October 5, 2008: Nice Relaxing Sunday

47 Days to Baby Day! (33 Weeks and Two Days Pregnant)

19 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing in 2 – 20 days.

I “slept in” until around ten thirty this morning although there was very little sleeping.  At best I probably got no more than two restless hours of sleep broken up between the hours of four and ten this morning.  Not a very restful night.

Well, this is it.  Barring any catastrophes today is Dominica and my final, free weekend day in Newark, New Jersey.  It is pretty hard to believe that our last weekend is ending and we do not even have a closing date yet.  Next weekend we are out of town for Joe’s wedding up in Rochester.  The weekend after that is, or at least it should be, our first weekend of moving to the new house.

I ordered Steve McConnell’s “Software Project Survival Guide” from Amazon Markplace in “Like New” condition for under $5.00.  That’s awesome.

I also ordered two movies for the purpose of doing some house keeping in my Amazon wish list.  We got As You Like It and Road to Hong Kong which completes our Bing Crosby and Bob Hope “Road to…” movies.  We have them all.

My “score” on StackOverflow is up to 428 as of this afternoon.  I wasn’t even really active on the site today.

This week was an incredible reading week for me.  I completed a book each day Monday through Thursday and then managed to finish reading “Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy” this afternoon which I only purchased from Borders on Friday evening on my ride home.  I had the good fortune of coming out to the living room and having Oreo join me on the snuggle recliner.  I just sat there with my feet up reading and he snuggled beside me bundled up in his wool blanket.  It was very relaxing.

Overall it was quite a relaxing day.  I did a lot of reading, as I mentioned, and Dominica watched tons of AppleTV.  We did watch quite a bit of AppleTV together and at one point Dominica even came out to the living room and read for half an hour or so.

Tomorrow I am covering the early shift at the office for someone so I have to be up bright and early.  Oreo will be happy as that means that I will be working from home, at least in the early morning, so he will get to stay home with me and rest.  That works out as it saves us a day of daycare costs too.

October 4, 2008: Scott and Dominica’s 5th Anniversary!

48 Days to Baby Day! (33 Weeks and One Day Pregnant)

19 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing in 3 – 21 days.

Today is Dominica and my five year wedding anniversary.  Boy has the time flown by.  I can’t believe at all that it has been five years.  How is that possible?

I slept in quite a bit this morning.  It is not every day that I get the opportunity to really sleep in so it was very, very nice.  We have the windows open and the apartment is rather chilly so I had a very snuggly dog pressed up against my side looking for warmth.

I started the day by getting out of bed, starting to put on my jeans and promptly falling right over.  I was hoping that Dominica didn’t hear me hit the floor as she was in the kitchen but she came right in to check on me and found me on the floor trying to me quiet.  I didn’t really hurt anything, luckily I was on carpeting, but it was rather embarrassing to just topple right over like that.  Didn’t do much to improve my back’s situation, though 🙁

Dominica was actually up before me today and started up the weekend’s laundry right away.  Then she moved out into the living room, once I logged into the office to start working for the day, to do some knitting.  She is working on some clothes for the baby that she wants to get done, obviously, before the baby is born.

Katie Twittered this morning that she found gas in Buena, New Jersey for $3.09!  People keep talking about it going to go over four dollars but at the moment we are pretty sure that we are going to be seeing it dropping into the twos again.  Who would have thought.

I earned a new badge, Commentator, on Stack Overflow this morning.  I did not manage to earn the reputation yesterday that I had been hoping to have earned but at least I am moving on up even if it is slowly.  By three this afternoon, though, I was over the 300 mark that I had set for myself yesterday.  (I finished the day with 337 reputation points.)

For lunch, Dominica made tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.  We recently learned that you could put raspberry preservers directly into the grilled cheese before grilling it for a more Monte Christo type effect.  This is a new grilled cheese technique that we learned from her father.

Around two in the afternoon Dominica decided that she was so tired that she was going to go nap for a while.  So she and Oreo went to bed and put on the second season of Bones which Dominica has on DVD from NetFlix.  She and Oreo stayed there watching DVDs and knitting until eight in the evening when we went out for dinner.

For our anniversary dinner Dominica and I drove out to the Oranges, Exit 8A on 280, and got dinner at Panera Bread.  It was very busy and loud out there.  Tons of people apparently had the same idea that we did for dinner.  Not many nice places to go around Newark without traveling too far and Panela is pretty accessible – especially if you live in the Oranges which are pretty heavily populated.  While we were at dinner I had meant to get myself iced tea but accidentally got myself iced coffee.  Oops.  Way too much caffeine after going more than a week without.

After dinner we picked up half a dozen bagels and some bread for tomorrow.  Panela has the best bagels although they were out of their cinnamon chip bagels which are my favourite.

We got back to Eleven80 and spent the remainder of the evening watching Magnum P.I. on the AppleTV.  Dominica went to bed sometime around midnight.

I was hoping to be able to go to bed around the same time but the caffeine was really affecting me.  I stayed up in the office reading and working on Ruby on Rails (just a project from the book that I am reading) until four in the morning!

Ruby/Qt: qtruby4.rb:2144: [BUG] [x86_64-linux]

You are working with Ruby and Qt and you get the following error:

/usr/lib64/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/Qt/qtruby4.rb:2144: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03) [x86_64-linux]

This is usually caused by a library linking problem. Most likely you are using:

require 'Qt'

Personally, I run into this problem when using Ruby/Qt on Novell OpenSUSE 11 64bit (x86_64 / AMD64).  What needs to be done is that linking needs to occur explicitly to the correct library.  If you are using ‘Qt3’ then you can link directly to that or, in my case, you want to use Qt4/KDE4 bindings then you will want to link to korundum4:

require 'korundum4'

Problem solved!

Thanks to Bemerkenswertes Meinerseits for some guidance in German!

October 3, 2008: Big Reading Day

49 Days to Baby Day! (33 Weeks Pregnant)

19 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing in 4 – 22 days; Fifth Wedding Anniversary 1 Day.

My goal for today is to achieve 300 reputation points (karma) on StackOverflow.  (I started the day with 219.)

Firefox users out there looking to enhance their image searching capabilities (on Windows and OSX, at least, we Linux users are left out on this one) definitely need to check out the free plugin available from CoolIris.  This is really awesome.  CoolIris was formerly known as PicLens.  Once you have the plugin installed do a Yahoo or Google image search and click the little CoolIris icon on one of the images and you will discover a whole new way to explore images online.

I got up at seven today and got ready a bit earlier than usual.  I logged into the office early and went through my mail.  Looking to be a slow day so far.

I starting reading the “No Fluff, Just Stuff 2007 Anthology (Volume II)“, edited by Neal Ford, today.  It has been on my bookshelf for a while and I have been wanting to read it but just have been backed up with other books that keep my occupied.  This is one of the books that I get to read purely for fun rather than for school or consulting purposes.

I did a little working from home early on this morning but was stopped by what appears to be overloaded servers at the office as the connection simply was not working.  My VPN dropped at least five or six times if not more.  Eventually I gave up and ran into the office as quickly as I could.  It was still pretty early compared to when I usually go into the office but normally I am able to get more work cleaned up from home before heading in.

If you are an AJAX gearhead and have not heard yet, Microsoft has announced support for JQuery built in to Visual Studio 2008!  This is awesome.

The Jedi Council Speaks has a new CafePress store where you can buy TJCS gear.

For lunch today Dan, John and I went out to Ulysses on Stone.  It may seem unbelievable but this was actually my first ever trip to Ulysses.  Of all of the places on Stone, Ulysses seems to be the most popular and well known but it is about the only place on the street where I have never been.  So today I got to try it out.  Ulysses is well known as a Wall Street watering hole in the evenings.

We all got the daily special which was the sesame encrusted tuna with wasabi cream sauce.  It was very good.  The price was not all that bad either.

I was supposed to do coffee with Katie this afternoon but she got caught in meetings and I never heard from her.  Shreyash and I ended up going down to Financier for our afternoon coffee.  I am at Financier so often that they say hello to me when they see me on the street.  I am one of their best known customers!

I was very productive today overall.  In addition to other tasks I was able to go through a short introductory tutorial for the Scheme dialect of Lisp and to do quite a bit of discussion work in my Process Management class at RIT.

I was pretty busy with work until a bit after six this evening.  Dan and I walked up to Trinity and then I stopped in at Borders at 100 Broadway  to do some quick shopping.  I picked up the “Ruby Phrasebook” and “Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy“.  Then on to Newark.

I did some distance calculations today about how much walking that I do each day.  The distance from the World Trade Center to my office on Wall Street is .9 miles outside with enough interior walking to take it up to a full mile.  My walk down to Stone St. which I do twice each day is .3 miles in each direction which is a total of 1.2 miles.  My walk from the apartment to Penn Station in Newark is an additional .5 miles in each direction.  So my total daily walk when I go into the city is 4.2 miles.  I’ve been saying that I do closer to two miles each day and people tell me that I am crazy about how long it takes and how far that it is.  But thanks to Google Maps “Walking” directions we now know how far it is and it is much farther than we had thought.

I got home and we ordered in from Nino’s for dinner and spent the evening watching shows on the AppleTV.  While we were waiting for the food to arrive, though, I took the opportunity to do some serious reading and managed to make some really good headway in my new Rails book.  In all I read almost ninety pages tonight which is pretty good for a late night after a long day at the office.

We actually stayed up a bit late tonight.  It was eleven thirty when I took Oreo out for his late night walkies and Dominica went to sleep.  I read until almost one in the morning and then turned in myself.

Tomorrow is our five year anniversary but we really can’t be going anywhere as there is a major change going on at the office and I have to be home all day to support it in case anything goes wrong.  If possible we are going to attempt to go out to Panera for our anniversary dinner tomorrow night but we will have to see how work goes and how tired Dominica is.

October 2, 2008: The Vice Presendential Debate

50 Days to Baby Day! (32 Weeks and Six Days Pregnant)

20 Work Days Left for Dominica

Oreo got me up to walk him at one in the morning.  We had a nice walk around the block then went back to bed.  I was very glad at that point that I had decided that I wanted to go to bed nice and early last night.

Oreo and I got up around seven thirty.  I was very well rested for a change and feel pretty good today.  The air is cool and breezy but there is a lot of sunlight today.  A perfect day for Oreo to be home with me.  Most of the week didn’t have such a nice day for him to lounge in the living room on his big Star Wars pillow.

I got up and got signed in to the office.  It is a pretty slow day today even with the market stuff going on.  I managed to get the dishes done pretty early on this morning.  I am working hard on getting all of the DVDs that we have here in Newark ready so that they can be shipped to dad’s next weekend so that they are completely out of the way before the move.  The last thing that we want is anything “extra” down in Newark to be moved more than it needs to be.  So far I am making good progress and remain on target.

This morning, on MSN.com, they have three pictures cycling by on the homepage.  Bear Mountain Bridge, literally right next to where we are buying our new house.  That is the bridge that we cross to get over the Hudson River just above Peekskill.  The article on MSN using the picture is “The 19 Autumn Foliage Hot Spots”.  It is a good sign that where we live is the highlighted picture.  Here is the direct link.

I placed an Amazon order this morning as I am running low on reading material here in Newark.  I have to maintain a stock of books that are rather small so that they will fit into my bag that I carry to and from work each day in addition to large format books that I read at home.  So I have five new books coming this next week.

Lunch was leftovers from last night.  A little pizza and a salad.

I started using Stack Overflow yesterday, the new developer’s answer site from Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.  So far it seems to work pretty well.  I have been listening to the podcast from them as they discuss the building of the web site for a few months now so it is very interesting to see it taking shape.  I already have 211 reputation points on my very first day and six or seven badges.

The afternoon flew by in a blur.  Suddenly it was three o’clock and I had no idea at all.  I didn’t even end up eating my salad until three!

Oreo is home with me so Dominica is able to bring home fish tacos from On the Border.  She has lost her taste for fish tacos in the pregnancy so she gets a salad and I get the fish tacos and she eats the rice and beans that come with the tacos.  It works out well.

Tonight I had someone, a Masters of City Planning Candidate (how does one fail to actually get a masters degree?) from UPenn, call me trying to rope me into a pyramid scheme.  He is a real UPenn student as he can’t afford real email and has to use his student account.  Newark is so crappy that even the Ivy League graduate students are trying to make a buck on a pyramid scam.  It was the same scam that we had to have homeless people removed from the building for previously.  I am so anxious to get out of this town.  I want to live in a place where an ivy league grad would feel embarrassed to be trying to get his neighbours suckered into a pyramid scam.

We ate dinner and watched some Fresh Prince and Magnum P.I. The vice presidential debate is scheduled for nine o’clock tonight and the plan is that Kevin, Pam and I are going to go down to the lounge, if it is available, to watch it.

Dominica and I relaxed until nine when it was time to watch the debate.  Dominica went to bed and I went down to Kevin and Pam’s apartment to watch it.  We had hoped to have been able to have gotten one of the lounges but they were all already in use.

Overall the debate was mostly a stalemate, in my opinion.  Palin did much better than I had expected although her unwillingness to face a lot of questions was pretty blatant and she didn’t really deflect them but just plain ignored them which was not overly skillful.  Already it seems apparent than any mention of energy by her is just another phrase meaning “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”  But she didn’t get totally destroyed in the debate like we had all expected although it was very clear that Biden was pulling all the punches and just letting her go even when the shots were open for him.

I got back to the apartment and wrapped up my class discussion for the evening.  Then it was time to walk Oreo.  Before heading off to bed I really wanted to wrap up the book that I was reading so I just sat down in the office and read until it was done.  At ten after midnight I finished reading “UML for the IT Business Analyst“.  That makes four books completed in four days!  It has been a very good reading week indeed.

Then it was time to head off to bed.  Tomorrow is looking like it will be a nice day for walking into Manhattan.  A high of sixty-four degrees.  I am so glad that autumn is finally here.

Dominica and I are planning to be home in Newark this weekend.  It is our final weekend “in Newark” deus volente. Next weekend is Joe Howlett’s wedding.  The weekend after that is our proposed “soft move” to Peekskill.  The weekend after that is our hard move to Peekskill.  The weekend following that we no longer have a lease for the apartment so we shant be here at all.