September 11, 2007: Basic Instructions

The incredible rains returned again today. Today they didn’t begin until almost noon although there was some amount of rain all night causing light flooding around Newark on my drive into the office.

At two thirty this morning the smoke detectors in Dominica and my apartment went off because of the incredible humidity. Of course I lept from bed and ran into the living room to see if there was actually any smoke or something causing the smoke detectors to go off. The moment I emerged from the bedroom my glasses fogged right up from the ambient humidity so I was pretty confident that that was the problem.

On my drive in, the windows of the Starbucks located roughly next door to our apartment were completely fogged up (someone was really enjoying their coffee this morning.) So much so that water was literally running down the windows on the inside!

I decided to get breakfast but to skip lunch today. I wanted coffee so I went down to the cafeteria and a large coffee, a donut (don’t tell Dominica) and an egg ‘n’ cheese on a hard roll.

One of the Java developers that I work with – I work with a lot of them – told me to definitely switch to using the Eclipse IDE for my Java work. So I downloaded and installed that today and began to play with it. I first tried out Eclipse a very long time ago and it has definitely come a very long way since that first trial that I gave it several years ago. So far it is working very well for me but my needs are incredibly basic at the moment. I have been using jEdit and vi for my Java development up to this point so the comparison is not really relevant.

Thanks to Scott Adams, today I discovered a new comic strip called Basic Instructions. Good stuff. Very entertaining. I think that I especially like the strip because the main character is like a thin, and funny, version of me. I especially like the one on “Morning People“. This one on “Justifying Extravagant Purchases to Your Spouse” is totally Dominica and I. (It even looks like me! And his name is Scott!)

This “semester” I am taking “Introduction to Storage Networks” from the HP Learning Center. I am halfway through that class today. Basic stuff but all learning is good learning, I say.

I went home at normal time.  It was still raining but only lightly by that time.  I was home by five.  We had two packages delivered today.  One package was Dominica’s next order of coffee for her Keurig one cup coffee maker that she just loves.  And the other was my “new” SUN SunFire V100 server which I imediately unpacked and set up to test out.  Externally the machine was immaculate and all the physical parts were as described.  The machine powered on easy from the LOM and booted right into Solaris.  Everything checked right out.
Before Dominica got home I unpacked her new coffee and started brewing her a fresh cup of something other than the same coffee that she has been stuck with for the past week or two.  Then I called Nino’s in Harrison and ordered in some pasta for dinner.  Fettuccini alfredo for me (with broccoli and eggplant) and fettuccini funghi for her and some garlic bread.  I have come to believe that Dominica would much rather have me just order dinner and decide what she is getting than have to look at a menu and decide for herself.  So I just ordered it.

We ate our dinners and started the fourth season of Ballykissangel.  Dominica did some laundry and I got to work building Solaris servers.

I am working from home in the morning.  I have to go to Newark court in the morning to deal with my traffic tickets from several weeks ago.  That is at eight thirty in the morning at the court on Green Street just around the corner.  At least it is just around the corner.

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