Sheep Guarding Llama

A friend in London sent me a link to the BBC’s Day in Pictures. There are some good pictures in there but the best is number seven. So cute!  Oreo wants to take a vacation in Japan now.

Today is my work from home day this week.  I had to work from home today because I have to go in to Newark’s traffic court at 31 Green Street for a traffic ticket (failure to display insurance card) from several weeks ago.  My court time is at eight thirty.

I got up and worked this morning for over an hour before walking Oreo and heading on out to the court.  The nice thing is that the court is just a little way down the street so it is an easy walk and I don’t have to bother getting the car out.  So I walked down to the court building and sat there for two hours before my name came up.  This was my first appearance and all I did was get instructions for what to do the next time that I go there – which is Monday the 17th.  The people who worked at the court were very gruff but the judge was very friendly.  It is a pain that I have to return on Monday but it isn’t stressful now that I know the process.

On my way home from court I stopped by Food for Life as they were just opening up and I grabbed a “The Round” for breakfast.  I don’t manage to get breakfast there very often so it is a nice treat when I do.

Oreo was very happy to have a daddy-doggie day as it has been a  while since he and I had the chance to spend the day together.  It is important bonding time for us.  Unlike most days when he is off from daycare he didn’t just sleep all day today but actually wanted to go on several walks and even made me play fetch with him at length.  It has been a long time since he has had so much energy.

It was a very normal work day for me.  Nothing to report.  I took the time while I was home today to order the drives that I am going to settle on for the SunFire V100s that I have.  I can’t use the very cool 500GB drives so I just got 160GB drives and will suck it up and only get to use 137GB of each of them.  What a bummer.  At least they will work.  I have tested out both boxes and am very confident in them.  It is just too bad that they won’t be nearly as useful as I had hoped.

I also got a chance to test out two “new” desktops that I have recently received.  The one was supposed to be an HP d530 with a 2.66GHz Pentium 4 but turned out to be the almost identical HP dc5000 with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 (533MHz FSB.)  I was very happy to discover that.  It didn’t come with an OS so I loaded up OpenSUSE 10.2 to test it out and the machine works like a charm.  Snappy and quiet.  Just what I like.

I also tested out an older Pentium 4 1.7GHz based HP Vectra.  It too tested out fine after I loaded OpenSUSE 10.2 on it.  Good deal.  That baby was just $42!  Can’t go wrong there.  Both machines are small form factors which I really like.  So this week I have done two Solaris installs and two Linux installs.  It’s been a busy week.

I had a hankering for pizza so for a late lunch, after two thirty, I walked over to Queen Pizza II across the street and grabbed myself a couple of slices.

I did manage to do a little cleaning today but not nearly as much as I normally get to do on my work from home days.  We have been falling behind recently.  At least today was a move in the right direction.

Dominica got home just after five thirty.  Not having to take Oreo to daycare really improves her day!  We hung out for an hour or so and then ordered in dinner from Big Bite – the Greek diner around the corner.  She got a veggie burger sub and I got a fish fillet sub.  We watched one episode of Ballykissangel and decided to call it a night.  Even with the evening being as early as it was we really only managed to squeeze in that one episode plus the miscellaneous things that we have to do in the evenings.

Dominica was pretty tired so we headed off to bed just after nine!  She did have homework to do though so she did some reading from bed.  It was actually after ten when we actually tried to go to sleep.  Oreo was extra snuggly in appreciation of having a day at home with me.

Tomorrow is a normal day at the office.  Friday we are leaving directly from Warren, NJ to head out to Alliance, OH.  Dominica is going to leave work, pick up Oreo and (hopefully not have to go home as the car should be packed) drive straight out to Warren where she will pick me up.  We will leave the Mazda here in Warren and we will drive the BMW out to Ohio.  We would take the Mazda but Dominica’s back doesn’t like the softer seats on long trips so we have to use the Beamer when we do that now.

The incredible rains returned again today. Today they didn’t begin until almost noon although there was some amount of rain all night causing light flooding around Newark on my drive into the office.

At two thirty this morning the smoke detectors in Dominica and my apartment went off because of the incredible humidity. Of course I lept from bed and ran into the living room to see if there was actually any smoke or something causing the smoke detectors to go off. The moment I emerged from the bedroom my glasses fogged right up from the ambient humidity so I was pretty confident that that was the problem.

On my drive in, the windows of the Starbucks located roughly next door to our apartment were completely fogged up (someone was really enjoying their coffee this morning.) So much so that water was literally running down the windows on the inside!

I decided to get breakfast but to skip lunch today. I wanted coffee so I went down to the cafeteria and a large coffee, a donut (don’t tell Dominica) and an egg ‘n’ cheese on a hard roll.

One of the Java developers that I work with – I work with a lot of them – told me to definitely switch to using the Eclipse IDE for my Java work. So I downloaded and installed that today and began to play with it. I first tried out Eclipse a very long time ago and it has definitely come a very long way since that first trial that I gave it several years ago. So far it is working very well for me but my needs are incredibly basic at the moment. I have been using jEdit and vi for my Java development up to this point so the comparison is not really relevant.

Thanks to Scott Adams, today I discovered a new comic strip called Basic Instructions. Good stuff. Very entertaining. I think that I especially like the strip because the main character is like a thin, and funny, version of me. I especially like the one on “Morning People“. This one on “Justifying Extravagant Purchases to Your Spouse” is totally Dominica and I. (It even looks like me! And his name is Scott!)

This “semester” I am taking “Introduction to Storage Networks” from the HP Learning Center. I am halfway through that class today. Basic stuff but all learning is good learning, I say.

I went home at normal time.  It was still raining but only lightly by that time.  I was home by five.  We had two packages delivered today.  One package was Dominica’s next order of coffee for her Keurig one cup coffee maker that she just loves.  And the other was my “new” SUN SunFire V100 server which I imediately unpacked and set up to test out.  Externally the machine was immaculate and all the physical parts were as described.  The machine powered on easy from the LOM and booted right into Solaris.  Everything checked right out.
Before Dominica got home I unpacked her new coffee and started brewing her a fresh cup of something other than the same coffee that she has been stuck with for the past week or two.  Then I called Nino’s in Harrison and ordered in some pasta for dinner.  Fettuccini alfredo for me (with broccoli and eggplant) and fettuccini funghi for her and some garlic bread.  I have come to believe that Dominica would much rather have me just order dinner and decide what she is getting than have to look at a menu and decide for herself.  So I just ordered it.

We ate our dinners and started the fourth season of Ballykissangel.  Dominica did some laundry and I got to work building Solaris servers.

I am working from home in the morning.  I have to go to Newark court in the morning to deal with my traffic tickets from several weeks ago.  That is at eight thirty in the morning at the court on Green Street just around the corner.  At least it is just around the corner.

The alarm went off at a quarter after five this morning and since I am not officially assigned to the early morning shift I laid in bed contemplating the option of going back to sleep and getting up after Dominica was leaving for work. But I was fairly wide awake so I decided that I should bite the bullet and just get on up out of bed.

Before leaving for work this morning I finished reading the “No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology 2006” and sorted through a stack of back mail that needed to be dealt with. Then it was off to the office.

It was a busy morning considering that it is a Monday. I was quite busy all morning dealing with emails, phone calls, etc. I did some additional bill paying and got some important mail ready that needed to go out today as well. Answered emails, got caught up from the weekend.

At six minutes after ten this morning the torrential rainfall hit where I was in Warren, New Jersey. It was surprising how quickly we went from moderate overcast skies to the roar of pounding rain that was very obvious even within the large industrial structure that I work in.

I have to include a link to Dominica’s coworker’s dog Dudley’s website.

I was very sad to learn that one of my all time favourite authors, Madeleine L’Engle, has died at age 88.  When I was younger I read almost all of her novels including the “Time Quintet”, “O’Keeffe” and the “Austin” series.

We had dinner with a friend who was recently a neighbour but has now moved into the cooler Ironbound section of town.  She just happened to be at the front desk when Dominica and I were heading out for dinner at Food for Life.  (If you want to eat with us apparently this is the process for that – just wait around the front desk until you see us come by.)

I completed by first weeks’ Java homework for my class at RIT.  It feels good to have homework done several days early.  I plan on submitting the homework tomorrow.

Dominica and I watched an episode of Heroes together.  Then I talked to Andy for a while while Dominica watched another episode.  Then she read some for her classes at Empire State.  Then we were off to bed.  It was an early night for us.