Sheep Guarding Llama

The end of June has come already. This morning I woke up at six thirty and decided to get out of bed. My cold is still really bad and I can barely breath. I feel pretty crappy. Dominica slept in for another half an hour but was up by seven. Nothing like getting up nice and early on a Saturday. Oreo had no idea what was going on. But the sun was bright today and Oreo was happy to get up and move into the living room to curl up in a sun spot on the futon.

I spent the morning studying for the SUN Certified Solaris Administrator exam (CX-310-200) and Dominica got started right away on her System Analysis and Design homework. When she went to get started on that she discovered that her class ends this coming Friday and that she pretty much has to have all of her homework done this weekend! That was a bit of a surprise. It is a really good thing that she decided not to travel this weekend or she would be in a panic now. It is going to be a really busy weekend for her. It doesn’t help matters that she has her cold still as well.

I finally got around to fixing the email functionality at ScottAlanMiller.com so that it is possible to email now from there. Not that that site gets much traffic but I have gotten a few complaints and it didn’t look very polished not having it there. I need to get my XHTML CV completed as well so that it is more “searchable” and more user friendly.

One of the guys who works and lives in our building got us a fruit basket/arrangement from Edible Arrangements today! There is an Edible Arrangements in the building next door to us. We have had their stuff before and it is very good. It was really awesome of him to get this for us. We were quite surprised. One more reason that we are really glad that we didn’t leave town this weekend. That would have sucked. So for lunch today we had fruit. Lots of fruit. It was delicious.

Dominica ended up dedicating the entire day to her homework. She was incredibly productive. I got a chance to finally play DQ8 for a significant chunk of time. It has been a month or more since I have been able to even get a solid hour in. I actually managed to play for about three hours today!

I did the dishes today and cleaned the kitchen which is a much bigger job than it sounds and Dominica did the laundry. Today was extra productive which is amazing as we are both under the weather so much.

Weight Lost So Far: 25lbs

The Seattle Times reports on students in Essex County, NJ (that would be Newark) being unable to comprehend when to write like normal people and when to use instant messaging abbreviations. But then again what do you expect in a city with giant billboards announcing that most students never manage to earn a diploma who go through the Newark school system?

I woke up feeling like crap today. My cold is much worse today than it was yesterday. Now it is in full swing. I am really glad that I went to bed on the early side yesterday. I really needed it.

I discovered today that I can get Microsoft Office 2007 for use at home for free! It is part of Microsoft’s new licensing plan where employees of companies using specific volume licenses can use Office 2007 at home too. I do have to pay a very small amount for the shipping of the product but considering the cost of something like this that is very nominal. And no, this is not one of those pirated MS Office copies that people are always selling. This is ordered, completely legitimately, through Microsoft’s own website. I was aware of this licensing deal before but did not think about the fact that it probably applied to me where I work. It isn’t a cheap version of MS Office either, it is Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 which is the good one. In addition to MS Office I can get Visio and Project which is pretty cool too. Visio especially.

The music industry is threatening to organize and punish Prince for giving away his music. Doesn’t this count as extortion? Or are large industry conglomerates allowed to actively organize and “blackball” content owners who act totally legally? If anyone has ever wondered if the RIAA represents a monopoly, this is extremely telling. It is time to move the lawsuits from extortion to anti-trust, in my opinion.

Today was very busy and I worked pretty solidly until six thirty or so.  I headed for home.  Min and I were both pretty seriously under the weather so we decided that the night needed to consist of little beyond pizza and <em>Are You Being Served?</em>.  We ordered from Papa John’s and while we waited for that to arrive I played about forty minutes of Dragon Quest VIII which was just enough time for me to solve one small puzzle and get to a save point.  Maybe I will get to play a little more this weekend.  That is one of my goals.

We decided to go to bed quite early.  Oreo was so tired that he didn’t even ask for his dinner – even after a busy day at Doggie Paradise where he had to keep four boxers under control!  All he wanted to do tonight was snuggle.  As soon as we had gotten onto the loveseat Oreo looked at us being very sad.  We invited him up and he spent the rest of the evening squooshed between us but very contented.

We went to bed but just before we actually made it I got paged out and had to work for almost an hour before actually getting to go to bed.

Weight Lost So Far: 24lbs

Today was my work from home day and boy did I need it. It has been a long week. Oreo was really ready for me to stay home. He was so tired that last night he decided to just come home and go to bed – he didn’t even bother to eat his supper! That isn’t like him at all. But this morning when he got up he was definitely ready for his breakfast. He was a very hungry boy.

My day today was pretty busy and I didn’t manage to get any of the “relaxing at home” that often comes with the work from home days. Actually I had to use the opportunity to get more work done than usual because of the fewer distractions.

I went over with Abdul to Food for Life for lunch. It was really hot and muggy today. The air was thick and the breeze was not cooling at all. It was quite unpleasant being outside.

This afternoon I finally managed to get my SUN SunBlade 100 workstation hooked up for the first time since having moved to Newark. I have been meaning to get this hooked up for a while but there just hasn’t been any space to put it because it cannot share a keyboard with my main Linux workstation. So just the keyboard issue is a major space concern. Right now the SunBlade and the HP dx5150 are sharing a monitor but pretty soon I hope to move the SunBlade into the corner spot and get it a dedicated seventeen or nineteen inch monitor of its own.

Dominica went grocery shopping on her way home from work tonight. We are pretty much out of everything and Oreo and I are going to be home alone all weekend so we will be fending for ourselves (read: breakfast at Food for Life on Saturday for sure!)

I have a really bad cold – Acute viral nasopharyngitis – forming today. Dominica has had it for a day or too. I feel like crap.

It was another stormy night tonight with heavy rain, lightning and wind. We decided that it would be the perfect time to order in some Chinese take-away and just sit in watching <em>Are You Being Served?</em>. We tried ordering from a new place tonight and the food was awesome although they forgot our springrolls. We had more than enough food though. I got General Tso‘s bean curd. That was excellent. One of the best Chinese meals that I have had in a very long time.

I went to bed early in the hopes of fighting off this cold before it gets too bad. Dominica was going to go to Frankfort tomorrow but I found out that she has a milestone due for her college class by Sunday night and that means that there is no way for her to spend any time with her family this weekend and all that she will be able to do is drive for nine hours and be exhausted and spend all day Saturday working on homework. She will be very unhappy. She agreed and decided that there is no reasonable way for her to go back home this weekend. So we will both be in Newark all weekend although I am planning on making a run to Scranton at some point to deliver the DL360 G2 to the data center there.

Weight Lost So Far: 24lbs

I was reading Wil Wheaton today and he mentioned that you can read the award winning novelette “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” by Cory Doctorow for free online.

By the way, if you are interested in utility poles you can learn more from Christopher Joyce on NPR.

Since I have been playing Sid Meier’s Pirates! over the last few days I am getting a much better idea of where places in the Caribbean are in relation to each other. I think it is weird living so close to the Caribbean and having such a poor geographic picture in my head of where things are. One city that I really didn’t know was England‘s Port Royal on Jamaica. I had no idea that it was such a big, rich city during the famous Caribbean expansion years. But I did some research and feel better now knowing that the city no longer exists having been all but destroyed by a major earthquake in 1692. The city was built on a sand spit and in the earthquake the city’s foundation liquefied and flowed into the harbor!

[Most of my readers will be interested to discover that the most important sand spit in their area is Presque Isle in Erie, Pennsylvania.]

It is amazing to me how many nations or semi-sovereign entities exist in the Caribbean region and how much important European history happened there. I think, as an American, that the history of the Caribbean region gets mostly covered up and forgotten because of the much larger current impact of American history. We forget that for the first almost three hundred years of New World exploration and exploitation that the Caribbean was the hotspot and that we were the backwater. The United States has only been the dominant player for about the same amount of time since the decline of the Caribbean! Now there is some perspective.

I also find it strange the level of current European involvement in the Caribbean and the lack of American involvement. Sure the US has Puerto Rico which is practically a state and we have the US Virgin Islands which are considered to be very much a part of the mainstream US (unlike Guam or American Samoa which are widely forgotten in the American consciousness.)

There is a lot of important culture, history and politics in the Caribbean. It is one of the regions where the colonialism of the Age of Exploration can be most readily observed. Here in the United States or to the north in Canada or even in Mexico the post-colonial civilizations that have grown up there are so prevalent that the effects of the colonial age have all but vanished. As an American it is hard to imagine America ever having been a colony of a far away political power. We have come very far from that place in our history.

Researchers from the University of Bologna believe that they may finally have discovered the impact crater from the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia.

Today at work someone managed to run me into a hallway display while I was carrying my lunch. The impact caused the can of Nestle Enviga that I was carrying to rupture and spew forth its contents all over the hallway. It must have shot almost three meters! The incident was accidental but it highlights a pet peeve of mine that seems to be a big thing here in suburban New Jersey – people are completely devoid of any etiquette in hallways! Everyone walks side by side until they fill any lateral space around them and never make any alterations for “oncoming traffic”. People will just plow right into you even if you are alone and taking only fifteen percent of the hallway width and they are three or four people wide. All four people will look somewhere where they can claim that you are not in their peripheral vision long after they have clearly seen you and will just keep walking. And to make matters worse the cafeteria ignoring the behaviour of New Jersians puts annoying displays in the hallway where there is the most traffic. After having run me into the display and causing the hallway to be covered in sparking green tea not one person who caused the incident even turned around or acknowledged it in any way. Argh. At least it was pretty funny to see the green tea explode and spray all over. Too bad it was a $3 can of green tea!

It was almost time to go home this evening when I realized that it was Wednesday and not Tuesday!! My week is, apparently, just flying by. It was six o’clock before I had even realized.

Dominica didn’t get home as early as she had hoped because she witnessed a fender bender in Wallington. She called and I wasn’t up to the Garden State Parkway yet so we decided to meet in Clifton at Chipotle Grill for some dinner. Traffic was awful and it took me forever to get there.

We ate dinner but couldn’t linger as Oreo was in the car and was way too warm. I had to run out before Dominica was done eating and run the air conditioning to keep him cool. Once we cooled him down enough we ran into Game Stop and did some shopping. Dominica found the original Guitar Hero which neither of her siblings have and of course had to pick it up. She is loving the second one and we think that the first one has a better song line up. We also grabbed Suikoden III for the PS2. I had Suikoden I or II (I really can’t remember or figure out where it is stored) for the PSX back in the late 90s and Andy and I used to play it when we lived Greece. We also got the Sega Collection for the PSP which was cheap and is loaded with twenty-eight class Sega Genesis games. And, last but certainly not least, I finally found the Space Quest collection (all six games) for Windows XP. (Technically they are the original DOS games packaged with a built in emulator but whatever – it isn’t like I can buy the DOS versions these days anyway.) That was only $10 for six games that I have wanted for years! Now if I can just get a chance to play them.

It was eight by the time that we finally got home. Dominica did the dishes and sat down to play some Guitar Hero I. I am working from home tomorrow so I get to relax a little tonight but I have to work extra early tomorrow so that I can coordinate with a team in Bahrain so I won’t get a chance to hit the gym in the morning.

By around nine o’clock the wind had really picked up and it looked like there was a storm rolling in. We could see the occassional flashes like there might be lightning getting close.

Weight Lost So Far: 24lbs

On this day in 1284 A.D. one hundred and thirty children born in the city of Hameln, Germany were lead out of the town by a piper dressed in fancy colours and were never seen again. Seven hundred and twenty three years later we are still wondering what happened to the children.

Anno 1284 am dage Johannis et Pauli war der 26. junii Dorch einen piper mit allerlei farve bekledet gewesen XXX kinder verledet binnen Hamelen gebo[re]n to calvarie bi den koppen verloren.

The University of Pittsburgh maintains a page with literary tellings of related tales from nearby villages. The Pied Piper was known as an historical event until the Brothers Grimm made the tale famous in the early nineteenth century. Later Robert Browning made the event even more famous in his poem “Pied Piper of Hamelin“.

In my “Forgotten English” calendar for today is the word chimble. It is roughly “to break into small pieces as would a mouse.” Another form of the same word was chibble. Small bits could be known as chimbling or chibbling. It is obvious that this is the root or shares a root with the modern work kibble.

This morning I discovered that I didn’t know my own strength when while attempting to separate a yogurt from the group in the fridge I accidentally tore the entire container of yogurt in half. What a mess that was. Dannon definitely messed up and failed to perforate the top of the yogurt containers making them nearly impossible to separate. I was unable to separate the destroyed yogurt container bits from its neighbouring containers even after the disaster.

Yesterday I started reading the book Self Service Linux: Mastering the Art of Problem Determination which is available in print at your favorite bookstore or you can read it online for free as a PDF.

Today was a really busy day at work. I got into the office and there was already a ton of stuff going on. And they kept me hopping right up until lunch. I decided that I needed lunch today. I needed energy to get me through the afternoon.

Dominica got out of work today around four in the afternoon – an hour and a half early – because her building lost power and they do not have backup power systems to allow them to keep working like we do. So she got to go home and already had picked up Oreo by twenty after four when she called me.  I left work just after five so that I could spend some extra time with her.

I did some additional work on the new server that I have been working on.  Dominica cooked dinner and we watched the final three episodes of <em>Angel</em>.  I’m not really sure what I thought of the ending of the series.  The series started off very light and happy but the last two seasons went rapidly downhill into a spiral of bizarre story twists and just got darker and darker.  I feel that the show lost direction in addition to cast.  In the end I think that the final “battle” had some really good stuff but for the most part was just blah and tacked on.

I played a little Pirates! and went to bed early.

Weight Lost So Far: 20lbs