Sheep Guarding Llama

Oreo got me up just past midnight again to take him out to the living room to check that his new bone was not stolen by a band of marauders while we slept. This is, apparently, his new late night activity. Worrying about bone thieves.

Dominica got up at six thirty and checked the weather and it was looking like it was going to be pretty bad today. We talked about it and decided that it wasn’t a good idea to go in today. It is especially important for me to stay home when the weather is bad because I can cover for all of the people who get stuck in bad weather out on the roads. Dominica’s mouth is hurting a little today too as she had her dentist appointment yesterday evening.

So Dominica and Oreo went back to bed and slept until ten. Oreo doesn’t know what to make of this as he heads into what is going to be a four day weekend for him. I got up at seven thirty and got to work. It is Friday and there will be a lot going on all day and if people aren’t making it into the office I will be needed more than usual.

It snowed heavily here all morning. I like it when the weather is like this and I get to work from home. The light is perfect – that bluish white light and there is nothing out of the windows just a bright soft whiteness. The light is even and easy to read and work by.

At ten thirty Dominica ventured out to the Airlie Cafe across the street to look for breakfast. Oreo opted to stay on his warm, snuggly Star Wars pillow in the living room. He doesn’t particularly like snow.

I finished reading “Agile Project Management with Scrum from Microsoft Press this morning. I had to start reading “Titanic Lessons for IT Project Management” by Mark Kozak-Holland for my term paper that is due next week. You can read more of Kozak-Holland’s writings on the subject in his article series for Ganthead “IT Project Lessons from Titanic“. The article series is actually the book published online as a serial.

Today while researching some titles on Audible I discovered “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West” by Benazir Bhutto which sounds like an interesting read from an important early twenty-first century polical figure so I picked that up although I doubt that I will have a chance to read it anytime soon.

I have been working on teaching myself to effectively use the new h.264 video codec and, so far, have been getting some very impressive results with it. I am really seeing MPEG2 videos brought down to half their original size while improving overall quality through deblocking and deinterlacing! It is really incredible. The one really major downside to the process is that hours and hours that it takes for even a short video, less than thirty minutes, to be recompressed. My Athlon64 3200+ may not be the fastest machine on the block but it is a decently fast machine with plenty of memory and it has a terrible time working through this material. Once I have the process down the h.264 compression will easily justify the investment in a much faster machine. It is unfortunate that there is not yet an easy way to offload h.264 compression to an outboard floating point processing engine like the NVideo Tesla. That would be really cool and effective. I wonder how long until someone creates a library to handle that soft of work for the free x264 implementation. That would be a really neat project.

Dad’s HP Pavilion laptop finally bit the dust today and is completely dead. His is now attempting to use his limping Toshiba Satellite that has been in horrible shape for years with all kinds of mechanical problems. His desktop has a virus, we believe, and he is trying not to use that until he manages to get it rebuilt.

Today was a long day “at the office” even being home. Lots of stuff going on and I ended up working far more than a twelve hour day starting at seven thirty in the morning and going well past eight in the evening. I am the primary “on call” all weekend and will be kept busy with that in addition to work that I have scheduled tomorrow morning at eight thirty. No time for relaxing for me this weekend, I am afraid.

We tried to get dinner from Food for Life tonight but they closed several hours early so we were not able to. We ended up just grabbing some simple food from downstairs in the deli.

We watched one episode of Family Ties and then it was back to work for me. I wrapped up the office work a little before nine. What a long day. But not as long as the people that I was supporting who worked towards midnight babysitting new software. Ugh.

I did a ton of reading today preparing for my term paper. Something that I didn’t know before is that a “black iceberg” is an iceberg that has scraped against dirt and picked up dirt and rocks and then flipped over so that it is no longer white. It was a black iceberg that the R.M.S. Titanic hit in 1912. I looked up a picture of one on the Weather Underground. So here is a Black Iceberg in Portage Valley, Alaska.

I wrapped up reading “Titanic Lessons for IT Project Management” just a little before eleven and then it was time to head off to bed. Tomorrow is going to be quite busy. Dominica spent the entire day watching Christie and I guarantee that she will have a migraine tomorrow. I think that she watched almost the entire series in one day. She started watching while eating her breakfast and I am going to have to convince her to turn it off so that we can go to bed. Her only breaks have been to walk the dog and to watch an episode of Family Ties so she is going to be hurting.

Today’s XKCD sums me up quite well.

Today is my day at home. I slept in until eight when Oreo decided that the sunlight was irresistible and headed out to the living room to find a warm, cozy sunspot on the recliner. Then it was time to work. I feel a little better today after having been exhausted all week. I have pretty much wrapped up all of my homework for my Project Management class and have nothing to do except write my term paper which is due on Tuesday.

I checked on Amazon today and, as I feared, the price of BluRay players is now increasing as there is no more competition from HD-DVD. So that just pushes off adoption for those of us who have been waiting for the price to drop and not waiting for HD-DVD to finally give up the ghost. This won’t help things any. As Dominica and I become more and more used to using Internet delivered content the less we even remember that BluRay was something that we wanted. Two months ago we were checking the prices every day (they were as low as $280 for a nice Samsung unit that is around $360 today from the same dealer) and now it has almost completely slipped our minds as being something that we were going to get. I realize that we tend to be ahead of the curve a little bit but there are a lot of people a lot more into this stuff than us and they must have given up on BD some time ago. I can definitely see BD having a really hard time really quickly if they don’t figure something out right away. It is funny that I am so concerned with the price of a BluRay player today in 2008 when Nate and I spent $350 on our first DVD player in 2000 and were not nearly so concerned about how expensive it was. My first Laserdisc player, a dual sided Sony behemoth, was $250 in 1994 which has to be quite a bit more than a BluRay player today and that was an extremely mature technology. If BluRay players were $250 today, I would definitely buy one. But it isn’t looking like they are going to make it there until the end of the year. We will see if I still care by then.

Of course one of the worst things about BluRay is the draconian and potentially illegal copyright and usage limitations that they are placing upon them (fairuse rights are refused, for example) that prevent you, not only from making your rightful archival copy, but also prevent you from being able to watch purchased movies in a modern, convenient way like from a media center. In today’s multi-media world people are rapidly moving to centralized media server systems in their homes – single devices handling audio, video, pictures, etc. that make physical media, even for people who own physical media, obsolete. Taking the effort to dig out a disc, put it in a player, wait for it to spin up, hope that it isn’t scratched and will play properly is going to feel more and more like a clumsy way to watch movies. People are getting used to just sitting down and watching anything that they want. BluRay has forgotten that it isn’t 1999 and the world has moved on. Sony is not a company known for looking ahead and, once again, they have no plan for the future.

Today was busy for a Thursday. Oreo was a little more restless than normal as he had a three day weekend and then just two days of daycare to wear him out. Susan and I tried to do lunch today but her lunch window was pretty small and I got a call that I had to take right when we were going to meet and so we had to cancel and shoot for next week. After work today Dominica had a dentist appointment to look at a crown that she has been having problems with recently. Then she had to run to Walmart to pick up some medicine. She would have gone to Walgreen’s which we like better but they have no good parking there and it is just such a hassle. It would be nice if we had a nice pharmacy within walking distance of home being that we live in the middle of a city but, of course, there isn’t one – at least not one that we feel safe walking to in the evenings. There was one but it closed almost immediately after our building starting having people move in. But it wasn’t open late so it didn’t really help us any. Walgreen’s in the Ironbound is about the best that we get and they are pretty weak. They were better when they were twenty-four hours but now they aren’t and you have to go wait in long lines with the crazy people.

Dominica may think twice about trying to get prescriptions filled at the Harrison Walmart after today. It took her half an hour or so to get through the line and then another hour for her prescription to get filled. An hour to kill in a very low class Walmart where you really don’t want to spend extra time. Of course, it is in Walmart’s interest for you to be stuck there just long enough to put up with the delay because then you are pretty much tied to shopping there while you wait. So Dominica spent her hour doing some grocery shopping which did work out well for us even though it was a horrible waste of time.

Dominica got home well after seven and for dinner we just heated up some frozen pizzas that she got from Walmart for just $1.50 each.  Talk about a cheap dinner.  We ate and watching a few episodes of the third season of Family Matters.  Oreo was super snuggly.  He has gotten into the habit of climbing into my lap when we watch television.  It is so sweet.  He has never been a lap dog until just the last few weeks but he seems to be starting to really want to be held more than before.  There is no question that he definitely sees himself as our dog now.  He has also begun to ask us for massages on a regular basis.  He is very funny.

My birthday present from Dominica arrived in the mail today.  She ordered it from Amazon and the free shipping plan said that it would arrive next week on my birthday.  It shipped yesterday.  But it arrived today and she was very impatient and decided to have me open it today instead of waiting.  She got me Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors for the Nintendo Wii.  I am very excited as Dragon Quest VIII was my favourite video game of all time and this is looking like it is going to be very similar but with somewhat updated graphics.  I am sad that I can’t play it this weekend, though, and have to wait until after my term paper is finished before I can even try it out.  The Wii isn’t even hooked up right now.

I didn’t feel like getting up at five thirty when the alarm went off but Oreo had gone and was in a blanket and not being snuggly so I figured that it was a bad morning to be lazy and sleep in.  Oreo got me up at a quarter after one during the night to take him out to the living room to check on the status of the new bone that Dominica had given him last night.  As soon as he saw that it was still where he had left it he was happy to go back to bed.  What a funny dog he is.  Although I think that he is funnier when he does not get me out of bed for this kind of stuff.

I got ready for work and was just about to head out when I realized that I was supposed to be working in Warren today rather than on Wall Street.  I was just in time to catch Dominica before she left and she was able to drive me up to the Broad Street train station and drop me off.  It was perfect timing.  It was really cold out this morning and I definitely did not want to walk all of the way over to the Broad Street rail station and then stand on the platform waiting for the train.

To add to my perfect timing, the train pulled up on the platform the instant that I set foot onto it.  So I just hopped right aboard and purchased my ticket on the train.  The conductor even overlooked the fact that I was buying it on the train and didn’t surcharge me for it.  So I just rode the train and read “Project Management with Scrum” on the way into work.

I got into the office just in time to get coffee and a bagel with the early morning crew.  Once again, perfect timing.  That appears to be the theme of the day.

It was quite a busy day for me out in Warren.  I haven’t been out to the Warren office for two months – not since the Christmas luncheon!  This is the longest stretch that I have been away from the office where I worked for almost all of 2006 and 2007.

I left the office this evening at five.  I caught the shuttle back to Summit where I catch NJ Transit.  Today I just happen to catch the Hoboken Express which bypasses all of my usual stops in New Jersey and takes me straight from Summit to the Broad Street Station in Newark.  It made for a very snappy trip home.

Originally Dominica was going to attempt to pick me up when I got back to Newark so that I wouldn’t have to walk back to Eleven80 in the cold but I ended up so far ahead of her that that didn’t really make much sense.  So I started walking home and decided that I would pick up dinner from Crown Fried Chicken on Broad Street.  We haven’t had fish sandwiches from there in quite some time.

Getting dinner there turned out to be perfect because I walked out the door just moments before Dominica and Oreo came by so they were able to pick me up and take me back to Eleven80 with them.  This was especially good as Dominica had done some shopping today and needed me to carry a few items.  The exciting thing that she bought today is the third season of Family Ties.

We finished watching Dragons of Autumn Twilight while we ate our dinners.  We both decided that it was so awful that it should never have been made.  It really does a disservice to a truly incredible book.  It is very sad.

Dominica had a lot of homework to do tonight so she spent most of the evening working on that.  I was really exhausted and took a shower, wrote SGL, talked to Andy on IM and decided to head for bed very much on the early side.  I did a little homework as well.  As long as I keep up on that I will be all done by Friday night and will have nothing but my term paper over the weekend.  I am completely done with the class at midnight on the 26th.

My new Dungeons & Dragons books came today.  Four of them, “Races of the Wild”, “Races of Stone”, “Races of Destiny” and “The Complete Divine”.  This just about completes my collection of D&D books that I really want to own from the v3.5 generation of sourcebooks.  eBay is a great source of D&D stuff like this.

I was off to bed even before ten o’clock!

I was worn out this morning but was still able to pull myself from bed at five thirty. I started up the shower as it takes some time for the water to warm up that early in the morning and went to the living room to the office to check on the status of some overnight malware detection scans that I had run. The network was down, of course, and had to be restarted. That will be a project for tonight.

I forgot to charge my iPod Nano over the weekend and so did not have that to take with me this morning. So instead I grabbed Ken Schwaber’s “Agile Project Management with Scrum” from Microsoft Press to read on the train.

I expected it to be very cold out today but it was actually quite nice. Perfect weather for walking to the office. Windy but not too cold. Bright and sunny for a change.

My project for this week it to write my term paper for Project Management. My class ends on February 26th so I am on the home stretch now. But that paper is going to be a lot of work and I still have to do my usual homework yet this week.

I did some cleaning up in my Amazon address book today and couldn’t believe some of the old addresses that were in there like: 4 Bayard Rd. Apt. 43 in Pittsburgh and 138 Greenleaf Meadows in Rochester. It really shows how long I have been using Amazon. Pretty much for an entire decade now. Maybe more. One of my addresses was even associated with an ancient 716 area code phone number. Rochester switched to 585 a very long time ago.

I noticed today on Amazon that prices on HD-DVD players have plummeted and they are barely more expensive than regular DVD players and are about the same price as DVD players with upconversion to the same level as the HD-DVD output. It didn’t take long after the Toshiba announcement for the market to completely vanish for those.

While I was on Amazon doing some maintenance I decided to put in a small order with two DVDs, one set of “News from Lake Wobegon” CDs and a book. I also ran through and did a careful update to the Amazon Recommends thing that they do to make it work better for me. With a little careful maintenance you can make that work pretty well. It discovers all kinds of things that I might find interesting.

Ars Technica posts an article highlighting the defeat of HD-DVD and BluRay’s newest challenger – Internet HD Downloads. Hmm, I wonder whose blog they have been reading. Speculation continues today as to the role saboteurs may have played in the crippling of the Middle East’s Internet access two weeks ago. Rocketboom commented at the time on the likelyhood of the US government being involved given the fact that Middle Eastern communications would be heavily routed through US backhauls allowing for the US government to snoop packets bound for countries to whom they are not very friendly. That all major Internet undersea backhauls were simultaneously cut is a bit more than “somewhat suspicious.”

I needed to do a virtual install of Fedora 8 today to do some self-education with Veritas Volume Manager (aka VxVM) so I decided, while I was at it, to experiment with innotek‘s Virtual Box. Virtual Box has managed to remain below my radar for some time now but with Sun’s pending acquisition it seemed like a good time to look into this technology a bit more closely. Virtual Box is much like other desktop virtualization products except that it is open source and available completely for free. Several other virtualization products are also free such as Microsoft’s VirtualPC and Virtual Server and EMC’s VMWare Server, all of which I have used in the past. I have used both MS Virtual Server and VMWare Server for production virtualization as well. One aspect of Virtual Box that I find intriguing is that its “client” and “server” modes are both handled by the same core components and are just two different interfaces to the same system. I find this more convenient than the Microsoft and EMC models.

I got a chance to listen to Ubi Manber of Google discuss challenges in search today on IT Conversations from the current Super Nova Conference. And I listened to Dr. Joel Selanikio speak about the Invisible Computer Revolution dealing with SMS delivered medical data in the developing world. And I wrapped up listening to Ed Rowe from Adobe speaking about Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo) technology which is very interesting.

I got home and we had about an hour before everyone was ready for the evening’s Dungeons and Dragons session.  I am very excited to have a chance to actually play.  It has been so long.  It was about seven when we started and we played until ten.  We are playing in the “Known World” setting, also known as Mystara, for D&D.  I am playing an Oltec Cleric from Hollow World.  It is an interesting character and I think that I am going to get to have a bit of fun with him.

We had a good session.  Not too much happened as it was the very first time that we have played in this setting and the first time that Feder has run a game for us and the first time that I have played in sixteen years.  So there was a lot of prep work still to be done and a lot of “getting used to” the process.

Dominica and I ordered dinner a little  after nine from Nino’s but it didn’t arrive until a quarter after ten.  We ate and watched one twenty-two minute “episode” of Doctor Who (the Tom Baker years in the 1970s) and headed off to bed.  Dominica gave Oreo a huge roasted bone with meat still on it tonight and he has been going crazy chewing on that.  He was so excited.

I am working in Warren, New Jersey tomorrow so I will be commuting out on NJ Transit.