January 4, 2007: NASCAR Polos, Koolats and Guitar Heros

I heard on the weather report today that we are supposed to hit almost sixty today and on Saturday, just two days away, that we are going to be breaking the all time record by four degrees and coming dangerously close to seventy! Apparently the weather is really throwing off the golf courses in the area as many of them are open and in full swing. I wish I had some time to get out and play some golf. This is perfect weather for it. I can’t believe that it is all ready the first week in January and it isn’t in the least bit skingy! New Jersey is awesome for weather.

I was up at five this morning luckily not sleeping through my alarm. It was nearly impossible to pull myself out of bed, though, as Oreo was in super-ultra-snuggle mode and had been sleeping right beside me sharing my pillow all night. He is a hard dog to leave in the morning. Apparently yesterday he was confused by my leaving for work so early and when Min got up to go to work he walked around the apartment looking for me.

It was another slow morning for me, but things are starting to pick up. I am starting to have work to do in addition to my reading. This morning I also took some time to focus on email housekeeping. My email only gets a really thorough cleaning out when I am facing an email migration. Currently my email runs on a custom built Postfix and Cyrus solution that took an incredible amount of work to put together. That system is aging now and the plan is to replace it, in the very near future, with a Zimbra based system. So I am taking the time to delete all of the email that I don’t think that I will need so that I don’t have to copy all of it over to the new system. For anyone reading this that is on the same email system as me, this is your heads up that it would be a good time to clean out your email.

While going through my old email I found some emails that I kept just as address book entries. I tried emailing several people that I haven’t had contact with in several years. Sadly, few people kept their email addresses from many years ago and I have lost contact with some people. Bob Murphy from Ithaca’s email is gone and I no longer can contact him and Salisa Mohammad from Singapore that I have known since the fall of 2000’s Yahoo account is gone and I can no longer contact her. If you are one of those people who don’t have a permanent email account, please get one ASAP and switch over to it and notify everyone that you know! This is a big deal. In this day and age there is no reason for your email address or telephone number to ever change. We live in a world of persistent contact. There is no longer any reason to lose contact with people. If you are using an email address tied to your Internet service provider, stop now. Get a free ISP neutral account from someone like Yahoo! or Google or someone else that is definitely not going anywhere. Make sure that everyone is aware of the new email address and start really using it. Don’t treat your email address like a street address that has to change every time that you move. It isn’t and doing that is destroying the underlying value of the system. An email address can follow you the rest of your life and keep you in contact with people forever. Don’t throw away one of the biggest value propositions of living in the Internet age. The reality is that it is vastly more work to switch email address when you move or change Internet providers than it is to learn one system that you use forever.

We lost power at the office again this morning! I am not sure what is going on in northern New Jersey this week but this is quite surprising given the awesome weather that we have been having. My office is on a massive battery backed power system so it doesn’t affect us much – the lights just turn on and off for about twenty seconds when the power switches over to generator.

Important Fashion Notice: Contrary to popular belief NASCAR polo shirts with checkered flag collars are not cool and hip. Yes I am serious. No, I am not kidding. If you own one, throw it out. Now. Go. (And no, mullets are not in style again either. Nor were they in style before. And no, even when someone knew who he was, Billy Ray Cyrus was not “cool”.)

Important Fashion Addendum: Just because someone is wearing a NASCAR polo does NOT make koolats somehow acceptable. Calling them gouchos or gauchos just makes it sound like you don’t know what koolats are because that is obviously what they are. And it makes you look like you don’t know how to spell gaucho because that is what they are named after. And it is bordering on racial slur. So just save us all a lot of embarrassment (you for looking like your mother mismeasured before making you prison issue pajamas and me for having to make fun of you in this forum about it) and wear either pants or shorts but not “jams”.

Francesca talked to Dominica earlier this week and Dominica told her that she had to go out and get Guitar Hero II for their Playstation 2. Apparently she listened because she sent us this review today:

I totally love guitar hero 2.

strike that, i AM a guitar hero.

that is all i can think about. nothing is gettting done at my house, cuz
i am rockin out in the living room as loud as i can. i totally ‘feel’
like i am playing all the rhythms in the whole song. my favorite is
“mother tell your children not to look my way, tell your children how to
blah blah blah…..”

and then there is motley crue and warrant, cherry pie!!!

i cannot get enough. cannot cannot cannot.

i totally love it!!!”

You can’t get much more of a raving review than that. I guess that she likes Guitar Hero II even more than she liked Cooking Mama on Dominica’s Nintendo DS.

Things got plenty slow this afternoon allowing me to escape from the office at a reasonable time. I really like the early shift because I get to escape on the early side.

I got home and spent the evening working either on the new TrixBox server or with Andy as he and Eric are just about ready to deploy the new system to the University of Rochester Medical Center. Andy and I are hoping that the installation can be scheduled this weekend. That would be awesome. What a great way to start off the new year.

Dominica and Oreo got home and we ordered some Dominos Pizza for dinner so that it would be quick and easy. They messed up the order a little and put pepperoni on Dominica’s pizza rather than onions though. That was disgusting but it would have been ridiculous to send it back. So she just picked off the pepperoni and ate the pizza anyway. It is too bad that pepperoni is so unhealthy or we could have at least given it to Oreo but he always has to watch his fat intake so he only got one piece. But he really enjoyed it!

Castile Christian Academy finally got back into touch with me this evening. We have been attempting to get into contact with them for some time but we know that things have been crazy down there and that no one has had much time for dealing with computer related issues. At least now we know that people are still alive there.

Dominica and I went to bed on the early side tonight. Tomorrow is my last early day and I am very tired after having lost more and more sleep all week long. Today was a good productive day for me though. Lots of reading, good TrixBox work and a bit of good work with Andy. Dominica got a tiny bit of studying done but not very much.

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