As always seems to happen when I am scheduled to work the early shift at the office – I woke up at 3:00 in the morning. Today I had some weird pain in my stomach and had to get out of bed. I am fine now but it got me moving quite a bit earlier than I had wanted to. I ended up starting working from home at 3:45 and put it a busy morning up until 5:45. Two hours before even leaving the house. Not too shabby.
I got to the office at 6:30 to officially start my day. I actually like these early mornings. I seem to be able to get a lot done and I feel better about my day. The best part is, of course, that I then get to leave early.
I have managed to get a lot done this week. I forgot to mention the other day that I scrambled to complete a bunch of HP classes that I have been taking this “semester” and this week I completed: “Microsoft Access 2003: Introduction”, ” Security for IT Professionals”, “Design Your Own Business Documents” and “Microsoft Windows Server 2003: Administering.” It was a busy semester. I also finished reading Joel Spolsky’s “The Best Software Writing I”. Now I am attempting to finish the book “Embracing Insanity” which I started a long time ago and never made it all of the way through.
MSNBC reported that Pluto Is No Longer A Planet. In some ways this is sad as now we only have eight planets and all of that stuff that we learned since we were kids is wrong. But Pluto has a wacky orbit compared to the planets and that should have been tipping everyone off. Of course in this article they state the reason why Pluto was demoted using the new criteria for determining what is and isn’t a planet: “A planet1 is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.” MSNBC then goes on to state that the reason why Pluto was rejected as being a planet for failing to clear the path around its orbit because it crosses orbits with Neptune. Um, did no one read that sentence? Later in the article MSNBC goes into depth about the much more heated debate as astronomers point out that earth, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, etc. all of uncleared orbits making them not planets either. It turns out that the voting on Pluto’s status was a farce with only a select handful of astronomers (who elected these people anyway) voting and 9,500 astronomers at the conference being shunned. It sounds like the scientific nature of the current astronomic field is being called into question here. If they can’t handle English definitions then how can they practice science? Clearly the astronomers involved in the voting and the subsequent application of the decision do not have the necessary astronomic backgrounds to complete a standard middle school introduction to the Solar system!
My day was very busy up until lunch time. Then things cooled down a lot which I really appreciated. It is nice to have things kind of taper off at the end of the week. I was scheduled to do some work later this evening but someone on my team covered that for me so that I would be able to leave early and get on the road towards Frankfort.
Dominica got onto the road coming from North Brunswick at 1:30 this afternoon. Not too bad. She is picking me up at work. We are leaving my car here at the office. It is awesome having a “gated” office where I can just leave my car if I need to and I managed to park right in front of the entrance so it is extra safe. We are taking the BMW to Frankfort this weekend and then Dominica will take me to work on Monday morning.
We are hoping to be able to arrive in Frankfort by dinner time. Close to 6:30. We will see. We are going to attempt taking the New York State Thruway almost the entire way. Part of the way will be roads that I have never taken before so that should help to make it more interesting.
I am going to go ahead and post today’s daily from the office so that it doesn’t get neglected over the weekend. I will have my laptop but will probably be out of touch most of the weekend. We will be back to New Jersey on Sunday afternoon, though, because I have work that needs my attention starting at midnight.
Today I had my first actual failure of WordPress. I attempted to post today’s update and instead of posting it just logged out and lost my changes. That wasn’t very cool. But fortunately I was able to just go “back” in my browser and everything was still saved in the browser so it was okay.