October 3, 2008: Big Reading Day

49 Days to Baby Day! (33 Weeks Pregnant)

19 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing in 4 – 22 days; Fifth Wedding Anniversary 1 Day.

My goal for today is to achieve 300 reputation points (karma) on StackOverflow.  (I started the day with 219.)

Firefox users out there looking to enhance their image searching capabilities (on Windows and OSX, at least, we Linux users are left out on this one) definitely need to check out the free plugin available from CoolIris.  This is really awesome.  CoolIris was formerly known as PicLens.  Once you have the plugin installed do a Yahoo or Google image search and click the little CoolIris icon on one of the images and you will discover a whole new way to explore images online.

I got up at seven today and got ready a bit earlier than usual.  I logged into the office early and went through my mail.  Looking to be a slow day so far.

I starting reading the “No Fluff, Just Stuff 2007 Anthology (Volume II)“, edited by Neal Ford, today.  It has been on my bookshelf for a while and I have been wanting to read it but just have been backed up with other books that keep my occupied.  This is one of the books that I get to read purely for fun rather than for school or consulting purposes.

I did a little working from home early on this morning but was stopped by what appears to be overloaded servers at the office as the connection simply was not working.  My VPN dropped at least five or six times if not more.  Eventually I gave up and ran into the office as quickly as I could.  It was still pretty early compared to when I usually go into the office but normally I am able to get more work cleaned up from home before heading in.

If you are an AJAX gearhead and have not heard yet, Microsoft has announced support for JQuery built in to Visual Studio 2008!  This is awesome.

The Jedi Council Speaks has a new CafePress store where you can buy TJCS gear.

For lunch today Dan, John and I went out to Ulysses on Stone.  It may seem unbelievable but this was actually my first ever trip to Ulysses.  Of all of the places on Stone, Ulysses seems to be the most popular and well known but it is about the only place on the street where I have never been.  So today I got to try it out.  Ulysses is well known as a Wall Street watering hole in the evenings.

We all got the daily special which was the sesame encrusted tuna with wasabi cream sauce.  It was very good.  The price was not all that bad either.

I was supposed to do coffee with Katie this afternoon but she got caught in meetings and I never heard from her.  Shreyash and I ended up going down to Financier for our afternoon coffee.  I am at Financier so often that they say hello to me when they see me on the street.  I am one of their best known customers!

I was very productive today overall.  In addition to other tasks I was able to go through a short introductory tutorial for the Scheme dialect of Lisp and to do quite a bit of discussion work in my Process Management class at RIT.

I was pretty busy with work until a bit after six this evening.  Dan and I walked up to Trinity and then I stopped in at Borders at 100 Broadway  to do some quick shopping.  I picked up the “Ruby Phrasebook” and “Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy“.  Then on to Newark.

I did some distance calculations today about how much walking that I do each day.  The distance from the World Trade Center to my office on Wall Street is .9 miles outside with enough interior walking to take it up to a full mile.  My walk down to Stone St. which I do twice each day is .3 miles in each direction which is a total of 1.2 miles.  My walk from the apartment to Penn Station in Newark is an additional .5 miles in each direction.  So my total daily walk when I go into the city is 4.2 miles.  I’ve been saying that I do closer to two miles each day and people tell me that I am crazy about how long it takes and how far that it is.  But thanks to Google Maps “Walking” directions we now know how far it is and it is much farther than we had thought.

I got home and we ordered in from Nino’s for dinner and spent the evening watching shows on the AppleTV.  While we were waiting for the food to arrive, though, I took the opportunity to do some serious reading and managed to make some really good headway in my new Rails book.  In all I read almost ninety pages tonight which is pretty good for a late night after a long day at the office.

We actually stayed up a bit late tonight.  It was eleven thirty when I took Oreo out for his late night walkies and Dominica went to sleep.  I read until almost one in the morning and then turned in myself.

Tomorrow is our five year anniversary but we really can’t be going anywhere as there is a major change going on at the office and I have to be home all day to support it in case anything goes wrong.  If possible we are going to attempt to go out to Panera for our anniversary dinner tomorrow night but we will have to see how work goes and how tired Dominica is.