Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Dominica and my 3rd anniversary!

After working until midnight last night I was called out of bed at six this morning and had to start my day quite a bit earlier than I had hoped.

Somewhere it had to exist. Check out the Lego gallows.

I was really tired all day today although I felt reasonably productive. I worked from home for a few hours this morning before making the drive in in between phone conferences. I have discovered a massive flaw in the design of Exchange and Outlook recently. I have never really used them before so their are relatively new to me. I have never been a fan of them as they are push based email systems and that encourages their use as real-time delivery IM replacements instead of acting as pull based traditional email. They are often faster but it makes people rely on them in ways that they shouldn’t. That and they crash constantly. I have never used any application so unstable. Anyway, the problem that I discovered is that the calendaring system is not centrally managed and only appears to be. The calendar is actually managed, as far as I can tell, by Outlook and not by Exchange and Exchange just syncronizes copies of it or something. So I constantly have meetings scheduled on my calendar that were cancelled but the system doesn’t alert me because there actually isn’t a “calendar server” but instead just emails containing things to attach to your calendar. So if someone emails you an appointment and forgets to email you a cancellation it stays on your calendar with no way of coordinating with a central scheduling service that says that the event was cancelled. Pretty poor. It has major effects where I work where tons of people lose half an hour or more a day to Outlook ghost events. I schedule my whole day around those events and it really messes up my commuting. And then everyone spends a ton of time confirming everything on their calendars or just skipping stuff because thay can’t verify if it is real or not. Very, very poor. And this is the “big selling point” of Exchange!

Josh managed to get to the apartment in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t get home until around six and, of course, work called just as I was getting home so I had to walk right in and work for half an hour instead of hanging out with Josh. Dominica and Oreo got home minutes after I got off of a conference call.

We were all pretty tired. We walked over to the Savoy which is really close to use and had dinner over there. The food was good but not spectacular. What we have heard is that the price is too high for the quality of the food and they are right. Everything was great. The atmosphere is really good and the service was great but none of it justified quite the price. But we had a good time.

Back at home we were so tired that we all went to bed pretty early. Josh and I used the NDSLs over the wireless to be able to race each other in Mario Kart from across the house. What a great feature that is.

Dad informed me that it was just announced that Rochester is now the second worst city in the entire country for job opportunities passing only New Orleans! Now that is rough. People never believe me when I say that there is no work at all in Rochester. But there really isn’t. I can’t believe how many people stay there through all of this. I also can’t believe how no one that we know is actually out of work and can still change jobs in the nation’s worst non-natural disaster economy. It really shows just how good the economy is here and how many jobs there are everywhere else!

My mobile rang at half past six this morning. And so the day began. I am actually having a problem that I am working such long hours and needed at with such an unpredictable schedule that I am almost unable to ever travel from home to the office. Even getting a shower in can be a challenge. Because of the way the project that I am on is set up internationally there is almost always something going on and as long as something is happening someone might need me. On a fairly regular basis the teams are running from about three in the morning to almost midnight leaving only a three to four hour “safe gap” in which it is almost impossible for someone to need me. On weekends the gap gets larger because only the US works over the weekend.

I was busy enough that I didn’t get a chance to leave Newark until after noon. All this time at home and no Oreo. 🙁 I did manage to run over to Food for Life and got myself breakfast. I got “The Round” the big breakfast sandwich. Boy was that good. And filling. And very affordable.

I did some eBay shopping for video games today. eBay is really great for lovers of slightly older cartridge based video game consoles. The Nintendo carts last forever and are almost impossible to damage and get really cheap really quickly and since they are so popular there are just tons and tons of them available all of the time.

This is a busy week. Tonight’s plan is cleaning and preparing for Josh to come down. Josh will be down tomorrow and will be here for the rest of the week.

The nice thing about starting work really early is that you get to leave early. Once I hit ten hours I try to work from home. No reason to hang around at the office. Especially with the type of work that I do. I can work from home just as easily as from the office. So at half four I decided to head back out to Newark.

I got to Newark and discovered that traffic was totally crazy and out of control. It took be fifty minutes to crawl from route 78 to the apartment. Traffic was nuts in every which direction. Apparently there are dual playoff baseball games in New York tonight and the commute to get to the games happens at about the same time as rush hour and a lot of the city is under construction with the new stadium going in traffic patterns are quite bad.

Dominica got home just minutes after me and we were both hungry so we pretty much went right out to Food for Life to grab some dinner. Dinner was awesome as always. It was a nice evening to go out.

At home we decided to relax as much as we could, which wasn’t much. We played some DS Lite including a Mario Kart head to head tournament.

I was only in bed for a little while before the phone rang and I had to work until midnight. No rest for the weary.

Today started off with a bit of a panic. Dominica went to work at a quarter to eight and at about half past eight I went down to the desk to pick up my car that had been ordered last night. I asked at the desk if the car had been brought around yet but they didn’t know. So I poked my head out and saw the car parked on the street but the desk didn’t have my keys or know anything about them. After the valet came back we realized that no one knew where my keys were. Uh oh.

The concierge, manager, valets and I spent about an hour searching for the keys. We checked in the car, we looked on the sidewalk, we looked around the valet stand. No sign of them anywhere. Eventually I went over to the Commerce Market and got some breakfast (egg and cheese on a hard roll) and went up to work out of the apartment. Around ten or eleven one of the other residents of the building called from work, in Yonkers, to let us know that he had found some keys in his car. Apparently the valet had dropped them there while shifting cars around this morning. So no transportation for me today.

Prior to the keys being located I had managed to catch dad in Geneseo and had him overnight the spares just in case. I was just about to call AAA when the keys were found. But obviously I wasn’t getting any keys yet today. So I was working from home today.

Big news today: AGDInteractive has finally, after three months, updated their site with more “it’s coming sooner or later” news on their remake of Quest for Glory II. But at least they updated the site. A lot of us watch it almost every day waiting for something to change. (This is a situation where they are TOTALLY missing the RSS feed boat

Dominica got home from work with Oreo. Oreo had a very good day in daycare. He was so excited to be back that he spent the morning barking at all of the dogs apparently telling them about his experiences moving to his new home this past week. It has been a very big week for a little Boston terrier and we figure that he didn’t think that he would ever see his puppy pals again. He was still very wound up when he got home.

I worked late putting in an hour of overtime before Min and I walked over to the Ironbound district to have dinner at the famous Mompou Tapas restaurant there. Everyone has raved about it so we didn’t want to miss it. The walk was very nice and we were really excited to get to explore the Ironbound which is really cool. It must be like stepping into a small town in Portugal.

The food and wine were excellent at Mompou and the atmosphere and service were excellent. Definitely our type of place. We tried three tapas, I had some Portugese red wine and Min got a Cuban mojito and we finished off the evening with a creme brulee sampler. It was awesome. The walk back to our apartment took only fifteen minutes (it took longer the other way because we were not positive where we were going and didn’t go direct) so getting into the heart of the Ironbound district is really fast and easy for us on foot. We will be spending a lot of time there. We saw several places during our walk that we really want to try out.

We slept in this morning and got up to a grey, raining day in Newark. We were only up for a little while when I had to start working. This project that I am on is really under a lot of pressure and I have been working really long hours and over the weekends. I worked for five hours today. Not much of a weekend. I am really looking forward to a break. I was so busy today that we didn’t get a chance to go out for brunch like we had wanted to and Dominica just ran down to Subway and grabbed some subs quickly so that I would at least get something to eat.

Around six this evening I was finally able to leave the apartment and Dominica, Oreo and I drove up to Nutley to do a little shopping. We haven’t been out shopping since we moved to Newark. Living in a city discourages that, I think. In fact, this is the first time that I have had the car brought around except to take it to work. We went up to the big shopping plaza on Route 3 in Nutley and went to the Target there.

Min and I decided that since I was putting in all of this over time that we would take the overtime money from today and put it into rewarding ourselves with Nintendo DS Lite video game handheld consoles. Dominica got a pink one and I got the black onyx one. And we got three games. One that she wanted – Zoo Tycoon, one that I wanted – Lost Magic and one that we could play against each other – Mario Kart DS. We also picked up a couple of basics like a new waste basket that will fit under the kitchen sink and some miscellaneous supplies.

I would have had to return to work but someone from the office was able to cover some stuff for me so Dominica and I were able to go to Chevy’s in Nutley for dinner. We have only managed to go out for Mexican twice since we have been down in New Jersey. They don’t have anything good like Garcia’s in Cortland. At least not that we have found.

We came home and just relaxed a little bit. It was getting late in the day. Dominica worked on her Java homework and that took her an hour or more. Then we played Mario Kart against each other for about an hour before going to bed. We have decided that we really like the new Nintendo DS Lites (NDSLs.) They are attractive, much more portable than earlier Nintendo handhelds, the screens are awesome and the built in wireless is really cool (although it doesn’t support some standard security features and that is a big pain.) Because they are backlit we are able to play them in the dark which is a major advantage over the older Game Boys (the GBA SP’s are backlit but they were too little, too late after all the serious portable players had owned GBA’s for years.) There were so few situations when you could really play the GameBoy’s that it made them not very useful. Not so with the NDSL.

I tried out some older GBA titles on the NDSL and discovered that they look incredible. I had no idea that these games were supposed to look this good. It is hard to believe that they are from an older system. There is a lot of life left in some pretty old games it would seem. I am really looking forward to having a chance to really get some good use out of my GBA game collection. The only caveat on the NDSL is that it does not have a Zilog Z-80 processor so it is not able to play the older GB/GBC titles from the original GameBoy series. Not that we are very likely to play those old games anymore but it would be nice to have one unit that can play everything. The GBA and the GBA SP were backward compatible all the way back to the very first Nintendo handheld. The Nintendo DS is the first Nintendo handheld to not be able to play the original titles. That is a bit disappointing.

As of noon today we will have been in the apartment in Newark for an entire week. It seems like we must have been here much longer than that. It seems strange to think that just six days ago we were in North Brunswick cleaning. I guess it shows what a long week it has been. At least Dominica’s overtime is over and Oreo’s daycare opens again on Monday so they can get back to their normal routines.

Lenovo announced yesterday that they too are recalling their laptops (after Alan Cox’s laptop exploded and called them into question as well) as they were using the bad Sony batteries but were hoping for the best, I guess? So they join Dell, Apple and Toshiba on my list of irresponsible laptop makers who knew that they had the bad Sony batteries and waited for bad things to happen before doing anything about it. And Lenovo, the third largest laptop maker, didn’t bother to do a recall until even evil Sony final broke down and issued a formal, all-out recall. That leaves, at least so far, Acer and HP as the only unscathed major laptop makers in this whole ordeal. Hey, what computer manufacturers is it that I always recommend? I forget. Can someone remind me? 😉

Dominica got up at eight after almost twelve hours in bed. She was really worn out from this week.

At a little before ten we went out with Oreo for his morning walk in the park. We can tell from his general attitude that he enjoys living in Newark so much more than North Brunswick. He gets tons of fresh air here as we almost always have the windows open, he gets loads of sunlight, he has more carpeting to roll around on and he goes for several walks in the park every day. Life is good for little Boston Terriers. And the concierge gives him cookies.

After his walk Min and I went over to Food for Life to get some breakfast. We got the seven mile high breakfast. Each of us. Whoa was that huge. We were so stuffed by the time that we were done. But boy was it good. We are so glad that that place is right next door.

We came back from brunch and Dominica did some homework and I got down to doing office work. The last several weeks have been just incredibly busy and I have barely gotten any time to relax. Around half past two Min and Oreo went into the bedroom and fell asleep. The big brunch made both of us really sleepy but I couldn’t nap because there as too much work to be done.

We got some rain this afternoon. The first rain that we have gotten, at least while we were awake, since moving to Newark.

I spent the day working. I put in seven hours today. Almost a full day. I was pretty tired by the time I wrapped up with work. More to do tomorrow but hopefully not as much as today.

I did manage to finish reading “From Bash to the Z Shell” that I have been working on for some time. I am glad to have completed that.

For some reason I wasn’t really hungry today and decided to skip dinner. I only ate lunch yesterday and then again just brunch today. Dominica had some leftovers from two days ago for dinner.

The fire alarm went off again today. That would be the fifth time since the middle of the week. This time the fire department was there by the time we went downstairs. We would have just stayed in the apartment, obviously it was a false alarm, but Oreo got so excited about getting to go out that we had to take him on his evening walk.

We went out for a walk to grab some supplies around eight but discovered that absolutely everything in downtown Newark shuts down at night and especially on a Saturday night. There was almost nothing open at all. It was weird. We walked down Broad, Market, Halsey and Raymond and found where a lot of stuff is but not where anything was going on. Sad that there is so much business here and none of it open. Even getting food and groceries seemed pretty hard. We did hear about Tops Diner that is supposed to really be something and is open twenty four seven. We are looking forward to trying that out sometime.

We watched Elvise Has Left the Building which we should have known would be bad being a Lion’s Gate Film which is a company that just produces bad B movies but John Corbett was in it so we tried it out. It wasn’t unwatchable and it had a few moments in it but overall it was a poorly written and boring movie and the whole thing was giving away in the synopsis on the DVD cover. And the actors were clearly not interested in the movie and it showed.