Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

This morning I wrapped up all of the work on both servers that I have been working on all weekend. It is really nice to have them done and ready to go. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to get them ready in time and that things would get pushed off again.

I was up working around half past eight this morning. Dominica slept until almost ten thirty. At nine this morning Andy went over to Marketplace Mall in Rochester to see if he could pick up a Nintendo Wii for us but when he got there he discovered that a lot of people had the same idea and all of the Wiis that they had were gone before he even had a chance to get close. Oh well. No Wii for us until after Christmas this year.

Around one this afternoon the datacentre contacted me and said that we could head straight there to drop off the servers. Dominica decided that she and Oreo would come along for the ride since otherwise we would hardly see each other today. So we loaded the car and left for Scranton around two o’clock.

We made good time and were at the data centre in time to unload, take a quick tour, get back in the car and make it back to the expressway by four! Not too shabby. We drove back down to US 80 and stopped at the Tandoor Palace at Exit 299 for some dinner. The food was excellent but it took a really long time. It ended up eating a lot of our evening but at least we really enjoyed our meals.

We came home and I got to work installing the half terabyte drive into Dominica’s computer. That took hardly any time at all. That will make her computer a ton more usable in the future. Space has been such an issue for her. Of course installing it was the small part. The real time waster was formatting the thing. That took a few hours.

Dominica and Oreo went to bed around ten and I decided to head down to the health club and see about sneaking in a work out. The rumor is (by rumor I mean official announcement printed and and slipped under our doors) that the locker rooms, steam rooms and saunas are done and that we were able to start using them a day or two ago. I am very excited to try out the steam room.

I put in a short forty minute workout and hit the locker room. Note: locker room. Singular. Apparently we have a single unisex locker room. There is a spot where I can only assume there is supposed to be a second locker room but if they call this finished I think the building inspector will want to have a conversation with them. The only part of the area that could even sort of be called done is the drywall. No floor yet, no doors, no lockers. All of the construction equipment is just piled in the middle of the room. It is totally unsafe for people to be walking around in there. Toilets are sitting on the floor next to where they will eventually go. I think their idea of “done” is a bit different than ours. This is two days after this locker room was “done”! I really should have taken some pictures to illustrate just how far from done they are. It looks as though they just walked into a blank space and started to set up shop and hadn’t actually started much yet.

I asked the concierge about the locker rooms, steam rooms, etc. I was told that the locker room labels were scheduled for tomorrow (um, labeled “unisex” and “do not enter”?) But that they had no idea what the “done” was supposed to mean or how we were expected to use coed showers, sauna, steam room, etc. Or if they really were coed or not. All they knew was that all of the residents of 1180 Raymond had received official notice that everything was complete and ready to use and that everyone was confused and asking what they were supposed to do.