This transcript starts with dad leaving Peekskill after having been on “baby watch” for over a week on November 26 at 11:00am.  It ends in the early afternoon today, the 28th.

Liesl is having her third feeding with Dominica right now. She is doing very well. about 6 hours ago from web

Preliminary results from the blood work and spinal tap show Liesl as being clear. 48 hours until the final results but good for now. about 8 hours ago from web

Liesl has been cleared to “feed on demand” which is very positive. about 10 hours ago from web

Dominica just finished her first meal since the operation. Still on fluids but feeling a little better. Still four nights without sleep! about 10 hours ago from web

Annie says, “It’s like candy for your bowels that help you fart.” I just had to relay that quote! about 11 hours ago from web

Dominica is eating her first meal since surgery. She is recovering well, but is quite sad about Liesl having to be tested already. about 11 hours ago from web

Liesl has symptoms of infection. Bloodwork wasn’t great. She has to have a spinal tap now to see if she has an infection in her brain. about 11 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Back at the hospital. Dominica is doing well. Waiting for our doctor appointment. about 13 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Dominica sent me home to sleep. Have to be back early in the morning. Oreo was so excited to see me! about 21 hours ago from TwitterBerry

@kweenkmatt thanks. You will have to come visit soon! about 23 hours ago from TwitterBerry in reply to kweenkmatt

Dominica and Liesl are hanging out at the hospital recovering. Min’s parents and I are at new city diner getting food. about 23 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Liesl’s birthday: november 27th, 2008 at 6:54pm 7:39 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

It’s a girl!! Announcing Liesl Lee Miller. 7lbs 11oz. 20inches 7:28 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

It is surgery time. 6:30 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

If all goes well in surgery, dominica can come home on sunday. 5:59 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Progression failed. Going to c section now. Baby is fine. Phone is about to die.   5:55 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Dominica has now been in labor for 26 hours. 5:29 PM Nov 27th from web

FB-IMing with Clare in London. Live chat and blogging from the delivery room! LOL 5:29 PM Nov 27th from web

I’ve moved from my BlackBerry to Twittering from my laptop set up in the birthing room at the foot of Dominica’s bed. 5:25 PM Nov 27th from web

Dominica is napping now. In theory she will sleep for another hour to an hour and a half and then we should see something get going. 5:23 PM Nov 27th from web

Epidural is working. Dominica is feeling so much better. 4:24 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Pitosin is working but the pain is incredible. Epidural happening now. 4:05 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Dominica is on iv drip pain killers now. Doesmnt stop the pain but she is starting to relax between contractions. 3:00 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Dominica is starting pitocin now. We are having problems progressing. C section is a very real possibility very soon. 2:20 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Midwife and nurses are prepping for delivery. Might be very soon. 1:03 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Lunch is free today at the hosp. Having a lite thanksgiving dinner here. 12:10 PM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

There was meconium present so the head monitor (that corkscrews into the scalp) has to be attached. 11:50 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Water just broke. 7-8 cm. Real progress now! 11:30 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Tried to get food but the hospital caf has nothing. Literally nothing. I guess that they are closed at 11:15 am!!! 11:25 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Dominicas parents will be here soon to take over so that I can get a bite to eat. 11:07 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Dominica is napping. She is completely exhausted. No sleep in days. 10:18 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

And the doppler system predicts…. High chance of baby today. (Doppler is used to listen to the baby.) 9:50 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Showering seems to help but all of the steam makes it way too warm. 9:40 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

6 cm now. Moving forward well. 8:54 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

5 cm dilated now. Progressing well. Dominica is really holding up. 6:49 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Happy anniversary to bennie and francesca   6:31 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Midwife predicts that the baby will arrive by noon – less that six more hours. Contractions have been going on for 14hrs already. 6:23 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Happy tofurkey day! 4:35 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Nurse says that we are staying this time. This is the real thing. Currently 3-4 cm. Doing well. Show time. 4:17 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Okay, found someone to let me in. We are in room 4. Same room that we had on Monday – we know this room well. Min is having tests now. 4:15 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

I am locked out of maternity…. Can’t get to dominica. 4:12 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Getting ready to head on out to the hospital to try this baby thing again. 3:03 AM Nov 27th from TwitterBerry

Heading to bed. No baby on the 26th. Will try to get some rest before the labor really starts. Dominica is very uncomfortable. 10:51 PM Nov 26th from web

@kweenkmatt At $1.57, I believe that once you adjust for inflation this is the cheapest gasoline in history – beating the 1999 prices! 10:17 PM Nov 26th from web in reply to kweenkmatt

Contractions are speeding up. Very likely going to the hospital in the next few hours. Thanksgiving looks to have been a good guess. 8:33 PM Nov 26th from TwitterBerry

Baby is progressing. Might be off to the hospital again in a few hours. 8:07 PM Nov 26th from TwitterBerry

@ClintonSkakun Yay, tofurkey day! 7:03 PM Nov 26th from web in reply to ClintonSkakun

Dominica’s contractions are pretty constant now. Every few minutes. 7:02 PM Nov 26th from web

@_calla_lily_ Have fun in Columbia. New baby by the time that you get back! Westchester Population + 1 7:02 PM Nov 26th from web in reply to _calla_lily_

Dad arrived home safely. No snow until Dansville. Toccos have now arrived in Peekskill. 6:01 PM Nov 26th from web

Check at the midwife’s went well. 2cm dilated and progressing appropriately. No schedule yet 3:46 PM Nov 26th from web

Dominica’s appointment is done. No news. Going to pick her up now. 2:59 PM Nov 26th from web

Just did the dishes and finished off unpacking another box. Minor house progress. 2:55 PM Nov 26th from web

Dad is in Elmira. No baby news so he is continuing on towards home. 2:53 PM Nov 26th from web

Dominica’s dr appt got pushed back. She has to wait until 2 just to get in but is already sitting there just reading a book. 1:09 PM Nov 26th from web

Dad just left for his long drive back home. Dominica’s dr appt is in two hours.   11:10 AM Nov 26th from web

“Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.” – Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Andre Morellet.

I had to do some quick research on this quote since it is often misquoted as: “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”  There appears, in my cursory search, no actual original reference document pointing to the more famous quote and that it is actually a bastardization of the original letter referring to rain and wine.  It is still a good quote regardless of who actually first said it.  I prefer the version without the word living.  The fact that there are two so common versions of the quote leads on to question its authenticity anyway.

The weather is awesome today.  Temperatures are not set to break seventy degrees all day.

Oreo and I got up a little before eight and went to the living room to work and to charge up energy laying in the sun (I will let you surmise which of us will be doing which.)  Because of continuing market volatility there is still very little to do at the office and today is promising to be a nice, slow day leading into my four day weekend.  This is, I believe, only the second four day break from the office that I have had since starting this position in March of 2006!  The other four day weekend was this past June in Walt Disney World.

During overnight trading in the foreign markets, the global economy seems to be recovering in a very serious way after a very rough week.

This morning I tested the new theory that yawns can be contagious between humans and dogs.  Oreo was sitting in the middle of the living room and I looked over at him and yawned right at him – fake yawn but decently convincing – and before I was done yawning he yawned as well!

Katie and I had lunch at Asian Fusion at 11 Stone Street in downtown Manhattan.  I had the pad thai.  It was okay, nothing special.  Overall the whole restaurant experience was not really worthy of lower Manhattan.  If this was a Thai restaurant in Warren, New Jersey I would not find a compelling reason to choose it over the competing Thai restaurants so it really does not cut it here in New York City.

The afternoon was pretty slow, as expected.  Today is the slowest Friday, actually, that I can remember so far this year.  It was great.  I was able to leave the office only a little after six – once I knew that there was not going to be any evening surprises.  Ronak and I were even able to step out to get some hot chocolate at Leonardis before the end of the day.  They have awesome hot chocolate on Hanover Square.

I took the train home and arrived in Newark around seven.  On my way home I noticed that 87 octane “unleaded” gas is just $3.29 per gallon in New Jersey!  That is pretty cheap after what it has been this past year.

I got to the apartment and found Dominica and Oreo asleep on the bed.  Dominica had packed up our “suitcase”, which is actually a duffle bag thing, and was exhausted and took a nap.  Oreo is always obliging when it comes to naps.

It took us until after eight thirty to get everything ready, the plants watered, the computers shut down, the windows closed and the car packed so that we could leave for our long weekend.  It is pretty rare that we leave Newark for four whole days.  It always makes us nervous in case we have forgotten something important.

The drive through Jersey had a surprising amount of traffic for how late it was on a Friday night.  We stopped at a McDonald’s along the route for some dinner.  We had been hoping to have been able to have stopped at a Panera Bread but we forgot to keep looking for one and bypassed the only corridor that has anything other than fast food and were stuck in our dinner choices.

Overall the trip was uneventful.  Dominica was pretty tired and slept for a good portion of the drive.  I was really exausted making it a pretty hard trip but I listened to quite a bit of IT Conversations podcasts that I had stored up on my iPod and when those ran out I listened to some of the “News from Lake Wobegon” podcast.

I also listened to a bit of the beginning of J. Maarten Troost’s “Getting Stoned with Savages” which helped to pass the time.  “Stoned” is the follow up to Troost’s really interesting book “The Sex Lives of Cannibals“.  In both books he and his girlfriend and then wife pack up and leave Washington, D.C. to live in the islands of the South Pacific (techicnally can an island along the equator be in the “south” Pacific – how Northern Hemisphere-centric is that?)

It was around two in the morning when we arrived at dad’s house in Peoria, New York.  Oreo was so stiff as he struggled to get out of the back seat of the BMW.  He slept soundly the entire drive.  My right foot, which has been having months of ongoing issues due to something rather like tendinitis, really hurt on this drive.  Normally driving does not seem to aggravate it but today it was really bad.  I was in some serious pain by the time that we got home.

Dad was up waiting for us.  We all sat up in the living room talking for what was probably close to an hour.  While we were awake I put an ice pack onto my right heel to see if that would help relieve some of the pain.  We have no idea if the issue is due to inflamation of some sort or not.

We slept in a little today but nothing like yesterday.  Dominica was up around ten or so.  I always get up when Oreo decides that he is tired of sleeping in the bedroom and wants to hang out in the living room instead.

For brunch today we went over to Hell’s Kitchen in the Ironbound with Kevin, Pam and Ryan.  Hell’s Kitchen has some awesome food and drinks.  We were really happy that we tried them out for brunch.  Unfortunately, they are discontinuing the brunch for the rest of the summer and today was the last day.  So it was more of a tease than anything else.

After lunch, Dominica spent the afternoon taking her HP Linux 101 class and getting caught up doing the first five lessons today (the final lesson, six, does not release until tomorrow.)  I did a bit of work of many different types throughout the day.  Overall it was a rather relaxing day involving quite a bit of catchup on many things that we have become backed up on.

In the middle of the afternoon, Dominica had an accident in the kitchen involving a glass and a coffee mug that resulted in a rather large glass explosion showering the kitchen and the surrounds in shards of glass and ceramic.  The incident resulted in an afternoon of cleaning and attempting to protect Oreo from bits of glass that went just everywhere.  It was quite a mess.

The glass breaking became far more disasterous because the kitchen was already a complete mess and the glass had just a million different places to lodge itself.  I spent the afternoon cleaning everything in the kitchen and getting everything off of the counter.  What a mess.

On this past February 12th the PBS program NOVA ran an episode called AstroSpies.  Coming out of college in 1967 the MOL was the very first project that my father worked on at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York.  He was on the project from 1967 until its cancellation in 1969.  Dad watched the show when it aired, completely by coincidence because the show he was planning to watch was a rerun and he just flipped over to Nova, and even recognized one of the engineering models shown on the show as having come from his drafter!

The NOVA episode AstroSpies can be viewed online.  Dad was involved in the training of some of the USAF Astronauts as well.  He helped to train Colonel Albert Crews and Colonel Richard Lawyer.

The whole gang down here in Arnold, Maryland (John, Rob, Trish, Dominica and I) went out for St. Patrick’s Day.  While at O’Laughlin’s on Bay Dale we met Michelle Miller (now Michelle Nicklin) for the first time.

I don’t remember for sure but I am pretty confident that  John Nicklin, Dominica and I went out for breakfast to the Double T Diner in Annapolis.  We have eaten at the Double T pretty consistently for almost a year by this point and for an additional seven years at the time of this writing.

For lunch Dominica, John Nicklin, Dave LeBlanc and I went out to Arlington, Virginia for a meeting about the Waste Watcher project at the apartment of Phil Kriebel.  This was to be the only time that Dominica would ever meet Dave.  Dave was the president of Nicklin Associates which I worked for from 1999 – 2005.

Phil, who sadly would die in 2007 while living in the Bronx, cooked us lunch while the four of us worked on business plans and strategies for medical waste workflow systems.  It was at this infamous meeting that Dave would come up with the plan of attempting to mount full sized scales onto truck beds which, of course, bounce too hard and destroy the scales.

We had to disband the meeting earlier than we had planned because Nicklin Associates was involved with the cleanup process at the Pentagon just a few miles away and a lot of effort was being put into that.  Phil would actually be put onto the Philadelphia news later this evening as the “eye witness” who was in the wreckage at the crash site when the left over fuel flared up again and the fires began anew.

I don’t remember for sure but I believe that Dominica and I drove back to Ithaca tonight.

I awoke to the phone ringing. My cell phone. Eric Millen was calling me from his office at the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Strong Hospital where he worked as the manager of the waste processing facility there. (As of December, 2007 he is still working in that capacity at that facility.) At the time that he called it was early in the morning and I had been planning on sleeping in late because Dominica and I were due to drive down to Washington, D.C. that evening and I was getting plenty of sleep before making the drive.

Dominica had gone to work. At this time she was living in Enfield in her small studio apartment there. She was working in a bio-chem lab in Ithaca and was at work already by the time that Eric Millen called me.

Eric just told me to turn on the television. I ran upstairs to the living room (my bedroom was located in the basement) and turned on the television. Luckily at the time the house was splitting the cost of having Time-Warner Cable so I was able to get the news right away on the 32″ Sony Trinitron that served as our house television. The Northern WTC tower was impacted at 8:46 am so this was several minutes after this when I received the call.

At the time that I turned on the television the first of the twin World Trade Center towers had already been hit by an airliner and was smoking badly. It was early yet and no one knew what was going on other than the fact that New York and Washington were in chaos and panic. The second plane had hit the Pentagon but we were not hearing too much about that yet. The news was mostly showing live footage from Manhattan.

I ran upstairs to Andy’s room and woke him up telling him that he needed to come down and watch the news. He didn’t believe me that anything was going on but I finally convinced him to get up as we didn’t know if the country was under attack or what. At this point the news was very sketchy and no one knew what was going on at all.

Andy and I spent the morning just watching the news as events unfolded. There was so little information. You really couldn’t afford to leave the television for any length of time.

We were watching early enough that we were watching, live, as the Manhattan reporter spoke to the world and over his shoulder the second airliner crashed into the second tower. The south WTC tower was hit at 9:03 am. So thus far only seventeen minutes have passed since the time that the first plane hit, Eric called me, I woke up Andy and now we have seen the second plane impact.

It was one of the strangest feelings ever – seeing the second WTC tower get hit by an airliner while the reporter was obliviously talking to the camera. And then watching his reaction as his camera crew sees it happen and then he whips around to see it himself. News doesn’t normally happen like this in American and never before in a place that I knew so well.

It was another forty minutes before the third plane hit the Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia. By this point we were beginning to become very alarmed. When it was only New York that had been attacked it seemed very isolated regardless of how much destruction there was. But once another site hundreds of miles away – and a military target at that – had been hit then the scope of things seemed to be changing. And to make it all more personal, every building that was hit was a building that I had been in at one point or another.

I took a tour of the Pentagon with Nathan Parker in 1993 while we were in Washington, D.C. on our “Close Up” trip. And I had been to the top of the World Trade Center’s Observation Deck in 1997 with Leanne Cooley while on a music department performance trip to New York City while I was doing my degree in Music Performance at Monroe Community College. And, by this point, I had living in Alexandria for six months of my life and had commuted past the Pentagon during most of that time. It was a familiar sight for me on the road.

It was 10:05, almost an hour and a half since this ordeal began and just over an hour since Andy and I started watching the news that we witnessed the collapsing of the south World Trade Center tower. This is the first building that we see be totally destroyed. And once again, the crisis was escalating.

Five minutes after the first tower collapsed we received reports of a fourth hijacked plane crashing into rural Pennsylvania. We have no idea when this is going to be over and the government has no plan for dealing with what is unfolding. All that has been done at this point is that the FAA has closed all US airspace and all inbound flights are being diverted to Canada. A first in US history.

Two minutes before 10:30 the north tower of the World Trade Center collapses bringing the disasters of the day to a close. But it will be some time before we know what is going on and that we are all confident that the day is over. It has been the most riveting two hours of my life and for just about anyone in America on this day.

Dominica was at work while all this was happening and did not get the news as early as we did. But her office did get a television, I believe, so that they could watch the news and she was following the events of the day as they were happening.

At four in the afternoon a small tower, Building Seven of the World Trade Center was reported to be on fire. Five years later (March, 2006) I would take a position with a company in the New York Metro Area and end up working in one of the offices that was evacuated from Building Seven and subsequently relocated to Warren, New Jersey.

My morning was cut short, however, as there was work to be done. Shortly after the “events” of the morning seemed to have settled down I was contacted by one of the guys who worked down at Lucente Homes and said that they needed me to come down and work with them as quickly as possible. The urgency was so high that he actually drove up to the house at Sanctuary where I was watching the news to pick me up.

My morning was spent as the technical adviser as Lucente Homes split into two companies. I had been working to a limited degree with Lucente Homes for the past year or so but this was a major change. Things had to move extremely quickly so we actually spent time today physically visiting Ithaca’s local Compaq vendor (this is before the HP buyout of Compaq) and getting much needed computers and equipment for the new company, Lifestyle Properties, ordered as quickly as possible. I spent most of the day working to get the new office up and running.

It was a long and busy day.  I can’t believe that we were working even with everything that was going on.

After Dominica got home from work she and I had to drive down to Arnold, Maryland as we were scheduled to spend a few days down in Washington.  She had decided to come along with me when I went down to work down there this week.

It would have been about six in the evening when we were finally able to leave for Maryland.  That means that it would have been just before midnight when Dominica and I would have arrived at John Nicklin’s condo on Bay Dale.

I drove out to Norwich from Ithaca this afternoon.  The drive really isn’t too bad at all.  Less than two hours.  An hour and a half if you do it right since I live on the east side of Ithaca and do not need to cross the city to get out here.

The drive went really well and I managed to drive straight to Kate’s parents’ house without making a single wrong turn the entire way (this was in the days before GPS or even having electronic maps on your mobile phone!)  The rehearsal went well.

Afterwards everyone else decided to stay at the Howard Johnson’s Inn in Norwich but since I lived so close, was carpooling with people and was short on cash I decided that it would be best if I drove back to Ithaca both tonight and tomorrow night.

It was quite late when I pulled back into Ithaca.  Not much sleep for me tonight.  Tomorrow will be a busy day.

Andy, Bob and I crashed at John Nicklin’s condo in Arnold last night.  Today we have to drive back up to Ithaca, New York (about a five hour journey) because we all have to be at work tomorrow.  (Bob teaches in Ithaca and Andy and I are both working full time at IBM Endicott about forty-five minutes south-east of Ithaca.)

Our project for this weekend was to work on a system upgrade for the servers located at Washington Hospital Center. We have a small “data centre” there that has housed our main servers since they relocated from the University of Rochester several months ago. Rochester was more convenient but the space that we have here in Washington is much better and has allowed for greater expansion.

We would have crashed last night at the condo that John Nicklin rents from our friend Rob in Arnold, Maryland. This would have been Andy’s first trip to the condo. All of his former trips to Washington would have been based out of the Extended Stay Suites hotel in Alexandria, Virginia.

The office was hot and very uncomfortable even though it is February and cold outside. Nothing makes the office here cool in any way. Jonathan Stagno, who was living in Pasadena, Maryland at the time, came out to Washington to help out on the project as well. This is, I believe, the only time that Andy or Bob have seen Jonathan as of December, 2007 when I am writing this update.

The work went well. I no longer know all of the work that was done but I do know that this was the weekend that we did some major hardware upgrades to our primary Windows NT 4 IIS 4 Server (a.k.a. “Vienna”.) We added three additional 9GB SCSI hard drives and moved the machine from a straight drive to software based RAID 5 for speed and protection. “Vienna” was one of the two Compaq Proliant 800 servers that Andy and I used in Pittsburgh in March, 2000. At this time it was also upgraded from 128MB to 1GB of memory which helped a lot.

After our day of work in the office we left Stagno to return home and Bob, Andy and I met up with John Nicklin, Rob and Trish at O’Laughlin’s in the Bay Green Plaza in Arnold, MD.  It was quite the party.  We even managed to convince a “not too with it” Andy that he had run up a $500 bar tab (a fake provided for effect by the manager) and that Andy had to cover it if he didn’t manage to get a girl at the bar to kiss him.  The girl was there with a very large male friend who was in on the gag and hilarity ensued.

We would have driven down in the late evening probably leaving Endicott around four or four thirty.  The route from Endicott was easy – a quick jump down NY 17 to Binghamton and then Interstate 81 south to Harrisburg and then Interstate 83 down to Baltimore.  A quick loop around Baltimore on the beltway (Interstate 695) and then Interstate 97 down to MD 50 and over to Arnold, Maryland.

Several months ago, John Nicklin rented a condo in Arnold, Maryland to use as a “home base” in the D.C. area.  And this is where we are all staying tonight.  I have my own room there.  Andy and Bob slept in the living room.  At this point John wasn’t really considering living in the D.C. area and was more interested in moving to Anderson, South Carolina.

Andy, Bob, Nate and I are all living in the house at 8-1 Sanctuary Drive, Ithaca, New York.  This is our first (and only) holiday season that will be spent here in this house.  It is also the first time that anyone of any of our friends has their own place that qualifies as a real “entertaining” house.  So we decided that we needed to through a real, blow-out holiday party.

The party tonight set the tone for the next several years.  The party was semi-formal and everyone was really dressed up.  The house members had just gone together and purchased a small, round hot tub that we placed in the garage and had all heated up and ready to go for the party.

We had been hoping to be able to get some digital pictures of the party and I bought a $99 digital camera at Walmart that turned out to not be any good and we took it back.  We weren’t expecting much of the camera but we got even less out of it.  It’s 640×480 resolution was horrible and it couldn’t take a picture even at that resolution worth anything.

The most famous moment of the evening was Matt Hoch playing piano and singing several of his own tunes for us like “Look at my Ass”.  Once he had had enough to drink, Andy joined Matt and sang along with some impromptu piano tunes making up the words as he went.

By the end of the night the hot tub was full.  It sounded silly at the time but a lot of the late partiers went for it.  The garage at Sanctuary was pretty small and we didn’t have much space for much else in it.  All we used it for was the hot tub and additional storage.  We didn’t have as much storage in the basement as you would expect since my bedroom was down there.

By late in the evening we had people running out into the cold, New York night making snow angels in the front yard.  There was a lot of snow out there.

So who made it out for the party tonight?  I wish that I could remember more clearly.  A lot of people made it and I hope that people who know that they made it can email me and let me know to add them to the list.  I know that Nate, Bob, Andy and I were there as we were the hosts.  Matt Hoch clearly made it.  Ryan Cloud was there – he was in the hot tub and making snow angels.  Nate’s cousin Mandy came back from Connecticut for the party.  Carrie was there – I can remember her getting tackled into the deep snow in the ditch out front.  I assume that Eric and Amanda made it although the weather may have kept them away as I can’t picture them being there.  Josh definitely made it as he always did.  I am pretty sure that Joe Howlett made it as well.  There were probably a dozen or more people that I just can’t picture for sure.

Today was a huge day for Andy and I.  When we first came to Pittsburgh in March our schedule for getting the Waste Watcher project up and running and “live” was May 1st.  That day was insanely ambitious and it was not realistic at all for the project to move that quickly.  But we did all that we could.  May 1st was Monday.  Today is Friday.
Since March 20th we have been working around the clock on this project.  Everything that we have done has been eating, sleeping and breathing this project.  Sixteen hour days, seven days a week has been almost constant.  We have been going completely crazy – barely taking time out to eat and neither of us has so much as seen a single television show, movie or anything else since we were here (except for that first weekend with my parents.)

We did not manage to “flip the switch” on the Waste Watcher as we had hoping on the first but we did flip it today and the first “production” data started flowing into the Waste Watcher system this morning.  The project is far from done but just getting to this phase and already replacing the paper processes at the first hospital location is a really big deal.  Today is a major celebratory day.

The new machines that are being used for the production tracking stations are Compaq iPaq Celeron 533 black and silver small form factor units with 64MB.  These are the first machines that we have worked with that run Windows 2000 Professional.  We had originally chosen these machines because of their low air-flow and forward looking design.  But quickly we discovered that RS232 serial communications was a critical piece of the system and that these units, needing USB to Serial adapters, were overly complex and error prone.

We don’t have Internet access from the hospitals but we do have phone lines in the office that will allow us to dial up to our AOL account to get Internet access.  This makes doing our work extremely cumbersome.  But that is just the beginning.

We are equipped with a limited amount of physical computing equipment while in Pittsburgh.  We have two Compaq Proliant 800 servers (each a Pentium III 500) that are being used for all development and we have two Hewlett-Packard Brio desktops (Celeron 433, 64MB, Windows NT 4 Workstation) that we have to use for all of our non-server work.  This wouldn’t be bad but we have only two monitors which leaves us in a pretty tight situation.  Andy will be stuck carrying a monitor back and forth from the apartment to the office many times over the next several months.

My parents left in the morning to head back home. For dinner Andy and I drove downtown and walked around for a little while to learn where we were and what Pittsburgh had to offer. We stopped at a small pizza shop near the confluence of the rivers to eat our first real meal of the project in Pittsburgh.

I took the northern bedroom that had a view of UPMC Shadyside Hospital and Andy took the southern bedroom which had the views of the Bayard Circle. We had almost nothing to move in. It was very sad. Our only piece of actual furniture was an old, broken computer office chair from my parents’ house. Our kitchen was stocked with a single, old pot and one old, large (but very dull) knife that we used to still things with in the pot. Our only flatware was two Styrofoam cereal bowls and all we had to eat with were some disposable plastic forks and spoons that we probably got from a fast food restaurant on the way down.

Neither of us bothered to bring down beds and we both slept on blankets on the floor. It was a rather ascetic existence but it did serve to help us focus on work rather than on leisure.

We spent most of the day taking care of getting into the apartment, getting what we needed set up and dealing with the parking situation.

As of today we have no telephone which is a bit of a problem. I have had a Rochester mobile phone through Frontier since 1992. Many of you may remember: (716) 737-3461. Back when Rochester and Buffalo shared the 716 area code. But when I moved to Pittsburgh Frontier was unable to transfer my phone to that region to allow us to make affordable calls. Even though Frontier had already been bought out by Bell Atlantic they hadn’t figured out how to transfer phones between regions yet and that left us with a problem. So that is a top priority.

My parents took Andy and I out to dinner down on Walnut to a Thai restaurant there.  Tomorrow will be another busy day so no one wanted to stay out late.

Just to make it clear: our apartment has no radio, no television, no telephone line, no Internet access.  This is early 2000 – high speed Internet access is a rarity and almost no one has that yet.  Dial up is the only real option at this point and we can’t get that here at this time.  Nicklin Associates provided us with an AOL Dial Up account to use when we were in a location that had a telephone line but that does not include our apartment!

Good thing that we at least have books.

Andy and I set off rather late at night hoping that it would only take four hours to get down to Pittsburgh where we were to be living for the next indefinite amount of time.  I remember leaving Ithaca and getting down on to Interstate 86 and traveling west thinking what an incredibly boring drive it was.

It wasn’t long before we needed to stop off in Friendship, New York to locate a restroom which we did at the local grocery store.  It was probably eight in evening or a little later at this point.

It took around six hours or just a little less before we reached Pittsburgh.  This was only my second time as an adult or in my memory coming into the city and my first time driving and it was Andy’s first time in Pittsburgh.  The nighttime view of the city as you enter on Internet 279 will always stick in my memory.  One moment you are driving through steep hills and residential neighbourhoods clinging to steeply tilted ground all seemingly in a very rural or mildly suburban setting and then, suddenly, a looming city of steel and glass swings into view directly ahead of you and impossibly close.

The northern approach to Pittsburgh must be one of the most impressive entrances to any city in the United States.  It is absolutely breathtaking.  It made it all that much more exciting as this would be my first time living in a city of any considerable size.  Ithaca being extremely tiny and Rochester feeling like it isn’t even a city at all (especially when you live outside of it in Greece.)  But in Pittsburgh we were to be living in a tall apartment building well inside the city limits in one of the center boroughs and it was to be very exciting.

Of course the southern approach to Pittsburgh, entering the city through the mountainside via the Fort Pitt Tunnel is one of the most impressive city entrances anywhere as well.  Pittsburgh is blessed with amazing vistas in a very tiny amount of geographic space.

We headed over to the AmeriSuites where we spent the night.  Tomorrow was the “moving in” day.

I came to Ithaca several times from 1994 until 2000 without having lived here.  Nathan Parker moved here in the fall of 1994 to attend school at Ithaca College.  I was able to visit fairly often during those first few years because our school schedules were so drastically different.  I had talked about moving to Ithaca for some time but hadn’t had a strategy to do so until this new project started and I no longer had to live in any particular location when not working on site at the client facility.  So Ithaca it was and a momentous decision it was in many ways.

Today we tried to get the apartment into some sort of order although there was little to be done.  In addition to all of my furniture I also had a giant Compaq Proliant 5000 quad Pentium server which took up all kinds of space and would move from apartment to apartment with me until many years later it was taken off of my hands by John Stephens (the Surfing IT Wizard.)  It was the prize piece of my collection at the time though.  In 2000, owning a real enterprise class Compaq Proliant was no small thing and it was quite an impressive line item on my youthful resume.  Even though I had started my IT career in June, 1994 – six years before – and had been the Director of Information Services for Nicklin Associates now since June, 1999 I was still building up my resume and laying the groundwork for my career and every little bit helped.

Additionally I had several desktop machines that I kept as “learning” machines – mostly running Caldera OpenLinux or Windows NT 4.  This list included by 1995 Digital Starion Pentium 75 computer that I bought to take with me to my second year at GMI (now Kettering University), a PentiumPro 200 Compaq DeskPro that we loving called “Oscar” and ran Windows NT 4 Server, three old Intel 486 machines (all Compaq DeskPros) that all ran Linux and a Gateway 2000 Intel 386 desktop that attempted to run Linux but did so very poorly.  I also, of course, had my Compaq Presario Pentium II 350 128MB which was my primary desktop that ran Windows 98.  I had received that computer and my main colour inkjet printer from Paul Binderman for whom I had done some consulting and he paid me by giving me the computer.  It was a fair deal at the time.  We were both very happy.

So there were many computers in the apartment and no Internet connection other than our AltaVista dial-up connection that was “free” dial-up Internet access that displayed ads to pay for itself.  I had my two paprika coloured leather Natuzzi couches which by this time had already become a bit famous amongst all of our friends. Nate had the big “Emily” couch so named because it came from Emily’s house in Perry.  We had my stereo which, at the time, consisted of a Rotel pre-amp and processor, two Marantz MA-500 monoblock amplifiers, an Adcom line controller and a pair of massive Paradigm Studio Reference 80 speakers.  Nate also had his own stereo system which included a pair of B&W 250 mini-shelf speakers and an Adcom integrated amplifier.  We both had laserdisc players as well.  My laserdisc collection took up no small amount of space either with about 350 titles amassed by this time.  (The collection was roughly at its peak here.)

Nate put his old television/VCR combo unit into his “master” bedroom and we put my Sony Trinitron into the living room.  The apartment had a nice deck too that we stored some stuff on.  We had NO space at all.

I remember very clearly how awful the shower was there.  It had some sort of “high efficiency” shower head that totally atomized the water and created a very dry feeling mist that shot out at you when you attempted to shower.  The mist had so much forced that it swirled as it came out but no actual water ever hit you.  It was very annoying.  I have never seen its like again.

The apartment, I also remember,  was an absolute cleanliness disaster.  Nate’s cousin Mandy had moved out from it some weeks or months before (his cousin Becky had lived there before Mandy did) but food that she had cooked (pasta) was still sitting on the rangetop and the fridge still had her old food in it.  We ate what we could and over several weeks the place improved slightly.

The main pastime was watching the extensive laserdisc collection.  Nate owned a few of his own but having my 350 titles there was a big deal.  People came over all of the time to watch them.

We all slept in a bit after the party last night. I have nothing going on today except for the drive from Greece to Ithaca. The truck was all packed and the apartment just needs its final round of cleaning before we turn over the keys and walk away from Rochester. Josh and Amber had already moved and were done with the place. Andy was heading back to his parents’ house, I believe, until he found another apartment. They aren’t very far away from Greece and just as close to where Andy was working in Brighton as we were up in Greece on Lake Ontario.

Andy was wrestling with his future plans all day I guess. As of this morning his plan was to keep working at the Wellesley in Brighton (right across from Monroe Community College) and to remain in Rochester. Nicklin Associates had offered him a position working on the Waste Watcher project that I was leaving to work on but he had decided that he wasn’t ready for it and didn’t want to move for such a risky project.

But as we were doing the final pack and inspection of the truck and were getting ready to start off down to Ithaca (Andy was driving my Buick down for me while I drove down in the rental truck) he decided that he had had enough of Rochester and wanted to set off on an adventure as well.  So he quit his job.  I can still remember him calling on the cell phone and getting Esther who was working at the time.  She was not happy about having to deliver the message to his boss.  We had been working at the same place but I had done my last day on Friday, if I remember correctly.  And off we were to Ithaca!

It was dark when we arrived in Ithaca and drove up the east hill on route 13 to look for Nathan Parker’s apartment where we were going to be roommates for the next month.  Nate and Bob Winans were there and helped us to unload the truck which was pretty full as I owned, even then, a significant amount of stuff.  In fact, I had much more stuff going into Nate’s apartment than he had had there before.  Luckily he had a two bedroom apartment but, once again, only one bath.

There was no space at all to deal with all of the furniture and computers that were pouring into the apartment.  We ended up using as much furniture as we could in the living room and putting the rest into the dining room and just counting that space as lost to us.  The second, smaller bedroom was used purely for storage and everything that could go in there did.  I just slept in the dining room on the floor and Andy slept in the living room on one of the couches.  For the first time in quite a while we had a place to actually set up my 32″ Sony Trinitron CRT television that I had bought when I first moved in to Greenleaf Meadows and had had no television of my own.

It was a very tiny amount of space for three people with so much stuff but we managed.  We had no real plan of how this was going to work long term or if it could at all but at the moment it was purely temporary.  Andy and I were only scheduled to be in Ithaca for exactly one month so we didn’t have to make it work for that long.  Then Nate would have the apartment to himself with my stuff all crammed into it as that was going to be stored there until we had a better solution for it all.

The apartment was on the top floor of the Gaslight Apartments on Uptown Road in Lansing very near to the Triphammer Mall.  The mall was just down at the end of the driveway which made a lot of things extremely convenient.  It really wasn’t too bad of a location and the price wasn’t bad at all.  Nate was teaching down at the middle school at the bottom of the hill so it was a really good location for him.

Andy and I were working together and I had lost my driver’s license (too many speeding tickets) and he was driving me to work a lot (Eric was driving me around the rest of the time) so after his roommates, snmnmnm, gave up their apartment on Cypress Street in Rochester he decided that he would move up with us to save on costs.  It worked out well because we were able to share a room easily as we had plenty of space and we worked opposite overnight shifts at the same place.

A while after we had been living in the apartment Amber, who worked with Josh at the car dealership, moved in.  So we had four of us in the two bedroom place.  Had there been two baths it wouldn’t have been so cramped.  Having grown up in a house with my own bathroom since I was little this was a bit much for me.  It was here that I learned the importance of having more bathrooms that it seems like you would need.

Yesterday and today we were busily packing everything in the apartment.  The apartment was empty tonight with the moving truck sitting in the parking lot with all of my worldly possessions on it.  Tomorrow begins the adventure but tonight is the “empty apartment party”.  Josh and Amber had decided to take a one bedroom apartment directly next door to the townhouse and had been moving in all week as there was some overlap in their leases.  So they were already moved out and living over there in the new place.  Andy had no particular plans of where he was going but he wasn’t going to keep the townhouse by himself and he hardly owned anything other than his clothes.  He didn’t even have a car at this point since he had been driving me around in my white 1992 Buick Regal GS (with the moon roof option and red plush interior) for the past year.  We had decided to save money and just share the car.

In the empty apartment with nothing but folding chairs we threw our farewell to Rochester party – or at least my farewell to Rochester party.  We had a pretty good turn out although now I can’t remember who all was there.  Andy, Josh, Amber, Eric, Amanda, Dana, myself and definitely several more people were there although everything is very fuzzy as I write this almost eight years later.  I remember very clearly that Amanda and Dana were there (Amanda had come with Dana) because it was the night that Eric and Amanda first met (they were married some years ago now.)

The party went late into the night and almost everyone slept over crashing on the bare floors.  It was a brisk night but not so cold that people weren’t out on the back patio smoking much of the night.  I remember people going in and out the back door a lot back when people actually still smoked cigarettes.

One thing that I do remember was Andy and I sneaking over to Josh’s new bedroom window with a can of “spray on window ice” that makes windows look like winter and we made a smiley face on his bedroom window that remained for as long as he lived in that apartment.

Andy was sleeping on the couch and I ran down to give him the news and to discuss the project with him.  He wasn’t nearly as impressed as I had hoped with the news but he was pretty groggy.

Later, after some sleep, we discussed the project during normal waking hours and Andy admitted that it sounded like a really cool project.  We had talked about it some before but we didn’t think that it was very likely to actually move forward as an actual project so we hadn’t taken it too seriously.

Now architecture and technology discussions actually begin and some serious inklings as to the long term outlook of the system begin to take shape.

I had the morning off from work and went in to the Wellesley Inn around eleven in the evening.  It was a perfectly normal day as far as the weather was concerned but shortly after I got to work that started to change very quickly.

I was on the phone with a friend who worked the same shift, the overnight audit, at the Super 8 on Lehigh Station Road in Henrietta just a couple miles south from where I was working in Brighton.  We were chatting about the normal industry events and exchanging shift information to speed things along.  I remember looking up from the desk and looking outside into the parking lot and I watched the weather change almost instantly from a calm to incredible wind and rain.  You could hear it shifting.  You couldn’t miss it.

Just as quickly as the weather changed everyone outside began running for cover and cars began to slide in the parking lot.  I asked the person on the other end of the phone, Bill I think his name was, if he was seeing the same thing and he said that something similar was happening down there.  I hung up the phone and ran to the front doors to watch the ensuing mayhem.  It was utter chaos as everything that wasn’t bolted down, and many things that were, began taking flight across the parking lot.  This was some serious wind.

I attempted to step outside but feared that the wind would rip the doors from my grasp and shatter them under the pressure so I kept them closed and locked unless someone tried to get in.

After not too long of a time a horrible noise came from the back hallway and I scrambled back there to inspect the situation.  I was met with a wall of rain in the middle of the long hallway that ran the length of the hotel!  The wind had torn open the windows and the pressure was so great that the rain wasn’t even hitting the floor for most of the length of the building.  Standing in the hallway was just like being outside.  The wind was so intense that it came down the hallway in a spiral.

It turned out to be a series of microbursts called a derecho and it did some serious damage from a bit west of Rochester through Syracuse and out to Utica.  There were a lot of people without power in the morning and the hotel filled up with people looking for a place to stay.

Since it is a big deal, having a new and exciting show to see, we made plans with my friend Erin Ryan to all go to her house tonight to watch the show. It’s like a big movie night or something.

The four of us watched the show and were all totally hooked. For those of us born at just the time that this show is supposed to be taking place makes the show seem quite magical. It really did a great job of capturing the look and feel on the late 1970s. Those days in the late 70s are a swirling mist to me. I was born in early 1976 and I have a lot of memories from around 1978-1980 and I can still picture how everything looked. All of the browns and oranges and everything was stripped and polka dots. Wood panel wainscots were ubiquitous, cassettes and long play vinyl records ruled, televisions were tiny and generally black and white, cars were huge and gas was cheap. No one had computers then. I wouldn’t see my first computer until the summer of 1980.

Eric, Mark and I would wind up watching most of the first two seasons of That Seventies Show together. It was a regular event after that point. It remained throughout the first five years of its run to be one of the only, if not the only, television show that I watched with any regularity.

Now that I have completed this class I now carry a card which authorizes me to use Kodak’s commercial color developing machines. This will make it vastly easier for me to do color darkroom work. Color is much more time consuming and difficult than black and white and lends itself far less to manual intervention. Now I can do the base darkroom work and then use the high quality processing machines just like professionals use.

It is really great that I am able to take classes on photography via the Kodak Camera Club as they are considered the best place to take classes – even better than the school which specialize in photography. The dark room facilities here are the best in the world. It is a very impressive experience to come here for all of my photography work.

Today, for the only time during my childhood, the Emergency Broadcast System sounded with “This is not a test, I repeat, this is not a test.”  As a child I did not really understand the importance of the system.  I was not yet, at the age of six, acutely aware of how close we were, throughout my childhood, to serious war with the Soviet Union (USSR.)  This alarm was not because of a military warning.  This was an alarm triggered by a steam leak at the reactor at the Ginna Nuclear Power Plant in Ontario, New York just east of Rochester.

The leak at Ginna lasted only for 93 minutes but, for many of us, the event would stick in our memory.  I had not been aware before today that there was even a nuclear power plant in the Rochester area.  It is not something that I would forget.

At nine this evening, President Ronald Reagan delivered his first State of the Union Address which I would have been allowed to stay up to watch.  My memories of the State of the Union Addresses always make me think of the Reagan years when they were really worth watching.

We rode the railroad with our friends the Hobbs.  Amy Hobbs is one year older than me and we pretty much grew up together.  I was five and she was six when we went on this train ride.

The ride on the train goes through a very rural piece of western Wyoming County.  It is actually not far from Buffalo but far enough out that the route is nothing but countryside.  You can learn more about the railroad on the Wikipedia: The Arcade and Attica Railroad.

If I remember correctly the train still traveled up to North Java at the time that we road in in 1981.  It is 2009 as I write this “Looking Back” and I am not sure how far the train ran in my childhood.  Today it runs only to the very first station only a few country “blocks” away to Curriers, New York which is nothing but a country crossroad with an old train depot sitting along the tracks for the tourist excursions.  The train no longer even runs between two villages for passengers which is quite sad.  The line stopped running between Arcade and Attica in 1957 due to flooding so even though Attica is in the railroad’s name the village itself has not seen the train arrive in fifty-two years (in 2009 and twenty-four years in 1981.)

The line is still used for freight today hauling mostly agricultural products from the Arcade area up to North Java where it hands them off to Norfolk Southern to take out of the county.  The line was first formed in 1917 and was only used for freight until 1962 when passenger excursion service was begun.  So in 1981 when I first rode on the ARA line it has been taking passengers for only nineteen years.

The steam engine, shown above, is ARA #18 and is an ALCO 2-8-0.  In 2002 it would be taken out of service but returned again in 2008 on Memorial Day.

Today we knew for sure that the space shuttle program was successful and American’s presence in space was reaffirmed.  The 1980s were to be America’s decade in space.

To put the era into perspective, the first manned space flight by Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin happened exactly twenty years ago today.  In the past twenty years all of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab missions happened – and that is only the missions sent by the United States.  The space race had been under full steam with the US and Soviet Union constantly working to one-up the other in space capabilities.  The space race was so present in everyone’s mind during my childhood that it never occurred to me that it was even a “thing”.  The space race was just a matter of fact and it seemed as though it would last forever.  Our goal was to create galatic starships for deep space exploration, colonize distant planets and create a massive stellar navy whose goal was to protect us from whatever was out there and, of course, the Soviets who would have a navy up there as well.

It all seemed pretty obvious in 1981.  First we put a man in space in 1961, then we orbited the earth, then we set foot on the moon and then we built the first spacestations, the Skylabs.  My father had even worked on the Manned Orbiting Laboratory project while at Kodak as an electrical engineer.  My entire life had been lived during an era when everyone talked about and thought about space travel and exploration and we had all been waiting for the next big thing – the reusable space shuttle.  The space shuttle project had begun in 1975 and, thus, had been underway for my entire life.  The leadup to today was something spectacular.  There was probably no event in my young life for which I had more expectations.

The first space shuttle build was the Enterprise, named for the ship in the popular Star Trek television series, but this first space shuttle was only for testing purposes and was never built to actually go into space.  Today the Columbia, the first true space shuttle was being readied.

The launch was televised and scheduled for seven in the morning – long before a barely five year old kid tends to get up, especially one who has not started kindergarten yet.  I probably got up around five thirty this morning just to get ready.  There was, of course, non-stop coverage on television as there was little else to show so early in the morning.  It was a momentous occassion and America was watching – as was the rest of the world.

I sat on the vinyl loveseat in my parents’ upstairs bedroom in the old farmhouse in Peoria, New York watching the launch on the tiny, thirteen inch black and white television that we had there.  It was my first live launch of any sort.  For the next few years, watching the space shuttles launch would be an important part of my life.

At seven we watched the countdown, T minus… and then it launched.  It was amazing, a defining moment of my childhood, one of my great memories of this age.  America was in space again and this time our spaceship was not a one shot, fall to earth, burnup on reentry deal.  We had a ship that would travel to and from space with a crew who were able to move about the cabin and even bring payloads with them.  Space travel had just changed significantly.  Flight STS-1 was underway.

Finally, we were in space again and I no longer had to dream of space exploration with nothing more than stories of space flights which, to my young mind, seemed long ago in the distant past, even though many of them had happened in the past fifteen years.  The space race was something in which I could now participate as an active observer and not something about which one could only read of historical triumphs.