Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my last actually day being based in Warren, New Jersey. Tomorrow is my last official day but tomorrow I will be working from home so today is the last time that I do the regular commute out to here. It is weird as this office in Warren is the office that I have worked in the most ever! I am not leaving the company just changing office locations and I will still be out here on a regular basis but it is a little weird to be switching into Manhattan.

Oreo is alone again today but it is his last day alone this week. He will be fine. Susan is going to walk him and Min will get home as quickly as she can after work. After work for me today I am taking advantage of my last day in Warren to make a run to Scranton after work. John Stephens, the Surfing IT Wizard, is meeting me there so that he can see the servers and so that we can do dinner and catch up.

Amazon is beta testing their new DRM free MP3 music download store today! Totally worth checking out. No DRM and no worthless Apple formats. It doesn’t get much better than that. Ogg Vorbis is better, yes. But only so much better. This is the big leap.

While researching music on the Amazon store I discovered that Robert Plant, yes that Robert Plant, is doing a duet album with Allison Kraus. Now that is weird.

At three I took a load of the stuff from my desk out to my car in preparation for my departure from Warren. I stepped outside and was greeted to a heat wave. It felt like afternoon on an island paradise (that’s a normal person’s island paradise and not mine.) This is not weather that you expect as October approaches. Very abnormal.

I left work at four thirty. Not as early as I had hoped but servieable, nonetheless. I headed west on i78 as quickly as I could which wasn’t very fast as traffic was horrible. No stopped traffic but it was highly congested and moving quite slowly the whole way through New Jersey.

I got into Pennsylvania and took the usual PA33 north to i80 west and then north on i380. While headed up i380 suddenly the sky grew dark – but not that bluish hued grey dark of a thunderstorm but that yellowish grey dark of the apocalypse. Dominica and Andy may remember one day of the most amazing “yellow dark storm” in Ithaca when we all lived in the house on Observatory Circle. It was similar to that.

Within minutes everything went from clear and sunny to one of the heaviest thunderstorms that I have ever been in. The rain came down so hard at one point that I lost site of the hood of the car! The whole storm didn’t last long but it was insanely intense. I couldn’t believe it. And while it was still coming down so hard I was having problems keeping my eyes open from the blinding sunlight that was still streaming in! It was crazy.

John Stephens called me from Scranton, just a few miles away, to check in on my estimated time of arrival. He said that the skies were clear and sunny and that there was no sign of the storm where he was. Very strange.

I arrived in Scranton at a quarter after six. John and I dropped off the servers that I was delivering and then we drove down to the University of Scranton “downtown” region and got dinner at a pub there.  Dinner was good.  I had never been to this particular part of Scranton before and it is really beautiful.  What a neat city.

It was around  ten when I pulled into Eleven 80.  It was a long evening but it was nice to get to see the Surfing IT Wizard for the first time in almost two years and it was really good to have been able to have delivered so many machines that were filling up the tiny Newark apartment.  This is a huge improvement.

Dad sent me a link to Students Worshipping the Engineering Fountain at Purdue University on YouTube.

That’s right, the youngest member of my generation in my family – on both sides – turns eighteen today.  I am the oldest at thirty one.  My entire group of cousins number only six (including me) with the next oldest at twenty three.  So happy birthday or bday to Jeremy Richardson.

Oreo is home alone all day today.  Susan is coming over during her lunch break to take him for a walk in the park.  So he won’t have to cross his legs all day but he will be very lonely.

It was a very warm late September day down here in New Jersey.  I didn’t check the temperature but I would guess that it was in the mid-eighties.  Tomorrow is supposed to be even warmer pushing into the nineties. Rochester hit ninety-two today which breaks the record for the warmest “Jeremy’s birthday” since 1891.

I got home this evening to a very excited dog.  He seems to have had a good day though.  He got lots of rest and did not appear to be upset.

My evening was extremely busy.  I finished preparing my DL145 G2 and SunFire V100 that are being transported out to Scranton tomorrow evening.  That took a bit of work.  I am hoping that I have everything done on them that I need to do.  One of the big disadvantages to having a colocation facility is that once you send stuff there it is extremely difficult to deal with it down the road since you can’t touch it.  You have to be really confident that everything will work properly “blind”.

I also had a lot of homework that I had to do because it is due tomorrow night.  Or so I thought.  After working like crazy on a big Java project until just about midnight I went onto the website for the course and realized that this is actually a two week project and that the homework is not actually due until October 4th!  What an idiot I am!

The upside is, of course, that I got a ton of Java work done ahead of time and now I don’t have to panic and can make sure that I am able to sit down and do it right.  I am doing well in my class so far and I don’t want to mess it up because of scheduling issues.  And we are not traveling this coming weekend so I have plenty of time to sit down and make sure that it is right.

Dominica bought some new shelf unit things that I can’t think of a good name for and she put in some time playing with Oreo, walking Oreo, assembling a new lamp and organizing the closets.  The bedroom is really coming together nicely.  We still need a good bedside table though with some drawers.  If we had that then I would have some additional storage, a place for a lamp, a place for my CPAP and a place for the alarm clock.  Boy I need a lot of stuff to sleep!

Because Oreo has no daycare this week we are having to be creative to keep him happy. I am staying home late this morning and working from here so that his day isn’t too long. It is a bright and sunny morning so he is very happy about that. Any chance to lounge on his favourite pillow in the bright sun is not to be missed.

My plan was to stay home until about ten this morning but nothing ever goes as planned. I was all set to head into the office around eleven thirty when I got caught on a conference call for quite some time. That actually worked out very well because Oreo got a nice long morning with me and his lonely afternoon was rather short. Dominica rushed home and spent a while playing with him.

I stayed at work really late – call it guilt for having worked from home this morning although I think that I got more done while I was at home except that I really did need some “face time” to discuss a few details on something. Otherwise I would have considered staying home all day.

Dominica went out and did some shopping for me over her lunch break. She ran to Staples and got me a USB Floppy Drive. I know, the most ridiculous thing that you could possibly image. But I need one because some of my HP server hardware – namely the DL145 G2 – does not allow BIOS or ILO firmware upgrades from any other media. So floppy it is. She also picked up a very cool Brother PTouch label maker because we both wanted one.

It was a bit after seven when I finally got home.  I had to hit the A&P on the way out of the office to pick up some water as we were just about out this morning when I left home.  I walked in the door to food waiting for me from Golden City.  Dominica had ordered it and it had arrived just minutes before me.  We threw on a little Ballykissangel and ate our dinner.

After dinner I had to walk the dog and then it was time to get down to work.  I was tired but I don’t have a very big window in which to get things done before Wednesday and on Wednesday I have to make an evening delivery to Scranton and my homework for the week is due.  And since I didn’t get any chance at all to touch it this weekend and really didn’t get a moment to do it today I am stuck really cramming for it tomorrow.

I tried to sleep in as long as I could. I was quite tired after being up so late last night. But we have nothing going on this morning so I stayed in bed until after eight thirty with my very snuggly dog who had me almost completely pushed out of bed from him trying to snuggle so close.

For breakfast Dominica and I walked over to the Center Street Diner (or something like that.) Our job today is to get some bedroom furniture so that we can get some of our mess cleaned up. This place is a disaster.

After breakfast we ordered the car and were about to head out to Ikea when we discovered that we could not order an elevator. We called down to the desk and were informed that the elevators had been shut off by a tech and they were trying to page him but the tech was on an upper floor without a phone and no one could ride the elevators to go look for him! So we were effectively trapped inside our apartment. Fortunately Oreo had been out just before this happened so we just had to wait it out.

We waited about an hour and discovered the elevators working again so we took off for Ikea. I don’t relish the idea of shopping at Ikea – I get serious crowd anxiety just approaching the place – but we have been unable to find the furniture that we need anywhere else so we are kind of stuck.

We raced through Ikea as quickly as we could but even that was annoying as just looking for the most basic furniture information puts you in the path of many angry denizens of New Jersey seedy furniture underbelly. If you ever want to encounter unhappy shoppers go to Ikea. They bring the angry people in by bus I think.

Ikea was insanely busy. So busy that people had given up making an attempt at the insanely long checkout lines and were lounging about in the warehouse making it impossible to pick up the furniture that you wanted to buy.

We finally got home with our new furniture that just barely fit into the PR5. We ate leftovers for dinner and watched the final episode of the sixth season of Full House which means that now both Dominica and I have watched the entire first seven seasons and are just waiting on season eight to be released on DVD. Then it was furniture assembly time.

We picked up two new bookshelves as we failed to find (today or previously online) any wardrobes that we felt would fit into our small bedroom. So instead we went with two bookshelves. The one, a tall and skinny bookshelf, is replacing the older oak coloured short bookshelf that we bought while we were living in North Brunswick. It was meant to be a temporary piece of furniture and its time has now passed. We took it down and donated to the “front desk” fund.

The new bookshelf is quite tall and has an extension at the top to make it extra tall – we have eleven foot ceilings. The bottom has a wood door that closes so we can smoosh our miscellaneous stuff onto those shelves to hide our clutter. That is important.

The other bookshelf is wide and just as tall with the extra extension. This bookshelf has glass doors enclosing it so that it looks rather classy. It is a bit strange to use a glass doored bookshelf for clothing and blankets and stuff but it seems to work well. We discovered immediately that the bookshelf with the heavy glass on the front was not stable and was going to collapse into the bedroom the first time that we used it so I climbed precariously up on an office chair while Dominica held it and carefully anchored the shelving unit to the wall. We filled the bottom shelf of the unit with heavy books so as to add ballast in the hopes that it would keep the unit from wanting to pull away from the wall in the first place.

The new bookshelves look really good and our bedroom has improved one hundred percent.  Dominica did ninety-five percent of the work putting them together.  I just moved the trash out of the way for her.

After getting our bedroom back together Dominica had to head off to the “office” to work on her homework.  I spent the evening stocking the shelves and rearranging things.  We have a lot more space now all over the house.  Dominica had earlier gone through and produced a big bag of clothes and another bag of shoes to donate so that helped a bit too.

We didn’t manage to actually get to bed until midnight.  Quite late by our standards.

No sleeping in for me today. I had to be up before eight this morning so that I could log in and work “at the office”. I have a bit of scheduled work this morning so I won’t be doing anything exciting today.

I ended up working from before eight until well after six in the afternoon! Much longer than the two hours that I had initially expected to have been the max amount of time that I would be needed at the office. Dominica walked over to Food for Life and picked up breakfast for us. Unfortunately for her our previously foggy morning turned into a steady rain while she was outside.

We ate breakfast and then Dominica started working in ernest on cleaning the kitchen, emptying the refridgerator and cleaning that out, laundry, dishes and more.  She decided to do some shopping today for a wardrobe for our bedroom.  We are so short on closet space it isn’t funny.  There is no place to put anything.  We are getting desperate.  She spent hours trying to find something that will fit into are extremely limited space but no luck.  There are just no good options out there.  We are pretty sure that we are going to settle with some doored shelving units that match our bookshelf in the living room.

Dominica also did several hours of work on her Academic Planning project for Empire State.  She is in the process of getting her degree planning done and out of the way.  It isn’t hard or stressful work but there is just a lot of it and it takes a lot of time.  Both she and I had very productive days today.  As anyone will notice from my barrage of technical posts earlier today I took the time to write several small “how to” articles.  I did a lot of work on the V100 servers today and am very happy with how productive I have been.

We ordered in dinner from Nino’s.  Dominica was really in the mood for a sub.  We watched two episodes of Full House and that was it for us for the night.  Oreo decided that he was very tired and actually went to bed an hour or two ahead of us!  He never, ever does that.

Unfortunately with Oreo going to bed so early his own schedule was thrown off and about two hours after Dominica and I had gone to bed Oreo got up and decided that he needed to go for a walk.  I walked him and he had a lot of energy so our walked ended up being three or four times longer than his normal late night bathroom break.  I got him home and put him back to bed but was now wide awake myself.  So I returned to work cleaning the house.  I took out the trash and the recycling.  Unfortunately I had a glass jar break and had to spend twenty minutes cleaning up that mess.  It totally exploded 🙁

I still wasn’t tired so I fired the desktop back up and started doing some more work included another tech post.  I pretty much ended up with insomnia and have been awake now for more than two hours since Oreo woke me up to take him out.

Dominica and I were very happy to not have to drive anywhere at all today.  That is the type of relaxing that we really need this weekend.  Tomorrow we are considering running down to Elizabeth to go to Ikea where they have the bookshelf that we need if we decide to go that route.  I am not sure if we have decided on that yet or not.  We don’t have too many options to consider at this point.