August already. That’s crazy. It feels like August when you are outside walking, though. It is hot and humid.
I started working at seven thirty this morning. My morning really was not all that bad. I worked for about two hours getting everything caught up and in good order. There was work to do, but I would not classify the morning as being necessarily busy.
I grab the train and headed off to Wall Street at what seemed to be the most appropriately slow time of the morning when no one was likely to require my attention for a little while.
Friday lunches are always an adventure in Manhattan. Today, Katie came up from the waterfront and met me on on Stone to eat at Smorgas Chef, an upscale Swedish eatery there. The food was excellent. I had warm goat cheese and beet salad to start and my meal was Norwegian salmon and scrambled eggs on toast. Very tasty. The one thing that was weird was that because the lunch rush was so busy we had to share a rather small four person table with two other people. It was rather awkward.
Afterwards we hit Financier for coffee and take-home goodies. I definitely love the food choices that working in Manhattan provides.
I was smart enough to grab take-home treats from Financier Patisserie for Dominica too. You can’t get food like this in New Jersey.
Tomorrow I have an extremely busy day scheduled. My morning deployments start at eight in the morning and an all-morning conference call supporting a storage migration starts at nine. In addition to five hours of already scheduled work I also have quite a bit of anytime work to do tomorrow when I have the opportunity. I am going to be working a full day most likely. Because I have to spend so much of the time on the phone we decided that I really needed to have a new phone before tomorrow if at all possible.
We shopped around a little and decided to get a Panasonic DECT 6.0 wireless phone system with three handsets and a speakerphone feature – which is actually the most critical feature at this point. Our old Uniden wireless phone system died some time ago and we have been living with a $10 Walmart special bare-bones phone for the last two years and it is pretty awful. We will be very happy to have wireless, speakerphone, CallerID, headset, etc. It will make our lives a lot easier.
We really have to have a new phone soon either way as we will not be able to live with just a single, non-wireless phone once we move into the new house in Peekskill. Having three floors and a baby will make that just impossible. We will require there to be phone access throughout the house.
For those who are unfamiliar with the DECT 6.0 standard in wireless phones – this is a 1.9GHz frequency band standard (1.8GHz outside of the US) with a new standard designed just for voice communications. This frequency range is nice because it does not interfere with the 2.4GHz band used for 802.11b/g/n that we normally use for our WiFi equipment in the house. The 1.9GHz band also gets greater range than the higher frequency bands get. If you are using WiFi, and who isn’t these days, and you still need a legacy phone system then DECT 6.0 is a very good choice. It is also less expensive to manufacture due to the lower technical challenges of making transceivers in this range. (We do not use a legacy phone system outside of the house, but our Vonage VoIP telephone system comes into the house digitally and then is transferred into legacy in-house analogue wiring. It is a strange system but it is simple and straightforward. I would prefer all digital but Vonage does not offer that in any useful form yet.)
Today involved more “trying out” of Twitter. I am able to use it from my BlackBerry now. I started using it via the web browser but that was pretty painful. So I discovered and installed TwitterBerry to see if that would work a bit better. That makes the Twitter updating process a million times easier and quicker. Now I might do it all of the time. I even got Dominica to sign up for Twitter today. Now she can keep everyone up to date on her comings and goings. She has tried blogging in the past but was unable to keep it up for any length of time finding it difficult to figure out what to write about. Maybe with microblogging and having access from her BlackBerry she will be able to stick with it.
So far I had only put a single application onto my BlackBerry 8830 SmartPhone – an SSH terminal application used to access UNIX servers remotely which worked worlds better than a similar application on the sad Palm PDA that I had before the BlackBerry. After trying TwitterBerry I realized that there is a world of useful handheld applications that I am missing. So I downloaded the BlackBerry FaceBook application as well. I am becoming more and more mobile as we speak. Although we aren’t really speaking.
My evening was quite busy. There is nothing “special” going on at the office which means that the developments are all running full steam ahead getting deployments ready making my night quite busy. The more upheaval at work the less work there is for me. When things are quiet is when I get really heavily loaded down on Friday nights.
My night became a very late one. At one point I really thought that I would be leaving the office a little before six in the evening. That was not to be. One of my deployments ended up keeping me in the office until well after eight at night – constantly dangling the carrot of hope before my eyes thinking that the software to be deployed would be available any minute. We didn’t end up getting to even begin the installation until ten past eight in the evening. Dominica was already home and well into watching 27 Dresses while I was still preparing for the work to begin.
I was in the office so late this evening that they shut off the lights on me and, as far as I could tell, all but one other person from my entire floor had left. It was very lonely, reminding me of my days working at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. where I would often work late into the night in an office where everyone had left hours before.
I got home at a quarter until ten! What a late day. I had just enough time to call Emily and to wish her a happy birthday. For her birthday we bought her an 8.1MP Samsung digital camera. She has been a bit of a photographer for a while always stealing her mom’s camera so we thought that she should have her own. She is the same age that I was when I got my first camera. My first camera was given to me by my parents while on our way to Bar Harbor, Maine for my first ever vacation there. Emily just got back from her first trip to Maine a few days ago.
It was pretty much straight to bed for us after eating the goodies that I brought home from Financier. I have to be up early tomorrow to go back to work, unfortunately.