Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is the shortest day of the year (sunlight wise that is – the earth rotational rate does not noticeably change on any given day.) It may be short but it is a bright and sunny day here in Newark, NJ. This is also the first daily post to be written completely with the new WordPress 2.0.5 interface. Yippee!

Today is also my work from home day this week. Not that being at home made the day more relaxed. Just the opposite in fact. Oreo and I had a much busier day today that if you took my entire week and wrapped it all up together.

Rochester’s Fast Ferry is scheduled to leave the Port of Rochester on its voyage to Halifax, Nova Scotia tonight. Everyone will be partying down in Rochester tonight. Talk about a great Christmas present to the people of Rochester.

I spent the day prepping the new web server in Scranton to be able to transfer SGL up there. This is my first time migrating a WordPress site so there was a little learning curve but the process was very simple and practically painless. I had to move the site itself and move the database but that was easy. Once the site was moved and I had tested it I used the WordPress upgrade process to upgrade the site from the old WP 1.x series to the very latest WP 2.0.5 so now the site has new features and capabilities and, supposedly, runs a little faster too. Our readers should notice a bit of an increase in speed when reading the site. Even though our new server is not as fast as the old one from a processor standpoint we now have dual processors (not cores, real processors), more memory, 10K rpm hard drives (instead of 7,200 rpm drives) and a much faster Internet connection. Let us know what you think.

My favourite new site feature is the Akismet comment spam filter that checks the incoming comments for spam. That was a major problem with the old system. I was getting hundreds of fake comments a day and I was spending a lot of time dealing with it and it caused a lot of real comments to get lost in the process as I would often have to go through hundreds or even thousands of fake comments at a time looking for the off chance that a real one might have been in there somewhere.

Dominica got home and we immediately ran out to do some last minute Christmas shopping. There was one major item for her that she knew that she was getting but I wasn’t able to find it without her very easily so we just went up and picked it up. It is a new Keurig B60 coffee system. It doesn’t make coffee nearly as well as our really awesome coffee maker but it makes coffee one cup at a time which she really enjoys. So this one is going to be here in Newark while the other coffee maker goes to Geneseo.

My evening was spent working on getting everything up and running in the Scranton Data Centre.  There was a lot of work to be done and I had to do a lot of coordination with the data centre staff.  I ended up being stuck working until almost three in the morning.  It was a long night but after a lot of work everything appears to be working as it is supposed to be in Scranton and we are in good shape.  People should be seeing SGL being hosted from Scranton sometime tomorrow depending on when your local DNS servers get the new address propagated down to them.

Christmas is almost upon us. Boy this season creeps up awfully quickly. Today is Oreo’s Christmas Party at daycare. He is very excited. Daycare parties are his favourite. He gets so excited about them. He was dressed up in his mistletoe t-shirt this morning before heading out for his party.

I got into work mid-morning. Another terribly boring day. I made great progress on the books that I am reading at the office. I am working my way through the very, very long “Head Start Java” and the much shorter “Ship It!” from The Pragmatic Progammers. I want to get “Ship It!” read before the companion tome “Release It!” releases in January.

I went out for Italian at lunch today. It was good but I felt bloated the rest of the day.

I left work on the early side today, just a little after five, and came straight home and spent most of the evening working with the Scranton Data Center getting everything set up and working. That ended up taking way too much time.

For dinner Dominica and I ran over to Food for Life and ate there. I haven’t been there in at least a week! They are going to start to think that I forgot about them or something.

After dinner it was back home to continue working with Scranton while Dominica worked on studying her A+. Only a few weeks left before she isn’t able to take the test anymore. She is in a bit of a panic.

After everything else was completed was watched a few episodes of Diff’rent Strokes. It is truly amazing that that show was able to stay on the air.

Less than a week until Christmas. Time is running out.

I got right up and headed right into the office this morning. I was in just after nine which is quite early for me. I talked to Scranton this morning and the new servers were racked and powered up this morning too so I will be able to play with them this evening.

This morning we found out as a surprise from our building that they are beginning to run a shuttle, as of tonight, in the evening hours to make getting around Newark easier for us! How cool is that? Quite the surprise. We had no idea that they were going to add a feature like this. Awesome. I am sure that some of the impetus for the decision is the incredible congestion that occurs in front of the building and having a shuttle should eliminate a percentage of the valet traffic going on but since they are not running the shuttle during peak commuting hours it will only affect that so much. Just one more reason to like at 1180!

First thing this morning at work I managed to finish reading “Joel on Software”. I only started reading it on Saturday and forgot to take it home with me last night so I am pretty happy with that progress. I also finished a magazine or two.

I brought Dominica’s “Head First: Java” book with me today. I decided that I might as well take the opportunity to really immerse myself in some programming. It is the perfect timing for it.

Today I stumbled on a blog by a local blogger in Newark who seems to frequent the same places that I do so I am wondering if I am going to run into him at some point. He has a lot of pictures of 1180 Raymond Blvd. taken from Military Park in Newark and he went to the same art exhibit at 744 Broad St. that Susan and I went to a few weeks ago and he took some pictures.

The ferry is finally leaving Rochester. In just two days the incredible blight on the city of Rochester will depart for its final voyage on the Genesee River (or so we hope) as it heads to one of my all time favourite destinations: Halifax.

I didn’t end up leaving work until well after six. I just got caught up talking to people. I got home just fifteen minutes before our Dominos pizza arrived. We ate dinner and watched Different Stroked. Dominica had some final work to do for her Java class and so she worked on that.

My new proxy server in Scranton was up and running tonight so I was able to do some work on that. I am really impressed with how well that works.

We went to bed on the early side but I stayed up and watched Elf in bed. That is a pretty good movie. I am a big fan of Zooey Deschanel who is a great actress (Almost Famous, Big Trouble, Failure to Launch, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy etc.) and a really amazing singer. She does her own singing in the Elf and her rendition of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” during the credits is worth hanging around for.

It is a gloomy, grey day in New Jersey. I love it. Not too cold but dark. I could live like this every day.

I ran a quick and dirty word count on the site two days ago. Very rough but SGL is up to approximately 1.1 million words! That is a lot of words.

Before leaving for work this morning I took the time to install the King’s Quest collection onto Dominica’s computer. It is amazing that the entire collection of seven games can fit onto just two CDs! You heard me right kids, CDs not DVDs. And just two of them. Pretty cool. It shows how far compression has come since the games first came out. I am really looking forward to playing KQIV-VII that I have never managed to complete. (I have never played KQ IV or KQ VIII except to check out the look and feel, KQ V and KQ VI never ran correctly on the Windows 95 box that I had at the time and I couldn’t get through them without them crashing so I am looking forward to finally completing them.)

I thought that these were going to be ports of the King’s Quest series to Windows XP but they are, in fact, just the original DOS versions of the games running on the DOSBox emulator. So really I got nothing here that I didn’t have before. KQ IV even still requires that I print out the manual so that I can enter in the copy protection code. Lame. Although the upside of this method is that it should be super simple to make all of these classics run great under Linux. Maybe I will give that a shot. That would be awesome. I am sure that lots of people have done this before and no one cares anymore but I CARE dammit!

This morning was massively uneventful. I was up late last night so I didn’t get up until half past eight this morning. I worked from home until eleven and then drove into the office where all was quiet.

I have been putting my time into ready “Joel on Software” by Joel Spolsky – much of which I have read previously online but I thought that I would read the book just the same. It is considered one of the really important books on software design and management. Joel runs the Manhattan software house Fog Creek Software from whom Andy has recently begun to use the product FogBugz for bug tracking.

Back before moving to the WordPress content management system for SGL, we used to have a lot of extra, non-daily, content that has been inaccessible. I decided to go through today and begin making some of that stuff show up in WordPress. You can once again laugh along with School Excuses, Children’s Proverbs, Product Labels, Out of the Mouth of Babes and Something to Think About: Part 1. More will be coming now that I am on a mission to get these all converted.

Dominica and I finally have something of a schedule for the holidays. The current plan is that we will drive to Geneseo on Friday night. We will be in Geneseo for the weekend. On Saturday night is my cousin Sara’s birthday party. Then Sunday night, which is Christmas Eve, is when my family celebrates Christmas. Then very late on Christmas Eve Dominica and I will drive out to Frankfort and we will be there on Christmas day. That is Monday. On Tuesday and Wednesday we will be staying in Frankfort and I will be working from “home”. On Wednesday evening I will be taking the train back to Newark and i will be working from the office on Thursday and Friday. Then on Friday night I will hop the train back to Rochester or Utica. Not sure yet, but I expect Rochester. Then on Sunday we will return to Frankfort and Dominica and I will drive back to Newark together on Monday, January 1st so that we can both return to work as normal on Tuesday.

Dominica discovered a Walmart over in Harrison and there is some last minute shopping that we need to do so our plan is to head over to Harrison (between East Newark and the Ironbound) to shop and then to go our for some Spanish or Portuguese for dinner.

The Walt Disney Company decided today that older, heavyset males with white flowing beards are not welcome in their parks. One such man was asked to leave Walt Disney World after telling some children who were asking him if he was Santa Claus that he was. Now I can understand the Disney officials not wanting him telling kids that he is Santa Claus but to tell him that he would not be allowed into the park looking the way that he does is 1) racist 2) sexist 3) ageist and 4) discriminated based on religion not to mention weight. You would think that the Disney company, for all their supposed political correct posturing, would think about venturing into this territory a little more closely. (If you are wondering how telling people that they cannot resemble what people think Santa Claus would look like – Disney is a partner of Coca-Cola who designed Santa, by the way – violates all these things just think about the fact that he has to loose weight, become a woman, become younger, shave (some religions prohibit this) or be anything but of European descent!!)

I left work a little after six. I got home and Dominica met me downstairs and we immediately drove out to Walmart on Harrison to the east of town. It was very easy to get to and is actually not too bad of a Walmart. They didn’t have what we were looking for but we did pick up some DVDs while we were there. We got the 1985 made for television move Alice in Wonderland which Dominica has been looking for for years. We also got the first two seasons of Diff’rent Strokes which truly was an awful show but it is an important part of our childhoods so we got it anyway. Disney does not appear to be releasing Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on anything but DVD so we went ahead and got that along with Elf which I have heard is one of the best holiday movies in recent years. Everyone has raved about it and it was not expensive so we decided to splurge.

After shopping we went to the Ironbound and ate at Mompou. I have now made it for almost two entire weeks eating only once per day. I am pretty sure that this is causing me to only eat about fifty to sixty percent as many calories as I was eating previously. By eating breakfast it makes me hungry all day long and all of those studies about how eating first thing in the morning increases your metabolism never take into account MY metabolism which is different than any generic study ever says that it should be so I have given up on listening to so called experts. This also saves a ton of money as I buy many fewer meals.

We came home and I did a little tiny bit of work and Dominica studied for her A+ for about twenty minutes and then we watched two episodes of Diff’rent Strokes before going to bed around eleven.