Sheep Guarding Llama

Today’s Music: Mike and the Mechanics

We went to bed really early last night and yet I still didn’t wake up this morning until after Dominica had gotten up and had taken her shower. Oreo was being super ultra snuggly which didn’t help.

It was good that I overslept though as I really needed the sleep. I would have ended up being pretty useless today had I not gotten the extra sleep.

I checked my BlackBerry and was needed right away in the morning so had to get right to work but at least I got to sleep till the last possible second. The morning ended up being incredibly busy and I was just slammed with work right up until noon.

During my “lunch” I ran to Newark Penn Station and grabbed some pizza from Triponi and rushed into the office. Of course, once I raced to the office the rest of the afternoon proved to be incredibly slow. Even so, the afternoon seemed to pass by pretty quickly.

I continued my project of moving data from my email over to a database server. That is continuing to take a really long time. Have a process doing one month of data at a time running on my desktop at home and it is seeming to take approximately five hours of processing for each month of log data.

I did get a chance to play a little Bard’s Tale in the background while working on other things. That is one of the big upsides of the original Bard’s Tale is how easy it is to play casually while doing other things. You just run it in the background and hunt down the bad guys when you get a chance. Works great. Very relaxing.

Over her lunch break today Dominica ran out and got the oil changed on the Mazda PR5 and got some new windshield wipers installed as the old ones were getting to be a little bit dangerous. She also got a car wash while she was out getting everything else taken care of since it had some salt on it and it has been pretty warm recently so it was time to get that salt off of there before it became a problem.

The current situation with the car is that it is going to be waiting to be sold until March now instead of February which is good for us since we get to drive it through the entire winter and make at least one additional run with it between here and dad’s house sometime during that stretch. The person who is buying it wants to wait until their tax return comes in so that they can use that for a down payment on the car which makes sense for everyone involved. And it means an additional several weeks of not putting miles onto the BMW.

I worked later today than I thought that I was going to not leaving the office until around seven or so. Dominica cooked dinner while I was traveling home – vegetable casserole. My goal for tonight is to relax, play some Bard’s Tale, keep transferring email logs to the database and to do some work on my homework. I have a “take home” test that I need to do this weekend as well. But that shouldn’t be too bad.

Dominica spent the evening reading.  In addition to my other work I also rolled up a new paladin character for Pam to play in tomorrow’s Dungeons and Dragons game.  It is good that she is going to play as the other characters were having a hard enough time with the goblins with the four of them.  Having to drop to only three characters would have made the challenges quite a bit more, um, challenging.

Up early and in to work.  Blah blah blah.  Nothing exciting to tell there.  Big IT news today: Sun buys MySQL!  This is awesome news for those of us who have worked a lot with MySQL and have been concerned about the long term open-sourceness of the company.  I am confident that SUN will lead the European company towards a greater level of being open source and will help to make the company enterprise ready.  The product may be enterprise ready but MySQL’s wishy-washy attitude towards its open source licensing has made the company seem as though they weren’t ready for the big time yet.

The early morning was slow as always. I am not sure that I can even remember a time that I had a busy early morning.  It just doesn’t happen.  Worst case scenario is an early morning conference call or something.  But nothing serious like that today.  The day itself turned out to be relatively normal.  There is starting to be quite a bit of chatter around the office about the announced layoffs, however.  So far I don’t know anyone who has been laid off but it is bound to happen soon.  Since we didn’t hear anything today it seems likely that we will be hearing something tomorrow.

For lunch I just ran up the street to the Wall Street Cafe and grabbed some pizza.  Dominica is coming home late tonight.  They needed her to work late this evening to cover for someone and since she was out on Monday we decided that it would be good if she stayed even though she has a cold and doesn’t feel particularly good.  She is getting paid double time for the hour that she stays which works out really well.

My afternoon got really busy and I have some after hours work scheduled for this evening too.  By late afternoon, though, it was decided that there was some “emergency” server builds that needed to be done and that I would just have to skip sleeping tonight to be able to do if that is what it took.

I took off from the office around three thirty.  Just enough time to get me home so that I could get right back to work.  I stopped at Borders quickly and picked up the next four books by R. A. Salvatore for Dominica.  Who knows when I will ever get a chance to read any but at least she is getting to enjoy them.  And I picked up the latest issue of Model Railroader for me.

I got home and immediately set back to work for more than an hour working on the project that was scheduled earlier today.  I hadn’t been expecting it to take so long but I should know better by now.

After doing my random project it was time to order in our dinner and shortly Dominica was home from work. This cold is really kicking her butt and she is totally exhausted.  We ate dinner and starting cooking the dog’s stew or else he won’t have any breakfast in the morning.  Then I headed back to the living room to get to work building those servers.  It is going to be a very long night.  No question about that.

In between other things I did get a chance to work on some Ruby code that I have been working on that takes emailed network appliance logs from Netgear hardware and parses it and files it into an enterprise database – in this case MySQL.  It is still a very basic system and I got most of it working a while ago but never got around to wrapping up some loose ends.  Now I have it working pretty smoothly where the email is parsed via a variety of sorting options, it is parsed, it is uploaded to the database, the email is removed from the folder that it is in and placed into a temporary “holding” folder to await inspection and then the mailbox is expunged.  It isn’t fast but it works and under normal circumstances would be run as a background job so speed isn’t too much of an issue.

Now that I have my script working my first order of business is to get one hundred and five thousand email messages moved out of my Inbox and onto the database.  This is going to take some time.  But it needs to be done.  My email just keeps getting more and more full.  I have been procrastinating long enough on this issue.

My work dragged on after midnight and that means that it is time to post.  I expect that I will get to go to bed tonight but my night will definitely be short.

Up at five this morning. I didn’t feel too bad though. I kind of enjoy getting up early and getting the day started. Oreo doesn’t like it – he prefers when I stay in bed until he leaves for daycare so that he is never without his snuggles.

It was all dark as I headed into the office. I grabbed the remaining cheese sub from dinner last night that I still had in the fridge and ate that while walking to Newark’s Penn Station.

Work wasn’t too bad today. Slower than it has been recently. I actually had the chance to get lunch today away from my desk. A friend from work and I grabbed food from the vegetarian food truck parked out front of the building and ate in the cafeteria.

Being a slow day I managed to escape after a normal length of time and head for home nice and early around four. Four being a full day when I come in so early.

On the way home I stopped in Penn Station in Newark where I pass through as I get off of the PATH. I decided to just grab a quick slice of pizza from Triponi in the train station. Their pizza is awesome as is their cherry lemonade. I hope that we will be getting pizza from there again sometime soon.

Dominica ended up running quite late tonight and didn’t get home until long after six.  She cooked fake beef Stroganoff or Govjadina po-strogonovski for dinner which turned out really well.  Much better than the hamburger helper that I remember.  It is a completely different dish.

Our evening was very short.  I did a little work and then did a bit of homework.  And we called it a night a little early.

I did manage to finish the adventurer’s journal for Dungeons and Dragons sessions that we played over the weekend and I got that sent out to everyone.  That turned into quite the chore to produce but I did discover that it worked out really well for getting everyone onto the same page as far as what happened in the adventure and where everyone was.  I think that recapping it afterwards like that helps to flesh out the adventure as sometimes while playing it can become disjointed and ultimately feel disconnected but the journal kind of ties it all together in a more literary form.

Dominica finished reading the second book of the Icewind Dale Trilogy by R. A. Salvatore tonight and moved onto the third one.  She is a bit ahead of me now and I don’t know the names of the books that she is on at the moment.

I was pretty tired when the alarm rang at five thirty this morning but not as bad as you might guess. This is my first day of my five days of early morning shifts this week.

I found out today that two images that I have on Flickr have been selected and will be used definitely in the upcoming “Schmap Montreal: Fourth Edition”. The link to the two images are here and here.

Here is a great tip for Dungeons and Dragons players looking for many of the older products out there from the AD&D and AD&D Second Edition time periods.  I have been looking for a lot of this stuff on eBay and you can get a lot there but the shipping costs tend to make the items a little more expensive than they would have been new even if they sell for a good price (depends on the items, keep an eye out for deals.)  Wizards of the Coast offer a good selection of older products available as free downloads from their website.  That is a great place to check first.  If they don’t have what you are looking for, check Paizo who has hundreds of D&D legacy products available as low cost PDF downloads.  Tons of older adventures and expansion books that would easily cost you six to fifteen dollars to get from eBay can be downloaded for just four dollars!  Now that is a bargain.  And you get them immediately.

In reality, getting the products via PDF might be better than getting them in print anyway.  Sure it isn’t as flashy but these days who has space to store all of that paper?  And if you have tons of resources in paper form you can’t easily take them with you when you are playing someplace other than your own home.  By having them as a PDF you can print out the sheets that you are going to use and you can happily write on them and know that your originals are still pristinely stored on your computer.  It also makes it easier for printing out “handouts” based on maps or images in the game materials.  Now I am sorry that I just recently bought two old adventures off of eBay.  I would rather have had them as PDF files and it would have saved me several dollars.

I bought “Sword of the Dales” and the classic “Ruins of Adventure” to check out the PDFs.  “Ruins of Adventure” became one of the most famous AD&D adventures ever when it was used as the basis for SSI’s classic 1980s video game Pool of Radiance.  I played and beat Pool of Radiance on the Commodore Amiga around 1989.  The game was new in 1988.  I also had the sequel, Curse of the Azure Bonds which I did not beat.

Things were pretty busy today.  I grabbed a knish out front of the office for lunch and ate at my desk.  That is how it normally is.   Not enough time in the day for everything.

I worked an eleven hour day and headed for home around six.  No snow today like everyone has been saying that there was going to be.  Just a little cold drizzle.  Nothing really notable.  I am amazed by how mild the weather is here on the coast compared to back home.

I picked up dinner at Metro Cafe in the Gateway Center on my way home.  That was a lot quicker and easier than trying to figure something out after I got home.  I had a cheese sub and Dominica had an eggplant parm sub.  We got some cake for dessert too.

Dinner was really good.  It was late in the evening already, though, and we weren’t up to doing much.  Dominica spent the evening ready from R. A. Salvatore and I did a little web design work and then worked on the adventurer’s journal from the game this weekend.  It is amazing how much work is involved in just writing down what happened.  We did play two sessions this weekend though so that definitely contributed.  There is a lot of material to cover in the journal.

In the short time that I was home I had to walk Oreo twice, feed him dinner and a snack.  When he wasn’t demanding food and walking services from me he spent the evening sleeping on the Ottoman between Dominica’s feet.

We went to bed around eleven.  I have to be up at five to head into the office.