Today there is some real sunlight for a change. Sunlight and warm. Very warm. It has been getting warmer and warmer the last few days. This has to be the warmest winter that I have ever spent in New York. The winter of 1999 going into 2000, as I remember it, was very warm and I am pretty sure that I managed to make it through that entire winter without ever coming across any snow at all. But that winter I was not in the Rochester area after February 20th so that may have had an affect on that. But most snow happens, normally, in January and February so it must have been a really warm winter. Or else I just might not remember it very well after all of this time.
I spent the morning in the office, as usual. Dominica’s plan for today was to sleep all day with Oreo. She didn’t quite manage to pull that off but she did manage to sleep until after 11:30. Dad came over to Geneseo at 12:30 and the three of us went to, you guessed it, the Omega Grill to get some lunch. I weighed myself today to see how this new diet is treating me. Unfortunately it currently appears that the diet is causing me to put on weight quite rapidly. I have always had my doubts about these low carb diets. This isn’t encouraging me. My body does not react to anything the way that other people’s seem to do so it just makes sense that diets that work for other people will not work for me. It is really tough with this eating all day long thing because it creates tons of unnecessary food cravings that I am not used to having. I will have to reevaluate the diet after a few more days if I continue to gain weight.
I got a call from the Castile school this morning: the electric has been hooked up for the computer lab. That means that we can now begin the full process of getting all of the computers installed there and classes might be able to begin by next week. That might be overly optimistic but it would be awfully nice to finally have classes underway again. We are so far behind at this point for this school year. Dad, Dominica and I have a lot of work in front of us. But it is fun.
We did some grocery shopping at Wegmans after lunch and then it was back to the house. Dominica and my goal for the day is to be home all day. Once in a while it is definitely nice to be able to stay in town all day. And Oreo really appreciates that too. In fact, even more than we do.
FedEx stopped by dad’s house today and dropped off some new stuff for me. The new speakers for the office have arrived so that we can occasionally watch DVDs or whatever in the office without having to use headphones or the PC speaker which is worthless. The big item that has arrived for me is my new Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 with GPS. I am really excited to get to start playing with that. I have been using Microsoft MapPoint 2004 on my desktop for two years now and I am really happy with it. It is an awesome product. I will be happy to have its counterpart on my laptop so that I can take it with me all of the time and with more up-to-date information. The really nice thing about Streets and Trips is that you get a version for your laptop or desktop as well as a copy for your Pocket PC. Since I have both it really ends up being a very economical package. And to come with a USB GPS unit it is an incredibly good deal. I think that it is going to be an important tool for me once I get used to using it all of the time.
Tonight is another Star Trek: The Next Generation night. We are working out way through season two that we borrowed last night from Andy. So far I am pretty sure that I actually like season one better. Gates McFadden was let go after the first season and the replacement character in the second season is really awful. The second seasons really suffers in general from bad writing and an apparent lack of direction from Gene. Hard to believe that I kept watching this show so many years ago if this is all that I had to go on. This stuff is really not entertaining even though many of the actors do an excellent job (Brent Spiner really kicks butt!)
Dominica worked on some knitting tonight and I did a little work on a train layout and did some reading on PHP and MySQL. I don’t normally get directly involved in development tasks but I have a project that I am really interested in that isn’t deep enough to require Andy’s expertise so I am having a little fun with it myself. Nice to get your hands dirty from time to time.
I checked today and now that I am using WordPress I am writing, on average, about 1,100 – 1,200 words a day. I have no idea how WordPress affects my writing whether it increases it, decreases it or does nothing at all. It completely changes the way in which I write and does make it vastly easier for me to be able to work on the site from just about any location at any time. That alone must have a pretty significant positive impact. It has taught me the importance of web based interfaces. I was really addicted to using a rich client to work on the site but now that there is a web interface for it I really see where I was just wasting tons of time and effort in doing things the hard way because I didn’t want to take the time to set up and learn to utilize this system.
It is almost one o’clock in the morning and time for me to turn in. My plan is to be working one day in Rochester and one in Buffalo this week, if at all possible. I have a short little contract that I need to take care of before too much time has passed.