Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

The past two weeks have really been blurring together for me. I am having a really hard time figuring out what day it even is. And even during the day I have a hard time figuring out what time of day it is. I am really looking forward to my “work from home” day tomorrow and not having to start quite so early. Normally I really enjoy starting early but when I get stuck working late anyway it looses some of the charm.

I slept in until five this morning and it would figure that for the first time all week the valet actually had my car on time.

The morning was nice and quiet in the office. Nothing much ever seems to happen when I am on early (knock on proverbial wood) which makes it quite nice. Today I didn’t even get a single phone call which is more quiet than usual.

Dominica got an awesome link today of a man in Australia who was half swallowed by a great white shark, headfirst and was in the shark for two minutes before he managed to jab the shark hard enough in the eye to convince it to loosen its grasp and wriggle free. The shark bit him again in the head but he still got away with just lacerations and a broken nose! This guy really kept his wits about him and thought through what he needed to do. Even worse was that his son was in a small boat just above him (they were in just three feet of water) watching the whole thing take place. After he escape the jaws his son and some friends pulled him into the boat.

I like Wil Wheaton’s Sunrise Blog Post from a few days ago. Everyone should read it.

For the first time this week things actually slowed down towards the end of the day which was awesome. I was actually able to stand up and move around a little bit and visit with some of the people in my office whom I have barely had a chance to talk to for days. Things slowed down enough that I was actually able to pack up and leave the office “on time” at half past three this afternoon. What a great way to lead into my “work from home” day. Now I am much happier. I have a rather long “to do” list to start off my time at home with but I am so much more productive when I am home that I feel pretty good about it.

I was home by four which was great. The world’s first baby rhino from artificial insemination was born today at the Budapest Zoo and she is SO cute! There was also a major breakthrough in genetically altered chickens that can lay “drug” eggs. This is an amazing breakthrough for the pharmaceutical industry (or for its competition) but could, in theory, be used for all sorts of illegal substances as well and could herald an era of very difficult to regulate drugs.

I check in with AGD Interactive for the first time in forever and they finally posted at least a blog entry as to the status of the Quest for Glory II remake that they have been working on for several years now. It is looking as though the game won’t be available until sometime next year (it was originally scheduled for January, 2004!) but as long as they keep us updated on the progress that isn’t so bad. It is the months on end of nothing but silence that is the real killer. I check back with them daily for months to see if progress is being made and then, eventually, I decide that they have been run over by a bus and give up on the site. Then every so often they surprise me with an update.

I did some looking around and discovered a group that is working on a remake of King’s Quest IV. Now this I am really excited about as I have completed the first three games in the series and playing them in remakes is fun just to see how well the games have been remade and to relive past adventures. But King’s Quest IV is the first game of the series that I have never played and I am really excited to get a cool remake into my grubby little hands so that I can play through it. I have played King’s Quest V and VI back on Windows 95 as far as the games would go before they crashed so I at least have an idea of what those games are like. But KQ4 is the one that I have wanted to play the most. I really want to complete them in order but I don’t want to go back and play the original KQ4. It is a lot longer than any of the original three games but the graphics were only marginally better and the sound was the same. So a remake of KQ4 offers the biggest challenge to someone recreating it but it also offers the greatest reward to potential players. KQV and KQ6 were both done in an updated style that is close to what is being done with a lot of these recent remakes so remakes of them make little sense in comparison to the first four of the series. In a way the original games are just being brought into line with the later titles although the remakes are generally outshining them quite considerably with better graphics, audio and voice actors being added in as well in many cases.

We haven’t managed to go far afield for dinner so far this week so we decided to go to IHOP tonight. Normally we try to go up to the Udipi Cafe on Wednesday nights for Dosa and Chat night but neither of us was that hungry nor did either of us want to drive that far and be away from the apartment for so long. So we chose IHOP since it is close and fast. I do still have work that needs to be done tonight but it isn’t that much so it is more or less an easy night for me. While we were at IHOP there was a car fire in the parking lot and the fire department and the police had to respond and at least four television news vans showed up. Big news here in Newark.

After dinner my first order of business was to get the Ralstons’ missionary weblog up and running. You can check out their site at LaborersForTheHarvest.com.  They are running on WordPress 2.1 which just released and which is a nice update to 2.0 that I am currently running.

Dominica and I watched the rest of The Gummi Bears while I worked this evening.  It is sad that Disney only made forty-seven episodes of this show over a course of three seasons.

We stayed up a little later than we have been tonight.  Since I don’t have to be up so early tomorrow I can stay up a little later.  I ended up staying up until half past eleven.  Dominica went to bed with Oreo around ten.