Sheep Guarding Llama

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

For some reason both Dominica and I were really exhausted and slept in late this morning. Oreo had a rough night. We think that he had a tummy-ache from having eaten too much right before going to bed and he slept mostly on the floor or at our feet most of the night. That kept waking me up.

We got up and worked on Dominica’s homework for a while and then went down to the gym. I only did forty-five minutes this morning but at least I am back into the swing. But then I got a blister on my little toe so that is going to be a problem.

Today was another very productive day here in Newark. I had a laundry list of tasks for this weekend and I managed to get through almost all of them by this afternoon. Including getting our final office desk ordered for our apartment here in Newark. We continue to be really happy with OfficeMAX selection, prices and customer service. They are definitely the best of the office supply companies.

I did a ton of web site maintenance this evening while Dominica worked on her homework.  It was extremely productive.  I am very excited to see how Google Analytics is going to work out.  It looks like a really amazing service.

I decided to skip the gym this evening as I have a blister on my pinky toe that really hurts and will just get worse if I work out tonight.  We ended up staying up until after midnight anyway.  What a long day it was.

Big rain storm tonight.  Unbelievable wind and rain.

Weight Lost So Far: 14.5lbs (Over One Stone!)

In order to truly think outside the box one must cease to think about the box.

I ended up staying up until two in the morning last night working on some IPSec VPN links that were down and doing some basic desktop maintenance. Nothing exciting but I didn’t get to bed at a very reasonable time. Although when I did go to bed I couldn’t fall asleep for a while as I wasn’t very tired yet. I guess that is what happens when you sleep all day.

I slept in until ten this morning which didn’t quite give me eight hours of sleep so I can only feel so bad about it. Today is Dominica’s big homework day so I am planning on keepin myself entertained doing miscellaneous work at my desk. It is so much more pleasent to work at my commercial quality Bush desk (made in Jamestown, New York for quality.) Bush furniture is not quite as sturdy as the stuff that we have at my daytime office but it is more comfortable, has a much better work surface (the specled kind that works so well with an optical mouse) and can stand alone on the floor instead of having to be built into a cubical system. Bush is the best home office furniture that I have ever found.

Our living room is now completely full to the point that it is difficult to walk around. Adding two very large desks to the room displaced everything that we had in here previously and now there is no space at all. We can’t wait until we are able to take a carload or two of stuff out of here. Over the next several weeks we will be moving a ton of stuff out. But until then the space is impossible to work in. We are very hopeful that at least one desk will be leaving here today. Just moving the one out will make a huge impact. Right now we can’t get to the lamp or the HVAC unit at all and Oreo can barely get to the futon where he is attempting to spend the morning laying in the sun and hanging out with us as we work at our desks. It is nice that the futon is now positioned to make it a perfect spot for Oreo when we are working. He is right next to us, in the sun, in the “office area” instead of having to be over in the “living room area” where he couldn’t really be with us. We are very happy with the new room layout.

Today is both my cousin Monica’s eighteenth birthday as well as my official college graduation ceremony for Empire State College at Riverside Convention Center in Rochester, New York. Obviously I am not going to graduation – I skipped my graduation ceremony for my associates degree from Monroe Community College as well. I would have skipped my high school graduation had my parents let me. But still, it is strange to think of there being a graduation ceremony for me graduating from college after all these years.

Dominica spent the day working on her homework and doing laundry. I had a number of projects to work on and kept myself quite busy. One of my projects for the day update SGL to WordPress 2.2. I also added WordPress Statistics to the site so that I can find out more about who is coming to the site. I also started using Google Analytics for one of my other sites so that I can learn about that service.

At six Dominica and I went to dinner over at Food for Life. I finally convinced Dominica to decide on what she wanted ahead of time and to call over so that we could eat quickly. It took less than half an hour to go over, sit, eat, pay and return to 1180. That is like record time for the two of us. I get food and get back in fifteen to twenty minutes all the time on my own.

At seven thirty we went down to the lounge for a birthday party that was scheduled for seven but we were the first people there (at all except for the caterer) so we came back up and hung out with Oreo a little longer before going back down at eight. It was a really nice party and we got to meet a lot of people that we didn’t know. We stayed until around eleven which was as late as we felt we could leave Oreo by himself in the apartment. We were there just late enough to get birthday cake before leaving.

It was straight to bed for us when we arrived back home.

Weight Lost So Far: 14.5lbs