Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up a little before eight this morning and Oreo followed me right out to the living room where there is some extremely bright sunlight today. Perfect for lazy dogs and growing plants. The rose bush has really been coming along thanks to being watered three times a day, being turned constantly in the window for even lighting and bi-daily mildew treatments and regular trimming and pruning. It is as full as it ever was and, as of yesterday, I have noticed a new rose flower beginning to form. We will have some pink in amongst the green in a few days. All of the plants seem to be healthy at this point. The mandarin is the hardest to read. It was really abused at the store but seems to be doing just fine since moving here.

Dominica got up around nine and started getting ready to go to Jenn’s place in Pennsylvania. She has been really tired recently and taking two classes at once from Empire State is really a problem so we decided that she is going to drop her Computer Operations and Security class that she just started (since today is the last day to actually drop it) and that she will try to take it again maybe in the fall. It is overlapping with her GPS and the New Geography class which isn’t too hard but involves a bit of time-consuming work and we were hoping that she would take HTML for Web Design right after the GPS class. Both would overlap with COS and taking overlapping classes is far more than twice the work of just taking one class. Just the task-switching alone between the two classes is the effort of at least half of another class. It is no wonder that full time college students get so little out of college – the system is completely not designed around the way that the human brain processes information efficiently.

We walked Oreo and picked up breakfast from Airlie Cafe. Then Dominica hit the road. First she drove me down to the Newark downtown post office so that I could mail her drop/add form to the university and be postmarked today and then she was off for Philadelphia. Oreo was very unhappy when I came back to the apartment without Dominica. He really enjoys his weekends when both of us are here.

Min made it safely out to Jenn’s apartment at a quarter after two.  My afternoon was all work and homework.  I was quite busy all day.  Not the way that I wanted to spend the weekend but at least it was a good use of the time while Dominica was out.  I got a lot done that needed my attention.  I also got a lot of time on Dominica’s laptop, our fastest workstation, with Handbrake getting stuff prepped for the ATV.

Oreo is very sad today without Dominica around.  He doesn’t like going very long without her.  Even on a normal weekday at home with me he starts getting anxious for her to come home around four in the afternoon.  So today he is very anxiously looking for her.

I wrapped up my work around midnight.  Hard to believe that there can be so much to do, I know.  I didn’t even manage to do any real work around the apartment today which is too bad as it really needs it.  I hate that this place is so small that we have no means of keeping it clean even for a few days.  At least my AppleTV conversion project will clear one whole shelf of space up which will help with some books and stuff.

At midnight I cracked open a bottle of Finger Lakes Cabernet Frank but, as you would guess, it had turned to vinegar.  Not only did we get an entire case of wine from Marketview Liquor in Henrietta in which half the bottles were bad but we have managed to have every other bottle that we try be bad.  Exactly every other bottle.  It has alternated through the entire case now, good, bad, good, bad.  It is unbelievable that even having six good and six bad bottles that we would open them in such an exacting order.  The second bottle that I opened, a 70/30 blend of Cabernet Frank and Lemberger from Anthony Road was good and so I enjoyed that while Oreo and I watched Doris Day in Glass Bottom Boat.

This week has really gone by in a blur.  Work has kept me really busy and when I haven’t been busy with that there has been homework today.  Today is the last day of my official early morning coverage week so on Monday I will be back to my normal schedule – whatever that is.  Because of the conference call that I got onto last night I didn’t get to bed until almost midnight.  So this morning I slept in until the last possible minute and then worked from home.  I was going to go into the office once there was redundant coverage but things got busy and I never had time.  Not that that is so surprising.  Things have been very busy all week.  Today is also the final day of my first two years at my current company!  I started on March 29th, 2006.

I didn’t get a chance to have breakfast this morning but I did get an early-ish lunch from Food for Life that I brought back and ate at my desk while working.  I had a really busy day of doing real, solid SA work with tons of troubleshooting and performance tuning stuff.  Much more interesting than my usual day.  I even got to work with an engineer from Red Hat today which I never get to do.

I did manage to squeeze in time to do the dishes today and to get the kitchen cleaned up, more or less.  It is looking a lot better than before, at least.  I forgot to mention yesterday that a friend in maintenance stopped by and hung two plant hangers for us yesterday.  We have a very healthy ivy plant that we have been looking forward to hanging on one of them and are hoping to have another ivy or possibly a spider plant to hang on the other.  They are swinging hangers that come out about nine inches from the wall.  We have them hanging on either side of the kitchen “window” coming out into the living room.  It may sound as if they would be in the way and taking up space in our tiny living area but they are mounted about nine feet up on the wall and are far above our heads.  It is quite nice and really adds something to the room.

I learned how to do queued encoding with Handbrake today which is making my video transfer process immensely easier than before.  Now I can just set half a day’s worth of video encodes up on Dominica’s dual-core Turion X2 laptop and let it chunk away without my intervention.  It is really going to be handy for getting the computers to work through the night.  Previously we could only set up a single encode job and it would finish one or two hours after we went to bed then the computer would be on but idle all night.  Now I can queue up enough work so that it is still working when I get up in the morning.

Dominica got home and we actually remembered to unload the groceries from her car today.  So once again there is some amount of food in the apartment to eat.  It won’t last long but at least there is something.  This way I probably won’t need to go out hunting for food this weekend while I am home alone.  Dominica has Jenn’s bachelorette party in Philly tomorrow night and I will be home with Oreo until Sunday afternoon when Min gets back home.  But I have plenty of homework to do along with plenty of work for the office to keep me more than busy all weekend.

For dinner we just ate some of the food that Dominica had picked up.  She had leftovers and I had Fiber One cereal (tastes better than it sounds.)  We watched some Family Guy that I have transferred to the AppleTV.  It was an early night for us as we have to be up relatively early tomorrow.  Dominica is going to drive to Philly even though the train is possible.  The train isn’t exactly cheap overall (about $50 to Philly and then another train for an unknown amount out to Ambler and then even more on Sunday to get home so $150 – $200 altogether) but it would be cheap enough to justify not driving if the schedule was good enough to make it not a rush on both ends.  The trip from Newark to Ambler would be pretty easy and runs every two hours all day long but the trip back isn’t scheduled nearly as well and would make Sunday quite difficult.  So Min is just going to drive since she now has the GPS and it will be quite easy.  The drive will be almost an hour shorter than going by train anyway (because of the transfer.)

Today is my work from home day but there is no sunlight today for little Oreo so he is stuck just hanging out in the living room on his pillow. He is not so happy about that. He loves his sunlight days. But he was sleepy and so it didn’t matter so much. He just slept the day away.

I am pretty tired today but getting to stay home and work all day without worrying about traveling helps. I started work at six thirty and spent a good deal of my morning on conference calls. I could barely get anything done because I was on the phone so much. I managed to grab a breakfast sandwich from Food for Life but that was about it. I had to skip lunch because there just wasn’t any time.

My day stayed completely busy and I wasn’t even able to do any of my regular cleaning around the apartment like I like to do when I am home for the day. I just made myself one cup of coffee after another and sat in the office – mostly on the phone. I did manage to keep Dominica’s laptop humming along doing h.264 conversions for the AppleTV. I got a lot of content compressed so that we can use it more effectively. I did manage to schedule a light bulb replacement with maintenance. Not much of an accomplishment for the day but at least it is something.

So dad discovered this caricature drawn of me in 1987 (yes, I was eleven years old and my family had just gotten their Commodore Amiga 1000 computer) in the arcade in the basement of the Contemporary Resort in Walt Disney World where we went on vacation that year.  I remember that the arcade was a really big deal at the time being one of the largest in the world which was a pretty funny thing to have in Disney World where there was so much else to do.  It wasn’t very heavily utilized and had a silly little snack bar.

My favourite game in the arcade, which we went to several evenings after returning from the parks, was a very early three dimensional space ship game.  It was one of those really large arcade games that was shaped like a cockpit and you actually climbed into it and sat in the dark to play, and you had a huge joystick with all of the firing controls built in.  Commonplace stuff today but quite rare back in 1987.  I am pretty sure that the background of the game was provided through video and that only the ship that you watched itself and the enemy ships were generated by the computer.  It was very simple but so much better than anything that I had ever played before.  Far better than SkyFox on the Amiga.

Dominica came home and did some grocery shopping today but forgot about the groceries until we started talking about dinner plans. But there was nothing in the groceries that would spoil so we decided to just leave the car in the garage for the evening and to deal with the groceries tomorrow. So for dinner we ordered in Chinese from Golden City and watched one episode of the fourth season of Allo, Allo.

One episode was all that I had time for as I had several pending phone calls that I needed to deal with from earlier in the day.  I spend the entire evening on the phone with Andy and trying to reach Susan who has been attempting but failing to catch me for days.  Then, at around nine thirty, I got caught on a conference call and didn’t get to go to bed until quite late.

I woke up at four o’clock this morning when Dominica got up for a minute. While she was up Oreo heard the smoke detector going off again – just the incessant beeping trying to tell us that the battery was low. I really hate this feature since the alarms are out of reach, all connected together and powered by A/C power anyway. They should be charged by the wall power and never need batteries replaced, IMHO. The biggest problem is that because they go off so piercingly loudly and echo so much you can never tell which one is the problem. And since they are all connected together one battery dying makes them all go off anyway. So you have no idea how to fix the problem.

The alarm, which didn’t go off all day until four in the morning, caused Oreo, of course, to panic. He was running around and jumping all over us. He was shaking and his heart was pounding. I got dressed as quickly as I could and took him for a walk. I talked to the front desk and one of the guys ran up with a ladder (which is why I can’t fix the issue myself) and spent a good twenty minutes getting all of the alarms to stop making noise. It was no small project. Just figuring out which ones were alerting (turns out that they all were) and moving from one to another trying to get them to stop is a major pain. Since you can never tell which one is bad or when you have fixed one or not. They even keep alerting after you have taking them off the wall and removed their batteries. It is like they are possessed.

Then I had to spent half an hour laying with Oreo to get him to calm down. He was so scared. We tried giving him cookies but he wouldn’t touch them.

I ended up having to work from home for a little bit this morning before going into the office because of Oreo’s little panic. I had to walk him again at six while Dominica was getting ready for work. After that he was finally ready to eat breakfast but not a cookie. Then he needed to stay with me in the office area and made me brush him for quite a while.   Dominica said that after she got him to daycare that he had calmed down and was feeling much better but was visibly quite tired.

Since I was stuck working from home by that point for the morning and since so many long phone calls kept coming in I didn’t get a chance to head to the office until after eleven.  I would have considered not going in but I am giving a “tour” of our Manhattan facilities to Antoni (an SGL reader) this afternoon so I kind of need to be there in person.  I grabbed a quick slice at Triponi at Newark’s Penn Station as I didn’t get any real food today except for some cereal.  That should hold me until dinner.

Today was an absolutely gorgeous day – I am really glad that I got to walk into the office.  It was bright and calm and warm.  No jackets needed today.  Not at all.  It was so pleasant.

I got to Wall Street and worked for about an hour before Antoni arrived there.  I took him around my office there and showed him where we work and he got to meet my coworker there.  Then we caught the company shuttle over to the Tribeca office where we spent the afternoon.  I took my camera with me today to get some pics of the area around the Tribeca office but I totally forgot to take any pictures so that was a waste.

We got to spend quite a bit of time hanging out on one of the Tribeca trading floors.  I have been there before but never get to go very often.  It wasn’t all fun and games as I had to log in to someone’s computer anywhere that we went to do work which was unfortunate.  I was working from my BlackBerry and borrowed PuTTY sessions all afternoon. Most of the afternoon was “meet and greet” kind of stuff.  Nice change of pace and good for me to get out and meet some of my guys in person too or to see people that I have seen before but don’t see too often.

After work Antoni and I went out to Salaam Bombay just south of the office and had dinner.  After diner we hit Starbucks and got some after dinner coffee and then walked on down to the WTC train station.  I headed to Newark from there and Antoni used it to connect back to the Long Island Railroad to take him back out to the island where he is staying for the week.  He had a long trip home.

It was rather late by the time that I got back to Newark.  I transfered a couple of shows over to the AppleTV and we headed off to bed and watched the first episode of the fourth season, circa 1987, of Allo, Allo.

I am working from home tomorrow so will just be there with Oreo all day.  He is looking forward to a day off after having missed so much sleep.