Sheep Guarding Llama

I didn’t have too bad of a time getting up when my alarm went off at three o’clock this morning but it sure did feel early. Today begins both my extreme early shifts as well as my working from home. The plan is that I am now working from home indefinitely. Originally it was going to start on Monday but since I am doing these extreme early mornings we moved it forward so that I could actually handle getting up so early.

I worked until just after seven when I had to take the BMW up to Spring Valley in New York to get it inspected. The drive took just about an hour even in heavy traffic which wasn’t so bad. I got up to the dealer and waited there while they took a look at the car. The inspection went fine but they noticed that the front bumper had pulled away from the frame (bumper cover – the safety portion of the bumper is just fine this is an aesthetic thing) and a few of the clips are broken. I didn’t have time to have that taken care of today as I am waiting for the car and have to get back down to Newark so that I can work again but it will need to be taken care of soon.

The car took about ninety minutes as there were lots of people waiting for their cars as well. I took the chance to take a look at the large selection of Ferraris and Maseratis that they have on their lot. Very impressive indeed. I tried to talk dad into a used 1999 Ferrari two seat targa instead of a convertible but he felt that even with the heavy used car discount that it was a little too much for a two seater. Personally, I thought that it was a bargain at $107,000 😉

I got back to the apartment at 1180 and spent the rest of the day working. It was a pretty busy day. When I could, in between normal tasks or while I was “thinking” I continued to work on geotagging my Flickr images and cleaning up the regular tags, dates, descriptions, etc. It is amazing how much work it takes to manage that many images effectively. But they are going to be extremely useful for many years to come because of this work so I don’t mind.

I managed to more or less wrap up with the office around four in the afternoon at which point I remained online but started doing housework. I cleaned the kitchen including the mountain of dishes that accumulated last week with me not working from home at all. I cleaned the hall table which was a disaster. I cleaned in the living room. I cleaned in the bathroom. I cleaned in the bedroom. I made pudding so that it would be ready later when Dominica and I want some after dinner. Maybe I need to rethink this working from home situation…

Dominica got home and we watch some Full House and ordered in from Papa John’s (Spinach Alfredo pizza) and did our best to relax.  I kept working on my pictures and stayed connected to the office.  Dominica managed to finished reading “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” this afternoon at work so tonight I got to start reading it.  I will not be reading it at the same break-neck pace that Min did (she only bought it yesterday afternoon meaning that she completed it in just under twenty-four hours) but I will see what I can do.  We ordered the book on CD but Amazon has not yet shipped it to us even though we could get it for the same price sitting on the Target shelves 🙁  We have no idea what is going on there.  We have had it pre-ordered for some time but apparently Amazon isn’t giving in to the “getting it there the day of release” craze and is just going to ship it when they get around to it.

I wanted to go to bed early but my body just isn’t ready to switch schedules yet so I ended up going to bed just before eleven this evening.  I have to be up tomorrow at a quarter till three in the morning.

I woke up on my own around five this morning. It uncanny how I do that.

The sun was out today and you can barely tell that it rained for the entire day yesterday although the air is clearer than it has been and it isn’t so warm today.

Wikipedia has a very lengthy page detailing corrections that Wikipedia has made to Encyclopedia Britannica. Interesting indeed.

In our continuing look at cute pet pigs you have to check out the tiny Royal Dandies.

So my big personal project for the day is geotagging my Flickr images. Now that I have it working I am really excited about geotagging. Geotagging involves specifying the location where a photograph was taken. A few modern cameras are using GPS systems so that the cameras can record the geographic information right at the time that the image is originally taken much like they are recording lens, aperture, shutter, ISO, date, time and other settings now. But for my catelogue of thousands of existing images and for the foreseeable future I will need to encode my images geographically by hand.

By geotagging my photos you will be able to go through the gallery and instantly see where any photo was taken or you can search by the map to find photos taken at a particular spot. It is a great concept and is really making picture taking much more useful.

I ended up putting in a full ten hour day at the office today. The original plan was for me to do the semi-early shift this week starting just after seven all week. Then the plan was for me to do the real early shift at six thirty all week. But today that changed again and now I am working on Bahrain hours which means that I will be starting my days at three in the morning all week! Tomorrow I have to start early and then drive to Spring Valley for a car appointment at eight fifteen. It is going to be a very long morning.

I got home at five and worked on some geotagging before Dominica got home at six fifteen. She did some shopping today and picked up the seventh “Harry Potter” book. She had meant to buy Guitar Hero 80’s Encore Edition but was so excited about the HP No. 7 that she forgot about it.

Dominica cooked a pizza for dinner (with a whole wheat crust) and I watched Full House while working on my picture and Dominica read “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” in which she is totally engrossed and doesn’t even know that I am here.

I wasn’t able to go to bed nearly as early as I would have like to have as I just wasn’t tired.  But at least I am not staying up late.  I have to be up at three in the morning but I expect there to be nearly nothing to do so I am hopeful that I will get tons of awesome geotagging done in the morning!  I am having a blast.  I love maps.  And I love photographs.  And I love web 2.0 mashups.  This is just all kinds of awesomey goodness!

I woke up plenty early this morning all on my own which is surprising considering how tired Dominica and I (and Oreo) have been the last few nights. It has been a long and exhausting week for us. Lots of overtime and “up in the air” stuff and just things going on. We were really happy to just get some time to just relax and drive with Oreo in the BMW yesterday.

I got a couple of good pictures from our trip yesterday. It was really bright while we were out so it was tough. We sent a copy of one of the pictures of Oreo hanging out in the back of the convertible to the Doggle company to show them how happy Oreo is wearing his Doggles.

It is raining in the city again today. Tons of rain. I am sure that it will be flooding again. My friend on Long Island say that it is really coming down hard out there as well.

Dad called to let me know that there was a problem with a part that we had gotten for the RX7 so the car is not going to be ready as soon as we had hoped. It could easily be several weeks before we are able to even make an attempt at putting it onto the road.

Today was so busy all morning that it was one in the afternoon before I even realized that time was passing. I got a lot done though. I like days when I am busy but not because I am thrashing but when I am able to really be productive and get lots of good work done.

This is a little old but in Australia the fastest Morse Code operator vs. the fastest mobile “texter” went head to head with the ninety year old Morse Code operator winning! This really goes to show what a pathetic interface to text messages the mobile phone keypad is. What is really dumb, though, is that people like me have TXT interfaces with full thumb keypads on my mobile device and regular keyboards from my computer so using the numerical keypad is an artificial limitation that doesn’t really have any application.

I am going to be working the very early hours on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday this week. That is, going in to the office at six thirty or so in the morning. I know that it is impossible to keep track of when I am working and when I am home. On Wednesday I will be taking Dominica’s car up to Spring Valley, NY to get its inspection taken care of and then I plan to work from home for the rest of that day.

It ended up raining all day. It was raining early this morning before I left for work and maybe all night for all that I know. It rained hard for what seemed like all day. The forecast says rain until midnight! That is a lot of water coming down out there. I can only imagine that we are going to be flooding horribly again and traffic tonight will be awful.

Rain, rain, rain. I grabbed you a pic of rain from Flickr.

I was all ready to go home when I found out that one of my teams needed me to stay late. So much for the plan of coming in early and leaving early. All last week it turned into me having to work extra hours and that is continuing into today.

I was hoping to have been able to have escaped early today just to beat the worst of the flood traffic but that was not to be. Jersey is so bad in the rain. Everyone drives like idiots. Actually, that happens even without the rain. But the rain exacerbates the problem. And then a lot of the roads actually are under water which really makes it all a disaster.

I got to leave work at six thirty which was only eleven hours and not nearly as bad as it seemed.  The drive home was quite good as well.  I guess everyone left work early to avoid the traffic leaving the roads clear by the time that I headed home just a little bit on the late side.

Dominica did some grocery shopping on her way home and was just unloading her car when I pulled up to 1180.  So I helped her carry up the groceries and then we walked right over to Food for Life to get ourselves some dinner.

We came home and I spent the evening either doing dishes and cleaning in the kitchen or scanning more old photographs in for my Flickr feed.  I have uploaded a set of the York Central School Swim Team from the winter of 1993.  I have tons more scanned but I upload them in groups to make the tagging process easier so the 1996 York Central School vs. Perry Central School Girls Soccer pictures will be coming in a few days.

We watched more Full House while I worked and Dominica relaxed with Oreo.  Oreo is still quite exhausted from his fun trip to the beach this weekend.

It was off to bed early as I need to be up just a little after five tomorrow morning.

Dominica and I slept in a little late this morning and then got up and decided that we had nothing on the schedule for today so it would the perfect time to take our annual drive down to the Jersey Shore in the BMW 330. We had wanted to go two weeks ago but thought that traffic would have been so bad at that point to have made the trip not worth it and last week we were in Pavilion. It was almost exactly one year ago this week that we last drove down the Jersey Shore to celebrate having just purchased the BMW.

It took us a while to get out of the house as we were being very leisurely. We started by heading towards the Oranges and getting the BMW washed at the hand car wash up by UMDNJ. It has been a while since we last got a car wash.

From there we drove down the Garden State Parkway and cruised along the Jersey Shore for a while. Oreo just loves cruising in the BMW with the top down. He loves when we go slow along the ocean because he climbs onto the side of the car and hangs as far out as he can and catches all of the smells. It makes him very happy.

We tried going to a public beach area that allows dogs but the parking was completely crazy and there were just tons and tons of people so we decided to head father south and keep exploring. We went past a Charlie Brown’s Steakhouse which I have enjoyed eating at in New Jersey in the past (I used to eat at the Charlie Brown’s on Route 1 when I was consulting for Wegman’s because the restaurant was located inside of the Clarion hotel that I always stayed at) so we stopped there to eat. Min had never eaten at a Charlie Brown’s before. It was quite good. Dominica enjoyed it and said that we can go there again 🙂

We kept driving south until we ended up at Island Beach State Park. That was a really nice drive along a preserved stretch of intercoastal sanddunes. We took Oreo for a walk down to the ocean and he played along the water but wasn’t too happy with the water caught him by surprise. It was extremely warm once we got out of the car, however, and we were all exhausted after our very short walk and very warm. We had wanted to have continued walking but decided that we couldn’t handle it and that we should just head for home. We wanted to keep the day as relaxing as possible.

On the way north from the park we stopped at Beaches and Cream and got some ice cream before getting onto the parkway to head back home to Newark.

All three of us were quite exhausted by the time that we got home and we decided to just take it easy all night. I uploaded our photos from the (as you can see) and we watched several episodes of Full House. It was a lazy night and Oreo just passed out as soon as we got home. All he did was eat his dinner and sleep. But he had a really good day and was very happy by the end of the day.

I am still on the early schedule (from now on but that was my segue in case you forgot) at the office so I need to be up very early tomorrow.  So it was off to bed early for all of us.

Today turned out to be a busy food based Saturday. I was up pretty early this morning – a bit before eight. I worked out in the living room until Dominica got up sometime after nine.

I went through my paperwork that arrived from RIT this week while I had some time to myself. Did I mention last week that I was finally officially accepted to the Masters of Science in Information Technology degree program at RIT? Today I found out that I have been granted their top Merit Scholarship which is very encouraging as well! I have never received a scholarship before so I am very happy to finally have gotten that recognition now.

Around eleven Dominica and I met up with some friends that live in our building and we walked through downtown Newark looking for some place to get lunch. We didn’t have much luck though. We went to several places that we wanted to try but everything was closed. And I mean everything. Restaurant and restaurant wasn’t open at a little after noon on a bright and sunny Saturday afternoon! How is Newark ever going to recover if there isn’t anyone doing business here?

We finally found an Irish pub that was “open” but open in this case only meant that the door was unlocked and that there were people inside. They turned us and the party ahead of us away as they weren’t serving and apparently had forgotten to lock the doors. That was about eight patrons that they gave up in the few seconds that we tried to eat there. They must have given up fifty or more customers just during the noon lunch period if not hundreds who would have eaten there if they had been actually open! Crazy.

We ended up eating at a diner across from the pub that said that it was open seven days a week. The food was fine and it was nice to find a decent diner close to our apartment. We need to find more restaurants as eating in Newark is nearly impossible with any variety. It just seems that no one wants to do business here (understandably.)

We had a really nice time at lunch and hung out there until a little after three when Dominica and I got a call from Jeffrey and his girlfriend who were meeting us to hang out for the afternoon. So we walked back to 1180 and met Jeffrey over at the PSE&G fountain. We hung out for fifteen minutes or so and then walked over to Food for Life for an early dinner. Luckily the food took a while as we were not very hungry yet. We managed to stretch the time between lunch and dinner to about four hours which isn’t too bad between meals but is still pretty close – at least for us.

We hung out until around six and then went back to our apartment to relax for the evening. We watched some DVDs until eight when I was supposed to work for a while. I logged on to the office network and did a little work while we continued to watch Full House. I “worked” for three hours but nothing really happened. After I was done with that Dominica and I played a little Rogue Galaxy on the PS2 although we were both so tired that we couldn’t play very much. From a first look, though, the graphics are totally amazing! I can’t wait to get a chance to get into that game.