Unfortunately because of the short notice Dominica and I haven’t had time to contemplate a vacation at all. This year is our five year anniversary and her thirtieth birthday and it would be a perfect chance to travel a little and actually take some time off. We really wanted to go somewhere for our anniversary this year but everything will be incredibly expensive doing it at the last minute. So we have no idea what we are even going to attempt to do let alone be able to do. Dominica does not have any vacation time saved up at work so it will be extra difficult (and expensive) for her to take time off. So we have no idea what we are doing.

Tomorrow is the Microsoft 2008 Release Event here in New York City. I got approved to be able to go to that a month or two ago. So I will be at that tomorrow up in midtown all day. It will be a nice change of pace. I haven’t had an opportunity to go to any of Microsoft’s sessions in the last two years. I used to go to these things all of the time. Although this is the last really big launch event since the 2003 Launch Event which I felt was quite valuable.

I stopped in at Airlie Cafe on my way into the office this morning and grabbed a breakfast sandwich as well as a salad to have as my lunch. That is all that I managed to eat all day and I was really hungry and tired by the end of the day at the office.

Dominica and I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out what me having two weeks off means. Does it mean that we should go on a vacation – a vacation with no money and no time to plan and without any firm details? Because we didn’t know until this morning that I was going on furlough she doesn’t have any vacation time saved up with causes additional problems. We thought about going to Europe but with the US dollar in such horrible shape against the Euro that seems like an extremely bad idea. So we are talking about maybe going to Mexico. But we really have no idea.

If you like Star Wars you will love “Star Wars According to a Three Year Old“.

I ended up getting stuck in the office quite late.  Much later than I had anticipated.  Some schedule work that I had from eleven in the morning got rescheduled until one thirty and then didn’t actually start until after three and took four and a half hours.  So it turned into a long day quickly on me.

I got home and Dominica cooked a really cool new dish that involves corn muffins, sautéed vegetables and baked acorn squash.  It was delicious.  We ate out dinner and watched the first two episodes of A Different World, the Cosby Show spin off about college life.  Boy did that show bring back memories.  I had totally forgotten about that show and I must have watched it all of the time.

We only got forty-five minutes of relaxation or so before I was paged out and had to work for another hour.  It has really been a long day now.  So that took me until nine thirty before being really done at the office.  Then I took half an hour to do some consulting work for a certification exam that I am working with but that took very little effort.

Dominica spent the evening alone playing MySims that I got for her for Christmas.  She didn’t even play it once for two months but has been playing it a bit the last few days.  I went to bed just after ten and we watched one more episode of our show while falling asleep.  Tomorrow is a very early day for me so I will be rather tired.  I will also be away from the office all day.

Today was my chance to check and see how SGL did in the month of February with my first full month of Google Analytics data. The most interesting things to note are that my technology articles are by far the most popular things that I write and that people from sixty countries read the blog just during February. I is amazing to think of how many people from all over the world are interested in SGL. Here are the countries, in order of visits, that have come to SGL this past month: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, India, Australia, Malaysia, Sweden, Ireland, Netherlands, France, South Korea, Mexico, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, South Africa, Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Netherlands Antilles, Denmark, Romania, Turkey, Finland, Thailand, Azerbaijan, Spain, Austria, China, Brazil, Hungary, Trinidad and Tobago, Serbia and Montenegro, Belgium, Singapore, Dominica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, French Polynesia, Sri Lanka, Greece, Cyprus, Chile, French Guiana, Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Taiwan, Kyrgyzstan, Estonia, Ghana, Iran, Norway, Luxemburg, Israel, Philippines and Argentina.

Here are some additional interesting facts about my visitors: Firefox beat out Internet Explorer as the most popular browser. While Windows was clearly the most popular operating system to visit SGL, Linux visitors neatly doubled the presence of Mac OS visitors. Solaris even made a reasonable showing at .4% more than doubling visitors from the Sony Playstation Portable. Somehow the hideously small 1024×768 was by far the most popular screen resolution. About one half of one percent of our visitors see the site as ScottAndDominica.com and not as SheepGuardingLlama.com.

We all went to bed on the early side last night after relaxing most of the evening. We watched the first disc of the sixth season of The Cosby Show and then did a little reading before falling asleep. With Oreo feeling better I was able to sleep all night which I really needed. Yesterday was a really long day.

This morning I decided that going in early was a bad idea as things were slow and I needed to get enough sleep so that I could be actually useful in the office so I opted to go in at “normal time.” That means getting ready after Dominica instead of getting ready before her. Oreo also appreciates the company as he gets to stay in bed with me right up until he eats his breakfast and heads out the door.

I hit Airlie Cafe on the way into the office for some protein and apple juice. The air was brisk this morning but I was plenty warm having shaved my head this morning. Somehow that always keeps me warm. Too warm, in fact.

My day was quite busy. I had to spend a bit of the day explaining why Linux machines with tons of free memory were not actually out of memory. As you can see from my previous post I got tired of having to write the same explanation over and over again once a week so I finally just wrote a real article about it.

One of my colleagues is leaving to go work at another company in New York in a week so today some of us took him out for his farewell lunch just in case we don’t get another chance before he is done. We went to the Lemongrass which isn’t too far away. They do Thai cuisine and it was quite good. That really hit the spot. Crispy vegetarian rolls and vegetable pad Thai.

It was cold and wet as we walked over to the Lemongrass. The snow is really coming down now and there is a pretty good coating out there.

I stayed late at work today as the weather was really bad for driving and that way other people on the team would have a chance to get home without having to worry about the office. So I didn’t leave the office until seven. Dominica was already home for twenty minutes and had called to let me know that she had gotten home safely. Her drive was crappy but she only saw one car that had gone off the road so it looks as though there were no accidents on her commuting stretch which is amazing. She did say that my old route along Interstate 78 was backed up significantly. Boy am I glad that I commute on food these days. Especially in bad weather like this.

I managed to keep up on my homework before leaving so I am in good shape tonight even though I worked late.  It was a cold and wet walk home.  We were hoping that I would be able to pick up dinner from the Metro Cafe in the Gateway Center but when I got there it was almost eight and they close at seven.  So I walked almost all of the way home before I heard Garrison Keillor mention something about McDonald’s in the book “Pontoon” that I was listening to and suddenly I remembered that Dominica had said to get McDonald’s if the Metro Cafe was closed.  So I turned around and walked back to McDonald’s and picked up dinner.

I got home and picked up our latest Netflix rental from the mailbox.  Today we got Disney-Pixar’s latest film Meet the Robinsons.  We popped that in and ate our dinners in bed.  Meet the Robinsons was really good and we quite enjoyed it.  Not as good as The Invincibles which is my favourite of the Pixar movies.  But the storyline was really cute and well done.  And for once I was able to guess the plot long before Dominica did which never, ever, ever happens.

After our movie was just watched a little of The Cobsy Show and went off to sleep.  Oreo and I are still exhausted from Sunday night.

I worked for a little over an hour and then took time to go shower and get ready to face the day. I did the dishes to get the kitchen cleaned up, went over to Airlie Cafe to get breakfast for Dominica and I and made coffee. Dominica was up around ten thirty or so and spent the morning reading R. A. Salvatore’s Path of Darkness series (part of the Drizzt Cycle.)

I learned today that Amazon is in the process of buying Audible. This is interesting as we know a few of the Audible folks who are our neighbours. Audible itself is located at One Washington Square right here in downtown Newark just a few minutes walk out of our front doors. So we will be watching this closely to see how it plays out and what affect it has locally and to our favourite audio book service which we live and die by around here. Audible is a major component of my lifestyle.

Speaking of Audible, I have been waiting a long time for Scott Adams’ two classics, The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future to be available from Audible. I have box on cassette from many years ago but as I have no cassette player anymore that does me very little good. So I am very happy to see them on Audible so that I can listen to them again. (These books are so good that I own them in print as well.) Scott Adams’ new book, Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! is available as well. I bought all of these today along with Louisa May Alcott’s “Jo’s Boys” which is her only major work that I have never read. I also got her lesser known book “Good Wives” which is also a part of the March Sisters Series along with “Little Women” and “Little Men” both of which I read as a child.

Dad installed the new 512MB into the SunFire V100 that only had 128MB before. That should help a lot. The memory install went fine and as soon as it was back online I kicked off a large rsync operation to see how the new memory would affect performance. It made a huge difference and my files were backed up from one location to another in no time at all. Very nice.

Our reimbursement check for Dominica’s dental work came today which was quite a bit of money. She also received her second Netflix movie, Dreamgirls.

Dominica and Oreo spent the afternoon napping in the living room. Dominica didn’t effectively get up today until around four thirty.

Many of my Brainbench certifications have expired over the past several months and I have been lax about dealing with them. So today I started “re-upping” my certifications to get them current again. When you have as many expiring certifications as I do this can be a rather significant process. It is far more certifications than I keep on my resume too since many of the certs which have expired are not IT certifications but are soft skills that are used to build up to larger cumulative certifications. I started today with renewing by Linux Administration (Red Hat) and Linux Administration (Red Hat 9). Both tests are out of date. The first one is so out of date that I have no means of even estimating the era in which is was relevant but it was definitely quite some time ago. Perhaps the popular RH 7.3 was the basis for this test which was before I did any work with Red Hat and instead used OpenLinux and SuSE. The second test was much better but still several years old – it wasn’t that new when I took it the last time more than three years ago. This time, on my first attempt, I scored a Masters and ranked number two in the United States even on a platform version that I have never worked on.

For dinner I just ran over to Food for Life and picked up dinner as take out so that we could eat at home and relax. I finished reading Johanna Rothman’s “Manage It!” while I waited for them to finish up with the food. Once I got back home we watched more of the fifth season of The Cosby Show while we ate. Oreo has decided that his new favourite thing to do while we watch television is to climb into my lap and go to sleep which makes it impossible to get up again. We we ended up watching about two hours before Dominica decided that she really wanted to watch Dreamgirls so, at that point, I was easily able to decide to go back to the living room.

I did some light work in the living room and did some reading but mostly just took time to play with and hang out with Oreo who was being very needy.  After Dominica’s movie was over we watched some more The Cosby Show and went off to bed.