Sheep Guarding Llama

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

We tried going to bed around eleven last night but we weren’t tired so I played Pirates! for about an hour on the PSP before attempting to fall asleep. I made it up to the level of Colonel for both England and France before I was done. Not bad for my first day playing the game.

I was barely able to get any sleep last night. I was rather restless and Oreo was incredibly restless. He got up several times and paced around the room. He probably had a tummy ache. Eventually he fell asleep on my chest which pretty much kept me from having any shot at really falling asleep. (I found a Boston Terrier named Oreo who lives in Singapore but looks just like our Oreo.)

Oreo then got me up (and Min too) at four in the morning because he had an emergency and needed to be taken outside ASAP. So, since I was up dealing with him, I decided that I would just get up and get ready for work. There wasn’t really enough time for me to fall back asleep anyway even if I could.

I am working the early shift today to cover for someone who called me on Friday to ask if I could help out this morning. So I got into the office at half past six and ended up working pretty hard all morning. Normally Monday mornings are slow and quiet but not today. This may prove to be a long week.

Today I discovered Office Space Recut on YouTube. There is a new edition of Mary Poppins as well. How about The Sound of Music? Or even When Harry Met Sally.

I have decided that SGL has far to few links to interesting content so I have starting linking things more to liven things up a bit. I went back over several days and added quite a few this morning.

I have been away from my regular RSS feeds so today I am trying to catch up. Scott Adams had a great blog post on The Fear of Fish. Even if you don’t read Scott’s blog you need to check the original article Florida’s Flying Fish Can Knock You Out.

I put in a good long day and left the office at three thirty. The best part about working extremely early is getting to miss all of the rush hour traffic. That makes the whole day so much shorter.

I got home and ended up having to work from home until six thirty.  So I ended up having a twelve hour day.  I was still working when Dominica got home from work with Oreo.

I spent about half of the evening working on a Windows 2003 R2 Server that I want to take to Scranton this weekend.  I did the HP utilities installation tonight which took a while.  I really like a lot of the utilities that HP is beginning to include with their servers.  Web based interfaces to the hardware support APIs are really cool.

The other half of my night was spent playing Sid Meier’s Pirates! on the PSP.  The one thing that is really crappy about the PSP is that it has a stuck pixel and it had it right out of the box.  But other than that I am really happy with it so far.  It doesn’t load games nearly as quickly as the Nintendo DS and that gets to be pretty annoying in the middle of game play but the “saves” to the memory stick are lightning fast.  I managed to run the battery down today and discovered that after the unit dies and you charge it again that it will return right to the moment that you left off!  That is a really awesome feature.

I ended up having to go outside and deal with an issue that ate up a lot of my evening.  We have a local guy who comes to the building quite often looking for me and it is beginning to cause a problem because he refuses to leave the lobby and just hangs out even when I am not in the building.  So I had to go deal with it tonight.

Tomorrow I am back on the normal schedule.  Today was just a fluke for timing.

My weight loss is very “high” today because of water retention from the weekend.  I expect to be back on to normal numbers by tomorrow.

Weight Loss So Far: 17.5lbs

Dominica and I were up nice and early this morning. Oreo had gotten up before we did and we were concerned that he might need to make an emergency trip outside so we both got dressed and took him out. Then Dominica walked him back to 1180 and I walked over to Dunkin Donuts – just like Art and Danielle did exactly one week ago – to get donuts and bagels for everyone for breakfast.

The Toccos were on the road around ten thirty to head back to Frankfort. Dominica and I decided that we were going to go out and do a little video game shopping this afternoon. It took about an hour before we were actually able to get out of the apartment. We drove up to Clifton and went to Game Stop. Min got herself Guitar Hero II for the Playstation 2 which she has been wanting for a while and she got the Game Stop brand wireless Guitar Hero Flying V guitar controller. I got the Playstation Portable (PSP) along with Sid Meier’s Pirates! for me and Diner Dash for Dominica. We also got Kingdom of Paradise because it was used and really cheap. I have never even played a PSP before so we will have to see how we like it.

We grabbed and quick and cheap lunch at Wendy’s right there in Clifton and then it was time to head back home. While we were at Wendy’s we learned that Wendy’s will start serving breakfast soon. It sounded good.

We got home and immediately Dominica was playing Guitar Hero II. She is in a rush to catch up with her siblings who have been playing the game for a while now.

Yesterday I took my Nikon D50 camera with me into the city and got lots of pictures although mostly I didn’t manage to get many until we were back here in Newark. But today I got them uploaded to Flickr.

I did some work on the DL360 G2 that I hope to deliver to Scranton this coming weekend and I played quite a bit of Sid Meier’s Pirates! on the PSP. I am really glad that I decided to pick up that game. It is not the type of thing that I normally pull off of the shelf to buy but I saw some good reviews and decided that it was worth the risk. But Pirates! is totally one of those games that I really enjoy – it is just like Uncharted Waters 2: New Horizons that I loved on the SNES. Apparently Sid Meier made Pirates! back in the 1980s and the game that I have is a remake of that one.

I have to work very early tomorrow morning so we are not staying up late tonight. We ordered in a Sicilian pizza from Nino’s in Harrison and ate that while watching an episode of <em>Are You Being Served?</em> and then it was time for bed.

Dominica managed to get a lot of homework done today and she is caught up at this point. She also got a lot of laundry done as well. We opened up the apartment today as it wasn’t to warm to give it a chance to air out as once summer really gets into swing we will be on air conditioning pretty much solid until September.