“Stripes aims to provide an experience similar to owning Apple hardware, Sony TVs and luxury German cars…” – Stripes for Java Website.
I was not ready to get up when the alarm went off this morning. Oreo was very snuggly and I was still quite sleepy. Five thirty is too early for me this week.
I got up and started the shower – it can take up to thirty minutes for warm water to reach us when I get up this early in the morning. Then I hit the living room and uploaded the podcast and finished yesterday’s post. I didn’t want to leave them as it might be a whole day before they would get posted.
It was raining this morning which is a nice change from the haze.
I got to the office and discovered that IBM was giving a class on PowerHA (high availability clustering for IBM Power servers running AIX or Linux) which was not completely full so I was able to get in on it. It was a good session – lasting for four hours – and it covered a lot of AIX and IBM Power stuff that I was not very familiar with so it was worthwhile.
The weather was really crazy today. Tornado warning for much of Northern New Jersey – especially Middlesex County where Dominica and I used to live just two years ago. Very heavy rains hit the whole area on and off throughout the day. There was so much rain that it caused a low voltage issue to some of the New Jersey Transit lines making the commute rather rough for a lot of people.
I left the office in Warren at five in the afternoon to catch the shuttle to Summit in the hopes of meeting Dominica on her way home from picking up Oreo at daycare. I got to Summit just fine but the trains there were running very slowly and one was just sitting at the station. They announced that all New York bound trains were being rerouted to Hoboken because of the power issues. Luckily the Hoboken line is perfect for me so I was able to get to Newark Broad Street Station without any real problem. The train took quite a bit longer than usual but it wasn’t bad.
Dominica got to Newark a bit before I did but she parked by Washington Park for a few minutes to wait for me. It worked out pretty well. The rain stopped for the little bit that I had to walk over to the par, and then she was able to drive me back home to Eleven80.
Tonight was Dominica’s cooking for Oreo night. He has been on canned food since the weekend as she just hasn’t had the energy to cook for him.
We got dinner from the deli downstairs and watched a little of the first season of Frasier which I do not believe that I have ever seen. I have seen a lot of the show but the very early and late shows I am not familiar with very much.
By around nine o’clock this evening the storm really got heated up and it was just constant lightning all evening. Really heavy rain with just amazing levels of lightning. I spent a bit of time just watching out of the windows. The lighting, the heavy rain, the thunder. I love rain in the city. Watching the water pour down on the lighted streets. Cars plowing through the puddles. From our vantage in Eleven80 we are just close enough to the ground to be able to make out the fall of the rain but high enough to see the waves and changes from block to block.
We are really, really hoping that Oreo doesn’t decide that tonight is one of his late-night go for a walk nights. We will all be really sorry if he does.
I stumbled across an article about the Coco Bidet. I totally want one of these. Somehow the thought of how toilet paper works (or doesn’t work) is just kind of gross. Of course, if you want to be cheap you can always just get a water gun for your butt.
Katie was in Atlanta this week and shared her breakfast at Waffle House with us. Here is her chef.
I spent a bit of the evening working on getting my dual head monitor setup working on OpenSUSE Linux 11 on my HP dx5150 desktop. I installed OpenSUSE 11 probably a month or more ago and never got the dual monitors working correctly so tonight I dedicated my time to fixing the issue once and for all. It is working great now and I am very happy. Having all of my monitors working makes getting work done so much easier. It is amazing how quickly you become completely addicted to having all of that screen real estate at your disposal.
I also did some work on getting Red Hat Fedora 9 installed on to VirtualPC but I did not have nearly as much luck with that.
Tomorrow Oreo and I will be staying home as it is Thursday. It is good that Dominica does not need to take Oreo to daycare as there is likely to be some serious flooding as northern New Jersey does not have good flood control and all of the streets are underwater whenever there is a good rain. I am so thankful to not be commuting by car anymore. Not having Oreo means that Dominica can leave earlier for work and only has to do about half as many total miles.