Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Wet and rainy in New Jersey today. It is surprisingly warm today. Much warmer than I was anticipating and I had to carry my fleece most of the way to the office. It is Friday so I get to go in a little late although I am sure that it will be a busy day overall. I ate breakfast at Airlie Cafe on my way in this morning.

I finished reading the Pragmatic Programmers’ “Interface Oriented Design” this morning.  I suppose that now I should move on to reading my textbook again.

My day was mostly uneventful. Just normal work stuff. I am wearing a new shirt today though. It is blue. I like it. Poplin.

It was pretty late when I finally got the chance to leave the office. A little after eight. We had late deployments and a few problems that needed to be resolved before calling it an evening. I ate dinner at Steve’s Pizza just off of Cedar in Manhattan on my way home to save time.

It was after nine when I got home. We stayed up and watched some of the eighth season of That 70s Show and then we were off to bed. Tomorrow is an all homework day for both of us.

If you like IHOP, you’ll love SpyHop!

Today is my work from home day and I am taking advantage of it to do the Vista Server Pack 1 update on Dominica’s HP Compaq 6515b laptop. It is a pretty major change and includes the kernel change syncing Vista with Windows Server 2008. So I am very interested to see how the performance improvements are and how the file copy issue has been addressed. That has been affecting me so I was anxious to get SP1 put into place.

Dominica went shopping today at Target and picked up the eighth and final season of That 70s Show. I am pretty sure that I have only seen half of one episode out of this entire season and she doesn’t think that she has seen a single episode. So this will be a nice treat. The other seven seasons have been almost entirely “reruns” for us. It isn’t very often that we actually watch something that is completely “new”. Although we are wondering how good the final season is going to be. The show has been winding down and with Topher Grace gone in the final season we are wondering what they plan to do with the show to keep it going.

It was a another busy day at the office. I did manage to do just a little bit of cleaning around the apartment as well. It really needed it. I seem to be spending just tons of time taking care of all of the cleaning. I can’t believe how often dishes need to be done, for example. I run the dishwasher every couple days and it is always half full of Oreo’s dishes. He goes through more dishes than Dominica and I combined, literally. He generated three or four pairs of plastic containers and lids per day, two food dishes per week and all of his food prep dishes once a week. It’s crazy.

Dominica got home and whipped up a vegetable stir-fry in an Indian coconut curry sauce. It was really good. No time for me to relax tonight, though, I have to do Object Technologies homework so that is my whole evening right there. Not fun but it has to be done. No way to put it off until tomorrow.

Before getting a chance to actually shut down for the night I was paged out for a small issue around twenty until midnight.  It is really tough to get any momentum going on homework – let me tell you.

I worked at home until midnight last night. I went to bed when I was just too exhausted to be of any use. I took Oreo for a late night walk outside and discovered that it was raining. Raining quite hard in fact, but it didn’t start until the moment that Oreo and I went outside. Very bad timing. Oreo was quite unhappy about the situation and attempted to avoid his walk but it had to be done so we just stayed out there and got wet and cold.

I actually got myself up nice and early this morning. I have no idea how I managed to do that. I got up at a quarter after five and got into the shower and started the day. The walk into the office on Wall Street was very nice today. The sun was out and the air temperature was pretty nice. The wind was a bit much but not all that bad.

My morning ended up being pretty crazy. I had been watching my BlackBerry all morning on the way in and I was thinking that yesterday’s slowness was going to roll on over into today but that didn’t happen at all. Instead my morning was bonkers and I didn’t really get a chance to get up from my desk to do anything until a bit after two when I finally ran out to get myself a falafel pita sandwich just outside the building. If you follow that link to Google Maps’ street view you can’t see the falafel guys because they aren’t there but the white car is parked where my falafel guys park during business hours. Just north-east a few feet of the Wall St. – Water St. intersection.

My afternoon wasn’t so bad. Still kept me busy but things slowed down to a little more normal pace. I worked until normal time for a change and then stopped by Borders quickly on the way home and picked up a couple books. One for Min and the “Python Phrasebook” for myself.

We kind of skipped dinner tonight. I just had a bowl of cereal because I had left the “milk” out and it will go bad if I don’t drink it all right away. It isn’t real milk, just soy milk. So it doesn’t spoil like real milk nor is it nasty when it does. So not such a big deal. And we go through it very quickly anyway. Dominica drinks real milk for calcium. I stick to soy for lower cholesterol – and I just like it better.

Tonight was a homework night. I did Java programming all night and have that piece of my homework that is due on Friday completed. Now I just need to do the modeling piece tomorrow and I will be all set. I can’t do any on Friday as I always work late on Fridays and there is just no way to guarantee that I will be able to hand it in if I wait until then.

I went to bed and watched some of Allo, Allo to catch up with where Dominica was in the series. I will be working from home tomorrow.