Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was a rainy day. Rainy and quiet. I got to work from home today which Oreo really needed. He was totally exhausted after four days of daycare with two birthday parties. He is a dog that has no idea when to say no. He just plays until he can’t take it anymore and then he keeps on playing.

But on his weekly “daddy/doggie day” he just sleeps and sleeps all day. He slept so much, in fact, that he didn’t even ask to go out for his walk until almost six this evening! That means that he went an entire twenty four hour period without going outside.

I took him for his walk in the park just before Dominica got home. She arrived home and we immediately set out to hop the train into Manhattan. That turned out to be just as easy as we had thought that it was going to. It is a short walk to the train station. We bought our tickets there – just twelve dollars for the two of us round trip to and from the city so that is only three dollars each way. That is very reasonable. The train ride takes about eighteen minutes and then we were in Penn Station in Manhattan. Now that is handy.

From Penn Station you could walk up to Times Square but it is a little far. By the Red Line on the Subway it is just a single stop. It doesn’t get much easier than that. We walked the final two blocks from the station to the Schubert Theater where Spamalot was showing. The timing was just about perfect. We were to the theatre plenty of time in advance of the show but not so much that we really had to kill time.

Spamalot ended up being quite a bit of a let down. We had had high hopes for the show and it was okay but it sure wasn’t anything special. For fans of the original movie (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) there are some funny bits but almost all of them are just gimmicks from the movie rehashed. Cute but it looses its charm very quickly. For anyone who hadn’t seen the movie I am not sure that the show would even be funny at all. The first half wasn’t bad but by the second act we were both pretty bored and just waiting for the show to wrap up. We were very disappointed.

We went to Cold Stone Creamery and got ice cream before heading for home. The trip back was quick and painless. Living in Newark is awesome!

This afternoon it became official – after twelve and a half years (June, 1994 – November, 2006) – I have graduated from college. A Bachelour of Science in Computer Information Systems from the State University of New York, Empire State College. Officially my graduation date is November 7.

Boy, now what do I do? Finally out of college. I started college just two weeks out of high school. I have almost never taken time off from college. I went solid from 1994 – 1998. Then I took off some time from 1999 – 2001 and went solid again from 2001 – 2006 (but the last two years have just been paperwork in the attempt to get the degree to come to fruition.) That is a very long time. I have no idea what to do with myself now. I have pretty much always had school, in one form or another – even if just running in the background, for twenty-five years.

After my two very early days today was early but not nearly as early as things have been. I have early morning and continuing almost all day conference calls today. Five hours of calls.

I managed to get a number of pictures of Oreo at daycare and posted them to the Flickr feed. He is such a cutie. He had another birthday party at daycare this week so he is all excited and going crazy playing with all of the dogs there. He spent a bunch of the day with his birthday hat around his neck. What a goof. His daycare providers are convinced that he can’t be over four years old which would be such an incredible blessing for us. We were told that when we got him he was six and that would make him seven now. Quite old for a dog. But if he was four or less would give us many additional years with him. He really does look and act like a very young dog.

Tonight was a very relaxing night. I did some work on my SUN Blade 100 workstation but didn’t get anywhere significant. Dominica finished watching The Gilmore Girls on DVD and watched two episodes off of YouTube (which, by the way is now owned by Google.) It was a slow night but tomorrow we are going to see our first Broadway show since being in Newark.

Not a terribly exciting day today. I have to be up very early this morning, half four in fact, so that I could hop onto an early morning UK conference call. But I managed to get up on my own without an alarm. This whole week is looking like it is going to be really early for me.

I discovered a really cool classic Commodore computer web site today. Commodore 16 Online is a site dedicated to the later, less expensive Commodore computers especially the C=16 and the Plus/4 which were brought out after the Commodore 64 and 128 but were not nearly as well known. The thing that makes this site so cool is that they have a C=16 emulator called Minus/4 (instead of Plus/4) that runs in a Java applet and allows you to play many original C=16 and Plus/4 games right on the web site. What a great idea. There is a huge library of really great Commodore, Apple, TI, Atari and other early computer games out there and these old machines can easily be emulated in Java and being able to play them from a web page is a really cool way of accessing them. I am able to get to the site from work but Dominica can’t which is too bad because she would totally play these games from work all of the time.

Dominica and I decided that we are going to go see Spamalot this week. We have had so much going on that we have not had a chance to go do anything on Broadway in a few months and we don’t want to miss our chances to do that so we decided that we are just going regardless of the scheduling. So we bought tickets to see the show on Thursday evening. One of the best parts of being so local is that we can go to the “off night” shows with the less expensive tickets. If we are really fortunate then I will be able to work from home on Thursday which will make getting to the show a lot easier.

I got to head for home before half four today. That is the great part about going in early. A nice long evening at home. It was a heavy rain day. It just poured and poured all day. It was very dark. Min wanted some ice cream and made me run out to the Dollar Bazar (yes, we are aware that Bazar is not a word but that is its name) to get her ice cream. Apparently there is a Bazar publishing company in Norway, though.

Min got home and we just hung out at home for the evening. She watched more of The Gilmore Girls last night and then read a little in her Java book.

It is only the second day of doggie daycare but Oreo is totally exhausted. He is going to have a hard time making it through the whole week.

There is no question that today is definitely a Monday. I woke up just fine. Actually I woke up on my own without an alarm at ten after five. Not too shabby. Less than five hours of sleep and I still felt just fine getting up. But when I tried to turn off my morning alarm apparently that didn’t work as it went off later and woke up Min.

I got downstairs to get my car that I had ordered last night and discovered that they had brought around Min’s car instead of mine. That would have been okay except she had things in her car that she needed and the totally blocked it in so I couldn’t just take it anyway. So I decided that it was probably better to just have them go ahead and get my car instead of trying to jostle cars around at the last minute while running up and down in the elevator trying to get everything that Min needed to her.

So instead of leaving Newark at six like I had planned I didn’t manage to leave until six thirty. That extra half an hour meant that instead of driving in during the really slow early morning traffic I was in the beginnings of rush hour. I drove like mad and managed to get to work before seven which was a little late but not bad. The car issue is getting bad though. It is very tough because I have to have the car brought around so early that I have to always leave it just sitting around or else I have to go down “on time” and just hope that the car is really there. It is pretty risky either way.

At daycare today one of the dogs, Bullwinkle – a chocolate lab, celebrated her first birthday today and all of the dogs had a birthday party. Oreo was one of the few dogs who wore his birthday hat almost all day. What a cutie he is. All of the dogs got little treat bags to take home that had a photo of the birthday girl on them.

When Dominica got home tonight we had to fill out paperwork because her car had a small accident in the parking garage. Her car was dropped off on Friday night and we didn’t use it until this morning so we don’t know exactly when it occured but when the car was brought around early this morning I didn’t notice the damage and I think that I would have from where the car was placed and which part of it was visible to me. It looks as though the car was backed into a pole inside of the garage. It turns out that this has happened several times all ready to other people’s cars in that garage. So the upside is that there won’t be any hassle with the parking garage company covering the repair. It is a decently serious “scratch” that left a damage area of almost six inches by six inches and slightly ruptured the bumper. It does not appear that the bumper compressed or that any metal was damaged – just plastic. So the repair should be too bad but it will mean that the car has to go into a shop for a while. What a pain. So we spent almost an hour dealing with that.

Dominica started studying her Head Rush Java book from O’Reilly. So far it looks like the new book is really going to help her figure out what is going on in her Java programming class. So far in her class they haven’t had them write a single actual program yet, not even a “Hello World”, so everyone in the class who has never programmed before is really learning everything so incredibly abstractly that it is not useful. This is the fifth week of the course so it is really pushing things that they haven’t written a stand along program yet. They have written some code but only totally abstract classes and stuff that are run through some other program. It really hides everything that is going on and makes learning extremely difficult.

Today actually turned out to be a day for relaxing. Yesterday wasn’t too bad but the shopping took its toll on me and working on that Sun Blade and getting nowhere didn’t make me feel any better.

I started the day walking over to Subway and getting Dominica and I breakfast sandwiches. Unfortunately they don’t open until ten so I had to wait around for a while and discovered that there was a parade/walk going on in downtown Newark and that all of the streets around us were going to be closed for hours so there would be no driving to or from our apartment! How obnoxious is that? They shut down the whole city for a group of people to walk around. They closed our parking garage since they were marching right on top of it and they shut down the city buses that service our area of the city so the only thing going anywhere was the subway!

I got breakfast and went back up to the apartment. Dominica had laundry started and humming along. We enjoyed our breakfast and then fell to just relaxing around the house. Min did a bit of cleaning today and the place is starting to come together. Her first real chore this morning was getting the towel rack for the bathroom put together. That took close to an hour but once it was together we were able to get it into the bathroom and now we have something functioning as our linen closet since we don’t have an actual linen closet. That is going to increase our space by a bit and it helps to make the bathroom look a little less sterile. The really high ceilings make the white walls a bit much for that room.

I had several servers that I attempted to work on today. I have three in the apartment on the docket. Two got completed today and will be shipped out as soon as possible. The third has a fan issue and I had to do some eBay shopping to get a replacement. Actually that will be a replacement for the replacement as the original was totally destroyed and this one that isn’t working now is the replacement for that one. So that will stall that for several week, I am sure. But I was happy to get two of them completely done and ready to go.

Dominica watched a good chuck of the sixth season of Gilmore Girls today. That is like her favourite show these days. She got in many hours of it today. She had to take a while off from it to pound on her Java homework. She had thought that she was going to get a reprive from he homework this weekend because the SUNY Learning Network’s servers were located in Buffalo and had been down but by tonight they were back online so she had homework that needed to be done and if she goes past tonight she will be stuck doing her homework during the busy week which is no fun. So that took an hour or two. But at least she managed to get it all taken care of.

I put in several hours of working on the asset tracking system. I wasn’t exactly ultra-productive but I think that I got some good work done and managed to relax a bit. Toward the end of the evening I got paged out and had to work a little and then I got asked to come in early and do the early shift tomorrow starting at half six in the morning.

We wanted to get to bed early but neither of us were tired and we ended up staying up until a bit after midnight. That is going to make getting up in the morning a pain.