Sheep Guarding Llama

I had to work from home this morning because Oreo is not going to daycare today. He was still a little sick yesterday and we don’t want to push our luck by sending him to daycare too quickly. I was super tired last night too. I went to bed just a little after nine and didn’t get up until around seven this morning! I did wake up in the middle of the night and was out of bed for a while and I was in bed awake a bit during the night so it wasn’t quite the full ten hour night of sleep that it sounds like but it was a lot of sleep for me either way.

Oreo wasn’t too sleepy today as he slept all weekend and he was actually pretty restless this morning. It was really obvious that he was bored while I worked. He paced around the apartment a lot and kept wanting me to play with him and pay attention to him. He was pretty much moping. When I took him out for his morning walk it was so cold that my breath was freezing to my mustache. This is one of those really brutal days for people living outside. We have a homeless man living in Military Park who has set up a pretty much permanent location there. I would have to say that he has been there for two weeks but at least he has one of those really nice super thermal sleeping bags that closes over his head and some plastic mats to lay beneath to keep him off of the cement.

I worked from home until noon and then ran over to Food for Life for a TBLT while Joseph got my car. The poor valets working in single digit temperatures! This is Joseph’s last week, though, he is heading for Atlanta this weekend. I bet he is really excited about that considering what a cold week it has been.

It was a busy day at the office. There has been a lot of work for me to do for weeks now and it hasn’t let up yet. I am starting to get some pretty serious eye strain and I have developed a twitch under my left eye that bothers me all of the time. I am looking forward to getting home and ordering in some Chinese take-away (we can’t go out to eat tonight since Oreo has been couped up at home all day and he was restless even when I was still there,) doing are mandatory “pre-visitor” cleaning spree and playing some Dragon Quest VIII. It is nice having a game console again even if it is an old one. Really we should have brought down the Dreamcast and hooked that up too. Maybe we will do that sometime soon. We still have a number of cool games on there that we want to play through.

I got stuck at the office a lot later than I had anticipated this evening. I had originally thought that I would get to leave around half past five as things had slowed down at the end of the day pretty much and I had one five o’clock deployment that I had to do. Well, that five o’clock deployment got held off until half past six! That is a long time to sit around waiting thinking that you might be done any minute. It was after seven by the time that I was able to leave the office. At least I made up for having to have worked from home for so long this morning. I actually put in quite a long day.

I got a hankering for white bread with butter and honey tonight. All of a sudden it just hit me. I haven’t so much as thought about eating butter and honey on bread in maybe ten years or more. I could not even begin to guess when the last time I thought of that food was. My mother use to make that for me when I was a kid. I didn’t have it much once I was a teenager or so but I definitely had it a lot when I was young. What a weird memory to suddenly have.

It is Super Bowl Sunday. And today I managed to make it all day without ever once even hearing who was in the game. And after the game was over I never heard who won. I heard nothing. Not a thing. And it was good.

Oreo got me out of bed early this morning to take him into the living room and get him set up in the sunlight. He has learned that sunny weekends means that there is a lot of bright spots in the living room for him to lay in and he wakes me up to take him out there. It is very cute. He spent the entire morning sleeping in the sun like a pat of butter.

I had office work that had to be done so I started on that and had plenty of time to work on it while Dominica slept. Today is mostly a relaxing day. Oreo needs his rest although he seems to be improving a lot. He only coughed once or twice all day and that was just in the morning.

We watched some DVDs today and Dominica played some of Kingdom Hearts 2. I got a chance to play just a tiny bit of Dragon Quest VIII but it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun. Dominica made sandwiches for lunch and we just stayed in.
Josh is coming out on Tuesday evening and is just planning on staying for one night. So we will be hanging out with him on Tuesday night. On Wednesday night Dominica and I also have some dinner plans. We will be going out to Mompou with a friend from the office.

We drove out to IHOP tonight during the game when we figured the world would be quiet. That worked out well. We were able to go out and didn’t have to deal with any number of crowds.

As has become our habit on Saturday mornings, we got up late and went right over to Food for Life for breakfast. Occidental pockets and pancakes. Yum.

Dominica was totally exhausted today and spent most of the day napping. She was “sleeping” on the futon or in the bedroom for at least six hours after I got up and possibly quite a bit more. She pretty much slept until eleven, got up and we went to breakfast, then came home and went back to bed. I woke her up around six in the evening and then we went out to do some shopping.

We went north towards Nutley and got Oreo a humidifier (shaped like a cow) from Bed, Bath and Beyond. We went to GameStop to get some games too while we were out. Dominica decided that she really wanted a PlayStation 2 so that she could play games like DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) and Guitar Hero. They are pretty cheap now so we bought one and got Dance, Dance Revolution SuperNova with the dance pad and Kingdom Hearts 2 for Dominica. I got Final Fantasy X and Dragon Quest VIII for myself. I have never played any of the Dragon Quest series and this one is supposed to be amazing so I am really looking forward to it. I also got the only game that I am currently interested in for the XBOX 360: Enchanted Arms. There are a few games coming out in the future that look good like Blue Dragon and Assassin’s Creed but right now Enchanted Arms looks to be the only thing on the 360 that has any hope of being good. But Creed in going to be available on the PS3 so I am probably going to wait to get it for that as that will most likely be the primary platform with the best game play and graphics.

We came home and hooked up the PS2 and played a little of each game to try it out. I think that we are going to have a lot of fun with the system.

Dominica wanted it mentioned on SGL that she remembered the Ralstons’ Anniversary all on her own.

Wheaton had a really good post the other day talking about the terror hoax in Boston which was actually just a mistake by the city officials and the local Boston media trying to get some ratings by claiming that there was a hoax when there wasn’t. He makes the point, which is incredibly valid, that if the police, government, media, et all don’t stop crying wolf then there is going to be no way to ever deal with a real threat. It is the Boston media who are to blame mostly, it would appear, for elevating kids with toys to the status of terrorist. If this is what the media what to think terrorist look like then we will all get bored and start ignoring the media. Oh wait, too late.

People probably wonder what I read every day. Actually, you probably don’t but I figure that I might want to look back someday at what I read every day in February, 2007 so I am going to make a list. I get RSS feeds for Google News, Wil Wheaton don Net, Linux Today, OSNews, Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog (CEO and President of SUN Microsystems), The Old New Thing (by Raymond Chen of Microsoft), The Jedi Council Speaks, Joel on Software, Freshmeat (just a feed of new software as it releases), Google’s Testing Blog, Labor for the Harvest Blog, XKCD and Scott Adams’ Blog. I have recently added several IT news services like eWeek, InfoWorld, MSDN and TechNet. RSS is a beautiful thing. I actually am not using an RSS feed aggregator because I can’t install one easily at the office so I use the Wizz plug-in to Firefox to handle the RSS feeds.

I worked from home this morning so that I could spend some time with Oreo. He can’t go to daycare so he needs people to stay home with him as much as possible. He has never gotten used to being home alone. We are keeping the apartment pretty warm so that he doesn’t cough so much – he normally only coughs when he is breathing cold air or he is exerting himself like when he runs around. So I took him for a walk and fed him his lunch at eleven. Our concierge is going to pop in around noon to visit with him a little bit and see how he is doing. Then Dominica is planning on going home around half past one or maybe two this afternoon to walk him again. So at no point will he be alone for very long. We are hoping that he will be happy enough with that arrangement. Given that he is fighting off a cold or something he is probably going to be pretty happy to sleep quite a bit today.

The original plan had been for Dominica, Oreo and I to head for Geneseo tonight so that we could do more packing but the weather looks as though it is not going to be in our favour to head north tonight so we decided to just stay in Newark this weekend especially as Oreo is not feeling well and being up in Geneseo in very cold weather would not be likely to help his throat at all. It will do him good to have a relaxed weekend in Newark with nothing going on. I do need to work tomorrow anyway so being in Geneseo is not as useful for that as being in Newark is. Although I was looking forward to installing Microsoft Vista tomorrow and seeing how it works. I have Office 2007 ready to install as well although I played with that in Beta so I am pretty familiar with it already. For those of you who are die hard MS Office fans, I think that you will like Office 2007. It has quite some learning curve compared to past updates but I think that the new interface, in the long run, is going to make life easier for application support staff.

For the longest time I have been meaning to put a link on SGL but I keep forgetting about it. In Rye Harbor, NH there is a restaurant that my parents and I went to one time when we were vacationing there. We used to stop in the area on our way to Bar Harbor, ME. Strangely enough, Andy’s family used to stop in the same area and he was familiar with the same restaurant. Possibly more strange is that both of us remembered that restaurant. Once, probably in 1999, Andy and I both took a weekend off from work and drove all of the way out to New Hampshire, ate and drove back to Rochester. Maybe not a record setting food road trip but definitely in the top few. You can check out Ray’s Seafood Restaurant online.

Our BMW damage woes continue. After having our BMW get into an accident in the parking garage some months ago and after going through a lengthy process to track down someone who could actually deal with the situation and then after getting the damage appraisal we have since been running around for two months attempting to get the damage paid for even though Central Parking has admitted fault. They claimed in December to have sent us a check but we never received one. It was fishy as they never told us that they were going to send us a check. Awfully strange for them to just throw one in the mail and hope for the best. I spoke to them in January and they said that they would cancel the check that had never arrived and issue a new one this time to our actual home in Newark because the first check had been sent to a random address that they just assumed would be okay without ever checking with us. Then, after waiting several weeks, I called again as no check has ever arrived and now they tell us that they couldn’t send the second check as the first check was cashed. This is getting fishier and fishier. The whole situation sounds like a scam. If they were sending out a check why would they not have told us, ever, that they were agreeing to pay us until after the check was already “lost”? So next week they promise to produce a copy of the canceled check and we can see who they issued it to. While there is some remote possibility that we cashed the check somewhere I cannot imagine where or when. Especially as my bank account has had a total of four deposits since long before that check was ever supposedly issued. Pretty hard to hide an almost $1,000 deposit! So we will see. The BMW has been damaged from Central Parking for about five months now which is outrageous as we have only owned the car for about eight months! That car was supposed to be garaged this winter and we have not been able to do that either.

One of the guys at work introduced me to the Mvix device the other day. I haven’t had a chance to look at this device until today and boy was I surprised by how impressive this little baby is – at least on paper. My favourite features are Xvid and DivX video support, 1080p output, upscaling, direct DVD playing (no additional level of compression so you get them at full quality,) BYOH (bring your own hard drive,) DVI output, included remote control and Ogg Vorbis audio support! On paper this thing is truly amazing. And when I priced it out it was bad at all. Every shop that I looked at had it for $299. Add $199 for a good, large hard drive and for $500 you can have a potentially amazing how entertainment hub. Unfortunately it only holds a single hard drive which can be a problem as DVD content is often around 5GB in size and that means that a 750GB hard drive can only hold one hundred and fifty movies at full quality. And that is movies – if you start adding television shows it is going to plummet quickly. If you could fit four or five hard drives in it it would help a lot. But hard drives continue to outpace optical storage mechanisms so in a year or two a future Mvix model is sure to be able to hold a more impressive collection. But I would need a drive in the range of 5 terabytes to be able to store my current collection so I will need to continue to look for alternatives until drive sizes increase considerably. Ogg Vorbis support is very important to me as my entire music collection is currently converted to OV and ready to be transferred over to this player.

Even though I know that the BMW issue will be resolved and that this isn’t a big deal this is what I classify as a “blue event” – at least in my mind that is what I call it. No matter how much I know that this isn’t my fault and that there is nothing for me to do but wait and that it will all be fine and we will get to the bottom of it in no time and that even if things go horribly wrong and they try to take advantage of us that we have plenty of leverage and have nothing to worry about it still puts me in a funk. It sucks. I wish that I was better at taking these things in stride and not letting it bother me. It is too difficult to not become emotionally committed to these events and it isn’t good for you.

Construction going on at the office today reach a point where it was getting difficult to work. Not because of the noise level but because it felt like an earthquake and out monitors were bouncing all over the place.

A bit of my weekend work got canceled because other people were not ready for it. So that will give me more time to relax and to get caught up with other things. I am still working on getting the BugZilla installer working the way that I want but that is getting close.

I didn’t get to leave work until around seven.  I got home and Dominica and I immediately went out to Food for Life for dinner.  After dinner we went to the health club and got setup with our memberships which just started yesterday and got a little tour of some of the new stuff.  Then we went down to the basement and got a tour of the stuff that has been added down there that we haven’t seen yet like the bowling alley, media room and half basketball court.  The media room was supposed to have an XBOX 360 and a PS3 but they actually just got a PS2 which isn’t nearly as cool.  I am guessing that someone writing the announcement doesn’t know the difference and just wrote down whatever seemed popular.  So we plan to get some XBOX 360 and PS2 games so that we can use the media room.  We figure that since the systems are provided for us we should at least get some good games to play on them.  There are no good games provided for them.

I got up before seven this morning and got right to work. Oreo was hoping for a nice lie in today but no luck there. There is just too much needing to be done at the office to stay in bed late. So he trotted out to the living room and slept on the futon as close to me as he could get. He has totally taken over the futon as his very own, giant doggie bed.

At one point Oreo fell asleep on his back and started snoring so I looked over at him. His eyes were open but he was in deep REM sleep. I could watch his eyes darting from side to side wildly. At one moment he would be twitching each of his individual toes and his paws themselves. Then he would stop and switch to twitching his entire nose. Then he would move his jowels like he was grinding his teeth. Once in a while he would heave his chest in a silent bark. It is so cute when he does that.

We have discovered that we really love The Little Penguin Cabernet Savignon from South Eastern Australia. It is a very inexpensive but really awesome wine. I think that I like it a bit better than Yellow Tail from the same region. Today I also tried Black Swan. All three wines hail from the same region in Australia and all three sell for about the same price. They do vary and I think the The Little Penguin is my favourite.

Dad went over to the house in Geneseo today and retreived several more stacks of my computer and technology books that are destined for destruction. He took pictures of the stacks before carting them away and I have uploaded to the pictures to Flickr so that they can at least be remembered. If anyone wants any of them take a look at the pics and let me know as soon as possible. They will all be gone by Saturday morning most likely. There are a few that we are hoping to pull out and send to the school in Castile. Better than just throwing them away.

Oreo would appear to have come down with bronchitis – known as kennel cough in dogs. He started hacking and weezing around ten this morning when he got up. He has been extra tired all week and that would indicate that his little puppy body has been fighting the illness through its incubation period and now it has manifest itself. If it turns out that that is what he really has then he will probably take ten to fourteen days to get over it and he won’t be able to go fo doggie daycare all of that time which will be very sad for Oreo because he loves going there. It will also be extra hard on Dominica because she will have to come home during her lunch breaks during the week which is very exhausting for her.

I went over to Food for Life for lunch today. It was just a quick lunch. I called ahead so that I was able to get breakfast before they stopped serving it. The occidental pockets that they make are just amazing. It is sort of a spicy salmon egg roll but not quite.

I managed to convert a large number of Are You Being Served? episodes into XVid today. As we convert them we are able to ship the DVDs back to storage and get them out of our tiny apartment. Space is very much of the essence. And once we convert them they are so handy that it just makes sense. Since Dominica wasn’t using her computer during the day today I was able to keep the conversion process running in the background without interrupting me much at all.

I started packing today for the trip tomorrow. I have a plastic bin that came down with us the last voyage and it is getting filled right back up again with stuff to take in the other direction. We are starting to get pretty efficient at this.

Dominica came home and we enjoyed a relaxing evening and ordered in some pizza.  Nothing much to report tonight.  Oreo appears to be improving but it will probably be several days before we know if he is actually getting better or not.  We are hopeful that he just has a cold.

Since SGL posts a day after most of the time, I will take the opportunity to wish a Happy Anniversary to Art and Danielle Ralston!