May 3, 2009: Walking Around Peekskill

Thanks to Francis for turning me on to JoshBlog’s Logic Gate Simulator.  Simple and tons of fun and it teaches about logic gates!  Can’t go wrong.  This is pretty much as good as those electronic kits that you get for kids but with less mess and free.  Every kid should play with this to learn about logic gates.  Adults really should as well.  Good stuff.

Today ended up being a really awesome day.  There wasn’t so much work as to keep me buried and for the first time in a long time I was actually able to make real progress and to really feel like I was being productive.  I got right to work building that Window Server 2003 machine that was such a problem yesterday.  I had a good plan for it today and was able to go pretty quickly with this fresh attempt.  The secret for this type of install is to have Server Pack 2 downloaded as an ISO file so that you can mount it up to the virtual machine and get it installed before ever even configuring Internet access.

I spent the whole day working but unlike a lot of days where I work and work and end up just spinning my wheels and getting exhausted I actually got a ton accomplished today.  That felt really good.

After work tonight I decided that I really needed to take some time and get some exercise.  It was too cold for Liesl to go out for a walk because it was raining.  So I just went on my own.  I walked downtown looking for coffee.  Of course, being in the New York Metro area, there was no coffee to be found.  The New York area is the sleepiest area I have ever known.  Everything closes so early around here.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  I am so not used to how laid-back life is down here.  It is very frustrating as an Upstater to come down here and have to deal with how slowly everything moves.

There was a lot of activity going on downtown so I walked around and found the Cinco de Mayo celebration underway.  They had the downtown streets blocked off and live music and stuff.  Had we been down there early in the day there had been a lot of food.  But, of course, it was all gone by the time that I was even ready for afternoon coffee let alone dinner.

Since I was already out and walkingI walked all the way across town, went up North Division Street to Highland to Constant Ave.  then crossed over and came back via North Division and took Cortlandt over to Broad and came back home that way.  About three and a half miles in total according to Google Maps.

It was a good walk and the hills definitely make it a challenge.  I listend to IT Conversations while I walked.  It is one of the few times when I get a chance to catch up on my listening and I really appreciate it.

After my walk we actually got some time to just relax as a family.  I am so glad that I was able to complete that server build today.  I did not need that hanging over my head for another day.