Scott Alan Miller :: A Life Online
Today we added my Twitter feed onto the main SGL page. This should make the impact of my Twittering a lot more meaningful. Now the last five Twitter updates appear automatically at the top of SGL. So even when SGL has not been updated recently you can still check in here instead of going to Twitter to see the very latest news.
This also makes following my Twitter feed much easier for people who do not have their own Twitter accounts and therefore are unable to “follow” me on Twitter.
Yesterday I finished reading “Writing Effective Use Cases” and today I started reading “UML for the IT Business Analyst“. Gripping stuff.
Two new books arrived last night that I have had on order. Jeffrey Gitomer’s “Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness” and “Customer-Centered Products” by Ivy Hooks and Kristin Farry.
My day started bright and early at seven thirty. Nothing like getting home from the office at ten at night just to be logged back in again before eight in the morning. At least I’m getting overtime which will help to pay for the house. That bill will be coming up on us very quickly.
I worked from just before eight in the morning until after noon on a conference call. That was painful and boring. Then I took a bit of a break but settled back in to work for most of the afternoon. There is just too much to do at the office. No time for a break.
Today, in my ongoing quest to figure out how to make Twitter cool and fit into my daily life, I have installed TwitBin which is a Twitter Extension for FireFox. Now my Twitter Feed just scrolls along the side of my screen and I can make updates at a moment’s notice.
I did some serious iPod loading tonight. I downloaded a ton of books from Audible and copied them onto my iPod so that it would be ready for whenever I want to listen to them. I also got all of the latest IT Conversations downloads and Prairie Home Companion – News from Lake Wobegon podcasts. Those are the only podcasts that I find myself listening to these days. IT Conversations requires quite a bit of time as it releases several hours of material each week. It is roughly like reading a book a week.
Today is a bit of a family medical emergency day. First I find out that my Great Aunt Betty is scheduled to go in for triple-bypass surgery on Tuesday. Then, this afternoon, my father has a farm accident involving getting whacked in the head by the sharp end of a iron fence pole. My Aunt Sharon and cousin Sara had to go over to make sure that he was doing alright. He is okay not but he got his bell rung pretty hard for sure.
Dominica spend most of the day either watching the second season of Frasier or playing Paper Mario from the Nintendo 64 on our Wii. She loves that game. It is one of her favourites although today she stopped playing after just an hour or two because she got frustrated at one of the harder parts. She also started knitting so that we will have some baby outfits knitted by her for the baby when it arrives.
At eight this evening, Facebook updated to a new interface in the middle of my using it. That was surprising. I am getting discovered on Twitter a bit too. I was surprised at that. Two complete strangers are following me now. That is pretty neat.
I finished reading “The Hacker Ethic: A Radical Approach to the Philosophy of Business” this evening and began reading “Shadow of the Silk Road.”
I did most of an install of OpenSUSE 11 Linux onto Microsoft VirtualPC 2007 as a test run to generate installation documentation for Jeremy who is going to be doing installs down at Castile Christian Academy soon.
August already. That’s crazy. It feels like August when you are outside walking, though. It is hot and humid.
I started working at seven thirty this morning. My morning really was not all that bad. I worked for about two hours getting everything caught up and in good order. There was work to do, but I would not classify the morning as being necessarily busy.
I grab the train and headed off to Wall Street at what seemed to be the most appropriately slow time of the morning when no one was likely to require my attention for a little while.
Friday lunches are always an adventure in Manhattan. Today, Katie came up from the waterfront and met me on on Stone to eat at Smorgas Chef, an upscale Swedish eatery there. The food was excellent. I had warm goat cheese and beet salad to start and my meal was Norwegian salmon and scrambled eggs on toast. Very tasty. The one thing that was weird was that because the lunch rush was so busy we had to share a rather small four person table with two other people. It was rather awkward.
Afterwards we hit Financier for coffee and take-home goodies. I definitely love the food choices that working in Manhattan provides.
I was smart enough to grab take-home treats from Financier Patisserie for Dominica too. You can’t get food like this in New Jersey.
Tomorrow I have an extremely busy day scheduled. My morning deployments start at eight in the morning and an all-morning conference call supporting a storage migration starts at nine. In addition to five hours of already scheduled work I also have quite a bit of anytime work to do tomorrow when I have the opportunity. I am going to be working a full day most likely. Because I have to spend so much of the time on the phone we decided that I really needed to have a new phone before tomorrow if at all possible.
We shopped around a little and decided to get a Panasonic DECT 6.0 wireless phone system with three handsets and a speakerphone feature – which is actually the most critical feature at this point. Our old Uniden wireless phone system died some time ago and we have been living with a $10 Walmart special bare-bones phone for the last two years and it is pretty awful. We will be very happy to have wireless, speakerphone, CallerID, headset, etc. It will make our lives a lot easier.
We really have to have a new phone soon either way as we will not be able to live with just a single, non-wireless phone once we move into the new house in Peekskill. Having three floors and a baby will make that just impossible. We will require there to be phone access throughout the house.
For those who are unfamiliar with the DECT 6.0 standard in wireless phones – this is a 1.9GHz frequency band standard (1.8GHz outside of the US) with a new standard designed just for voice communications. This frequency range is nice because it does not interfere with the 2.4GHz band used for 802.11b/g/n that we normally use for our WiFi equipment in the house. The 1.9GHz band also gets greater range than the higher frequency bands get. If you are using WiFi, and who isn’t these days, and you still need a legacy phone system then DECT 6.0 is a very good choice. It is also less expensive to manufacture due to the lower technical challenges of making transceivers in this range. (We do not use a legacy phone system outside of the house, but our Vonage VoIP telephone system comes into the house digitally and then is transferred into legacy in-house analogue wiring. It is a strange system but it is simple and straightforward. I would prefer all digital but Vonage does not offer that in any useful form yet.)
Today involved more “trying out” of Twitter. I am able to use it from my BlackBerry now. I started using it via the web browser but that was pretty painful. So I discovered and installed TwitterBerry to see if that would work a bit better. That makes the Twitter updating process a million times easier and quicker. Now I might do it all of the time. I even got Dominica to sign up for Twitter today. Now she can keep everyone up to date on her comings and goings. She has tried blogging in the past but was unable to keep it up for any length of time finding it difficult to figure out what to write about. Maybe with microblogging and having access from her BlackBerry she will be able to stick with it.
So far I had only put a single application onto my BlackBerry 8830 SmartPhone – an SSH terminal application used to access UNIX servers remotely which worked worlds better than a similar application on the sad Palm PDA that I had before the BlackBerry. After trying TwitterBerry I realized that there is a world of useful handheld applications that I am missing. So I downloaded the BlackBerry FaceBook application as well. I am becoming more and more mobile as we speak. Although we aren’t really speaking.
My evening was quite busy. There is nothing “special” going on at the office which means that the developments are all running full steam ahead getting deployments ready making my night quite busy. The more upheaval at work the less work there is for me. When things are quiet is when I get really heavily loaded down on Friday nights.
My night became a very late one. At one point I really thought that I would be leaving the office a little before six in the evening. That was not to be. One of my deployments ended up keeping me in the office until well after eight at night – constantly dangling the carrot of hope before my eyes thinking that the software to be deployed would be available any minute. We didn’t end up getting to even begin the installation until ten past eight in the evening. Dominica was already home and well into watching 27 Dresses while I was still preparing for the work to begin.
I was in the office so late this evening that they shut off the lights on me and, as far as I could tell, all but one other person from my entire floor had left. It was very lonely, reminding me of my days working at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. where I would often work late into the night in an office where everyone had left hours before.
I got home at a quarter until ten! What a late day. I had just enough time to call Emily and to wish her a happy birthday. For her birthday we bought her an 8.1MP Samsung digital camera. She has been a bit of a photographer for a while always stealing her mom’s camera so we thought that she should have her own. She is the same age that I was when I got my first camera. My first camera was given to me by my parents while on our way to Bar Harbor, Maine for my first ever vacation there. Emily just got back from her first trip to Maine a few days ago.
It was pretty much straight to bed for us after eating the goodies that I brought home from Financier. I have to be up early tomorrow to go back to work, unfortunately.
I was pretty tired when I got up this morning. I got almost six hours of sleep which is one of my best nights of sleep all week long. I am really looking forward to the weekend.
Dominica decided that she was going to take the train up to Utica this weekend to visit her family before her sister, the girls and Garrett head back for Houston, but when she went to buy the tickets the train was sold out.
Today was my day at home with Oreo. I just scrounged around the kitchen for food here today. It’s cheaper and easier than going out I suppose. Healthier, that’s for sure.
I was decently busy today. Dominica’s day was actually a little slow it seems. She needed that. Her week has been pretty crazy. Her job now is doing email / ticket support primarily rather than being tied to a phone. This changed a few months ago. She likes this as the work is a little less “real time” and there isn’t a phone ringing for her to “jump on” every few seconds. But because she can work at her own pace and doesn’t have to wait for the work to trickle in she actually works much harder and, when the emails or tickets get caught up or the phone people call behind, she jumps back to the phones to help out. So she can get exhausted easily.
Dominica brought home fish tacos from On the Border for dinner. It is a common Thursday night treat for us since she works very near to an On the Border restaurant. Her drive home was terrible, though, because of traffic from Bruce Springsteen whom I guess is playing at the Meadowlands tonight and American Idol is filming or something in Newark’s Prudential Center right next door. So traffic is a mess everywhere and Newark is, of course, gridlock.
Once Dominica got home, we watched some of the second season of Frasier and relaxed for most of the evening. I didn’t get to see much more than half of the first season, but I have just been far too busy to spend time watching that so Dominica has been watching it without me.
After Dominica went to bed around nine I stayed up working until almost midnight. We are trying to get things moving at the school so that we have computers updated and ready for the kids when they return in late August. More importantly, really, is getting computers ready for the teachers and staff. Getting everyone else onto and using the computers regularly is actually more important because it forms a critical support structure for the kids to have computers at their disposal.
I played around with Twitter again tonight. Haven’t tried it in over a year. Microblogging is kind of interesting and I see it taking root within Facebook now as well. I will see how Twitter works out. Now there are badges so that I can add my Twitter feed to SGL. Maybe I can do that this weekend. That might make it more worthwhile for me to try. I already blog so much I don’t want to be sending people elsewhere to see my microblog updates.
I can’t believe that July is already over. This year is flying by. The house move in October and the baby in November are going to be here before I know it.
I worked until one thirty last night and had to be up at five thirty this morning. It was not a happy event, me pulling myself from my bed. Just four hours of sleep, ouch.
Dominica was actually the one running late this morning so I didn’t get to catch the earlier trains like I prefer and had to take the 7:26 Dover train to Summit. This line has fewer stops but it is just late enough that I have to take the next shuttle from Summit to Warren.
My shuttle driver this morning decided that even though it was eighty degrees and extremely humid that we, his passengers trapped in the airless metal box that he drives, did not need air conditioning or fresh air. So the ride was rather unpleasant and very exhausting that early in the morning. I started to feel a bit ill between the stale air, heat, humidity and the horrible jerking and swaying of the shuttle. To exacerbate the issue the driver actually got lost and drove all over Summit before he figured out how to get out of town. I almost panicked when he went to an entirely different company than where I work and I was sure that I had gotten onto the wrong shuttle but, it turns out, it wasn’t me that was confused today.
The weather is pretty nice today so I brought a real, paperback book rather than my iPod. I got a chance to read quite a bit in Alistair Cockburn’s “Writing Effective Use Cases.” I should be done with the book relatively soon.
Today was very busy but in a “catching up” kind of way. I managed to work my way through my email so that, by the end of the day, I had only a tiny handful of emails left in my inbox, which acts mostly like my to-do list – enough that they easily fit onto a single screen. It is pretty amazing to ever get my email queue so low when you consider the fact that I receive more than one thousands emails every day. And at the office none of those are SPAM either. That is all, actual mail from within the company.
I made it to Newark quite a bit ahead of Dominica so I had to walk from Broad Street Station to Eleven80. It was pretty hot and muggy so I came home and took a shower before Dominica got home. Once she was home we walked over to Food for Life to eat dinner there.
After dinner Dominica did a little reading and went to bed very early. I spent the evening working. Tomorrow I am doing the early morning coverage so I have to be working by six thirty.