Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica and I started the day by sleeping in a little. No big plans this morning so we had lots of time to relax and enjoy our house in Geneseo.

Dad came over to Geneseo after church and we all went out to the Omega and hung out there for a while. After lunch we all went over to dad’s house for the afternoon and exchanged presents. No real surprises this year except that Dominica got me a really nice scarf and the complete Gummy Bears on DVD! I am very excited about that. I loved that cartoon back in the 1980’s. That was all time favourite Saturday morning cartoon. One of the few that was produced like a movie and not like a low budget kids’ show. The quality really showed. My big present from Dominica is the Creative Zen Vision W with the 4.3″ 480×272 screen. She got me the 60GB model that can store close to 100 movies!! I am very excited to get to try it out.

We ended up hanging out at dad’s house a lot longer than we had been anticipating. Our original plan was to only be there until five and then to go back to Geneseo, pack and get ready to travel and then to meet the family at church. But we ended up staying right up until it was time to go to church and then we went down to Leicester to the Christmas Eve service.

After the candlelight service at the church in Leicester we rushed to Geneseo and packed the car as quickly as we could.  It took just a little under an hour to drive to Geneseo and get ready to go and be off again.

The drive to Frankfort went well and took barely over two hours!  Not bad at all.  Everyone was still awake when we arrived and the Christmas present process was just beginning.

I was up at eight thirty this morning just five hours after going to bed. Every time that we are in Geneseo I realize how much I miss our awesome seven foot square platform bed that Art Ralston built for us. Sleeping on the floor in Newark is okay (we have a foam mattress on the floor so we are not sleeping directly on concrete but there is no “bed”) but the giant, sprawling feel of the haphazard bedding on the platform frame in Geneseo is my favourite. Oreo really like it too as he has plenty of space and can choose where he wants to sleep and can migrate around the bed during the night. In Newark he is pretty much stuck sleeping directly between us generally with he head on one pillow or the other.

Once Dominica got up about an hour after me we showered and got ready for the day. Dad came over for breakfast around ten thirty. We went, as always, to the Omega Grill and hung out there for about three hours which is actually pretty short for us. Dominica and my pictures from Disney World are still on the milk fridge there. It has been well over a year since they were first put up there.

Dad went back home after brunch and Dominica, Oreo and I did some work around the house and then ran out to Walmart to do some shopping. The Walmart by our house here in Geneseo was “packed” (read: the parking lot was full) which is a totally different thing than a packed store in New Jersey. In NJ the parking lots are three times the size and almost no one is working in the store. Here in Geneseo the store is well stocked with stuff to by, the people shopping are more or less polite and orderly and there are more than enough cashiers and stock people that you are able to easily find items that you want, pay for them and leave the store very quickly. In New Jersey the parking lot would be just half full and the cashier lines would be snaking back into the store and most of the registers would be closed or the cashiers would be moving like molasses in, well, December. Amazing how much the culture of Upstate New York varies from the culture of Northern New Jersey.

The Ralstons came over to visit right after we got back from shopping. They have been trying to get down to Newark to see us but haven’t been able to squeeze in the trip yet. Art and Michael have never been to New York City so it will be a really neat trip for them.  We all visited for about two hours.  Michael got to open his Christmas presents from us.  We got him a The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe video game for the Game Boy Advance.  We are getting him a GBA SP but we were totally unable to find one yet so he has to wait on that but he has an older GBA that he can use to play his new game in the meantime.  He also got, but not officially as a Christmas present, our year old Kodak digital camera to take to New Guinea with him so that he can take pictures and make movies of the island so that he can share it back with people here.

After the Ralstons left it was time for us to head over to Perry to go to the Lumberyard Restaurant.  Dad took the extended family out for a nice Christmas Eve Almost and Sara’s Birthday dinner (Sara turned nineteen yesterday.)  We had a really good time.  Dominica and I both went for stuffed, broiled Haddock which was very good.

From dinner everyone drove over to dad’s farm and we spent the evening visiting there.  Dominica, Oreo and I stayed until almost one in the morning before returning to Geneseo.  Dominica and Oreo were very tired (as was dad) but I stayed up until three working on SGL as I really wanted to get the Christmas theme onto the site so that everyone would see it on Christmas Eve morn.  Getting the theme was easy but there was an issue with any files that I managed to transfer to the server and it took quite a few hours to get everything actually working and to diagnose the issue.  What a pain.  But it is working now and looks awesome, I think.

I wrote a lot of today’s post and then lost it when the office’s DNS cache reverted and cut me off from SGL. What a pain.

I had to get up early this morning. No rest for the weary. Even after working until three in the morning I had to be up because the Mazda PR5 that Dominica and I are driving to Rochester tonight has to go into the shop this morning.

I took the car into the shop because it is having the same issue with the shifter that it was having a month ago. I don’t want to do any damage to the car so I decided that it needed to get into the shop before we were out of town doing tons of driving for a few weeks. Since it was going into the shop anyway I also decided that it should get a full tune up. Over the past few months, as the car approaches ninety thousand miles, it has been getting weaker and weaker. It is really having a hard time with the hills and the gas mileage has dropped considerably. So I am sure that a tune up will do it a world of good. It is getting a new timing belt, drive belts, water pump, front breaks among other things. About $1,600 in all. A bit more than I had been hoping for but the car should be safe and we really hope that the gas mileage will be back in the range that it belongs in.

Unfortunately because my car has to be in the shop all day I am stuck in the office until much later than I had figured that I would be today. Dominica is only working until five today but I don’t have a ride from the office to the dealership until six. Fortunately Dominica and I are not planning on leaving Newark until relatively late so that we are not stuck in the really awful holiday traffic although I am sure that it will still be pretty bad.

The office was almost completely empty today and there was no work to do at all which was pretty cool. I brought books with me and everyone was just hanging out having a good time. IT people are very social. People like to make fun of IT workers for being very antisocial but the reality is that we work in the field of information transfer – our whole world is about communicating! That is what many of us chose this profession because of.

One of my coworkers and I went out for a nice Thai lunch today when we couldn’t find anyone else around the office. Lunch was good and we had a good time. I also received two bottles of wine from my managers today. Really good wine for me too. A California Cabernet Sauvignon (J. Lohr Estates 2004 Seven Oaks Cab) and a Spanish Carinena – Syrah – Garnacha (Can Blau Montsant 2005.) I love dark, heavy, dry reds.

Next week is going to be incredibly slow at the office as well. There is just about nothing expected to be going on all week. I am only in the office for two days which is really cool. This is, by far, the biggest holiday “vacation” that I have ever had. I pretty much have eight days off out of the next ten! That is really cool. I just wish that I didn’t have so much driving to do during that time. Newark to Rochester to Utica to Newark to Utica to Rochester to Utica to Newark (there might be an extra Utica to Rochester in there depending on what we decide to do next weekend.) We really don’t have very solid plans yet for next weekend.

This is the first year since 1990 that I don’t have a New Year’s Party to attend!! Most years it has been me hosting them and, in fact, SGL was originally started as the New Year’s 2001 Announcement site back in the fall of 2000. But this year I have no New Year’s plans. I won’t know what to do with myself.

Dominica and I will most likely be leaving Newark between eight and nine o’clock tonight. The weather is supposed to be bad but I have had the weather be bad so many times this year when I go to drive from New Jersey to New York that I have given up on that battle all together. Our hope is if we leave late enough that Route 280 and 80 will not be overly congested. Once we get into Pennsylvania on US 80 we are normally in pretty good shape. US 380 and US 81 take you into such remote areas that the traffic thins out considerably and moves very well even on really heavy traffic days. We will probably take advantage of the time and location to grab dinner in Clarks Summit, PA at the Waffle House.

By six this evening there was just no one left in the office.  I decided to write the final wrap up for the blog for today so that I could post and be on my merry way.  It was well after six by the time I was finally able to leave the office and head for Newark.  What a long night it is going to be!

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.