Sheep Guarding Llama

72 Days to Baby Day! (29 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)

Nationalism and Patriotism are not synonymous, in fact, they are quite often mutually exclusive.

Got to bed pretty late last night, was doing a Solaris 10 installation until two in the morning.  This is was first serious Solaris 10 on AMD64 installation.  I’ve always used Solaris on Sun UltraSparc processors.

I got up and logged into the office at seven this morning.  I did the usual morning cleanup and was just about to head out to the office when someone sent me a schedule for morning deployments that would start before I could reach the office and would last for most of the morning.  So I was stuck working from home until almost lunch time.

I did a Red Hat / CentOS 5.2 Linux build this morning.  It has been a busy week, apparently.

The weather is pretty nice today.  Bright and sunny and the air is nice and cool.  Not autumn crisp or anything yet, but not so warm as it has been.  Summer is finally wanning.

I made it to the office just in time to log in, answer my email and walk right back out again to get lunch.  Just went for a simple tuna fish salad on an organic mescalin salad that I brought back and ate at my desk.

I was in the office until around seven or a little thereafter when Ronak and I went out to the Full Schilling for a few drinks – they have Old Speckled Hen on draught there – and some salads for dinner.  It is a big salad day for me, I guess.  I had the “Big Ceaser” salad with a huge slab of salmon on it.  It was quite good.  I got a salad “to go” for Dominica as well.

Anytime that I leave the office late it takes forever for me to work my way back to Newark.  Over an hour even in the best cases.  It was almost nine thirty when I finally got back home.

FireFox 3.0.2 beta is out.  We discovered this when Dominica’s laptop automatically updated to it.  We didn’t realize this before but because she was a beta tester for FireFox before 3.0 released they automatically update her ot beta releases now while my machine only updates when new production releases come out.

73 Days to Baby Day! (29 Weeks and Four Days Pregnant)

It is better to make bad decisions too early than to make good decisions too late.

Seriously overcast in the New York Metro today.  Very dark clouds – no sunlight whatsoever.  Nice change.  My eyes have missed the clouds.

I worked from home for a little while this morning.  Right when I would have started walking to the office it turned into a massive downpour and there was no way that I was walking out in that.  So I did some work at home until it lightened up a little bit and then headed in.  It was still raining for the first half of my walk but it wasn’t bad at all.

I opened the windows today as it is so much cooler than it has been and we are desperate for some fresh air in here.

I ate lunch in Penn Station on my way into the office.  I figured that I would kill two birds with one stone and save myself some time this afternoon, and it isn’t often that I can manage to get Triponi Pizza.

Work was pretty much normal today.  Nothing worth mentioning.  I am not traveling in to Warren tomorrow, just as a reminder to those who follow my schedule closely.

We had coffee, soup and salad at Financier this afternoon.  I am in there for coffee at least once or twice a week if not more.

This afternoon I got a chance to try a Korean snack food that is roughly like a Captain Crunch cereal ball except many times larger – almost half the size of a golf ball – but instead of being a peanut butter flavoured puff it is flavoured with squid and shrimp and the center contained a hazelnut!  This is some seriously crazy snack food.  It was actually rather tasty.  No one else in the office was too thrilled about them.  Not the next snack food craze on Wall Street, I guess.

There was no rain for the walk home.  It is still a little warm and humid for my taste but the weather is quite an improvement.  I got home and discovered Dominica and Oreo already napping.  Dominica was really worn out today.

We decided to skip a real dinner.  Min just mad some risotto and mac’n’cheese that we had around the house and we both had just a little bit and called that dinner.  Then she watched an episode of Frasier and called it a night around nine thirty.

I spend the evening building Solaris 10 on VMWare.

74 Days to Baby Day! (29 Weeks and Three Days Pregnant)

I started my day reading David McCullough‘s 2003 Jefferson Lecture from the National Endowment for the Humanities: “The Course of Human Events.”  (This lecture is available, read by David McCullough, from Audible.)

I stopped by Airlie Cafe and grabbed a coffee to drink on my walk to the office.  The weather has turned much nicer today, still a little warm for me but far better than it has been, and I enjoyed my walk to the office in Manhattan listening to my iPod loaded with conference talks from IT Conversations.  I listened to an especially good talk from O’Reilly Media’s Emergency Technology Conference by Lawrence Lessig on Coding Against Corruption.

For lunch today, four of us headed uptown to hit a south Indian dosa restaurant about which we have been talking about for weeks.  I haven’t been able to get dosa in months!  It was a very nice change from the regular cuisine that I get these days.

My new BlackBerry Curve 8300 was approved this morning and should be arriving at the office in the next few days.  Because of disaster testing, I am not going in to the Warren office this week, so I expect that I will be picking up the new BlackBerry next Wednesday while I am out there.  This will be a very nice upgrade from my current, ancient, BlackBerry.  That thing is awful.  It was not fun to carry around as it was so old that it was embarassing, but it just kept on working so I was reluctant to have it replaced.  It finally died so now I get a nice, new one.  Yay!

Google turns ten years old today.  Now I feel old.  I remember when AltaVista was hot, new search engine on the block and when Yahoo took over from them!  Heck, I remember when there was no “web” and we just had the Internet and we used Gopher for text resources.  I remember when the web was available but the idea of graphics hadn’t arrived yet!  Then this crazy thing called Mosaic showed up and everything changed!

I worked at the office until almost seven thirty.  My foot problem is really bothering me today and my walk to and from the office was really painful.

Dominica ordered in Nino’s so that it arrived just minutes before I got home.  We watched a little Frasier while eating dinner.  It wasn’t long before I had to stop relaxing and get back to work, though.  There is way too much to do now that school is back in session.  No relaxation opportunities for me from until, well, I have no idea.

I had to jump on and work for the office again at eleven thirty.  I worked for a little while then remembered that I hadn’t put in my time sheets yet for the last two weeks!  Oops.  Wow, good thing that I remembered that.  So I took care of that as well while I was online.

75 Days to Baby Day! (29 Weeks and Two Days Pregnant)

I accidentally left the alarm set and ended up waking up to it at eight this morning.  I was pretty well rested and just decided to get up.  I logged into the office.  During the night someone had called and sent me a Manhattan callback number so I assumed that it was from work, but there was no email waiting for me (well, technically there were hundreds but none that were urgent or reflected a call to my mobile phone) so apparently it was a wrong number or something.  If it isn’t important enough for email it definitely isn’t important enough for me to call.

I worked for about an hour this morning “at the office” while Dominica and Oreo slept.  Nothing heavy, just some light work mostly responding to emails and a few loose ends left over from yesterday’s long day that needed some typing up.

Dominica and Oreo got up around ten.  It was a beautifully bright, sunny day.  Crystal clear air after the wind and rain from the tropical storm yesterday.

My homework and reading assignments took most of my day.  Dominica watched Ratatouille while I worked which she has been dying to see for a long time.

It was a rather uneventful day.  Spoke to Andy by phone for an hour or two before dinner.  Overall today was light work and a bit of relaxation.

Weather is supposed to be cooler this week.