September 9, 2008: Yummy Squid Puffs

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.

September 8, 2008: Finally Rava Dosa Again

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.

September 7, 2008: Back to Doing Homework

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.

September 6, 2008: Tropical Storm Hanna Comes to Newark

76 Days to Baby Day! (29 Weeks and One Day Pregnant)

I left work around a quarter after seven last night.  It had cooled down a bit but was still very humid.  The tropical storm is pushing up in our direction pushing water laden air in front of it.  Tomorrow is going to be very wet.

My Office FloorOn the PATH train this evening I got to see real, unadulterated racism in action.  Coming from Upstate New York, I’ve never been exposed to anything like this.  Living in Newark, of course, prepares you a bit but this was crazy.

A woman on the train, with a group of supporters, was yelling at a poor and terrified Indian couple, one of whom was crying, telling them that they were not wanted in this country and that they could not speak English (I am paraphrasing of course as the woman screaming was only barely able to speak English and was yelling at people who probably had a rather extensive grasp of the Queen’s English) and she kept referring to them as A-rabs (is that a word?) and saying how they were evil and siding with the “white man” out to get everyone.  Her crew was chanting 9-11 in the background (apparently white New Yorkers and their Indian allies were behind the attacks?  This is a new one to me.)

It was very scary and there were terrified children on the train.  The group kept saying that they were going out to vote for Obama and that Obama would “take care” of all of the A-rabs and their white friends.  It was quite clear that they were confusing Obama with Osama and thought that Obama was being elected to lead a massacre of those would didn’t support the 9-11 attacks or something like that.  It was amazing that violence didn’t erupt on the train right there.

Luckily the woman was screaming and that brought the Port Authority Police rather quickly.  She was pulled from the train and arrested there.  Our train had to be held for them to remove her.  It’s amazing that someone so pro-terrorism and full of hatred could act out in such a way while inside of the World Trade Center.  People like this make me ashamed to be an American.  Although she was directing some of her rant at me, as the only white guy on the train that I saw, so maybe I am only ashamed that she is an American.

All I can say is, we are so ready to move out of Newark.

We ate our dinner and watched some Frasier. In the past two weeks the baby has really started to become active and not only can Dominica feel the baby moving around on a regular basis now but I can as well.  Once in a while you can even see it moving!  It is getting very exciting.

Up at eight to work for the office today.  That lasted for about four hours.  Dominica got up around ten and decided to spend the day watching “classic” movies.  She started with Fame. The “classic” selection from NetFlix on demand is pretty good.

I walked over to Airlie to pick up breakfast.  It is really humid and warm but completely overcast.  We got a little rain during the night but nothing so far this morning.

I had a migraine that got pretty bad this morning so around one, after I had wrapped up my scheduled morning work at the office, I took a nap until almost five.  That really helped.  At some point Dominica came in and napped with Oreo and I as well.  I had given Oreo a bath earlier so this gave him a chance to get all bundled and warm up while he dried.

After my nap I got back to work and Dominica watched Xanadu! Yes, with Olivia Newton-John.  Weird, weird stuff.  It is no wonder that her career ended abruptly with that movie.  What a disaster.

My latest shipment from Amazon came today.  My textbook for my class at RIT arrived, “Dynamic Software Development: Managing Projects in Flux” by Timothy Wells along with “CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions” and “Professionalizing Business Analysis“.

We ordered in dinner from Nino’s.  We definitely were not going to go out into the rain to look for food.  I feel bad for making the Nino’s driver come out.  He was in a yellow mac and looked pretty sad.  We tipped him better than usual.  What a bad day to have that job.

I took a short break from working to eat dinner and to watch a little bit of Frasier. After eating I went right back to the living room to keep working but Min and Oreo stayed in to watch the show.

I wrapped up my work for the office at eight thirty.  What a long day.  Now time for my RIT homework.

We watched some more Frasier before calling it a night.  I probably won’t sleep that much tonight after my long nap this afternoon, but at least I feel quite a bit more rested.

September 5, 2008: Rochester IHOP is Famous

77 Days to Baby Day! (29 Weeks Pregnant)

In today’s XKCD, one of the most important comics on the web and a staple of Internet culture, makes mention of the Rochester IHOP where Dominica and I have eaten many times!  Very cool.  I feel that much more connected to XKCD now.

I discovered today that Questionable Content has been unblocked at the office.  That can’t last for long so I will be making use of the time to plat catch-up.  I am hundreds of strips behind.  Maybe even five hundred!

Anticipating your own incompetence is not a good interview strategy.  It is especially bad as the collegiate system so often does such a poor job at training people for the software development field.  Normally we assume that it takes several years away from college/university before a good developer will hit their stride and really learn what software development is all about.

It takes quite some time just before they learn to learn at a pace acceptable in IT because so often college learning is too slow and lenient to represent the ongoing pace of IT.  Believing that a recent college graduate will likely have more skills than you do with several years of actual development under your belt is a sad statement indeed.

Today I downloaded and began using Google Gears on Firefox.  There are not that many websites that yet use Gears so I signed up for an account with Remember the Milk to try out the Gears integration.  Gears is an interesting toolkit from Google that allows a website to have access to your desktop and to work offline.  The design is such that it allows application on the web to behave much more like traditional desktop applications.  It is used, of course, to enhance the Google Doc and GMail applications which is its obvious use.

For lunch, a group of us went out to the Full Schilling on Pearl.  It is very close and handy to the office.

In the news today there was an interesting article about how global warming is reducing the size of glaciers in Switzerland.  The retreating glaciers are leaving behind amazing artifacts including some of the oldest artifacts of their kind high in the Alpine mountains.

I wrapped up almost all of my work by five thirty.  But one team that I was working for had some files that they forgot to make available for me and I ended up getting stuck in the office for quite a long while into the evening waiting for the files to be made available.  So it was well after seven when I finally wrapped up.

Dominica and I decided that it would just be easiest, especially as I need to work tomorrow morning at eight in the morning, if I just picked up some McDonald’s on the way home this evening.  There is a McDonald’s in Newark Penn Station which makes that very easy.

I am going to post early tonight as I just don’t feel like logging on and updating once I arrive home, and since I now have Twitter keeping you up to date there really isn’t that much need.  So I will leave you with this from Questionable Content:

Questionable Content is dedicated to educating the world about our wily, bladed cousins to the North. Australians, on the other hand, have venomous spurs on their ankles which they use to immobilize their prey (drop bears). But you probably already knew that. Wil Wheaton is mostly defenseless, but will charm you with amusing anecdotes about life on the Star Trek: TNG set until you no longer feel like attacking him. Why were you attacking Wil Wheaton in the first place anyway? Are you a polar bear?