I was pretty tired when I got up at eight this morning. Only five hours or sleep or less. Dominica got right up at around seven thirty and took a shower so I got to hang out with Liesl this morning. We played for about an hour which was nice. It is great having a Liesl with whom to start the day. She is very much a morning person at this stage. She wakes up and is instantly excited and happy. No “wind up” period for her. Hopefully she keeps that throughout her life. Dominica has a rough time kick starting the day and that makes life a lot more rough.
We had a serious cold front move in today. It was overcast and drizzly most of the morning and then, around noonish, the snow started! Yes, snow, on the ides of October! Who would have guessed. And this is down in the normally mild Hudson Valley. Generally far warmer than back home.
Today was pretty busy at work. Quite busy indeed. I took a rather short lunch to hang out with Dominica and Liesl. We had Dominica’s awesome taco salad with chipotle ranch dressing and watched an episode of the seventh season of The Gilmore Girls. We have not watched that show in quite a while but never finished the final season so I don’t know how it ends. I’ve seen six and a half seasons thus far and would kind of like to just wrap it up. That is a lot of that show to have watched without having finished it.
I can’t believe that today is Thursday. Where has this week gone? I am very happy to have my desktop back up and working today! At least mostly working. Mozy backup still does not work at all and I am still getting a few packet problems but very few. Few enough that I think that everything is fixed. I am just having a really hard time being absolutely, completely sure.
The big news in the US, and I guess around the world, today was the story of a six year old boy who went flying in a giant helium balloon from Fort Collins, Colorado to Denver. The balloon crash landed and no one was found inside. It was an all afternoon news event with people following the story pretty intently. Later, long after the balloon crashed, we finally learned that the boy had been hiding in his parents’ attic the entire time and apparently his brother and he had made the story up. The military had helicopters out chasing the balloon and everything. It was rather a costly search and rescue operation underway that took most of the day. Quite the elaborate stunt to have pulled.
Today I got my invite to Google Wave. Wave is the hot, new email and instant messaging replacement technology that Google has been touting for some time. It is about bringing traditional modes of communication together in a new, collaborative way. This is just a developer’s preview so it is not even up to Alpha status yet so lots of bugs but it is working enough to give us an idea of how the thing will work.
I’ve got four friends who are on Google Wave at the moment so I got a chance to check it out for about half an hour or so this evening. Definitely interesting but a long way to go before it is really useful. The hardest part is dealing with the overwhelming about of information streaming at you in a very confusing manner. You see people typing to you live and you can interject things into past portions of the conversation and do weird things that make it very difficult to follow. It will definitely take a lot of getting used to before I am able to use it on a regular basis. But lots of great ideas in there. I will keep reporting on it as I get a chance to really test it out.
Work went really late tonight. It was eight before I was able to call it a day and take the laptop upstairs to hang out with the family! That worked out alright, though, since Liesl had decided to take a late afternoon nap and slept from four or five until seven thirty. So I wasn’t missing my evening with her really.
This evening Dominica and I watched the next three episodes of Torchwood which we have on BluRay from Netflix. That show is pretty good. It really does a pretty good job of carrying on the tradition of Dr. Who in a new setting. We are really enjoying it. Unfortunately they put very few episodes onto each disk which makes no sense at all to me since the entire season would easily fit onto just one or two disks lowering the production costs by quite a bit. I can’t figure out the logic of spreading the show out onto several disks and only putting two or three episodes on each one. BluRay disks have tons of storage space and can easily fit a lot of episodes.