Sheep Guarding Llama

When I got up this morning I thought that I was going into Wall Street to work but after being awake and realizing that today was my only day all week to go into Warren and that one of my colleague whom I have not yet met was down from Toronto working in Warren all week I decided that I needed to head out into rural New Jersey.  So I got ready as quickly as I could and walked up to the Broad Street NJ Transit train station and road out to Summit to catch the company shuttle.

I finished reading “The Art of Project Management” this morning which I thought that I would never get through.  That is a really long book.  I started reading “Interface Oriented Design” which is much shorter and I made appreciable progress through just while riding the train and shuttle today.

Work was really slow today as it is Easter Monday which is a bank holiday in both the United Kingdom and Switzerland so the foreign exchange was closed leaving me without much work.  Some of us went out to Bombay for lunch which was nice as living in Newark makes it difficult to get good Indian food.  We just haven’t managed to find any restaurants around here.  Very frustrating.

I grabbed the five o’clock shuttle back to Summit and the Hoboken train back to Newark.  Dominica went grocery shopping after work and was a long way behind me getting home.  Ramona txt’d me while I was on the train as she was getting dinner at Food for Life.  Ryan tried to get a hold of us for dinner as well but Ramona beat him by just four minutes.  We are popular tonight.  Dominica wasn’t feeling very hungry and wasn’t going to make it home for a while so I walked down to Food for Life and met Ramona there for dinner.

Dominica got home tonight but was feeling pretty tired.  We had a pretty short evening.  She read her new “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” graphic novel and went to bed.  I had to take Oreo out and then got caught working for the office for several hours until almost midnight.  I am on the early shift tomorrow so I am going to be pretty tired.

Dexter didn’t sleep with us last night. We just couldn’t handle another night of his anxiety. It is sad because he is so excited that Dominica and I come to visit and all that he wants is to be with us like in the old days when he used to come stay with us for days at a time. But he has such awful anxiety that he spends the entire night panting and panicking which, in turn, keeps us from being able to sleep and doesn’t help Oreo out much either. So last night he had to sleep upstairs and just Dominica, Oreo and I slept in the living room. Dexter came and joined us early in the morning after his and Oreo’s early walk outside.

We just hung around the house until two in the afternoon when we went over to Dominica’s grandpa Tocco’s house for Easter dinner. Dominica spent a bit of the morning working on homework for Empire State while I added the new memory to her parents’ computer and watched Joe play Call of Duty 4 on the PlayStation 3. I did a little bit of reading for my class today as well but not very much.

We had dinner at two and stayed there until around four when we went back to Min’s parents’ house, packed the car and got on to the road headed for Newark. It was probably around five when we finally got out the door. We stopped at Ramapo, in southern New York along the Thruway, and grabbed dinner at the McDonald’s at the rest stop there. It was quick and easy. We ran into fairly little traffic and were home to Newark just after nine.

Dominica and I spent our short evening working on homework. It isn’t much fun having all of this homework due all of the time. I wrapped up around ten thirty. Dominica went much later. I decided to go to bed with Oreo and to read while Dominica wrapped up her homework. Her plan was to work until she was exhausted.

My video of the sunrising over Manhattan was added to the NYC HiDef channel on Vimeo.

I made a mistake last week and I am actually on the early morning shift this coming week. That was pretty dumb. I am not on it tomorrow (Monday) for the same reason that I thought that I was not on it last Monday. But Tuesday through Friday I will be doing the early morning.

Congratulations to Josh and JoAnne Relyea who just had their first baby, Lilly Allison Relyea, on Wednesday night!

Dominica and I slept in quite a bit this morning. We got very little sleep last night because of Oreo and Dexter and their competitive drinking, eating, peeing, pooping activities. They will just drink and eat every bit of water and food made available to them and then will get me up every two hours all night long to take them out for walks. So I almost never got a chance to sleep at all.

Joe and I spent a bit of the morning working on the Netgear router and the Sony Playstation 3 trying to get his Playstation and Bennie’s Playstation 3 in Houston to talk to each other.  We are not having very much luck, though.  We put in a few hours working on it last night as well and didn’t really get anywhere.  There is some issue with their machines connecting and we have tried everything including default port forwarding for both machines (Netgear calls this a DMZ) but that did not work either.  So we are stumped.

Dad left Peoria this morning around nine thirty and arrived in Frankfort just a little bit before one in the afternoon. He said that he had a pretty good drive. We are really fortunate that the weather has worked out so well this weekend with Dominica and I driving so much and dad driving almost as much as well. It was bright and clear today. Probably the first really good weekend that we have had since Christmas!

We went out to Herkimer for lunch at the Albany Street Cafe & Pub. Neither Min nor I had been there before but we had eaten next door at the Empire Diner when we had come out to Herkimer so that I could play trombone in Dan Waltermire’s wedding on October 12, 2002. I drove the Toccos’ new 2008 Chevy Impala SS to lunch to test it out. They just got it recently and this is the first time that we have seen it. They got rid of the Oldmobile Bravada that they had been using as their second car and not just have the Impala and the Chrysler 300M.

Lunch was good although it took a really long time. Dominica and I both got crab cake sandwiches which were really amazing. We will be wanting to eat there again sometime.

After lunch dad hung out in Frankfort until just after five when he hit the road back to Peoria. He took our rather large load of stuff to transfer back with him. We are very glad to have some extra space reclaimed in our tiny little apartment. Now we can move around again. Although we will almost instantly discover more stuff that needs to be put into storage.

Dad also brought out three months worth of mail including some Model Railroad magazines that I have been having sent to his house and some Amazon and eBay shipments that went there on accident including “Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight” the graphic novel that I got for Dominica for Christmas that she has not had a chance to get yet. So she is excited to finally have that. I have a set of books that went there as well that I have totally forgot that I owned which include “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning”, “Rome’s Greatest Defeat: Massacre in the Teutoburg Forest”, “The Day of the Barbarians: The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire”, “The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians” and “Dreaming in Code”. So now I have a lot of reading to work on. I need to get busy with that.

After dad left, Dominica, her father and I went out to Best Buy and Circuit City to do some quick shopping.  We picked up a 1GB stick of PC2700 (a.k.a. DDR333) memory for the Toccos’ Dell Optiplex 170L desktop which has been suffering from being too low on memory.  It had only 256MB before so the additional 1GB will have an enormous impact taking it from .25GB to 1.25GB total memory.  Quite a nice upgrade.

I spent the evening working on my Systems Analysis and Design homework. I have two assignments due by midnight tonight and then discussion work that I need to get to tomorrow at some point. I am behind on my reading for that class (I know that this sounds incredible but I have been putting a lot of effort into getting the book that I am in the middle of out of the way before putting too much effort into reading my textbook and this has been proving to be a challenge.) So I read three chapters in the textbook today which took a really long time and I re-read “No Silver Bullet” by Fred Brooks and wrote my essay on that. Then I had to do some small UML diagrams. It was about eleven thirty when I wrapped up. Dominica had already gone to sleep by the time that I was done.

We are having Easter Dinner with the family tomorrow afternoon around two o’clock.  We are having dinner early so that Dominica and I can get onto the road as early as possible.  We are anticipating really bad traffic on the drive back down to Newark.  Also, tomorrow evening two of my colleagues from the Toronto office are flying into the NY Metro area.  One is coming to Newark and so we are hoping to get together for drinks before he drives out to find his hotel.  But we will see.  He is scheduled to arrive at seven which is too early for me to be able to make it but with Newark’s infamous delays and the time needed for him to find luggage and rent a car it might be feasible if we get out early and make really good time down to Newark.

We felt like we were really sleeping in this morning but, in reality, we were up at eight thirty.  Not much of “sleeping in late.”  Strange how your perceptions of these things change as you get older.

We spent the morning packing.  We have a lot of stuff that we are taking to Frankfort to switch over to my dad when he comes up there to visit tomorrow.  Our living room and our bedroom have been piled up with stuff just waiting to be transported for months now.  The winter months really prevent us from being able to move stuff around effectively at all.  This is going to be our first trip to visit anyone in New York since Christmas!

We got onto the road around two in the afternoon.  This is our first long-distance trip using the new GPS unit instead of just using it around New Jersey.  We didn’t really need it since we know the entire route very well.  But having it was really neat because we could see the map moving by as we drove and it provided us with an extremely accurate and up-to-date time estimate for our arrival in Frankfort.  Or it would have if we didn’t have to make two bathroom breaks for Dominica and an emergency stop for more fuel at the Iroquois station just outside of Herkimer.  It was almost exactly six when we arrived at the Toccos’.

Everyone went out to the Kitlas in Utica for dinner.  That is the Toccos’ equivalent of the Omega Grill for us in Geneseo.  We ate and them went back to the house.  Oreo and Dexter haven’t seen each other for months so they were playing quite a bit.

Joe, Dominica’s father, Min and I sat down and played a little Munchkin Cthulhu before going to bed.  We only made it through about half of a game, though, because everyone was so tired.  Tomorrow dad is coming out to visit and both Dominica and I have our weekend homework to do.

My first project this morning is moving from Firefox2 (2.0.0.12) to the very latest Firefox3 (FF3 Beta4.) I had heard some rumours that Firefox 3 was really going to be amazing and so I decided that I should try it out, get a sneak preview and maybe help out with some Beta testing. So far I can say – Wow! FF3 is screaming fast. You can really feel it. It loads faster, scrolls smoother, reacts better and loads pages faster. And all fast enough that you can feel the difference! And I am told that it uses less system memory although that is tough to determine without some serious work which I am not going to do for myself. But so far in my first hours or working with it I am extremely impressed and will be sticking with it. Opera, Safari and IE seem to have lost some significant ground with this release.

Today is the final day of my early morning week. It was a little warm as I walked into the office today. But not bad. I got in nice and early but can’t stay late today because Dominica and I are going to NJPAC this evening. We don’t have time to go out to dinner before the show, though, so we will just be doing something simple and quick. I might grab dinner on my way home if the timing works out well.

I was going through the list of search terms used to find SGL today and this has to be the best one ever – and to make it even funnier, more than one person arrived at Sheep Guarding Llama through this exact phrase: i watched the great mouse this morning it was awesome. What? I can’t even find SGL when looking for it using that term on Google. Some people must be pretty serious about their searching on that term.

Almost as funny is how consistent it is that people find SGL when searching for Cannibal Cuisine. On Google we are a bit hard to find but on Yahoo we are the very top hit for that term. This stuff is endlessly entertaining to me.

For a change I actually brought my camera down to Wall Street with me and took a few pictures. It is overcast and exceptionally dark today so we will see how many I manage to get. I took it with me when I stepped outside for breakfast and I tried to grab a few shots off of the pier but there wasn’t much to get with it so incredibly dark. I should bring the Nikon down and get some real pics one of these days.

Normally my morning seem to fly by but today the day really dragged on. It seemed like forever before we reached lunch time even though I had plenty of work to do. For lunch I just ran over to my Halal falafel guys and had my usual falafel pita sandwich and fries. I just ate at my desk. It was very lonely.

Luckily the market is closing early today because of the holiday weekend so all of the work that usually takes place late in the evening on the “weed end” night is happening on the early side around three in the afternoon. So hopefully I won’t be stuck late tonight as that will be a problem since we have to get to the theatre.

I stayed later in the office than I had planned but only until five which wasn’t bad at all. I stopped at the Metro Cafe in the Gateway Center on the way home and picked up sandwiches for dinner. I got home just minutes after Dominica and Oreo.

We ate dinner and watched the “lost episode” of A Different World. Although after having watched it I have to wonder if it was really a lost episode or if it was just left on the cutting room floor because it was total crap. What a horrible episode.

Then it was off to NJPAC to see My Fair Lady. The show was excellent but, as always, the show was plagued with the issues inherent in having a show in Newark. Tons of people’s seats were given away and were forced to sit in other locations than the seats that they paid for and families were separated because of the NJPAC not honoring their tickets. It was not as bad as at the last show that we went to but the attitude of NJPAC is atrocious towards their paying customers acting as if “squatters” who may not even have paid for the show have more rights than the seat owners do. Newark’s “entitlement” attitude even extends to the theater where they attempt to act classy – but it is a shallow facade. And then to have extremely loud commentary coming from people everywhere including comments about how amazing the scenery is at volume louder than a full normal voice! As if people are trying to make their commentary to strangers several rows away. Although, I suppose, maybe they had to shout to speak to the person who had the ticket to the seat directly next to them since they might have been forced to sit just anywhere. There was also quite a bit of “singing along” coming from all over. Going to a show in Newark really feels like you are with a group of people who have never even learned how to behave in a movie theater let alone a real theater.

We came home and went right off to bed. We have to get up and pack the car tomorrow and hit the road for Frankfort in the morning.

Six new images from Wall Street have been uploaded to Flickr. I did not manage to get any pictures later in the day, unfortunately.