Sheep Guarding Llama

No matter how hard we try to keep our weekends clear so that we can get stuff done around the house there is no end to the “other” stuff that needs to be done as well.

We slept in a little this morning and then dad came over so that he and I could do some banking at the bank that he uses here in Geneseo.  We went over before ten thinking that it would only take a minute and it actually ended up taking over an hour and a half.  It was almost noon by the time we got back to the house in Geneseo and just as we were about to leave the bank I got paged from the office.

So we got to the house and I had to spend about an hour working before we could get lunch.  Right after we arrived at the house Dominica’s parents arrived with her brother’s Ford F150 pickup truck so that they could get mom’s old armoir to take back to Frankfort with them.  They disassembled the armoir while I worked and as soon as everyone was set at the office we went over to the Omega to all get lunch together.

After lunch we loaded the armoir into the truck.  That took about an hour or so to get it all to fit and then to get it all strapped down.  Both dad and Dominica’s parents took off at about the same time and Min and I settled in for a few hours of packing.

I am still mostly just working on getting the books sorted.  I think that I am doing pretty well at picking out books to dispose of rather than to store indefinitely.  It is a real challenge for me but I am improving.

At six this evening the Foxs – Craig and Vaneri (I hope that I am spelling her name right) came by.  We haven’t been able to visit with them in well over a year.  Maybe almost two years if that is possible.  The last time that we were all together they hadn’t had their baby, Michael “Z” Fox, yet and he is now fourteen months old.  I don’t think that Vaneri was very pregnant the last time that we all got together either.  I should really look through SGL and figure out when it was.

We hung around the house for an hour or so before we all went down to the Big Tree Inn on Main Street for dinner.  The place was actually completely packed and we had to wait a while for a table.  We ended up going for a five course meal and all ate ourselves sick.  But the food was excellent and we discovered that we really love their 2004 Valkenburg Gewürztraminer.

We didn’t realize it but we stayed at the restaurant for three and a half hours and were the last ones to go.  The Foxs visited at the house for another half an hour or so and then they headed for home.  We would have hung out longer but I have to be up at six in the morning so that I can meet Andy and Eric at the UofR at seven!  What a way to start a Sunday.

Dominica and I slept in until around nine thirty. It seems that every time that we are home in Geneseo I get an allergy attack or something similar and it makes it nearly impossible to sleep through the night.

Dad came over and we did breakfast at the Omega as usual. We have our routine down now pretty well. After breakfast we dropped Dominica off at the house so that she could work on packing and dad and I drove up to the city to do some banking and to give me a chance to drop off some paperwork with my attorney.

I got back to Geneseo and Dominica and I spent the afternoon doing as much packing as we could fit in. Most of Dominica’s day was spent sorting through her stuff that was in the basement storage area and I spent most of the day bringing books upstairs and logging them into a spreadsheet so that we can keep track of them. By the time that I was done today I was up to almost sixty technology books that I will either be throwing away or giving away or something. Sixty! That is dramatically more books than most people will ever buy for their profession and this is just the first day of throwing stuff out that isn’t relevant anymore. This is a lot of books that we are dealing with here.

While Dominica was going through old books she found a piece of paper in one of my mother’s fondue cook books with a shopping list written on it. When Min looked at the paper more closely she saw that it was one of my parents’ old Christmas letters that they would send out every year. We read it a little to see what year that it was from. It turned out to actually be the letter that they wrote in 1976! And of all of the things that dad has kept records of over the years he does not have a copy of this letter that he is aware of. This is quite the weekend for finding things in books.

We went over to dad’s around five thirty and got pizza from Davis’ Farm Market in Pavilion. We ate and spent the evening sitting around the living room fire place. I did take some time to attempt to get dad’s VoIP phone working. His is having the same issue that mine is (it appears to totally freeze once it fires up) and we are pretty sure that our GrandStream BudgeTone 100 models that are white are all having this issue while all of the black ones are not. Weird, I know. There was one black phone at the house and we hooked it up and got it working great immediately. That is four lines working without an issue. I think that the white phones are toast. At least we don’t have many of them.

We left dad’s house and ran over to Geneseo to meet up with Carrie Russo (the artist formerly known as Carrie Hooper from York Central School class of 1996) and Laura Farwell (York Central School class of 1999) at Denny’s. I haven’t seen Carrie since her Junior Prom (I was her date) in 1995! We hung out at Denny’s for two hours or so and caught up a bit. Carrie has been living in Connecticut until just recently and is now back in York. While we were there Joe Howlett and his girlfriend came in to Denny’s and we got a chance to meet her and to visit with them for just a little bit. Joe is done teacher at Greece Odyssey on January 26th – just ten more days of classes – when he will be beginning a leave of absence.

Dominica and I got home a little before midnight and continued doing a little work around the house before heading off to bed on the late side.

Today begins the process of leaving Geneseo.

I got up around half past eight and got right to work. I am in Geneseo this morning and am taking a “work from home” day so that I can get five full days up here at the house. I had some actual work to do first thing this morning so I worked for about an hour before showering and getting ready for the day. Since I had so much work early this morning dad and I ended up getting together more for an early lunch rather than a breakfast.

Dad picked me up just before eleven. We made it almost to the Omega when I got an email of more work to do so we turned around and ran back to the house so that I could wrap that up and just call it a lunch. It didn’t take long so it was just after noon when we finally made it to lunch.

While working from home today I took the opportunity to begin catalogueing all of my technical books that are not all ready packed. I was using Google’s online spreadsheet program to do this but quickly discovered that for doing anything that goes over one hundred rows that Google’s online tool is capable but not at all efficient so I downloaded the work that I had all ready completed and switched over to working with OpenOffice instead. That was a lot easier.

Dominica decided that she and Oreo are going to leave Newark tonight and will travel up to Geneseo to be with me. She had thought about waiting until tomorrow morning to come up so that she could travel in the daylight but it would meaning losing quite a bit of time with an extra commute and spending all of tonight down in Newark. This way she will get almost three full days in Geneseo. She took Friday off from work so that she could come up and pack. It seemed to be the most efficient use of our time. I am glad that they are coming up tonight. It is lonely packing up the house all by myself.

After work dad came back over to Geneseo and we went over to the Shanghai for the dinner buffet. Dad came over after dinner and hung out for an hour or two. Andy called and we worked for about forty-five minutes and Dominica called to say that she was just passing through Clark’s Summit, Pennsylvania where we like to stop to get Waffle House just to the north of Scranton.

While I was working on moving the basement to the upstairs this evening I moved the guitars and it occurred to me that I have never so much as taken any of the guitars out of their cases since we moved to Geneseo! To be honest I have been very afraid of opening my classical guitar’s case as the last time I did in 2001 it turned out to have broken – the neck having separated from the body. At that point I had only not played it from February of 2000 (when I stopped playing professionally for Wegmans) until May of 2001 (when I took it out again to practice so that I could play at Craig and Emily’s wedding.) After their wedding I had the guitar repaired in Ithaca but never played it again. So it has been sitting since June, 2001 until now without ever having left its case! Dominica has never even seen it let alone heard me play it. She has never seen any of my guitars which is really strange to think of as I spent such a huge portion of my life playing guitar.

Dominica and Oreo arrived around half past eleven.  They made very good time coming from Nutely.

We decided that it is time to start throwing out some of the books in my library that are no longer relevant to anything.  Mostly this will be exam question and answer books to exams that no longer are offered and product manuals to completely antiquated products that just don’t matter.  I plan to err on the side of conservatism when it comes to the books.  I definitely don’t want to throw out a book that I spent a lot of money on just to find out that it would have been useful sometime down the road whether as a technical resource or for historic or nostalgic purposes.

While choosing books to throw out Dominica just haphazardly flipped through one of the books.  Just one.  Just at random.  Both of us saw it.  Just a tiny flash for a second.  We looked at each other and looked back in the book.  There it was – after seven years or so there was my original birth certificate!  It was lost on a trip to Toronto one time when this book and the birth certificate were kept in Josh’s gym bag.  We thought that it was gone forever.  I had no idea that it was still around anywhere.  So now I have it again.  It doesn’t do me any good as the City of Rochester didn’t emboss the certificates back when I was born so my new one is the only “official” one anyway but still, it is nice to have the paper that has been with me since I was born.

Deciding what books to throw out is going to be tough.  I have never been one for getting rid of things and books especially are resources to be treasured and kept and protected.  It would never have occurred to me to throw books out before but I really do have large numbers of completely useless books now.  They were mostly good at the time but now they really are pointless.  I can’t even donate them to libraries as it would just be an expense for them to keep worthless old technology books on the shelves.  What they need are modern books.  Or to just stop being libraries and let people read stuff online.  But what they definitely don’t need are books that even I am not willing to store anymore.  I probably won’t throw out more than two dozen books but at least it is a start.  I have also cut back on my magazines that I keep and I am storing only a small fraction compared to what I used to keep.  Mostly Baseline and Windows IT Pro and TechNet and Linux Journel.  I used to keep tons of stuff but that just got silly.

I am also thinking of selling off one of my guitars.  Or maybe two.  I can’t bring myself to part with some of them but there are one or two – the electric and possibly the twelve string acoustic – that I should be storing and moving from place to place.  My classical will be with me forever, of course.  And my bass is quite nice and I wouldn’t want to part with that.  And my original acoustic I will hold on to for some time yet as it was the instrument that I learned on.  Instruments are, I think, very tough to part with as you spend so much time with them.  They become an extension of you and a real piece of your life.  But I am not a guitarist and if I was to be one now I would use different tools than I did when I was young and only the classical guitar is really something that I really need to keep.  Maybe I will be able to bring myself to part with a few more of the guitars.  We will have to see.  It is so easy to become attached to stuff.  Just knowing that I still have it makes me feel better sometimes.  A little connection to the past.  But as we see how much stuff we have to store our perspective is forced to change.  And it isn’t like if I were to have children that they would want to use my old guitars or read my ancient books.  They will need new things.  If I keep my old acoustic guitar from the ’80s it will be just for me to take out of its case once a decade, blow off the dust and remember my childhood.  But it won’t be to play.  I hope to play the classical again.  I can see that happening quite easily.  But not the others.  That time has passed.  Now they are just memories.  Memories and storage space.

Dominica and I went to bed around half past midnight.  Oreo beat us to bed after having run around the house like a maniac.  He is always so excited whenever he arrives in Geneseo.  He really loves the wall to wall carpeting and just goes crazy.

Yes, it is actually cold in New Jersey today. It is my first snow in Newark!

I got up a little early this morning while Min was getting ready for her day so that I could get her Vision M loaded up with some Audible books for her to listen to while she travels tomorrow (assuming that she travels tomorrow – she might go to Geneseo on Thursday night or she might wait until Friday morning.) I got her M working and loaded it up with “Mayflower” and “Confessions of a Shopoholic”. Audible rocks.

After Min and Oreo left for work and daycare I got busy getting packed. I am taking a huge amount of stuff with me to Geneseo on this trip. The biggest items are large, empty boxes that we have had to contend with down in Newark for things like our television and coffee maker. We don’t want to throw them away because we might need them when we move stuff but there is no place down in New Jersey for us to keep anything that large. It is a real problem. So now it is all going to the barn so we won’t have to worry about it any more.

Before leaving for work this morning I managed to also finish reading the last bit of “Extreme Programming for Web Projects” that I received from Amazon on Monday. Now I am ready to tackle new books that have been arriving. One arrived at dad’s house from eBay today as well. Maybe I can finish that one while I am in New York so that I won’t have to ship it down to Newark and then back up again when I am done.

I packed up the one server going to Scranton and two servers going back to New York. One is just a spare for parts and one is being decommissioned and retired. That is a lot of extra “space” in the apartment and a really good feeling to have all of those machines “dealt with.” Dominica packed several bags of clothes and shoes that she doesn’t plan on wearing anytime soon to take back as well. That was really important because we were not able to close our closets most of the time and it was making our bedroom seem to be a continual mess.

It took me about an hour to get the luggage cart all loaded up and by the time I was done I was just beginning to see a few flakes in the air outside the windows. These are the first snow flakes that I have seen in New Jersey! I was thinking that I might make it all year without seeing snow except for when I visit New York.

By the time I made it down to the lobby to start loading the car it was no longer a nice, light, first snow of the season but was instead heavy wind and almost blizzard-like conditions. I could not believe what I was seeing and in the heart of the city, no less, where there are lots of big buildings to block the wind! The wind was just whipping down Raymond Boulevard from west to east. It was crazy. Joseph, our regular morning valet, came outside with me into the “storm” and helped me get the car loaded. It would have been horrible if he hadn’t been there to help. It took two loads between the two of us and the luggage cart and things were blowing over and almost away and it took quite a bit of work to get the car loaded so that everything fit and that I could see out of the back window. We had so much stuff that we had to put down the rear seats and take out the trunk cover to make it all fit. Even the front passenger seat is full.

The snow only lasted until I had made it out to US 78 and then the sun came back out and the snow completely vanished as if it had never happened except that there was snow blowing off of the tops of cars on the highway for the next twenty minutes. The wind kept up and it was still cold when I got to the office but the snow was gone for the moment. It ended up being a beautiful, crisp and clear day in New Jersey after that little, unprovoked squall.

This morning was totally crazy at the office but that sure made the time pass quickly. It has been quite some time since I have had this much work to do. I am hoping that tomorrow will not be like this too but I suppose that it is fairly likely that it will be.

For people who have been living in a shoebox or under a rock or slaving away in a third-world sweatshop (as if people in the third-world don’t sweat enough they actually waste time manufacturing the stuff!) or something, don’t forget that daylight savings time is changing this year and it is coming much sooner than you would think. We will be “springing forward” on March 11th this year. In fact, now we don’t spring forward anymore but winter forward instead. It doesn’t even make sense now. Personally I think that this is a truly boneheaded move on the part of the US government this year (thanks George Bush for signing this one into law) – it is likely to cost us a fortune in power consumption and even more in “change management” in US business and who knows how much productivity will be lost in conveying this change and managing it in international businesses. At the office where I work there is a massive effort underway to keep our computer systems operating on the correct time system. The cost on a national scale is probably quite significant but difficult to estimate. All I know is that the cost is all loss and totally unnecessary. US business has plenty to do attempting to compete in the global economy to be sacrificing labour time to the childish whims of an insane wanna-be dictator. The only good side to the whole DST fiasco is that congress maintains the right to change the time back if this proves to be a bad move – except that the issues is the MOVING not the actual dates and so if it proves to be bad then the recourse is to move AGAIN making it even worse. Good thinking. There is a reason that all of these people have to be politicians and can’t get normal jobs.

Things slowed down after lunch like they always do. Everyone gets food and is out of the office over a two hours span and then everyone is sleepy when they get back to the office so nothing happens for several hours start just before noon. It is funny how that happens in almost any office setting. Lunch just totally kills productivity. I think that people should work from first thing in the morning until lunch. Take the afternoon off and then work again in the evening. Seems to me like that would work better. Run errands and stuff during the sleepy, worthless afternoon hours.

I started using Google’s document system for tracking my books today. I thought that using an online spreadsheet that I could easily access from home or from work would serve as a pretty decent, quick and easy way to deal with the need to track my books. I should really use or write a simple web application to do that but I don’t have the time to write the program nor do I have the time to enter all of the data. So I am just getting the titles and basic info put in so that I can avoid buying duplicate books and I will try to get it organized into some more useful form sometime down the road. I also attempted to upload my resume to Google today to see if I could store that online and edit it there but I immediately discovered that Google couldn’t handle the complex formatting and that that was not a workable solution. So that I am stuck working with locally installed, normal office applications.

Just before the end of the day at the office today we had a fire alarm go off and we all had to go outside and stand around in the cold. After weeks of insanely warm weather we have to go out and stand around on the one really cold day that we have had all year! It would figure.

Things slowed down at the office towards the end of the day, and after the fire alarm sent everyone outside for a little while, so I was able to escape at a reasonable time to hit the road for Scranton. I am going to make an attempt at taking the regular local roads through Scranton tonight to get from the data center back to US 81 on the north side of town. That should be a lot more interesting than just driving back out and taking 81 around town the way that I normally do. So I will probably get lost.

I expect to be in Geneseo around eleven o’clock this evening. I am leaving Warren a bit before six and Scranton is not out of the way at all. Now if it just can hold off from snowing the entire time that I am driving I will be all set.

I will be in Geneseo tomorrow. I am having breakfast with dad at the Omega and I will be working from home all day. Then starts my official four day weekend.

I have noticed now that I have the Forgotten English Word a Day calendar from Jeffrey Kacirk that if I do a search on the word of the day (day, for example, is ramjollock – I will let you do your own search for the meaning) that I will find, each and every day, a large number of people talking about their new calendars and the words that they are learning. I wonder how many people will be doing this every day by the end of the year? It is pretty funny how Jeffrey’s calendar is now the largest reference, possibly ever, to many of these forgotten words.

I slept in a bit this morning not getting out of bed until Dominica was almost ready to head to the office. I woke up earlier but Oreo decided that he was cold and moved over to lay with his back right against mine and I couldn’t just leave him there to be all cold all by himself so I stayed in bed for an extra hour. I had a crash at work last night that left me unable to work from home until I got into the office today so I didn’t need to get up extra early anyway. Tomorrow I hope to be into the office on the early side as I hope to not be staying too late before driving out to Scranton and out to Geneseo.

DRM (Digital Rights Management – a clever term meaning digital consumer rights removal) rears its ugly head today as Microsoft is forced to admit that because of DRM built into BluRay and HD-DVD discs that a large number of Vista users will be unable to watch the high definition discs. This is because most new computers and most high end consumers are using digital connections (generally DVI) to connect to their monitors for the best image quality. These connections are forbidden by the DRM in the new high quality discs. Old, low quality analogue connections will be allowed, we hear, as will content protected HDCP connections that a few computers today have – but very few. So few, in fact, that even as an IT consultant who constantly buys the latest and greatest I have never seen one nor heard of any person having used one or seen a monitor that connects to it!! Now this is not Microsoft’s fault. They are caught in the middle. Disc player makers face the same dilemma as do other operating sytems like Linux and MacOS. The real issue here is DRM and the US laws that allow content providers to dictate the way in which a consumer is allowed to use content which they have all ready purchased – and worse yet to determine AFTER the purchase has been made. In reality, it has made it that consumers no longer purchase anything except the plastic disc and everything else is at the whim of the content provider.

So what are our options? Well, unfortunately, the iPod crowd has pretty much established the fact that Americans are too uneducated about their own freedoms and so little concerned with them that they are willing to give away unlimited amounts of money to the iTunes store for music that they don’t even get to own because they don’t consider what will happen six months in the future let alone ten years. So the content makers are very well aware that Americans won’t band together to fight DRM or to fight for their fair use rights. They will just buy whatever junk is advertised on television and never consider the long term consequences of their actions. My only hope is that underground media – Internet television and the like – will create some good content and that people will decide that that is so much better and that the ability to do useful things with their content is so much more important than being able to get Mel Gibson in ANOTHER cop movie blowing things up from Best Buy that they are only allowed to watch on their expensive HDCP gear and only once a month without paying an extra fee and only for three years before the discs self destructs and that they weren’t allowed to back up anyway and if they did i they might have gone to jail for five years. Once they decide that – then the movie studios will start losing money and will eventually go away – replaced by companies that make content that makes sense and deliver it in the way that people actually want. But Americans don’t value freedom so good luck.

I have been picking out the classes and concentrations that I will be doing at RIT (assuming that everything goes to plan.) I am definitely planning on doing concentrations in Software Project Management and Application Development and I think that I will most likely choose my third concentration (you are supposed to have three) in Health Systems Administration which applies well to my career thus far. I really wish that I could take classes from the school of business but they are apparently not at the same level as the IT and hospitality schools and do not have their classes online. By not having their classes online they are guaranteeing that the best and the brightest have gone elsewhere so these classes must be just for the leftovers which is not how I want to do my degree although MBA cross-over classes would be awfully handy.

I did some playing with Google’s online Writer today. This is my first time really playing with it. It occurred to me – because normally I only think of tools such as this in terms of their usefulness to businesses – that with a word processor and spreadsheet available online with simple collaboration and storage Google has effectively removed the need for ninety percent or more of all home users to ever need to install office suites at home. Some power users will continue to need the power of locally installed OpenOffice, KOffice or Microsoft Office but for your average casual user the Google tools are more than adequate. In fact with Google taking care of storage using the Google tools is often the better option just because home users don’t have to worry about where they are going to store their files, file formats, backups, etc. Plus without any installation there is no need to worry about versions, licenses, etc. And you can automatically work from any Internet connected computer anywhere even if you don’t have your own personal account there. Having grown up using productivity suites on computers for so long I often forget how little most people need from an office suite and, in fact, how few people even have one. If you haven’t checked out Google’s online office products be sure to do so. They will be sure to impress. If you need a real, locally installed and feature filled office suite and don’t have one yet go to www.OpenOffice.org and download one that is completely legal for free.

Dominica found an awesome “Old West Shootout” video on YouTube that is short and well worth watching for a chuckle (notice: no animals were harmed in the making of this film.)

I had to stay late in the office tonight. Not too late but there was some work that couldn’t be done until after six. I have been out early quite a bit though so I figure that I have it coming by this point. It was close to seven by the time I was able to head for home. This is my last night in Newark until Monday night.

I got home around seven and we decided to just take it easy and to order in a pizza.  We ordered from Steakhouse 1 and, of course, it took just under two hours for the food to arrive.  While I was waiting for the food I managed to almost completely read “Extreme Programming for Web Development” that I got from Amazon yesterday.  I want to get through it quickly because a new box of books arrived today.

The pizza finally arrived and we ate and watched some Are You Being Served? and then were off to bed.  It was a really short night.