Sheep Guarding Llama

I got home from work and Dominica and I went right out to IHOP for dinner. I was in a good mood and just felt like going out and taking the night off from work. We came home after our scrambled egg skillets and watched Are You Being Served? while I worked on writing a script that will automatically install BugZilla onto CentOS because it is way too complicated to be doing by hand should I ever need to do a rebuild and there is simply no documentation on how to do this anywhere. So I figure that someone will benefit from this once I am done with it.

I went to bed a bit after eleven and woke up, completely rested this morning, with but two hours of sleep! I got out of bed at one thirty in the morning. I was up for about an hour and a half and then decided that it was a mite too early and decided to just lay in bed for a while “reading” the book that I have been working on “In the Wake of Madness” which I finished this morning.

I got completely out of bed a little after four, but without having slept a wink since half past one, and got ready for work. I have some work to do that is perfect for the early morning when I am pretty much guaranteed to be alone with nothing to do. There is especially little to do since I am not officially covering the phones so there is someone already in the office taking care of that so I am free to just do server builds in peace.

I got into the office just after seven but immediately discovered that there was an outage that prevented me from doing the work that I had come in early to do which was not useful at all. So that was a waste of getting up nice and early. I could have stayed in bed with Oreo who was very sleepy after having had a birthday party at day care yesterday.

Doggie Paradise has posted the Halloween Party Pictures from a few months ago. It was Oreo’s first Halloween party and he loved it. There is a picture of him in his costume on the costumes page and there are several group pictures that he made it into that I am reposting onto Flickr to make sure that we preserve. We now have one hundred pictures of Oreo on Flickr!

Josh TXT’d me this morning to let me know that he is coming down to Newark the middle of next week. He doesn’t know his exact schedule yet. He should be down for a few days. The building is a lot more complete than it was the last time that he was down. This should be rather a shock for him.

I learned today (from reading Dilbert of course) that Penn and Teller (the illusionist in Vegas who have poor cat handling skillz) promote smoking because they claim that there is “no evidence that second-hand smoke is dangerous.” As second hand smoke is the same as first hand smoke without a filter they therefore are either stating that filters are dangerous or, more likely but even less reasonable, that first hand smoke isn’t bad for you at all and all of those people that you know personally who died from smoking, um, didn’t. Let’s face it. Smoking is so insanely bad for you that we would be lucky if there was a single person reading this blog who didn’t personally know someone who died from smoking induced cancer or lung failure. And think of the incredible number of people that we DON’T meet in our lives for exactly that reason. All those people who died before we could meet them. Maybe the lesson here is not to smoke. Maybe the lesson here is that two-bit Vegas performers define scraping the bottom of the social barrel. Maybe there is a lot to be learned today.

I started listening to David McCullough’s “The Johnstown Flood” today. I love David McCullough books. The story of the great flood at Johnstown is particularly interesting as the town was founding by a long lost relative (named John) and because it is located close to Pittsburgh where I once lived.

I came across a letter written to Scott Adams by a very adamant reader who was extremely upset with Scott for having suggested, in a comic-strip no less, that fish feel pain and that by doing so he was risking the collapse of America’s outdoor traditions and conservations practices. Apparently Americans can only exist happily and not kill things by inflicting horrible pain and wounding poor, defenseless animals. The person who wrote in (who withheld his name for obvious reasons) actually infers in the letter than pain is a human feeling and that animals don’t feel pain and that they have no rights – none. This person clearly is a scary, sadistic person – for any living creature to “need” to hurt another! This isn’t an argument about food supplies, health or anything of the sort. This person is lashing out because there is a one in a million chance that the population might catch on to animal torture practices and realize that people who take pleasure from killing, maiming and torturing one living creature are only the tiniest, unmeasurable distance away from being serial killers. In fact, the only mental difference between the two is the fear of going to jail for what you do. In both cases it is a matter of a living creature taking pleasure from the pain of another. Or, in Christian parlance, taking pleasure in the destruction of what God has created. The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Coincidentally I just finished reading “In the Wake of Madness” today which just happened to be about several men, specifically whalers – people who make their living killing gentle sea mammals on a daily basis – who are considered fine, upstanding citizens at home who, once out to sea away from the laws of the land, turn to racist serial killers who use their positions of power to torture innocent non-Europeans to death. It was widely known that the Massachusetts whaling fleet had a very high percentage of captains and mates who lost all concept of humanity when out to sea. What set the whaling fleet apart from other sea-faring jobs was the constant killing and death that was involved in the job. And with whales, unlike with fishing, the killing of a whale is a very personal experience where you have to spend a lot of personal time struggling to take the life of a large and highly intelligent creature. “Moby Dick”, often considered to be America’s most important novel, deals with the obsession one man has with needing to take revenge on a whale – apparently the inability for humans to separate the suffering of men from the suffering of animals is a critical thread in the very traditions of our country.

A new robotic parking garage is about to open in Chinatown. Now, before I mock this parking garage because you just KNOW that I am, I want to state that I am a big fan of the concept of robotic parking garages. They save tremendous urban space and lower the cost of city life. They just make sense. However, after Hoboken’s failed robotic garage fiasco the Chinatown facility was quoted as saying “”It is a complete virtual impossibility that damage can occur.” according to the Associated Press. A “complete virtual impossibility” – does that imply that it isn’t just a partial virtual impossibility which would actually make it rather likely? Is he trying to say that he isn’t lying when he says that it isn’t likely that your car will fall, upside down, onto the street below? I’m not sure what exactly they are implying but the one thing that I am absolutely sure of is that they are NOT saying that the garage is actually all that safe. (Remember, the cars are EMPTY in the garage. Do NOT leave pets or children in the car. The Hoboken garage dropped one car six stories and another car four stories!)

I found a great old video by the Apple team when they decided to start licensing the Mac platform to clone manufacturers. The really funny thing about the video is how completely convinced they were that by making really low quality Mac clones that look like PCs (read: ugly) that they would suddenly own the desktop computing market. Check out “I Think We’re a Clone Now“. They go on and on about how much better PowerPC is than PC and how CISC is awful and all that. Now Apple Macs are just clones of Intel PC boxes running CISC Pentium III enhanced processors. Lame. Now from the same time period: John Cleese in Compaq vs. “That Trendy Computer”.

I had a pretty good day today. I really appreciate my long day off yesterday. I really needed that time to just let my brain melt-down for a while.

I read while a bit of Scott Adam’s blog today and there was a lot of good stuff but one of the best is Wedding Favors. This really sums up what I think of wedding favors in general and, I believe, what everyone thinks of wedding favors in reality but some people have this big running practical joke going about them.

I worked until six this evening which was actually a pretty long day without even feeling like it. Eleven hours sitting at my desk. Not to bad. I am running to the grocery store on the way home and picking up some basic supplies. Dominica is planning on cooking at home tonight. We will probably just take it easy this evening as we usually do. Our plan is to head to Geneseo on Friday night – that is just three nights away. We have packing to do and we are going to go to Buffalo to visit Dominica’s cousin who has just gone into the hospital there a very long way away from home and family.

I am excited that I have no work to take home tonight so I don’t have to even log onto the office from home. Yay. I can just relax and enjoy some Are You Being Served? which I need from time to time.

I am back to my normal schedule this week and I got to stay in bed with Oreo until Dominica was ready to go to work. Oreo was excited thinking that it was going to be a stay at home day and he didn’t want to go to daycare with Min. As soon as she turned her back he ran in and hopped back into bed and put his head on me hoping that I would let him stay home today. It was very cute.

Before going into the office I sat down and paid all of the bills. I hate paying bills. And there are so many to pay. I am looking forward to having the house be sold as that will eliminate several of them. Today I had to pay homeowner’s association fees (which have gone up considerably since we bought the townhouse – about twenty percent up!) and the taxes which are never fun. We are still recovering from Christmas. Paying the bills is always close this time of year. And Dominica had time off during December so her paychecks were smaller than usual and my paychecks are smaller at the beginning of the year than they are at the end so we took a big hit the last few weeks in addition to having more than the usual number of bills.

I had to run over to FedEx to send out some stuff this morning. It is great having a FedEx directly next door. That makes life so much more convenient. There was actually a bit of snow on the ground this morning. I wasn’t expecting that when I came down from the apartment.

I have decided that XKCD is one of my new favourite sites to visit. I read it at work and I have its RSS feed subscribed in my feed reader so I get it as soon as it comes out now. I found it thanks to Wil Wheaton who points me in the right direction of all sorts of cool stuff. XKCD had a comic recently that perfectly describes my wife: Dominica’s comic and strangely just one comic later they had the perfect one for her college roommate: Jenn’s comic. One of my favourite of the older comics there is the Donner Party of Four comic.

I have an important announcement today: Rockstar Juiced Energy+Guava is AMAZING! I am totally drinking two of these today. My head is really close to exploding. (Strongbad: Your Head Asplode)

Today is my day of discovering someone who has the exact same humour as me (Randall Munroe of NASA) and crossing that experience with a LOT of caffeine and fruit juice. I am sitting in my cubicle giggling and attempting to get some work done. But mostly just giggling. He even mentions my favourite SNES game!

After several hours of scouring XKCD comics I finally found the comic that best describes me. This is Scott Alan Miller in a Comic! If you don’t believe me, go back and read the SGL Goed to DisneyWorld posts and listed to the podcast.

I decided that after working, more or less, straight for a month (I haven’t really taken a day off since December) that I have lost the ability to be productive and decided to completely and totally blow today off. And… I was successful. I managed to do just about nothing. (As productivity approaches zero…) Boy do I feel better. Or maybe that is because I am high on caffeine. But my stress level is way down today. Paying the bills helps that as well.

I once heard a conundrum on the radio saying “There are three words in the English language that end in ‘g-r-y’, one is ‘hungry’, one is ‘angry’ – what is the third?” In reality there is no third work in the language that ends in ‘gry’. This isn’t funny nor is it clever. It is one of those things that dumb people ask when they need to stump smart people and can’t come up with anything. Like five year-olds ending any comeback with “I know you are but what am I?” – even when it doesn’t make linguistic sense (does it ever) and simply shows an immaturity resulting in a lack of ability to speak English properly. So finally there is a comic that answer the question “What is the third word?”

And another (can you believe how many comics I read today?) – here is a simple explanation of string theory that finally explains what is going on.

I ordered some free CDs from BMG today (by free I mean I paid for them previously and now selected what they can send me for the money that they already have of mine.) A lot of you may be surprised that I, Internet / computer guy, still buy physical CDs and do not get my music as a download. But this is caused by the fact that I am also a music guy. I don’t want low quality (or lower than CD quality) downloads of my music. I want the highest quality that I can get – CD or DVD-Audio or SACD are even better. But CD is awesome because the quality is really high and I can quickly and easily turn a CD into high quality Ogg Vorbis files to play on my computer or into MP3 files to play on my portable music players. I am not limited to the quality that they allow me to download and I don’t have to do cross format compression ruining quality and size all at once. I also OWN what I buy. It is mine. I have a piece of plastic to confirm my license to use it. I have better quality of sound, more features and better archiving and longevity. My music collection will be intact and I will be able to easily pass the entire investment onto my children without any DRM getting in the way or any bizarre format / hardware requirements making it illegal for them to use it. If I wanted my music to cost $1 per song and only get to use it for a little while I would just get a satellite radio. I want to know that the things I buy are mine until I die and then I can pass them on. My music is an investment – just like my movies – I buy them because I want them to be mine to use whenever I want. Otherwise I would rent them and pay a flat fee for each time that I watch them. Someday there will be lots of good, DRM free music and movies in insanely high quality, standard formats downloadable online but until there is I will continue to go for the REAL “geek” formats or openness and freedom and enjoy my high-fidelity music while everyone else enjoys the squawk of AAC compression. Enjoy. (By the way, MagnaTune and The PodCast Music Network offer tons of awesome downloadable music today is open formats but not mainstream music very often and not high-fidelity formats so far.)

From reading comics today I learned that in 1979 US President Jimmy Carter (the “Peanut President”) was “attacked by a swimming rabbit“. The incident was minor but it was mentioned once too often and eventually became front page news. A White House staffer decided to attempt to make the incident sound more “believable” by saying that it was actually a “swamp rabbit” – that, of course, did not help the situation. XKCD has a great comic to commemorate the event. Maybe the rabbit was just looking for some peanuts.

I decided that after reading through the entire XKCD collection from beginning to end that I had sufficiently killed the entire day and that it was six o’clock and time for me to leave the office. I feel great and happy and ready to take on the world – or at least dinner. I feel so good, in fact, that I intend to go ahead and post early and blow off the evening as well and probably go somewhere for dinner (caffeine makes you hungry you know) and not have to wrap up the daily before going to bed.

Oh, and if you like XKCD be sure to support Randall by buying some t-shirts. They make great gifts. I wear XXXL. My birthday is coming up soon.

When Windows/386 first released, Microsoft made a promotional video that they sent to their resellers to explain to them the benefits of the new system – mostly how similar it was to the more powerful OS/2. Google Video is hosting the original Windows/386 sales training video and it is well worth the twelve minutes it takes to remember back to when character based Windows were “cool”. Half of this video is sort of boring but takes you back to the early days of excitement in making “charts” from your spreadsheet data – I remember those days well. Harvard Graphics anyone? But then, halfway through the video, the crew making the video completely lose their minds and the insane ’80s show through. Err, burst through and take over. Oh to live in the ’80s again. Oh wait, I live in New Jersey. It is always the ’80s here. But so much so as in Texas. But it is similar in many ways.

We slept in a little this morning but not too much as Oreo got right up and decided that he wanted to go to the park. He was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for Dominica to be ready to go so I ended up taking him by myself out for his walk.

Zach and Susan called and wanted to get lunch today so we made some plans and Dominica and I started getting ready to go out. It was almost ten by the time that we started making plans so we didn’t have a lot of time before lunch. We didn’t know if they were going to come up to see the apartment today or if anyone else might stop by to visit so we got ready and then did a pretty good job cleaning the apartment. It is amazing how quickly such a small place can become such a mess. But the upside is that it doesn’t take too much to really get it clean.  We both felt a lot better after the place was all cleaned up.  I think that the mess had been weighing on us.

Zach and Susan picked us up in front of our building a little after noon and we drove out to the northwest to the Udipi Cafe that Dominica and I really like out there.  I think that Zach and Susan really liked it too.  Especially the palak paneer.  This was the first time that I have had curry at Udipi and it was really excellent.

After lunch Dominica and I picked up Oreo and we drove out to Harrison to do some quick shopping at Walmart.  We had to go because we are were totally out of bottled water (the water in the building is undrinkable) and we really needed a tire gage for Dominica’s BMW.  We had been hoping to be able to pick up the first season of The Facts of Life on DVD but Walmart has all but eliminated their DVD section so that wasn’t an option even though they had it on special display the last time that we were in the store.  We checked the tire pressure when we left the store and then went right over to the gas station and I taught Dominica how to check and to fill her tires.

Both of us felt really tired this evening and, for the most part, the evening was a loss.  We watched several episodes of Are You Being Served? and I worked on getting a working installation of BugZilla working.  It didn’t take too long and I have it working pretty well now.  My next task is to start a clean machine and document exactly how to do the install so that it can be done easily again.

Dominica made dinner and we just relaxed at home.  Just before we went to bed it started to snow pretty heavily outside.  I took Oreo out for a last minute walk before going to bed and he just ran out, did his business on the first pole he could find and ran right back in to get out of the cold.

All three of us slept in quite significantly today. I was the first up around nine thirty or maybe a little later. Dominica got up just before eleven thirty and Oreo was only minutes ahead of her. We were up way too late last night for sure.

I was on the phone working with Andy when Dominica got up but as soon as I was off of the phone we called in a breakfast order to Food for Life before they stopped serving breakfast. We ordered the occidental pockets and hurried to take Oreo out for a walk in the park while they were making our food. The timing was perfect. By the time he had walked and returned to the apartment and we got over to FFL the food was ready and just the right temperature for us. By this time it was well after noon and they stop serving breakfast on Saturdays at noon. We wanted pancakes but breakfast was long over. We made sad faces and they made us pancakes even though they weren’t supposed to. It is good to be well loved (and probably the most regular customers that they have.)

After lunch it was time to come back to the apartment and finish watching the final season five epidose and the one holiday special episode of Monarch of the Glen. While we were watching that I started doing the big weekend project that I have for the office. That ended up taking me all afternoon. I had a ton of work to do today. While I was waiting for stuff to happen at the office I also worked on building a CentOS based BugZilla server. Andy and I talked this morning and he was so unimpressed with my experiences in installing FogBugz that he does not feel confident in the long term stability of the company or the resiliency of the software. So we made the decision to return that software and to explore other avenues. My plan is to write an essay on my two day experience of attempting to install FogBugz and start a new “Essays” category on SGL so that my long diatribes can be relegated to an easily avoided section while becoming more searchable.

At six we had to rush to get ready for our dinner this evening. I jumped into the shower and then took Oreo out for his evening walk while Dominica was in the shower getting ready. I got Oreo back to the apartment just in time to walk out the door with Dominica and over to pick up Jeffrey whom we are having dinner with tonight. By “picking him up” I mean on foot as he lives just one block away from us and the restaurant that we are going to tonight, The Savoy Grill, lies between our homes. The Savoy is actually closer to us than our car is and I am pretty sure that Jeffrey is closer than the car as well!

We ended up staying at the Savoy for three and a half hours and we had a really good time. We also got a chance to talk to the general manager a little bit whom we met two nights ago at Food for Life during the party at 1180 Raymond. The Savoy Grill is located on the first floor of the NorCrown Bank Building. In the Savoy there is an old picture on the wall between the restrooms that was apparently taken in the early 1930s of the NorCrown Bank Building from a towering neighbour building looking down on it and showing the empty Military Park with the lonely Trinity Church located in it. It only took a second of looking at the picture before I figured out that the picture was taken from 1180 Raymond shortly after the building was finished when it was one of the few high rises in the area.  It was eery to see Military Park so desolate.  It is very strange to think of this building that I am sitting in right now as I write today’s post to have been built as this gigantic testiment to human engineering and efficient use of space while the area around it was empty and low lying buildings could easily have been built instead.
While doing some online searches today I found two great pictures of downtown Newark taken across the Passaic River: Resurgence City Daylight Downtown Newark and Resurgence City Night Downtown Newark. In both images you can see the new skyscrapers of Newark but right in the center, on its own, is 1180 Raymond Boulevard reminding viewers of the Newark’s heyday.

I got to sleep in just a little this morning which I needed. After we got home from the party last night I had an entire server build that had to be done before I could go to bed so I was stuck staying up working until midnight so that I could turn the server over before going to sleep. It was nice to have the work done but it made for a long evening. I got up around a quarter after seven this morning. I have a bunch of scheduled work that starts at nine so I really have to get moving and get into the office. No wiggle room today. The work had originally been scheduled when I was doing the early morning shift but then when that got changed the work was a little on the early side.

Today’s interesting tidbit: When gas-lighting first came to England in 1807 (Pall Mall was the first gas-lit street in London – Wyoming, New York was the first gas-lit village in the United States) people were so ignorant as to how gaslight worked that they believed that pipes carrying gas would be hot and were afraid to touch them. Much like computers today, gas-lighting was a “hot” technology that people had a hard time comprehending. I wonder what technology will displace computers in the future and people will think of computers like we now think of gas-light – so incredibly obvious that we can’t understand not understanding it! It has only been two hundred years (officially as of this coming Sunday, the 28th) since London began to be lit by gas and yet people from that era were so far behind us in understanding the world around us that they thought gas pipes would be hot. Think about those implications.

Today was super busy – so busy that I had to work through my usually peaceful Friday lunch. I had to spend most of the day on the phone with major migrations going on all day. While on the phone I did get to keep up well with my regular Friday backlog (from working at home on Thursday) of RSS feeds and magazines. I made it through several magazines today and I am ready to get another load of them from dad next weekend. I am on course to have none left by next weekend when Dominica and I go back home again to Geneseo and get the mail. Dad has new books waiting for me as well that have arrived since the last time that we were home.

I spent most of the day with a pretty bad headache. Not a headache so painful that I couldn’t function but enough of one that it was just a continuous dull, throbbing behind my eyes all day and I really did not want to spend any additional time today staring at a computer monitor. By half past four I just couldn’t take the overhead lights anymore and decided to go home before I got too sick to be useful at all.

I got home and felt better after about two hours. I laid down for a while and sort of took a nap. I took an Excedtrin (and then it was gone.) Dominica got home and we ordered in some Domino’s so that we wouldn’t have to go anywhere tonight. We watched quite a few episodes of Monarch of the Glen while I did quite a bit of work installing Fog Creek Software’s FogBugz software tonight. Yesterday I put in several hours attempting to install it onto CentOS 4 without any luck. That was a huge amount of work that did not pay off at all. CentOS is not officially supported but it was a crazy amount of work to figure out whether or not I would be able to get it to work. It was very disappointing as I did not want to have to switch to a different, less enterprise, distribution but I am stuck apparently. Solaris 10 was suppossedly an option but I don’t currently have a Sparc64 server running Solaris 10 ready to install it on. And unlike the x86 distributions I can’t run Solaris 10 for Sparc64 in a VMWare virtual machine. Solaris for x86 can be run that way but that operating system isn’t supported either.

So tonight’s project was to install Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS into a VMWare Virtual Machine and then to install FogBugz onto it. I had a lot of learning to do as I have never really used Ubuntu or its parent Debian hardly at all before. So I had to learn a lot about the whole dpkg and deb system and the apt automated package management system. That took quite a bit of time to get working as well as I can use rpm and yum. But now I can use that pretty well. Getting FogBugz installed still proved to be rather a chore. It took me several hours to get FogBugz installed but finally, after several emails to Andy complaining about what a pain that was, I finally got it working. I never got eAccelerator working although I did get it installed. So that is a project for later this weekend. But I am very happy to finally have FogBugz up and running. Later this weekend I can start really seeing if it is going to meet our needs going forward.

Dominica and I didn’t get tired for a long time (although Oreo was ready for bed sometime around eight!) We ended up watching almost the entire season of Monarch of the Glen Season Five. We tried to get sleepy drinking some wine. We drank a bottle of Seneca Shores Blueberry Amulet which was still good even though we have let it stand for far too long and have moved it several times. After that didn’t work we also opened a bottle of The Little Penguin’s 2005 White Shiraz from Australia. This is our first ever white shiraz (which can be safely said to be Australia’s version of the California White Zinfandel.) Zinfandel and Syrah (aka Shiraz) are both very deep red wine grapes (along with the Cab Sav and Cab Frank) and making a white wine with them is a bit untraditional (and generally considered very passe) but the blush wines that result can be a lot of fun and very drinkable no matter what the wine snobs say. I can drink a varietal Cabernet Frank with the best of the wine snobs but I also can enjoy a tasty blush when it is done right. The Little Penguin White Shiraz is fun, drinkable and a good recommendation for occassional wine drinkers and anyone looking for a change from the 1980s “pop” wine White Zin. If you aren’t afraid of what the California wine crowd is going to think – check it out. You might be surprised. You will probably want it chilled but I like it room temp as well.

It was almost three o’clock in the morning by the time that we finally went to bed.  And still we weren’t all that tired.  We watched all but the final episode of MotG before turning in.  I am sure that we will finish it up tomorrow evening.  Tomorrow during the day I have rather a bit of work that needs to be done for the office so I will be quite busy.

Since we stayed up so late I managed to actually get our FogBugz issue tracking system up and running online – a major achievement for one night of work.