Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is May Day, the celebration of the coming summer. Traditionally this was the day that was considered the beginning of the summer season. In the UK this is a bank holiday. Good deal for me since I mostly work with clients in Great Britain.

It was a beautiful morning. I slept in until just after 6:00. Oreo even stayed in bed all night. Normally, because the bed is smaller here than at home, he decides that it is too warm and he moves to his pillow to cool down.

Sorry to everyone who got the giant “Don’t Buy from AIT” banner yesterday. I didn’t realize that it was that large and I didn’t view the page myself for several hours. So some people got a pretty ugly page. And sorry about the Tripod hosting image that came up two days ago. I am working on rectifying that one. It only happens on some machines. I keep checking it with some and it is fine.

I got my usual breakfast at the office this morning. I did my first Solaris 10 install this morning. I have a SUN Blade workstation on my desk and I put Solaris 10 on it. So I am now using SUN’s Java Desktop Environment. It is a modification of Gnome but it would appear that they did a really nice job with it and this is an environment that would be very comfortable for Windows users.

I was able to head for home at 4:30 which was nice so Dominica and I could spend a long evening together before she and Oreo have to return to Geneseo. Dominica was going to do some laundry for me today and forgot to do it during the day so she ran out to do it right as I was leaving to come home. So I ended up getting home almost forty-five minutes before she did. But Oreo was at the apartment and I got a chance to spend some time with him.

Min got home and shortly she and I went out to Tanjore just a little ways down on Route 1 for some dinner. Tanjore is a vegetarian Indian restaurant that we had spotted as we drove to Jenn’s apartment last weekend. It is very close to the apartment so it is really interesting to us. It is only about five minutes away on the same road that the apartment is on.

Dinner was spectacular. Everything at Tanjore was really, really good. Finding South Indian cuisine is not nearly as easy as the more common North Indian cuisine so it was an extra treat. And being completely vegetarian there is just a ton of stuff for Dominica and I to eat. We are very glad that we discovered Tanjore and we will be returning often.

After dinner we came back to the apartment and just relaxed for the evening. It was all ready fairly late and we had to do some work on Dominica’s resume since her last two jobs were not on there. She is done with her current position on May 13th which is less than two weeks away so she needs to be diligently working on finding something new down here in New Jersey. We have some leads so we are hopeful that she might be able to find something right away.

Before going to bed we broke open Season Three of Remington Steele and watched the season opener. By the time that that was done it was late enough to go to bed. I have not been getting enough sleep since I have been down here and that is a real challenge. Min and Oreo head back home tomorrow for the last time. Next weekend I go to Geneseo instead of them coming down here and then the following weekend Dominica is moving down for good. Then, just to keep things interesting, we are traveling out west to Ohio the weekend after that.

Richard Stallman, or RMS as many know him, decided to print a simple placard and to hold it silently as a representative of video card maker ATI spoke in RMS’s office building at MIT. The event organizers at MIT decided that they were going to take a heavy handed approach and called in local authorities telling them that there was a public disturbance and even manage to convince them to pull RMS from the event without even having to tell the police what the disturbance was. When the police learned that there was no disturbance and that RMS was sitting quietly in the event simply holding a sign they were less than pleased. MIT officials finally admitted that they had lied about the disturbance but believed that a disturbance could have happened, apparently in the potential, indefinite future. RMS was allowed to return to his seat once the police were more likely to arrest the MIT staff than RMS (who is also MIT staff, possibly MIT’s most famous professor.) It is scary to see just how close a large, totalitarian institution like MIT can come to simple removing someones rights. Even a staff member’s rights. But the real damage comes from the fact that instead of being a quite man holding a sign in an event with 35 people attending (I don’t know the actual number, I made that up) it has now made major news and is being linked everywhere. So ATI you have MIT to thank for making your poor driver practices no longer just geek political concern but national mainstream news over first amendment rights. Go MIT. (P.S. Any students out there considering a career in computer science? I strongly urge you to consider schools that focus on education and not on being big business.) (P.P.S. Buy NVidia. Although their driver practices aren’t very good either. But they are a nicer company in general and treat their customers with a little respect. Just ask Andy about what ATI thinks of people who buy their products.)

Dominica and I slept in quite late this morning. Almost until noon. Oreo made me get up a couple of times during the night and that made it really tough to get a good night’s sleep. The upside is that one of the times that he made me get up also encouraged a certain centipede to make a mad dash for it across the floor but I was ready and I got him. Pheww. There are no known additional centipedes in the house although I am quite sure that they are here. We just haven’t seen them yet.

We were getting hungry so we went out for lunch at 1:00. As expected we went over to the Omega Diner. We had our lunch and then we went to Walmart to do some “quick” shopping. The whole thing ended up taking three hours. The Walmart here is impossible to get around. It is small and completely packed full of people just meandering here and there and not paying any attention to the people that they are blocking the way of that are trying to get through. And the lines take close to an hour to get through. And no I am not kidding. Every single line in the place was backed up into the shopping areas and they weren’t moving forward at all. It was terrible.

While we were at Wally World we managed to get some lamps that we have desperately needed to have around the apartment. We got one for the living room and one for the bedroom. We picked up some DVDs since I had managed to have watched everything that was left for me at the apartment. We picked up Remingston Steele Season Three, Broken Lizard’s Club Dread (Nicklin would be proud), State Fair both the 1945 original and the 1962 remake with Ann Margaret, some movie with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan that was in the bargain bin, a five movie collection of Marlene Dietrich films, the latest Judy Dench film Mrs. Henderson Presents and Fletch Lives! with Chevy Chase.

We came back home and spent most of the day just relaxing in the living room watching movies. We get almost no time to just relax together, or at all really, so it was a nice change. Dominica has never seen State Fair and it is one of my favourite musicals so we started off with that. We watched the 1945 version. That is the one that I have seen several times. It was one of those musicals that would show up on television every so often when I was a kid. I have no idea why they would have done a remake of that movie only seventeen years after the original. The original was so good. That would be like making a remake of a musical from 1989 today! How weird would that be? State Farm is a really great, feel good kind of movie. It really makes you wish you had lived on a midwest farm in the 1940’s although I think that miss protraying just how poor everyone really was.

After State Farm we popped in Mrs. Henderson Presents which is “based on true events” that happened in London in the late 1930’s and up until about 1940. The movie was good and I think it did a good job of portraying how awful it was in England during the war. The movie was very interesting from a historical perspective. It was well made and entertaining. I wouldn’t put it into the classic category but it is worth a watch. Excellent performances all around.

After watching two movies back to back either filmed during the war or about the war we decided that we needed a break and moved on to the corny 2003 Bill Paxton movie Broken Lizard’s Club Dread which is one of those “bikini movies thinly disguised as a cheesy horror movie” movies. I have seen Club Dread on cable a couple of times at Min’s parent’s house but I have never managed to have seen the entire thing. That is the problem with traditional television – you always end up coming in in the middle of a show. The movie isn’t very good. No, actually it is terrible. But it is funny in that “horrible horror movie” sort of way. There isn’t any plot and the characters really don’t develop but it can be entertaining. I think that Min thought that it was funny. It is totally a John Nicklin film.

That pretty much wrapped up the day. We ordered some food from Pizza Plus Cluck U (yes, that is there name) and ate that while watching the final movie. We got eggplant parmesian and corn nuggets. The subs were better than the pizza and the corn nuggets were awesome again.

It was bedtime at 11:00. Even though tomorrow is May Day I still have work. Dominica and Oreo are going to just hang out at the apartment and hopefully find someplace to do some laundry. I have not had a chance to do any since I have been down here and so far we have had to just keep buying new clothes to give me more time between laundry trips. Dominica has been taking laundry back and forth when she travels to get it done at home.

Hard to believe that I have been here for over a month now and I haven’t had a single day alone to myself since I started the new job. Today is my day to just relax. To take it easy. To take out the garabage. The garbage has been collecting for two weeks. Mostly it is just cardboard and other packing materials from the shelves and futon and chair. I finally got that all cleaned up along with the regular trash and took it out to the dumpster. I love having a dumpster. That is so much nicer than having to have trash pickup. You can get rid of everything the moment that you get it and you never get stuck in a situation where you are storing large amount of trash waiting for to get taken away. And you can take care of it immediately and instantly the house is cleaner.

For a late lunch or maybe an early dinner today I ordered a pizza from Pizza Plus and some corn nuggets. I figured that it was time to start trying out some local restaurants. The pizza was okay. Nothing special but it was edible. But the fried corn nuggets were awesome. I popped in Gidget and finally finished the movie that Dominica and I started watching last week. It really isn’t a very good movie but it isn’t that bad. There was about twenty minutes of Gidget left and then I watched Gidget Goes Hawaiian. Wow is that movie bad. For some reason they decided to replace Sandra Dee with some massivley ugly girl who is totally unattractive and comlpetely awkward. You can tell from the acting that no one in the scene could think of her as being attractive and the acting is weird. She really comes across as “ugly girl acting like an ugly girl would think an attractive girl would act.” I can’t imagine what they were thinking when they cast her. The only highlight of the movie is that it has Carl Reiner in it.

After torturing myself with bad Gidget movies I watched My Father the Hero which I thought that I had never seen but once I started watching realized that I had seen long ago. Probably on television or something. It is a pretty good movie. Nothing ground breaking but it is cute and it has good people in it. I had bought it for Dominica because she really likes that movie and it got brought down here for her to watch but I ended up watching it first.

I went into the bedroom after the sun had gone down to find a DVD. In the darkness I saw something large moving on the wall. It was very dark and there is no light at all in the bedroom because we don’t have more than a single lamp in the entire apartment yet. So I ran into the living room and grabbed the lamp and ran back into the bedroom and plugged it in just in time to see a centipede run into the BED!!! And, of course, I spent half an hour trying to find and kill it but I was unable to. It never came back out again so somewhere in the bed is a centipede. An elusive centipede at that. And now the living room is dark and there is nothing that I can do about that. It is going to be a really rough night with very little sleep. I can tell all ready. Having acute chilopodophobia really sucks. Spiders don’t do this to me at all.

I tried to put the incident out of my mind as much as possible (while still regularly going into the room to see if the offending creature had decided to emerge from its hiding place) and, after about an hour I got Remington Steele put into the laptop and I was merrily on my way to 1980’s television land. More or less. It is very difficult to forget about a big, nasty arthropod hiding in the bed just waiting to feast on my neck as soon as I lie down for the night. That is really a pain because I had originally planned on going to bed early and getting up when Dominica got in but I really don’t want to go to sleep by myself as long as that thing is in there. Why? Why centipedes? Why not anything else? Argh!

I got some important web design work done tonight that I haven’t had the chance to devote the mental energy to in way too long. That was weighing on me and I am relieved to have it taken care of. I hate having projects that never get finished. I find them increasingly difficult to complete and I find that they mentally interfere with other work that needs to be completed.

With all of my spare time today I managed to not only finish watching all of Remington Steele Season Two but also to finish watching all of the DVDs that I have here in the apartment. I guess that I will need to send the ones that I have back home with Dominica. Next weekend when I am home I will have to try to remember to pick up some that I haven’t watched yet and bring them down here for days like today. Having the laptop sitting right beside me while I work on the computer seems to work out pretty well. I wouldn’t say that I was super productive today but I managed to relax a lot and still get a decent amount of work done.

Dominica and Oreo arrived around 3:15. By the time that they got in I was really exhausted and I was looking forward to getting to bed – centipede or no centipede. Actually, as the night dragged on and after I spend many, many trips into the bedroom scouring the room looking for the little bastard and not finding any trace of him the panic began to wear off and I started to lose the feeling that he was going to jump out and get me at any second. Chances are that he probably either died when I moved the bed or he made a dash for it and is somewhere else entirely by now. It doesn’t seem like hanging out in the bed would make much sense for a centipede for any length of time.

It felt really good to be able to get to bed early last night and get a full night’s sleep. I didn’t pull myself out of bed until around 6:10! That is a full eight hours or even a smidgen more. It has been a while since I have gotten that much sleep in a single go.

There was some work waiting for me when I first got into the office this morning. I got that taken care of and got some breakfast. Bagle and fruit. This is three fruit days in a row. I might even get healthy if I am not careful. Yesterday I ate very healthily.

Tomorrow is going to be the first day that I have had alone in New Jersey since I first came down over a month ago. Every potential day off has been filled with driving or work. Dominica is coming down tomorrow after work but isn’t likely to arrive until very late like 3:00 in the morning or later. That is the time that she got in last week and this week her work schedule goes later so she will not get the chance to leave as early. That is going to be really tough for her. Hopefully she can get plenty of sleep tonight so that she is well rested.

Today ended up being super, unbelievably slow day. Not one thing happened all day after 9:00 this morning! I was so bored I can’t even tell you. Unfortunately I got talking to my cubicle neighbour and ended up missing the lunch windows – that is the window of time that the cafeteria is open. I could always have gone out somewhere for food but I wasn’t that hungry and by not having lunch now I can go out and get a pizza or something for dinner later at the apartment. I will probably eat and watch some Remington Steele that I haven’t done all week.

Dominica put in her two weeks notice today. The plan is, if they let her, that she will work tomorrow and then two full weeks following that so that she will be wrapping up on the weekend of the fifteenth when we are supposed to be in Ohio for my cousin Brett’s graduation party. Dominica is really relieved to be winding down at work. The going back and forth has been really tough on her and she is really looking forward to having the opportunity to be in New Jersey full time.

No sooner did I mention how slow it was than I got hit with work! I didn’t do a single thing all day from 9:00 – 5:30 and then I got stuck working heavily from 5:30 – 6:30! Figures. Not that it matters. I don’t have any specific plans for after I get home. Just relax for a little while and then go to bed.

SGL has been completely deluged with comment spam. It is awful. I am going to have to implement a strickter comment system. I am getting hundred of comments a day from automated engines attemping to advertise on the site. Maybe the thing that is most annoying is that obviously they don’t manage to actually post because I verify each comment manually so what they are actually doing is not comment spamming but attempting a form of a Denial of Service or DoS attack, which is a felony. But of course it is way too much effort to prosecute and it is probably coming from outside of the country anyway.

I spent the evening in from of the computer as always. I didn’t have any lunch today so I decided to break down and order myself a Domino’s pizza. It ended up taking close to two hours before it actually arrived and it wasn’t all that hot when it finally got here. But it was tasty and I was really looking forward to it. I tried watching an episode of Perfect Strangers while I ate my pizza but then it became painfully clear to me why I ended up hating that show when it was originally on. Let me tell you, I am not of Balkin decent in anyway but I am sympathetically insulted for anyone who is. That show was totally an attempt to mock anyone from Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, Crete, etc. There was no plot, nothing funny, no good acting, no nothing but a platform for saying that the Balkans are a backwards, useless, sub-human culture and I hope that anyone connected with that show never worked again. I don’t know how any show with that much agenda made it onto prime time but it is reediculouws. The characters name is even “Balki” which, of course you can’t even SAY! If you called someone that at a job they would have to fire you on the spot. If it was more popular people might call it the “B” word.

My project this evening was to set up a Mambo Content Management server. That took a little while as my default PHP installation was not equipped to handle the install but that wasn’t too much of a problem. I got that up and running and then turned in for the night. It was pretty late by the time that I went to bed but tomorrow I actually get to sleep in. Yay!

First of all, congratulations to Wil Wheaton who totally just scored the voice job that he wanted on a new show at Nickelodian!! Go Wil. I will give everyone details when he releases what the project is.

It was around 9:30 when I finally rolled into the apartment last night. I think that Dominica and I are most definitely going to be doing some serious looking for a new apartment once the six months are up on this one. I am pretty happy with the apartment itself and I hate moving but this place is just too far from work. My commute is a major part of my day and it isn’t like I use the apartment for anything more than just sleeping. I don’t even eat there. I have a SlimFast dinner and go to bed. I haven’t ordered in food or gone out once on my own since I got down here. And it sure isn’t like I cook.

For dinner I had, you guessed it a SlimFast and a small salad. I got in to the apartment so late that I pretty much did nothing. I had a little support work that needed to be done and I wrapped that up quickly. Boy am I glad that I have the firewall with the solid VPN support. That makes such a difference to my sanity.

I talked to Mary over instant messenger last night for a little while. She is just wrapping up her semester at GCC in Batavia. Two more weeks. She doesn’t know what she is going to do after that. She has the summer off from school and has to get some work for the summer. She is hoping to get to be the student aid for the Army Corp of Engineers at the Mt. Morris Dam. That would be cool.

I went to bed at 11:30. It is hard to go to bed much before that when the evening is so short. It makes for a short night when the alarm goes off at 5:45 (I pushed it back a little.)

I fell back asleep after the alarm went off this morning. I didn’t feel like I did but I did. I got up around 6:30. I checked my mail before getting ready for work. Supporting Europe means that there is often stuff to do VERY early in the morning. Most of my work requests are generated in a time zone five hours ahead of where I am so that can be tough.

I got into the office at 8:00. It is another beautiful day in New Jersey. I am still (Day 2) listening to my German CDs in the car. I haven’t learned very much yet. I decided that I would take them into work today and convert them to Ogg Vorbis files so that I can listen to them during the day with Zinf without needing to take the CDs to and from the car every day. So I downloaded CDex and started converting. What a great program that is. So simple and useful.

I did my usual breakfast at the office. A bagle with peanut butter (George Washington Carver is my hero) and a big thing of fruit. I am trying really hard to add fruit to my diet. It has been terribly lacking in fresh fruit. Today I must have gotten about twice as much fruit as I did yesterday (they weigh it on a scale) because it was about $8 just for the fruit! But boy is it delicious.

Everyone told me when I started work down here that it would take about a month before things would get up to speed and that I would be pretty bored for the first four weeks then it would pick up. Well that appears to be pretty accurate. I am just hitting a month and this week is completely different than it has been. I am busy just about every day and I am actually being useful and not just sitting around asking questions. I still have to ask tons of questions but I can do more and more independantly. It is getting to be a lot more fun now that I am actually keeping busy a lot of the time. Not so busy as to not be able to keep up with SGL luckily so you all get to come along for the ride.

Today was the big day for getting Indian food in the office. We were going to go yesterday but it is too big of an event and they weren’t able to schedule it at the last minute. So it got held off until today. The place is in Morristown which is about twenty minutes or farther from the office. Nine of us went in two cars. I didn’t go with my team from work but with our sister team. I actually sit in the middle of our sister team as there was no space within my own team for my office. So we left around 12:30 to get lunch with everyone in tow. It was quite the undertaking to organize that many people. Two people from our sister team got stuck staying behind so that there was someone there in case something happened. It would be a bit dangerous to take absolutely everone. But I was excited as it was obvious that everyone really wanted to go and that this was a major event.

The place was really fancy considering it was a buffet. You really felt like you were being seated at a nice hotel restaurant. The food was amazing! This was definitely the best Indian food that I have ever had. It was absolutely, totally awesome. And, of course, I ate until I felt sick. I stopped after a reasonible amount but the guys all said that they weren’t proud of me and I wasn’t really well versed in Indian cuisine if I didn’t eat another round so I gave in and feel gorged now. But it was worth it. They tried to get me to eat dessert as well but I managed to resist that. I have been hearing about this restaurant for a long – almost since I first arrived here so this was quite the treat that I had been looking forward to.

It was almost 3:00 by the time we got back to the office. I couldn’t believe how much time it took just to get lunch. No wonder they were so concerned about leaving a few people behind for coverage. That really ate into the afternoon but boy was it ever worth it. It was a lot of fun going out and doing something social with so many of the people from the office.

I found out today that I am staying in the office that I have been in since I first arrived in New Jersey. Up until today it has just been a temporary office while they decided where to stick me but today I officially got assigned to the office so now I will be getting a telephone number of my very own that I can actually answer. that will be a change. Up until now there have been no calls for me so I never even have to react to the phone ringing. It was nice while it lasted. But it is good that it will be possible to call my desk in case of an emergency.

At this point in the day someone needed to use my computer and pushed my browser too hard and I didn’t have a chance to save what I had been writing and I lost everything that I wrote after lunch so hopefully I won’t miss anything as I go back and try to think of anything that I might have written. That kind of sucks because I really use SGL as a pensive (Harry Potter reference, go read the book) and once I put things in I don’t remember them. I only keep the feeling of having told people. I’m weird, okay, get over it.

Wil was able to write this afternoon about the new show that he is going to be working on over at Nickelodean. The show is called Kyle + Rosemary and Wil has scored the lead role of Kyle. How hawesome is that? I am looking forward to checking out the new show. I guess this is really good news for Wil not just because it is a cool project and looks like fun but also because it looks like it must be a pretty major, full time kinda gig. More or less. I don’t really know how these things work but it isn’t a small part or an occasional character. Pretty cool.

Things were really slow around the office this evening and so I decided to head for the hills around 6:30. (For those who don’t know, on the other side of the hills is my apartment so I have to head for them before heading for the apartment.) Last night was such a short night at home that I would like to have a little bit of time to myself this evening. Even if it does just involve sitting alone in front of the computer. There is always plenty to do at home. I haven’t even cleaned up any of the mess from putting all of the furniture together yet. I suppose I should do that sometime soon. Dominica will appreciate if it is gone when she gets there the day after tomorrow.

I actually got home at a reasonable time tonight. My project for the evening (I have had to reduce by intense “at home IT schedule” down to a single small project per evening to keep my sanity) was to get Asterisk working in conjunction with Free World Dialup. Free World Dialup or FWD is a free, open VoIP solution that uses both the big IP phone protocol SIP as well as the big VoIP PBX protocol IAX2. Unlike closed, casual users only solutions like Skype, FWD is open and enterprise friendly. One of the biggest deals is that FWD allows interconnects between different phone systems as well as PBX connections. PBX connections means that people running their own telephone systems at home (like me) can connect to FWD. I think that Skype users overlook the significance of this little feature. It means that any business anywhere who wants to have a VoIP connection to FWD can do it, for free AND have it just be another connection on their CURRENT phone system! Okay, follow me here. You want to call company X in Australia. You have a FWD account. They have an FWD account. You can place a call from your telephone and it rings their phones just as if you called on a regular old fashioned telephone line but for free. They don’t notice whether the calls are coming from FWD or from the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network.) This is a really big deal. Companies that want to use Skype HAVE to run a Skype client on one person’s desktop and have them answer that line seperately from their regular phones. No integration. No access to regular voicemail. Nothing. Companies are not going to do that. FWD is a real phone solution that can be managed by companies and used by people at home. It is a complete replacement to the traditional phone system that can run along side it at the same time. Go check it out. Get an account. Make some calls.

I got to talk to Min at work over IM a little before I went to bed. And I helped Jeremy a little. He is in the process of picking out the components to buy for a computer that he is building. He has never built a computer before and he is having a lot of fun picking out the components that he wants to buy. He is putting together the first NVidia SLI (that is a dual graphics card system) gaming machine that I know of. It should be something to see.

I was really tired and decided to go to bed really early. I hit the hay at just a little past 9:30!! Boy does that ever make me feel old. Tomorrow is Friday, which is the slowest day of the week and the shortest. Most everyone starts calling it a day around 5:00 instead of 6:30 – 7:00. And Monday is a bank holiday in the United Kingdom which is where I do most of my work (virtually, of course, I have never actually been in the UK.) So Monday is going to be a nice, quiet day as well. Unfortunately I will not get to work from home on Monday because of technical problems that keep me from being able to be productive remotely. Until we get that fixed I am stuck coming into the office for just about everything.