Sheep Guarding Llama

Sleep is a luxury that I don’t get this week. After going to bed at not that long before five this morning I was awake around ten. I was scheduled to be in the office at noon so I had to be up and moving. Not long after I was up my schedule was pushed back to two o’clock in the afternoon so I had a little bit of time to relax. So Min and I walked down to Market Street to the Dunkin Donuts and got some breakfast before I had to leave.

I got caught in a conference call just before leaving the house and had to work from home until two. Then I hopped into the car and drove on into Warren to go to work. I am hoping that today will be pretty slow and that I will have plenty of time to relax and work on SGL and just take a breather while waiting for disaster to strike. There are a lot of people in the office today.

I ended up working, in the office, until around six. It wasn’t a long day but it was long for a Sunday. But hey, overtime is always good. I didn’t want to stay too late because I have to be into the office very early tomorrow morning.

Microsoft appears to be having a much harder time with the time change than we are in the Linux world. Our operating system impact was pretty low. All of the Linux machines that I use at home needed nothing at all. They just took care of themselves. At the office the only reason that we had a hard time getting the DST configuration working was because we do our own distribution of Linux and don’t have a normal distro making the patches for us. Really one of the biggest problems for Microsoft is that so many Microsoft customers buy their expensive products and then think that they can just skip buying the next one and run on old stuff forever. This isn’t how it works. No reasonably. If you use a free product, like openSUSE or CentOS, then you can upgrade as often as you like since it is free and you tend to stay up to date even though you don’t have to. But when you buy a really expensive product like Windows Server you tend to want to skip cycles to save money. But if you are penny pinching so much you shouldn’t be buying a product that requires constant commercial support. Microsoft makes some great products but you can’t use them in an unrecommended way outside of the support time frame. It just isn’t reasonable. If you are going to do it that way you are wasting the money on the product in the first place. When purchasing products like this the entire life cycle needs to be considered before investing in core infrastructure. You would never put down a new highway that needs to be repaired every five years if you know that you will only have a budget to fix it every fifteen years! Imagine how problematic that would be. Ten out of every fifteen years the road would just be closed waiting for you to save up enough money to open it back up again.

I spent the evening working on the server that has to head to Scranton tomorrow.  I worked late into the night getting Zimbra and WildFire servers working.  It took a long time and a lot of work but I finally got everything in place.  It was well after eleven when I finally got a chance to go to bed.  I was really tired but happy with the work that I had gotten done.  Tomorrow is going to be really hard though.

It was a pleasant walk to the World Trade Center train station last night when I left the office on Greenwich Street. I love Manhattan. You can just walk everywhere and then hop on a train. It doesn’t get much cooler than that. I hate having to use a car to get places. That isn’t any fun. It is too expensive and takes too much work and it breaks down all of the time. Give me public transportation any day.

I took the PATH back to Newark and walked home via the Gateway Center. I had never tried this until tonight. That was really handy. I was able to walk almost the entire way from the train terminal to my front door without ever going outside. This is an entire piece of the city of Newark that I have never seen before and barely even knew existed. It is nice to know that Newark has big, upscale urban areas like this. I was very impressed.

I met Dominica at 1180 and we walked to the Theater Square Grill to get dinner off of their late night menu. We had been hoping to be able to make it there for the regular dinner menu but it was quite late by the time that I was able to get back to Newark.

My birthday present arrived last night but I didn’t get a chance to play with it. Pinnacle Studio 10 Titanium Edition that I bought with the money that dad gave me for my birthday. Now I can do some real video editing. I am anxious to get to try it out but I probably won’t be able to do much of anything with it until after next weekend. Only one week left to go to get everything moved out of the house. What a week this is going to be!

Dominica and I slept in just a little today and we really needed it. I have barely had a chance to get any sleep for several days – ever since we learned of SUN’s Java bug with the new Daylight Savings Time. We got up and went to Food for Life for breakfast. After breakfast we had to drive up to Bloomfield to pick up Dominica’s car from the shop. They called last night to let us know that it was ready for us. We grabbed a car was too since the weather was so awesome today. That was pretty painless but still took way too long and by the time that we were done with breakfast (which was so late as to really be lunch) and the car it was mid-afternoon already. Boy time flies when you only get one day off all week.

Today is my only chance to relax at all so we took advantage of it. I installed Pinnacle Studio 10 which took a few hours between the long installs, constant reboots and crashes (it is not the most stable software.) But I finally got it installed. I also worked on my first ever installation of the WildFire (which just changed its name to OpenFire) Jabber/XMPP Server. One more thing that needs to be done this week. I have more work that needs to be done this week than I can remember having had in a very long time.

We watched quite a bit of the fourth and fifth seasons of Remington Steele while we relaxed. I really needed the downtime. For dinner we just ordered in from Nino’s in Harrison to make things quick and easy.

I hobbled together my first video in Pinnacle but I had to do most of the editing in QuickTime Pro because Pinnacle doesn’t appear to actually support QuickTime MP4 as an input type and since that is what my one camera makes natively there isn’t much that I can do. Apparently QuickTime is a pretty bad format to work in because Apple’s own native QuickTime products like QuickTime Pro are buggy and crash all of the time even now that I updated to the latest version 7.1.5. If Apple’s own QT software can’t handle the format what is the point? And people wonder why I don’t get an iPod! So this first video is pretty roughly edited as Pinnacle can’t do it and QuickTime can’t do it well. I will be using QT less and less as I move forward. Now that I have real editing software I will want to be making higher quality videos. It didn’t matter so much before.

I thought that I would be going to bed at a reasonable time but I wasn’t tired and ended up staying up way too late.  I got paged out just after midnight and had to work until half past one taking care of that issue.  Once it was that late I decided that it would be best if I just stayed up and watched Daylight Savings Time hit us to see how bad it would be.

One fifty nine rolled over to three o’clock in the morning and a number of issues did crop up.  I didn’t want to go to bed until all of my issues were resolved.  I don’t want things waiting for me in the morning if I can help it.  So I ended up staying up until half past four in the morning working.  Not the night that I had hoped for but not totally unplanned for.  I was very tired when I finally got to go to bed.

When I finally got home last night after nine thirty my one piece of mail was a birthday card sent from Leicester that was stamped by the post office on February 20th.  That would be sixteen days ago for a standard, ordinary first class letter to go from New York to 1180 Raymond in Newark, New Jersey.  We have no way to know where the delay in the process is but it is hard to believe that the entire city of Newark receives mail two weeks slower than the rest of the country.  Anywhere else I can get a first class letter around in one to two days.  We are suspicious that the delays are inside of the building.  For some reason our mail boxes are not yet available to us so.  We were expecting them in November so we don’t know what is wrong there.

Last night was a really long night.  I ended up not being able to leave the office until after eight.  Then instead of getting to go home I had to drive up to Bloomfield and meet Dominica at Essex BMW so that we could drop off her car.  That wouldn’t have been too bad but Min got lost of the way there due to a bad map and we spent about half an hour trying to figure out where she was and how to get her to the dealership.  So we lost a chunk of the night there.

The good news for the evening was that Oreo checked out well at the vet and that they did not feel that there was anything really wrong with him. Just a sore leg – probably bruised and just barely swollen.  Nothing to worry about.  They gave him some anti-inflamatory medicine and sent him on his way.  We have been worried about his leg so that made us feel a lot better.  We were also happy to learn that the vet that we took him too also has a Boston Terrier of her own and got hers from a shelter as well.

We finally got home to 1180 and Dominica heated up some frozen pizza that she had picked up at the grocery store during her lunch break today and we ate quickly.  I did not get to go to bed like I wanted to but had to stay up until around midnight working on the server that is destined to be going to Scranton right away.  I had a base amount of work that had to be done on it before it will be ready to go and I have to assume that I am not going to get any time to work on it today.  So I was very exhausted by the time that I headed off to bed.

I was barely able to wake up with the alarm went off at a quarter to six this morning.  It was tough dragging myself out of bed and into the shower.  But there is no time to spare this morning.  Way too much needs to be done right away.  When I was first making plans for today the day was going to be really relaxing.  I was going to simply go casually into Manhattan around nine or so and have a nice lazy afternoon and be home before the regular Friday evening work.  But now I have to get to the DMV before the meeting and the whole day is totally crazy.

I was out the door before eight this morning and walked down to Newark’s Penn Station by just after eight.  This is my first time trying the New York – New Jersey Port Authority PATH train.  It wasn’t bad figuring out how the process works but knowing that you can only get the tickets on the platform is the real trick.  You have to actually get onto the platform then there is a ticket machine right there for you.  Once you do that it is really simple.

I rode the crowded PATH into the World Trade Center.  I had no idea that they had put another train station down inside of the pit beneath where the WTC once stood.  It was a little weird.  I haven’t actually been right to “Ground Zero” – I hate that term – since December, 2001 when it was all still quite a mess.  Now it is all construction there.

I exited the train station and decided that I just felt like walking.  That is one thing that I really love about Manhattan – you can just walk anywhere.  It is almost as fast as taking the metro half of the time.  I walked from the WTC Train Station all of the way down to the southern tip of the island and then back up Greenwich so that I could get to the New York State DMV office at 11 Greenwich.  Everyone told me how awful the DMV was going to be in Manhattan but actually it was great.  Everyone was friendly and even though there were a lot of people there the whole thing went quite quickly.  I was impressed.

I took the subway up from there to Canal Street but really I think that I would have been much better off just walking the whole way.  Getting down into the subway, riding it and getting back out takes way too long and isn’t all that practical.  It costs $2, waste a lot of time and you don’t get any exercise.  You have to go pretty far to really make it worth it.

I came up on Canal and walked through Chinatown over to Greenwich again and down to the office where I had my morning meeting.  The timing was perfect.  I was there just in time to make the meeting and be the first one there and be able to be quite casual about the whole thing without having to rush at any point.

After the morning meeting the team that was hosting me and I went out to lunch at a little Italian place near the office.  I had cheese ravioli that was completely amazing.  I think that it might have been the best ravioli that I have ever had.

After lunch I went to another office that was right next door and got a sister team to my team to find me some “hotel” space to use as my office for the day.  It was weird working in an office with a great view of Manhattan.  I have not had a good “city view” since I worked for Oil Navigator and Fortune Consultants on Farragut Square in Washington, DC back in the fall of 2000.  I have been in cities but not in a high-rise office and even back then the view was nothing like this.

I thought that my afternoon would be pretty light but the daylight savings time storm began almost immediately and the whole day was a total craze attempting to deal with it.  It was non-stop work from the time I got into the office after lunch until late in the evening.  I never got any time to just relax.  It was quite the day.

Dominica and I decided early on in the afternoon that traveling to Geneseo this weekend was just not going to be an option.  Firstly tonight went from being a semi-early night to a total nightmare.  There is likely going to be work for me tomorrow beyond the little bit of datacenter work that I am expecting in the morning.  Everyone is stuck working more or less a full day on Sunday.  I can work from home in a pinch but I won’t be as effective and what is the point of driving seven hundred miles round trip just to work from home?  So I am going into the office on Sunday to work mostly a whole day from there.  And then I have to be in early on Monday morning – six in the morning to be precise – so we would be racing back from Geneseo just to be able to get any sleep at all before driving in for the daylight savings time disaster that is bound to be waiting.

Once we decided that we were not traveling this weekend we decided that we would at least go out to dinner someplace nice tonight like the Theater Square Grill.   But that plan started to fall apart as I got stuck in the office later and later as the night wore on.  I didn’t wrap up in the office until ten till nine and it is still a long walk to the PATH station.  We will see how late it is by the time that I actually get back to Newark.  I HOPE that the train is still running by the time that I get down there.

Today is International Women’s Day. I know a few international women but almost all of the women that I know are domestic and apparently have a separate holiday. I am not sure when that is though.
The new US Passports are so easy to copy that people are already able to make full copies of the new biometric security mechanism without even removing the passports from their shipping envelopes! This is a whole new level of “no security” in the US Passport system – just like I predicted.

Last night we ran to Food for Life and grabbed a quick dinner before coming home and watching Zoom: Academy for Superheroes. I had never heard of the movie before but Min was able to borrow it from someone at work. It was cute but nothing special at all. I’m not even sure if this movie made it to theatres or if was a direct to DVD deal. It sort of had that low budget “B” movie feel so I wouldn’t be surprised. It didn’t have any big names in it just television stars Tim Allen and Courtney Cox. It was okay, definitely don’t actively avoid it, but I wouldn’t take any time out of my schedule to look for it either. Would I buy it from the Walmart bargain bin? No.

I had to stay up late last night working on the server that is going to Scranton this weekend. I ended up staying up until just after midnight working on it. Not the evening that I had been hoping for. I finally decided that I just had to get some sleep and the rest of the work will have to wait until today so I went to bed.

I was up just after five this morning. It is a bright, sunny day and quite a bit warmer than it has been the last two days. Winter might finally be over. We are into the second week of March and so far it has been so warm with only a few days of cold here and there. You sure can’t complain about the cold this year. It’s barely worth owning a coat these days.

I put in an hour or more working on the server before I left the house and finally got things to a pretty good state before I headed to the office. Knowing that the server is working will make being at work a lot easier today. I only have tonight to get that machine ready to travel to Scranton since we are taking it there tomorrow night. One thing that I did discover, though, is that the machine does not have as much memory as I had thought that it did and it does not have nearly enough. So I need to deal with that. It is always something. But at least that is something that is easy to deal with. I am hoping to be installing a second processor in a machine while I am in Scranton tomorrow which is a bit of a pain but only so bad. Installing memory is nothing. Getting a hold of it might be a pain though.

I managed to leave at a very decent time this morning and had a nice drive into the office. This morning was actually quite slow compared to recent days and it was a nice chance to relax. I was able to catch up on my blogs and the tech world news and stuff like that and to watch Rocketboom. I even got a chance to discover some new videoblogs. You can check out cool videobloging goodness from Josh Leo and KellyBelly.

Boeing Aircraft is talking about implementing a new “secure autopilot system” for its planes. While there is a certain logic to a system like this you can just imagine the problems. First of all you have to wonder what legal counsel at Boeing is going to approve this. And secondly just think about any situation where a plane cannot be rerouted. Weather or runway conditions could prove to be hazardous. And imagine the lawsuits over multiple deaths caused by a plane landing on a runway full of – fill in the hazard here – without anyway to stop it. Or a terrorist who sneaks a large bomb onto the plane, has it discovered and then triggers the “secure” autopilot feature. Suddenly everyone is on a ticking time bomb that is flying directly to its predetermined “safe” location to destroy it and the pilots can’t even stop it. Now the only option is to shoot it down mid-flight. I don’t see the families of the people on the plane – who probably already killed the terrorists and have control of the plane again – being happy when all those people have to die because of an “anti-terrorist” feature. Even if a feature like this saves lives on average it will never be able to save enough lives to make it worthwhile in the long run.

During lunch I ran down to Warren to the UPS Store to find a Notary Public and to send out some documents that I need to get to the courts to deal with a speeding ticket from two months ago. It is so difficult to deal with every little thing when you consult outside of your home area.

I got a note from Audible today that said that they have over eighty Star Wars books available now for download! I looked a long time ago and they didn’t have many or maybe any. Not that I am too excited about Star Wars books or any fiction for that matter but I know a lot of people who would be thrilled to be able to get loads of Star Wars books that way. Now if they have the really good Timothy Zahn Episodes seven, eight and nine books maybe I could listen to them as I haven’t read them in many years.

While watching Josh Leo’s Vlog I stumbled across Josh on Sports (QuickTime Movie.) This video really tells a lot about why I am not into sports. I just don’t have that part of the brain that makes in enjoyable. I can’t even empathize with people who watch sports. I have no idea what it is that they enjoy about it. Strangely, I do seem to understand sports business and sports professionals more than the average sports enthusiast. I understand the economics of the business and appreciate the work that goes into creating “sports experience” and I have no problem with the high salaries often paid to top athletes. I see athletes as performance based professionals earning a prevailing wage that is based on solid results like we see in any industry. Now I simply appreciate their hard work and have no problem with them getting paid so much. I do not feel any need whatsoever to open my wallet and buy their “products”. What amazes me is how many people are willing to spend insane amounts of money to watch a an athlete perform and then get mad when a good portion (maybe 1% at most) goes to that athlete. Apparently many sport spectators really feel that their dollar should go to the businessmen who hire these athletes but lets face it – a top athlete is much harder to find than a business manager capable of not driving a sports franchise into the ground. So who should earn more? And who gets a longer productive career path? And who takes more personal risk?

If you are wondering where Amanda Congdon has been since leaving RocketBoom you can now find Amanda on ABC News.

Right at the end of the day we had a major emergency and we ended up going into “lockdown” where no one can leave the office. I was originally planning on escaping the office early around five but just before I was able to leave I got stuck on a conference call that turned into an all out crisis.  It is going to be a really long night leading into a really long weekend.

It was a relaxing night last night for Dominica and I. We ordered in from Nino’s in Harrison, watched two episodes of the fourth season of Remington Steele and went to bed. The server rails that I have been desperately waiting for have arrived but they are not as complete as I would have hoped that they would be (no fault of the supplier but of the way that HP supplies the parts) and I can only mount one server with what came and I need to figure out some way to mount the other now. Will this never end?

I woke up bright and early this morning and was out of bed just after five thirty. I was glad to be awake so early. I wish that I could be up at this time every day. It really helps me to get my day going. I immediately showered and got ready for work. Dominica was just getting out of bed as I was ready to head out. Oreo got up and wouldn’t return to bed. He kept following me around closely until I realized that he was trying to tell me that he needed to be taken outside which he never, ever needs to do until Dominica takes him out on her way to work. He was in a panic so I rushed to get him ready and we ran out of the apartment. He paced rapidly back and forth in front of the elevators because they were taking too long. When we got down to the lobby he made a mad dash for the doors. He only managed to hold it back until we were literally one inch or less outside of the front doors and he stood out there for what was probably a good minute! He was a much happier dog after that. He must have drank a ton last night without us noticing. I ordered my car when we came back in which, by this time, was around seven.

It snowed all last night and there is a good, solid dusting in northern NJ this morning. The roads were slippery and it took me until well after eight before I was into the office which is a really long commute for me. Generally it takes less than half an hour.

Dad emailed me this morning to let me know that Nick Tahou’s on Lyell Ave. in Rochester is changing ownership and name. In theory the menu is going to stay the same but it will be hard to maintain such a major Rochester tradition. Tahou’s has been the “gang’s” traditional restaurant for a good dozen years at this point. The entire Rochester region has taken much of its culinary identity from the restaurant. This is a sad time for the city.

Dell’s “Ideastorm” site is proving to be detrimental to the company although it started off as a good idea. Dell started the site with the hopes of it generating ideas that Dell could use to revitalize its products. Of course, as anyone even remotely interested in computers these days could tell you, the number one request on the site was to sell computers preloaded with Linux. Dell almost immediately promised to deliver but then, after generated tons of positive spin in the media, pulled the plan presumably from pressure from Microsoft. Now Dell has really shot themselves in the foot by getting everyone really excited and then redacting on the project. Why have something like Ideastorm when you already know the main ideas and don’t want to do them anyway? Dell is starting to delete comments from the community on their site to cover up what has happened but some places have managed to get screenshots of them so that Dell can’t completely cover their tracks. At this point the project seems to have generated more storm than ideas. Here is a tip to big business – it’s okay to not ask for the opinion of your customers but definitely don’t ask if you don’t care and definitely don’t ask if you know the answers and don’t like them.

US colleges and universities are starting to warm to homeschooled students says CNN today. Perhaps this is in response to Bush’s “No Student Left Behind” plan to send public educational funds down the proverbial toilet.

Did you know that from 1881-1895 the device that we now know as the facsimile machine was called a telephotograph?

I discovered today that I was able to get VLC to play QuickTime movies at my office even though, for some reason, QuickTime itself doesn’t work. Interesting. Go VLC! So now I am able to watch the high definition Rocketbooms instead of just whatever scraps they are willing to through to the Windows Media viewers. Personally I would much rather see RocketBoom in Xvid and/or Divx but I take what I can get. My media player doesn’t like QuickTime very much and the Windows Media is unreliable from RB so I am always in rough shape.

Dad sent me an interesting article from Breakpoint on China’s looming demographically driven crisis. China is soon facing a serious problem with a male to female imbalance resulting in thirty million single men if no women in the country remain single. Thirty million is a gigantic population. One tenth of the population of the entire United States. Bigger than most countries. And that thirty million are all about the same age or at least the same generation. This disparity is not spread out over the entire population but is isolated to that group born after the population control measures were instigated. The underlying issues are, of course, that the country has a social problem that leads to both overpopulation without individual responsibility and a hatred of women so severe that parents are often willing to kill their own daughters in the hopes of getting a son. There is little that a government can do to combat social issues of this scale.

Today I got a message left on my voicemail. It was from a telemarketing training center. Apparently our phone number is one now being used by telemarketers to use for training purposes. The message was five minutes long because the girl being trained didn’t figure out how to hang up properly. You can hear in the message them saying that that is good and that they can just hang up now. They go on to call another poor, hapless customer and manage to illegal use our voicemail to record the entire conversation. I wonder how that disclosure message might go: “This call may be monitored by previous customers for quality assurance.” Of course the person making the calls is barely able to speak English so luckily we didn’t have to talk to them. They are selling compressed air. Maybe it is compressed hot air. It really shows how useless the US “Do Not Call List” is. Not only do companies ignore it but foreign telemarketing companies are apparently using the US “Do Not Call List” to get their practice numbers from!

We had a chance to get a Wii today but decided against it. I would have had to have wired money and the weather is quite bad down here so extra driving for a video game system that I couldn’t actually pick up for weeks seemed like a bad call especially when I am swamped at work and have no time to run around dealing with that stuff even in good weather. So it looks like there is no hope for a Wii for us for anther two months. But that is okay. We have plenty to do and as time marches on the hype has vanished, at least where we are, and the interest level in the Wii has dropped off for us significantly. So we will see if we still decide to get one after two more months of them not being on shelves. The only games that I am really excited about are Blue Dragon and Assassin’s Creed and neither is on the Wii. Maybe if Microsoft figures out the XBox 360 this year we will get one of those. If they add HDMI they will become quite interesting.

My day ended up being extremely busy. I had breakfast at work but skipped lunch which ended up being very good and I just got busier and busier all day long and never had a chance to slow down at all. By the end of the day I was quite exhausted. This is what Dominica’s whole week this week and last have been like.

Friday is going to be crazy for me. I am going to make an attempt first thing in the morning to get to the DMZ in Manhattan which, I’m sure, will be completely crazy. They open at 8:30 and I have a 10:30 meeting so I have no idea how that is going to work but I have to get there sometime on Friday so that is my first attempt. If that doesn’t work then I have to get there in the early afternoon after my meeting. Then, of course, from Manhattan I have to take the train back to Newark, pack and head for Geneseo for a long weekend of packing.

Given the weather and the slippery roads I decided to leave the office a little early today.  Dominica borrowed a movie from a co-worker today that I guess that we are watching tonight.  Tomorrow we have to take Oreo to the vet after work and drop off the BMW to get the door fixed.  What a month this is!  I cannot wait for April.  I am really looking forward to having a little extra time for a change.  I have way too much to worry about between now and the end of March.