September 9, 2006

I was awake, on my own, at five in the morning. Way too early to be awake but what are you going to do. I tried laying in bed for about half an hour but that didn’t get me anywhere so I decided that I would just be happier if I got myself out of bed and did something productive. Normally Oreo would have gotten up with me but he is still attempting to recover from his first day at daycare two days ago. He has been pretty much sleeping continuously since having gone. That is the one big upside to using daycare for him – instead of spending all of his time at home needing excercise which we don’t have time to give him enough of he will get that at daycare and can spend his time at home just hanging out with us.

Dominica surprised me by getting up at half past seven herself. I figured that she would sleep in quite a bit today. Oreo was glad to get up to and played a lot all morning. I did a little light work here and there and spent most of the morning reading. I finished reading Frederick Brooks’ “The Mythical Man-Month” today – the Anniversary Edition with the four extra chapters making for an almost thirty percent longer book in total. It is a good read and it is nice to see parrallels between software engineering today and the projects of the 1960’s. It was also cool to discover that Frederick Brooks had worked at IBM Endicott (he was a system architect) since I worked there in the same job role some fourty years later. In fact, it is completely possible that I was the last person to have performed that job function at IBM Endicott before the facility was closed.

Today is mostly a lazy day and a well deserved one at that. Dominica managed to drag me out of the house after our lunch of leftovers to go shoe shopping. My current casual dress shoes, which at this point are several years old and have been well worn, are completely destroyed and are likely to fall off of my feet in the very near future. I have been putting off going shoe shopping because I have a massive dislike for trying on shoes in stores. But it had to be done and Dominica promised that we would do it as quick and as painlessly as possible. We ended up just going to Sears up the street where the sales tax is just 3.5% and there was a sale on as well. I managed to find four pairs of shoes. Four pairs! That might be as many shoes as I have ever bought for myself as an adult (and I don’t mean at any one time I mean total!) It probably isn’t quite that dramatic but it is definitely a significant percentage of my adult shoe buying. Hopefully this shopping trip will last me for quite some time.

I only managed to read a single book all week. That gives you an idea of just how tired I have been. Today I moved on and began reading “Practices of an Agile Developer” by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt. I am familiar with Venkat’s writing as he is a popular Java developer and writer who appears frequently in the Java Developer’s Journal which I subscribe to and read with some regularity.

I put in some time this afternoon while Dominica was napping to work on the assett tracking system that I had been working on several weeks ago. It is a rather large system and takes a lot to do anything with it right now so I am trying to work on it a little at a time as I have the opportunities. I need to work on the movie database project as well but that isn’t as high of a priority. Really the thing that I need to do with that is to get the system populated with all of the data. Other than that it is quite usable as it stands. But the assett system still needs a lot of work.

I also worked on the server that is now located in Scranton. It is such a pleasure working on a machine located in such a fast and easy to use data center. Not only is the system itself a bit higher end than we are used to working with and not only is the connection that we have in Scranton a significant upgrade for us but also we have higher end switching, routing and VPN aggregation and all of this together is really noticeable.

Dominica napped for several hours and didn’t get up until almost seven in the evening. When she finally got moving we went out to Tanjore for Indian and then hit the ice cream parlour next door for some dessert. We have been so busy the last few weeks that we haven’t been able to get to Tanjore as often as we would like.

We didn’t look at apartments today as neither of us had any energy for that level of undertaking but we really cannot avoid it any longer. We have an appointment to look at a small one bedroom apartment in Jersey City tomorrow morning at eleven. It is small but it is in the perfect location for commuting and it has a great view of Manhattan which is very important to me.

I spent the remaining evening working on the assett tracking system that I have been working on. (Now if that isn’t a redundant sentance I don’t know what is.) I got a lot of good work done tonight and I am really happy with how it is coming along. I am learning a lot while working on it. It is a good experience for me.

Dominica spent the evening looking up apartments that we are interested in looking at tomorrow in Jersey City and Hoboken. She has managed to come up with several so we are going to have a really busy day tomorrow.

We went to bed on the early side. We are getting old and both of us have to be up early all week long so shifting our schedules for the weekend doesn’t make much sense. Poor Oreo, he misses sleeping in late. He really misses when Min and I used to sleep in shifts – he pretty much never had to get out of bed.

Leave a comment