Sheep Guarding Llama

I am covering the very early shift at the office today so I was up a little earlier than usual. I like the really early shift because it lets me go into the office when it isn’t so warm out and when the crowds are thin. It is nice that by leaving twenty minutes early I can arrive at the office thirty minutes early. I barely have to get up early at all to get into the office on time.

The office was incredibly warm when I arrived and it was quite uncomfortable to be there for the first hour or so. But eventually the air conditioning kicked in and it cooled down. But it took quite a while.

I have built myself an office “shelter” out of cardboard that was left in my cubicle when I moved in. I have my computer in one corner of the office and over that corner is quite a bit of cardboard being supported by a foam pole about two feet long that is standing on top of my computer which is behind my monitors standing on its side. It looks funny but it blocks most of the “eye strain light” that would come from that direction so it does its job. If I could just turn off the light that is on directly over my head it would be perfect.

I found out today that not only am I “on call” this weekend like I was originally expecting but I have a scheduled project starting a four in the morning on Saturday! That means that there is just about no way for me to get enough sleep going into the weekend again. Friday nights always go late and having to be up and working at four is an awfully short night.

Over my lunch break I walked up to Borders and picked up Core Java: Volume I Fundamentals 8th Edition. Core Java is the Java “textbook” published by Sun themselves. This is the new version that just came out a few weeks ago and covers Java 6.

On my way back I stopped into Cafe Wall St. and picked up a tuna fish salad panino. I ate at my desk and read the tech news for the day.

Today has been surprisingly quiet. Very little going on. My cubicle is in a very low traffic area and my “doorway” is quite isolated and so I start to get the feeling that I am alone. I don’t work with anyone in my building so I truly am alone almost all day. Very strange to be in such a huge office building and have no one at all around to talk to.

I discovered a cool website offering free web page templates – OpenDesigns.  There is some good stuff there.

I got home at a decent hour.  Dominica and Oreo were not too far behind.  We didn’t do too much tonight.  Dominica cooked dinner.  And I got around, finally, to ordering her new HP laptop (dual core AMD Turion 1.9GHz, 1GB, 120GB HD, MS Vista Business 32, etc.) along with a docking station to go with it as she will be using the laptop as her main computer at home as well as when traveling, some ink for our HP DeskJet 5150 in the living room and two additional Samsung 204b 20.1″ 1600×1200 LCD monitors that I will be using on my desk at home.

It is a big order but stuff that we have really been needing.  We don’t have enough space to be able to work on things at the same time.  I end up using both my desk and Dominica’s desk at the same time so that I can get Windows and Linux concurrently and with enough screen real estate.

My classic, working Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop came today.  Complete in the original box with the vinyl carrying case and AC adapter.  I plugged it in and fired it right up.  It works great although the dimmer for the “monitor” is a little touchy and only works at certain settings.  I put it into BASIC mode and wrote a tiny program and it worked.  Oh nostalgia.

We ate dinner, watched Family Ties and went to bed early.

Okay, now this really gets my goat. Goats are not war machines people! They are garbage disposals. 🙂

I was completely exhausted when I dragged my butt out of bed this morning. This weekend really took a toll on me. It was all that I could do to get moving this morning.

Before I could head out the door to get to work I had to log in to the office and clear out my mail. About three thousand messages had accumulated since I had logged off just thirty-six hours ago and my mailbox was overfull. That meant that the email server would no longer send out mail on my behalf and my BlackBerry might as well be dead.

I got off to work. It was a nice, cool morning. Perfect for walking. I got into the office and spent a good twenty minutes wandering around on the eighth floor trying to figure out where my new office is located. On Friday, while I was working from home, my office was moved from the tenth floor to the eighth floor. But now I have to find it.

I did stumble across it after not too long. The new office is dramatically fancier and more comfortable than the one two floors up but there is a lot more traffic here, more noise and, most importantly, the area is much warmer which makes me want to sleep. There is a lot of pink noise which doesn’t help either.

I got settled in and figured out where everything was and how everything works. I had a large cardboard box on my desk that I decided to rip apart and place across the top of my cubicle to reduce the ambient light coming down. The light isn’t horrible here but it is much brighter than is appropriate for using a computer all day long. It is amazing to me how much money companies are willing to spend on lighting that is too bright and negatively impacts productivity. That is one of the craziest spending areas as far as I am concerned. Electricity is expensive and to go beyond wasting it seems a bit much.

For lunch I walked up to the Wall St. Cafe and got myself some pizza. It was good and I just ate at my desk.

My afternoon went fine.  I tried to leave at my usual time but got caught talking to some clients and didn’t manage to attain escape velocity until almost five thirty – long after I should have left for the day.

I rushed home and discovered that I had beaten Dominica home anyway.  She went grocery shopping at the A&P up near where she works for groceries so it took her a while to get home.  On her lunch break she had gone shopping at Target so we now have an HDMI switch so that we can have both the DVD player and the AppleTV hooked up to the television in our bedroom.  However, she forgot another HDMI cable so we couldn’t hook it up tonight.

I was really tired this evening and it was pretty late by the time that Dominica got home so we just ordered in a pizza from Nino’s and called it an early night.  I have to be up and moving early tomorrow because I am covering the early morning shift for someone so some extra rest tonight would be good.

We watched some of the second season of Family Ties and ate our dinner and went to bed.  Oreo was very thankful for the extra snuggle time.

We slept in late this morning, as you can imagine. Dominica got up sometime around eight and Oreo and I pushed on until around nine thirty. Even then we were quite tired. Well, I was at least. Oreo was probably pretty well rested as he did almost nothing yesterday although he did find it to be a very stressful day.

It took us a while to get moving this morning. A friend came over from the Ironbound and we all walked over to the Central Ave. Diner to get some breakfast/lunch. Military Park was packed full this morning with the Breast Cancer walk using it as its ending point. Oreo got a short walk in the park but we couldn’t use a lot of it because of all of the people.

After lunch we hung out at the apartment for several hours. After yesterday I was just not ready to get back to work right away even though I have more homework that I need to be working on right away.

I won a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 PC1 handheld computer on eBay. This is a classic from 1980. This was the first “pocket” sized computer – really a PDA – on the market. It is programmable using BASIC. This would have been amazing to have owned back in the day.

We took the evening really easy. Min had some homework today and Oreo was feeling very needy and wanted tons of attention.

Today was an insanely long day for me.  If you look at yesterday’s post you will see that my “long weekend” began on Thursday night with a three hour trip home from the office in Warren.  That wasn’t bad but it was just the beginning.

Yesterday I worked thirteen hours and then had Oreo get me up just an hour after falling asleep to take him for a walk around the block.  So I was very tired going into this morning.

My alarm went off at a quarter ’till six and I peeled my tired body from the bed and dragged my sorry butt out into the living room office and sat down at the computers that I had prepped and left on from last night so that I wouldn’t have to worry about anything additional this morning and could sleep for an extra few minutes.

I had a crazily busy day doing multiple projects for “the office” this morning.  Running from just before six until just before noon.  That made for a crazy start to the day.  I also had to build our replacement Windows XP Pro machine this morning as Dominica’s Windows desktop is just about dead and the replacement for it is finally here.  We really can’t wait on it anymore and I have been needing to document my Windows XP build process for The Surfing IT Wizard for a while so I took care of that as well.

The IT Wiz was working in Ithaca today and had a lot of questions for me so he kept me busy on the phone much of the afternoon as well.  In between everything else I finally, after over a year, managed to hook our home Vonage phone back up!  I can’t believe how long we have been without it.  Without any sort of home phone line at all.  So if any of you know our “old” Geneseo phone number – it is back online and working fine.  I have tested it out a few times and it works great.  That has been hanging over my head for quite some time.  It is going to make my life a whole lot easier in general.  My cell phone barely works at all when I am in the apartment so we are mostly unreachable when we are home.  Now that is no longer the case.   We have been paying for the phone line all of this time so having it working will actually save us money rather than cost us more.

Around nine thirty this morning Dominica decided to clean the oven.  She did some light cooking earlier and we noticed that it smelled a little bit so we figured that the oven was dirty and needed a good cleaning.  It is a relatively nice day out and we have the windows open so there is a breeze.  The perfect time to do an oven cleaning with a self cleaning oven.  Otherwise it gets way too hot in the little apartment.

Around ten o’clock the smoke detectors went off.  This is nothing new.  They go off when we cook, when we shower and sometimes just for fun.  So we have a routine of fanning the ceiling where the troublesome detector lives and it normally just shuts off.  So when the alarm went off Dominica immediately grabbed a blanket and stood in the hallway trying to turn off the fire.  Oreo started to panic because of the noise and I was preoccupied trying to get him into the bedroom where it isn’t quite as loud.  It really shows how dangerous it can be to have false alarms on a regular basis.  We were totally unprepared for the smoke detectors to be actually doing their jobs.

It turns out, as you can guess, that they were actually doing their jobs.  Oreo ran out of the bedroom convinced that he didn’t want to be in there and ran into the living room.  As I ran past the kitchen following him I caught a glimpse of the black billows and flickering red and yellow.  I grabbed Oreo and sent he and Dominica down to the lobby.  Min had no shoes and no time to put Oreo’s harness or collar on but carried them with her.  I ran into the kitchen to see what could be done.  Fortunately the fire was inside of the oven and never spread outside of it.  The oven is designed to contain a fire and did its job well.  I had a really hard time figuring out how to turn the oven off from its clean cycle, though, so it had a bit more time to continue heating with the additional natural gas being pumped into it.  A quick “shut off” button would be required if this was for a business.  But one I got it turned off the fire ran out of oxygen – I am assuming that the vents that bring in fresh air close off – and the fire went out.  It took many hours for the smoke to clear.  What a mess.

It turns out that the fish from last night had leaked a bit of oil that had collected in the bottom of the oven.  We never guessed that there could be grease in there.  As vegetarians that isn’t that much of a real possibility.  So that was our real excitement for the day.  It couldn’t have happened on a busier day.  I had no time to spare dealing with this.  One of the guys who works for the apartment building came up and made sure that everything had operated properly and that there was no more danger.   But everything was fine.  The oven did its job well.  Just surprised us a bit.

Oreo was very upset by the whole ordeal and had accidentally peed in the kitchen when the alarms were going off.  Maybe he had seen the fire and didn’t know how to tell us that it was there.  For the rest of the day he had bad diarrhea and we had to walk him many times.  Dominica walked him four times and I walked him twice for six total times which is an amazing amount for a dog who will often only go out twice in a day.

Every spare minute of the morning and the entire afternoon was spent doing my really intense Java homework for my class at RIT.  I had almost no time for the past two weeks to prepare for this and I have to squeeze everything, including the planning, into this one, long session today.  This is the homework equivalent of a software production death march.  I drank coffee and diet soda all day to keep myself going.  I was on quite a buzz.

I took no breaks, not even really for meals, and Dominica sealed herself away in the bedroom and watched the entire third season of The Cosby Show so that I could have the living room office area to myself to work.  Even Oreo mostly avoided me.  Dominica ran interference on everything she could all day.  It really made a difference and at fifteen minutes until midnight I was finally able to turn in my assignment.  What a day.  I definitely feel like a bit of the project was rushed but it couldn’t be helped.  Everything was functional and I am sure that I correctly met the specifications of the assignment.  But I am not sure that I was able to do it with my usual finesse.  But I did what I could and I am proud of my work under the circumstances.  I did not slack off at all and drove as hard as I could all day long.

I was deliriously tired when I wrapped up at midnight.  I was so wired, though, that I couldn’t fall asleep.  Oreo made me take him for a midnight walk and then he and I settled in to watch an hour or more of The Cosby Show before finally retiring for the evening.  Dominica had fallen asleep around eleven.

At two thirty in the morning Oreo woke me up for another trip outside.  I was so tired.  It is amazing that I was even able to take him out at all.  I can’t imagine how he was able to wake me up.  I don’t really remember the walk.  Just the fact that I did it.  Dominica didn’t even wake up or know, until morning, that we had gone out at all.

It is a rare Friday that has me working at home. Today I had to work at home because my office on Wall Street is being moved two floors down and into the middle of the building. No more awesome views for me. Since my office was being moved I had to work from home or else I would have just been standing around the office with no phone and no computer. As relaxing as that would be – kicking back with a good book and some coffee – it is Friday and the deployments are pretty critical today and I can’t just blow the day off. And getting to Warren, as we proved yesterday, is not possible on a Friday when late deployments don’t even start until after the last shuttle run has already taken the offsite workers home for the evening.

At least by working at home on a Friday, Oreo and I got a chance to sleep in much later than usual. I start work later on Fridays so that I can work late into the evening without hitting overtime – at least for an average day. Some days go really late regardless and I just can’t skew my schedule enough for that. But I don’t mind overtime so no big deal.

My day ended up being quite busy. I had hoped that it would be moderately slow allowing me to get some Java homework done but that didn’t happen at all. I was “rushed off my feet” all day. I was so busy and had so much work backing up on me that I actually didn’t get a chance to wrap up until ten thirty in the evening which is a thirteen hour day – without any lunch even! Boy was I exhausted.

I did manage to take a couple of pictures of Oreo while he was lounging about the apartment today. He was very lazy – Mr. Snuggles McLazybutt – and really enjoyed the bright sunlight that we were blessed with today. He was a happy dog and very much enjoyed getting to spend the extra day with me this week.

Dominica cooked again tonight – fried fish in the oven (this will become important tomorrow as you will see.)  The fish was excellent although I had very little time to enjoy it.  I was working like crazy all night.

Tomorrow I have to be up very early and work pretty much a full day.   So I was looking forward to getting to bed early tonight but no such luck.  I got to bed around eleven thirty – just an hour after finishing up my work for the office – but then at midnight or just a little after Oreo got me up to take him out.  Apparently it was an emergency.  So my night was interrupted.

While I was walking Oreo I noticed that our building, Eleven80, has had lights added to the top of it making it one of the brightest spots in Newark.  That will do wonders for its marketing visibility.  And it makes it a lot more attractive at night too.  Up until now it has just been a dark form looming in the Newark nighttime sky.  This is very attractive and I am quite pleased with the change.

Dominica found out that the work on the Prudential Center – new giant new downtown arena here in Newark – is under a lot of pressure to be completed in the next six days.  And because of the pressure there there is also a tremendous amount of pressure for Eleven80 to also be completed externally by the same date simply because of the grand opening down the street and all of the people that will make seeing Eleven80 for the first time as they pour into Newark to use the new venue just one and a half blocks away.  Rumor has it that the scaffolding surrounding our building for the last two years will finally be coming down.  That will make our apartment so much nicer.  I am really looking forward to that.