Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today ended up being our day to babysit Oreo after he fell last night and can now barely walk.  We were very hopeful that he would be fine when he awoke this morning but that was not the case.  He spent the entire day walking on just three feet.  It is very sad but he seems mostly happy and perky.  He doesn’t act at all as if he was partilly immobilized.  But it is depressing to see him hopping along with a little puppy invalid.

Today was mostly a relaxing day although we decided that we just had to get a rug to put in the living room to keep Oreo off of the slippery hardwood so we took a trip up to Target and picked up a decent throw rug for the living room and managed, somehow, to get a parking spot at Chevy’s and had a late lunch.  We were able to take Oreo along in the car because it wasn’t so cold and he was able to relax.  We didn’t feel that we could leave him along at all in case he fell again which is very easy now.

Dominica did more studying for her A+ exam tonight and I filmed myself assembling a computer which I hope to use in a video for CCA.  Once you want to start filming anything you quickly realize how dark your home is.  We always know that it is a little dark but we like it that way most of the time so it isn’t a big deal.  But when you want to film something or to take a picture it becomes very noticable that this house is much darker than anyplace that we have ever lived before.  I have to buy a studio light to be able to do any real filming.

We watched more of Monarch of the Glen that dad taped for us.  We are through the sixth season and into the seventh and final season.  The new rug really adds something to the room and makes it a lot more comfortable in the living room for all of us.  It makes the apartment seem more homelike.

Ah the weekend. Dominica is spending the weekend working on studying for her A+ and getting ready for her next college class: Systems Analysis and Design. I think that she is going to enjoy this class. Of course they are making her buy yet another copy of the same text book that I own the past two revisions of. Apparently SAD at Empire State gets the latest SAD textbook every twenty-four months from the publisher so that you can never, ever reuse one. Even when I took the second half of the class they changed between the first and the second halves so that you couldn’t even continue from one to the other. It has been some time since I took that class but we just knew that this would happen. Considering the book is like $150 it is pretty obnoxious. The real issue is the publisher coming out with a new edition every two years. How often do you need a new book like that? It is a good book and maybe there is some awesome new material in it but I find it unlikely. I couldn’t even tell a difference between the two versions that I own already.

We spent a bit of time today watching Monarch of the Glen Season Six that dad recorded for us off of the television. The last two seasons are not yet released here in the states (a major financial blunder demonstrating how clueless big media is to its market) on DVD and so the only way for us to see it here is to have dad record it for us. Our plan was to go out grocery shopping tonight on the shuttle but just before we were set to leave the building Oreo fell off of the futon onto the very unforgiving hardwood floor (uncushioned hardwood on concrete) and hurt himself quite badly.

So we spent the evening in the apartment looking after Oreo who can no longer put any weight on his rear right leg.  He is having a really hard time getting around.  So we just ordered in some Dominos pizza and spent the evening with the dog and watched more shows.

I haven’t seen this film yet but you can’t tell me that West Bank Story can be anything but really great! I am definitely planning on getting this movie on DVD.

The word of the morning is rain. It rained most of the night and is positively pouring this morning. The rain has resulted in traffic jams up on Route 3 which Dominica has to take to work and on 78 which I have to take. Visibility is very low today.

Dad found a good article on household poisons that are often ingested by dogs. Good reading for pet owners. Some things that you might not think of as being poisonous for dogs are in there like ibuprofen and, of course, chocolate which we all know is toxic for dogs.

Tomorrow the Star-Spangled Banner celebrates seventy-six years as our national anthem. I learned today that while the lyrics are genuinely American – penned by Francis Scott Key in 1814 in the Maryland littoral near Fort McHenry – the tune is actually in inappropriate adult drinking song from England in 1780 called “Anacreon in Heavon.” The tune was written by John Stafford Smith and Old Glory flies above Gloucester Cathedral in his honour.

My day today was quite busy and flew right by. I grabbed breakfast when I first got to work this morning and decided to skip lunch. I always feel better when I do that anyway. And it is so much cheaper. Lunch at the office cafeteria is generally $3.50 but breakfast is like 65¢!

I had to spend a bit of time getting things cleared up so that we are all set to sell the house this month. It is hard to believe that we are now just four weeks to the day from the proposed closing day! That leaves almost no time to actually get everything packed up and moved out of the house.

Wheaton points us to an awesome XHTML Coder Geek Tattoo. This definitely falls into the “you know you are a geek when…” category.

So our weekend plans have changed and our current plan is to just stay in Newark this weekend but this is the last opportunity to do so that we will have. We have only two weekends left to do the moving! That is a little scary. The plan is to hire professional movers to do the big stuff in the end but that still leaves us with a lot of packing to do in the meantime. The bottom line is that we can have no more social anythings until the house is sold. We just don’t have the time. Nothing extra. Sorry to everyone who might want to do something with Dominica and I over the course of the month but we are one hundred percent out of commission until April. There just isn’t any getting around that – sad as it is. It isn’t all that long. I will be spending this weekend doing what I can to smooth the server transitions but there isn’t much left to be done with that until I actually get them into place. I was really hoping to have those rails by this weekend but it looks like I am not even going to have the tracking number for them until Monday!

Microsoft suffered a major patent defeat in German court today as the FAT patent is declared NULL! This is a major relief for, well, everyone as the patent would have been used to extract extra money from everything from Linux, UNIX, Mac users to digital camera owners, MP3 player owners, etc. Absolutely everything uses the FAT. (FAT = File Allocation Table.) The German courts ruled that everything “new” in the FAT is completely obvious to anyone who can program and therefore unpatentable.

On OSNews today there was a follow-up review for a Dell w1700 television / monitor combo unit. The reviewer discovered why no one should ever buy a Dell product: they don’t care at all about their customers. It turns out that Dell has been shipping this product knowing that it is faulty and that the back-light will just burn out. It is such a common problem that a third party has the backlights in stock and ready to go. It is an expensive item and Dell won’t pay to replace it but will recommend going to the third party and opening up the monitor and replacing it yourself. Dell is selling back equipment knowing that their customers aren’t very big on product research and taking advantage of them. This is a bad, bad company as we have seen from their exploding laptops and other products and now their SEC securities fraud investigations. No wonder Dell just took a 35% dive!

It is a good thing that I am not traveling tonight as I ended up getting stuck in the office very late. Friday nights are always busy but tonight was extremely busy. I had way more work to do than usual.

My Pinnacle Studio Titanium Media Suite 10.5 shipped tonight according to email that I received. I should be getting it in a week or two. I keep forgetting how long it takes for mail to make its way through Newark. For some reason just sending a letter across town seems to take a whole week.

Today the BBC partners with YouTube!  This could be very interesting indeed.

It was well after eight when I finally got a chance to wrap up in the office.  Tonight is such a busy night that plenty of people are still in the office working now that I am leaving.