Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

The saga of the fire alarms continues as I learn this morning that the fire department is coming in at some indeterminate time on Thursday to pull the fire alarms again. That is three days of testing in just eight days and in just six business days. Every other day for over a week. The fire inspector is due to come in today to find out what is going on. There are ways to test fire alarms safely and there are ways to do it dangerously and this continues to be a dangerous process. I am hopeful that the inspector today can push through a change in the way that the testing is done. I am told that the alarms can be tested only locally to the areas that need to be tested and that they can be tested silently as well.

I stayed home with Oreo until about ten before going into the office. There just seems to be no physical way for me to leave the apartment before ten. No matter what I do I am always stuck either working or with something going on until ten. Every day. Without fail. Oreo does appear to have improved some during the night and he is not as delicate with the injured leg as he has been.

Last night before going to bed Dominica and I managed to finish the seventh season of Monarch of the Glen. It is sad wrapping up a long running drama series like that. You really get connected to the characters. Although Monarch completely changed its cast between the fourth and the sixth season. It was a very dramatic change and they did it so dramatically and abruptly that it is sort of disrupting to the show. Some of the characters just vanishing even when they are pivotal pieces of the drama. The cast that they ended on was much stronger than the original cast though. And Tom Baker of Dr. Who fame playing Donald MacDonald was awesome. Lloyd Owen has long been one of my favourite British actors and it was great to see him get a leading role on such a big series.

Now that Monarch has ended I have no currently running shows that I am actually interested in. Chris at the office tells me that the newish US show Prison Break is actually amazing so I plan to check that out at some point and I have heard about a BBC show called Robin Hood that has potential but those are the only leads that I have. Nothing awesome like Monarch of the Glen that I know of right now.

Here is some really cool news: MIT is putting its entire eLearning catalogue online for free! Currently the majority of the catalogue is available – over fifteen hundred classes – but the remaining several hundred are expected to be available by the end of the year. I look forward to checking it out.

A new material engineered at Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, NY promises to be the “blackest” material that humans have ever seen. They mention lots of important uses for the material such as enhanced solar cells and brighter LEDs but, of course, I immediately realize that it is the ideal material for defeating police speed reading lasers 😉

Best Buy, who has always seemed to walk a fine line between being an overpriced retailer of mediocre electronics and being an evil retail giant with few ethics, has been charged in Connecticut court with maintaining an internally accessible web site that is visually identical, or nearly so, to their real web site and using the increased prices on the internal site to “prove” to customers seeking the price matching guarantee that the store prices are the same as the Internet prices. But the internal web site displays the store prices and not the web prices but is designed to be indistinguishable. Best Buy pleads that this is an accident and not intentional and that employees are not aware that there are two web sites but one has to wonder why there are? If the purpose is to have higher in-store prices in the hopes of confusing customers – which is what Best Buy appears to be claiming – but not to use it to disprove outside prices it still seems that this falls under the category of being intentionally misleading. Just because you don’t actually state that the outside prices are different than they actually are going to the effort of building an entirely separate system in the hopes that customers are confused and don’t actually compare the prices is almost if not just as bad.

I have to link to Scott Adam’s “The Things I Say” Dilbert Blog post because you that know me will know how well this posts describes me. Good stuff Scott, keep it coming.

Okay, a lot of people don’t believe me when I say that AT&T has garnered itself a bad reputation over the past ten years or so. In the circles that I run in AT&T is up there with Dell as one of those “all marketing no product and no customer service” companies that caters to the crowds that purchased based on gloss rather than on engineering. Finally someone substantial writes something to back me up. Tom Yager, one of the most respected pundits in the IT industry writes about AT&T in Enterprise Mac. And now you know why I am not buying an iPhone. Until the iPhone comes with a Verizon sticker on the front I will stick with my Q, thanks.

This Friday I am working in Manhattan for a change of pace. I almost never go into the city which is so weird as I live so close but for one reason or another we almost always avoid going into the city. But Friday I will be going to a couple of presentations and then working the rest of the day from downtown, possibly from right on Wall Street.

I finally got a chance to make an appointment for the BMW to get into the auto body shop to get the rear bumper taken care of. It goes in on April 9th. They could have squeezed it in the last week in March but that is the house closing week and that seemed like it would be a bad idea to add anything extra that week. And it gives us plenty of time to bring down the Mazda 6 so that we are not stuck renting a car for a long time which would make the repair very expensive. As it is we are very hopeful that there is nothing but superficial damage and that no working parts have to be replaced once they take the bumper off and get a good look at everything.

This morning Dominica discovered that her interior door latch is no longer working which means that if the car loses power (and since it did yesterday that is a real threat) that she will not be able to get out of the car since the only way that she is able to do that now is by rolling down the window first! That isn’t good. So the car needs to be taken to the normal shop right away as well. We were not able to make her an appointment for the car today because to do that the shop requires the VIN number and Dominica was not about to walk out in the bitter cold just to go look it up.

Today was more or less the usual if anything ever is. The one thing that I do enjoy about my day back after having been at home for a day is that there is always a backlog of blogs to read. One of the most exciting things going on today is Make is preparing to “go to space” with a weather balloon and take high resolution pictures. You can check out the details as Make Prepares to go to Space on Rocketboom. This is good stuff.

If you are a child who has grown up with Hollywood as your teacher be sure to check out “Nine Laws of Physics that Don’t Apply in Hollywood.” Strangely, everyone knows these laws but somehow when watching movies don’t realize that they don’t even expect them to exist or work. It is really weird.

Today two US Senators have abused their positions in the US government to pressure Canada to bend to the will of large US media corporations to enact a DMCA like law in Canada that would significantly remove citizens’ rights and hand them over to large, primarily American, corporations. You can contact the Canadian Prime Minister via email and inform him and the rest of the Canadian government that the voice of a few US senators who have sold their souls to big American business do not necessarily represent the opinion of Americans at large and should surely not be considered when they goal is to remove Canadian civil rights in favour of American commercialism. It is bad enough that we have done this to our own citizens because the American public has failed to educate itself and stand up for its own rights but we should hardly be an abusive neighbour and global partner. I emailed the PM today and I urge you to do the same whether you are an American asserting that the American public does not support this law domestically or pressure from the US to enforce it abroad or if you are a Canadian concerned over your own civil liberties that US senators want to take away from you.

By half past five today the office totally ground to a halt and even because quasi-silent so I decided that I should duck out a little early and take advantage of the situation to escape. By the end of the day I was stuck waiting for responses from other people anyway and by that time I am pretty unlikely to be getting them before the morning.

I ordered some CDs from BMG today. How about “Best of” CDs from Chris De Burgh (Lady in Red) and Rick Astley! Now that is some classic ’80s stuff. It is amazing how the music from the ’80s really stands out to the people of my generation as “the music of our lives” and almost no music from the ’90s does. Maybe it is because the music of the early to mid ’90s was so silly (Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer – seriously this was awful) or maybe it was just because of the age that we were. By high school your impressions of the world are pretty solid but in the ’80s when the world is more ephemeral to me and I guess the music of that era took on a greater significance even though when compared to other music in the “big picture” it was very silly indeed.

I took some heat today from a regular reader of SGL for my flippant treatment of the Newark Fire Department in regards to the constant fire alarm testing at 1180 Raymond. So I will take this opportunity to state in a public forum that I apologize to the Newark Fire Department who, I am sure, in general are extremely dedicated to saving lives in the city and work very hard and tirelessly for the residents here. In my defense, unannounced fire alarms have been a pet peeve of mine since childhood and I have always considered any alarm set off with the intention of “testing” but without warning to be a prank. This particular instance was not one of these cases and we did have warning, as I did state, but the warning covered a very large period of time over which we had “no alarm.”

In response to the fire alarm situation I spoke to the Newark Fire Chief’s office today who directed me to the fire safety department of the Newark Fire Department. They were very friendly and helpful. The fire safety department agreed that having many “fire alarms” – announced or otherwise – in a populated building was not safe. They also agreed that having a system where we had to spend a day or two at a time without any alarm at all – effectively – was completely unsafe. And they were very unhappy to learn that our fire alarm instructions were that the alarm is always a test unless they make a special “this is NOT a test” announcement to go with it. And, of course, they weren’t thrilled that the PA system is only audible from the hallway and not from the apartment so what we end up with is a loud annoying sound that blots out any hope of hearing the PA which is the actual alarm system in our case.

So tomorrow the fire inspector for our region of the city is scheduled to pop into 1180 and find out what has been going on. This is encouraging that they have someone coming so quickly to look into the matter as they agreed that the entire situation is completely unsafe and that our building has effectively had its alarm disarmed at least in any meaningful way even under the best of circumstances. I will keep you up to date on the situation. The best outcome of all of this would be if a new process was adopted by the city to ensure that alarm tests were organized in a well informed way so that residents were confident as to what constitutes an alarm and what constitutes a test in a reliable way in any building in the city. There should never be a situation where a person wonders whether or not an alarm is real and whether to risk life and limb rushing out of a building into the snow in their pajamas. It is so sad that we have, so far, been able to safely assume that every alarm at 1180 over the last six months has been false. Had any one of those alarms been real many lives might have been lost simply because people were trained not to believe the alarms.

This morning started off as a bit of a panic. The valet called up to say that Dominica’s BMW’s battery was dead and that they could not start the car. What a way to start the day. In reality there aren’t many days when this would have worked out better since we didn’t know what we were going to do about Oreo anyway. So I emailed into the office and let everyone know that I would be working from home today. The valet manager took Min, Oreo and I over to the garage so that Dominica could get stuff that she needed out of the Beamer and so that we could get our roadside assistance information out of the car. Then she headed off to work and Oreo and I returned to our impromtu doggie daddy day.

Oreo is still feeling pretty rough today. He appears to have improved slightly but his foot is really hurting and he still doesn’t walk on it most of the time. I had a busy work day and couldn’t spend much time with him. He is definitely getting really bored with being stuck in the apartment with nothing to do all of the time. He has a lot of energy that he wants to get out.

I paid some bills today and, for the first time in a very long time, I managed to do some actual investing. We have been sitting on some money for a while just holding it in a saving account which is really foolish but we just didn’t have the time or energy to figure out what to do with it. It turns out that that wasn’t such a bad decision with the market having gotten inflated. The market came down dramatically over the last week and we appear to have bought in just in time to have caught the market in about the same condition that it was late last year. We are much relieved.

Dominica was able to go grocery shopping today so now we have a little bit of food in the house.  We had frozen pizza for dinner and spent the evening hanging out with Oreo and watching Monarch of the Glen.  Tomorrow I have to return to the office and we aren’t sure what we are going to do with Oreo.