Today is my last actually day being based in Warren, New Jersey. Tomorrow is my last official day but tomorrow I will be working from home so today is the last time that I do the regular commute out to here. It is weird as this office in Warren is the office that I have worked in the most ever! I am not leaving the company just changing office locations and I will still be out here on a regular basis but it is a little weird to be switching into Manhattan.
Oreo is alone again today but it is his last day alone this week. He will be fine. Susan is going to walk him and Min will get home as quickly as she can after work. After work for me today I am taking advantage of my last day in Warren to make a run to Scranton after work. John Stephens, the Surfing IT Wizard, is meeting me there so that he can see the servers and so that we can do dinner and catch up.
Amazon is beta testing their new DRM free MP3 music download store today! Totally worth checking out. No DRM and no worthless Apple formats. It doesn’t get much better than that. Ogg Vorbis is better, yes. But only so much better. This is the big leap.
While researching music on the Amazon store I discovered that Robert Plant, yes that Robert Plant, is doing a duet album with Allison Kraus. Now that is weird.
At three I took a load of the stuff from my desk out to my car in preparation for my departure from Warren. I stepped outside and was greeted to a heat wave. It felt like afternoon on an island paradise (that’s a normal person’s island paradise and not mine.) This is not weather that you expect as October approaches. Very abnormal.
I left work at four thirty. Not as early as I had hoped but servieable, nonetheless. I headed west on i78 as quickly as I could which wasn’t very fast as traffic was horrible. No stopped traffic but it was highly congested and moving quite slowly the whole way through New Jersey.
I got into Pennsylvania and took the usual PA33 north to i80 west and then north on i380. While headed up i380 suddenly the sky grew dark – but not that bluish hued grey dark of a thunderstorm but that yellowish grey dark of the apocalypse. Dominica and Andy may remember one day of the most amazing “yellow dark storm” in Ithaca when we all lived in the house on Observatory Circle. It was similar to that.
Within minutes everything went from clear and sunny to one of the heaviest thunderstorms that I have ever been in. The rain came down so hard at one point that I lost site of the hood of the car! The whole storm didn’t last long but it was insanely intense. I couldn’t believe it. And while it was still coming down so hard I was having problems keeping my eyes open from the blinding sunlight that was still streaming in! It was crazy.
John Stephens called me from Scranton, just a few miles away, to check in on my estimated time of arrival. He said that the skies were clear and sunny and that there was no sign of the storm where he was. Very strange.
I arrived in Scranton at a quarter after six. John and I dropped off the servers that I was delivering and then we drove down to the University of Scranton “downtown” region and got dinner at a pub there. Dinner was good. I had never been to this particular part of Scranton before and it is really beautiful. What a neat city.
It was around ten when I pulled into Eleven 80. It was a long evening but it was nice to get to see the Surfing IT Wizard for the first time in almost two years and it was really good to have been able to have delivered so many machines that were filling up the tiny Newark apartment. This is a huge improvement.
Dad sent me a link to Students Worshipping the Engineering Fountain at Purdue University on YouTube.