March 29, 2007: Pittsburgh

There is no rest for the weary. At least last night I managed to pull off a real, full night’s sleep. It is a good thing because this morning I discovered that I really am needed in Pittsburgh and that I have to run out there tonight! I don’t have any spare time and since I am working from home today I need to be in the office tomorrow. That means that I have to drive to Pittsburgh tonight (in rush hour, no less) which Google Maps says is six hours away. Three hundred and sixty miles. And I have to do it round trip in a single night while stopping in the middle to work after having put in a full day and then go to the office in the morning. At least it is Friday. That is the equivalent drive of going to somewhere between Columbia, South Carolina and Augusta, Georgia! Seven hundred and twenty miles round trip (from here to Columbia is just seven hundred!)

Oreo spent the morning, and the early afternoon, lounging in the sunlight pouring through the windows. I worked from home and managed to catch up on my RIT homework as well.  I am glad that I was able to get caught up on my homework.  I would hardly want to have that hanging over my head while I am traveling tonight.

I was able to escape Newark around five this evening.  It is going to be a REALLY long night.  I hope to be able to go to bed at some point but it seems unlikely at this point.

SGL Vlog: Leaving Geneseo

Download the SGL Video Blog from March 25, 2007 – Leaving Geneseo in 640×480 Xvid (Recommended for Computer Viewing)
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This is my “farewell” video blog post from Geneseo, New York. This was Dominica and my first home that we purchased in July, 2003 and this past weekend we completed the packing process and the house is ready for the movers to take everything away. It is sad selling our very first home and we wanted to have a little video to remember it by. I didn’t have much time to shoot the video so this was taken after the packing was done and we were about to walk out the door, most likely for the last time. Unfortunately because of when I had to shoot the video and the fact that the lights in the house had been packed the basement is almost entirely unlit and is almost impossible to see and the entire house is completely full of boxes so the impression is quite different than how the house was while we were still living in it.

This house was very special to us. It was the first home that either of us ever bought. It was the house that we bought to move to when we got married having bought the house just a few months before the wedding. It was the only house that my mother and my paternal grandmother would ever see of mine. It was the only house that Mr. Humphries would ever live in. It was house where we got Oreo. It was where we spent the first almost four years of our married life together. It was the house that we bought with the intention of building the ultimate theatre room in the basement which we never got a chance to finish. A house can be a very nostalgic thing. I can see why people can be so reluctant to leave a house that they have lived in for a long time. This house was the home that I have lived in more than any other since leaving my parents’ home.

The structure is an end-unit ranch style townhouse right on the end of the village of Geneseo. We start in the driveway where you can see Dominica’s 2002 Mazda Protege 5 waiting to take us back to Newark. The garage is painted in a wine colour that Dominica was very excited about. We never quite finished doing the trim in the garage. We only just put working locks on the house after many years of using defective ones that had come with the house. We should have just left them. There is a lot that we had planned to do but never got around to doing. When we bought the house we were one of only two structures in the complex. We were the fifth unit to be filled and the last of the original buildings. No one new moved in after us for quite some time as an entirely new building had to be built. As the camera swings around you can see the finished development with many new homes almost all occupied. The landscaping and other niceties were never quite finished and I seriously doubt if they ever will be.

When we first moved to Geneseo there was just beginning to be speculation that a Super Walmart might be built somewhere close to us to replace the aging Walmart that was located over in the plaza near Wegmans. At the time the project sounded absurd and highly unlikely. But it wasn’t long after moving in that construction began and for some time now there has been a Super Walmart just behind the house which is just barely visible in a shot looking over the deck. The Tim Hortons was built next to the Walmart and for a while we went there on a regular basis.

In the basement you can just barely make out the baker’s rack located in the “server alcove”. That alcove was a major selling point of the house for us and it served as the location for several servers and related networking and power equipment that ran for almost every moment that we lived in the house. The hum of those servers was a part of our lives.

The theatre is the saddest part of the house. We had had such dreams of making that into an amazing theatre and listening room. We never even got to the point that we put down carpeting. The walls are painted black but were to be carpetted as well. The screen area was painted with a carefully formuated Benjamin Moore paint very carefully to make an excellent movie viewing surface. With the projector mounted near the back wall it was able to fill every inch of that screen area. As the camera turns around you can just make out the mounts where the stereo and theatre equipment had been mounted to the ceiling behind the seating area to make it accessible without interfering with sound or image. The amplifiers had been mounted into the ceiling to get them completely out of the way.

The last room in the basement was my office for the more than the first two years that we were in the house. That room was originally filled with bookshelves and desks. It was also the hub of the old Age of Empires II Friday nights games. But after Andy moved out I moved my office to the second bedroom and the basement mostly sat undisturbed.

I hope that you enjoy this short video of my first home. I didn’t want this important memory to be lost and so I recorded it here. There is no talking in the video – it is just a chance to share in a significant moment of our lives. We are excited about moving on to new opportunities and adventures. The house has been all but empty for a long time. We use it on a regular basis and dad has been there almost every other day. But it doesn’t feel like home anymore.

March 28, 2007: Another Allergy Day

I had to get up a little earlier than usual this morning and go down with Dominica and Oreo and help Min get a urine sample from Oreo for her to take to his vet at the Rutherford Animal Hospital so that we can find out how he is coming along. So that cut another half an hour off my already short night. This has been the week of no sleep for both dad and I. Me with work and him with working on our house in Geneseo.

The tentative closing date on the house remains this Friday but it is looking unlikely that they will be ready to close by that time. I found out this morning that I will not need to be at the closing in person and that I can take care of all of the paperwork from my end via parcel post which will make my weekend a world easier. I had no idea how I was going to manage getting up to Rochester this weekend in addition to everything else that needs to be done. I really just want to get some sleep at this point. I am going to need a vacation very soon.

I had a big scare this morning and spent most of the day being pretty sure that I had to leave from the office to drive out to Pittsburgh, work all night (or at least a couple of hours) and then drive back to New Jersey so that I could work all day without any sleep at all if I even managed to make the drive. But they called this afternoon and it looks as though I don’t have to go down there today. Oh boy do I hope that I don’t have to drive there today.

Today was actually quite slow at work. Almost nothing happened and I spent a lot of my time waiting on other people for resources that I needed. I took advantage of the opportunity to work on SSL-Explorer and managed to get a fair amount of stuff working with it. The biggest wins are that I now have instant messenger access back to home, SSH access and a remote desktop. I don’t have NX working which would be the best and I don’t have HTTP Forwarding yet but one thing at a time. Today qualifies as a pretty major victory.

Today is another one of my weird and as yet unexplained “allergy days”. These new allergies are completely baffling me. I have heard from many sources here that New Jersey is the land of allergies and that almost everyone who moves here has never had them before and gets them after a few months of living here. Mine started around August or September, if I remember correctly. They are strange. They come upon be quite suddenly. I can’t find any correlation between fresh air or stale air, warm weather or cold, open windows or air conditioning or heat, etc. I can’t even find a correlation between being in New York or New Jersey. Generally I wake up in the morning with it and it last for two to three days. And it is nothing more than an insanely runny nose. I don’t understand it at all. Having lived my entire life without any allergies at all and then getting hit with these so quickly seems unlikely. And they manifested themselves for the very first time during a trip back home to Geneseo but since then have almost always been in New Jersey.

YouTube (Google) announced the first YouTube Awards which are probably well worth checking out.

I was able to escape the office at a reasonable time and was home just a little after six.  Dominica did some shopping after work and she and Oreo weren’t home until long after seven.  We spent the evening just relaxing and enjoying having an evening when we didn’t have to frantically try to get tons of work done.  It was a good change.  It was off to bed early.  Tomorrow is looking like it will get to be a doggie – daddy day for Oreo and I.  He is very much looking forward to it.

March 27, 2007: An Empty House

This morning dad met the moving company at the house in Geneseo and supervised the emptying of the house. By one this afternoon they were done. It is hard to believe that our house is empty again. We moved all of that stuff into there in July of 2003. And now it is out.

I learned today that, not surprisingly, Radio Disney has been promoting torture, killing and racism. It is amazing that the FCC allows Radio Disney to stay on the air. As Disney is seeking legal measures to cover up any reporting on what Disney considers appropriate programming for children (they legal force anyone repeating their on air vomiting to be silenced under so called “copyright” laws which are not supposed to prevent news reporting) people have begun to go after AT&T who pays for the time slot. That means AT&T and Cingular subscribers and others need to think long and hard about what types of minority hatred they are funding with their cellular subscriptions or long distance plans. Companies with this type of agenda have no place in this country. I hope that the American public wakes up and does something about it. The type of rants heard on Radio Disney are clearly the voices of terrorist seeking to strike fear into the hearts of Americans. In a time when the US government is willing to remove any amount of our civil liberties under the guise of anti-terrorism how it is possible to have a group so clearly attempting to garner support for illegal, quasi-military terrorist actions via the public’s airwaves is unthinkable.

In positive news, In-N-Out Burger pulled advertising from Radio Disney upon learning exactly what type of content their money was being used for. Good for them. I bet their customers appreciate knowing that their burgers aren’t paying for something evil. I wish that AT&T felt that their customers cared so much.

I decided that since it is now Spring that it is now time to move away from SGL’s winter theme and onto something more, well, green. Time for life to renew itself once again.

I got home and Dominica sent me over to Food for Life again to pick up dinner and bring it home.  She did a bit of homework before we had dinner and then we watched a little of the third season of the Facts of Life.  I had a lot of work to do tonight so I didn’t get much chance to relax.

I ended up working until three in the morning but got a ton of work done.  My big triumph for the night was installing SSL-Explorer which is an SSL VPN solution.  I have been wanting to try it for a while but have not had an opportunity or a burning need but that has changed in the last year so I thought that I would give it a try to see how far that I could get.  It took several hours to get it up and running correctly on SUSE 10.2 but it worked and I am very excited to get to put it through its paces tomorrow.