2 Days to Baby Day! (39 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)
One Laptop Per Child XO Linux laptop is available again, this year from Amazon. The program is just like it was last your. For $199 you can donate an XO to a child somewhere in the developing world or, for $399, you can donate one and get one for yourself. Makes a great gift for the techie in your life (this thing is just plain cool) or for a child. If you are a technology collector like me this is a must have for your collection, and the first $199 is tax deductable and buying a laptop for a child is just plain awesome.
I forgot to set my alarm last night but fortunately woke up on my own before five thirty this morning. That could have been very bad. I got up, did some reading, deployed some packages for the office, got ready and Dominica drove me down to the train station. We ended up being just a minute or two behind the train and ended up missing the 6:42. It was really cold out this morning so Dominica waited at the train station with me and we sat in the car until I caught the 7:08 train instead. That was crappy.
Katie turned me on to having my Twitter feed go directly into FaceBook so that my FaceBook Status is updated automatically by my tweets on Twitter. Now I only have to update Twitter and the FaceBook users will see me automatically. That is great since I have that handy Twitter command line client and, as of today, my office has opened up the firewall to let us access Twitter but not FaceBook. Now I am only updating one microblogging location instead of two. Much better.
Danielle got hooked up with Twitter today as well.
Dan and I went swimming over lunch today. Katie was not able to go. I did 1,500 yards today. Not a major workout but it was a good hour of cardio which is what I need the most.
Our new basement theatre seating arrived today from Bob’s Discount Furniture. The new chest that is going to our bedroom is back ordered and is expected to arrive on Friday. Dad loves the new seating in the basement and is thinking about possibly sleeping down there tonight rather than in the living room.
Today was a brutal day for the stock markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below the 8,000 mark as the US considers the very real possibility that it is going to let the big three American automakers just fail without any hope of a bailout. Overall, Americans seem very favourable to watching the automakers fail. No one wants their taxes to go up to pay for bloated, paperwork heavy, inefficient American manufacturing to be saved when they have had decades to figure out how to operate like lean, competitive companies. Citi shares closed today at just $6.25. This is a crazy market.
Consumer pricing was released today and we have had the biggest one month downturn in consumer prices since 1947. So while the market is doing poorly and no one is making any money (whatever that means) the price of things is going down, way down. Normal goods are getting cheaper and fuel is practically free compared to where it was just six months ago.
I was stuck in the office until after six thirty. I made the 7:18 train out of Grand Central so Dominica was able to pick me up at 8:13. I’ve been reading “Spellfire” by Ed Greenwood while on the train. I’ve been reading this book for months (read: started it months ago and haven’t gotten back to it.) So I am trying to finish it now. Ramona will be very pleased that I am reading a fiction book for a change. Although it really isn’t a very good one.
For dinner Dominica made Quorn fake-chicken with gruyere and goat cheese, mixed vegetables and cornbread stuffing. It was delicious.
After dinner I went down to the basement to work on some projects. There is always so much to be done. I have no spare time now that I am commuting so much. I feel like I get home just barely in time to get to bed. My readers will notice that I have all but stopped watching any shows at all. I am not getting a lot of sleep either. I am looking forward to the more relaxed schedule of having a baby! 😉
Oreo has really been missing me. He comes down to the basement to lay beside me or sits with me in the chair in the living room. It has been a long time since he has been so snuggly.
I worked until well after eleven. I spent the entire night trying to get connectivity to a VMWare Server. VMWare has made even their simplest packages so hard to find on their website and so large and cumbersome to download that it took all evening to get anything at all working. In the end I had to abandon even the simplest project for the evening as there was enough time to get one working install of the VMWare Client before it was well past time to go to bed. I am going to be very tired tomorrow.
I may have to stay home simply because I am getting too tired with everything that is going on and all of the commuting. At the current rate, Dominica is not going to be going into labor anytime soon and having me get worn out is not a good way to be prepared for things.