Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 857 – Scott Alan Miller

March 18, 2008: Oreo is a Dog Poser

I went to bed at a reasonable time last night but Oreo got me up to walk him at eleven thirty and then again at one thirty in the morning. Once you do that twice you tend to me rather awake. So I didn’t fall asleep again until two thirty or maybe even three making for a rather short night – the second in a row. So I was pretty tired when I got up this morning for the early morning shift at work.

I am working from home today which is quite the blessing or I would have gotten no sleep at all as I have to get up more than an hour earlier when going in to the office and even then it is a mad rush to get in there. My workstation at the office got damaged yesterday and Microsoft Outlook is not functioning which leaves me rather crippled when in the office but I have all of my faculties when working from home (all of my email faculties at least.)

Oreo is happy to be home today. He really needed daycare yesterday after his long weekend. He gets so bored when he is just in the apartment for an extended period of time. Daycare is so good for him. It gives him a much better life. But after a day of daycare he is always ready to sleep all day if he is allowed to do so. He will have only two more days of daycare before another long weekend since Friday is Good Friday which is a holiday for me and Dominica took a vacation day so that we could spend it together.

The sunrise was really beautiful this morning. People often wonder why we chose to live in Newark but the sunrises over Manhattan are awfully convincing. As we leave winter the sun sneaks out from behind Seton Hall Law School (off camera to the right in this picture) and works its way northward over Manhattan starting from downtown where it is today and heading up towards Harlem. All spring the sunrises just get better and better. I was not well prepared to capture the sunrise this morning but I will try to get some decent images of it as the year progresses. Our windows are really dirty right now which does not help and I am not mastered any sort of focusing with my new Kodak digicam so I probably need to switch to my good Nikon for this type of thing. I did manage to get a high def video of the sunrise on my digicam which turned out better than the picture did, I think. From Vimeo’s page you can view the video (standard or high def) or you can download the h.264 file directly so that you can watch it in QuickTime, MPlayer or VLC. Manhattan Sunrise from Eleven80. If you can’t reach Vimeo you can also get a lower quality version from YouTube.

I managed to do an install of DocuWiki last night while playing Settlers with Dominica. I have been interested in getting it set up for a while and am glad to see it now working. I have a ways to go yet as I would like to get it to attach to Active Directory for authentication. That would be really cool.

Dad reinstalled Mac OS X on the Mac Mini this morning so that he could start with a fresh system (and so that we could remember what the system passwords were as it has been three years since the unit has been used.)

I have a question, why do we call people who pose for a living, models? It isn’t like they are prototypes. I think someone was confused about the term model somewhere along the line. I suppose it is because calling them posers wasn’t as flattering as they had hoped. I suggest that we start calling people who pose professionally posers and see if it is still considered glamorous. That would make people who want to become models someday “wanna-be posers” and people who pretend to be models “poser posers.”

It was a very busy day of work today and it carried me through until six thirty or so after Dominica got home. We ordered in dinner from Domino’s and watched one episode of Doctor Who that we have on DVD from Netflix (the 2006 season.) Then Min took her laptop into the bedroom and worked on homework while watched some of The Gilmore Girls. I talked to Andy a bit who has been out of contact with the outside world for the last two weeks as his Internet connection (over which his phone is transported) from Frontier Telephone has been down. For his Internet to be down for an entire week is pretty ridiculous especially when you consider the incredible price that he has been paying for it. He figured out that he can switch to Time-Warner’s Road Runner service and get cable television thrown in all for less than he was paying for nothing but DSL Internet access from Frontier. In addition to the fact that Road Runner keeps enhancing its service while Frontier’s continues to deteriorate just makes the equation pretty simple to solve.

March 17, 2008: Fires on St. Paddy’s Day

I got stuck working from home for a little while this morning going from one emergency to another. While I was working a large fire broke out in Newark as two abandoned buildings went up in quite a blaze fueled by the high winds. I was on a conference call when I looked over and saw the thick black smoke billowing up from near the Passaic River where the fire was visible on the ground. The sounds of emergency vehicles whizzing past came just a few minutes later. I ran to the window to get a picture but as I went to focus and snap the shot the battery died and I was not able to get it. When it first happened half of Manhattan was obscured from view from the smoke. But by the time that I got a picture there wasn’t all that much to see. I am getting better at having a camera always at the ready, but my second battery wasn’t close enough to switch to quickly.

My morning was absolutely crazy. I had a few emails that I wanted to address before heading for the train so I logged in (always my first mistake) and got stuck immediately going from one crisis to another all morning. My morning was just nuts and I never got a chance to have breakfast or to relax at all. I was doing fairly well – more or less keeping up – until someone decided to powercycle my workstation a few times to boot me off of it resulting in my Outlook being corrupted which affects me a bit as I use it for everything all day long. So I had to spend quite a bit of time working on and around that. Today was not the day for this to happen. I had been looking forward to getting into the office as there is someone there that I really need to meet with this week.

The upside was that I was pretty much forced to go get lunch as I was completely useless sitting at my desk for a while until someone got back from lunch to look at my workstation. There is always a silver lining (or a nickel lining as Alex P. Keaton would say.) I went over to Food for Life and did a little reading in “The Art of Project Management” and watched by BlackBerry.

I did manage to make more headway cleaning in the apartment today and the living room is really coming along. I did the dishes and the kitchen is in good shape. I am so domestic.

There was more “plant management” today as we attempt to get the rose bush healthy again. It has been doing well but today there was some mildew that went to spore that we hadn’t caught. I think that the bush is holding up alright but we really have to get the mildew under control.

Today dad hooked up the G4 Mac Mini running Mac OS X to replace his two laptops that died yesterday. This will be his first time using Mac OS X for any amount of time. It will be interesting to see how he likes it and how the Mac works out for him.

My office chair died today. The back got caught on the underside of my desk twice when I was attempting to zip back and forth between Dominica’s desk space and my own so that I could use all of the available computers. The backrest put pressure on the main part of the chair and ripped it apart. So Dominica ran to Staples to get me a replacement chair. They had one that she liked but not in stock so it is being delivered on Wednesday. I will make do with the remnants of my chair until then.

My day was exhausting. Dominica got home and we ordered in dinner from the Japanese/Mexican place that we have recently discovered. We ate and watched some A Different World and relaxed.

We played a little Settlers of Catan tonight but not very much. It was a short evening. We were both quite tired.

So our plans coming up are to go see My Fair Lady at NJPAC on Thursday night (we have season tickets) then travel up to Frankfort, New York on Friday morning to spend the weekend there. My father is coming out to Frankfort on Saturday to visit for the day. The the following weekend I am scheduled to work all weekend on a major migration project at work and Dominica is going to be gone most of the weekend in Philadelphia hanging out with Jenn.

March 16, 2008: Miscellaneous Catchup Sunday

Dominica actually woke up before me today. I was pretty tired but not too bad. We got up and checked in with Kit and Jay about meeting them brunch in the city but they weren’t feeling well this morning and decided to drive back to Baltimore this morning rather than this evening.

We got up and got breakfast from Market City and played some Settlers of Catan while we ate. Dominica has been continuing to beat me repeatedly now that she has gotten addicted to it.

Dad’s HP Pavilion laptop, which has been on its last leg for weeks now, finally died completely today and does not boot up anymore. So he attempted to switch back to his even older Toshiba Satellite laptop and found that it decided not to fire up today as well. So he is suddenly down two laptops and only has his Hewlett-Packard desktop which desperately needs to be rebuilt because of a virus infection. The plan is to dig out my G4 based Mac Mini that is at his house and to use that for his normal, day-to-day, computing needs like surfing the web and checking email.

It makes me feel better about owning that PowerPC Mac that never really got any use before. We had used it as our “guest” computer in the living room of our house in Geneseo but it never came to New Jersey with us because we didn’t have any space for it and no real need for an extra machine of that type since all of our computers are already in the only space that we have for them anyway – no need for a computer in an alternate location. The Mac Mini that we currently own isn’t wireless either so it would only be useful along one of the two walls next to the routers that we have. The next Mac Mini that we get will have built-in wireless so that we can use it anywhere connected to our Apple AirPort.

I had homework due on Friday night and more due today by midnight. So my afternoon is set aside for working on object modeling for RIT. Dominica decided to avoid her computer and to was Mr. and Mrs. Iyer on DVD that she borrowed from a friend at her office. Dominica worked on a knitting / sewing project that she finished two years ago but had to make one small alteration before she could use it. So hopefully tonight she will have a “new” sweater to wear.

I uploaded a couple new pics today and put them on the last couple day’s posts – in case anyone missed them. The Abby Mott show ticket image and the Newark St. Patrick’s Day Parade coming down Mulberry Street.

It’s the weekend and so that means tons of laundry going on all of the time. It might be noisy but having the laundry facilities in our apartment really helps us to be able to spend a lot more time together. You don’t realize how important this is until you live without it for a little while. Then when it takes a huge toll on your ability to spend time together you figure out that it is a critical investment to make.

I wrapped up my homework at a quarter until six. So we tried to see if people would still be available for some Dungeons and Dragons tonight as we haven’t had a chance to play in quite a while. We didn’t end up managing to get a hold of everyone, though, once we knew that we would be able to play.

Dominica and I played two games of Settlers of Catan and then Dominica realized that her Computer Operations and Security class is set to begin tomorrow. She had been thinking that her class was not going to begin for another week yet. She hasn’t ordered her books yet or checked on the class requirements so she is scrambling to get ready to start tomorrow. She got all of her books ordered right away. Hopefully she will have all of them in time.

This is the first semester in quite a while that Dominica is attempting two classes overlapping while working full time. She is going to be really burned out over the next sixteen weeks. The later half of her GPS and the New Geography class overlaps with the first half of Computer Operations and Security. And the later half of COS overlaps with the first half of her Intro to Web Design with HTML class.

Since I was doing Flickr updates today I went back and updated February 22 with its “snow day” image – a picture taken from the apartment to show just how much snow we were getting all day. I also updated February 15 with pictures that I took on Wall Street that morning.

I needed to do some editing of QuickTime videos so I bought Apple’s QuickTime Pro 7 tonight. My first project is to see about converting videos taken with my Kodak digicam and making them playable on the AppleTV. I am converting the videos to 720p h.264. Unfortunately the sound isn’t very impressive.

I talked to John Stephens (a.k.a. The Surfing IT Wizard) tonight – he is just moving into a new apartment in Apalachin, New York this weekend. He has moved up from a tiny little one bedroom in Endicott where he has been for years to a bigger two bedroom although I think that he is a bit farther away from work now. Apalachin is famous as being the home to the 1957 Mafia meeting (known as the Apalachin Meeting) which is featured in the beginning of the movie Analyze This. A friend of mine lives next door to the famous home.

Dominica spent the later part of the evening playing MySims with Oreo snuggled on the bed. Oreo had decided that he really just wanted snuggles and wasn’t going to be happy until someone went to bed and stayed with him. He gets that way sometimes. He is such a funny dog.

March 15, 2008: Abby Mott and Country Devils

Even on the weekends it is nearly impossible to get a full night’s sleep. My alarm went off and before eight in the morning I was logged in and waiting for my colleagues from Bahrain to come online and to get started with the work that we have this morning. I went to bed just after midnight last night. So it wasn’t exactly a short night’s sleep but it wasn’t a long one either. Rather than a catching-up night it was more of a holding-my-ground night.

I am extremely thankful that the apartment is so clean and that we have managed to do so much with the living room and office. The addition of all of the plants really has helped and the clean desks really make a difference when I stumble out here early in the morning.

Dominica and Oreo got up just after ten. There is no sunlight today so Oreo was not clamoring to move into the living room early. But he, and the plants, got a lot of sunlight this week so he (they) can’t really complain.

We got lunch from Airlie Cafe. We didn’t realize before that we can get food delivered from there. So we had them bring it over for us. That was a nice change. I was busy working and Dominica hates going out alone to get take out.

I ended up working about six hours today – until two in the afternoon. This is par for the course these days. My Saturdays are always really long but I can’t figure out why so much assistance is needed. But the timing is pretty good. Starting at eight means that I do a bit of the work while Dominica is still asleep so it doesn’t really cut into our time together too much on the weekend.

I took a break after wrapping up for the office and we played a few games of The Settlers of Catan. Dominica kicked my butt in almost every game.

Dominica and Oreo spent the afternoon napping while I did some work. At seven thirty we headed out to Manhattan to meet up with Kit and Jay. Jay is playing drums for Abby Mott who is performing at the Knitting Factory at 74 Leonard tonight.

We took the path over to the WTC and from there followed the directions to take the E train to Canal even though I felt like walking was better. It turns out that Canal is even farther from The Knitting Factory than the WTC is. So that was a bit of a waste. It ended up taking half an hour longer or maybe more. It was almost nine when we finally arrived at The Knitting Factory.

We actually made it there at the perfect time. Just in time to hear one band coming off that we weren’t interested in and got to listen to the Country Devils who were very good. We bought their CD. Kit bought their CD as well. The Country Devils are from Baltimore – same as Abby Mott.

Abby Mott was very good too. It was neat getting to go out and see live music in Manhattan. We never take advantage of being so close to the city and it is definitely nice to do it for a change.

We got home around midnight and Oreo was very glad to see us but did not have any accidents even with us being gone for so long and so late at night. We walked him and then were off to bed.

March 14, 2008: St. Patrick’s Day Parade

I slept until the very last possible second today. I was still completely exhausted when morning rolled around. Oreo has been really tired this week too. So I am staying home today because I am so tired. This actually worked out really well as I was needed solid all morning and I could not have possibly gone into the office anyway.

I thought that today was going to be dreary but the sun came out this morning and it was pretty nice. Another good day for our plants which are now taking over the apartment. Today I have at least one plant in every window of the entire apartment plus two in the one window and the ivy on the counter. Maybe tonight we will manage to hang the ivy on the wall with the new wall hooks that Dominica picked up for it. Over the weekend I plan to get my “Fragrant Herbs Grow Kit” kicked off in the hopes of soon having a windowsill of herbs by my desk.

Oreo didn’t feel very well this morning. He slept in and got sick several times. He is acting alright, though, and running around and playing like he normally would so we are guessing that he just had a little bit of an upset stomach. He ate a bit of marrowfat peas last night and we think that that might have been rough on his sensitive tummy.

Last night we did some research on our rose bush and figured out that it has a mildew infection from when it got dried out really badly last week. So we did some research on remedies and think that we have a fix so we have that a try last night. We are hoping that it will pull through. It has had a rough time of it already.

Today is Newark’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade. It comes right down Mulberry Street and is quite visible and audible from the apartment. I had no idea that that would be today. So I took the little Kodak V1253 and took some quick videos from the living room window until my memory card filled up – which didn’t take very long. The video portion turned out not too bad but the audio was garbage and I can’t use it at all. So the videos are silent. Oh well. Any sound that would have been on it would have been overwhelmed by the whine of the cooling tower from Catholic Health Services next door anyway. These are my first real 720p videos and I hope to have them posted soon.

It was a busy work day. I worked all day starting from six thirty and didn’t really wrap up until seven thirty and then did a tiny bit of work after that.

Dominica made some palak paneer for dinner and baked some brownies. We played two games of Settlers of Catan (she kicked my butt both times) and then we walked Oreo. Then at ten she and Oreo went to bed and she played MySims from bed while I stayed up until midnight doing my first assignment for my object modeling class at RIT.

I have been scheduled to work tomorrow. So my first project starts at eight in the morning and my second one starts at nine. I shouldn’t have to work too late but I do have to get up early which I was hoping was not going to happen this weekend.

Tomorrow evening Dominica and I are going into Manhattan to meet Kit and Jay at The Knitting Factory. They are coming up from Annapolis, Maryland tomorrow. Jay is playing drums in one of the bands playing at The Knitting Factory. So we are going to hang out with Kit while he performs.