3.

For Firefox: ln -s `which firefox` /usr/bin/netscape

For Konqueror: ln -s `which konqueror` /usr/bin/netscape

April 5, 2008: That 70s Show Day

Spring is really here as of today. The sun is out and it is very bright. It is so warm outside in Newark that you don’t need even the lightest jacket to be outside.

We all slept in a bit this morning. The past two weeks have been really exhausting and I wanted to get caught up before spending a lot of time trying to get homework and other stuff out of the way. I have homework due tomorrow night and more due in the middle of the week. But I don’t know how much time that I will have to spend on that later in the week so my plan is to do it all this weekend. Plus I have around one hundred servers that need patching at the office this weekend and I am planning on doing that this evening after a long Handbrake compression job that has been running for forty-eight hours on my main Windows desktop wraps up. Min has quite a bit of homework, both current and backlogged, that she is planning on doing this weekend as well.

We decided that we were really getting burned out and that we really needed to take a little time and just relax. So we spent a great deal of the day laying in bed watching the eighth season of That 70s Show. Nineteen episodes, in fact. Which is a bit much. But when you figure that they are just twenty-two minutes per episode and that we cut off the end credits and that we are able to go from show to show dramatically faster even than if we were watching them on DVD, it comes out to six hours and twenty minutes of viewing, which is still ridiculous, but manageable. I wonder what percentage of Americans watch over six hours of random television – mostly commercials or time skipping from one show to another – every Saturday. At least our viewing was pure content and all pre-selected and material that we have been waiting for years to see.

The sun was out part of the day and Oreo migrated back and forth between the living room and the bedroom. He is having a very good day full of sleep, sunlight and snuggles. It doesn’t get much better when you are a lazy, seven year old Boston Terrier.

We got breakfast from Airlie Cafe and a late lunch or early dinner from Food for Life. It was a very simple day.

By evening time I had work that just had to be done and could not be put off any longer. So I brought my laptop into the bedroom and did system patching for three hours while we were watching “television”. So half of my day of watching That 70s Show was mixed with work at the same time.

There was quite a bit of work to do and I didn’t actually get to go to bed until after one in the morning.