Sheep Guarding Llama

I still haven’t caught up no my sleep and feel pretty run down this morning. I am very relived that my term paper is to be done today. One way or another I can’t keep working on it after today.

My early morning was pretty slow. The weather was pretty nice today and my walk into the office was perfect. Just warm enough to only need a fleece but not so warm that you got too warm.

Good news for young writers out there – it appears that it has now become acceptable to begin sentences with conjunctions! Yay! Oh joy unbounded. Now if we were only allowed to end our sentences with prepositions we would really be making some progress. But if we did that, what would the world come to? 😉

I found a very good article from the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Log “If They Do It Too Much, They Should Be Told Not To Do It At All” in which is discussed the use of but, however and nevertheless as primary position words. The synopsis is that however should, in all but the rarest of cases, be used within a sentence while nevertheless being nearly synonymous is the more appropriate first position word (reference to Strunk itself.) And, more recently in Garner’s “The Winning Brief“, that but is more appropriate than however as a first position word. This gives us two very strong recommendations against the traditionally held schoolteacher belief in the incorrectness of the leading conjunction. The paper from UPenn makes a good analysis as to where this traditional most likely began as well. It is a good read.

Another high school friend, Alayna Dickerson, tracked me down today. Being as prevalent on the web as I am is very handy in being findable for people who have not spoken to me in a very long time.

Yet another person in my building, Eleven80, that I have never met before came up to me in the lobby to tell me that they recognized me from my web-based video tour of the building. Scott’s November, 2006 Video Tour of Eleven80 in Newark, NJ. I am planning to do another video sometime soon when the weather is a little nicer and put it up on Vimeo. Something that shows more of the interior space and some changes that we have done to our apartment and some views, maybe, from some higher floors and in some different directions.

I got stuck in the office rather late today. I was contacted by people who needed my assistance near the end of the day and held for a really low time waiting for work details that never came. Eventually I gave up and decided to just go home. I called Dominica to attempt to make some dinner plans but was unable to reach her from the office. The original plan was for there to be a Dungeons & Dragons session tonight but our dungeon master is under the weather and about to leave for Germany so we are pretty sure that the session will be cancelled tonight. That is probably best as Dominica and I have more than enough work backlogged to keep us busy. I have been totally overwhelmed by this term paper over the last several days.

I spent a bit of time today attempting to polish my term paper. Lots of literary refactoring. Not something at which I am usually very good. I ended up doing some additions and modifications today but I think that it was all for the better. The paper ended up being a little longer than it was supposed to be, I think, but I feel that I covered a lot of good ground and that it turned out pretty well. My plan is to post it on SGL somewhere between midnight and tomorrow morning. All depends how late I am up.

I came home and talked Dominica into going over the The Spot for some dinner.  We haven’t been over there since their soft opening and this was our chance to try them out for dinner.  This was my informal birthday dinner since we didn’t get a chance to do one last night.  We tried the vegetarian sliders which were really good.  It is great having another eating option right next door.  This is going to make a real difference for us.  Our food selection is very small and we are getting really run down eating the same food over and over and constantly trying to come up with something that we want to eat night after night.  Eating really feels like a chore sometimes.

Ryan came over with some beer right after we walked in the door.  We were lucky that we didn’t have anything planned tonight.  It turned into a rather full evening.  Dungeons & Dragons was cancelled as everyone involved was too busy, worn out or under the weather.  So Ryan hung out until a quarter after eleven.

I kind of wanted to stay up and post my paper to SGL at midnight.  I can’t post before midnight because that is when the submission deadline is so I can’t make it public until after the class has closed.  But since I was already up so late it seemed like it would be worth staying up a little later to get it posted.  It took so much work I would really like to get some feedback on it.

We got into bed at eleven thirty and watched an episode of the third season of Family Ties before going to sleep.

It’s official.  I am thirty-two years old.

Dominica and I were wide awake last night and ended up staying up until two in the morning or later watching Family Ties.  Around one thirty in the morning Dominica decided that she was hungry and so went out and cooked up a breakfast or toat and eggs and vegetarian sausage.  I did some work with Audible downloading books to my iPod which has recently run out of books for me to listen to.  I downloaded a ton of books and podcasts.

I was quite exhausted when the time came to get up this morning.  I am really worn out from all of the research, reading and writing on the term paper.  I am really putting a lot of effort into this paper.  I am finding the project rather difficult as the subject is a hard one to tackle.  At least for me.

I was going in at regular time this morning rather than my usual early shift because I was so tired and worked so late last night.  My session was still logged on on my workstation so I checked the mail and ended up getting dragged into some priority issues and troubleshooting.  Then it was on to conference calls.  I ended up not getting a free moment until noon.  It was an extremely busy morning but I did get a chance to do some interesting troubleshooting.

Today I am working on reading “The Titanic Disaster Hearings” by Tom Kuntz – the official 1912 Senate hearing transcripts. I got a copy from it last night from Audible and I am listening to it whenever I have an opportunity.  It is an extremely eerie experience listening to a word for word reenactment of the hearing of the survivors taken the morning after they had arrived in the United States.  I definitely now have an appreciation of the entire Titanic disaster that I never expected to have.  I have quite a picture of the overall event now from 1907 when the project was conceptualized until days after the sinking.  Never having been interested in the accident before it is strange for me to now know it so intimately.

I grabbed lunch from Airlie Cafe.  I decided to try out their salad bar today.  It was really good.  I will be getting that more often.

Dominica came home at six thirty with groceries.  I went down to help her carry in.  She cooked vegetarian sausage and peppers for dinner.  We ate and watching some of Family Ties.

After dinner Dominica read through my term paper and made some suggestions and corrections while I read “The Art of Project Management.” That took an hour or more.  It was quite a project.

After working on my homework Dominica went to bed with Oreo and watched the end of the last Christy movie.  I continued reading “The Titanic Disaster Hearings” and worked on SGL before going in to bed myself.

Oreo got me up at seven thirty to check on his bone in the living room. He must have been really sleepy to have taken so long to want to verify that it was still okay. It worked out well, though, because the office called just fifteen minutes later to ask me to start working at a quarter to eight instead of eight thirty. Some of these guys are rather demanding. I had stayed up and did my last deployment last night just before eleven to support some people still working in the office and now they expect me to be logged in and working before eight. That’s literally just eight hours between “shifts”. If I didn’t need less sleep than normal people I would be in really rough shape.

I discovered a cool blog today called “No Wrong Turns” which chronicles the adventures of Tom and Kelsey as the attempt to drive from Calgary, Alberta to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. Three posts up so far and they are already a good way down on the California coast. They are making the trip in a VW Golf but won’t be driving the connector from Panama to Columbia as there is no “road” connecting the two and only some serious offroad equipment can make it through there if anything can. I have always wanted to do a trip from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego hitting every country along the way (and not skipping Columbia.) Unfortunately the Darian Gap connecting Panama to Columbia is a swamp (brackish, I would guess) and is extremely dangerous because of drug runners. So crossing there is pretty much impossible.

As of this morning everything is officially done for my Project Management class except for my term paper which I have been working on for the last few day. That will be pretty much my only project until Tuesday night. I really hope to have it done early but working all weekend makes that somewhat unlikely and I am going to be rushing a bit to get it done in time.

I ended up working on the morning deployments from seven thirty until after twelve thirty. So much for my Saturday morning. Dominica got up a bit after ten. It turns out that she could not sleep last night, which she normally cannot on Friday nights, and she stayed up until three in the morning working on her homework.

I walked over to Airlie Cafe at eleven thirty and picked up a late breakfast for us which pretty much counted as lunch as well. The weather is better today. Snow and slush everywhere but it is coming down only lightly now and it is not quite as cold as it was yesterday.

I was totally exhausted by early afternoon and took a nap with Oreo on his pillow in the middle of the living room floor while Dominica worked on her home. Then we watched two episodes of the second season of the “new” Doctor Who which we have on DVD from Netflix. The first disc only had two episodes on it so that was all that we had. This is actually good for us as it keeps us from having the option of watching all of them at once. But it is bad because now it will be late in the week before we can see another one.

Dominica made pasta Alfredo for dinner. We watched one episode of Family Ties and then we had to walk Oreo and get back to school work.

I was excited tonight when I learned that RIT is currently ranked as the number eight school in the northeast region of the United States by US News and World Report for Masters degrees. Very cool. It outranks all of the ivy league schools. Good time to be doing my Masters there.

The evening was spent doing homework.  Both Dominica and I spent many hours in the office just working.  Kind of sad for a Saturday evening.  Not the glamorous lifestyle that one would hope for.  We worked until almost midnight and then went to bed and watched a little of Family Ties before falling asleep.

Before totally falling asleep, I was pages out at one in the morning.  This, in addition to seven hours of work today.  I am going to be tired again tomorrow.  I can tell.

Today’s title is a reference to AoE2.

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.