Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.