Sheep Guarding Llama

Before going to bed last night I managed to get Jabber/XMPP instant messaging working on the Treo 700p which is very exciting. That was the last major thing that I really needed in order to have full functionality on it. I can do just about anything from my handheld now. It is devices like these that will really play a major role in issuing in an era of persistent communications. You can see where we are headed when you use a device like this – several significant forms of communications (legacy telephony, SMS (i.e. paging), email, VoIP, instant messaging, Internet radio, web, subscription audio, etc.) all bundled into a single, portable, easy to use package.

Just for Raymond Chen at Microsoft, shopautodotca seocontest.

While I was in bed I was playing with the Treo and figured out that there was Internet Radio from RadioIO already ready to go on the phone and so I checked that out. That was incredibly easy and I discovered that I really like RadioIO. I really like the idea of portable Internet radio. Internet radio on my desktop is nice and I appreciate that a lot of people like that as an alternative to traditional radio but I don’t like to listen to either when I am sitting at my desk except for extremely rare occasions. But when driving, walking, resting, traveling, etc. I do like to listen to the radio sometimes but I don’t really like traditional radio much because the selection is awful, the DJs are annoying and when traveling either you can’t get any radio or it keeps going in and out. But with Internet radio on my Verizon powered Treo I get the best of everything. Very cool. It is like satellite radio except cheaper (free) and with a gigantic selection instead of just a few hundred channels each playing the same ten songs over and over again.

What I don’t have working yet but hope to have soon is an RSS/Podcast aggregator so that I can easily pull down podcasts that I want to listen to like the Daily Breakfast, InfoWorld and IT Conversations. One thing at a time. Having Audible and Internet Radio will get me through the weekend, I guess. Having RSS for reading the news would be handy too but that isn’t nearly as important for me. I spend very little time reading the news (whether Google/Yahoo News, OSNews, eWeek or LinuxToday) when I am away from the office because their isn’t enough to keep me occupied there.

It occurred to me today that I have been online for thirteen years (my first real Internet connection was at university in 1994.) I got my first home Internet access (other than logging into SUNY Geneseo’s VMS server a few times in 1996) which was dial-up through MSN in 1997. I got persistent “always-on” dial-up through AltaVista in 1998 and occasionally used an AOL dial-up line from Nicklin Associates in 2000 or so. I got my first real “broadband” connection from Time-Warner in 2000 and have been on high speed ever since then having used everything you can imagine from wireless to ADSL and SDSL to Cable.

Today was a moderately busy day at work. Like most Fridays the morning is slow and there is late work to be done once the market has closed. Nothing unusual.

I left work just after five thirty and raced home to do some late work before Dominica and I will be leaving for Frankfort.  There is a big storm coming tonight and we want to get out of Newark as early as possible in the hopes of hitting it as little as possible.  We will be in Frankfort all weekend.  We are taking the BMW as Francesca and the girls have not seen it yet.

Weight Lost So Far: 18lbs

I slept in until seven this morning because I was quite tired from having gone to the gym very late last night. I went to the gym and did a short forty minute workout before having to run back to the apartment to do some early eight o’clock work that has been scheduled all week.

My morning was quite busy. I worked very solidly until at least ten if not quite a bit later. Oreo had me taken him on a morning walk around eleven which is when I passed by the front desk and discovered that my new Verizon Palm Treo 700p had arrived. So I was able to take that up to the apartment and get it set up.

The Treo 700p is really cool and I think that I am going to be really happy with it. It looks much larger in pictures than it actually is. It is quite small, in fact. It has a 320×320 (.1 megapixel) screen as opposed to the 240×240 (.05 megapixel screen) that comes on the equivalent Windows Mobile based model, the 700w and the 700wx. It didn’t take me long to get the Palm software loaded onto our Windows XP SP2 machine and got the Treo syncing to the desktop.

Once the Treo was syncing to the desktop I was able to start loading some additional software onto it. The first thing that I needed was VersaMail which is Palm’s included email client to compete with Outlook Mobile. In my opinion, VersaMail is far superiour to Outlook. I had Outlook on my Motorola Q and on my HP iPaq and it is not a pleasure to use at all. But VersaMail is much easier to set up, works much more easily with Zimbra’s security features and is easier to navigate and control. In addition, VersaMail is able to delete mail off of the server which Outlook would fail to accomplish on my Q.

A couple of surprise features of the Treo that I was not planning on when I first bought it were PalmOS versions of Audible and Google Maps. These are two of the most exciting applications on the platform. As my readers know, I am a huge fan of Audible and now I am going to be able to take my Audible library with me anywhere that I go without having to download loads of books ahead of time. There is a complete Audible player and manager that ships with the Treo. All I had to do was load the application from the Audible.com web site, plug in my username and password and I had instant access to my personal book library online that I can listen to anytime, anywhere. Awesome! That was worth the price of the Treo right there.

I also navigated in the web browser to see what would happen when I attempted to go to Google Maps – one of my favourite places to go online. And amazingly Google makes a Google Maps application specifically for the Treo. It is free and I was able to download it and have it working in no time at all. It works almost as well as the regular desktop version does! It is wonderful. It even gives you the satellite views and traffic information.

One of my biggest complaints about the Motorola Q was the lack of a working SSH client. PocketPutty is available for it but there are critical usability features missing and it might as well be nothing more than a toy. I was told by a friend that TuSSH was available and worked well for the Treo so I decided to give the Treo a try in the first place because SSH is a major factor for me in any remote access device. I use SSH so much that I happily downloaded and installed both TuSSH and pSSH so that I would have options and flexibility. As it turns out I think that both are going to work although I know for sure that pSSH meets my needs. Yay!

I found other applications that I am working on but haven’t ironed out the kinks with yet such as a Jabber/XMPP client that would give me access to my instant messaging.  That is my next thing to work on.  But quite quickly the Treo 700p is turning into a very useful device indeed.  Another thing that I really was impressed by was how easily VersaMail allowed me to connect to my backup GMail account from Google and use it just as easily as my regular mail.  Now my Treo has my regular mail as well as a backup account “just in case”.  And it gives me the ability to do email testing all from this one device.

The Treo does all the regular stuff that you would expect, of course, like calendaring, task lists, a calculator, some simple games (which I did not install but they are available on the expansion CD that came with the unit,) and it has the regular extra hardware features like voice recording, a built in still and video camera and a speaker so that you can listen to things without having to hold it to your ear or have headphones.

One thing that I have not had a chance to try yet but looks like it will be awesome is VZAccess which is Verizon’s Internet access software.  On my Motorola Q the ability to use the Q as a high-speed Internet “modem” was disabled making the unit nothing more than an expensive stand-alone email device.  But the Treo comes packaged with the connection software that would appear to allow the unit to be used as a modem easily so that we will have a backup should our cable go down and I can use my laptop on the road!  I have not tested this yet so don’t get too excited as this is a feature that people have been looking for for a long time.  But the software is all there and I will try it out very soon.  This is a very major feature if it is actually available.  I am quite excited about it.

Dominica came home and decided that she wanted a Treo as well.  We will see.  Her account with Verizon is up for renewal in January, 2008 so we have a little while to think about it and see if it is something that she will really use.

Tonight is our night to pack and get ready to go out of town for the weekend.  We have nothing in particular planned for tonight.  Just cooking some cabbage lasagna, packing and hitting the gym.  We had been hoping to have been assembling my new desk this evening but it did not arrive as scheduled.  It was supposed to only take one to three days to arrive and today is the third business day (it was ordered on Sunday so Monday was the first day) and it has not arrived yet.  We hope to have it tomorrow so that at least we know that it is here.

Weight Lost So Far: 18.5lbs

In blogging news, blog software company SixApart has promised to move its premier product – Movable Type – into open source by the end of the third quarter this year placing it squarely up against open source blog software leader WordPress (which you are seeing at work right now.) I plan to stick with WP, though. I love the platform.

The RIAA, the recording industry litigation arm that likes to sue old ladies and children and drop the lawsuits and walk away once they know that they have lost leaving the “victorious” defendants destitute from heavy legal fees, has been sued today in Tampa, Florida for extortion, conspiracy, trespass, computer fraud and deceptive trade practices!

The Ballmer party in Redmond has egg on their faces again as they award a Most Valuable Professional award to a man and then proceed to harass him via their lawyers for making the software that they were so happy that he made! The issue is so intense that Microsoft is completely unwilling to even tell their MVP what he has done wrong. Apparently Microsoft is claiming that using APIs published on their own website is illegal. Maybe using Microsoft software is just illegal in general. Who knows. Maybe Steve Ballmer knows.

What is the most troubling is that given the horrible behavious, vicious lies and bullying attitude of Ballmer that presidential hopeful McCain wants him placed in the cabinet! This one horrendous point alone is enough for me to vote Democrat (a first for me indeed) should McCain (whom I previously supported) become the Republican candidate for president. Ballmer is known far and wide as being the most intensely evil, out of touch and totally into his own self interest person in the entire IT field (now that management “hacker” Patricia Dunn is done.)

I slept in a little more than usual this morning. After working out so much last night I was pretty tired and wanted a chance for my muscles to heal. So I took the morning off from working out but will definitely go tonight. Also tonight Dominica and I have a small party in the 1180 Resident’s Lounge to celebrate the new wireless Internet access that we have in the building. It has actually been on for a few days but today is the official launch. It would appear, however, that it does not support SIP so its usefulness is severely diminished unless there is some trick that I haven’t figured out. My Linksys/Cisco iPhone connected instantly to the network and was able to ping the SIP server (TrixBox) but was unable to connect to it over SIP so I am pretty sure that SIP is blocked. That “event” is from six to eight tonight. So we will just be able to make it for the end since we have a really hard time getting home before seven.

I had to work from home this morning for about an hour and didn’t get a chance to head to the office until nine. But once I got to the office things were much slower than they have been the last few days and I finally got a chance to do a little catching up. Today is one of those days when I wish that I had a lot more tech news to read to keep myself busy. I would do some extra work but I broke my SSL proxy yesterday and didn’t realize it until this morning and it is too late to fix now until tonight 🙁

Popular search engine terms sending people to SGL include Rockstar Guava, Llama Pirates, Zimbra and Llamas Doing Crazy Things. I guess, in some small way, Sheep Guarding Llama is an authority on all of those things. Certainly Llama Pirates if nothing else. Ay. Shiver me quinoa fields.

By tomorrow I will have tons of people coming here looking for the Apple iPhone only to find that I own the Cisco iPhone. Boy will they be disappointed. I am not, though. I think that the Cisco iPhone is probably more useful that Apple’s version although Apple’s version looks pretty cool.

Today I ordered my Nature’s Best IsoPure Zero Carb protein drink powders. My SlimFast that I have had around since before I started on my recent diet are just about to run out and I need to get something else right away. I am actually out of SlimFast at the apartment and have about half a block of them in my desk drawer at the office. I am hopefully that moving from SlimFast which contains carbs and even sugars to the IsoPure will prove an additional boost in my weight loss as I shift again to an even leaner carb intake and higher protein levels.

I left work just before six – it was another full day for me.  What a long week it has been.  Tomorrow is doggie-daddy day though.  Oreo and I are really looking forward to that.

I got home just seconds after Dominica and we went pretty much straight to the Spot On Wireless Wind and Cheese party in the resident lounge to “celebrate” 1180 Raymond’s new free wireless Internet access.  It isn’t for the whole building – just for the common areas.  You still have to buy normal Internet for your apartment.  But this means that we can easily use laptops, PDAs and more in the lounge, billiards room, conference area, health club, bowling alley, basketball area, video game and television lounge and lobby.  Very useful for the people who use those areas very much and a lot of people do.  It isn’t a groundbreaking amenity but I think that I will use it quite a bit.  I am very glad that they added it.  I took my HP iPaq handheld WiFi PDA with me and was able to sign right on to the service.  Considering how much time I spend in the gym this will prove, I believe, to be very handy.

We hung out at the party until they wrapped up at eight o’clock.  I expected more people to show up but it wasn’t a bad turn out.  The cheese was very good.  There was some left over and we got to take the leftovers home with us.

After the party it was a short evening.  We watched a little <em>Father Ted</em> and I did some work.  Dominica took the night off as it was short and she is finally caught up with her homework although this weekend is going to be really tough for her to do any since we will be in Frankfort the whole time.

At eleven I went down to the gym for my evening workout.

Weight Lost So Far: 18lbs.

So British citizens and expatriates everywhere are horrible embarrassed now that the new logo for the 2012 London Olympics has been seen on the events official website. Wow is that bad. How can the UK allow that to happen?

There was a good article in the Canadian National Post today on “The Six Days That Changed the Arab World Forever” discussing the history and ramifications of 1967’s Six Day War. Well written and a good introduction to the pivotal war for those not well versed in Palestinian history. The Six Day War is one of the most important military conflicts of the age and completely defines the modern Middle East.

The UK Guardian had a good article covering the basic history of the ETA – the Basque separatist army which has just ended its fourteen month ceasefire with Spain. I find the ongoing ETA vs. Spain skirmish to be extra interesting since I read the lengthy “The Basque History of the World” in 2005.

I went to the gym late last night, around half past ten but only did about half an hour because it was so late. I didn’t want to skip my workout completely though. Dominica did not go down. I was really tired this morning and didn’t get out of bed until around half past six which probably had more to do with Oreo being snuggly than actually being sleepy.

I wasn’t able to leave for work nearly as early as I had hoped today as I got contacted at half past seven that work needed to be done at eight so I had to log in from home and work from home for an hour before going into the office. That is never a good sign. Work ended up being extremely busy again and I barely got a moment to myself all morning.

This weekend Dominica and I are traveling up to Frankfort to visit for the weekend. We have a baptism to attend and Francesca and the girls arrived a few days ago. Next weekend, we believe, the Ralstons are coming down here to visit. And I just found out that Craig might be coming down the weekend after that. We were supposed to go back home next weekend and then the weekend after that so we might have to adjust our schedule yet again. And I am sure that Dominica will want to get back to Frankfort again soon to visit with Francesca. Maybe she can go there by train on the same weekend that I go back to Pavilion. Scheduling stuff is so much fun.

We had a little outage this afternoon from about three thirty until four thirty. No idea what happened. But everything was down and then everything came back on its own. I am pretty sure that the datacenter has these little outages and then lies about them acting like nothing happened. It happens fairly often.

I have had a chance to look at the reports coming from my WordPress stats page and one of the most interesting things is how people are getting directed to the site and what pages are being read.  The searches that bring people here are generally quite strange.  People must be pretty surprised when they get here.  So far the biggest thing sending people to SGL is a softdrink review search engine sending people here for my reviews of Rockstar Guava!  Of all things.

On her way home Dominica stopped off and did some grocery shopping.  She found some Crystal Light sugar free electrolyte replacement drink mix that I can use in my drinking water at work to make sure that I am not depleting my electrolytes with all of the water that I am drinking.  I have been beginning to get light headed just a little and I am pretty sure that I am running out of non-sodium salts.  I drink tons of water and sweat hard for about two hours each day which moves salt through the body quite rapidly.

I finished reading “Questioning Extreme Programming” this afternoon. I have been working on that book for a little while now. I have been anxious to get through it. It wasn’t long but for some reason I wasn’t progressing very quickly.

Dominica spent the evening working on her homework for Systems Analysis and Design after cooking dinner (veggie pizza burgers with cheese.)  She managed to finally wrap up her homework from last week and get it submitted.  She is now caught up.  It took her all night though and she did not end up with enough time to be able to go to the gym.

I spent the evening working on some Zimbra administration and doing some Ruby programming.  I finally made a breakthrough in the little program that I have been working on.  I am really enjoying working in Ruby.  It is fun and fast and easy to express yourself in.  Perfect for casual programmers like me.

Unlike Dominica I did get a chance to go down to the health club this evening and put in a pretty serious workout.  I actually did a pretty hard workout for seventy minutes!  It was half past eleven by the time that I returned to the apartment.  The workout felt great.  I am continuing to lose weight and it is starting to show.  I am able to feel the weight loss at this point and can tell that my clothes are fitting differently.  I am dramatically in the lead at the office.  There appears to only be one person giving me any competition at all and I think that I have about a fifty percent lead on him in percentage of body weight lost so far so that gives me a lot of cushion (no pun intended.)  A number of people claim that they haven’t started left and that there is plenty of time yet to catch up although we are about twenty-two days through ninety-one which is a pretty major percentage.  We are roughly one quarter of the way through and at least two people have managed to gain weight in the competition and one person has given up!  If you subtract the one that gave up the first day that leaves only five people in the running.

Weight Lost So Far: 16lbs

Today is my father’s birthday! Happy birthday to Thomas Alan Miller!

Even though we got to bed quite late last night I was naturally awake by three forty-five this morning! I lay in bed for just a little while and decided to get out of bed and get moving on the day by a quarter past four or so. I always have more than enough that needs to be done so it isn’t like getting up early means that I will be bored.

I took the opportunity to finally shave my head which I have been needing to do for quite some time now. I have been letting my hair get pretty shaggy which really does not work now that I am so bald. So I did that and took a shower to get the loose hair off of me. By the time that I was done with all that it was a little after five.

I went down to the health club and worked out for an hour. It was a really good workout this morning. I felt great doing it and really pushed for the entire hour. I burned about seven hundred and fifty calories according to the elliptical machine! That is a good way to start the day.

I ran up to the apartment and showered quickly and was only barely in Dominica’s way as she started to get ready for work. I fed Oreo his breakfast and was off to work before seven thirty. After a productive weekend we are off to a good start on the week.

Dominica called me shortly after I had gotten to work to tell me that she had discovered that someone had been joyriding in the BMW over the weekend. We don’t know much but we know that the top was taken down and the dog’s seat was moved in the back (presumably to make room for more people.) So we can hypothesize that three people went driving with the top down at some point over the weekend. We know this because the pillow that we use for his seat in that car was not put back into position (so whoever it was had no concern for getting caught) and the pillow was left in a dangerous position and was caught in the roof mechanism when they put it back down. So we were really lucky that there was not any damage to the car. Now it is somewhat possible that the top was taken down and the car was used just to transport a couple of people between 1180 Raymond and the parking garage which is not a big deal (except that we had asked them not to operate the roof anymore after having left it halfway up TWICE and totally draining the battery TWICE) but undoing the dog’s seat and leaving it undone and then getting it caught in the roof is pretty much. Dominica had to take extra time this morning while trying to get to work just getting Oreo’s seat re-attached to the car and ready for him. The problems are never going to end!

Before switching over to WordPress 2.2 my Akismet Blog Spam (Blam) filter listed itself as having caught over 18,000 pieces of blog spam. Just over the past weekend Akismet is listing as having caught 1,800! The pace appears to be picking up.

Now here is an interesting article about transferring heat energy into electricity! What an awesome project. In the article they mention that they are so confident about the technology that they feel that it will be displacing photo-voltaic cells in solar panels in two years. This could potentially be a big breakthrough in power conservation.

Today was totally crazy at work. I am really glad that I had a really productive weekend because that helps keep me calm and relaxed. It is also good that I was up early this morning because I had plenty of time to get to work very early and knock out a lot of stuff before things got really crazy. I had pretty much no chance to just stop and sit still for a minute all day long. We have a lot of people out of the office this week and those of us that are left have rather a heavy load to deal with.

I figured out today that I am drinking around three gallons of water a day! I had no idea that I was drinking that much. It didn’t occur to me as being possible until Dominica bought herself a .75 gallon drinking container and is trying to go through two of them a day. I drink so much more than her that I decided to measure out the containers that I drink from all day and they are much larger than I had realized. I go through about 1.5 – 2.0 liters of water before leaving the apartment in the morning mostly due to going to the gym. Then at work I drink about 4 – 6 liters every day while sitting at my desk. Then at home I drink several liters are least before going to bed and if I go to the gym at night I drink at least half a liter more if not an entire liter. It is a LOT of water. I am worried that I might be getting electrolyte depletion so Dominica is going to look to see if she can find a supplement for me to add to my water to replenish some of my body’s lost salts.

I was planning on leaving the office a little after four today as I had been in so early but I ended up getting stuck on a production call from just after two until around five! What a crazy day. I was pretty worn out by the end of it all. Dominica must have had a really busy day as well as she was unable to email me pretty much all day.

I ended up not being able to leave the office until after six. I actually topped a ten hour day! I did finally get around to calling Verizon and getting my mobile phone changed. I am doing an early upgrade and melding my old Motorola Q line and my regular mobile line that has been on an LG VX8100 into a single combined voice and data plan on a Palm Treo 700p. I choose the 700p which uses PalmOS instead of Windows Mobile because everyone that I have talked to with the PalmOS version was really happy with it, the Q was not very useful with Windows and because the screen resolution on the 700p is more than double the resolution of the 700wx. PalmOS is also supposed to have much better SSH software compared to the Windows versions. I tried the only SSH that I could find on Windows and it did not work at all. People tell me that it works on their Palm machines. We will see. I will be happy to have a single device that I can use for everything.

As always, Verizon’s national call center was extremely helpful and got me into the phone/PDA that I wanted and got me into a cost saving combined voice and data plan.  They also, once again, managed to get me into an upgraded phone before be actual plan time was up which has saved me a couple of times now!  I should have my new Palm Treo 700p on Thursday.

Weight Lost So Far: 13.5 lbs