Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is the big day touring Manhattan. I didn’t wake up to my alarm this morning and accidentally ended up sleeping in until 6:30 which didn’t leave enough time for me to drive out to Panera and get bagles for everyone. But in hindsight I think that having the extra sleep was probably more important in the long run anyway. I have been so tired all week and even sleeping in that much only barely got me five hours of sleep and today is going to be a very long day.

Everyone was up and moving pretty early. Our goal was to be ready and out of the door by 7:00 so that we could make the 8:00 run of the Staten Island Ferry which is about 36 miles away from the apartment. I was ready by 7:00 but not everyone was and we didn’t manage to leave for twenty minutes. We were running really late and making the ferry was going to be extremely tight. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that none of us have every used the Staten Island Ferry before and we are not familiar with the route to get there, the parking situation or any other logistics necessary to make this happen smoothly. In fact, I don’t think any of us have ever even been on Staten Island before at all. So even that part of the trip will be a bit of an experience. I have spent a bit of time in Manhattan and I have driven across the Bronx once but that is the extent of my time in the city. I have never set foot on Long Island which includes Brooklyn and Queens. Our dreams of making the 8:00 ferry were almost shattered when we discovered that Francesca’s truck had no gas and couldn’t make it to the ferry without getting a fill up.

My father in law and I were in Dominica’s car and we raced ahead to make sure that we knew the route to the ferry so that we could help speed up Francesca and the rest of the family. We were doing okay and there was a slight chance that we would have been able to make the ferry but when we got to the exit for US278 (the Staton Island Expressway) the bridge to the island was closed and we were screwed. No chance of making it as the nearest bridge to where we were was twenty minutes away down the turnpike. Frank and I turned off and pulled into a gas station to call Dominica and figure out what we needed to do. They were just a little bit behind us and it was way too late for them to turn around and try to make it to the other bridge. So they were just going to meet up with us and figure out where to go from there but when they got to the bridge they were just opening the bridge and they were able to get onto it. So they ended up being in front of us instead of being behind us and we most definitely missed the ferry.

We got to the Staton Island Ferry station and discovered that parking there is more difficult than you would imagine. They expect you to have $5.50 in quarters for every vehicle that you are parking or else you are supposed to have some sort of parking card that we had no idea what it was or how we would get one. Fortunately the security guard working the parking lot was really nice and took care of our parking for us. We paid him and he got a parking card on his break and registered our cars. That was going to end up being an amazing pain if he hadn’t done that for us.

We got into the terminal and got on the 9:00 ferry. There was no way that we were going to make the earlier ferry. That was just silly. The ferry ride is really cool. It takes about 25 minutes and takes you right past the Statue of Liberty and Governor’s Island and gives you awesome views of lower Manhattan, Jersey City, Staten Island and Brooklyn. And it is free. We all went out onto the observation deck so that we could watch everything in the harbour.

We got off of the ferry and discovered that the ferry terminal that we had been intending on taking was closed so we had to find a different terminal. This would have been fine but we didn’t realize that it was so close and we were past it before we even started looking for it. No map ever shows you were the entrances to the stations really are so they can be quite difficult to find. There was traffic between us and the station entrance and we didn’t see it. We ended up getting directions from someone and even then had a hard time finding it.

We started the day by riding the subway up to Rockefeller Center and walking east to Fifth Avenue where we went to the American Girls Store. I am creeped out by dolls (to me they are just models of baby corpses which is just gross) which is technically called pediophobia which is not to be confused with being afraid of real, living children which is pedophobia. Since everyone knows that I have a fear of dolls, spiders and centipedes all ready I might as well let you know about the last one, coulrophobia, which is a fear of clowns. So anyway, Joe, Brittany and I went shopping in the nearby area so that we wouldn’t have to spend any time in the American Girls Store. We went to the Godiva store and then to the Sharper Image before returning to get everyone about an hour later.

From the American Girls store we walked north so that Francesca could see St. Patrick’s Cathedral. We went inside but only for a second. Then it was back to walking the street. We walked up to see Trump Tower. We went inside, looked around and then left. There really isn’t much to do in Trump Tower if you don’t have an office there although it is quite nice inside. Then it was on to FAO Schwarz. Here Dominica, her mother and I just sat outside of the store while everyone else rushed in and took pictures of themselves in the store. Next we were on to Central Park. Everyone just wanted to see the park so we walked in several hundred feet and took a picture on a park bench.

Everyone was starting to get hungry but there wasn’t any time allotted for getting food so Dominica and I grabbed crepes and empanadas at a little vendor on the south side of the park and everyone else went to a nearby vendor and got hot dogs and pretzels. Then it was back onto the subway for a trip to Chinatown to be attacked by the vendors on Canal Street. We arrived on Canal and spent two hours walking up and down the street looking at purses, watches, etc. It was impossible to move up and down the street it was so jam packed with people. If anyone is ever planning on going to New York City this is one part of the experience that I sincerely suggest avoiding. The whole thing exists just for the tourists and it isn’t really a part of New York culture. With seven adults and two children navigating the street was nearly impossible. We were all totally exhausted from the experience and it really took the fun out of the rest of the day because no one wanted to walk anywhere anymore. Everyones feet hurt and everyone was tired. That alone is a good reason to avoid Canal Street. Just because it might take all of your energy away and leave you very little for the other things that you want to do in Manhattan.

From Canal Street Francesca wanted to walk to Little Italy and SoHo but everyone was exhausted, including her, and they managed to talk her out of that idea. So we just hopped back onto the subway and rode back north to Times Square. On 42nd Street Dominica and I decided that we were hungry and that it was going to be a while before dinner so we can into the Cold Stone Creamery and got some awesome ice cream. They make the ice cream right there on the spot mixing in the pieces to make whatever flavour you want. It is really cool. We found out that it is a chain and not unique to New York but really, not much is. New York is a city that thrives on a lot of chain businesses. It is strange that that happens in a city so large to the extent that it does.

We walk through Times Square and up Broadway so that Joe could see the Theater District. This is Joe’s first time even in Manhattan. We walked up to 48th where Francesca wanted to see the Hershey Store. Min, Joe and I just sat outside while everyone else bought Hershey’s chocolate. Then it was time for dinner. We walked up to the Jekyll and Hyde Club which is way up near Central Park. It was a lot of walking after a long day of walking. Everyone was really exhausted at this point.

The restaurant was pretty interesting. It is really targetted at kids even though the whole place seems like it must be designed for adults. They did a really good job with the whole place and it really gives you the feeling of being in Disney World. It is a four floor restaurant and we were seated on the fourth floor. We got there really early, before 5:00, so there was hardly anyone there yet. That was nice. We were able to get seated right away and there was plenty of room for us. It was dark inside, very dark, and everyone was very tired so by the time our drinks had come everyone thought that it was late in the evening when, in fact, in was late in the afternoon and still quite early to be eating. The food was pretty good and the service was excellent. Everything was pretty expensive but it wasn’t bad. If you have kids who enjoy spooky stuff then it isn’t a bad place to go at all. Nice because the adults get to eat and drink and the kids have some stuff going on to keep them entertained.

After dinner no one was ready to do anything else besides me. I kept trying to convince people to stay in the city and go to a show but no one wanted any of that. Everyone was just thinking of bed at that point. We got onto the subway and rode all the way down to the docks where we waited for the ferry back to Staten Island. It was a more or less uneventful trip back to North Brunswick. At the plaza across the street everyone decided to stop at the Baskin Robbins to get ice cream. Everyone but me. I headed back to the apartment because Oreo had been alone for thirteen hours and was not going to be happy about it. I didn’t want to leave him alone any longer than was necessary. When I had suggested going to a show earlier that was assuming that one group of people were going to head back immediately to take care of the dog and that just a few people would be staying for the show.

Oreo was so glad to see me. I think that this might be the longest that we have ever left him alone in the house before. He to go out so badly when I got there but he was so happy to see me too. He was jumping all over. He was so happy to be “rescued”.

Once everyone got home we just sat around in the living room for an hour or so. No one had any energy left to do anything. By 10:00 we were all heading off to bed. I was very much ready to go to bed by that point. I am exhausted from the entire week of not getting enough sleep.

Today is the big day that Dominica’s family all comes down to visit us in New Jersey. They are not arriving until close to midnight but we have a lot of preparations that need to be done before they get here so that we are ready for them because everyone is going to want to go straight to bed as soon as they arrive and they are going to want to be able to go right into Manhattan as soon as they get up in the morning. The morning is going to be tough because there are going to be nine people here and there is only one bathroom and barely enough hot water for a single person to take a shower!

Dominica woke me up from my nap at midnight and I came out into the office to get to work. She decided that she was really tired and Oreo was insistant on getting back into a normal sleeping schedule so the two of them went to bed right as I got up. That will make tomorrow a lot easier for them as we need to be back onto a regular schedule by tonight. I am not looking forward to having to function on a normal sleep schedule so quickly after a full week of overnights. I am expecting tonight to be a very quiet night, though. Thursday night going into Friday must be the quietest night of the week. I had thought that last night would be pretty quiet but it was actually the busiest night yet as there was a major disaster that required just about everyone to get out of bed and to work all night. Fridays are always nuts at the office but I expect that most of that mayhem will not begin until after I have signed off for the morning.

I have begun using BitTorrent on a regular basis now and I really love it. I first tried using it a year or two (or three) ago and found it very difficult to configure and basically useless for anything that I ever wanted to do and so I stopped using it and mostly forgot about it. But recently more and more things that I want to get are only available via “the torrent” and so I decided to give it another try after all of these years. I am aware that from a technology standpoint it is really awesome but if it is something that doesn’t “just work” it will never be a life changing technology. Apparently everything has changed and BitTorrent is now the download technology of choice and it totally rocks. I mean totally! For you Windows users out there in the least BitTorrent affected world I suggest going and trying µTorrent (that is pronounced micro-torrent for those of you unfamiliar with standard engineering notation, the greek letter µ is an abbreviation for micro.) µTorrent is completely free (although donations are appreciated) and requires no setup at all. Just download it and away you go. On Linux, if you are on SUSE Linux 10.1 with me, KTorrent is included in the K Desktop Environment and works right out of the box – you don’t even need to know that it is there. Just click on a torrent file and it will take you from there.

So, “What is this BitTorrent?” you ask. I will tell you. BitTorrent is an amazingly cool technology that involved that dreaded peer to peer download distribution but does it in a completely different way that is nothing like traditional peer to peer networking. BT splits files to be downloaded into tons of really tiny files and makes each person who downloades a large file share out a few tiny pieces of it back to people looking to download it. You still need a central point to host the .torrent file itself to get any download started with is completed different than traditional peer to peer technologies. So this is not a useful technology for the software and music pirates looking for a way to skirt detection. Not at all. This is a totally legitimate download acceleration technology that makes everyday people like you and me capable of offering large files for download without having to have millions of dollars on hand to pay for huge Internet connections capable of handling all of the traffic. Trust me, it is awesome. Using BitTorrent I am able to regularly get downloads in the range of 10Mb/s!! Actual single downloads. That is just amazing.

To use BT you simple have to download a BT client (or downloader) like µTorrent (there are lots of others but I am really happy with µTorrent), install it and then go to a web site that offers a torrent. Often sites will offer traditional downloads and torrents because a lot of people have not discovered the torrent yet. So, for example, I do regular large downloads from sites like OpenSuse and VMWare, both of which offer downloads as torrents in addition to traditional file downloads. If I do a download from OpenSuse of one of their CD images it might take three or four hours to get a single CD ISO image. But using the torrent I can get the same file in about eight minutes! You can’t complain about that. Dominica has to right an article for her Networking and Data Communications class this week and is thinking about writing her article about BitTorrent technology. I was telling her about it tonight and she was really excited about what a great idea it is.

One of the biggest problems with living in New Jersey is the constant need to have bottled water available. The tap is completely unpotable and even in an emergency I am not sure that it would be a good idea to drink. I tried it once and immediatly felt ill. Tonight we are just about out of bottled water and need to run to the store to have anything to drink. Water is one of those commodities that you should never have to worry about running out of. I realize that I am spoiled having grown up in a world where fresh, clean water is just as expected as air and that much of the world does not have good, cheap, easy access to safe water sources but in New Jersey it really should not be an issue.

The early part of the night just flew by. In no time, it seemed, it was two o’clock and I felt like I had just sat down at the computer. I did some work on Dominica’s desktop while she was asleep. She is starting to use Microsoft Office for the first time and finding that Microsoft’s offline folder option is incompatible with MS Office (isn’t it funny that OpenOffice doesn’t have an issue when used in a Microsoft server environment but MS Office does?) Just another reason not to spend all that money on MS Office. Min is using Microsoft Access 2003 for her Database Development class at Empire.

A little after two Oreo came out to spend some time with is daddy. He has been trying to make up for lost time from being away for the past two weeks. He pretty much just follows me around all of the time now. He came out to the living room and made me take him for a quick walk and then he laid on the living room carpeting and sucked on his new hedgehog binky that we got him at the pet supply store yesterday evening. He loves that new hedgehog. It is really cute and it makes a grunting pig sound when he bites it that is really funny and we think that he really likes. He is really happy with this binky. He is one of the few dogs that I have ever known who really appreciates it when you get him presents.

Three o’clock rolled around and still the world was quiet and nothing was happening at work. These are the nights that I love. Peace and quiet. Oreo sleeping on pillow beside my chair next to his hedgehog. The windows are open and it is a little warm and humid but not bad. At least we are getting fresh air. I will have to turn on the air conditioning before Dominica gets up in the morning. I am supposed to wake her up at seven to get her ready for the weekend schedule. Occassionaly the neighbour’s air conditioning unit will fire up and it is located just beneath our kitchen windows and it is really loud but not nearly as bad as running our own air conditioner. Unfortunately the living room has no air flow in it whatsoever. The bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen have windows that we can open but the living room is on the other side of the apartment from those rooms and there is nothing to open on this side of the house. What we really need is a screen door for our front sliding glass doors. That would help immensly.

I put in some serious email cleaning up time this morning. I have had the same work email account for five years now and it tends to accumulate a lot of junk and all of that has to be stored on our server so I try to keep it to a minimum if at all possible. All of those huge attachments and thousands of email messages really slow things down – especially when it comes time to do big migrations and when I set up a new email client somewhere and want to make my email available when I am offline. That can be quite the hassle.

Four o’clock and still quiet. Halfway through my shift now. The overnight must be the easiest shift to work. There is just so little going on and you spend so much time waiting for feedback on one thing or another that you really can’t do any project work unless everything is taken care of ahead of time. So it is quite relaxing and for someone like me who finds working strange hours to be more of a comfort than a problem it works out really well. I just hate rigid schedules and always sleeping at the same time and always eating at the same time. I loved it when Dominica and I were in Halifax and the weather was so overcast that day and night blended into each other. With all of the rain and my odd sleeping schedule we have gotten a lot of the same effect this week. It is great for me. Dominica seems to handle it okay. Oreo is the only one who is really unhappy with it. He is very much a schedule dog.

I almost forgot about this one. This is a video from You Tube that is an actual clip from a new series here in the States where people dance and get selected for a dance competition kind of like American Idol but for dancing. This guy is the worst dancer to ever appear on television and looks like someone from the short bus trying to get on television. If he didn’t say he was dancing you would think that he was just walking on the stage and having a seizure. To make matters worse he decides to tell everyone that #1 is the best and that #2 is first loser – apparently this guy is the last loser. And then he gets snotty with the people when they get offended that he wasted everyone’s time. But since he is snotty he decides to pick his nose on camera. Later we figured out that he wasn’t actually picking his nose but doing that “I just snorted coke” nose wipe that you see junkies do. Now the most embarassing thing ever is that this guy went to school at SUNY Geneseo and Dominica actually knows him! She now knows two famous people from SUNY Geneseo – one rude, flailing junkie and one girl who made it onto the television ads for Snoop Dog’s Girls Gone Wild video.

Six o’clock and the sun has been up for a while. The birds are singing and Oreo is restless. Dominica is restless too. I can hear her moving around in the bedroom. She hasn’t slept well all night. I have to get her up in an hour. For the moment the sky is clear and the sun is out. This is the first sunrise morning that I have seen in weeks. It is actually quite bright out. This is going to be really good for the Toccos traveling. We were worried that they were going to have to drive in rain the whole way. It is supposed to rain tomorrow which will make for a soggy day in Manhattan.

Part of my job to day is to make travel plans for tomorrow. Francesca sent me a list of places that she wanted to see in Manhattan so that I could plan out a route through the city. It is going to be really tough because there are nine of us and the tour is going to be a mad dash race across the city as many of the desired destinations are huge general areas like SOHO and China Town and the specific landmarks range from the Statue of Liberty (we are going to see it, not go into it) in the harbour to the south and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Harlem to the north. That is a lot of city to cover in one day. And there is food and shopping to be done as well. One of the toughest things is that there are so many stops so close together that it makes it too hard to take the subway in between them and so it leaves us with several miles of walking to be done. It might be a total of five miles or more by the time that we are done.

Seven o’clock rolled around and it was time to get Dominica out of bed. I don’t think she slept well at all last night. I woke her up as requested but she decided that she wanted to sleep some more. Oreo came in and hopped into bed to get warm. He loves his snuggles. The plan is to go at eight and get some breakfast at the Omega and then go over to Borders in East Brunswick to see if they have any useful tourist stuff for New York. What we really need is a good map that we can use while we are wandering the city tomorrow. It will be really tough if we end up getting lost.

Eight o’clock came around and I finally managed to get Dominica out of bed. I was pretty tired but wasn’t quite ready for bed yet. I convinced Dominica to go out for some breakfast so we got moving right away and went across the street to the Omega to get the day started. From there we drove over to East Brunswick. It was the first time that Dominica had been to East Brunswick. Now she knows how to get to the shops over there and there are a lot of them. We went to Borders and did some shopping for travel guides to New York City. We got one travel guide and a map that we can carry with us tomorrow while we are in Manhattan. We also got the Lonely Planet guide to “Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Dutch Country” so that we are prepared for whenever we feel like taking a quick trip into Philly since it is only half an hour away. I had tried to get a Philly guidebook previously at Barnes and Noble near the apartment but they didn’t have a single guide to that city and only one decent guide to New York. On the way back from East Brunswick we stopped in at Office Depot and picked up a neat laptop table. It is just a small table on castors that is designed to be a mobile laptop platform. Pretty neat. We saw it a few weeks ago and decided that we needed to have it. Now it will be easy to have one of our laptops in our bedroom or pulled up to the futon. We also stopped at Pathmark to pick up some water, milk and cereal so that we are ready for the busy weekend.

It was almost noon by the time we got back from eating and shopping. Dominica called her sister and started working out plans for tomorrow while I got back into contact with the office and got some work done. There is always more to be done even when I am working the overnights. No rest for the weary. We were home for about an hour when Dominica discovered that Oreo had gotten upset with us for being gone for so long in the morning and had peed on the futon and Dominica had laid in it. So she quickly changed her clothes and drove back to Pathmark to get pet urine cleaning supplies so that we could get the futon clean before anyone arrived. Of all the days to have a problem with this. It just figures. Now we are worried about leaving him home all day tomorrow while we are in the city. It is going to be a really long day for him and he is going to be really upset.

While Dominica was out I decided to take the opportunity to get the cardboard mess that has been in our living room cleaned up. I know that she is stressed out with everything that is going on and she is not happy about the dog situation so I figured that it would be smart to have some cleaning done before she got back. I got that done and I started the long, hot process of pumping up the first of the air mattresses. There is only one here now, the other two will be arriving this evening and there is nothing that we can do about those until they arrive.

I switched us over to air conditioning around a quarter after one because it was starting to get pretty warm and with doing physical stuff around the house I was going to be overly warm very quickly. Today is a beautiful, sunny warm day. The kind of warm that encourages you to sit outside with a drink and enjoy the sunshine but not so warm that you feel the need for Burmudas and a Hawaian shirt.

Speaking of Hawaii, Democrats today attempted to introduce racial based voting rights in Hawaii. Racial based voting rights! That is unbelievable. They want to make people who can prove “native” Hawaiian ancestry to have more rights than all of the other racial groups that occupy the archipeligo. Hawaii is known for its racial diversity and is one of the worst spots to attempt such massive disregard for politcal correctness. The measure was only barely shot down with not one single Democrat voting for racial equality. If you think that racial discrimination on the job is bad wait until we reinstroduce it to politics. Forget women’s suffrage, we are going back to slavery days here! And, of course, they are keen to try this in Hawaii but don’t make similar measures to give the Haudenosaunee (known to illiterate Europeans as the Iroquois) control over Upstate New York or to give the Dutch descendants extra rights in New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut or to let anti-separation-of-church-and-state religious freaks hold sway over Massachusetts, no they single out the Hawaiians as the one racial group that they want to promote. Something is pretty fishy.

Dominica got back at 1:30 and was very happy that I had been getting work done around the house. She got right to work doing some serious cleaning. We are lucky that the apartmetn is pretty small so doing serious cleaning isn’t really all that bad of a chore. The cleaning went on solid for a few hours. The apartment is pretty Spartan (meaning that it doesn’t have a lot of stuff in it and not that it is likely to betray its own to the Persians) but looking good.

I talked to Andy this afternoon and he is happy to report that Kodak got back to him today and he is starting on a twelve month contract with Eastman Kodak in Rochester on Wednesday of next week. This is a really big contract for him and he is really excited. So he has a really busy half week ahead of him as he prepares to start his new position.

Dominica was reading Fodor’s “Exploring New York City” and she said that our itinerary for tomorrow is covered in the book and they suggest taking about two weeks to do all of the things that we are attempting to do in one day. It is going to be one crazy day. We have to be up at 6:00, I think, to have any hope of getting to the ferry terminal in time and even that, I think, is going to be a long shot.

I got the chance to try out my Vonage service to the UK today. A lot of the work that I do involves our offices in the UK and now that my Vonage is working I am able to make calls to there without a problem. Having unlimited long distance to the US, Canada, UK, Spain, France, Italy and Ireland is really awesome. You can’t go wrong with service like that. It is cool getting to call Europe. I don’t know anyone who calls Europe on a regular basis.

While I was working Dominica set to work assembling the new laptop desktop that we picked up this morning. It came together very nicely. It is quite sturdy and I think that it is going to work really well.

I found out today that net neutrality was shot down in congress. For those who do not understand the technical underpinnings of this decision this is a major blow to American freedoms. Never before has a nation’s core infrastructure been sold out from under it. In no way was this decision made by congress with the intention of benefiting the American public nor was it a vote for capitalism no matter how the Republicans attempt to paint it. Today Americans lost their freedom to communicate with each other. Our Internet and our telephones and the future of television, radio, publishing, etc. have been made a privately controlled concern. No longer do we need to worry about our first amendment rights. Instead of fighting for the right to speak our right to speak “to each other” has vanished. Today is a dark day in America. A very dark day indeed. The loudest voice of freedom has been silenced and most Americans will simply plead ignorance as we descend into the abyss.

Andy and I ended up talking on the phone for over and hour discussing the net neutrality issue and the overarching implications that come with it that have been conveniently ignored in the mass market media that stands to benefit royaly from the landmark decision. We don’t get to talk very often and we wanted to take the opportunity to talk over VoIP just in case that disappears later today. Remember, congress sold off your right to equal telephone access today too. Telephones ride on the Internet and it is no longer open to all.

The Good Humor man came by as he does every day but I just happened to be standing outside when he pulled into our parking lot today so I called in to Dominica and she came out and we got ourselves some ice cream. I have never lived in a place that had an ice cream truck that actually came there before so this is a novelty to me. Dominica didn’t understand why I was so excited to be able to get some ice cream until I explained it to her. Ice cream trucks are just something that she takes for granted. People who grew up in suburbia really have a poor understanding of what it is like to have grown up in the country. No neighbours, no local phone calls, no corner store, no pizza delivery, no cable television, no walking to anything – ever, bike riding only for the teen set, no ice cream trucks and no jobs with having a car first. It is a rough life living in the middle of nowhere and no one seems to appreciate it.

At a quarter after six I ordered some pizza and cheesy bread from Domino’s in New Brunswick to have delivered. Dominica decided that she really wanted some pizza so that is what we are having. Her family should be just leaving Frankfort right about now. We are expecting them to arrive right around midnight.

I managed to win a new server on eBay that I have been looking at for a week now. It is a Compaq Proliant DL380 G2. I plan to use this machine as a virtualization machine for running VMWare Server. VMWare Server is awesome. It is a really impressive product.

The pizza didn’t come for a long time. We started winding down for the evening. We watched some of The Simpsons that Dominica borrowed from her brother the last time that she was home. I have discovered that I really don’t enjoy The Simpsons very much anymore. We finished the season that Dominica had been watching and then we put in the last disc of The Piglet Files so that we could finish that series as well. After one episode we decided that we needed to get out to Panera Bread on Route One so that we could pick up bagles for breakfast tomorrow. Panera has the best bagles. Dominica didn’t want to go alone so Oreo and I agreed to go along with her.

We discovered that Panera only has bagles first thing in the morning so I am going to have to get up early and drive down here again to get bagles then. We decided to stop at Walmart on the way back to the apartment to pick up a toaster since we don’t have one and everyone is likely to want their bagles toasted in the morning. As always, shopping at the nasty Walmart was a huge pain and took forever. Maybe half an hour or more just to get through the express check out line. Walmart really doesn’t do anything to maintain any semblance of quality control at their stores.

Min called her family and they were eating at the McDonald’s in Great Bend, Pennsylvania so they are about three hours away. We came back to the apartment and continued watching The Piglet Files. There were just two episodes left to go so that didn’t take very long for us to get caught up with. After that we took our showers so that we wouldn’t have to take them in the morning since there won’t even begin to be enough hot water for everyone who is left to take showers let alone us. When we got out Dominica discovered a very large centipede hanging out in our bedroom so I had to kill that. I hate centipedes!

We were only up to eleven o’clock so we decided to start watching Red Dwarf Season Eight, the final season. It has been almost fifteen years that I have been waiting to see the final season of Red Dwarf. It is very exciting.

Well, we are fast approaching midnight and the Tocco clan is due to arrive here in not too long so I am going to wrap up the post for the day. There is plenty here for everyone anyway. Tomorrow is going to be a long and busy day. We are hoping to get to bed a bit before one in the morning. And I need to be awake by six. And I skipped going to bed today all together.

Today begins with work starting at midnight for my fourth overnight of the week. The night started off slow. Dominica and I continued watching Monarch of the Glen Season Four. Dominica has acclimated to the overnight shift and she is able to stay awake through most of it with me. Oreo is starting to get used to it as well although I don’t think that he is very happy about it. He is very confused about the weird sleeping patterns. He has not idea what is going on. He will be far more confused tomorrow when Dominica’s family comes and stays. This place will be crazy with all of those people. Oreo will have no idea what to think.

I went outside at one in the morning to see how the weather was and it was still raining. As far as I can tell it hasn’t stopped at all since over twenty hours ago! That is a lot of water that the ground has to contend with. There must be bad flooding but I haven’t heard anything about it. I haven’t been out of the house so I don’t really know but our yard is definitely under water.

After starting the show yesterday afternoon Dominica and I managed to push our way through the entire fourth season of Monarch of the Glen before the end of my overnight shift. The entire season in one sitting. Personally I don’t feel that season four was up to the level of quality of the earlier seasons. I didn’t find this season to be nearly as engaging and it seemed like the writers were slacking a bit using common show writing cop-outs to pull off some of the episodes. But overall it is still a really awesome show. I am looking forward to season five but it will probably be close to a year before we are able to get that on this side of the pond.

The rain let up sometime mid-morning. Dominica stayed up in the living room with me until 6:00 am! Oreo napped on his pillow beside my chair all morning.

By the time that 8:00 rolled around I was very, very tired. Dominica went to bed and was fast asleep around 6:15. I went right to bed and slept soundly until 2:30! Apparently I have been behind a little on my sleep and needed to do some catching up. It is funny that catching up happens with just six and a half hours of sleep but that is a lot more than I have gotten at any other point this week.

Today sort of ended up being like a day off. Very little going on and I ended up with a migrane that made me not want to do any real work. I did a little bit here and there and got some administrative things taken care of like getting the paperwork finalized on our new datacenter facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I am realy excited about that move and am looking forward to that project a lot. It is going to be a ton of work and it is going to be spread out over a bit of time but it is going to be great. I can’t wait to get the old datacenter in Geneseo mothballed. SGL readers should notice a change as well as I will be taking the opportunity to update SGL to the latest and greatest version of WordPress and you will be able to download the site at twice the speed and half the latency which should be very noticable since the site is so large.

Dominica and I tried to order in vegetarian Indian from Tanjore again tonight but the nice people at TakeOutPoint.com had to call us and tell us that they were unable to contact the restaurant and that they couldn’t get the order placed for us. We tried calling ourselves and they didn’t pick up the phone for us either nor did they have an answering machine (an answer phone as they say in the UK.) So we decided to give up on ordering in and just went out to the Omega to get dinner. We both got salmon – hers was grilled and mine was stuffed – and then we drove into Edison to go to a high end pet supply store there in the Edison Plaza to get some much needed supplies for Oreo as he is just one day away from running out of food.

While we were out it started raining again. The sun had actually been out for a few minutes during the day but by the time we had left the Omega it was all ready raining pretty steadily again. This has to be the most rain I have ever seen at a single shot. Once again all of the grass is submerged wherever you go down here.

We got back to the apartment and my headache was getting pretty bad so Dominica convinced me to go to bed and to sleep until my shift started. I didn’t want to sleep the evening away but I wasn’t going to get anything done with my head feeling the way that it was so I decided that that was a good idea. It was almost nine when I layed down and I slept right up until midnight. I was feeling much better when Dominica came in to wake me up. Sometimes I get woken up in the middle of a sleep cycle or else I sleep with the room way too warm or something else and it causes my body to go into a “feeling awful” setting that doesn’t seem to get reset until I sleep again and complete a sleep cycle. It is really weird but it seems to be a really consitent problem. So I got out of bed and began my final shift for the week. Not that I really work in shifts but when I am doing the overnight I have an officially assigned time that I am responsible for. But I am still online with the office for most of the day so it is almost like I never stop working. People just don’t ask me to do very much during the afternoon.

Dominica didn’t go to bed last night and stayed up in the living room watching Grey’s Anatomy that she borrowed from her sister and occassionally working on her A+ material. She finds it very difficult to sleep when she knows that I haven’t had a lot of sleep and that I have to be up for work. She spends so much time worrying about me waking up that she can’t sleep herself.

I had actual project work to do tonight so I kept myself busy on my shift doing that. I also managed to get a Fedora Core 5 server built on the VMWare Server that I had built last night. I am doing virtualization on my desktop now. On Monday, while Dominica was busy building her new desk and her new office chair, I worked on upgrading my desktop to 2.5GB of memory and adding a 250GB hard drive to the all ready existing 80GB hard drive giving me a total of one third terabyte of storage on my desktop. I did this specifically so that I could do some serious virtualization without having any issues using the machine as a high powered workstation. This machine is seriously impressive now.

At 4:30 Dominica finished the first half of the first season of Grey’s Anantomy which is all that she has. She went to bed after that and studied in bed for a while. I was really impressed by how long she was able to stay awake studying. She didn’t fall asleep until after 5:00 in the morning.

Around 5:30 I noticed that it was raining outside so I shut down the air conditioning and opened up all of the windows to get some fresh air into the apartment. It started off as a really light rain but it got heavier and heavier as the morning progressed.

I wrapped up work at 8:30 and went in to get some sleep. Oreo had been out in the living room with me and he came in and slept by the bed at this point. Dominica, Oreo and I slept until 12:30. Not a long night’s sleep but it wasn’t bad. When I woke up the rain had gotten pretty serious. I can’t believe how much it rains here in New Jersey. This is really cool. I don’t think that I have ever lived in a place that rains so much.

In the early afternoon Dominica ran out to Dunkin Donuts to get us some “breakfast”. I need my bagels since I am not going into work this week.

Scientist have developed the allergy free cat. Pretty cool.

I managed to not leave the house all day and we managed to keep the air conditioning off all day for a change. In fact the house got pretty cold with just the bedroom and kitchen windows open. It was a nice change.

Dominica put in a lot of time studying for her A+ and for her classes today. She also did some research on options for classes in the fall and was looking into Master’s classes.

I managed to be pretty productive today. Productive enough to be happy about it. I did a bunch of work on the phone system. I managed to get our VoicePulse account set up and activated and working with the phone system. That was a good feeling. We now have four phone lines coming into the system. I was able to complete both incoming and outgoing calls so I was pretty happy. And the sound quality was good too.

For dinner we tried to order delivery from the Indian place that we love so much but they were having issues with their delivery driver tonight and that was out so we tried ordering from a Mexican place in New Brunswick. It took a bit of work to get the driver to make it to our place but once they finally got here the food was really good. It was a ton of food in fact. The burritos that we got were probably the biggest that I have ever seen. Just huge. And they had a really awesome vegetarian selection. Both Dominica and I got BBQ Tofu Burritos and Cheese Enchiladas.

Everyone back home in the Geneseo area has been anxious to see the latest season of Monarch of the Glen so Dominica and I set to watching it so that we could get it shipped back for everyone. We made it through four episodes before midnight.

When working overnights it is very difficult to decide exactly when to call it a day on SGL. So today I just went with midnight and am starting today’s entry right with midnight.

I didn’t have any projects on my plate tonight which was really good because I didn’t have to “set up shop” and work on any in particular. I managed to work most of the night from bed. My primary responsibility is to monitor the shop and basically act as a high end help desk making sure that we have an overnight presence. The reality is that there isn’t all that much call for any work on the overnight so things tend to be pretty slow when there are no projects to be done. It is great. I am really lucky that I am able to function in a half-sleeping mode that I learned about from years of work at Niagara when I would be in DC or Pittsburgh and would have to work a little here or there but would need to fit sleep in between little jobs or checkups. I suppose that, if I was to think about it, it really goes back to working at the hotels when I used to work the overnights alone with nothing going on ever.

So I managed to work my shift and stay decently rested. I didn’t get any real sleep but it was like a bunch of serious power naps. Dominica can’t believe that I am able to function for a long period of time like that. I can’t believe that I can still do it even though I am this old. I had a few times when there was actual work requests coming in and I had to move into the living room and really work. But that was only for a couple of hours total all night. Not bad at all.

I was really fortunate that the morning guy got to work nice and early and let me sign off early so that I was able to get to bed at seven instead of eight. That was a life saver. I got one whole sleep cycle in because of that. I slept solid from seven until a little after ten and felt really good when I got up. I even woke up on my own. No alarm necessary. I took a quick shower and rushed out the door to get up to the restaurant which was about forty five minutes away from the apartment even in midday traffic.

I had a really nice lunch with the consulting firm and a few of the guys from my team and one guy who does a similar job function but works for a different department so that I hadn’t met him before. The food was really good. It was a really nice restaurant, Vincent’s in Warren on King George’s Road, and I got an awesome tilapia lunch. I was quite happy with it.

Dominica and I spent the afternoon together at the apartment. Oreo was very happy that I wasn’t gone for very long. He has been loving all of the time that we have been able to spend together this week. This has been awesome – especially after having been alone for the past two weeks. I introduced Dominica to the British comedy The Piglet Files that my mom and I used to watch together long ago. It is a really short series but it is cute. We watched about half of the series this afternoon.

My main project for the day is getting VMWare Server running on SUSE 10.1. I spent a bit of time working on that but did, eventually, manage to get it installed and working. It was a bit of a pain but once it was working it really looks to be an impressive product. I am quite excited to have an opportunity to check it out. I am planning on using it extensively in the very near future. Currently VMWare Server is in a late beta phase but it is due to go stable later this month or maybe in July.

Dominica and I spent most of the evening not watching anything and just working. She has a lot of studying to do as she has not yet taken the second test in her A+ sequence and she needs to get that out of the way soon. That is her main project right now. That and the two classes that she is taking at Empire State. But those are not very demanding yet. They will probably take several weeks to ramp up. She also spent a lot of the evening making plans for this weekend’s excusrion to Manhattan with her family. We have a lot of people coming down here for the weekend: Dominica’s parents, Francesca, Madeline, Emily, Joe and Brittany are all coming down on Friday night. That means nine people plus Oreo will be camping out in our little one bedroom apartment for the weekend. We have one futon, Dominica and I sleep on a foam mattress on the floor, we have one air mattress here for someone to use and the Toccos are bringing two air mattresses with them. It is going to be tight around here.

Min ran out to Walmart to do a little shopping this evening. She was desperate for hangers so that she could get her clothing into the closet instead of all being piled in her suitcase on the floor. Moving is tough.

Dominica discovered a number of restaurants in the area that deliver to us here. Most importantly she discovered that the Tanjore vegetarian Indian restaurant that we love delivers here but isn’t open on Tuesdays so we are planning on getting dinner delivered from there tomorrow. Now that we know that they deliver we will be getting food from them all of the time. We love eating there but the biggest issue is that it takes too long for the service (they don’t ignore you but restaurants in New Jersey are very relaxed and they expect you to want to sit at the table for a long time even when you are not eating.) So we are very excited.

I worked until eleven this evening and then decided to take a nap before starting my shift. Oreo came in and slept next to me. He has been “daddy’s boy” ever since we got him back. He hasn’t left my side for a minute in the past three days. I managed to get a couple of hours in doing the same process that I did last night of keeping my eye on the email while still snoozing a bit. Having a wireless email device like a BlackBerry really helps. Otherwise I would have to move my laptop into the bedroom and have it set up in some way that I can use from bed and that would be tough. I really like small, wireless devices that I can use from bed.