October 6, 2008: A Day with No Title, Oops

46 Days to Baby Day! (33 Weeks and Three Days Pregnant)

18 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing in 1 – 19 days.

I am on the early morning shift today so Dominica got me up when she got up to get ready to go to work.  The office was pretty slow this morning.  It was a nice morning to be on the early shift.

For breakfast I ran over to Airlie Cafe and picked up a sandwich.  Oreo is happy to be home with me today.  He spent the entire morning sitting in the brown chair in the living room right beside my desk all bundled in his wool blankets like a little papoose (actually, at 25lbs, he is a rather large papoose.)  I have the windows open and am wearing a sweatshirt around the apartment.

Today feels a bit like winter.  It is dark and cold and the streets are mostly barren of people.  The apartment is rather chilly.  Yesterday was much, much warmer.  According to the Weather Channel, today is supposed to be the coldest day in the first half of October.  Too bad, today would have been the perfect weather for moving.

I got my “classwork” done for my RIT class first thing this morning giving me a bit of a jump on the week.  Then I went on and read all of the reading assignments for this week.  Then, as there was more time available, I just went ahead and did this week’s homework!  Talk about getting a jump on the week.  I completed the entire week’s work on the morning of the first day!  This is going to be a really busy week, though, so getting this out of the way was a really good idea.

Today is another wild ride for the financial markets.  What a day.  Today the Dow fell below 10,000 points taken us to the lowest market levels in four years!  At least I can say that it is an interesting time to be working in the financial markets.

I went to do the work that I needed to do for BrainBench today and realized that my manager had not applied the work that I did last time correctly and that now we had two rounds of work having been completed based on work that was not correct.  All of this came about because the web site that I use to do my workflow with them doesn’t have all of the necessary functionality implemented so I have to have my manager at BB do some of the work for me.

Today was a scary day on the market.  At one point we had a drop of over 800 points – the all time largest point drop.  But at the end of the day it was just over 300 points down.  Still a pretty bad day.  Oil dropped to just under $88 though so gas should be getting cheaper quickly which will, in theory, encourage people to do some additional spending.  If it stays down until Christmas it might have a significant impact on Christmas shopping habits.

The weather was crazy here today.  Very cold this morning.  Then mid-afternoon it got so warm and sunny that Dominica was driving the convertible with the top down when she went to lunch.  Then by five it was cold and windy again.

Katie saw gas at $3.03 in NJ yesterday.  Imagine what it will be tomorrow!

On her way home from work Dominica picked up food from Cheeseburger in Paradise.  We get BBQ Cheddar Veggie Burgers from there.  They are pretty good.  Although what I really miss is the veggie burger from Tom Wahl’s in Avon, New York.  They make the best veggie burger anywhere.

We watched several episodes of Magnum P.I. during and after dinner.  Dominica has gotten hooked on that show.  It really is a classic.  She went to bed around nine or nine thirty.  I went out to the office and continued studying Ruby on Rails from the book that I finished this weekend.  I am attempting to do all of the samples and examples in the book to get as much out of it as possible.  I am having a lot of run with it.

To get a little more out of the book I decided to adapt the project in the book to SQLite instead of MySQL which they use.  I have used MySQL a lot over the years but have never used SQLite in my own project and was interested to see it at work.

I stayed up until elevenish and then headed off to bed myself.  Tomorrow will be my only day on Wall Street this week.  The weather is nice, though, so I am looking forward to not overheating on my walk into the office.

October 5, 2008: Nice Relaxing Sunday

47 Days to Baby Day! (33 Weeks and Two Days Pregnant)

19 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing in 2 – 20 days.

I “slept in” until around ten thirty this morning although there was very little sleeping.  At best I probably got no more than two restless hours of sleep broken up between the hours of four and ten this morning.  Not a very restful night.

Well, this is it.  Barring any catastrophes today is Dominica and my final, free weekend day in Newark, New Jersey.  It is pretty hard to believe that our last weekend is ending and we do not even have a closing date yet.  Next weekend we are out of town for Joe’s wedding up in Rochester.  The weekend after that is, or at least it should be, our first weekend of moving to the new house.

I ordered Steve McConnell’s “Software Project Survival Guide” from Amazon Markplace in “Like New” condition for under $5.00.  That’s awesome.

I also ordered two movies for the purpose of doing some house keeping in my Amazon wish list.  We got As You Like It and Road to Hong Kong which completes our Bing Crosby and Bob Hope “Road to…” movies.  We have them all.

My “score” on StackOverflow is up to 428 as of this afternoon.  I wasn’t even really active on the site today.

This week was an incredible reading week for me.  I completed a book each day Monday through Thursday and then managed to finish reading “Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy” this afternoon which I only purchased from Borders on Friday evening on my ride home.  I had the good fortune of coming out to the living room and having Oreo join me on the snuggle recliner.  I just sat there with my feet up reading and he snuggled beside me bundled up in his wool blanket.  It was very relaxing.

Overall it was quite a relaxing day.  I did a lot of reading, as I mentioned, and Dominica watched tons of AppleTV.  We did watch quite a bit of AppleTV together and at one point Dominica even came out to the living room and read for half an hour or so.

Tomorrow I am covering the early shift at the office for someone so I have to be up bright and early.  Oreo will be happy as that means that I will be working from home, at least in the early morning, so he will get to stay home with me and rest.  That works out as it saves us a day of daycare costs too.

October 4, 2008: Scott and Dominica’s 5th Anniversary!

48 Days to Baby Day! (33 Weeks and One Day Pregnant)

19 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing in 3 – 21 days.

Today is Dominica and my five year wedding anniversary.  Boy has the time flown by.  I can’t believe at all that it has been five years.  How is that possible?

I slept in quite a bit this morning.  It is not every day that I get the opportunity to really sleep in so it was very, very nice.  We have the windows open and the apartment is rather chilly so I had a very snuggly dog pressed up against my side looking for warmth.

I started the day by getting out of bed, starting to put on my jeans and promptly falling right over.  I was hoping that Dominica didn’t hear me hit the floor as she was in the kitchen but she came right in to check on me and found me on the floor trying to me quiet.  I didn’t really hurt anything, luckily I was on carpeting, but it was rather embarrassing to just topple right over like that.  Didn’t do much to improve my back’s situation, though 🙁

Dominica was actually up before me today and started up the weekend’s laundry right away.  Then she moved out into the living room, once I logged into the office to start working for the day, to do some knitting.  She is working on some clothes for the baby that she wants to get done, obviously, before the baby is born.

Katie Twittered this morning that she found gas in Buena, New Jersey for $3.09!  People keep talking about it going to go over four dollars but at the moment we are pretty sure that we are going to be seeing it dropping into the twos again.  Who would have thought.

I earned a new badge, Commentator, on Stack Overflow this morning.  I did not manage to earn the reputation yesterday that I had been hoping to have earned but at least I am moving on up even if it is slowly.  By three this afternoon, though, I was over the 300 mark that I had set for myself yesterday.  (I finished the day with 337 reputation points.)

For lunch, Dominica made tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.  We recently learned that you could put raspberry preservers directly into the grilled cheese before grilling it for a more Monte Christo type effect.  This is a new grilled cheese technique that we learned from her father.

Around two in the afternoon Dominica decided that she was so tired that she was going to go nap for a while.  So she and Oreo went to bed and put on the second season of Bones which Dominica has on DVD from NetFlix.  She and Oreo stayed there watching DVDs and knitting until eight in the evening when we went out for dinner.

For our anniversary dinner Dominica and I drove out to the Oranges, Exit 8A on 280, and got dinner at Panera Bread.  It was very busy and loud out there.  Tons of people apparently had the same idea that we did for dinner.  Not many nice places to go around Newark without traveling too far and Panela is pretty accessible – especially if you live in the Oranges which are pretty heavily populated.  While we were at dinner I had meant to get myself iced tea but accidentally got myself iced coffee.  Oops.  Way too much caffeine after going more than a week without.

After dinner we picked up half a dozen bagels and some bread for tomorrow.  Panela has the best bagels although they were out of their cinnamon chip bagels which are my favourite.

We got back to Eleven80 and spent the remainder of the evening watching Magnum P.I. on the AppleTV.  Dominica went to bed sometime around midnight.

I was hoping to be able to go to bed around the same time but the caffeine was really affecting me.  I stayed up in the office reading and working on Ruby on Rails (just a project from the book that I am reading) until four in the morning!

Ruby/Qt: qtruby4.rb:2144: [BUG] [x86_64-linux]

You are working with Ruby and Qt and you get the following error:

/usr/lib64/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/Qt/qtruby4.rb:2144: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03) [x86_64-linux]

This is usually caused by a library linking problem. Most likely you are using:

require 'Qt'

Personally, I run into this problem when using Ruby/Qt on Novell OpenSUSE 11 64bit (x86_64 / AMD64).  What needs to be done is that linking needs to occur explicitly to the correct library.  If you are using ‘Qt3’ then you can link directly to that or, in my case, you want to use Qt4/KDE4 bindings then you will want to link to korundum4:

require 'korundum4'

Problem solved!

Thanks to Bemerkenswertes Meinerseits for some guidance in German!

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.