April 23, 2006: My First Day Off in New Jersey

You know something that is free but can make you really happy? I know that you are thinking what I am thinking… awesome desktop wallpapers! If you want to take a little time to find some really awesome wallpaper for your desktop just head on over to KDE-Look where there is tons of amazingly beautiful stuff. They have images in just about any size you could want. Now the site is dedicated to making desktop stuff from the K Desktop Environment (KDE) but the wallpapers are just wallpapers and will work for any operating system. That is any except for SVG which are by far the highest quality and are not supported by the liked on Windows. Just another way that the Microsoft world is years behind everyone else.

Min and I slept in this morning. We were both pretty tired after having stayed up late last night. It was after 3:00 when we finally managed to get to bed. I had to get up this morning to help work remotely. There is always stuff that needs to be done. The life of an admin is never a restful one.

Before getting to bed last night I managed to hook up the new Netgear FVG318 firewall that I got. Now I can actually plug in multiple devices at once and I have wireless as well. First thing this morning I got my Grandstream IP Phone setup so that I can now make internal calls on that instead of using the headset on my computer. This will be much easier and I now have a speakerphone as well. And best of all it will actually ring like a real phone and I don’t have to be wearing the headset to hear if someone is trying to reach me. You don’t realize how important that is until you don’t have it.

I also unpacked my latest Amazon shipment. I got another book to study for the Solaris 10 certification exam. Plus two new movies: My Father the Hero which Min really loves and License To Drive which I have always wanted to see but somehow never managed to. I think that it was one of those movies that wasn’t very big at the time but I had wanted to see and missed and then by the time I could have seen it it was never around and everyone mostly forgot about it. Well now I have it. So there.

Today is awesome. The most relaxed day that I have had in over a month! My first day off in New Jersey. What a weird feeling it is to be here and not have to go to work. We started the day by going over to the Omega Diner on Route 1 and getting a late breakfast or early lunch. It was definitely lunch time and they were quite busy. I get the impression that they are always busy over there. The food was really good again. We are going to be very happy with that place.

After lunch we decided to run to the Pier One Outlet store because Dominica wanted to see if they had anything that we needed for the apartment. Of course they didn’t. That place is really crappy overall. I don’t like shopping there.

Then we decided that we wanted to see some areas where we were considering getting a future apartment or maybe property so we drove north east on Route 1 through Edison and up to Woodbridge. We managed to find a condominium complex that had an open house right next door to a Wegmans! So we stopped in. The place was a disaster. The condo was being sold way under market value because the person who had lived there had totally trashed the place and vanished – although there was a refridgerator in the apartment that couldn’t be opened so we had some suspicions. If you had seen the place you would draw the same conclusion. In fact, I didn’t tell you what we were thinking so you did just draw the same conclusion. Sicko. Stop watching morbid television like CSI!

We didn’t like the condo that we saw, obviously, but we did learn a lot about stuff in the area and got a good idea of how far it was to Woodbridge. It was a good use of our time. We came back to the apartment stopping quickly at Office Depot and Walmart on the way. We were only home for a little while before we had to get ready to drive south west down to Philadelphia to have dinner with Jenn.

This was our first time driving to Philadelphia from the apartment so I was very interested to see how long this would take. I timed the trip carefully. We left at exactly 6:40. It was 7:00 when we hit Princeton. 7:05 when we reached Trenton. And at 7:09 we were in Pennsylvania in the outskirts of Philly. So 29 minutes to the Pennsylvania portion of the Philadelphia metro area. Not bad at all.

It took longer to get to Jenn’s place in Norristown on the west of Philly than it did just to get to Philly itself. The Philadelphia metro area is wider than New Jersey is, I am pretty sure. But you can’t drive nearly as quickly through the city either. So the time can be misleading. It was about 7:45 or just a little after when we arrived at Jenn’s apartment.

We had a good time at dinner. One of Jenn’s friends came over and had dinner with us. We couldn’t stay very late because Jenn and I have work tomorrow and we hae a decent drive back to North Brunswick. It is weird that Jenn now lives almost as close to us as Josh does in Geneseo. It is just weird living down here in general.

We got home around midnight and pretty much went straight to bed. We were both really tired. Fortunately tomorrow is my first “Work from Home” day since starting work down here. So we will see how that goes. It is awesome that they have that kind of flexibility so that I can be at home working when Dominica is here. At least this week I can. Unfortunately my chair and desk and everything here isn’t up to par with what I have at the office yet so it is far less comfortable and I don’t have the triple LCDs, yet. Maybe I will break down tomorrow and get an office chair. Having nothing but folding chairs can really wear on you.

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