Sheep Guarding Llama

The weekend is finally here. Dominica and I slept very well last night after our first day or working out in our new gym. Oreo slept well too sharing Dominica’s pillow. He thinks he is a small human.

Today is a hazy, raining day in Newark. Newark is neat because when there is hazy or rain or any type of atmospheric interference Manhattan simply fades away as it if was never there. And then, after a good rain on a bright day it is very clear and very close and hard to believe that it could ever have disappeared. It is a neat effect. One day you are all enclosed in a little bubble and the next you are in the middle of the enormous metro area.

I was up at eight this morning – one of the hazards of my line of work. I actually didn’t get off to bed until like one in the morning. I was busy playing Lunar Legend on my Nintendo DS Lite. It is an old Sega Genesis era game, I believe, that has had many lives and was eventually remade and repackaged for the Game Boy Advance and it is the GBA version that I am playing. It is a good game though with fun gameplay, entertaining storyline and nice graphics. I am having fun with it. I have put about four hours into it so far which all ready makes it a pretty decent bargain since I got it for only like ten dollars.

I was up for nearly four hours this morning before Dominica managed to pull herself out of bed and even then she only got up because the sunlight was streaming in on her face and she couldn’t take it anymore. While she was sleeping I managed to put together another episode of the SGL Podcast. W00t! That is the fifty-second episode so far.

We made it back to the gym today. Dominica worked out for half an hour and I put in just six minutes under a full hour. Not bad for our second day. That is two days in a row. A good sign if ever there was one. It is perfect that we managed to get started on a Friday night leading into a weekend when we are home all weekend so that we have plenty of time and opportunity to get into the work-out groove before Monday comes along. Monday will be tough getting the exercise to fit into our routine – especially with the club only being open for limited hours right away. One thing that is really awesome is that yesterday there were only three of us using the gym and today there was only Dominica and I and when she left I was alone the whole time that I was there. We remembered to take headphones with us today and we had a much better time and were able to enjoy the television. That is going to make exercising awesome.

We did some shopping tonight up at Target and Stop and Shop. Mostly we needed groceries and work out clothes. That killed several hours this evening. Then it was home for a light dinner and to watch Stargate which I haven’t seen in forever and forgot that it was actually a pretty good movie. I am glad that we watched it again. This is the Extended Edition but I am not sure what was added. But I probably haven’t seen the movie since it was in theatres.

Weight Lost Going To Gym: 0.0 lbs.

Dominica’s migraine was so bad last night that we just skipped dinner entirely. She slept for a few hours with Oreo while I worked on the podcast. When she got up we took the opportunity to go down to the new healthclub in our building that semi-officially opened today and we took a quick tour of the portion that it operational. Technically we are allowed to be using it this evening but no one else is and we would feel weird. But our plan is to start using it tomorrow. At least I plan to do that. I am really just looking for a cardiovascular workout. Not trying to bulk up or anything. Just need to get a little bit closer to actually being somewhat sortof in shape. But boy will it be awesome to have a gym right in the building! I have never had that before and I am quite excited.

While we were out and about in the building we also took the opportunity to pick up our bowling shoes. Everyone in our building get a pair of bowling shoes so that they can use the bowling alley whenever they want.

Our big happy news today is that we made the final payment on Dominica’s 2002 Mazda PR5. It is the first time that we have ever paid off a new car and own it outright. I bought my yellow PR5 before she bought hers but mine was traded in on the Mazda 6 so we didn’t pay it off before it was gone. What a great feeling it is to never have to make another payment on the car. Pheww. I also made a payment on the Mazda 6 today. But that car won’t be paid off until August or September of 2008 so we still have a long haul with that one. The BMW has almost a full five years left to go but hopefully we will be able to shave some off of that.

I talked to John Stephens, the Surfing IT Wizard, this morning and he is taking the day off of work to come down to New Jersey for a Magic: The Gathering tournament this weekend. He might be able to make it out to Warren for lunch before continuing on down to Tom’s River in South Jersey where the tournament is this weekend.

As with most Friday morning, this morning was nice and slow. Fridays are very slow in the morning and busy in the evenings. Dominica decided that she is going to run to Target today during her lunch break to do some needed “we have a healthclub” shopping. Neither of us has been working out in so long that we don’t have any workout clothing and we want to get started today so that is a priority.

Before leaving for the office this morning I managed to upload all of Dominica and my wedding pictures to Flickr. That was a lot of uploading but now, finally, we are able to share all of our wedding pictures with everyone. I know that people have been anxious to see all of the guys in their kilts!

Okay, this one might be a little to techie for a lot my audience but Joel on Software had a great article today on how management consultants fake productivity tests to IT managers. And for those who can’t believe that things like what happen in this article really take place I am here to testify that yes, they really do. It is because IT workers find the obviousness of the ability to game the system and the completely counterproductive nature of the metric so great that we are constantly amazed that management knows so little about what they are managing that they can only serve as a threat to productivity or, at best, a pointless cost center. Just about everyone working in IT knows, it would seem, more about management than management graduates. How can this be? We have no idea. That is one thing we definitely cannot explain. The bottom line is that this would never (almost never) if managers were required to have greater competence than those people that they manage. People are never productive when they know that they are working for a person who has not managed to demonstrate the ability to do the jobs of the people that they manage. If they can’t do the job then they cannot understand the complexities of the tasks. Even Burger King knows this and expects every manager to be able to do every job in the place. Even if they aren’t the best burger flippers they have to have done it enough to appreciate the demands of the position.

Everyone loves cat web sites. This might be the best one yet: Cats That Look Like Hitler. What could be better?

I got home from work pretty late tonight – just a little before eight. But my last while at work was very slow and I managed to watch a ton of Rocketboom. I am rapidly catching up with all of the episodes that I have missed over the last several months.

I got home and tried on workout clothes that Dominica bought today and then we headed straight down to the building’s health club “Club 1180” for our first workouts in forever. I put in a full half an hour on the eliptical machines. I would have worked out longer but I got paged in to work and had to head back to the apartment to work. But really, I think that half an hour is probably enough for my first day working out. Dominica put in about twenty two minutes. So our plan is to be back in the gym tomorrow. But we will see if we manage to stick to that plan or not. It’s the second day that is hard. But we will sleep well tonight.

I am very excited about the statistics that I am seeing from podOmatic. In a bit less than twenty-four hours and on a weekday the show had sixty downloads from podOmatic and an additional fifteen or more from OurMedia! Not too shabby. PodOMatic reports that the SGL Podcast hosted there, even after months of inactivity, is still getting downloaded hundreds of times a week! Now that is encouraging and very, very cool. Now that I am back to doing the show maybe we can get those number up again.

For dinner we just stayed in and had salads and pb&j. We popped in Big Trouble in Little China which is totally classic ’80s Kurt Russell that I haven’t seen since, well, the ’80s.

Today is the third anniversary of my mother passing away.

Last night I got home and Dominica, Susan and I went out to IHOP by UMDNJ for dinner. After dinner we went to Wendy’s because the girls wanted some frosties for dessert. Dominica and I didn’t stay up for too long after getting back from dinner. I did end up having to take Oreo out to Military Park for a walk around eleven though.

It turned out to be a really beautiful night for a walk in the park. It was really bright and the rain all day had collected on the trees so that they all sparkled. The wine that blew all day had taken down most of the remaining autumn leaves leaving the ground a mat of yellow and the sky clearly visible. Oreo made me take him on several laps of the park so we were out for quite some time. But it was the best possible weather for a long walk. It was cool but not cold enough, even late at night, to warrant a jacket. We enjoyed our walk even if it was a long and unexpected one.

Today is my work from home day this week so I get to do a little relaxing and just wear jeans and a sweatshirt all day and hang out with Oreo. I decided today that I really love using Flickr and that for just under $25 per year it is totally worth it to me to have a professional account there so that I can put as many pictures there as I want, more or less (limit is 2GB per month – which is quite a few.) So I bought an account. Now my plan is to slowly copy all of my archival pictures up onto Flickr. I have been taking pictures pretty seriously since 1988 so there is a lot of stuff to post and it will take quite a long time to get it all up and with the proper tags, titles and descriptions but it will be really handy for people to actually get some use out of all of the pictures in the future. It will also serve as an important backup to my own picture archives. And now instead of manually processing each picture down to a small, manageable size I can just upload the pictures at their original quality which makes them more useful to everyone.

I lost my Internet access for a little while this afternoon when Cablevision was in the building. Perfect time to go to lunch. I met Susan at Subway in the building next door for a quick and healthy lunch. Luckily for me the local Subways all seem to have the veggie patty subs that are so uncommon back in New York. Dominica has found them before but I have never managed to get one before. I am not the biggest fan of Subway but the veggie patty sub finally gives me something halfway decent that I don’t mind getting every so often.

Dad discovered the MSN list of the ten worst video games of all time. At number eight on the all time awful list is “Make My Video – Marky Mark” which Dominica had for the Sega CD platform. But even worse, but just barely, was my “Smurfs: Rescue from Gargamel’s Castle” which came in at number six! Oh the games of our childhoods.

Susan had a gig in Allentown, PA today so she headed out that way this afternoon. Today is the first day that our in-building health club is open so we are excited to see how that is coming along.

Dominica got home and had a terrible headache so she took some aspirin and went right in to bed with Oreo to get a nap. I took the opportunity to catch up with her and finish the fifth season of That ’70s Show. It is amazing that they were able to keep the show so good through five seasons. I watched most of the first four seasons when the show was new. This past season I had only seen about one episode previously. I think there is one episode after the fifth season that I have ever seen. I have heard that the show mostly died after this season but I am interested to see what they did with it.