Sheep Guarding Llama

Congratulations to Phil and Kate Ayers who are welcoming into the world their first child born yesterday, on Dominica and my anniversary, at 9:45am. It is very apropos that their first child be born on our anniversary considering that Dominica and I met at Phil and Kate’s wedding which also happened to be Phil’s birthday.

Before heading off to bed last night I took the time to finish downloading the installation CD for OpenSuse 10.3 KDE. I have been running on OpenSuse 10.1 for a year or more now and I am ready for an update.

Since I have been so anxious to try out the latest incarnation of OpenSuse I decided to just go ahead and get it installed before going to bed. It isn’t that risky for me, even though I am installing to my primary desktop, because I have two separate hard drives and everything important from the system drive is backed up to the data drive and all of the really critical stuff is backed up on my SAN drives. And besides, Linux is known for very smooth upgrades compared to other operating systems. There is very little to worry about.

Since I was up waiting for the install to continue I decided to pay some bills that needed to be taken care of. I figured that I shouldn’t be wasting the time.

I didn’t actually get into the office until pretty late as I got caught doing quite a bit of work from home this morning. To save time I just hit McDonald’s on the road and ate in the car on the way into the office.

My afternoon ended up being crammed with work and I got stuck working quite late. You have to expect that on a Friday night and especially on a Friday night when I am going to be traveling. Dominica left from Nutley at five but hit horrible traffic and called me at the office at seven twenty to let me know that she had just crossed into Pennsylvania. So she has more than a two hour head start on me but I have a tiny distance advantage – nothing to compare to two hours through. Fifteen to twenty minutes of distance advantage at best. She and Oreo will arrive at dad’s long before I do.

I am going to be very tired tomorrow morning when I have to get up at six to start working again.  But at least I get overtime today and tomorrow.  Helps to pay for all of the driving.

It is just after seven thirty right now and I am wrapping up and logging off and heading out to the car.  It is going to be a long night and I will be really lucky if I manage to get four hours of sleep before having to get back to work.  Enjoy your weekends.

It is hard to believe that Dominica and I have been married for four years! That is 1,461 days. It was a cool and drizzly day when we got married. Today is starting off overcast but expected to be almost twenty degrees above normal. A very different day indeed.

Last night Dominica decided that we just have too much going on this week, mostly from homework, to be able to go out to dinner tonight for our anniversary. We went out for a really nice dinner on Tuesday night and we are going out with my family to the Lumberyard in Perry, New York this weekend so we are going to have to make due with that.

My office on Wall Street isn’t ready for me yet, at least not that I am aware of, so I decided to get some human contact today and come into Warren since I am still using the desktop that is sitting on my former desk there. I figured that I am already taking up the space so I might as well get to see some people. Plus going into the office forced me to get back to my schedule of getting up at five in the morning and hopping straight into the shower instead of rolling out of bed at seven and going straight to work and showering at the end of the day.

This is actually my last real chance to drive into the Warren office. Tomorrow evening Dominica and I are delivering the car up to dad’s so that we can scale back to a single car in Newark. The cost savings will be enormous. And the stress reduction of not having to deal with the regular, everyday “car stuff” will be pretty good too. I hate dealing with oil changes, soft tires, clanging sounds, shakes, etc. I just don’t have time for this kind of stuff.

So tomorrow Dominica is hoping to be able to leave for back home straight from work and Oreo and I will leave from Newark whenever I am able to get to a point that I can leave. I have to work on Saturday morning at six so I will need to get as much sleep as possible which isn’t looking to be very much. It is going to be a crazy busy weekend.

Today is the final production release of Novell’s OpenSuse 10.3 operating system. Good luck managing to get a download on day zero. I hope to start working with it as soon as possible.

Coming next month, the One Laptop Per Child initiative is going to begin selling the OLPC to potential buyers in the United States. The cost will be $400 but what you get is a lot more than a laptop. What you get is one laptop for you and one for a child in a developing nation that was unable to afford the $200 unit for themselves. In fact, your cost covers a lot of logistics in addition to the hardware. And you get a tax credit for the donation. The laptop that you get isn’t the hottest laptop around but it is a very cool piece of hardware and I, for one, am very excited to get my hands on one. This is definitely going to be the “must have” geek toy this Christmas for hardcore hardware geeks.

And, as you know, Dominica and I are all about geek toys. I think that Dominica wants an OLPC more than I do.

I got home and went crazy trying to get an anniversary card for Dominica. There are no shops anywhere near my office in Warren that I can find that sell cards of any type. Everyone thinks that I am crazy but I have tried all three grocery stores and have driven around several plazas to no avail.

While I was out exploring the depths of Newark’s greeting card district I ran into one of SGL’s regular readers who mentioned that today is his birthday in addition to being our anniversary. Big day I guess.

So I walked all over downtown Newark before I found a drug store that was open. The Rite Aid on Market at Washington was the only store anywhere that I could find with cards. Luckily they have an actual selection. So I was able to get something nice. Unfortunately because my wanderings took me so far Dominica and Oreo got to Eleven 80 while I was out looking for the card.

We aren’t able to do anything exciting tonight for our anniversary so we just ordered in some Chinese from Golden City and ate in bed while watching two episodes of The Cosby Show. After dinner we had to get to work on our respective homework assignments. What an exciting life we lead.

We both wrapped up our homework in good time.  Then I did some work online and Dominica packed for our trip back home this weekend.  We have had to amend our plans a little bit.  I am going into the office in Warren tomorrow on my usual Friday schedule and Dominica is going to take Oreo to daycare and then they will travel together straight from work to go back home and I will leave right from Warren.  It evens out the traveling a little bit.

Dominica went to bed a little after eleven.  I stayed up getting SGL posted, among other things.  We did have a short outage this evening but everything appears to be fine.  Just a network blip for about forty minutes.

It is a light rain and medium fog in Newark today. A perfect day for being productive. Sunlight always drains me so much.

I read a great, new essay from Paul Graham today on the lack of differentiation between universities. A very good read. I also really enjoy his essay on The Age of the Essay. Nothing like an essay about essays.  Paul makes some excellent points.  He is definitely one of the best writers in an industry known for the strength of its exposition.

Nothing to really mention about the day.  How much can you really read about how my work day is?  I mean really!

Today is a mad crazy homework day for me.  I have a big Java project due on Thursday and I want to get it wrapped up today so that I don’t have to work on it on our anniversary.

Dominica did some grocery shopping on her way home from work so she got home around six thirty.  We ordered dinner in from Nino’s to make the evening faster.  Both of us are doing a lot of homework tonight.  This dual student thing is tough.

We watched two episodes of the first season of The Cosby Show and then got back to work.  Today is really nothing but work.  🙁

Nothing exciting this morning, just a lot of work.  I was quite busy all morning.

I have finally gotten around to reading “Hackers and Painters” by Paul Graham.  “Hackers and Painters” is one of the most important and influential collections of essays in the IT industry.  I have gotten most of the content of it either from reading isolated essays or by hearing Paul speak from the book.  But now I am finally working through it cover to cover.

Around noon I hopped the train into Manhattan to check out my new office.  It was supposed to have been set up and working either yesterday afternoon or this morning.  So this was my “check out” time while things were slow at the office (mostly because I humped all morning to get my slate cleared).  It turned out that I do not yet have security access to the building nor do I have a desktop.  Although I do have quite a nice office (read: cubicle) with an amazing view – and I’m talking ten foot windows that run the entire wall behind me.  Very cool.

I grabbed lunch, ran an errand and took the train back to Newark.  I figured that it might be a wasted trip but I have to do it a few times to get the office up and running so it is a price that must be paid at some point.  I am sure that there will be other wasted trips down the line before everything is set up.

I worked for a few more hours after arriving back in Newark.  Dominica got home with a very excited Oreo.  He had a wonderful time and daycare being obnoxious and terrorizing all of the other dogs.  He has so much energy to burn off.

Dominica was finally in a mood to leave the house and get something different to eat.  So we walked up the street to the Theater Square Grill and we ate outside in their open summer tent restaurant – Calcada.  The food was excellent and the service, as always, was perfect.  They were very slow and it was quite depressing to have so few people eating there.  True, it is Tuesday.  But still.

We came home and decided to call it an early night.  We watched the pilot for Chuck on our AppleTV.  The show is weak and sad.  We won’t be watching that again anytime soon.  It sounded good on the commercials and the plot device gave it some hope but it is just bland Hollywood weirdness that really just grinds home how disconnected the uneducated Hollywood system is with the rest of the universe.  The show is watchable but totally uninteresting.

I just like the phrase caveat amplexus. In English, beware of the embrace.

Wow, October is here. Today feels like October too. The sky is overcast and the weather has finally turned cool. Today is also Oreo’s last day being stuck at home. Tomorrow he gets to return to daycare and boy is he ever looking forward to that. He is totally rambunctous today. He has so much energy he has no idea what to do with it all.

No luck going into the office again today. On Friday morning I was supposed to be all moved to Wall Street but I didn’t dare go in and start experimenting with the new office as Friday’s are so busy and I couldn’t afford to have things go wrong. No one was able to verify that the move had happened though. It turns out that it is a good thing that I played it safe because even by today my office in the city is still being used for storage and it has not yet been set up. So even today if I was to have gone in to the office I would have been unable to work. I am hoping that I have a desktop by tomorrow afternoon. I am, at very least, going to go in and get my badge and stuff working so that I don’t have to deal with that when there is some emergency going on and it is a big panic.

I hooked my laptop up to my Netgear SC101 SAN drives today and started using the shared file system for backing up the laptop and sharing resources between it and Dominica’s windows desktop.

We have decided that one of Oreo’s official nicknames is: Mr. Snuggles McLazybutt.

Here is something cool, OpenSuse 10.3 which I have been waiting for is scheduled to release officially on this Thursday, October 4th which is Min’s and my fourth anniversary. Our plan is to go out to 27Mix for dinner that night.

Oreo is completely crazy today.  He has been out of daycare for a week, two weekends and two days now and he can’t stand it anymore.  He is a terrier time bomb flying around the apartment.

Min got home and whipped up a quick dinner out of the fridge which we ate while watching The Cosby Show.  I tried to watch two episodes but got a call and had to skip out.  For the rest of the evening I worked on some Java homework and she finished watching the first season of Heroes.