November 5, 2008: Very Long Day

16 Days to Baby Day! (37 Weeks and 5 Days Pregnant)

I got myself up at six this morning on just five and a half hours of sleep.  I am pretty tired today.  I had hoped to maybe make the 6:42 train but that just wasn’t possible so I got the 7:08.  That turned out to be very unfortunate as the 7:08 had a delay and we ended up just sitting north of Tarrytown on the tracks for almost an hour.  It was two hours and forty minutes of travel time from home to the office.  What a long start to the morning.  At least I will get to swim today since I am in the city.  Yay exercise!

Here is an FYI – my favourite thing about Joe Biden is that he is a major supporter of Amtrak and public rail transportation.  Yay Amtrak!  It would be so awesome if Joe was able to advance the rail agenda over the next four years.  The recent fuel crisis may act as a catalyst to make Americans realize that we need to beef up our efficient rail infrastructure.

Yesterday on my train ride home I finished reading Marc Levinson’s “Guide to Financial Markets, 4th Ed.” published by The Economist and Bloomberg.  Today, on my long train ride, I began reading “The Victory of Reason” by Rodney Stark.

I finally got to work but decided that breakfast was needed.  Shreyash and I walked down to Financier and got coffee and I got a croissant with brie for breakfast.  Yummy.

Dan and I took a late lunch and headed to the gym around two this afternoon to go swimming.  This is my fourth week of getting into the pool on a regular basis.  It is starting to feel pretty good although I feel like I am covered in chlorine all of the time.  Taking a shower at the gym doesn’t really get the chlorine off very well.  Today was a good swim, almost an hour.

I looked at SGL’s information on Google Analytics today and it would appear that readership has really increased in the last month or two.  I do not look at the stats on the site very often so it was a nice surprise to find that we have ten to twenty percent more readers now than we did just two months ago!  Awesome.  Keep telling your friends.

I decided that the only way for me to remain productive on my final paper was to stay late in the office and just keep working on it.  I have a very tiny window in which to work on it and if I don’t stay on top of it I will not be able to finish it by Friday.  The work is not hard but there is a massive amount of it to do before Friday night.

Dominica had her next doctor’s appointment today.  Everything went well there and she got home around seven this evening.  Crazy that her doctor’s office is open so late.

While I was stuck working on my process management paper Dominica did some more testing with PlayOn and the PS3 and got NetFlix working now in addition to Hulu which we had working before.  She says that it works just as well as Hulu worked and that the image looks better coming through PlayOn and up to the PS3 and displayed on the big screen than it did on her laptop.  That might be because of the PS3’s playback capabilities, because of the way that the Westinghouse blends the image compared to her precision Samsung monitor or just because the PlayOn server detects us having a faster Internet connection in Peekskill than we were getting in Newark and therefore we might be getting a higher quality video stream.  In any case, its awesome that the system works so well.  It’s like having the best features of television without the crap of commercials and the cost of cable.  It can’t be very long before services like Netflix will be able to deliver high definition video that rivals what cable is delivering today.

I left the office at nine thirty and made the 10:12 train out of Grand Central Terminal.  That meant arriving at Peekskill at 11:06.  What a late day!  I called Dominica from the train and she was already asleep and was not at all happy to have to come down to get me.  This week’s schedule is really rough on both of us.  It is a very good thing that she is done with work and home full time now or we would be in really rough shape.  I would be taking a taxi constantly otherwise.

Got home and finally got some dinner.  Just some stuff from the fridge that Dominica picked up at the grocery store today.  Finally we can have food in the house again and actually get to eat something different and healthy, and fresh breads too.  This is great.

I decided that I just have to work from home tomorrow.  There is no way around it.  I am far too tired to be able to go in early enough to get anything done nor do I have the four hours of commuting to spare at the moment.  Beyond that, there is no way that Dominica can get up in the morning to take me to the train station.

It was around midnight when I finally got to bed.