Sheep Guarding Llama

Tonight is Wassail Eve – also knows as Twelfth Night, the last night of the Christmas Holiday season which traditionally began on December 6th with Saint Nicholas Day and would end tonight making it a full month of festivities. But recent American tradition has made Thanksgiving Morn (with the Christmas themed parades which are actually recorded ahead of time putting those localities ahead of everyone else) the beginning of the holiday season and Black Friday the beginning of Christmas shopping but has moved the ending of the season to January 2nd. So the American season is actually a little longer than it traditionally would have been but is focussed totally around shopping and not the holiday itself.

(The term Twelfth Night refers to tomorrow being the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas – Epiphany in celebration of the Magi bringing gifts to the baby Jesus. In easter Christian tradition, this is the actual Christmas day celebration instead of December 25th as we celebrate in the west. But the twelve days of Christmas spans from December 25th until January 6th so the full Christmas covers both gift giving traditions under a single religious celebration.)

In some older English traditions, the winter holiday season begins with All Hallows Eve (Halloween) and runs until Wassail Eve. It was a long holiday season. In some of Latin America, Christmas is considered to run until February 2nd ending in Candlemas. However in the United States and Canada this has been overshadowed by Groundhog Day.

Wassail is the old English term for “Good Health To You” which was derived from the old Norse words meaning roughly “be you” and “healthy”. I have not studied the etymology of hail too closely but my understanding is that it was long the word for healthy in several Germanic languages and is still used that way in even modern American English although not very commonly. The word “healthy” is directly derived from it and even the more common use of hailing someone (Star Trek “Open hailing frequencies”) is from the usage meaning “to wish good health from a distance”.

I got six hours of sleep last night making one of the best nights of sleep for me this entire week. I got into the office and it was a very quiet morning. The phone didn’t ring once the entire time that I was covering the desk. That is how I like it. I like a nice, quiet morning when I can get caught up on things, get my head wrapped around the day, etc. I even got a chance to read some more in the book that I am currently working my way through. I am hoping to finish it today.

Email was slow today. I received little office email and didn’t get any personal email all morning. It was crazy. It ended up being a slow day in general. I never really got the feel that it was slow but just about nothing actually happened all day. It was a weird sensation. I was hoping to get to go out to lunch today with some of the guys but no one ended up going out for lunch today and I went down to the cafeteria again today. I have had egg salad wraps all week!

Well, my plan had been to get out of the office nice and early today but there was no such luck. My “get out early” turned into a very busy evening. I put in a full ten hour day at my desk including eating lunch without leaving my desk.

I did manage to get some decent reading done during the day and I spent a little while teaching myself some C++ programming. I have a cursory knowledge of C++ but I have decided that I need to learn it a little more thoroughly. Nothing real serious, just enough to be able to actually use it from time to time. I wrote a cool little temperature conversion program today to test it out. I made it act just like a normal UNIX utility taking command line parameters, returning version information, outputting its own help page, etc. And it does its work silently just taking in a number and returning unformatted output so that you can use it inline with other tools. You can even pass it a precision parameter and it will modify the length of its output for you. Handy and cool. Not bad for passing the time at work today. I might actually find myself using it myself.

I got home and had to work for about two hours before we were able to go out to Food for Life for some dinner. We came home and watched some of Disney’s Gummi Bears. Both Dominica and Oreo were exhausted tonight. Oreo has been at daycare for four straight days and is totally exhausted. We are looking forward to a laid back weekend of just staying in Newark. We really don’t have any plans for the weekend other than Dominica studying for her exam and me working on the Asterix server that is being delivered to Scranton on Wednesday evening.

Tomorrow is the beginning of Opentyde.  SGL is your source for traditional calendar information 🙂

I heard on the weather report today that we are supposed to hit almost sixty today and on Saturday, just two days away, that we are going to be breaking the all time record by four degrees and coming dangerously close to seventy! Apparently the weather is really throwing off the golf courses in the area as many of them are open and in full swing. I wish I had some time to get out and play some golf. This is perfect weather for it. I can’t believe that it is all ready the first week in January and it isn’t in the least bit skingy! New Jersey is awesome for weather.

I was up at five this morning luckily not sleeping through my alarm. It was nearly impossible to pull myself out of bed, though, as Oreo was in super-ultra-snuggle mode and had been sleeping right beside me sharing my pillow all night. He is a hard dog to leave in the morning. Apparently yesterday he was confused by my leaving for work so early and when Min got up to go to work he walked around the apartment looking for me.

It was another slow morning for me, but things are starting to pick up. I am starting to have work to do in addition to my reading. This morning I also took some time to focus on email housekeeping. My email only gets a really thorough cleaning out when I am facing an email migration. Currently my email runs on a custom built Postfix and Cyrus solution that took an incredible amount of work to put together. That system is aging now and the plan is to replace it, in the very near future, with a Zimbra based system. So I am taking the time to delete all of the email that I don’t think that I will need so that I don’t have to copy all of it over to the new system. For anyone reading this that is on the same email system as me, this is your heads up that it would be a good time to clean out your email.

While going through my old email I found some emails that I kept just as address book entries. I tried emailing several people that I haven’t had contact with in several years. Sadly, few people kept their email addresses from many years ago and I have lost contact with some people. Bob Murphy from Ithaca’s email is gone and I no longer can contact him and Salisa Mohammad from Singapore that I have known since the fall of 2000’s Yahoo account is gone and I can no longer contact her. If you are one of those people who don’t have a permanent email account, please get one ASAP and switch over to it and notify everyone that you know! This is a big deal. In this day and age there is no reason for your email address or telephone number to ever change. We live in a world of persistent contact. There is no longer any reason to lose contact with people. If you are using an email address tied to your Internet service provider, stop now. Get a free ISP neutral account from someone like Yahoo! or Google or someone else that is definitely not going anywhere. Make sure that everyone is aware of the new email address and start really using it. Don’t treat your email address like a street address that has to change every time that you move. It isn’t and doing that is destroying the underlying value of the system. An email address can follow you the rest of your life and keep you in contact with people forever. Don’t throw away one of the biggest value propositions of living in the Internet age. The reality is that it is vastly more work to switch email address when you move or change Internet providers than it is to learn one system that you use forever.

We lost power at the office again this morning! I am not sure what is going on in northern New Jersey this week but this is quite surprising given the awesome weather that we have been having. My office is on a massive battery backed power system so it doesn’t affect us much – the lights just turn on and off for about twenty seconds when the power switches over to generator.

Important Fashion Notice: Contrary to popular belief NASCAR polo shirts with checkered flag collars are not cool and hip. Yes I am serious. No, I am not kidding. If you own one, throw it out. Now. Go. (And no, mullets are not in style again either. Nor were they in style before. And no, even when someone knew who he was, Billy Ray Cyrus was not “cool”.)

Important Fashion Addendum: Just because someone is wearing a NASCAR polo does NOT make koolats somehow acceptable. Calling them gouchos or gauchos just makes it sound like you don’t know what koolats are because that is obviously what they are. And it makes you look like you don’t know how to spell gaucho because that is what they are named after. And it is bordering on racial slur. So just save us all a lot of embarrassment (you for looking like your mother mismeasured before making you prison issue pajamas and me for having to make fun of you in this forum about it) and wear either pants or shorts but not “jams”.

Francesca talked to Dominica earlier this week and Dominica told her that she had to go out and get Guitar Hero II for their Playstation 2. Apparently she listened because she sent us this review today:

“I totally love guitar hero 2.

strike that, i AM a guitar hero.

that is all i can think about. nothing is gettting done at my house, cuz
i am rockin out in the living room as loud as i can. i totally ‘feel’
like i am playing all the rhythms in the whole song. my favorite is
“mother tell your children not to look my way, tell your children how to
blah blah blah…..”

and then there is motley crue and warrant, cherry pie!!!

i cannot get enough. cannot cannot cannot.

i totally love it!!!”

You can’t get much more of a raving review than that. I guess that she likes Guitar Hero II even more than she liked Cooking Mama on Dominica’s Nintendo DS.

Things got plenty slow this afternoon allowing me to escape from the office at a reasonable time. I really like the early shift because I get to escape on the early side.

I got home and spent the evening working either on the new TrixBox server or with Andy as he and Eric are just about ready to deploy the new system to the University of Rochester Medical Center. Andy and I are hoping that the installation can be scheduled this weekend. That would be awesome. What a great way to start off the new year.

Dominica and Oreo got home and we ordered some Dominos Pizza for dinner so that it would be quick and easy. They messed up the order a little and put pepperoni on Dominica’s pizza rather than onions though. That was disgusting but it would have been ridiculous to send it back. So she just picked off the pepperoni and ate the pizza anyway. It is too bad that pepperoni is so unhealthy or we could have at least given it to Oreo but he always has to watch his fat intake so he only got one piece. But he really enjoyed it!

Castile Christian Academy finally got back into touch with me this evening. We have been attempting to get into contact with them for some time but we know that things have been crazy down there and that no one has had much time for dealing with computer related issues. At least now we know that people are still alive there.

Dominica and I went to bed on the early side tonight. Tomorrow is my last early day and I am very tired after having lost more and more sleep all week long. Today was a good productive day for me though. Lots of reading, good TrixBox work and a bit of good work with Andy. Dominica got a tiny bit of studying done but not very much.

Today is my first day of the extreme early morning shift. My alarm was set for five in the morning which is way too early, in my opinion. I have gotten used to getting up after Dominica and working from home for a little while before heading into the office. Getting up hours before her is no longer a habit for me.

Apparently I turned off the alarm in my sleep. I have sort of a vague memory of doing that. But only sort of. Nothing concrete. It was pitch black when I woke up on my own at six after six and decided to take a peek at my phone just in case I didn’t wake up with the alarm. I was actually assuming that it was about fifteen minutes before the alarm should have gone off but when I looked at the phone and realized that I had over slept by just over an hour and had originally intended to have been in the car on the way to the office by this time I flew out of bed and into action. I have two major hurdles to getting out of the apartment in the morning: no hot water and the valet has to get me my car!

I turned on the shower and the sink at full blast to attempt to get some hot water up to the apartment. Until the building is full we have the issue that we live so high that it can take up to twenty minutes before hot water can get to our apartment. This is the reason, I believe, why they don’t make us pay for our water since we have to waste so much every day just to be able to take a warm shower and we never get to use hot water for any other purpose since it could take an hour or so of just running a faucet to get hot water.

As soon as the water was running I called down for my car. I brushed my teeth and got into the cold shower trusting that it would at least heat up by the time that I was done so I wouldn’t have to have hypothermia before going to work this morning. As of this weekend we have our bathroom heater from Geneseo in Newark now so that helped to take the bite off of the air even though the water was cold. The water was warm before I got out and it wasn’t all that bad.

I was showered and out of the door in just nineteen minutes from having woken up! Not too bad after just five or six hours of sleep. I got down to the lobby and my car was there and ready to go. It isn’t too hard to get your car at this time in the morning as the crew for the morning rush is on but most people aren’t coming down yet. I jumped into the car and hit the road.

One thing that I discovered this morning was that the real rush hour on west bound route seventy-eight starts much earlier than I would have imagined and that the traffic that I normally see an hour or two later than this is actually lighter. Apparently early in the morning is the popular time to be out in northern Jersey heading away from the city. I still made great time and was able to get from the apartment to the office in about twenty-five minutes. After all of my rushing I was really just about ten minutes late getting to the office and I am the only one in anyway. The only reason that someone has to be in so early is to cover the phone line (which only rang four times all day yesterday – ALL day) as there is an hour and a half overlap with the overnight support. So no one is left hanging, they just have to email for support instead of calling. And almost anyone that would call at this time in the morning is in the UK and knows my mobile number anyway and would never call the main line even in the middle of the day. So everything was good.

It was a slow morning, just as expected. Today is the first day back to the office for everyone so things start off very slowly. This turned into a really short week too. Normally this would be a four day week but with the extra memorial day yesterday it is now just a three day week which leaves us with just a Monday, a hump day and a Friday. Once the week gets this short you might as well not even bother! Everything productive happens on the two days that get eliminated.

We lost power briefly this morning. Just for ten seconds or so. Nothing in the weather indicating that we should have had a power loss. Speaking of weather, the weather has continued to be amazing down here. I am just wearing my fleece to work every day even when I walk outside a bit. Yesterday when I left the office it was bright, sunny and warm. It has been in the fifties down here and we are expecting it to hit the sixties over the weekend!

PC-BSD 1.3 is out and I downloaded that at the office today. I run PC-BSD at work in a virtual machine from VMWare to give myself a local UNIX environment to work in. PC-BSD is awesome. It is a desktop focused UNIX distribution built off of FreeBSD on a single CD with the KDE desktop built in. It is very fast and very user friendly.

I had a productive morning today. I did some reading. I am working on Andrew Hunt and David Thomas’ “The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master” which is a seminal tome in the field and the founding book of the Pragmatic Programmers. A lot of the material in the book has been covered subsequently in later books by the same authors and their students but I wanted to read the original as well. I also did a little reading in the programming language books that I am reading right now. This is my reading week still.

I paid the bills today. I hate that bill paying is such a complicated, spread out process. Every week I have to sit down and pay a different set of bills and every bill has a totally different billing system and some of them are decent and straightforward and some of them are completely complex and confusing. I have two accounts with Bank of America – one of them is normal and I can just pay it online, the other requires that I call to pay over the phone. I cannot figure out the difference between the two. BoA apparently has randomly chosen one to be a normal account and one to be a pay by phone only account but makes it look just like a normal account online except if you make a payment to it it credits to the other account.

Anyway, we have just eighteen payments left on the Mazda 6. Eighteen may seem like a lot but that is just a year and a half, exactly. Considering that the car has under seventy thousand miles on it, maybe quite a few less than that, it isn’t bad at all. The car still looks and drives as if it was brand new. A year and a half will fly by like it was no time at all.

Speaking of cars: We have decided that the time has come to sell the 1988 Mazda RX7 convertible. We are very sad to do it but having four cars is completely unreasonable at this point in our lives and the longer that we wait to sell it the longer it will just sit there depreciating. Best to get rid of it now and to move on with our lives. So if anyone knows anyone who might be interested in a fun two-seat red convertible, let me know. Rotary engine, rear wheel drive, Alpine stereo. Lots of fun.

Joe Howlett is on his home stretch to the end of his teaching career. He is officially on long term leave from the Greece School District on January 26th. He is going into business with his father which is going to be a really big switch. It will take him a long time to get used to it, I am sure.

Today I found out that we have Martin Luther King, Jr. day off which is January 15th. That is the Monday following the weekend that I had all ready intended to make my long weekend in January. If I manage to orchestrate this correctly, I may be able to be in Geneseo from Wednesday’s night, the tenth which is a week from today, until the night of Monday the fifteenth! Dominica would come up for a three day weekend in the middle from Friday morning until Sunday evening. The amount of time that I would get would probably be enough to move everything except the servers out of the house all in a single, long weekend! That would make such a difference. Knowing that all of that stuff was moved and not hanging over our heads. Just the server alcove and the furniture left. Just the absolute minimum. I have a three day weekend in February that could be used to get the furniture out although it would be nice to have a certain amount of stuff there right up until we can’t use it anymore. This will actually be the longest stretch of time that I will have spent in the Geneseo house since sometime around mid-March, 2006! That is very hard to believe.

I have been going through so many books recently that I decided to do a little eBay bargain book shopping today. I almost never buy used books so I thought that I would give it a try. Used technology books are often very inexpensive even when they are still available new for quite a bit of money. I bought “eXtreme Programming Perspectives” and “eXtreme Programming Explored”. I also picked up “Questioning eXtreme Programming” from one of Amazon’s used book sellers. I worked hard today to pare down my Wish List at Amazon to a manageable two pages – down from four. It was starting to get a little silly.

Today was much more busy at work than it has been. People are mostly back from their vacations and people are itching to get things done. It is almost weird to have things happening around the office after it has been so slow for so long.

I actually ended up getting some projects at work today so the day wasn’t completely boring. I decided to have lunch today so that Dominica and I could go out to a relaxed dinner tonight. Now that she has a little more time on her A+ exam we are able to keep eating together in the evenings.

Dominica placed the first order for coffee from Keurig today for her new coffee maker that she got for Christmas. Right now the coffee maker is only so useful as the stores barely carry any coffee for it and what they do carry is almost all that burnt French stuff for “newbie” coffee drinkers.

I got stuck in the office a lot longer than I had anticipated. Normally I would have left around half past three but I didn’t get to leave for another hour. It was close to five when I scooted out of the office. I had to run up to the A&P near work to grab some bottled water and coffee supplies for Dominica before getting onto the road home.

I got home just a little bit before Dominica and Oreo rolled in. Min and I immediately ran out to Food for Life to get some dinner. I was really wanting another Tuna BLT after having one yesterday. Boy are those good.

Scott Adam’s Blog (aka The Dilbert Blog) has a great article from last week about people like he and I Doing Household Chores.

My project this evening is to build a TrixBox 2.0 server. TrixBox 2.0 released this evening and I have been waiting for it for several weeks so I had to take the opportunity to jump on it and to get it installed. It took the majority of the night just to get the server (a Compaq DL360 G1) prepped with SmartStart, to download TB2, get the install disk burned and ready, do the installation and check everything out. The box is barely configured at all but it is all installed and ready for me to work on tomorrow. Boy am I glad that that is installed and working. My goal is to drop it off in Scranton a week from today. That will be one less machine sitting around the apartment in the way.

I managed to find a decent deal on a second processor kit for the TrixBox server on eBay so I bought it. I am hoping that it will arrive by Tuesday. It will only take me twenty minutes to install so even if it arrives at the last possible minute I can still get it in and working. If I don’t get it in time then I will have to have the crew at the data center do that for me. That will be a much bigger pain.

We had a light bulb out in our main hallway burnt out for the last few weeks. We have been out so much that we haven’t bothered to have it replaced yet. We can’t replace it ourselves as it is eleven feet in the air and we don’t keep a ladder in the apartment. So tonight we finally took the time to run down to the desk and ask maintenance to have a look at it when they had a chance. Our regular maintenance guy came up and hung out for an hour or two and had some coffee and snacks. We had a good time visiting.

Dominica managed to get to bed way before I did tonight. It was well after eleven before I finally made it to bed. I never manage to get enough sleep when I am working the early shift. I have to be up at five in the morning tomorrow.

The major US markets are closed today to honour our recently departed ex-President Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford was president of the United States when I was born in 1976 and so it is especially sad for me to have him now gone. This definitely marks the passing of time for me. Dominica was born under President Carter who is still alive but is not the oldest living president at this time. Gerald Ford had, in 1916, one of the very early Boston Terriers which was, of course, an indication that he would go on to be a great man.

Something that I discovered while looking into former presidents is that Chester Alan Arthur spent much of his young childhood in Perry, New York and that his father was the pastor of Perry Baptist Church which I have attended on several occassions, is directly next door to Brick Presbyterian where Nate, Joe and I grew up and where mom taught at Tiny Tot University! Chester A. Arthur attended church there as a boy. Very interesting indeed.

[In addition to being an impromptu American bank holiday, today is a standard Scottish bank holiday.]
Neither Dominica nor I got a lot of sleep last night. The incredibly high winds were so loud that it was hard to sleep and the stupid laundry dryer kept turning on every five minutes all night long. That is possibly the dumbest “feature” of an appliance that I have ever heard of. Personally I believe that it is a bug in the design of the dryer and they didn’t catch it until it was too late and had no way to fix the firmware. I will definitely use the existence of that “feature” to determine whether or not to purchase a particular appliance in the future.

I was up around half past five this morning. I haven’t been up and working that early in a long time. I showered and was on the road before seven and into the office in under half an hour. The express was completely empty this morning even in rush hour. I am looking forward to a whole week of almost nothing happening whatsoever.

I put my new “Forgotten English” desk calendar onto my desk (how apropos) this morning and today’s word of the day is “practic: artful, cunning, deceitful, treacherous” from 1895.

I started the day by going through all of my weekend email which wasn’t much, for a change, and reading Game Informer to see what their Top 50 Games of 2006 list looked like. Then it was on to my huge stack of IT rags and books that I have piling up in my office in preparation for this week. I have a lot of paper to burn through before Friday night but I have a lot of time to work on it as well. This is my big reading push to get the year started off right.

Raymond Chen writes today about the perils of family computer support in his blog, The Old New Thing. He points to an issue between technical support and the people who are looking for technical support that I think is an important distinction. Technical people are not simply normal people who use computers more often than others do. We simply are people who see computers in a completely different way. It would never occur to a technical person to refer to every program on a computer as Outlook or Internet Explorer or Netscape. We automatically separate the difference between the computer, the monitor and the Internet. We know that “programs” on the computer and executable files that the operating system runs and that data files must be opened with an appropriate application. For the average technical person there is no concept of computers as a strange ephemeral cloud and there is no appropriateness to using technical terms in abiguous, meaningless ways for technologies that we don’t understand. It would never occur to us to call storage memory or the entire computer the hard drive or the CPU. These are specific terms that mean something and if we don’t know what they are we know that they are still specific terms that can’t just be thrown around.

But the important piece here is that to technical people this is not the stuff that we consider technical! We have no concept of a world without these basics being true. We simply don’t understand what it means to think of every application being called Outlook, for example. We don’t understand what makes people confuse applications, like Internet Explorer, and a random web page within it that you occasionally open. We see it as an application and a document – two distinct entities. It doesn’t occur to us to confuse them. This is what makes technical support so hard. I imagine that car shops must have similar issues. It would never occur to a mechanic to call the entire car the engine or the trunk (engine like CPU or trunk like hard drive which is storage.) Your mechanic won’t call the wheel bearings the carburetor just because he has heard that word and wanted to use it. And if you do these things to him, he can’t communicate with you. He simply thinks that you have lost your mind. Computer professionals are no different. Once people lack the fundamentals and the underpinnings of the workings of computers we have no basis for communication and since we likely were never in the position of not knowing these things have little capability to be empathic about them.

Is there an answer for technical support? No, I think not. The ability to work with computers is, apparently, selective and there will be, I am told, always a segment of the population that is not capable of using computers effectively. The aspect of this situation that is hard for people to accept is that this segment of the population will rapidly lose all ability to work most jobs, to communicate, to protect themselves and will be relegated mostly to manual labour where records and communications are less necessary and where information security is purely physical. What will exacerbate the predicament of this segment of the population is that they very thing that forces them to earn lower wages will be the very same thing that keeps them from being able to shop easily and to hunt for better prices.

And people wonder why I am so adamant about the necessity for teaching children at a very early age about the basics of computers and not, in any way, abstracting these concepts in order to make computers “more friendly” at the cost of their long term understanding of them. No one can risk becoming a computer illiterate today. In today’s technology driven world not understanding computers is no different than being unable to read just fifty years ago and being unable to read today is closer to not having been able to feed oneself in the not so distant past.

By nine this morning the other people from my team that were working today as well signed on and announced that they were working from home leaving me as the sole person in the office for the day. It can be a lonely existence sometimes. I have come to realize that most people, who do not work in IT, think that IT jobs are generally loner jobs where people with few social skills go to hide from the rest of society. But, in fact, IT is a massively social job function. We provide support and infrastructure for communications! Few jobs are so based around social interactions. Many of us choose IT as a job field because of our love of communications and networking. The entire global push for massive interconnections and world wide communications and instant access to everyone is all a side effect of what IT people want and create for themselves. Everyone else just communicates as an afterthought. Many traditional IT communications modes have recently caught on for non-technical people but email and instant messaging have been stalwarts of the IT pro for decades and it is IT that is making voice communications ubiquitous today. And when working in IT I can vouch for the fact that IT professionals interact with each other more than people in any other field that I have ever seen.

Unlike my day, Dominica’s day was totally crazy. Her office was back to work full swing this morning with all of the associated help desk headaches that come with people having been off for two weeks and forgetting how to do the things that they do everyday. All kinds of fun there.

Did you know that: In 1916 and again in 1948 the superstitious municipality of San Diego, California hired rainmakers to force it to rain on the city. When the rainmaker of 1916 was followed by a flood the city claimed that although the man had delivered on his promise that since he could not prove that he had been the one to make the rain that they would not pay him. They considered it to be an act of God. And while this is true it means that they entered into a contract in bad faith, in contradictions of their supposed belief in God and with intent to defraud. But, then again, God did take fifty of the city’s residents to stand for judgment in the flood that followed.

The cafeteria at the office was closed today which I discovered when I wanted to get some lunch. The cafeteria has developed this nasty habit of being closed or closing early without alerting the consultants who work in the building. No one was notified of the facility being closed today at all. You are just expected to know these things apparently. There is food available in other buildings significantly across the campus from us and it is not worth making the trip. I have Christmas chocolate on my desk to hold me until I go home for the day.

Today’s fish keeping tip: Don’t raise pets that want to eat you. That is just dumb. I will stick with snuggly Boston Terriers and hamsters, thank you very much.

Quote of the Day: “The captain that goes down with his ship often finds it difficult to secure another command.”

I finished reading “Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects” from the Pragmatic Programmers Library by Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney, Jr. I read almost the entire book just today while sitting in the office with just about nothing to do. At least I am able to make good use of the time. Today is actually a very fruitful day for me in my personal educational quests.

I headed for home just a little before three. Boy was it nice to be able to get out of the office so early. I got to the apartment and headed straight for Food for Life to get some lunch / dinner. I tried the Tuna BLT today for the first time which was really awesome. That is one huge sandwich!

Dominica checked the CompTIA A+ exam today (she has been studing for the 2003 exam and as of yesterday the 2006 exam is now available.) She has been hoping that the test will be extended through the end of the month. It has been rumored that some testing locations will offer the exam for the next few weeks. She checked with CompTIA today and it turns out that they are offering both versions of the exam until June 30th! The Lord was really watching over her. Getting ready for the exam in just two weeks would be really tough especially now that we are going to be moving and will be traveling back and forth to Geneseo a lot over the next few months.

Dominica sent over a good article from Time magazine about Gerald Ford and His Faith.

Dominica and Oreo got home a little before seven and Dominica wanted to watch Disney’s The Gummi Bears to celebrate not having to take her A+ exam right away.  We watched an episode or two and then she got to work on her studying for the evening.  Jonathan Stagno called tonight to say that he just took a new position as a Senior Network Administrator – still is LA where he has been living for over a year now.  We have been hoping to be able to get out there to visit with him and his wife but with the move from Geneseo it is going to be even longer now before we can get out there to visit.  We have lost our opportunity to get to Disney World for a weekend this month like we had been planning on as well.  Planning is such a waste of time I have discovered.

I converted some more movies and television shows over to Xvid so that I can watch them on the Creative Zen Vision W.  We are now starting to convert the classic BBC shows that we love to watch.  We will really start getting some mileage out of the media players once we have BBC shows on them.

I spent the evening working on web site maintenance issues for Andy.  With the rapidly approaching move to Scranton and out of Geneseo there is just so much that needs to be done ASAP.  We are in quite the panic.

Oreo was in a very good mood tonight.  We think that he is very happy to be back home and back at day care.  He had a good time today and has been “smiling” all night since he got home.

Happy New Year from everyone here at Sheep Guarding Llama!

Last night while I was waiting for dad to get done with dinner so that Dominica and I could go over there to hang out I got our Christmas theme switched over to our Winter theme to get everyone through the cold New York nights (for those of our readers in New York which is probably about a third of you.) I didn’t want to leave the Christmas theme up after the holidays like the people across the street’s outdoor Christmas lights.

Dominica and I stayed at dad’s house last night until just a little after midnight before driving home in the driving rain and high winds. Boy was it ever windy. We drove home at forty miles an hour most of the way. It was really something out there. Once we were home Dominica wasn’t really sleepy and she played her Nintendo DS for an hour or so. Long enough that I had to go get a book to read until she was ready to fall asleep.

I was awake around half past eight this morning but Dominica and Oreo slept in for another hour. Dad came by to pick us up to get some breakfast at the Omega at half past ten.

After breakfast dad came over to the house in Geneseo. Dominica packed our car to get it ready for the trip to Newark and I worked on getting a set of boxes ready to be taken over to dad’s house for storage. We don’t have any time to waste now. We have a lot of stuff left to pack, although it does not appear to be as much as I had previously feared, and I have a lot of technical work that has to be done to get everything ready to move as well. We have fifteen weeks to get everything moved so it is a bit of a challenge. Fortunately I have another long weekend due very soon so I am hoping to be back in Geneseo in two weeks to do some serious moving. If I really work at it I might be able to get a bulk of the physical moving done at that time. We will be saving the large “truck” items like the sofa, loveseat, dining room set and baker’s rack until the last minute when we get some sort of moving truck to haul them.

We went over to dad’s for a few minutes to drop off the load that I had gotten ready and so that I could help dad lift his old one horse sleigh onto his hay wagon. We have had that sleigh since I was a baby and he has finally managed to sell it after all of these years. That will clear up some barn space and make the new owners quite happy, I imagine. It is a nice antique but in really rough shape right now. It has to be totally refurbished to be useful in any way.

Dominica, Oreo and I hit the road returning to Newark just before three in the afternoon. Right about on our target. The weather wasn’t too bad and it was fairly warm out even without any sun and just a teeny bit of rain here and there. We stopped in Dansville to get a bite to eat at McDonalds before heading out onto the road.

Down in Avoca I got pulled over for speeding and got a ticket.  What a pain.  Just this morning I was thinking how cool it was that I had no tickets on my insurance – over three years without a ticket.  It seems to be my lot to always have one ticket.  Just one.  It has been about six years now that I have gone with just one ticket on my insurance.  As soon as one is gone, I get another to take its place.  It just keeps going and going.  Normally, though, the tickets seem fair and just unfortunate.  Today was not the case.  The ticket was written for a bit faster than I was going and I was singled out from all of the traffic around me when the trooper couldn’t even clearly see me as I was behind a tractor trailer.  We were going the same speed and he had to very carefully bother to clock only me and not any of the other traffic anywhere to have picked me out.  I wasn’t the first vehicle or the fastest.  I was just the cheapest car.  I have noticed that when driving the Mazda Proteges I get pulled over and never with any other vehicle.  Dominica noticed too that it was really obvious that we were profiled and picked out as a target and not because we were the first car seen or the easiest to get or the most obvious.  Well, we will see what the judge thinks.  This is just the ticket.  But what a pain 🙁

The rest of the drive was uneventful.  We stopped at Barnes and Nobles in Big Flatts to use the facilities and to do some quick shopping.  I picked up a book and Dominica got a calendar on sale that she had wanted.  I got “The Pragmatic Programer: From Journeyman to Master” that I have been eyeing for a while.  I need a lot of books to read this week.  I expect to get a lot of reading done as it is a slow week AND I am on the early shift all week.  The office is going to be all but empty tomorrow all day as it is the memorial day for the late President Gerald Ford.  A reading day for sure.

We got to Newark around nine or a little before.  We unloaded the car and got moved back into the apartment.  Oreo was very excited to be home again and ran around the apartment like a maniac.  We are glad to be home as well.  I checked in with dad to let him know that we were in and started a number of movies being processed on Dominica’s computer.  Dominica spent the evening studying for her A+ exam which technically expired yesterday but there are a few facilities that are continuing to offer the exam throughout the month and she is hoping to get into one of them to take it before there is no way to anymore.  If she doesn’t make it by the end of the month she will be really sorry as she will have to start the testing process again.  She is not taking any college classes this semester so that she can take the time to focus on getting the CompTIA A+ out of the way.  The A+ is such a stupid test that it is very difficult to study for.  A lot of the material on the exam is so dated that anyone having entered the IT industry in the last five years or so could easily have never worked with or seen much of the antiquated material on the exam.  For example, Dominica’s exam has a lot of Windows 95/98 questions as well as DOS!  But the purpose of the exam is to certify that she is ready for work, not for fixing old worthless home computers.  The reality is that any computer running Windows 95 is so old that no one could afford an IT professional’s time to work on it.  And the serious business world switched to Windows NT 4 around 1996!  That is eleven years ago.  That is an epoch in the computer industry.  I have been working with Windows desktop systems in business for a long time and cannot recall having to have worked on a Windows 95 machine since the late 1990’s.  And even then it was ridiculous and a sign of a place that you wouldn’t want to work.  To test people on those skills now is not only pointless but many IT professionals with many years of very serious experience may never have witnessed those systems first hand and have no reasonable way to get their hands on a Windows 95/98 machine today!  I don’t know anyone who owns one and can’t recall the last time that I knew someone who did.  Even Windows 2000 is rare today but a reasonable operating system to test on.  Windows XP replaced Windows 2000 and has been out for six years at this point.  A test covering anything more than Windows XP and Windows 2000 is just wasting people’s valuable time.  CompTIA really shows how little they think of their test takers.

We didn’t manage to get to bed until fairly late which is tough for me as I have to be up much earlier than I am used to in the morning.  I have to be in the office by seven thirty tomorrow.  I will be up around six thirty.