Sheep Guarding Llama

I slept in this morning and got up around ten when Dominica was getting ready to take Oreo out for his morning walk.

We had a very light lunch of whatever was in the kitchen and the rest of the day was spent doing homework.  Dominica had homework to do today as well but not nearly as much as I did.

We just ordered in Domino’s pizza delivery as we had no spare time to go out or to do anything else.  It was homework from dawn until midnight.  Then off to bed.

I got up a little before nine this morning. I have a migraine that I believe is being caused by the incredible noise coming from the cooling system of Catholic Health Services next door. It is so loud that I had to put in ear plugs this morning just to be able to handle being in the apartment. Poor Oreo has no ear plugs. It seems like Newark must have noise pollution laws – most cities do. But maybe because they are so poor they don’t want to do that stuff. This is really a problem as our apartment faces that side of the building and we are very near the level of the coolers and there is nothing but open air between them and us.

It is a cool and rainy morning here in the New York Metro. It is so humid that my glasses occasionally fog up while I am sitting at my desk! My desk is covered in water from the can of Archer Farms Sugar-Free Energy Drink that I have on it. The water is condensing and just running down on to the desk. I have never seen a can sweat so much indoors.

Dominica stayed in bed until just about noon. She got up and we walked over to Cafe Airlie on Commerce right across the street and got some brunch.

Oreo spent much of the afternoon hunting a fly that is n our apartment. He loves chasing flies. He is very funny. He was sleeping in this morning and this fly crashed right into him bum and he has been after it ever since.

I did a little shopping on Amazon for MP3s to download today and discovered more good stuff on there like Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, Lynard Skynard, Tom Petty, etc. Amazon has improved the service a little bit too. I really like being able to buy music this way. Amazon must make a ton of money from people like me who are perfectly happy to buy any song when it is just 89¢. At that price you can really just grab anything that you want and the fact that you get it instantly makes it so handy.

This afternoon Dominica cooked some vegan paella with quinoa for Pam’s birthday party that we are going to this evening.  Everyone is supposed to bring something “Latin” – even though paella is Catalonian.  But with the quinoa it was a bit more Pacific South American.

We headed down to the bowling alley where the party was on at Eleven80 around nine thirty.  It was a lot of fun.  There were lots of people that we already knew and plenty new people to meet too.

At midnight we got kicked out of the bowling alley so several people headed home including Dominica and about half a dozen of us went out to the Arena Bar across from “The Pru” to get some drinks.

Scully’s Publick House on Clinton in Newark, New Jersey now has a web site. Check it out. SGL has been getting a lot of hits from people looking to find out about Scully’s. So far we like it over there. The shrimp is good. Menu is light while they are ramping up. Staff is inexperienced but friendly and learning. The only actual complain would be from Min who was disgusted by the fish fry (beer battered tilapia, eww) and couldn’t even finish eating it. That is really too bad since it is the perfect venue for a good fish fry.

I stayed up very late last night working on Dominica new HP Compaq 6516b laptop. After putting in several hours trying to get the default install working with Windows Vista Business 64 we learned that some key applications like the Z-SAN drivers, Spark (from Ignite Realtime which we use as our IM client) and Microsoft’s own Live OneCare. The machine was barely functioning between the issues with the OS and the incredible amount of pre-installed garbage from HP. So around eleven last night I put in the Vista 32 DVD and began reinstalling.

The install of just the OS went dramatically faster, maybe half an hour, than just getting the pre-installed HP image to fire up. The HP image took five times longer and was dysfunctional and had less available disk space. I need to remember to never, ever use a stock laptop image. It is always so much better to reinstall even if the machine has never been used before. It is the only way to have a reliable machine.

I worked on the laptop until around one thirty in the morning. Earlier in the night, while I was working in the living room, Dominica watched a few episodes of the seventh season of That 70s Show and while I was reinstalling Vista I watched the same episodes after she went to sleep.

This morning was quite cool as I walked to the office. It is overcast today and right on the verge of rain but it isn’t quite raining. I stopped at the Airlie Cafe and got myself breakfast and ate is as I walked to Penn Station. Work was busy for a Friday.

At one I ran out to meet Kevin, my neighbour, and we walked up Wall to Broadway and ate lunch at Suspenders across from the Borders that I always shop at. I got the fish and chips and it might be the best fish and chips that I have ever had. Wow was that ever good. Kevin complained that I never mention people from down here by name – what a jerk 😉 (inside joke) so he is getting mentioned here now. (For my regular readers, Kevin is “recklessmess“.)

On my way home from lunch I stopped off at Borders and picked up “Minimal Perl” and the “Perl Hacks” book.  I also grabbed the NFT as Kevin had suggested now that Dominica and I are living in the NYC metro area.

I was looking on the Apple Store today, trying to figure out if you could order a Mac today and have it guaranteed to come with Mac OS X 1.5 – Leopard. But there isn’t so I can’t order one. But I did find a really great deal on a refurbed pink iPod Nano for just $99. So I grabbed that for Dominica because I know that she wants all pink electronics ever made. We had decided that we were going to get a cheap iPod to keep in the car so that we could load it up with stuff and just have it in there for when we are traveling. A dedicated carpod.

Dominica had a really crappy day at work today.  I can’t really discuss it at this point but it is bad enough that she was upset all night and unable to sleep. 🙁  We will know more on Monday.

I had to work lightly for several hours after returning home.  I wasn’t done until almost ten.

We did pretty much nothing tonight.  We ordered in from Nino’s and watched That 70s Show.  I went to bed a little before midnight but Dominica ended up staying up in the living room watching Veronica Mars until after three in the morning.  Personally I find VM to be extremely depressing and exactly the wrong type of thing to watch when you are feeling down.

I have to be up and ready to work tomorrow morning at nine so no staying up late for me tonight.

It is a cold and dreary day here in Newark. We opened the windows yesterday evening and the apartment is now sixty-five degrees. Oreo is sleeping on his fleece pillow bundled in his hand knit blankets. He will barely get up at all today, I imagine.

Today I registered for my winter semester class at RIT. I had been hoping to take another programming course but the one that I need next is not available until next semester (spring) so I am taking my Project Management course instead.

Dominica had an interview this morning and she has a late team meeting this evening so Oreo and I will be left to fend for ourselves for dinner.

Oreo set a new record for sleeping in today. He didn’t get up until after four thirty in the afternoon! Boy was he hungry and ready for a walk by that point.

Dominica’s new laptop came this afternoon. She got an HP 6515b AMD Turion64 X2 and a docking station so that she can comfortably use it as a desktop as well. This laptop came with Windows Vista Business 64. (It actually comes with the choice of 32 or 64 which is very nice.) But since I tend to be forward looking and since the AMD processors are native 64bit I wanted to move forward with the latest version of the OS. So we will see how Vista 64 fares on the laptop.

This is rather exciting as this is our very first Windows Vista machine between us. We have both played with Vista on Josh’s new laptop a few months ago and I have run Vista in a virtual machine but that is very different. This will be our first time joining Vista to a Windows Active Directory structure and actually setting everything up.

It actually took me several hours to get the laptop setup and ready to use. The initial Microsoft / HP setup process is very long indeed and if it seemed long on this extremely fast laptop I can only imagine how involved the process must be. The initial “startup” of Windows Vista took about ninety minutes. The following, pointless “backup” by HP’s own software took an additional hour for something that I just want to remove anyway. Then it took another forty-five minutes to uninstall worthless advertising that HP installed onto the machine for me (PDF Complete, Trail Version of MS Office 2007, Roxio something or other, etc.) It was almost ten before I was able to attach the laptop to the docking station and see it on the real monitor.

My very first real issue with Vista is that they made it that when you select “power down” all it does it go into a suspend mode and leave partial power on without offering you choices as to what you want to do. Of course, I wanted to “power down” like any reasonable person because I wanted to unplug the power supply and move my laptop. I didn’t have the battery in yet because I only keep the battery in while running off of battery or recharging so that I don’t ruin the battery. So, of course, I crashed Windows because it isn’t designed to lose power in suspend mode.

As soon as I put the laptop into the docking station and recovered from the crash I fired up the desktop monitor but the monitor selection applet failed and couldn’t properly extend the screen to the second monitor. So that wasn’t very impressive. It eventually worked but only after turning the feature on and off a few times first. Then it was on to Internet Explorer and the very first page that I went to caused it to crash. So we aren’t off to a very good start.

Today is the opening day of “The Pru” or the Prudential Center here in downtown Newark. Of course, Eleven80 didn’t manage to get the scaffolding down nor the side street cleared so it is still a complete mess down here. Not that that wasn’t expected though.

Today ended up being a very different but busy day for me.  I got into the office and carried my umbrella with me all day long.  And, of course, it never rained as it was predicted.  On my way in this morning I finished reading Kent Beck’s “Test Driven Development”.  This train ride is really working.  I am just ploughing through these books while I am commuting.  The value of switching to Manhattan for work is greatly increased by the increased quality of my reading time.  So far I have made it through one book per week of commuting.

I worked out of the office for several hours and then had to get to another office in midtown on Fifth Avenue to meet with some engineering folks and Sun Microsystems.  That was very productive and I got a chance to meet with some really cool people from Sun.  One of the engineers and I went out for lunch in midtown and I got a chance to get a tour of the Sun offices on Park Avenue before heading back to the office.

The afternoon was very slow but since I had had a busy mid-day I decided that I should work late to be sure to make up the time even though I had been “working” the whole time that I was out it was a little fluffy for work and it was a last minute thing so I didn’t feel that it counted very well.  So I stayed a few hours late and did some work.

I ran up to Borders and picked up a few books today.  One book is just for my “collection” of reference material on web design: “CSS, DHTML and AJAX, Fourth Edition” by Jason Crawford Teague.  I also picked up the classic fourth edition of “The Little Schemer” which is considered one of the most important works on the LISP programming language and specifically the Scheme dialect.  And for my normal reading I grabbed the classic GoF book (Gang of Four) “Design Patterns” from 1995.

I accidentally left my umbrella at Sun today.  Which was fine since it hadn’t rained all day.  I realized that I had forgotten it the second that I was locked out and couldn’t get back in easily.  It did rain later, though, on my walk home.  It rained the whole way.  I was pretty wet.  So I carried the umbrella almost all day when it wasn’t raining and never had it when it was.  🙁

We got to bed early tonight.  Dominica has an internal interview tomorrow at work that she wants to be rested for.  My homework that was due tomorrow has been pushed off until Sunday night.  So I will be working on that all weekend.  I will be working from home tomorrow.