Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my work from home day this week. The weather was cooler last night and so we opened the windows and am getting fresh air for one of the first times in a long time. We really hate the air conditioning system here so we are much happier when we get a chance to turn it off. I think that it is actually less humid in the house without the air conditioning running. We do have window fans running. That helps some. During the day it is still pretty warm but it was a little overcast so it didn’t get too hot in the house.

I had a fairly busy day “at work” and Dominica had a lot of homework to work on. She is in her home stretch coming up to the end of the semester. Funny that everyone else is getting ready to start school next week and she is just wrapping up. She has another class starting in two weeks, I believe. Right now she is just taking her Introduction to Programming with Java ni the fall but she might, depending on our schedule, take either Database Systems II or Systems Analysis and Design. We will see. I have been pushing to get my degree wrapped up but that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. What a pain that is.

No word yet today on the job that Dominica interviewed for on Monday. We are very hopeful that that is still moving along well. And, in reality, if she had heard about the job this week it would have meant either bad new or that she had to start on Monday which was faster than we were ready for so it is probably best that we have not heard anything yet.

For lunch we ordered in Chinese from one of the places that has been hanging their menus on our doorknob. I let Dominica order lunch and she ended up ordering two or three meals worth of food. The food was pretty good but boy was there a lot of it.

I did manage to put in a tiny bit more time on the York Class of ’94 web site today: York94. There isn’t much content yet on the site but I am really happy with the layout and clean theme. I think that people will like it and find it easy to use.

We haven’t had any chance to look at apartments or to even see the Jersey City area so we decided that we would go up there this evening to get a feel for what the area was like. We have looked at tons of apartments and condos online but we have never actually been there (I have been near there in Newark or Weehawken but not in Jersey City, Bayonne or Hoboken themselves to really know what the area is like.)

We left to go look at apartment “areas” as soon as I was done with work which ended up being later than I had anticipated – close to seven o’clock. We drove up to Bayonne, Jersey City and Hoboken and drove around quite a bit in the BMW with Oreo hanging out in the back. He had a good time. We discovered quickly that we do not want to live down in Bayonne. It is okay but too expensive for what it is which is way too similar to North Brunswick. No wonder we were able to find decently priced places there! So JC and Hoboken are the only areas that we are really looking at now. There is some really awesome stuff there. We are very hopeful that that is where we will get to live. We both seem to think that Jersey City is the right balance for us.

On the way back we stopped at the Omega Diner for dinner as we hadn’t had a chance to get any yet. It was way too late by the time that we got back. I didn’t manage to get to bed until after eleven and I have to be in the office by six thirty tomorrow morning! Ugh.

Boy did Dominica ever get a lot of sleep last night. When I went to bed at midnight she had been in bed for four or five hours all ready. I got up this morning at 6:30 and she didn’t get up until I was headed out the door after 8:00! She might have gotten thirteen hours of sleep.

Today I took a poll of Linux desktop users and was delighted to see that openSUSE has, according to this small poll at this current time, passed Fedora in use as a Linux desktop and that SLES has passed Red Hat in use on the desktop. That is awesome. Red Hat must be leading significantly in the server arena but it is very encouraging to see my long time faith in SUSE on the desktop paying off. Ubuntu is still the desktop darling and is leading the poll by quite some margin but SUSE and Red Hat products are important pieces of the desktop puzzle as well. Additionally, KDE and GNOME are neck and neck with no clear winner.

Today’s big project for Dominica is apartment hunting. Now that we no longer have a house that we are planning on moving into we have to figure out where we are going to be living in just a few more weeks. We are hoping to be able to find something up towards Jersey City or something on that peninsula. Jersey City would be perfect for us since it has such easy access to lower Manhattan while still being right on Rt. 78 making it easy for me to get into and out of work on a daily basis.

I was out of work at a decent time today. I got home and we just had some leftovers for dinner. I did some light work this evening while Dominica worked on her database design homework. She is starting to not enjoy that class so much as the focus moves more and more away from actual database topics and more and more to just dealing with the poor interface of Microsoft Access 2003. And, of course, her professor is not able to see her database the same as Dominica sees it here so heaven only knows what is wrong with it. Most likely her professor doesn’t know enough about Access, have the current version or have it patched but you never know. It really points out why Access is a bad product. In the time that it has taken Dominica to get her database built she could have sat down and learned all of the components necessary to building a truly useful web application using more robust database and development tools that were free and then been able to have shared her database driven application with as many people as wanted to use it. With Access the very first person that she shared it with the system failed and the whole thing was a complete waste.

Happy Birthday to Jeremy Bragg!

The big news for us today is that the lawyers from the homebuilder were not willing to meet any of the changes that we had asked for for the house in Lebanon so we are backing out of the project. The biggest deal is that they won’t meet our need for a contingency upon selling the house in Geneseo. That is understandable as it is a big risk for them but it is so unlikely that we will be able to sell the house in the awful market that is going on up there that we just can’t take the chance. They were also unwilling to commit to finishing the house this year. They have all kinds of penalties if we can’t close by November 15th, far less than 90 days away but they were allowed to extend into the middle of next year giving themselves a cushion of way over 200%!! That is a ridiculous amount of buffer. It is one thing for a project to take half again as long as someone says but three times as long is way too much. And we aren’t at the beginning either. The houses are nearly completed. Their contract would let them just sit for eight months if they felt like it. We aren’t going to get caught playing that game.

So the current plan is to find a nice apartment somewhere quickly. Our current lease runs out in the middle of October so we don’t have very much time to find some place to live. But we aren’t worried. There are a lot of apartments around. We are back looking at Jersey City. Dominica has found an apartment there that she is interested in. It is roughly affordable, takes dogs and appears to have views of Manhattan which we would really like. We are both really looking forward to getting out of North Brunswick. (I killed yet another centipede tonight.)

Work was more relaxing today than it has been in a while. I managed to read two whole issues of Baseline Magazine and this month’s Java Developer’s Journal which got me caught up in my magazine reading which is nice for a change. I was able to leave work on the early side so that Dominica and I would have plenty of time to go out for her birthday dinner which we skipped last night.

It was just after six when I got home. Jeremy Bragg called just as I was pulling in the parking lot to talk to Min since their birthdays are just a day a part. While they were talking I walked out to the ice cream truck as it came by and got ice cream for Dominica and myself. The ice cream truck girl thinks that I am hilarious. Everyone else getting ice cream is kids or, on rare occassion, adults with kids. But I always go out there and get myself ice cream. I don’t care. I didn’t have an ice cream truck as a kid so I am getting the use of it now.

For dinner we went out to Bertucci’s. Dominica is back on the South Beach Diet and they have a meal there that she really likes. So we got dinner and then returned home.

It was quite early when we got home but we were both really tired so we decided to take a nap. Oreo was thrilled that we were going to bed at seven in the evening so he climbed right into bed and snuggled in for the night. I napped a little but spent most of the two hours in bed just reading in Joel Spolsky’s “The Best Software Writing I”. Dominica fell fast asleep and ended up being out for the night.

I spent the evening doing some work for the office. Nothing too heavy. I was pretty tired for some reason. I worked until ten thirty and was planning to go to bed around then but Andy called and we worked and/or chatted until close to midnight. So at that point I was very happy that I had taken a nap earlier. Then it was time for bed.

Dominica turns twenty-eight today!

I was up nice and early this morning, got ready for work, got Dominica out of bed, starting packing stuff into the car for dad to take home and then discovered that the SGL server was down. The plan had been to go for breakfast at eight this morning and I was pretty much ready to walk out the door at a quarter to eight but then with the server issue it took an additional forty-five minutes before we were actually able to leave the apartment. But at least the server was back up and running before we left. Otherwise it would have made for a much longer day.

I stopped into the hotel and transferred all of the stuff that I had over to dad’s car and then drove him over to the Omega to get some breakfast. Dominica was there waiting for us when we arrived. We had breakfast together and said our good-byes and then I was off to the office and Dominica returned dad to the hotel so that he could begin his drive back to Pavilion.

I got to the office just in time to park the car and wait in the lawn with everyone else. We had a small fire in our building this morning and they had to bring in the fire department and everything. That killed a huge chunk of the morning. We were standing outside waiting to be let in for at least half an hour and maybe quite a bit more. Not the most efficient way to spend the morning. But it did add some interest to the day and make the day go past a lot faster.

The rest of my day ended up being very busy. I barely got a chance to do anything today. Instead of getting lunch (after this weekends food fest I was in no mood to eat anyway) I drove down to Jiffy Lube on Route 22 and got an oil change for my car. I have been needing to do that and it keeps getting pushed off so I just forced myself to take care of it today. At least something productive happened.

Dominica had her interview in Nutley this afternoon. She thinks that it went well and is hopeful for a job offer. The position is perfect timing – she is finally out from under “the gun” and has been having actual free time, more or less, down here in New Jersey. She will have a lot more when two of her classes at Empire end in a week or two and in the fall semester she is just going to take a single class – Java Programming. So her fall will be more relaxed and the perfect time for her to start work. And the job is for six months which is a good time frame for this type of work for her. Hopefully after completely her stint there she will be in a really good position to begin to move up the ladder and look to some more interesting work. And with us attempting to buy a house in November we can really use every extra dollar that we can scrounge. It is going to be tight and the expected closing is just ninety days away which is much closer than it seems. Autumn is going to be very busy for us (as if the summer wasn’t.)

I got stuck at work very late tonight. I ended up working on a server that was down all day and that we couldn’t get fixed no matter what we tried. While I was waiting for it at least I managed to get through some reading that I was backed up on. I read a bit more in the Joel Spolsky book that I am working on, read an entire issue of eWeek and made it through most of an issue of Baseline.

It was about half past eight when I finally got back to North Brunswick. We were tired and didn’t want to take the time to go out to eat so we just ate some of the leftovers that we had around the house from this weekend. Then it was time for bed.

No sleeping in for us this morning. We had to be up nice and early this morning so that we could get up to Lebanon to go to church. Fortunately we went to bed at a pretty reasonable time last night so we weren’t too bad this morning. Our plan had been to pick up dad at 8:30 but we weren’t able to get over there until 8:40 but we had built in plenty of buffer time so it worked out fine.

We drove out to Lebanon and went back past the entrance to the condominium and took the scenic drive around Round Valley State Park so that dad could see the area where we hope to be living in a few months and went to the small, rural church via the local backroads where were very much “back roads” here in New Jersey. Dad was really impressed with how nice the area is. The drive from Lebanon to the church is really pretty and a lot of the drive is preserved historical farmland – sort of like an agricultural museum.

We were very early for church which is unusual for us. It was a very small church and we got a chance to meet just about everyone before the service actually started. We enjoyed the church although the service was very long which ended up being a problem with the dog out in the car. I had to leave the service early to go sit with him and turn on the air conditioning as the sun had come out while we were in the service. He was fine but it was going to be getting hot.

After church we went back to Lebanon so that dad could see the condominium development. I had to drop off another check for the house anyway so it was a good use of the trip. We went up to our unit and gave dad a tour so that he could get a feel for what it will be like. Then we went down to Main Street and got lunch at the Fox and Hound Tavern. It was a really good lunch but one thing that is going to be a problem living in Lebanon is that eating is very, very expensive. It is a very good thing that there is the luncheonette and a Stewart’s there too.

After lunch we drove back down to North Brunswick and decided that we all needed naps. So we took dad back to the hotel and Dominica, Oreo and I returned to the apartment and crashed. Dad only slept for thirty or fourty-five minutes but I slept for about three hours and Dominica for even longer. I really needed that and felt much better after I got up.

In the evening we took dad over to Tanjore so that he could see what we really eat out here in New Jersey. We got a lot of food. Dad tried the soup (mulligatawny) that we warned him about – it is very spicy. He doesn’t normally eat spicy but he tried to eat it but had to give up about halfway through. We got cashew pakoda and bel purhi as appetizers so dad had a sampling of food. Then he got the rava dosai with cheese, cashews and potato masala. He even got dessert. We think that he liked it although it was all very adventurous for him.

We came back to the apartment after dinner and just visited for a little while before having some cheesecake to celebrate Dominica’s birthday which is tomorrow.