Sheep Guarding Llama

Just in time for us to make travel decisions, the public transportation workers in Paris went out on strike today which means that if we arrived there we would have no means of getting around in the city and might even be trapped at the train station where we arrived. Not a good situation. As our first trip to Europe we can’t be taking a risk like that when we have such a tiny window to be in France anyway. This does mean, of course, that it could be a long time before we ever go to France. We were just going to go because it was so convenient and the timing was just perfect. So we are back to our original, low-key, low-stress plan of spending the weekend chilling in Stratford-upon-Avon. I am sad that we won’t see France or even the continent but I feel better about just relaxing in Stratford. Less effort, plans are already all made, less cost and less opportunity for things to go horribly wrong.

There was a major earthquake on the coast in Chile this morning. Right now it is isolated but the time is ripe for a major fault correction along the Pacific Plate. What that means is that San Francisco’s and Anchorage’s “hundred year” earthquakes – which are overdue – could be coming any time now. Chile tends to see that activity first as it moves it’s way up the fault.

I am home today with Oreo. My schedule is all messed up this week with the trip this weekend interrupting everything. Oreo is getting his “home” day a day early so that tomorrow Dominica can grab him from daycare as soon as she gets out of work and then run him up to Frankfort where he will be staying for the next two weeks with his uncle Dexter. I will be back on Wall Street tomorrow and Friday.

Today was about normal as far as work was concerned.  Oreo was quite happy to be home with me all day.  He will be very unhappy tomorrow when he goes away and won’t see his family for almost two weeks.

I talked to Andy today.  He just bought a new 40″ Samsung 1080p HDTV LCD display.  He also got a Samsung Blu-Ray player.  So he is now officially the first person that I know that has a BD Player.  We are still using old, legacy DVD here.  It’s like the dark ages.

I gave Oreo his “going to stay with his grandparents for the week” bath this evening.  Now he smells all clean and fresh.  It has been a while since his last bath and he was definitely starting to smell a bit “doggie”.  He is so good about his baths.  I actually give him a shower, not a bath.  I turn on the warm water and he stands in it which gets him much cleaner than a bath would.  He almost seems to enjoy it now that I have made it so that he is warm the entire time.  But after a little while he starts to get antsy because he knows that when we are done that he gets a cookie.  But other than that, he is such a good little boy – even when I wash his face and hold him up to the shower to get him nice and clean.

Dominica ordered in Italian from Nino’s and I spent an hour or so on the phone with Verizon getting the last of my Blackberry stuff ready for our trip.  Now the BlackBerry is my main phone which rings when you call me.  And my European phone service is now turned on and activated.  And my European data service so that I can surf the web and get email is turned on.  So we are all set to be contactable while we are out of the country.

The evening was spent getting the BlackBerry as ready for the trip as possible including running it down so that it can take a full charge over night.  Dominica did additional packing and made more lists.  Effectively we are leaving for the trip tomorrow morning since Dominica and Oreo are leaving the apartment at seven in the morning and Min will only be returning just in time to do the final bit of packing and to get onto the plane on Friday evening.

We have changed our plans slight, again, and are now planning to go not directly to Belfast but first to Dublin and then north through Ireland on Thanksgiving so that we will have a chance to see Ireland proper.  We are able to do this without using any additional time simply by planning our train and ferry travel more effectively.  We are excited to get to see the Republic of Ireland in addition to the UK.  We will also, because of the detour to Ireland, be passing through much of Wales which is a great bonus to the trip too.  We are hoping to be able to take lots of pictures and videos to share with everyone.

We watched some Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century while preparing for the trip and then it was off to bed.

Dominica and I made an attempt at going to the Chinese restaurant on Commerce Street here in Newark that is directly across the street from us as we have not even tried to eat there yet all of the time that we have lived here. It is impossible to tell when this restaurant is open because they have no open or closed signs and there is always activity there. So we went in but it was very uncomfortable as if they were closed but didn’t want to tell us. Not one person in the restaurant would even look at us and it really looked like we had walked into a business meeting or some seedy underground thing like you see in a movie. So we turned around and left and won’t be trying that again. It definitely gave that feeling of just being a front for some underworld crime ring. So we are just going to avoid that place.

We did a quick and simple dinner at Subway next to Eleven80. Eating there is relatively healthy, quite cheap and very quick and easy.

I was doing some searching for pictures of Eleven80 on Flickr and found this great picture of Farty G – Ikea’s box of stinky pajamas. Seriously, how does marketing fail this horribly for such a giant company?

I felt a little better when I got up this morning. Yesterday I was quite under the weather with a minor sinus infection. Normally I get them these days because of the CPAP. It makes me extra sensitive to them and to weather changes.

Today I worked out in Warren. So I got up, stopped at Airlie Cafe for breakfast and walked up to the Broad Street Station of NJ Transit here in Newark. Going this way costs a lot more in walking time getting to the train station. I think that the walk probably takes me at least twenty minutes if not a little more. That station is quite some distance from the apartment at Eleven80. At least it is good exercise. It was raining a bit this morning but rather warm. Incredibly warm when you consider that it is just about December!

As always happens in Warren by day was very busy – mostly with meetings and talking to people that I never get to see. Today Dominica and I realized that we are spending so much time traveling from London to Stratford-upon-Avon that we could actually get out to Paris in far less time on the train.  And somehow, going to Paris for the weekend just sounds like a better plan than going to Stratford-upon-Avon for the weekend.  Stratford would be cool and we would like to go someday but as this is our first trip ever to Europe it would be awfully nice to at least get to set foot upon the continent even if just for the weekend.

I took the shuttle/train home from work and arrived to find my new Blackberry had arrived.  I got it unpacked and fired up and activated and all that jazz.  It works but there is another step to getting it set up that we can’t do until tomorrow evening.  So it is only half setup right now and there is a lot of stuff that I can’t test.  So my review of the unit is pretty minimal today.  So far so good.  It looks nice and the interface is pretty decent.  But that is about all that I have for the moment.

I found out from RIT that my next semester does not begin until December 4th so I am free and clear until then.

Oreo made me take him out late before going to bed and then got me up in the middle of the night to take him on a long adventure through Newark.  I’m not sure if he had a tummy ache or if he was just bored and tired of just laying in bed.  But it was a pretty serious interruption to the night and I didn’t sleep very well.

I am so relived to have my Java class over and done with.  I did not need that hanging over my head this week.  This week is going to be more than hectic enough for Dominica and I without having to deal with homework too.  We are going to be spending the rest of this week attempting to get ready to leave for the UK as much as possible although we are definitely in a scramble at this point.

I took the day to work on some serious Ruby scripting that I have been putting off because of the Java class.  Dominica split her day between some Perl that she is trying to learn and working on her program design for Empire State College.  We didn’t go anywhere today at all.  Dominica cooked us a late breakfast and we ordered in our dinner from Golden City.

Dominica also worked on getting iTunes, Audible.com and the iPods set up so that they would be ready for us to take them on the trip with plenty of books to listen to as well as some walking tour podcasts which she is very excited about.

I actually spent a lot more time working today than normal.  I did a ton of programming and managed to finally get the first (and very rough) form of my Ruby logging utility working.  The program takes emailed log files from routers and firewalls that are sent to a central email address and processes them into a few basic components and then connects to a remote MySQL database and uploads log data into the database.  So I had to get IMAP, MySQL, some parsing and a few other things working.  At the end of the day I ran a small test and moved almost thirteen thousand logs over and it worked flawlessly.  I was very happy about the results.

My big project tonight is updating my Zimbra email server from 4.5.0 to 4.5.9 which is a fairly serious update.  That required that I stay up late so that I would only take down the email server when there wasn’t very much mail going through and people weren’t using the server.  I started working on it around eight or a little bit later in the evening.  As I feared that it might, it turned into an all night kind of project.  Anything this critical – who can live without working email – always takes a long time even when things go smoothly.  It ended up taking about seven hours to complete.  Most of the time was spent making careful backups and being sure that nothing was out of place.  Then I got surprised that the new version required a significantly larger amount of space than the version that I have been running so I had to add all new storage to accommodate it before I could continue.  What a night!

While I was working on the Zimbra server I had the opportunity to squeeze off the fifty-sixth SGL podcast!  It is short and not nearly as polished as most of the shows that I do but it has been a long time, since May 19th, since I have been able to get any show completed at all so I am very happy that at least this one was done.  I got it posted to Podomatic and uploaded to OurMedia and the Internet Archive which took a very long time as they have changed their architecture since the last time that I did a show.   I am really hoping that Min and I will do a few shows from the UK but the chances seem slim that more than one or two could be done with our limited time there.  We will definitely be taking a lot of pictures, though.

Don’t forget that the OLPC XO goes on sale tomorrow morning at six!