Sheep Guarding Llama

I forgot to mention yesterday that our check for the damage to the BMW finally arrived last night. Several months late but it did arrive and we are much relieved. Speaking of cars – the Mazda PR5 is heading to the shop this morning. That car is no longer saving us any money but with all of the money that we are putting into it it seems like it would be foolish to get rid of it anytime soon! Argh.

I worked from home for two hours or so this morning before rushing into the office to get the PR5 into the shop. I dropped the car off and got a loaner – a new Toyota Corolla S. This works out well as I have been wondering whether or not I would like a Corolla S. It is a small, sporty looking economy car. And my rental is even a colour that I like for this car. So it is like an extended test drive – not that we are looking for another car at this point. We really need to sell three cars as it is. Let me know if you are interested in one of them.

The PR5 is going to end up costing around $1,500! Both front bearings are toast and very dangerous and so they and their hubs have to be replaced which, in turn, requires a front end alignment and, while it is there, it is getting an oil change as well. It is things like this that make me REALLY want to get transferred up to Jersey City so that I don’t have to drive any more and we can go down to a single car. That would be awesome.

Work wasn’t too bad today. A lot of “recovering” still from yesterday’s emergency and a few incidences for today as well but not bad. A good day, I would say.

We are expecting some real snow tonight. Our first real snow of the year with driving problems and everything. But it isn’t expected to hit until this evening so the morning commute is the first that we will really see any driving issues. Everyone at the office is making contingency plans to deal with a lot of people needing to work remotely. Oreo would be very happy if I didn’t have to leave the house tomorrow. As it is he is planning on losing this week’s “Doggie / Daddy Day” and he will be SO exhausted come the weekend. At least it is a long, three day weekend so he will have a lot of time to rest up and recover from five solid days of daycare.

Barry Leiba from IBM expanding on Raymond Chen of Microsoft’s email subject etiquette article and I thought that I should copy it here: Guide to Email Subjects. It is a good read for everyone. I know you all are like me and poor at choosing useful email subjects. In the article he talks about how some people may only get a few emails a day but some of us get dozens or even hundreds but I want you to know that, not including SPAM, I am getting several thousand a day and can top ten thousand on rare occasion and I know that there are a lot of people like me out there and for us it is VERY important to have meaningful email subjects. It isn’t a long read and it would be good for us all – so go read it.

I had to leave the office a little early this evening because I have night work that has to be done, well, late.  So I had to get home early enough to have time to get the work done.

Today is the first day of our valet service working from Commerce instead of Raymond so now we are getting our cars on the south side of the building instead of the north side like we have been.  In the long run we think that this will probably be the better solution as Raymond just wasn’t working but with all of the parking and construction that go on on Commerce and the total disaster that that road is every evening I have no idea how this is going to work.  It is all that we can do to drive down Commerce in the evenings let along actually get in and out of our cars there!

I was up nice and early this morning and had to immediately get to work on an office emergency. I was planning on going into the office today but that didn’t end up happening. I was so busy all day that I ended up being stuck working from home all day. It turned into a really long day and I didn’t actually quit working until one in the morning!

It wasn’t an absolutely solid day of work like it sounds but I never really got any time off. I had to babysit a recovery process and only quit when I did because Optimum online went down and didn’t come back soon enough so I just went to bed so that I could get up and continue tomorrow.

I did get a chance to play a little Dragon Quest VIII today. Not a lot but a little and that was enough to keep me happy. I am a little over twenty hours into the game now and supposedly it should have about ninety hours of gameplay. My game clock was at twenty-five hours by the end of the day but a lot of that time was caused by me playing and having to leave the game running during conference calls and emergencies and other things that keep happening while I am playing. Several hours have been run up on the clock without me actually playing so I am estimating that I can’t be over twenty percent through the game thus far.

Dominica went out and picked up fish tacos from Chevy’s for dinner on her way home which worked out really well. We ate dinner and watched several episodes of The Facts of Life Season One from 1979. TFOL is a spin off of the really bad show Diff’rent Strokes but was far better than its parent show and actually lasted a bit longer as well do mostly to the acting talents of Lisa Welchel who had more acting talent than the entire Diff’rent Strokes cast combined. I think that the producers figured out that DS just didn’t have the acting depth to be able to last and even though they attempted to build TFOL using the same formula they looked for someone to lead the cast who could actually portray emotion on the screen and balance out Charlotte Rea’s completely insane performance that threatened to drag everything around it into the mire.

We are continuing to enjoy the new living room layout and are looking forward to putting in the real television stand with front door that will hide the PS2 and the DVD player.

Oreo got me up as he does every Sunday just after eight in the morning. He acts as though he needs to be taken outside to make sure that I get up right away but then he just runs out to the living room and lays in the sun. He has learned to time it so that he gets me out of bed just minutes before the sun is in a position for him to be all toasty so that he doesn’t miss any sun time.

Today is Dragon Quest VIII day. Dominica is still tired of Kingdom Hearts II after they put in that silly, long and very frustrating “Tron” section so she retired to the futon with Oreo and spent most of the day watching me play DQ8.

Today is our first day trying out the new furniture arrangement in the living room and the verdict is that we really like it. Dominica found a television stand from Walmart online that she really liked and ordered it. So we should be moving away from the tacky wire-frame printer stand and to a simulation wood television stand in a week or two.

The Mazda is not in good driving condition as its bearings are beginning to go so we are attempting to avoid driving it as much as possible until we can get it into the shop to get the bearings fixed. So today is “staying in” day which is great for me as I have possession of the PS2 for most of the day. I put in pretty much a full day of video gaming. It is amazing how much less expensive a good video game can be than a movie or something else similar. DQ8 was only about twenty dollars but will provide a lot of entertainment value. This game is very cinematic and really gives a good feel as if you are interacting with a movie. The cell shading is absolutely gorgeous and the game really feels like you are living in an anime film.

Dragon Quest IX has been announced in the last several weeks but is not coming to one of the new consoles but is instead going to be targeted at the Nintendo DS. The DS is awesome and I love it but I don’t know how excited I am about a cell shaded Dragon Quest sequel going to it when the cinematic qualities of the last one are so phenomenal. What I really want to see is DQ9 going to the PS3 or, even better, to the PC with full 1080p output and everything so that we can see just how amazing this stuff can look.

Since we didn’t travel back home this weekend we have some time to relax this weekend. Our goal for today is totally, unadulterated relaxation. And, I think, we were wildly successful.

Last night, before going to bed, I put in some long hours and finally finished playing Lunar Legend for the GBA. That is a very good, traditionally styled jRPG. Quite enjoyable and not too difficult. Overall far too linear but still quite fun. I am looking forward to playing other Lunar games. I really wish that Lunar 2: Eternal Blue would get a GBA make over. That would be great. But alas, it is not likely to happen, and so the only way for me to play it is to find an old Playstation copy of the game used on eBay which is rather expensive as it is a rather classic title.

Dominica played a ton of Kingdom Hearts II today until she got to one part that was dramatically harder than everything else that she had done in the game up until this point and she got frustrated which worked out well for me because it allowed me to play Dragon Quest VIII for the rest of the evening. That game continues to be awesome.

We went out shopping this evening looking for a television stand. We have re-evaluated our living room arrangement and have decided that our setup is not very conducive to the way that we live. Our current furniture arrangement does not utilize the space well at all and is a horrible waste of space. So we looked hard into a number of options and decided that we needed to be setup better oriented towards playing video games and working on our computers which are the only two big activities that we do there. So we need a television stand as we have a spot to actually put the living room television. The long term plan is to get a new television for the living room and to move the current one into our bedroom. But for now it will be the living room television.

We were unable to find anything that we liked for the television that matches our apartment so we ended up returning home basically empty handed. The hope had been to run out quickly and to get a television stand and to spend the evening re-arranging the living room.

We got home and decided to do some re-arranging anyway. We took our larger printer stand that we have been using in our bedroom as a closet extension and put that in the “hidden” part of the living room to hold the router, cable modem, phone and printer. Then the shorter printer stand was moved in front of the book shelf along the north wall and the television was placed there. Now we have turned what was a single, large “L” shaped living room into two smaller rectangular rooms. The strange thing is that instead of losing a lot of space it really feels like we have quite a lot more space.

Dominica went to bed a little after normal but I stayed up for a while playing Dragon Quest VIII because I am totally addicted!

The original plan was for Dominica and I to drive back to Geneseo tonight since we didn’t manage to make it home last week but as this is February there is supposed to be quite a bit of snow back home and we decided that it would be silly to go home this weekend. So we have another unplanned weekend in Newark. We didn’t make the decision until this morning when we looked at the weather. It isn’t supposed to be so bad but considering that we don’t really need to travel and are just trying to get things done early at the house it doesn’t seem like a good idea to take the risk for no reason. Coupled with the fact that the PR5 has summer tires on it and not its winter tires, needs an oil change and needs to have its bearings replaced it seems like we will be better off just waiting. Next weekend I have a three day weekend and may just head back home by myself to take advantage of the extra day (although I think that Dominica just wants me to go back on my own so that she can take the entire weekend to play video games.)

Work was actually slow today! Yay! I have plenty of work to do over the weekend though that can’t be done during the week so it isn’t like a slow day today means that I have nothing to do this weekend. That is unfortunate. I have to stay a little late tonight as we have after hours diagnostics and maintenance that has to be done and then tomorrow I have a bit of updates to do to support compliance. Boring. But hey, at least I get overtime right? It could be a lot worse. No complaints here. And it works out that we could travel this weekend too. Although I am really looking forward to installing Vista and I have to hold off on that for yet another week now. I am not as excited as if Novell had released the latest version of openSUSE Linux but Microsoft only releases operating systems like every five years so I have to say that I am very curious to see what they have done and I have heard that there are some really nice changes. Although the install is supposed to just take forever.

For those who don’t know my personality, I am a very cyclical person when it comes to my interests. I have a set of primary interests – mostly in the areas of my personal entertainment – and I cycle through them over a period of several years. I imagine that this was very frustrating to my parents as during my childhood the cycles would have been so long as to make it seem like childhood stages and not as a natural cycle that didn’t noticeably emerge until I was in my mid-twenties. One of the areas in which this is very noticeable is video games. I can sometimes go for one to as much as three years without playing any significant amount of video games. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy them from time to time but I have no major desire to play them for an extended period of time. I believe this to often be triggered by external factors like the existence of a video game that I just can’t put down or a new technology becoming available – but I am not sure that I could prove that.

That leads me to: I am addicted to video games again. 🙂 It happens every so often. The last time that I really got into a game was Age of Empires II several years ago (which I really wish I had some time to be able to play again) and before that it was Quake II back around 2001. Both of those times I got hooked when we found a game that really allowed me to play games against friends. Andy, Bob and I played a lot of Quake II and later Quake III (and to some degree Call of Duty) against each other and that was a blast. Now I am starting to play all of the great console games that I have missed over the last several years. I owned a PlayStation and a Nintendo 64 as my last real consoles (I did get a DreamCast recently but that was recently and long after it had left the market.) The Nintendo 64 had almost nothing worth playing available for it except for Perfect Dark which lead us to try Quake II. The PlayStation I never really used and I even forgot that I had. I think that I gave it away at some point but I am not sure. The only games that I really used on there were Ridge Racer IV, Final Fantasy VII and Suikoden. It is weird to think that for several years I owned this really cool (at the time) video game console and really didn’t use it at all. So much so that I totally forgot about even owning it. I have no idea how that happened. I guess I was just too busy doing other things during that time period and, I suppose, the PlayStation was pretty old by the time I bought it and I hadn’t intended to have bought it (someone borrowed money to buy it and never paid me for it.) So I guess I hadn’t been prepared to play it at the time and was never happy with it because of that.

Towards the end of the day things slowed down even more than usual and exceptionally early for a Friday night which may be, in part, to the fact that I have been phased off of supporting a small client who does a large amount of late Friday evening deployments. So tonight I was actually able to leave the office before six! On a Friday night! It doesn’t get much better than that.

Dominica was home ahead of me and was already deep into Kingdom Hearts II before I arrived. She will be playing this all weekend. I got home and once she was able to save her game in progress (which can often take half an hour or more to be able to find a save point in KH2) we headed over to Food for Life for dinner. We didn’t feel like being away from the house tonight and thought that a quick trip over there would work well. They have a new menu item called the Tahitian Event that Dominica is totally in love with.

We came home and I hooked up the new cable for the PS2 (we switched from the cheap, included A/V cable – aka composite video – so a cheap component video cable from GameStop) and the difference, even on a low quality game like Kingdom Hearts II which is just 480i, was very noticeable. The biggest differences were the sharpness and the colour saturation. If you have a PS2 and are still using the included cable definitely get out there and spend fifteen or twenty dollars on a halfway decent component cable. Every game will look better and the high definition games will take on a whole new life.