Sheep Guarding Llama

For the first time in a long time I get to work from home today. I have missed my days with Oreo. We all went to bed insanely early last night at just a little after nine which sounds crazy but we were all really tired – Oreo included. Oreo and I then slept in until six this morning and didn’t get out of bed until seven. It was awesome. Actually, Oreo stayed in bed by himself until nine or so.

Work was quite busy today and it kept me hopping all day long. I was lucky to be able to sneak out to get lunch at all.

I had hoped to have been able to have gotten a lot done around the house today but with as busy as I was I didn’t get to do anything more than the mildest of cleaning in the kitchen and sorting some mail.

I went over to Food for Life for lunch with Abdul and his brother. 1180 has started letting Abdul into the building again as of last night. This always happens. The building comes up with a reason why he isn’t allowed in the building, expects be to tell him so and then, eventually, they just allow him back in and make me look like the bad guy making it up. It is really unfair to me and I am not playing along anymore. I don’t want him coming into the building. Some of the guys in the building said that the accusations against him were made up and impossible which is probably true. But either way I don’t want him in the building having the concierge page me at all hours. This is supposed to be my home! But they keep letting him in.

Today was one of those really bright overcast days when there is just that incredibly even white light everywhere. It was a gorgeous day but not as cool as it has been for the past week or so.

Just before Dominica got home I finally got a chance to start working on the SUN SunFire V100 server that has been sitting under my desk for a while now waiting for me to get to it. That was no little project. I had to open it up to inspect the hardware to see what we really have. It only has one of the two drives so I need to deal with getting a second drive cage for it. That is a bit of a pain.

The thing that kept me from working on this machine before is that its only outside connections are either network ports or the Lights Out Management (LOM) console interface which I didn’t have a cable for. I bought a cable from eBay and am giving it a try now. It took me a little while, but not long, to get that working. I have it attached to the serial connector of my HP dx5150 OpenSUSE 10.1 machine and used minicom to make the connection. That works pretty well.

The server kept throwing errors and I quickly discovered (well, quickly might be an overstatement) that all four memory chips in the machine were either bad or of the wrong type.  They were definitely mismatched.  I was extremely fortunate that I just happened to have some spare memory (ancient PC133) kicking around the apartment and the one stick that I found popped right in and the server fired right up.  Argh.  Now I have to deal with getting more memory for it.  Always something.

Once that was fixed which actually took several hours after testing all of the memory I was able to perform a Solaris 10 install without too much hassle.  The machine is limping with just 128MB of memory but I got far enough to confirm that the machine is working, needs additional memory, needs a drive cage and two, new 500GB PATA hard drives to make it really useful.  So I will have to get that stuff ordered and get back to it.  At least I know that it is working and exactly what I need.

Dominica and I ordered in dinner from “Big Bite” just up the street and watched some of the fourth season of The Cosby Show which Dominica had picked up recently.

We have started seriously considering getting a downtown apartment in Manhattan.  Our lease ends in November and Dominica isn’t happy at all with her current job and even if she was we don’t think that there is very much chance that they would want to keep her past that point anyway because she is getting paid way too much for what she is doing.  And I am going to be working out of Manhattan soon so the advantages of living downtown are pretty high.  We could do without the cars altogether and I could walk to the office.  That is a huge deal.  We will see what we can find.

We turned in early as I am working the very early shift tomorrow.  Overall today was a very productive day.  I feel good about it.

I decided to work from home this morning so that I could deal with the traffic ticket that Newark is giving me a hard time about.

I FINALLY had the court pick up the phone today. They said that even though the notice that I was sent said that I missed the original court date that that was incorrect and that there was no original court date and that yesterday was the first one. I asked why the letter said that I had missed the first one but they wouldn’t tell me. I asked why the ticket had a date written on it if it wasn’t my court date and the Essex County Court informed me that it is the policy of the Essex County Sheriff’s Office to give out “Notice to Appear” notifications with a stated court date but that it is something made up by the sheriff’s office and is for their record only and is not for me! (Read: The courts and the cops have a deal worked out that makes everyone in the city a criminal no matter what they do.)

This is extortion. This defines extortion. I was issued a ticket be a renegade cop and have to go to court but there is no way to communicate with the courts or the cops to find out what the “truth” is until after you have missed the court dates. The police told me to go to court on August 8th but I didn’t because the court’s website told me not to go until August 28th. And in between, without any notification to me, the court date was moved to August 21st and I was not notified of such until after the fact. Very convenient indeed. Seeing as mail takes weeks to move around the city of Newark it would appear that the county has worked up quite the situation for itself.

The bottom line is that Newark and Essex County are built on corruption, mismanagement and crime. This city has no interest in law abiding citizens and business people living here. They will do whatever it takes to push us out. This city is built on crime and drugs and welfare and they don’t want anyone here that will interrupt that.

It took me so long before I was able to leave home this morning that I just ran over to Food for Life and grabbed breakfast there while waiting for the valet to bring my car around. Once I got in my car it was time to fight traffic to get onto the street so that I could drive. No sooner than I had put on the blinker and was ready to pull out than someone pulled into the “no parking zone” directly in front of me and backed up so close that they almost hit me and got out of their car. They had a whole car length in front of them but decided to completely block me in anyway. Just one more reason why I hate Newark. Not what I needed today.

Dominica spent a bit of time today looking up apartment options for us to go look at. We have both had it with Newark and don’t feel that this city or Essex County are friendly enough to professional residents to warrant spending our money here. It’s just the whole attitude of the place. I’m tired of a city that doesn’t want to improve but likes being like it is. That’s the upsetting part. It isn’t that Newark is disadvantaged and doing poorly – Newark has striven to reach this level of depravity and likes it. Fine, not my problem.

I am working from home tomorrow which is good because I am still tired and need some doggie – daddy time. And I need to do some cleaning in the apartment.

Friday I am working the very early shift at six thirty and then at lunch I have to run the Mazda down to the shop to get it looked at. I have been putting that off because I have been so busy but it can’t wait any longer. It has several minor issues – headlight out again, gas smell and a shimmy. Hopefully none of it is too major.

I informally registered for my fall class at RIT today. I am taking the graduate Java Programming course which I am hoping is challenging without being stressful. I am only taking the one class and I have done two courses in Java already so I think that it should be fine. This will be my first graduate level technical class so we will see how it compares to the last grad class that I took.

I found my keys today that went AWOL yesterday. For some reason I had locked them into my desk drawer at work. It was just one of those days I guess.

I ended up having to work a bit late tonight.  Busy day.  But I am home tomorrow so it isn’t a big deal.  I won’t likely be writing tonight and this post is long enough already so I am posting before I leave work.  Talk to everyone out there in the blogosphere tomorrow.

Today is Dominica’s 29th birthday!  Happy Birthday Dominica!

Today started out very normally as any other day.  Can you tell that we have been here long enough that we are hitting a routine now?  I was pretty tired this morning as I have been for a while – just haven’t had an opportunity to get caught back up on my sleep I guess.  So I slept in a little and didn’t start working until seven and then did so from home until there was a lull when I could run into the office.

Overall today was a fairly busy day but not too crazy.  It kept me occupied most of the day.  I ran some errands instead of getting lunch but I don’t normally eat lunch so it wasn’t a big deal.

For Dominica’s birthday dinner she wanted Thai delivered from the Thai restaurant in Warrenville so after I work I ran down there and picked that up and then headed for home.  I ended up getting home quite a bit before Dominica and discovered that I had lost my house keys.  Argh.  I looked through the car but couldn’t find them.  I have no idea where they can be.  The only place that it very reasonable is on my desk at the office and I can’t check there until tomorrow.  One more thing that I have to worry about now.

At the end of day today Dad emailed me to let me know that I got a “rescheduled court date” for a traffic ticket only it was rescheduled to this morning and the mail didn’t arrive until hours after the court date and minutes after the court’s phones lines were turned off.  The big issue is that when I got the ticket I went online and checked the date of my court appearance and it was scheduled for one week from today.  Now I get a notice that I missed on appearance, it was rescheduled for today and I missed that one too!  So I went online and they went in and moved the date up a week so that I have nothing scheduled now.  Newark gained a reputation for bad court scheduling several years ago and apparently they haven’t changed their ways.  I called because their website said that their phone lines were still on until four thirty and I hung on the phone on hold for forty minutes but no one ever picked up.  The last time I called it didn’t even go to hold – just rang and rang.  What a scam.  No wonder people don’t want to live in Newark – the city does everything that it can to drive people away.

Dominica got home and as she pulled up to the building a Newark police officer started harassing her because she was using the valet parking.  The issue here is that 1180 Raymond’s valet parking is illegal as the area is not zoned for valet but for normal parking.  So the only options that we have are leaving our cars in the middle of the street, on the cross walks, in an intersection or in a bus stop.  As you can see, that doesn’t work.  But the police need to deal with the building selling us (and changed a lot for) an illegal service.  The city lets the building operate so the city makes their own bed and now they need to lie in it.  The police are just harassing us because they don’t like us.  This has been an ongoing issue since we first moved in.  And there is no resolution in sight.  Not even word that the building is going to try anything.  It would appear that this is just considered an “acceptable situation” which it is not.  And right now the building is only half full.  Eventually the street will be continuously blocked by our cars going in and out of parking and this is a very busy street.

Dominica stopped by Target on her way home and grabbed some DVDs to watch for her birthday.  She got Kinky Boots which was entertaining but nothing special.  And she got The Fountain which is one of those movies that makes me give up on watching movies.  The movie was boring, slow, depressing and just poor.  It had no entertainment value.  It was horribly written and horrible acted (although what did they have to work with?)  It was horribly sad and made you feel like crap both because it had a sad ending and also because you just wasted all that time and got nothing for it.  🙁

Oreo spent the entire second movie sleeping on our laps.  He is starting to become a lap dog now that we have had him for a while and now that we have the loveseat where the only way he can sit with us is to be on our laps.

By the end of the two movies it was time for bed.

Today was an exceptionally “nothing” day with nothing extraordinary happening at all. I went to work. Dominica went to work. Oreo went to daycare. It rained all day. It’s been raining. It is so cool that we are able to have the windows open instead of using the air conditioning.

I got paged out (after getting paged out both Saturday and Sunday) at six in the morning today and I was so busy that I had to work from home until ten.

I refuse to bore you with any further details. Don’t forget, tomorrow is Min’s birthday!

Finally a chance to really sleep in. I have been dying all week from a total lack of sleep. I’m not exactly caught up yet but at least I am on the path to sleep recovery. The whole family slept in until around ten this morning.

Today is the ultimate lazy day. We decided that we aren’t going anywhere all day and are just going to stay in the apartment and relax. Pretty much our day involved watching the seventh season of Full House. Dominica did some shopping online and Oreo was extremely snuggly and spent almost the entire day on the love seat with me.

We ordered in Italian from Nino’s and did a double order so that we would have both lunch and dinner delivered in a single shot so that we wouldn’t have to worry about it later. Now that is lazy.

I think that I forgot to mention the other day but on Friday Dominica and I bought our airline tickets with British Airways to travel to the UK in late November! Neither of us has ever been outside of the US and Canada so this is a really big deal for us. We are going to be in the UK for nine days.

Our current plan is to fly into London and stay there for several days. We will be heading out on November 16th from Newark and will arrive in London early in the morning on the 17th. We are hoping that we will be able to sleep on the plane since we got a seat upgrade and we have power at our seats. That means that I can put in ear plugs and turn on my CPAP and just might be able to get to sleep. That would be awesome.

Our first several days will be in England. I am not sure what we will do for the first weekend but that is our chance to go see the English countryside so we might do that right away. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I will be working from Canary Wharf in Greenwich. (Here is another great shot of Canary Wharf from Flickr – and one more.)

On either Wednesday night or Thursday morning we plan to hop the train and head north to Scotland where we should be able to catch the ferry that runs between Scotland and Northern Ireland.  We will get ourselves over to the Green Isle on Thursday and on Friday I will work from Belfast’s White Star House famous as the building site of the Titanic.  Here is another good picture of White Star House.

On Saturday we will travel back to England and on Sunday we will fly back to New Jersey.

I got paged and had to work for a couple of hours this evening.  Nothing too major.