Sheep Guarding Llama

I actually beat Dominica home from work last night by a few minutes. She got home and I hopped into the BMW and she drove up to Clifton to do a little shopping and to get dinner. We ate at the Shannon Rose which is a new Irish Pub style bar and grill up there. The food was excellent – we both got fish and chips. And the service was good. But they had the radio cranked so loud that we couldn’t talk to each other and the food took forever. I doubt that we will be going back. It is just too expensive to eat in those places if everything isn’t perfect.

After dinner we did some quick shopping at Target. Today just happened to be the release day for new DVDs and today The Drew Carey Show and WKRP in Cincinnati both came out in their first seasons on DVD. So we grabbed those. Target is also having a special promotion with the food network and they are selling some really good programming for just ten dollars if you can find any. We found that everything except Rachel Ray is sold out.

We came home and watched the pilot of WKRP and were off to bed. I listened to some older SGL Podcasts from Disney World for about an hour before falling asleep. Oreo was completely exhausted. At daycare today they said that he found a sunspot on the floor and just layed down and slept for half the day. He has never layed down at daycare before. He must really be tired. But he had a full five day at daycare week last week and the week before and then we took him out walking on last Saturday and this Sunday so he really got some exercise before going right back to daycare. It was like putting in two six day work weeks in a row. And the one Saturday that he got at home I wasn’t home so he probably didn’t sleep as well as normal as he was worried about why I wasn’t home on a weekend day.

I was up and at’em this morning. I was awake around four twenty but decided to stay in bed and continue to recharge. Then I pulled myself out of bed at six thirty and went right down to the gym and worked out for a little over half an hour. Instead of watching television I have been listening to SGL in Disney World to brush up on what we liked and didn’t like while we were there. It is really cool being able to go back and listen to that stuff. I am really glad that we did that. While I was gone Dominica got up and took her shower. She doesn’t have to leave so early today as Oreo has a nine o’clock doctor’s appointment in Rutherford for his blood work. So he is enjoying a lazy morning. I can tell this morning that he is still very tired. He will be very happy when he learns that he gets to stay home this Thursday with me.

Traffic was bad going into the office again this morning. Not nearly as bad as it was yesterday but still not the way that it should be. And, once again, there was no reason why it was slow. Just a region of really slow moving traffic and then nothing.

I am a lot less tired today than I have been the last week or so. I guess that I am starting to catch up a little on my sleep. And getting to the gym got my blood pumping this morning so that probably helped too. I really hope that I manage to keep getting up early and getting out to the gym. That is a great way to start the day. I don’t want to fall back to getting up late this week since I am doing the early shift next week again. Switching back and forth isn’t really good for me so best not to do that.

Dad was able to get a new battery into the Mazda 6 in Geneseo today and he said that the car ran great. That is a relief. It has been sitting for a long time. Close to eight months I think.

Today was pretty slow. I have a backlog of work that I just kept plugging away at. The office was quiet. Nothing really significant happened all day.

I took off a little earlier than normal today – but still later than normal people. I am driving home to Newark and picking up Dominica. We are then driving down to Edison, NJ to meet some friends formally from the office and we are going out to dinner on the legendary Oak Tree Road which I have heard so much about.  We are trying out Mithaas.
I discovered today that HP has finally released an AMD based tower server in their ML family. It is a 100 series server which is not what I would have hoped for as I prefer 300 series servers but it will meet my needs. I was going to get an Intel based ML350 G5 to use as a storage box but the new ML155 has an Opteron processor and is about half the cost. This is a great machine for small business although I would prefer if they were to make the more flexible ML355 to match the Intel ML350.

I will be home tomorrow with Oreo.  I expect that Oreo will be sleeping all day.  He really needs a day off.  As do I.  I haven’t had a work from home day in two weeks nor a full weekend so I am really looking forward to not having to travel tomorrow.  I don’t get a work from home day again next week so Oreo and I are going to be that much more tired again by next weekend.  Tomorrow will give me some time to clean before dad comes down on Friday.  He is coming down to Tannersville on Friday and then I am picking him up and bringing him into Newark on Saturday where he is staying for the weekend.

Dominica started listening to our podcast from Disney today at work.  I think that she is excited about doing the podcast again while we are down there.  The shows that we did from there turned out really well.  It will be really fun to do them as a team again.  Maybe I can figure out some way to get better sound this time.  The one microphone that we used was not very good. I wish that there was a way for us each to use USB headphones like I normally use.  That would be great.

Today’s quote comes from Blaise Pascal: “Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”

I got home from work last night and Dominica and I went right over to Food for Life and got our dinner. I am FFL deprived after last week having to skip my regular Thursday and Saturday meals there. We also made a quick trip to FedEx-Kinkos to send off my Mazda 6 key fob to dad so that he can get a new battery put into the “6”. The car has to have the fob so that you can turn off the alarm when you put in a new battery. It is a weird security feature I guess.

We came home and watched Material Girls with Haley and Hillary Duff that Dominica bought the other day. She has been wanting to see that movie for a while. It wasn’t very good. It was okay – I didn’t want to shoot myself or anything, but there just wasn’t any plot at all. It was written like a bad episode of a low rated sitcom that dragged on for an hour and a half. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t dramatic, it wasn’t intelligent and there wasn’t any action. Just absolute blah.

After that it was time for bed. I am still recovering sleep from last week and I am not able to stay up very late yet.

This morning I was up and moving and out the door at a pretty good time. I was very proud of myself and was going to be into the office at a very good time which is always a challenge for me. But the moment that I got onto the highway I discovered that traffic was moving like molasses. It took me almost an hour and a half to get into the office! Normally it takes just under half an hour. I was never even able to figure out what was wrong this morning either. Traffic was just stop and go everywhere for no apparent reason.

The latest version of Pinnacle Studio is out today. Just two months or so after dad and I both bought version 10 now 11 is out. I will probably upgrade because it works with Vista and has some new features and I am a big believer in keeping up with software upgrades when the discounts are deep (and they are – 50% of the retail price.) So maybe I will be getting that. I have been using Pinnacle Studio 10 a bit. One of the few commercial software packages that I use with any regularity.

We tried to talk Francesca into letting us take the girls to Disney World in two weeks but we couldn’t convince her. We tried to get both her and Bennie to come along as Bennie has never been there at all and Francesca hasn’t been there for fourteen years but they are waiting a year or two (they say) before they go but then they will go during the summer when the park is really busy and really hot and more expensive. I had to note this here so that in the future when Madeline and Emily look back and read this they will know that we tried, for several hours, to convince their parents to let us take them to Disney for three days. 🙂 Just in case they wonder why we never took them anywhere.

Dominica and I are planning on going down to Edison tomorrow night to have Indian food with friends that live down there. Oak Tree Road is considered to be “the” place for getting great Indian cuisine so we are looking forward to checking that out. We have been trying to get together for weeks but Dominica and my schedule is just so busy and we are never around on weekends so it is very difficult to get together with anyone.

From Raymond Chen: People didn’t answer your first email for a reason.

I fired up CentOS 5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 5) today for the first time. The CentOS rebuild of RHEL 5 has only been available for about a week now and I have been looking forward to seeing it in action. I use RHEL 3 and 4 extensively at the office and RHEL 4 (via the CentOS rebuild) extensively at home as well. New versions of RHEL don’t come out all that often so it is exciting when a new package becomes available. I have been waiting for this too because I am planning on installing it to run my main MySQL instance on.

We are booking our Disney weekend (read: mini-vacation) today. We are flying out of Newark on Thursday night and flying back on Sunday night. Thank you to AirTran for making weekend trips to Florida affordable. We also decided to make a little Disney World investment this time down and buy ten days of non-expiring tickets instead of just three days for this one trip. We are very likely to be back fairly soon and the cost per day of ten days is so much lower than the cost for three days that it is totally worth it. That means that we could take three three-day weekends like this one and still have a spare day. It makes going to Disney a lot easier down the road.

One thing that makes the “all Disney” vacation cheaper than if you do the “alternative” accommodations option like we did the last time that we came down is that Disney handles all of the ground transportation for you while you are in Florida. They pick us up from the airport and drop us off and take us directly to the hotel and everything. And it is all included in the room price. During a short stay like this that is pretty significant. That could easily be $100 of the cost right there and the last time we were down the car to take us to the airport never arrived or called and we could easily have missed our flight. So we will really appreciate that this time.

We are definitely taking cameras and the camcorder on this trip (we didn’t have the camcorder until a few months after our last trip) and the plan is to do more podcasting this time down. We had such a good time doing the podcast last time and so many people were following along that is was just a lot of fun. So we will be doing that again and hopefully with plenty of video and pictures as well.

We are spending all three night in the Animal Kingdom Lodge in a Savannah View room. This will be the first time that I have stayed in Disney is a premier hotel since I first went with my parents in 1987 and stayed at the Contemporary Resort near the Magic Kingdom. This is Dominica’s first time staying in one of the Disney premier resorts. This will be my sixth time going to Disney World and the fifth time that I will be entering the parks. Dominica will be going for her third time.

There are some changes in Disney that we are excited about. On our last trip The Living Seas was closed for renovations so we didn’t get to do that. Now it has been replaced with The Seas featuring the cast from Finding Nemo. So there is a new pavilion that we didn’t get to see in 2005 just waiting for us full of new stuff. And also in Epcot there is the new Gran Fiesta Tour featuring the Three Caballeros ride that replaces the aging El Rio del Tiempo in the Mexico pavilion. I liked the old ride but felt that it really needed to be updated and am very excited to have a chance to see what Disney has done with it. And, of course, there is the new Johnny Depp character in Pirates of the Caribbean that we have not yet seen. Also in the Magic Kingdom is the new Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor. But I doubt that that will be all that high on our lists of must see new attractions. In the Animal Kingdom there is Finding Nemo the Musical which opened last year. There would appear to be plenty to keep us busy on our three day weekend.

Now we have to work to remember all of the food that we really loved while we were there and we need to figure out what we missed that we really want to try. We only have a couple of meals to experiment with so we are on a tight culinary budget. Dominica remembered the sweet pretzels in Norway today. We definitely don’t want to forget about those. They were our favourite snack.

Dominica had a really busy today in the office today but mine wasn’t too bad. I got a chance to watch another episode of Floaters (I am up to eight of fifteen now) and to catch up on Rocketboom. She managed to get car appointments for both of our cars down in Newark to get into a shop to get inspected for our car insurance. That is such a pain having an insurance inspection. It takes so much to keep cars on the road. Inspections, registrations, insurance inspections, etc.

Dominica worked late tonight until six to put in some time because she is going in late tomorrow as she has to take Oreo to the hospital in the morning to get some follow-up blood work done.  We are planning on running out this evening to do a little shopping and to get some dinner then will probably just relax in the apartment.

I slept in this morning and really needed it. I didn’t pull my sorry butt out of bed until eight. It was a bright and sunny morning when I finally got out of bed and it is great to be getting fresh air again.

I had one of those mornings when it was hard to keep things together. Luckily I managed to remember the stuff that I needed that I had no way to make due without like auto insurance paperwork but I forgot my ID badge for the office and my multi-factor authentication device but I decided to make due rather than to turn around and go back home for them.

The office was mostly slow today as everyone is tired and still recovering from the really long weekend. I actually had it much better than most people if you can believe that. My weekend was a trifle.

There has been a slight change to my schedule and I am back on the early shift again next week all week. It is sad because I will miss another day at home with Oreo but I do enjoy my early morning weeks as I get home in bright sunlight and get a little time to myself which doesn’t happen very much these days.

Dominica and I are attempting to schedule a trip to Disney World in the next few weeks. We are hoping to take a long weekend and do some serious eating at Boma. I am sure that we will eat there at least twice while we are down there. It will be tough to resist not going back to the Garden Grill Room too as that was so good. That is the biggest problem with going to Disney – trying to find enough time for all of the food that we want to eat. There is just so much amazing stuff all in one place that it is nearly impossible to choose.

For those not aware, Allison Krauss has released a new album which contains a lot of her material that has appeared on other people’s albums (like John Waite and Brad Paisley) so if you have failed to get your hands on Baby Mine or Whiskey Lullaby here is your chance: A Hundred Miles or More.

I found out officially today that I am going to be featured in my company’s summer employee magazine as professional profile. The magazine comes out four times a year.

I managed to get through another episode of Floaters today. I am through six of fifteen episodes now. I haven’t managed to get Dominica hooked on the show though which is surprising as it is totally her type of show.

I ordered more camcorder supplies today for the Canon Elura 60. I ordered some filters for the camera including a UV and Neutral Density filter. I only need the ND so much but the UV is really important in protecting the camera lens and is generally suggested to be used at all time for any camera since it can protect the expensive lens. I also ordered a wide angle adapter for the camcorder which should really increase the field of view allowing me to use the camera more effectively in the car which is where I use it a fair amount of the time.

We found out officially that I have the time off at the end of the day so Dominica and I are heading to Disney World. We will probably be leaving the night of Thursday, May 10th to fly from Newark to Orlando. We will be in the park from Friday morning until Sunday night. Sadly I doubt that there is anyway for us to make it to Boma in time to eat on Sunday night. We would be SO happy if we could do that. That would be the best. One extra dinner can make a big difference when you are traveling that far just for food. We are currently planning on staying at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge where Boma is located. We toured the resorts the last time that we were there in 2005 and we were pretty impressed with that location. So that is the plan.

Hopefully we will be able to continue podcasting like we did the last time that we were down there. That was a lot of fun and I think that people really enjoyed it. This is just a long weekend so it isn’t the same but it should be cool to do a two year recap. It is hard to believe that it has been so long since we last went down. It does not feel like it was that long ago.

Work went smoothly today and I was able to leave around six.  Errands to run tonight and then Food for Life.  Yay!

I got home last night, we watched a little Full House and I was off to bed. I even fell asleep for a little bit before managing to get off to bed. I was totally exhausted.

This morning was absolutely gorgeous outside – as yesterday was but I totally missed that – and so we decided to get up and get moving and go see the Cherry Blossom Festival which is promising to actually have cherry blossoms today. I was up at seven thirty after an entire week of being on the early shift and Dominica got up just a little after eight.

Our friend Jeffrey came over and we drove up to IHOP for breakfast before the after-church crowd hits and then we drove up to Branch Brook Park for the blossoms. The trees really were in bloom today and it was quite nice. It is hard to believe that this is one of the largest cherry blossom displays anywhere though. It seemed awfully small to me. I took along the Kodak digicam which was a mistake because the sun was so bright that I really needed the Nikon with its filter sets and aperture control but oh well. I took the Elura 60 but I have no had a chance yet to check the video to see if it is any good.

The cherry blossoms were beautiful and the sun was shining. Oreo had a great time running around the park and we managed to get some exercise and fresh air ourselves. I hope to get a video together of the park over the next few days but it will be Tuesday at the earliest that anyone will get to see it. There are several pictures up on Flickr to check out.

We got home around two and mostly relaxed for the day. Originally we were going to pick up Susan from the airport as she flew in from Phoenix but her flight got delayed… until tomorrow morning. So she doesn’t need us today. So we decided that we needed to do some shopping.

We drove north to Clifton and hit Game Stop. No Wiis yet (I don’t want one anymore but Dominica still wants one) but we did find headsets for our Nintendo DSs. I am looking for Rogue Galaxy but haven’t seen it anywhere yet. We had dinner at Chipotle. It was okay but nothing special. The price wasn’t too bad and we were quite full when we were done but we won’t be going there very often. Nothing compared to the price or quality of Desert Moon Cafe.

We went to Target and actually found a fair amount of stuff that we were looking for. Several DVDs and CDs and some miscellaneous supplies. It was a good trip and we enjoyed having more time to drive around in the BMW with the top down.

It was a lazy night. But I had homework that I had to do so I had to take care of that. No rest for the weary.  It was after midnight before I got off to bed.  But I don’t have to be up early tomorrow.

Last night the traffic was so bad that it took me about two hours to get home from the office and it wasn’t even quite rush hour yet! Traffic was awful. Apparently it is spring weekend for a lot of students and it is the first really amazing weekend of the spring anyway so everyone is cutting out of work early and heading to the shore I guess. It was insane. So I lost my chance to play Dragon Quest VIII like I had been hoping.

Two separate orders from Amazon arrived today. The first package was my second battery and a combination wall and car charger for the Canon Elura 60 camcorder. That will make it a lot easier to take videos all of the time. Less need to constantly babysit the one battery. And the second package included three O’Reilly books on filmmaking.

Dominica got home and we went over to Food for Life for dinner. Abdul happened by before our food came out so he came in and joined us.

After dinner we watched Full House and just relaxed as both of us had really long drives home and I have to be up early tomorrow for work.

I got myself out of bed at half past six this morning. Nothing like getting up bright and early on a Saturday. I continue my week of little sleep. I took my time getting ready and was into the office around half past eight. Today could be a normal eight hour kind of a day or it could easily stretch into sixteen hours or more. But it is a casual weekend work day with lots of people in the office in jeans with pizza, donuts and bagels all day. It is rather fun.

I link to Scott Adams a lot and today is no exception: Scott Adam’s on Outsourcing the US Government to India. Scott leaves out an important point, though, that most people would superficially be concerned about the language, or more appropriately the accent barrier, between the US and India but in reality we have already dealt with this issue with President Bush who has both an accent and absolutely no comprehension of the English language. So it is really a moot point.

Having a slow day at the office is great from time to time. I did some catching up on my reading. I read Game Informer that came in the mail last night. But that didn’t take long. Games that interest me are few and far between. The only game coming out soon that I am interested in is Dawn of Mana and that doesn’t come out for a month and a day and I don’t find it very likely that I am going to run out and pick it up the first day. I might not even get to it this year. I still have to finish Dragon Quest VIII and then the plan is to move onto Final Fantasy X which I already own. Those two should last me for quite a while yet. But a good investment the PlayStation 2 was.

I took care of some homework too while I was in the office. I forgot to bring my textbook with me so I was not able to wrap up all of my weekend work but there is just one paper that I need to write yet for this week so it isn’t a big deal to do it at home at some point. Dominica is spending the day working on her Systems Analysis and Design homework.

While I was sitting around the office this morning I started reading my new book “DV Filmmaking: From Start to Finish” by Ian David Aronson. I interspersed reading with watching back episodes of Floaters.

In Episode 3 of Floaters they deal with someone being offered a permanent job as an administrative assistant and making quite a bit more money than they were able to make in their regular job. I liked that episode because it deals specifically with something that I have railed against for years – people accepting “jobs” that pay too well in lieu of holding out for “career” positions. It happens to people all of the time and really hampers personal and professional growth. It often happens to twenty-somethings. They have a low end job that they are holding down while trying to break into whatever it is that they want to do or maybe they are just floating along waiting to figure out what it is that they want to do. Then they get into a position, often in shift management or some sort of service position, that pays more money than it seems like it should and in order to ever make a move into a career position with upward mobility they would have to take a huge paycut and lose seniority even though it would only take a few years to be doing way better than they were when they took the cut. But taking a pay cut is really difficult and a lot of people can’t do it no matter who obvious it is that the move would be better for them in the long run. So I really liked that episode.

Floaters is really impressive as an Internet-only television show. It is fully produced and acted with professional actors, filmed well, lighted, etc. The big mistake that I feel that they make is that they make the show only available via streaming flash video which isn’t the best quality or most convenient way to watch things online. Lots of people like streaming videos because they are really simple for casual viewers but the problem is that once someone is hooked on a show they become far less likely to want to watch it streaming online. The streaming concept became popular from YouTube, Google Video and Blip and is perfect for what they do but for a complete television series it is seldom the right choice. Serious viewers want a number of additional options. They might want to be able to download the show for portable viewing on a video iPod or a Creative Zen Vision. They might want to subscribe via FireAnt or Democracy – they used to offer this feature but they took it away at the end of the first season so only the “online” viewing is currently available. Fortunately the show is offered in a decent resolution – much higher than what you get currently from YouTube or many other streaming sources. But because of the integrated flash player the show can’t be shown on computers without flash but more importantly you can’t view it full screen. I want to watch the show full screen, maybe on the television, and I would like to watch the episodes intact. But each episode is broken up into five segments which is a neat release mechanism but for serious viewing it makes the show feel like a vlog rather than real television. It is also rough having to watch titles and credits five times per episode – it gets old quickly. The show is done so well that it is very unfortunate that it is crippled by its technological implementation. Hopefully they will correct this in the future.

I thought that the day was going to end up being no longer than eight hours but it ended up turning into a decently long day.  I was finally able to leave after eleven hours!  So I am posting and heading home.