Sheep Guarding Llama

Originally I had planned on being in Ohio today but cancelled those plans yesterday so that I could stay home and catch up on sleep and work. It is going to take me a while to get used to Dominica going to work so early in the morning. She didn’t have to leave nearly as early today as she has the last two days because I am staying home and watching Oreo today so she is able to drive straight to work instead of taking him to daycare.

I slept in a bit and I really needed it. I have just been so tired all week I can’t believe it. I have not been able to catch up on my sleep at all. Going to bed early and sleeping in late this morning might have done the trick though. I am feeling pretty good today. Oreo, on the other hand, is completely exhausted from playing with all of the new dogs yesterday and he is totally beat. It took a while before he decided to come out and hang in the living room with me even though he has a bed and his pillow out here. I am really glad that I am working from home today. That really makes a difference in the level to which I am able to relax. No driving at all and my day is much shorter as my commute is two hours all by itself. Dominica’s commute is even longer but we hope that that will be changing very soon.

The big news today is that after putting in a busy day of work and working with my server engineers in Scranton the first test server is now online in Scranton! This is a very exciting day. We didn’t have anything working until almost the end of the day and there are still some glitches but we will get those worked out over time. For the moment things are progressing pretty well and I am very happy. Only a few more weeks and we should be able to move SGL to Scranton. That will be very exciting indeed.

Dominica had some shopping to do so I drove out to East Brunswick and met her on her way home from work. She went and did her shopping and I went to Borders and looked for some books that I need for the D&D game that I hope to be running in the very near future. I found the books that I needed and I also found a parrellel German and English version of Geothe’s “Faust” which I have never read so I picked that up as well. It is a really long play but a real classic. For English readers not familiar with Goethe, he is the German language equivalent to Shakespeare or as close as anyone gets.

We went out to dinner as we have barely had a chance to see each other all week. We went to the Omega for the Friday night mac and cheese. It was a different mac and cheese tonight, though, which was disappointing. It was still good but not the same.

When we got home we decided that we were so tired that we were just going to go to bed. It was not even eleven yet! Boy are we ever getting old. I did a little reading from bed but not too much.

Happy 30th Birthday to Jonathan Stagno!!

Dominica didn’t have to get up quite so early this morning but she did have to be up by six. She took Oreo with her this morning so that he could be dropped off at Doggie Paradise in Wallington. It is a fairly new, high end dog daycare service with doggie cams so that you can watch the dogs during the day. Our dog is so spoiled you can’t even imagine. Today is his “test” day to see how well he fits in with the other dogs. If things go well today then we plan on him going to Doggie Paradise four times a week (just on the days when I am not working from home because I don’t want to be home if my dog isn’t there with me!)

Dominica accidentally stepped into dog doo while taking Oreo to day care this morning and ended up with it all over. Not the best way to start her second day at the office. She spent a long time trying to get it all cleaned up. She is not very happy about that.

Today, while using the restroom, I noticed a guy washing his ping-pong paddle in the middle of the morning. Everyone seems to take their ping-pong really seriously around here. I like to think that he was just back from playing a gruelling match and he was washing the blood off of his paddle.

Dad and Aunt Sharon are driving out to Ohio today. Originally I had planned on going out after work but with the move to Scranton this week that just isn’t going to be possible. I have been so busy that I am totally exhausted and I have a headache – not the best combination before going into a ten hour drive. So, unfortunately, I am going to have to pass on driving out for Uncle Bill’s funeral.

Today I am bringing you an extreme example of the mass media completely skewing its reporting to totally mislead you in the interpretation of its story. In ABC News today they cover the HP Boardroom shakeup and SEC investigation. In the story they say “Private investigators are accused of using the possibly illegal procedure of ‘pretexting’ — an investigative technique in which someone poses as another person to gain private information.” Um, an “investigative technique”? You have to be kidding me. Possibly illegal? In security and technology circles this “technique” is referred to as social engineering, the single most common form of cracking or hacking as the uneducated media often puts it. If this social engineering was done using any form of digital device, even if not in direct contact with the cracker involved, it would be a violation of the DMCA and could carry a massive felony charge. In fact, this EXACT event – social engineering or pre-texting – was considered so severe that the US government held Kevin Mitnick for four years without trial! Four years without trial or charge means that the constitution was suspended just for him (Clinton set the precendent for Bush on this one.) This is right up there with treason except treason has a legal punishment associated with it. Social engineering might get your shipped to Bush’s Romanian torture prison.

ABC News covers their tails only nominally by saying: “Pretexting, consumer groups say, is the same tactic used by identity thieves.” But they word this to make it sound as if the identity of the board member in question was not stolen. But it was. A person was paid to use social engineering (hacking, if you can’t use the correct terms) to steal personal information from a business for money. What part of this isn’t identity theft? The damage being done here is many times greater than simply stealing a credit card or emptying a savings account. Whole careers are on the line here and Disney’s ABC has the audacity to cover up for corporate criminals as if identity theft and cracking weren’t massive felonies. It’s okay when companies do it, ABC implies, but if an intelligent twelve year old bored with pointless homework does it we should ship them to Guantanamo Bay.

It is articles like this that show why mass media must fail. The point of this article was not to provide news, or opinion, but to put HP into the news, to give ABC writers something to do and to imbue a sense of corporate infalability into the consciencess of Americans. This is not news, it is propaganda. Tabloid. Yellow journalism.

I am tired of hearing so called “journalist” ranting and raving about the profession of “journalism” and how bloggers and other writers aren’t journalists because they don’t have a degree and didn’t pay someone acknowledged as a journalist to acknowledge them. They claim that only trained journalist have the ability to write unbiased news coverage. But as we can see there is little no journalism left. ABC News sure isn’t interested in hiring any.

Here is my quote for the day: “When the people chose the source of their own news, propaganda dies.” Basically, once media conglomorates and government agencies do not control access to news outlets (radio, television, etc. is a governed monopoly – just try starting your own radio station) and people are able to find real news, honest voices, obvious opinions they will be able to turn off the lies, the illusions and the engines that have long been propaganda will be silenced. Hopefully forever. ABC News is part of the proud tradition that skews the truth just like the papers in Nazi Germany and in WW2 Japan that told the populace to keep sending their children to the front because they were winning the war. Today it would be very difficult to keep up lies of this nature. The Internet is giving the world a voice and the world is listening. If ever we have had a weapon against war, it is now.

Okay, I am putting the soapbox away now. I was just really, really upset that they would dare to attempt to mislead people like that. At least now Google will link the story back here. Just to make sure that it is available, I am posting early today.

I spoke with Aunt Sharon at five this evening. She and dad were just driving through Canton, Ohio. So they have arrived safely.

I have two players signed up for the new Dungeons & Dragons game that I hope to start soon. Josh and I were hoping that Phil could play but he doesn’t have a fast Internet connection yet and that rules him out for now. Two players in and two more to go before we have enough for a game. I am really excited to try out RPTools in the game.

I managed to leave work at a quart to six and I hit the road to Scranton. The traffic on 78 in New Jersey was really bad and cost me a lot of time. I wasn’t expecting to hit bad traffic this evening. I stopped at the McDonald’s on 33 with the “50’s Decor” that Dominica likes to make fun of (they advertise the decor on their billboard.) I grabbed a quick dinner and ate it in the car on the way to Scranton.

Finding my way around Scranton was really easy and I could practically do it blindfolded now. I got right to the facility with no wrong turns or anything. I was really pleased. The equipment drop off went smooth and I was back on the road headed home by eight.

When I arrived home I found that Oreo and Dominica had all ready called it a day and had gone to bed. I checked my email and Oreo came out to visit. Then I just went in and read in bed until I fell asleep which didn’t take too long.

Just as I was leaving work yesterday Dominica emailed me to let me know that she was able to find a dog walker who would be able to come to the apartment and walk Oreo on Thursday and Friday which leaves no one to come walk him today so I am planning on running home during lunch and taking him out and getting him calm so that he doesn’t panic with the house empty all day. He is such a nervous boy.

I got home from work and immediately Dominica and I left to do some emergency shopping that needed to be done tonight. We ran to CompUSA in Edison and picked up a bunch of Category 5e cabling in preparation for the move to Scranton. We managed to get everything that we needed and then took a quick drive down to East Brunswick to go to Borders there. I had finished reading the book that I was working on today and am getting low on books to read even though I brought a few down from Geneseo so I picked up a couple technology books to keep me busy and I also picked up the new Dungeons and Dragons book “The Dungeon Master’s Guide II” which I have been eyeing for a month or so. I haven’t played a real role playing game in probably thirteen years and I would really like to get a game going again soon. Even if just once in a while.

We got back from shopping and boy were we tired. It was nine o’clock and both of us were ready to collapse. We decided to give up and to just go to bed. Oreo thought that that was a great idea. Sleeping is one of his four favourite activities.

Today I discovered the really handy online version of The Shotgun Rules that would have been much easier to have around when I was younger. Of course, the issue with all of these kind of rules things is that they don’t quite manage to remove all of the ambiguity and this particular set of rules makes the point of saying that no everyone has to be outside in order to call Shotgun but they seem to imply that the person calling must be but all we know for sure is that someone must be. They say that making sure that everyone has to be outside doesn’t work but in Nate and my experience it is the only thing that works or else it is a fight to get out the door first and that is the same as rushing to the car and not about calling Shotgun. Once you have a physical limiter by participant you have eliminated the underlying purpose for having the Shotgun system in the first place. They also don’t have the cool Bitch and Boomstick additional rules.

I found out this morning that Cory is in East Rutherford, New Jersey working this week. Too bad this week is so busy or we might have been able to have gotten together. As it is I am just swamped. Dominica was up very early this morning, around five in the morning, so that she could get ready and be into the office for half past seven! Ugh. She is going to be really exhausted tonight.

I slept in until half past six with Oreo and then did a little work from the apartment before getting ready for work and going into the office for ten. I figured that if I did a little work from home today that Oreo wouldn’t be alone for nearly so long. That way his alone time didn’t start until ten which wasn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things.

Work was okay today. Enough going on to stay busy and not so much to be a problem or stressful. I normally get to do a bit of reading during the day, a score or two of pages at least, but today that didn’t end up happening.

For my lunch break, which I took very late, I ran home as quickly as I could and spent my lunch with Oreo. I tried to log in and work from home but, as usual, that didn’t work like it was supposed to and I wasn’t able to connect to the office. Oreo was quite glad that I was home and didn’t seem to be upset at all. I ate lunch, vegetarian spaghetti-o’s, and walked the dog. Then it was time to rush back to the office.

During my lunchtime drive I finished listening to Garrison Keiler’s “Lake Wobegon Boy” which was an interesting aside to the usual stories of Lake Wobegon – the little town that time forgot. This particular book followed the life of one of the lesser known characters from the town as he grew up and moved away and followed his life in the Ithaca area which I thought was very interesting and noticed more than a passing resemblence between the university mentioned in the book and a certain “Ivy League” school located in Ithaca in it being a well known school as expensive as Harvard or Yale but where the rich could send their children whom were unable to handle demanding schools and would be basically guaranteed a sheep skin for their money regardless of their childrens performance, attendance or intelligence.

I moved on to listen to “Wicked” which Dominica read and really enjoyed. For those who have been living under a rock for the last several years “Wicked” is the biography of The Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz”. A retelling of the infamous Oz story from a different perspective – from someone who saw Dorothy as a murder and shoe thief. So far it is interesting.

Dominica got home before I did by about half an hour. Oreo was in good shape and not upset that he had spent the day mostly alone. But he was very happy to have us home with him. He had been bored all day and really wanted to play with us when we got in.

Neither of us felt like dealing with food tonight so we broke down and just ordered from Papa John’s. Dominica ate, did some miscellaneous work that needed to be completed tonight and went to bed early. I had a lot of work that needed to be done in preparation for the move to Scranton tomorrow so I was up until about one in the morning working on that. But I think that I am ready or at least as ready as I am likely to be. I am driving out to Scranton after work tomorrow evening to deliver the equipment which will be installed on Friday morning. This will be the first of many trips to Scranton over the next two months.

After a long, tiring weekend I am back to the grind. Today is the last day of me working and Dominica getting to “stay home” although even today she has to run around taking care of some paperwork. She is also dealing with finding someone to stay with Oreo or finding him a place to go during the day so that Dominica can go to work tomorrow. Originally I had planned to stay home with him tomorrow so that we would have an extra day to worry about him being alone but I am going out to Ohio on Thursday evening for Uncle Bill’s funeral on Friday morning so I am using my “work from home” day to allow myself to work from the hotel in Canton, Ohio.

Andy starts his new job today in Rochester. This is quite the busy week for everyone. I think Miranda probably drove back to North Bay, Ontario today but I am not positive. She might have left yesterday.

My reading spree continues this week. Today I managed to finish reading “Pragmatic Version Control – Using Subversion, 2nd Edition” that I started late last week. PVC is the first of the three books of The Pragmatic Programmers’ “Pragmatic Starter Kit” with the next installment being their book on unit testing. I am hoping to be able to go out and maybe pick up the next book in the series this evening.

I need to go out tonight and do some shopping for network cabling for Scranton. We don’t have very much going in to Scranton right away but I really want to make sure that we are doing everything “the right way” now that we are moving to such a large datacenter. I am hoping that we will be able to get enough coloured cabling to be able to colour code everything that we do to make it really simple to work on down the road. We are starting very small with just a single server going into Scranton this week and the bulk of our long term networking equipment. We have two routers and a new switch all going in. I will be very happy if we can get SGL relocated to Scranton by the end of the month and I think that our regular readers will be happy also as the site should load in roughly half of the time that it currently takes.

Another project that I have this week is my first attempt at building an AMD Geode based computer for CCA. This really shouldn’t be much of an undertaking because the Geode is based on the AMD Athlon which I have worked with many times before but this is the first time that I will be building a computer using a solid state hard drive instead of a mechanical hard drive and I will need to do some stuff to make it work well. So there will be a little bit of a learning curve.

I was seriously tired this afternoon in the office. I got eyestrain and a headache from trying to stare at the computer screen for so long. I was so completely ready to go home by the time that the end of the day rolled around. Dominica had gotten home from going down to Princeton to take care of her paperwork for her job tomorrow at half past four. That shot a big chunk of her afternoon but at least she is all set and able to start working tomorrow. She has to go quite early tomorrow as she has her orientation starting at half past seven in the morning which is an hour earlier than she will normally have to go into the office. She isn’t used to getting up early in the morning so this is really going to be a shock to her system. This will take us back to when we lived in Geneseo and she was always the one getting up early and I was always the one sleeping in with Oreo.

It was a dark and rainy day all day today. I was so tired and useless that I decided that I needed to get out of the office on the early side. There is so much going on this week that I need some time just to get everything done.

Dominica didn’t have any luck finding a dog sitter for Oreo this week. She called a ton of places today and no one even called her back. This is the problem with pointless holidays – the weekend becomes so long and everyone takes a vacation in conjunction with it that you end up in a situation where all kinds of businesses fail to function properly. In this case the pharmaceutical company that Dominica is starting with tomorrow “hired” her on Thursday but because of people in the middle who took vacations on Thursday and Friday they weren’t able to get her paperwork processed promptly so she didn’t have a confirmation on the job until the end of day on Friday. Now it is Tuesday, the first work day since she found out that she had a job and the only day between getting confirmation and starting, and in this one day that is all that she has she is not able to find anyone who is able to even return a phone call! It feels like six days have passed since she got the new job but only a handful of “work hours” have passed and I keep feeling as if many, many businesses just don’t realize that Friday at four in the afternoon, when the last stragglers sneak out of the office for the long weekend, on a holiday weekend is just one hour before nine in the morning on Tuesday! There is no “work time” between those hours. But people act as if you have a whole week to take care of things during that time and act like you won’t need paperwork, phone numbers, contact information, directions, travel time, etc. I can’t believe how many times I was expected to relocate over a weekend when there wasn’t any “final confirmation” made on Friday and I was supposed to be at some unknown location reporting to some unknown person many hours away from my home at eight in the morning when the only person in the whole universe who knew anything about where I was supposed to be was never in the office until between nine and ten and would only be coming in to work that day if we were lucky! Argh.

It is going to be such a busy night and I don’t want to have to worry about getting back to SGL this evening that I am going to go ahead and post as I leave the office. It is a long post anyway. That way I can save something for tomorrow. It is a quarter to six and I am leaving the office now. I am way too tired to be useful.

It is starting to be weird when I actually wake up in Geneseo. Kind of like waking up in an apartment that you used to live in but haven’t lived in for a long time. Now that the place is mostly empyt it feels a lot more like an apartment and we have been there so little over such a long period of time that it really doesn’t feel like home anymore even though it is still our house and it is looking more and more like we are going to be holding on to it for a long time yet. I suppose that the original plan had been to keep the house so we shouldn’t be complaining now. If we could just rent it out I would be happy keeping it indefinitely. We love the house so much but it is just so difficult maintaining a residence when you don’t live there. But really with housing values as bad as they are right now maybe it would be beneficial to wait out the market anyway. Owning it sure does make returning to the area very convenient and we do seem to be back quite often and it gives us enough garage space that dad shouldn’t have to keep storing one of my vehicles in his barn.

One of our projects today is switching cars. The Mazda 6 is being left behind in Geneseo and I am taking the PR5 back to New Jersey. It is still for sale should anyone be interested but for now we are going to continue using it. We are trying to make the best out of our extra house and car situations.

Dad came over to Geneseo and picked us up for breakfast at ten. We went to Denny’s and hung out until almost noon. We get to see everyone back home so seldom these days.

Dad went back home and Dominica and I did some work around the house for about an hour before going over to the farm to help move the RX-7 into a position so that it can easily be picked up by the wrecker. I was quite pleasantly surprised when I climbed into the RX-7 to discover that the car was pretty much all intact after having sat in the barn for several years. The tires are still okay and the seats are dried out but not destroyed. Pretty much everything is pretty decent. It is still going to take a ton of work to really get it back into driving condition but at least it will take a lot less work than we had expected that it would.

We went back to Geneseo and packed the cars for the return journey to North Brunswick. We are taking a lot of stuff back with us. We are hoping to get the first servers and network equipment into Scranton this week or maybe next so we are hauling a lot of that stuff down in this trip.

On the way out of town I swung into Aunt Cookies and grabbed myself a sub. Getting a good sub is a hard thing to do in New Jersey so I wanted to take advantage of my limited opportunity to get one. Dominica left straight away and had a lead on my on her way south. We ended up meeting at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center on route 81 and from then on I was ahead of her.

During the trip I finished listening to “The Devil Wears Prada” which I found to be way too close to “The Nanny Diaries” both of which I thought were boring, had no plot and were filled with either evil, dumb or just uninteresting people. The protagonists of the stories were very difficult to identify with as they both placed themselves into obviously horrible situations and no matter what happened to them or how much damage they were doing to themselves or others they just kept letting things get worse and worse. The stories were practically identical and must be being pumped out of a “women mocking women” literature factory. I think that women should feel offended by the poor portrayal of women in these books and I can’t believe that this crap made it onto the best seller’s list. It just shows how sad the state of American literature is. Or at least the state of the average American reader.

After punishing myself with “The Devil Wears Prada” I went back to something written by someone who finds something interesting other than fashion, getting drunk and just living in New York and listened to more of “Lake Wobegon Boy” by Garrison Keiler which actually deals with human relationships and has a plot and characters and identities and humor, etc.

It was not far from midnight when we pulled into the apartment in North Brunswick. We were very tired but I had some work to do and didn’t manage to go to bed until almost two in the morning.

[A quick comparison between The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada – both of which were written at approximately the same time and both of which were turned into movies at about the same time.]

Both books deal with an early twenties girl living in Manhattan beyond her means with “top notch” but totally meaningless liberal arts educations. Both take really ridiculous jobs that should be totally embarrassing to even mention having for a college graduate. (Nanny and Gopher.) Both are hired by mean, evil and apparently mentally challenged middle-aged women. Both let their personal lives far by the wayside in the attempt to please these women that they totally despise. Neither girl is intesting in any way whatsoever nor does either have any hobbies, real friends, good family ties or interests whatsoever. Both go on a “trip” with their bosses. Both get fired while nearing the end of the trip. Both feel better after being fired. In fact, I would venture to say that these were actually the same book. I can think of almost no aspect of these books that makes them different at all. In both cases the protaganist is so self destruct that I have no interest in seeing them happy at all.