Sheep Guarding Llama

I slept in until half past seven this morning. You know that you are getting old when that is considered to be sleeping in! Dominica slept in for another two hours after I got up. Oreo was actually surprisingly awake this morning and came out and spent the morning in the living room with me while I did some work. One of my favourite things about living in Newark is being able to watch the sun rise over Manhattan in the mornings. It is just beautiful. I love city life and mornings are probably the best time in the city.

I did some serious eBay shopping today and managed to win two more Nintendo games for our handhelds. I won Lunar for the DS which I have been really interested to get after I started playing the GBA version, Lunar Legend, two days ago. The old game is really gorgeous and well done and I want to see what they have done in the years since that one released. Lunar for the Nintendo DS is still expensive in stores but I got a great deal on eBay. I also finally won a copy of the original NES Zelda II: The Adventuer of Link that was re-released on the GBA a few years ago. I never played the original two Zelda games from the NES but games of that era intrigue me because so much of my childhood happened when the NES was such a phenominon but I was always an outsider looking into the weird world of Nintendo games back then. So now I want to play a lot of them to relive pieces of my childhood that I always wanted to have. I have bid on probably no less than fifteen or twenty copies of Zelda II before I managed to win one inexpensively enough to make it worth it to me.

At this point I pretty much have the definitive collection of jRPG and Adventure games for the Game Boy Advance and DS. I don’t quite yet but I am getting close. The biggest title that I need yet is The Minish Cap which was the only Zelda game designed exclusively for the GBA. Not that I have ever played a Zelda game that I actually liked but this one is supposed to be one of the best if not THE best Zelda game ever made.

I tried taking a picture of Oreo this morning and Dominica noted that the flash was very sickly and that something was wrong with the camera. I looked closely at the flash and discovered that it was burned out – literally charred on the inside of the flash enclosure. So we decided that it was time to get a new camera to replace it. This is just our cheap “everyday” digital camera. We get cheap ones specifically so that we can feel comfortable carrying them around all of the time and if they get damaged then we can just replace them. So far the theory has worked great. It really helps us to use the cameras in situations where we would never want to lug around or wouldn’t feel safe with my good Nikon. So we had dad order us a refurbished Kodak digital today that is the same model as the one that died but the newer version which is basically identical exept that the case is smaller and more fashionable. Smaller is good since it always goes in a pocket.

Dominica was in a mood to get out and go somewhere for breakfast so we ordered the car and drove up the hill and ate at the IHOP up by the medical center in Newark. The IHOP was totally packed and it was a ten or fifteen minute wait to get a table for breakfast. After breakfast we decided to drive up to Nutley since we were all ready out and about and do some shopping at Target. We needed some basic supplies like a mop and cleaning materials and while we were there we checked out the movie selection. I discovered last night that Dominica had never seen The Usual Suspects which was unbelievable so we set out looking for that on DVD (to replace the LD that we all ready owned) but had no luck finding it. Probably the Lord telling us that we need to wait and get it either on HD-DVD or BlueRay. It is all ready a replacement for a format that we own so we probably shouldn’t buy it in an old format.

While we did not find the movie that we were originally looking for we did manage to find a number of good deal including That 70’s Show Season Five, Big Trouble in Little China, Stargate the second extended cut, Smoke Signals and Swimming with Sharks with Kevin Spacey which I have been wanting to see for years. Everything was really cheap (or else I would never get Stargate.) Now that we live in New Jersey we watch a ton less than we used to and our DVD spending has declined dramatically. Sorry to all of you that live off of our collection (you know who you are.) 😉 We also found some cheap CD collections of Bobby Darin, Nat King Cole and Ricky Nelson. Not a cheap trip to Target but we made out well.

We also ran to Barnes & Nobles while we were in the shopping plaza and I was able to grab the new O’Reilly Bind and DNS book that just released that I have been wanting. I know, not very exciting.

The afternoon was dedicated to Dominica’s JAVA. She had some independent learning that she worked on for a while first from the book that she bought a few weeks ago and then with me tutoring her directly. The big mistake, in my opinion, that her class and all of the books seem to be making these days is that they completely skip the step of having the learner actually do any programming. She has been in her class for almost six weeks now and they still haven’t written the most incredibly basic stand alone program yet. She is several chapters into her own book and they haven’t had her make a program yet. Everything that she is learning is so completely abstract that none of it is sinking in and being helpful. So I made her sit down and write a couple of basic programs and do some enhancements to them and look at the the how and why and reality of programming and I think that it was really helpful. We will see but I think that it was a pretty decent breakthrough today.

After a bit of programming we watched some of That 70’s Show and ordered in some Domino’s thin crust pizza for dinner. We watched two episodes and then Dominica had to set about doing her actually JAVA homework which isn’t nearly as much fun as my programming examples. Min’s homework ended up being significantly longer and more difficult than she had anticipated and ended up requiring her to work much later than she had intended so she was unable to finish up tonight and has to turn in her homework late.

I did manage to finish reading my book “Pragmatic AJAX: A Web 2.0 Primer” today. Now I am ready to move onto that brute of a DNS book that I picked up at the store today.

I was up by a quarter after five this morning after having gone to bed so early last night. It is rough when you aren’t even able to sleep in on Saturdays anymore. Oh, for the good old days of sleeping until nine and spending the morning eating cereal and watching cartoons like the Gummi Bears, Smurfs and tons of others that were all so much the same thing over and over again that I have forgotten them. It is amazing how many cartoon series I watched as a child and how few I actually remember. The only show that I really loved was the Gummi Bears. Perhaps because it was a good setting, a better than average story line, targetted at being a really happy show and, as Wikipedia put it, the forerunner of the bevy of new, high quality cartoons that happened in the late 1980’s. The Gummi Bears was Disney’s first Saturday morning cartoon and really did a lot for the company even though it has languished forgotten ever since it went off the air in 1990. It is really quite sad. I feel that the Gummi Bears would have had a really big following and that Disney really missed a big and obvious opportunity with them. Why is there no Gummi Bear movie? Why does Disney World have no Gummi Bear attractions (at the very least a snack bar if not an all out ride) or merchandise? While researching Gummi Bears for SGL I happily discovered that in just under one month Disney is finally releasing the Gummi Bears on DVD! I am very excited. It is the only Disney cartoon series that I really liked (Ducktales, Rescue Rangers and Talespin were okay but nothing special.) I have long held that the Gummi Bears were my favourite cartoon series ever and I have been very sad that I have not been able to watch them again since they originally aired. Very sad indeed.

I also learned a bit about the Smurfs that I had never known before. For one thing, the Smurfs 3D movie is set to release in 2008. That will be creepy. I had long known of the suspected communist undertones of the Smurfs when I was a kid (what wasn’t communist undertoned in 1980?) but I was unaware of the fact that religious groups were claiming that it was the work of Satan and that it was a demonic production. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, this went so far that there was a widespread belief in Latin America originating from Puerto Rico that when people watched the show or listened to Smurf records that real life Smurfs would come to life and run around causing mischief for you much like gremlins. It was common to get reports from people who believed that they were actually seeing Smurfs in their gardens or around their houses. The Smurfs are planned to released on DVD next year. And no, I will not be buying them. That was a really boring and stupid cartoon.

I spent the morning working on the total overhaul of my personal, professional site ScottAlanMiller.com which has not been updated in three or four years and was horribly out of date. That took a few hours of work but I am pretty happy with the look of the new site and how much I was able to get done this morning.

Dominica slept in until half past nine. That was about twelve hours of sleep for her. We went to breakfast at Food for Life and took Oreo for his Saturday morning walk in the park. He is really excited whenever we get to go to the park now because he only gets to go a few times a week and there have always been many dogs there that he hasn’t had a chance to smell yet. Overall Oreo is not nearly as sleepy today as we would have expected. You can hardly tell that he spent most of the week at daycare. He must be getting stronger. We are pretty sure that he is getting leaner.

There was a picture from Oreo’s daycare that was messed up when I posted it to Flickr but that is fixed now. He is so cute that you can even see the cuteness when it comes from the Axis security camera at his daycare. Speaking of pictures, I did finally manage to remember to take my Kodak digital camera with me while walking Oreo in Military Park today and managed to squeeze off a couple of pictures of 1180 Raymond from the north end of the park. I think that Military Park has the best view of the three big downtown buildings with 1180 right in the middle. The shots are taken well within Military Park standing almost directly in front of but slight to the west of NJPAC (the New Jersey Performing Arts Center) and due west of the entrance to the Robert Treat Hotel. The lighting isn’t great as this is totally an almost noon shot but at least I remembered. I will work on getting some great shots some other time when I have my Nikon with me. I also posted a picture of Dominica’s BMW’s bumper so that everyone can see the damage. It is very sad.

I did some work on my Nintendo DS Lite to see if I could get the touch screen working today. It turns out, as far as I can tell, that the problem was simply that the protective screen had stuck to the pressure sensitive screen in such a way that it was causing it to think that it was being touched all of the time. I was able to use some Scotch tape and to get the protective screen moved away from the real screen and everything started working like it should. I will be keeping an eye on it but it would appear that everything has been fixed. What a relief that would be.

Dominica went out shopping downtown for some clothes today. She also overnighted a Oreo’s halloween costume to Frankfort to have it altered. The shipping to Frankfort cost more than the costume did. This is becoming a very expensive halloween outfit.

For dinner we ordered in pizza from the place that Dominica has been getting pizza from recently and we settled down in the living room and watched Beyond the Sea the biography of Bobby Darin written and performed by Kevin Spacey. It was a really good movie and Kevin Spacey remains possibly the best actor ever. His range is just so incredible and he actually did all of the singing for this movie which is amazing as Bobby Darin was one of the greatest singers ever even if he was a horrific actor (never, ever watch his performance in the remake of State Fair!)

After that it was time for bed. Dominica played her new Urbz: Sims in the City game and I worked for a little while on Lunar Legend.

It is a grey, drizzly Friday here in New Jersey. Oreo was still tired this morning but seemed happy to go to daycare. We can tell that he is getting thinner with all of the exercise that he gets all day long now. This daycare is really good for him and for us. We get to spend so much more time just hanging out with him now. He almost never wants us to “play” and just wants to be with us. Fortunately he is a very snuggly dog so we don’t loose quality time with him just because he doesn’t want us throwing his toys all of the time.

It was a slow day at the office today. That was awesome. Having a nice slow day leading into the weekend is great. I was able to relax a bit before heading home and didn’t have to get all worked up just before the weekend. I didn’t even have any late deployments this evening so I didn’t have to stay late like I almost always do on Fridays. So by half past five I was on my way back to Newark to start my weekend.

I got home just a few minutes after Dominica and Oreo did. Her car was still sitting outside in the valet’s line of cars to take back to the garage. We decided that we both wanted some wine so we went for a walk down to the, apparently, local liquor store to pick up some wine. It turned out to be close to a mile away to the liquor store. Much farther than we had intended on walking. At least it made for some good exercise. But boy was that a lot of unexpected walking. It took quite a bit of time especially as we spent the whole looking carefully to make sure that we weren’t missing the place.

We got back and went for dinner at Food for Life which also ended up taking forever. So it was quite late by the time we actually got home from just running to the local liquor store and stopping across the street for sandwiches. It was almost nine in the evening. A package of video games that dad had shipped out earlier this week arrived today so we decided to just go to bed and play some video games. Oreo was exhausted and we were both pretty tired anyway. So it was a very short evening for us.

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.