Sheep Guarding Llama

36 Days to Baby Day! (34 Weeks and Six Days Pregnant)

11 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing scheduled in 5 days.

“If you want to really hurt your parents…the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Today is a warm and muggy day in the New York Metro area.  Thick haze and no breeze.  It is only supposed to last for today and tomorrow it should be nice again.  I am quite glad that I am not walking into the office today as it would be all sticky and uncomfortable.  (Actually, I am going into the city today but not until this evening when, hopefully, it will have cooled down considerably.)

Today, whilst doing some houseplant maintenance tasks, I discovered the source of the mysterious mushrooms that have been appearing here and there in the soil of the plants around the house.  It turns out that they are coming from the potting soil that we have.  When putting some new soil in the ivy plant I noticed mushrooms growing in the sealed back of potting soil.  That explains a lot.

For lunch today I walked over to Blimpie and got myself a cheese sub.  I ate at home alone while watching an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1970.  Dominica was going crazy for a meal from IHOP and was unable to find anyone who would go with her today so she decided to just go on her own.

I did a little bit of cleaning today in the kitchen.  Really needed to do a lot more but there really was not any extra time today.  It was really warm too.  The humidity is so high and it hit almost eighty today.  It was so warm that even with all of the windows open and it being overcast I was literally sweating sitting at the computers in the living room.

The weather changed pretty dramatically around four in the afternoon.  The wind picked up and the clouds rolled in and the temperature dropped about ten degrees all of a sudden.  It was a nice change, for sure.

We found out today that, because of a billing accident at work, I was not paid for an entire week in my last paycheck.  Normally this would be a mostly trivial issue as our bills are all on a monthly schedule so getting paid anytime during the month is all the same, but this was the final paycheck which we were counting on to provide much needed capital for the house closing next week.  This puts just that much more strain on the whole process.  We think that we are going to be alright but this did not exactly do anything to alleviate the stress of the situation.  We also still do not know how much the final total is going to be so we are extra worried about that.  Hopefully we will find out tomorrow.

The good news for the day is that I spoke to the bank and they have received all of the necessary paperwork for the house, including the certificate of occupancy, so we are now free and clear to proceed with the house closing.  Pheww.  There is one last paper which I need to sign and send back to the bank which I am supposed to do tomorrow when I have access to a fax machine at the office.  I am hoping that there is a fax machine at the office!

I left the house just after six after having fed and walked Oreo.  I took NJ Transit into Manhattan’s Penn Station and walked north up to Chef Yu to meet some friends for dinner.  The trains were running pretty late tonight and I ended up taking much longer than I had anticipated.  It took me forty minutes to catch a train going to Manhattan!

We made it early enough to Chef Yu to make happy hour so we all had a few drinks and lots of delicious appetizers.  Dinner was okay but nothing special.  The appetizers were far better than Dominica and I normally get from Golden City in Newark but the food itself was not as good.  The vegetarian spicy dumplings were amazing.

We all headed home around nine thirty.  On my walk and ride home I managed to finished reading “Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager” by Michael “Rands” Lopp of Rands In Repose fame which I have been reading slowly for a while.

I also finished J. Maarten Troost’s latest book “Lost on Planet China” which was really good.  Troost is an amazing “travel writer” although he didn’t like to call himself such although with his latest book actually chronicalling his travails through the People’s Republic rather than being a story of a place in which he was living there is little that he can say to dispute the label.

By the time that I reached home Dominica and Oreo had long previously retired to bed.  So I simply set about wrapping up SGL for the day, kicking off some Handbrake jobs and getting ready for bed.

Last night I discovered that Dominica was unfamiliar with the verb “to redd”, which was an extremely common word used in the household of my childhood and one that occurs with great frequency in my inner monologue so I was rather surprised that she was unaware of its usage.  For those of my readers who are not familiar with “to redd” I will cover its usage briefly.

The most common style of usage is in the phrase “I must redd up the house.”  It means, quite literally, to make ready – as ready is a derivative of the older redd.  It generally means, in colloquial usage, to clean, to tidy, to prepare.  Redding up the house would imply that it was made ready, as in “for company”.  The usage in which I most often heard it used was not to necessarily imply cleaning but tidying and organizing – making presentable.

The word is used in both the United States and England and is an Old English word having been used for hundreds of years.  It shares a common root with words in Germanic dialects outside of English and has its largest impact for English speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch (Swiss and pre-unification Germans) decent primarily in the American midwest – which explains why it is so commonly used in my family.

38 Days to Baby Day! (34 Weeks and Four Days Pregnant)

13 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing scheduled in 7 days.

Joel Spolsky had a great article in Inc. recently on the dangers of paying commissions.  This is an extension of the greater concepts that surround the flowed ideas of organizational measurability.  Often the MBA kids in the offices are so disconnected with the real world that they assume that they can simple apply metrics that determine desired outcome and apply incentives to tweak the output to those metrics.  According to Harvard professor Robert Austin in his book “Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations“, this type of behaviour always fails and I agree.  I have been arguing for some time for this point and have written a few articles already about it myself.  Joel Spolsky: How Hard Could It Be?: Sins of Commissions.

I am happy to announce that the Pandora, the hot, open, handheld Linux video game console has sold outs its initial run!  Cross your fingers, this could bode extremely well for the handheld and Linux based gaming circles.  One of the really neat things is that games built for the Pandora are likely to run on standard Linux as well making it a very attractive target platform.

My body was not ready to get up this morning extra early after having swum yesterday.  I am pretty soar and tired.  My brain was ready to get up but my body was not.

Oreo, who visited the doggy hospital yesterday, seems to be feeling much better this morning.  He is exhausted still, but that is to be expected considering that he is on some medicine for his itching that might be making him extra tired and the allergies themselves might be wearing on him as well.  The important thing is that he is not really scratching himself this morning and they said that he did not seem to be scratching while at daycare yesterday either.

Steve, from the moving company, arrived at ten till seven and the inspection was done by around a quarter after.  Dominica was able to hang around to be here and ask questions during the inspection which was helpful.

Today was a good day to get an early start on my walk in because it was warmer than it has been and rather humid.  Surprisingly humid for mid-October.  I stopped by Airlie Cafe to pick up a bagel for my walk and was just finishing it at the corner of Raymond and the McCarter Highway when I ran into Linnea who was also walking to the train station so we had a chance to talk although she was not taking the PATH so we did not get to talk for very long.

I stopped by Modell’s Sporting Goods on Broadway on my way to the office to pick up a pair of swim goggles.  I had managed to make do swimming without them yesterday but it was not nearly as pleasant as it would be if I were to have them so I made a point of looking for a pair on my walk.  Speedo apparently no longer sells the hard plastic goggles that I used to prefer so I am stuck trying some softer, wimpier goggles that I have serious doubts about.  Hopefully plastics engineering has outpaced my cynicism.

I actually forgot to turn onto Wall Street today and ended up walking an extra three-quarters of a mile down past Bowling Green.  At least it was a nice walk and I got some extra exercise.  Not that I need it today after having swum yesterday.  I am really feeling it today, but that is a good sign.  Exercise that doesn’t hurt is a waste of time.

My morning was pretty busy.  Everyone is getting back into the swing of work and there is plenty that needs to be done.  For food, Dan and I grabbed quick sandwiches from the shop just outside and ate quickly while sitting out on the East River enjoying the weather and looking at Brooklyn’s skyline.

Today, while reading about Scheme, I found that MIT makes available the complete text of their classic “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” online for free.  This book varies from many computer science texts in that it uses Lisp, and not C, as the basis for its teaching.  Specifically, SICP uses the Scheme variant of Lisp which I have installed on my desktop and with which I have been playing.  Scheme is fun.  I like the way that makes me think differently about programming.  Working with it today I came to realize that my old HP Calculator was actually a simple Lisp programming environment.

On her lunch break today Dominica ran out to do shopping for the boxes and other packing materials that we need to get the apartment ready for the movers.  The movers estimated that we will be needing approximately forty-five boxes to move our tiny, little apartment!  It is a good thing that we have the Mazda already.  Those boxes would not even fit into the BMW.

My afternoon was pretty hectic.  We had some major system hardware problems today that kept me busy all day.  I really never got any sort of a break.  I did not get a chance to go to the gym with Dan until after four.  It was a shorter day today than yesterday, but I am very glad that I went and am getting some momentum going.  I really enjoy going to the gym in the middle of the day.  It makes me feel good.

It was five when we got back to the office.  I had tons left to do and ended up working until long after seven in the evening.  What a long day.

I found out yesterday that SquareEnix’s Final Fantasy XIII has been announced fairly recently for the XBOX 360 in addition to the PS3.  As Dominica and I both really detest Sony and as the XBOX is far less expensive than the PS3 and since this title was the one game making us really feel confident that the PS3 was for us – it really seems as though an inexpensive 360 will be a much better choice.  FF13 and Assassin’s Creed and I will be good to go.  Not many titles in which I have much interest but it only takes a few to make a console really worth while.  I have one or two older XBOX games like Shenmue II that I will happily spend some time playing on the 360 as well that I already own.  So it will get some use right away.  I hope that we have an opportunity to have one before Christmas, but that might be just a little bit ambitious.  I am going to be awfully busy between now and then.

I am really looking forward to being able to play video games with my child.  That is one of the coolest things about being the parent of a child of this generation.  Unlike my generation whose parents, by and large, were unable to really grasp the overarching concepts behind video games which created a bit of a chasm between the generations, my generation gets to use video games as a bonding experience with our kids.  Just look at the Ralstons who love to play games like Age of Empires II together – that is a vastly more “family oriented” activity than, say, watching television.

It is strange for me to think that the XBOX 360 and Nintendo Wii (we already have the Wii and the 360 will definitely join it before the end of 2009) will be to my child very similar to the Atari 2600 to me.  The Atari 2600 (a.k.a. the Atari VCS up until I was about six years old when the 2600 moniker arrived) was introduced when I was just one years old and was the video game system of my early memories.  Even though the Wii and 360 are years older in comparison to my child’s pending age they will be in a similar memory slot and will be practically identical to Dominica’s recollection of the 2600 since it game out about a year before she was born.

Video games are very different now, though, and now they represent more of an interactive literary experience rather than simple, mind-numbing time wasting.  The Atari 2600 left much to be desired in the interaction department.  Those were simple days that I do not regret having been a bit too young to have truly been mired.  Now video games have depth and excitement.  My child will likely have quite an amazing experience getting to play a huge available backlog of gaming classics (more than they could ever hope to play through) along with an amazing array of games that we cannot even yet imagine.  Getting to see the world of video gaming through a child’s eyes, again, is going to be a lot of fun.

It was almost nine when I got home to Eleven80.  I keep timing the trip casually and I am not sure if the commute to and from Peekskill is really going to be that much longer than the trip to and from Newark.  Having a published train schedule and not walking the bit at the end (the half mile each direction from Eleven80 to Penn Station) might make more of a difference than I realize.  Or, possible, the door to door time will be much longer than I am anticipating and that will be awful.  I think that realistically it takes me quite a bit more than an hour to get from Eleven80 to the end of Wall Street.  The walk is so far that it really adds a ton of extra time to the trip, but the exercise is obviously very good for me.

Dominica couldn’t decide on dinner so just had me pick up McDonald’s from Penn Station in Newark on my way home.  That is so convenient that it is tempting to do it all of the time but we try to avoid that whenever possible.  Tonight it was just meatless Big Macs and French Fries for us and a fruit and yogurt parfait for Dominica as well.  Oreo was very happy.  McD’s fries are his all time favourite food.

While eating dinner we watched a little of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.  Only two episodes which is approximately forty-five minutes.  One of the advantages of using AppleTV to watch television (or Tivo or other means of non-traditional time shifting) is that we get fifty percent better content density without any marketing affecting the way that we think.  So we get to shave fifteen minutes off of every hour of television shows compared to regular television while getting the same amount of content.  It makes watching a few shows a lot less of an impact on our evening.

Dominica went to bed around ten.  I stayed up a little longer just watching some podcasts from the AppleTV.  I watched some video game trailers to see what is coming out as I am pretty out of touch with the video game world these days.

Podcasting is really the format for video game news, I think.  The topic is so accessible to everyone and all that anyone cares about in video game journalism is either previews or reviews.  To provide previews you pretty much just need to republish trailers from the vendors or get your hands on an early copy and make some previews.  To do reviews you just need one or more people to play the game for a while and tell people what they think.  A reviewer in a major gaming rag or just a serious amateur player have the same potential to provide reviews that are useful to you.  With lots of amateurs you are more likely to find someone with similar tastes to your own which is more useful than a handful of staff gamers.

The video format is far better for video games too.  Looking at static images in a paper-based magazine does little to convey the emotion of the game.  Just watching a video of the game only does so much as well but at least you can see the animation, the effects and hear the score.  It is far more engaging.

So it was around eleven, most likely, when I finally got to sleep.  I could barely stay in the bed as Oreo was snuggling as close as he could and was pushing me right off of the side of the bed.  Tomorrow I am in Warren so I will be up nice and early.

39 Days to Baby Day! (34 Weeks and Three Days Pregnant)

14 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing scheduled in 8 days.

First thing this morning we looked at Oreo and determined that he needed to go to the doggy hospital right away this morning.  His allergies are out of control and they need to be dealt with in some serious manner as soon as possible.  So Dominica called in to work and let them know that she would be running late and she took Oreo to the animal hospital at nine, just as soon as they opened.  She picked up breakfast and ate there waiting for them to have an opening or a cancellation as she was not able to get scheduled to see anyone until almost noon!  (And after that Oreo can’t go to daycare because they don’t accept the dogs that late in the day.)

It turns out that Oreo is having severe environmental allergies and needs some serious treatment.  Right away he is on a steroid series and will be getting a topical steroidal shampoo starting tonight and every few days.

This morning I finished reading the “No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology 2007” edited by Neal Ford.

Dominica and I have been discussing the “14 more days of work” situation and it looks like she is actually going to extend that date a little bit.  We have not figured out the details of how this would work yet so we are not committing to any particular plan of action quite yet.  But after we move up to Peekskill she might put in another few days of work down in Totowa, New Jersey even though the commute is really long.  Figuring out what to do with Oreo those days will be the toughest part but I might just stay home with him on the off chance that we will be able to have Internet access hooked up un the house by that point.  (We are really worried about that because of the tiny window in which we have to get that hooked up before moving.)  So it is possible that Dominica will not actually be done at the end of the month but we do know that she can only do so much after the first.  Maybe four or five days tops.  The extra money is really important with the house, baby and everything else going on.

I worked from home for a little bit this morning just making sure that no one was waiting on anything.  Then I walked into the office on Wall Street.  It was a very quiet day.  Even the groups that do not have today off were all running at partial staff and lots of people were leaving after lunch so the day just got slower and slower.

For a late lunch, Dan and I walked down to the bottom of Whitehall and went to the New York Health and Racquet Club.  Dan did weights and I went swimming for forty-five or fifty minutes.  Just laps.  This is my first time swimming laps since 2002, I think.  By the time that I was done I was quite sore.

The afternoon flew by in no time.  Since today is a holiday and the office is mostly empty there was no reason to need to stay late this evening.  I left the office at around a quarter until six and headed for the train at the World Trade Center.

I had to give Oreo a special steroidal bath this evening.  He is such a good boy.  I told him that he needed to have a bath and he came into the bathroom all by himself without me calling him.  It was a long bath too.  Actually a shower.  He likes getting a shower but not so much a bath.  A shower is much warmer and probably feels really good on his back.  He loves to just stand in the shower.

The steroidal shampoo required me to put in on him and then to leave him standing in the bath for five to ten minutes to let the topical steroid treatment set in.  Oreo did not like this part very much.  Cold, wet dog standing in the bathtub was not his idea of an evening treat.  He was a very good little boy and put up with the cold and hopefully will not be itchy tonight.

Our evening was so busy that we just ordered in from Nino’s and ate while watching a single episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.  It was a quick evening even though I made it home a little bit early.

Dominica and I have to be awake early tomorrow as our apartment inspection by the movers is at seven in the morning.  That means that I need to be awake at five thirty so that I can get ready before they arrive.

40 Days to Baby Day! (34 Weeks and Two Days Pregnant)

15 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing scheduled in 9 days.

As you can imagine I was pretty tired this morning when I got paged from the office!  I was not expecting there to be any work going on this morning and so I only had about four hours of sleep at best when dad woke me up to let me know that people were calling looking for me from the office.  So much for sleeping in.

I didn’t have to actually work for very long this morning.  Only about an hour.

After my work was done, we got ready and then drove over to Geneseo to go to the Omega for our last meal in Upstate New York for a while.  This weekend was our last real trip until… well who knows when.  If it wasn’t for the wedding on Friday we wouldn’t have considered traveling this weekend either.

There was much to be done at dad’s after we returned from lunch.  I spent some time working on my class work for my graduate class at RIT and did the base operating system install on the HP Proliant DL385 G5 that has been sitting in dad’s basement.  CentOS 5.2 with Xen.

Dad and Dominica worked on some serious packing projects as we are taking a number of items back with us to Newark that will be moved by the movers in a few weeks to the new house in Peekskill.  Today is also the day in which we winterize the BMW and take the Mazda PR5 out of storage and put it back to good use.  I will never, I think, get over how strange it feels to own a car that you routinely do not sit in for six months and then suddenly drive it out of the barn and drive away with it.  And compared to that, owning the RX7 that hasn’t been driven regularly in five or six years is truly bizarre.  I am used to people owning shells of cars but actual, working, ready-to-go cars in storage is strange.

It ended up being about six in the evening when we finally pulled out of dad’s Peoria estate and hit the long road back to Newark.  We found it strange to think about this round trip home being the first time that we had the opportunity to drive on the newly completed Interstate 99 corridor that we have spent years watching be constructed.  Finished just in time for us to move and have little ongoing need for that route.  After this trip we will be getting very, very used to the entire length of Interstate 86 once again.

The trip south went very well.  We stopped in Mansfield, Pennsylvania and fueled the car (the PR5 has a smaller tank and uses lower grade fuel than the BMW and prices have come down so much!)  A fill up on the BMW has been about $55 and a complete fuel up on the PR5 tonight was just $34!

We stopped at McDonald’s in Mansfield to have a quick bite and were back on the road, after getting confused about how to re-enter the highway, in about an hour.  I listened to my book, “Lost on Planet China”, on my iPod for a bit of the trip while Dominica took a nap.

It was eleven thirty when we arrived in Newark and, hopefully for the last time, loaded up the luggage cart and took a haul of stuff from our car up to the apartment.  After this, all loads should be exiting the building, not entering it.

Oreo has been extremely itchy all week and this weekend it seemed to be getting quite a bit worse.  I took Oreo for a walk after we arrived and we almost couldn’t continue walking because he constantly had to stop to scratch his face.  It is very sad and he is definitely note feeling very well.  We looked at his muzzle closely after we got back to the apartment and he has scratched himself raw and is starting to bleed!  We are going to evaluate him in the morning and see what his condition is then and figure out what needs to be done.

I checked my computer that was loaded up with Handbrake jobs to run while we were gone.  I did such a good job of keeping it busy that the load that I started on Thursday afternoon was still running and was not likely to complete until almost morning!  That was a lot of work out of the way that I would have just been sitting around waiting for otherwise.  I am very glad that I made the decision to run it for the three plus days that we were gone.

Tomorrow I have to go into the office even though it is Columbus Day.  Normally I would have Columbus Day off but I am covering for people tomorrow and will be off on the twenty-second instead so that I can go to the closing for the house without having to take a day off from work.  It really could not have worked out any better timing-wise.

Tomorrow is also the day that Dan and I will be heading down to the tip of Whitehall to try out our local New York Health and Racquet Club which has a pool.  My intention is to go swimming during my lunch break and to see how I like it.  I would really like to get into a serious exercise regimen and it is such a hard thing to do.  Being able to go over lunch in the middle of the day is the perfect solution.  It should, in theory, actually save me money by keeping me from being able to go out to eat anywhere expensive on the days that I go to the gym.  That, in addition to the discount that I get from the office making the membership just $75 per month with a six month commitment, seems like a pretty good deal.