Sheep Guarding Llama

Home today and it is a good thing – I have a serious blister on my foot from all of the walking that I am not used to. It is a beautiful fall day today and for the first time of the season I was able to wear a fleece. No sun today but it is bright and overcast which makes it perfect for working at home where I don’t have tinted windows. I am able to have the blinds up and get real light but I am not blinded or looking at reflections everywhere. No wonder that San Francisco and Seattle are such IT hot spots – they have better light to see monitors by.

For breakfast I just ran right across the street to the Airlie Cafe and got myself an egg and cheese on hardroll and one of their excellent cheese danishes. Oreo is in a great mood today. I think that he is tired after several days back at daycare and he is very happy to be able to just sleep on the futon and have me be in the living room so that he can keep a drowsy eye on me.

I have been reading “Peopleware” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. As I read it I can see why so many people make reference to it. It is unbelievable how much material that I see regurgitated in other management books originated in this classic tome. The original book was published in 1987 and the eight chapters longer version that I am reading is the second edition from 1998. The book is really excellent and any in software development and especially in project management should read it.

My day today was heavy on phone calls, conferences and emails but light on the real, honest work. It happens. Every day is its own balance. Some days no one speaks to me and its all real SA work all day and other days I am just a coordinator.

I grabbed a light sandwich this afternoon at Airlie – I really like their mozzarella sandwich – and just ate at home while I worked. By four it started to rain pretty heavily. It was dark and cloudy all day.

Oreo wanted to go outside around five when the rain was really coming down. I walked him down and opened the door for him. He peered out into the deluge, put one paw tentatively out into the wet, pulled it back and looked at me imploring me not to make him follow through on his former wishes. So I walked him back upstairs and he decided to just hold it until evening.

After work Dominica had an appointment to get her hair done – we have a wedding to attend this weekend. I will probably need to shave my head tomorrow too. On Saturday morning I have to take my midterm for my master’s class at RIT. It is a busy weekend – but what is new?

Around eight Oreo and I were still waiting for Dominica to get home from work so I went ahead and ordered some Chinese take-away from Golden City. General Tso’s Bean Curd and Vegetable LoMein. It takes fifteen to thirty minutes to get the food and I figured that Dominica couldn’t take much longer than that to get home. I didn’t want dinner to be so late that we couldn’t reasonably eat it.

I discovered a cute webtoon today: Dan and Scoti.

It was almost a quarter to nine when Dominica got home.  Her hair is very short but cute and back to her original hair colour.  She got tired of having it coloured.  She got home at the perfect time because I met her in the lobby of Eleven80 as I came down to pick up the Chinese as it was arriving.

We ate dinner and watched The Cosby Show and called it a night.

I accidentally hit my elbow on a door frame this evening.  I was fixing the collar of my fleece as I walked down the hall and I walked right into the doorframe with my elbow around head level.  It was the perfect position to really smash it quite badly.  The pain was really intense but does not feel like it is broken.  I am concerned that it is fractured though.  The pain was incredible and now, several hours later, my fingers are tingling while I write this.  My joint moves correctly but any pressure on it from lifting or compression make it hurt which is not typical of a bruised bone.  But it might be a swelling around the nerve so I am taking an anti-inflammatory and going to bed.  Hopefully that will take care of it.  I don’t need another broken bone – the ankle, rib, wrist, nose and toes should be enough.  Just thinking about it bring a psychosomatic twinge to my toes.

Today is my first morning with badge access to my office on Wall Street so I actually get to go in nice and early since I don’t have to rely on having someone there that I can reach to come down and let me into the office. So I was able to get back onto my five in the morning cycle and to get out the door while Dominica is just starting to get ready for work.

Before going into the office this morning I finished reading Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” which I highly recommend to anyone working in IT, thinking of working in IT or really to just about anyone as so much of it has very little to do with IT at all except for the last few chapters that deal heavily with programming languages and those bits are easy to skip if you are not interested. “Hackers and Painters” is certainly one of the most important works in the field for this decade.

I timed my trip into the office today. It takes about fifteen minutes for me to get from the apartment to the train. And then it takes about fifteen minutes for the train to go from Newark to the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The distance, according to Google Maps, is .4 miles from the apartment to the train.

Then, once I am in Manhattan, it is .7 miles from the World Trade Center PATH Station to the far end of Wall Street where I work. Google Maps won’t quite show the path that I take but this is approximate. I actually go down Church to Cedar and then cross diagonally down Broadway / Canyon of Heroes to the head of Wall Street at Trinity Church and then walk down the length of Wall Street to the very end at the South Street Seaport and the Wall Street Piers.

This morning is cool and drizzly. Perfect for walking. And I am happier now that I know that I am walking about 2.2 miles per day. That is more than I thought that I was doing. No wonder I am feeling it. I walk pretty briskly that entire way.

For lunch I went out for Malaysian with one of the guys that I work with. We walked (yes, walked again) up to Chinatown which, according to Google Maps, was about a mile and a half in each direction for an additional three miles today. Over five total miles. Not too shabby. The food at the New Malaysia was very good. I am loving working in Manhattan.

The afternoon whizzed by after taking a late lunch. On my way home I stopped by the Borders on Broad and Wall by Trinity Church and checked out their technology books section – quite impressive. The section itself is small but very well stocked. I am really going to enjoy walking by here every day (although not as much as Border’s is going to enjoy it!) I already found tons of books that I want to read. I decided to pick something up to read on the subway: DeMarco and Lister’s “Peopleware” which is one of the quintessential software project management books along with “The Mythical Man Month” which I have read before. I managed to read several chapters on the train.

I got to Eleven80 just in time to meet the guys who were going to head up to Min and my apartment to mount our LCD television on to our bedroom wall. So I took them up and we spent an hour or so working on that. It took some doing but now we have our thirty-two inch Westinghouse 720p LCD hanging above our bedroom closets so that it can be easily watched from our bed. It is very cool. Our goal is to have a computer with a built in DVD player in there and the AppleTV. But we will need an HDMI switcher if we are going to do that. For the moment we just have the DVD player from the living room moved in there until we can get the rest of the stuff sorted out. I will probably move the PS2 in there tomorrow. The PS2 is going to be our bedroom system and the Wii is going to be our living room system. And, eventually, we expect an XBOX 360 as well but we can’t totally decide on that quite yet. Because so many of the new devices get so hot and can’t be stored in a cabinet we are hesitant to get them and have to have them sitting on the floor.

Dominica did some light grocery shopping today and spent her evening cooking Oreo’s food for the week. We had some frozen Kashi pizzas for dinner and called it an early night. I had to do some late evening work for the office but that didn’t take too long. For some reason I am feeling really exhausted (probably a lack of caffeine after getting used to having so much – I didn’t even have a coffee all day) and need to get to bed early. We wrapped up the first season of The Cosby Show and started the second season. Watching television from bed rocks. I haven’t had anything like this in my bedroom for a very long time.

When I lived at my parents’ house post-highschool I had a thirteen inch Commodore Amiga computer monitor hooked to my Sony (and later Pioneer) laserdisc player that I could watch from bed but the image was so small that it wasn’t really practicable. Then again when I lived in Greenleaf Meadows in Greece with Josh and Andy for a short time we had two televisions and I was able to have my thirty-two inch Sony Trinitron CRT on top of my dresser in my bedroom but the only device that I ever hooked to it was the original Playstation. It was there that I used to spend hours playing through Suikoden. Not since Greenlead Meadows in 1999 have I had any sort of television in my bedroom.

This morning was kind of busy for me. I did get to sleep in until Min left for work and then I got up and worked from home for the first bit of the morning. Today my office is supposed to be ready for me in Manhattan but I can’t go in until there is someone there to meet me and let me in and then I have to deal with getting my PC set up (assuming that it works correctly) and then I have to get my security badge sorted out. So once I get into the office the day is mostly a waste so I wanted to be sure that everything that needed to be completed was done so from home before I hiked into the city for the afternoon.

I actually had a very productive morning. I am working on my “new” OpenSuse 10.3 machine and so far I am very impressed with 10.3. I can’t wait to start rolling this out to Castile Christian Academy. OpenSuse 10.3 is fast and solid and very attractive. I have only been using it a few days but already I can tell that it is much better than its predecessors. I use only KDE on a regular basis and occasionally play around in XFCE. KDE has really come a long way at this point but is still in the KDE 3.x family. I am really looking forward to the KDE 4 family which, I expect, will take OpenSuse into its 11.x series.

I had a number of issues at work that were spread out and scheduled ahead of time that I knew that I couldn’t make the trip to Manhattan until lunchtime. Since I didn’t have much time I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to run across the street to the week old Airlie Cafe on Commerce here in Newark. I got the mozzarella sandwich that they have which was light but quite tasty. I also got a scrumptious cheese danish. I can tell that I am going to be addicted to those very soon. I also got a coffee to try it out. It is good but not necessarily as good as what we have at home. Dominica and I are pretty serious about our coffee.

As soon as my lunch was finished and I got the “all clear” from the office I headed out to catch the train over to Manhattan. Having done that as much as I have recently it has come to feel like second nature to run into New York City although it must still seem very strange to Dominica and most of my readers. Today is an odd day for me because as of today I am not a visitor nor a temporary employee in the city but, as of today, I am “working in Manhattan” full time. This is my base city now. And not just Manhattan but Wall Street. And not just Wall Street but Wall Street with a view! (Although that is only temporary.)

The weather was perfect today too. Overcast and breezy. Warm but with a certain chill in the breeze. Just the way I like the city. Perfect for a lot of walking which is what I do now everyday. I am really looking forward to the forced exercise that I will be getting. City life seems to be so much more naturally healthy than suburban life.

My main job today was to get situated so that I can actually be productive out of Manhattan. Changing offices always causes a certain amount of “downtime” and this one has been extreme. Luckily I have been able to continue working from home and Warren all this time or else it would have been a real problem. But now that I have my PC sorted out and my security access sorted I am ready to go. Now I can come into the city early in the morning when it isn’t so warm out and when the traffic (human traffic that is) is so much less. The commute will be much more comfortable. I just need to remember to bring a water bottle with me tomorrow or I will be sorry.

Jenn had a conference in Newark today so she is in town and is going to visit with us tonight at least long enough to get dinner. She arrived at the apartment around three thirty this afternoon.

I was hoping to be able to leave work early so that I could get back and entertain Jenn but no such luck.  I actually left the office later than Dominica did so she was home a bit before me.  Jenn didn’t have a lot of time this evening so to speed things up we all just met at Food for Life and ate dinner there.  We haven’t seen Jenn in over a year and this is her very first time visiting us since we moved to New Jersey!  And she only lives ninety minutes away or so in the Philly suburbs.

Light night for us after that.  Early to bed.  A little The Cosby Show.  That’s all.

Happy White Supremacist Columbus Day. Today, for those outside of the United States who wonder what this “holiday” is all about, is a celebration of a man who lead a military expedition to Hispanola with the apparent goal of reaching India and killing everyone or enslaving them. But due to his massive lack of maritime knowledge and complete disregard for common sense and complete dearth of research into geography or anthropology he arrived in the very near Caribbean where he landed, called it India, and began on his zealous attempt to kill all of the inhabitants as quickly as possible.

Columbus’ landing in the new world was roughly the equivalent to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II only time has allowed a few more people to drive home the “it never happened” and “Native Americans aren’t real people” messages for so long that some people actually think that celebrating Columbus Day as a national holiday is somehow better than the Iranian president claiming that no Jews died in World War II. In fact it is quite the opposite. Questioning something that is obviously true is potentially bad. But only potentially so. But celebrating the holocaust with a holiday is mockery and racism at its most extreme. Today is an American celebration of genocide, of colonialism, of conquest, of war, of racism, of slavery – of Europe’s darkest hour.

“They [the Indians] do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
-Christopher Columbus

This morning was very crazy for Dominica and I. My five o’clock alarm never fired because my phone crashed and had its time indicated as almost seven in the evening! This Palm Treo is total garbage and it turns off the phone portion of its circuitry whenever it feels like and then loses important features like having reliable time. So the phone thought that there was ten hours or so to go before my alarm should go off.

Dominica’s alarm clock, coincidentally, was not working this morning and showed it as just being time for her alarm to go off, that is six in the morning, when it was, in fact, almost seven and time for her and Oreo to be on the road. Oops. She didn’t even believe me that something was wrong with the clocks when I first told her. She sauntered into the bathroom and then saw the atomic clock’s accurate time and started rushing to get out the door to the office.

I logged in from home and got some early morning work done. I thought about not bothering to do this so that I could rush out to the office faster but my email mailbox is completely full from the weekend’s mail and I can no longer respond to mail from my BlackBerry. So I felt that I really had to log in and get that cleaned up before I could start traveling.

So it was later than I had planned which equates to warmer than I had planned when I started walking to the train station. I took the PATH into the World Trade Center and then the subway up to Canal and walked to the shuttle from there. I grabbed a sandwich and enjoyed the moderate morning air before the shuttle shuttled me off to Warren where I am working today.

Today is my first day without a car of my own. The Mazda PR5 was dropped off at dad’s house on Friday and has not moved since. I have always had to have had a car to be able to get to work – ever since I was sixteen. This is quite a liberating experience. I can see why so many people are willing to live without a car. It makes you feel so much more free.

My day was pretty busy as I was one of just four people in the office covering for twenty to thirty people.  Even though a lot of the company had the day off most of it did not and many had no idea that today was a semi-holiday.  So we were kept on our toes all day.

By four in the afternoon I was the only person in the office which meant that I was exceedingly busy.  I had asked my shuttle driver in the morning when the pickups would be and he told me that they were at five, six and seven on the hour with seven being the final shuttle back to Manhattan.  I really wanted to catch the five o’clock shuttle as going any later would put be home insanely late and everyone else had left an hour or two earlier so I didn’t feel too bad about going that early.  I got stuck on a phone support call until five minutes until five so once I was done I literally ran out the door and hoofed it as which as I could from my office down to the shuttle which is quite some ways away.

To my amazement the shuttle had not left yet.  Pheww.  I boarded and was told that the shuttle wasn’t leaving until half past five.  But more importantly – this is the only afternoon shuttle.  The two later shuttle runs are canceled, indefinitely.  So, had I waited for the completely appropriately late six o’clock shuttle – having left myself an hour of buffer just in case something went wrong so that I could still take the seven o’clock shuttle – I would have been stranded at the office!  Talk about bad planning.  I came very, very close to being trapped even after making sure that I knew when the shuttles were running and that I had left to catch an early one leaving two after it “just in case.”  There were several people on the shuttle quite upset to discover how close they had come to being abandoned at the office.

It took over two hours to get home to Newark.  Dominica had spent the time between when she got home and when I did cleaning.  Jenn is coming to visit tomorrow so we are trying to get the apartment in order to some degree.  I got in and we ordered in dinner from Nino’s.  We watched a little of The Cosby Show while we ate.  Then Min went to bed and I headed out to do some work.  I logged into the office and worked for an hour or two.  There were several last minute items submitted for me to work on after I had left the office and I didn’t want them lingering until today.  So I got that all wrapped up and then went to bed around midnight.

Tomorrow I get to actually work, or so the theory goes, from Wall Street in Manhattan.  Almost everything is ready for me there.

Min and I didn’t have to get up all that early today although I think we were up by eight anyway. We are going to be really exhausted by the time that we get back to Newark tonight. We have been getting hardly any sleep the last several days.

I got back to work on the new Active Directory server this morning. I got almost everything done yesterday but ran into some migration problems caused by incompatibilities between Windows Server 2003 and 2003 R2. So I am continuing to work on that today. I also did some standard updates to the older machine just in case I need to keep it up and running for a while longer. I took both machines up to SP2 this weekend. That is a huge update.

Around eleven everyone went down to Perry to get a late breakfast at the Hole in the Wall Restaurant. It is really cool that we came down here to eat on Dominica and my anniversary weekend because it was the old Hole in the Wall Restaurant that the groomsmen and I ate breakfast at before heading off to Wyoming for the wedding!

In the picture here is our waitress from the Hole in the Wall this morning shooting a foul shot.  She played basketball for Perry around 1996 or 1997 when this picture was taken at a game against York Central School.  I mentioned to her that I recently scanned this picture in and that it was online now and she said that she still has the poster of this picture hanging in her room.  I made posters for almost everyone on the Perry team that year back when I still had access to the Kodak Camera Club darkroom complex in Rochester.

After lunch we went back to dad’s and I got back to work on that server.  In between attempts on the server Min and I did a bit of cleaning around in the garage.  She managed to find, after much searching, some luggage that we really need.  We also managed to eliminate an entire plastic bin of stuff that was being stored there.  If we could just work our way through that much stuff on every trip we could eliminate the mess eventually.  That is a tall order though.

I finally found my box of telephone equipment that got packed up and moved from North Brunswick, NJ at some point and lost in the garage.  I have put in a lot of time looking for this stuff.  We will be taking that back down to Newark with us.  Hopefully this will let us get our Vonage phone up and running again so that people can really call us instead of only being able to reach us over the useless Verizon wireless phone.

Last night, I forgot to mention, dad helped me find the Netgear wireless access point that has been missing in the house as well.  I got that set up this morning while I was working on other things.  I got his Linksys WIP300 wireless VoIP phone working too.

My grandparents and aunt Gayle left in the middle of the afternoon.  I had enough to do before we could leave that Dominica really needed to do her homework for the week from dad’s house instead of waiting until we got home to Newark tonight.  So she set up my laptop in the kitchen and worked on that.  That gave me plenty of time to wrap things up and to do some more cleaning in the garage.  Dad went down to Davis’ in Pavilion and picked up pizza for dinner.

It was seven in the evening when Dominica and I finally managed to pull out of dad’s.  Much later than we had been hoping but we didn’t have anything “hanging over our heads” for after we returned to Newark so we felt pretty good about the timing.  It was a very productive weekend – visiting with the family from Ohio, anniversary dinner, worked almost a full day on Saturday, built new server, found missing wireless unit, fixed wireless phone, found missing phone equipment, found missing luggage, Min did her homework, etc.

Route i81 in northern Pennsylvania has gotten to be so bad recently that we decided to take the alternative route going south on NY15 into Pennsylvania where it turns into the new i99 corridor.  We took i99 down to Williamsport where we caught i180 to the east which took us down to i80 and that brought us back onto our normal route around Stroudsburg.  Going this route had no traffic problems and allowed us to pull into Newark right at midnight.  Only five hours of travel time inclusive of a fueling stop with food, drinks and two bathroom breaks.  Not bad at all.

During the trip I finished listening to the 25th Anniversary program of A Prairie Home Companion.  Dominica slept most of the trip.  Oreo was totally zonked.  He got a lot of play time in this weekend with the other dogs and dad playing with him in the back yard.

We also got a chance to talk to the neighbour about the house next door to dad’s.  Unfortunately it is not for sale like we had heard in the rumours.  So we are out of luck there.