Cold, rainy and windy. That is my day today. I had to be up early to do some early morning deployment work to get teams prepped for the work that we will do tonight. Then I covered an early morning conference call. Nothing exciting, just one of those “sit on the phone in case something happens” calls. After that it was time to get into the office.
I discovered a very cool web application today at Ulteo.com. The idea of Ulteo is to provide free, online web applications and even an entire online KDE desktop in your browser. The service is still in beta and there are a limited number of accounts available. But I managed to snag one and am trying out the service. So far it works pretty well. You get free storage and a full desktop loaded with common applications like OpenOffice. It uses Java in your web browser so you can access your new “desktop” from just about anywhere. There is also an option to “share” your desktop which I have not tried yet but am very interested in possibly using as a collaboration tool.
My trip to the office was quite long. It was raining so I brought my hat and umbrella with me. I stopped and ate at Food for Life on the way so that I wouldn’t have to worry about lunch until later. Then I walked to Newark Penn Station through the Gateway Center to stay dry. There is a fair amount of rain coming down and it is rather cold.
Once I got to Manhattan I discovered that it was quite windy and raining much harder over here. I tried using the umbrella and only made it one block before the wind inverted it and I had to give up on it. With all of the construction going on and so many people just lazily making their way indirectly all over the place it took forever to get down to Wall Street and by the time that I made it all of the way to the office I was completely drenched. Drenched and frozen.
Dominica and I checked on the weather and decided that traveling today was just a foolish idea. Everyone that I work with from Toronto was calling in due to the weather first thing this morning. They have seven inches from overnight snow that has fallen in the Toronto area. I talked to dad this morning and the Rochester area doesn’t have the snow but does have quite a bit of ice as it was warmer there and the storm advisory for the region has been extended until midnight. That means that if we were to drive there that we would be driving in the storm the entire way.
So we are staying in Newark this weekend and tonight we have an initial “start up” Dungeons and Dragons game. We have Pam’s brother Feder who has a ton of D&D experience and is going to be Dungeon Mastering a new group for us which means that I actually get to play which is awesome. I have really been wanting to play so I am very excited. It is unfortunate that we have to start so late tonight and then there is that American football game on Sunday that takes away what would otherwise be a perfect day for it as well.
Over her lunch break today, Dominica ran out to Target to do some shopping. It is great that she is able to get things so easily from work. She must go out shopping at least three times a week during her lunch breaks.
Dad discovered that there was a storm heading out way that was due to hit around five this evening. So just after four I called to the New Jersey office and coordinated running home early to avoid another awful walk in bad weather. The timing was perfect and I was able to get home in pretty good conditions and then cover the evening so that everyone else could leave early to avoid the traffic and bad weather and get a start on the weekend.
Another Amazon shipment arrived today. I got the new Pragmatic Programmers “Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!” as well as R. A. Salvatore’s “The Hunter’s Blade Trilogy”.
Our secondary Dungeons and Dragons group got together around eight in the evening. This is the first meeting of our second, smaller group. We are playing a mix of AD&D 2nd Edition rules with D&D 3.5 Edition rules and playing in the traditional Mystara (aka Known World) setting. We spent the night getting our characters set up so that we can play the next time that we get together. We broke around eleven thirty to call it a night. Most of us have something that we need to do tomorrow morning so we aren’t in good shape to go very late tonight.
The word of the day is perseveration.