Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I was talking to a friend in London the other day and we were discussing the differences between the US and the UK. It came up because in the states we use a single pronounciation for the word written as router regardless of whether we mean the wood working device that is similar to a drill that you approach from the side or if you are talking about the device that chooses the route of network data. In the Queen’s English they pronounce the two works differently which makes sense. The strange thing is that they are spelled the same. We started talking about the age of homes and the different approaches that our cultures take to structures. In the states we tend to tear down homes nearing one hundred years old and build anew while in the UK they tend to keep homes around forever. And the guy I was talking to pointed out that his father’s house was actually older than the United States!

Oreo and I got to sleep in today. He was so happy that he came up and shared my pillow while Dominica was getting ready for work. Oreo and I got up before Dominica left as I do have a lot of work to do today so no serious sleeping in for me, unfortunately.

Dominica is addicted to reading the news while at work and sent me news that a university has determined that microwaving a wet sponge for two minutes is enough to kill most dangerous stuff on the dirty sponge. But in releasing this simple information to the country we have determined that a large number of Americans are simply too ignorant of how everyday household appliances work to be able to use them safely. It isn’t like we are talking about some futuristic, computer controlled, complex appliance here with logic and hidden decision making going on. We are talking about a simple, everyday microwave. It turns on an “antennae” and shoot electromagnetic waves at the inside of the microwave oven to make food hot. You tell it how long to do so. This is nothing more than an extra powerful “easy bake oven” for children. Sure, easy bake ovens use a light bulb – but you can’t see it because it is enclosed. And microwaves use a totally different frequency of electromagnetic wave than that. But since you can see microwave transmissions it doesn’t matter – it is exactly like an easy bake oven to you. Both use unseen electromagnetic waves to heat items inside them and are controlled with a timer. What we have learned today is that there are far too many adults who cannot safely operate easy bake ovens!

Dick Cheney (our current Vice President for our foreign readers and those Americans who can’t use microwaves) was quoted today as saying that Bush’s credilbility was not on the line because of the situation in Iraq. News outlets relayed this as if Cheney was defending Bush’s credibility but, in reality, even Cheney can’t be that moronic and I think we can safely give him the benefit of the doubt that what he was implying was that Bush’s credibility is completely shot and the war in Iraq isn’t going to make it any worse than it already is. Bush’s saviour, in the historical sense, will be that he will just be “the other Bush” much like John Quincy Adams. John Quincy, being the son of the much more famous second President, was a major political figure in his own right but history has forgotten him and he will forever be just “the son of the second President” and George W. Bush will forever just be the son of George Bush. Right now he is a major blemish on the reputation of our country but, in time, he will likely be forgotten as one of those Presidents who have no particular identity – and this will be his saving grace.

Today was “slow” compared to the last few weeks. I actually got a little time to visit with Oreo on our Doggie – Daddy Day, but not much time. He spent the day sleeping on the futon next to me as I worked. At the last minute today I found out that I do not have to work the early morning shift tomorrow which is good, in a way, as I have a lot to do tonight but it is bad as I am already onto that schedule and it works out so well for Dominica and I.

Tonight is the official Grand Opening Gala for 1180 Raymond Boulevard here in downtown Newark, NJ. There are spotlights shining on the sides of the building and just about every single person who works in the building is on and working this evening. When Dominica got home she said that there are about ten valets working downstairs and they are parking on both sides of the building – Raymond and Commerce. There is a giant catering staff on in their black ties and all of the finishing touches have been put onto the building. There have been a lot of little things here and there that haven’t been done yet and living here has been a lot like living on a construction site but just about everything was cleared away last night and the place is looking really good.

Dominica got home and I had to work for a while before we could head out. She had managed to get a peek at the gala event going on and informed me that it was definitely time to put on a suit contrary to the “come as you are” instructions. We got all dressed up and headed down to the second floor to join the party.

We arrived at the party with an elevator full of visitors checking out the eighteenth floor. We stepped out into a very, very packed lobby full of people that we did not know. We attempted to make our way around the floor but there were far too many people and all of the local Newark “socialites” all seemed to know each other and this took on the flavour of a private party just for them. Any residents that we managed to find said the same thing – that this was really not a party for the people who live in the building.

We felt rather uncomfortable so Dominica and I walked over to Food for Life to get some dinner. Things were quiet over there so we were able to just relax and hang out. Everyone thought it was great that we were all dressed up. Some more really dressed up people were seated at the table next to us so we struck up a conversation assuming that they had been at the party at 1180 as well. It turned out that he was the general manager for the Savoy Grill which sits directly across the square from 1180 and where Dominica and I are planning on having dinner on Saturday night. We ended up talking to the couple for at least half an hour. We had a really good time.

After dinner we returned to 1180 and decided to give the now dwindling party another go. This time we found that most of the “Newark crowd” had dissipated and that there were a high percentage of residents now hanging around and enjoying the remains of the party. We ended up hanging out for several hours and having a really good time just hanging out with our neighbours. One of the guys who works in our building had gone over to Food for Life just about an hour before we did and while he was there he ran into Shaqille O’Neal! We can only guess that he was in the area to go to the party at 1180 and that we just missed him there (which is hard to do but we were only there for a minute.) How cool is it that Shaq eats at Food for Life when he is in town (Shaq lives in Newark part-time.) The party also drew a lot of other big names in the area like Newark’s Mayor and the head of the city council along with business leaders from Prudential and other downtown businesses.

I love Raymond Chen’s blog post on his finest hour. This makes me feel a lot better about constantly losing everything around the house.