July 28, 2008: Reading

Today I finished reading Bill Bryson’s “Shakespeare: The World As Stage” which I got from Audible.  Listening to the book reminded me that we had hoped to have been able to have gone to the Stratford Festival in Ontario as there are doing several shows this year that I really wanted to see including: The Music Man, Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost and All’s Well That Ends Well.  We had been hoping to make a long weekend of it sometime in July or August and see several of the shows back to back but with the baby coming and the house underway it is very unlikely that we could do that.  It would have been a great year to see several shows.  At least I am not missing a performance of my favourite Shakespearean play As You Like It.

Today was extremely busy at the office.  My morning was completely crazy.  It was rather exhausting.  I didn’t have a chance to even eat lunch (or breakfast for that matter) until after two thirty in the afternoon.  Dominica’s day was quite busy as well, and she was quite worn out by the time that she came home.  She did manage to spend her lunch break doing some much needed grocery shopping.

While busy, my day was almost entirely uneventful.  I started listening to Mark Twain’s “A Murder, A Mystery & A Wedding” late this evening.  It has been in my Audible queue for a while.  I really only selected it because it is narrated by Garrison Keillor.  It is pretty short and I do appreciate the importance of classic American literature of which there is only so much.  Mark Twain is a great author.

Recently, Dominica and I have been discussing literature a bit because of the baby on the way.  It is interesting to think about what literature our child may enjoy and experience.  Dominica was a born reader – far in excess of myself.  I liked to read and read many great books but nothing in comparison to her.  I, however, read a greater variety of books and enjoyed more of the classics like “Little Women”, “Johnny Tremain” and “1984”.

When I was young, my literary tastes tended towards classic Americana (in addition to my obvious love of C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicle of Narnia”.)  Authors that I read the most, in my memory, included Louisa May Alcott, Irene Hunt, Madelaine L’Engle, L. M. Montegomery (yes, she was Canadian) and others.  Unlike Dominica or I, though, our child will have access to audio books throughout their life as well which really didn’t become possible for us until we were in our twenties.  The only “books on tape” that I knew as a child were ones that my mother read to me and recorded while she read.  Having commercial books on “tape” wasn’t something that I could afford until I was much older.  Very occassionally we would get a book on tape from the library when I was young like “Lyle the Crocodile” and “The Jungle Book” but those were by far the exception to the rule.

I spent most of the evening working in the living room while Dominica watched Frasier.  It was a pretty lazy night.  Andy was up late working so I stayed up to make sure that he didn’t need anything.  I am working the early morning shift tomorrow but then taking Dominica into work at seven.  Tomorrow afternoon we are going for the house inspection!  Hopefully there will be pictures soon after.

July 27, 2008: Glass Explosion

If you ever need a laugh at the expense of cruelly tortured children, spend some time at Not Without My Handbag’s Guide to Bad Baby Names.  You will cry with laughter and, we hope, sympathy.

We slept in a little today but nothing like yesterday.  Dominica was up around ten or so.  I always get up when Oreo decides that he is tired of sleeping in the bedroom and wants to hang out in the living room instead.

For brunch today we went over to Hell’s Kitchen in the Ironbound with Kevin, Pam and Ryan.  Hell’s Kitchen has some awesome food and drinks.  We were really happy that we tried them out for brunch.  Unfortunately, they are discontinuing the brunch for the rest of the summer and today was the last day.  So it was more of a tease than anything else.

After lunch, Dominica spent the afternoon taking her HP Linux 101 class and getting caught up doing the first five lessons today (the final lesson, six, does not release until tomorrow.)  I did a bit of work of many different types throughout the day.  Overall it was a rather relaxing day involving quite a bit of catchup on many things that we have become backed up on.

In the middle of the afternoon, Dominica had an accident in the kitchen involving a glass and a coffee mug that resulted in a rather large glass explosion showering the kitchen and the surrounds in shards of glass and ceramic.  The incident resulted in an afternoon of cleaning and attempting to protect Oreo from bits of glass that went just everywhere.  It was quite a mess.

The glass breaking became far more disasterous because the kitchen was already a complete mess and the glass had just a million different places to lodge itself.  I spent the afternoon cleaning everything in the kitchen and getting everything off of the counter.  What a mess.

June 26, 2008: Lazy Saturday

I found OniGirl using a pick from SGL.  I also found this site that I can’t read using a pick of 111 Wall St. from me.  The E-News Journal used one of my Wall Street pics as well.

Dominica didn’t get up until almost noon today.  She really needed her sleep, apparently.  I was up with Oreo around nine.  It was a bright and sunny morning and he insisted on going out to the living room to soak up the rays as much as he could.

I thought that I had a bit of office work that needed to be done this weekend but luckily the bulk of it was not approved for this weekend and I actually ended up having some time to myself!  I put in some time doing some web design that turned out pretty well, I think.  I do enjoy my occassional forays into the web design world.  It provides a much needed break from the command line into a world involving colours, shapes and composition.  It satisfies a certain creative need that I feel.  That being said, my favourite web design tool is vi.  Go figure.

Dominica did an install of Red Hat Fedora 9 on Microsoft VirtualPC 2007 today.  She hasn’t been working on Linux too much since we moved to New Jersey and she is taking the HP Linux 101 class online right now as a kind of “refresher” before she starts the UNIX Administration Certificate program at the University of Illinois this fall.  I did a few installs of Fedora 9 this past week just to be sure that the install worked correctly.  There is always something that you “need to know” like the noreplace-paravirt trick.

We really enjoyed having a very slow, not really leaving the apartment kind of day today.  I got a lot of work done and Dominica did a ton of laundry.  We got a chance to watch a bit of Frasier too.

Evil Petting Zoo [epz]

In 1998, Andrew T. West and I (Scott Alan Miller) sat down and formed a techno/ambient band called Evil Petting Zoo.  We were known as DJ Loopy and the Tour Guide.  Andy did the bulk of the work but we collaborated on all of the songs (except “For Me To Poop On” which was not written until 2000.)  We even got some radio play, thanks to DJ Layla, on WBER 90.5 FM Rochester.

The Evil Petting Zoo discography (if the handful of songs can be called that) has been available on the Internet for years but there has never been a single page pointing to them.  Of all of the songs, only the short DJ Loopy “Fritos” has been lost.

Download Evil Petting Zoo [epz] “hits”:

Download DJ Loopy’s “hit” “For me to poop on” is sadly no longer available.

Most of the songs are in much higher quality in their Ogg Vorbis versions.

“I’d like to dedicate this song to all the girls who work in the mall, at the ice cream stands, because they scoop their ice cream for me, and I like ice cream.” – The Tour Guide, Ice Cream Girls

July 25, 2008: So We Bought a House…

Little Lulu Moppet lives at 22 Main Street in Meadowville (aka Peekskill, New York.) Little Lulu is a classic American comic strip character from the 1930s.

Little Lulu Moppet

The rain is gone and the hot, humid weather is back in force in the New York Metro area. Not only is it hot today but tomorrow and Sunday are set to be even warmer. All week is going to be pretty rough. Autumn can’t come too quickly for me.

We are still pretty excited this morning about the prospects of our new home (pending) in Peekskill, New York.  We are trying to get the engineering inspection done as quickly as possible and then it is time to get the lawyer involved to check over the contracts.  October 15th will come much more quickly that it seems that it would.

One of the big challenges that we are going to have is the issue of moving one large load of stuff from the apartment in Newark as well as moving the huge load of stuff from dad’s house in Pavilion.  The new house is going to be completely filled with stuff for us to sort and find homes for as soon as we move in.  The entire basement will be just stacked from floor to ceiling with stuff until we figure out what to do with it all.

The new house is actually smaller than the house in Geneseo when all of the space is considered together.  The new house in Peekskill is listed at 2,000 square feet – which is large and luxurious when compared to our itsy, bitsy apartment in Newark.  Peekskill has that 2,000 sq. ft. split between three levels (that means two sets of stairs taking up space) and has two bedrooms and two and a half baths.  But the Geneseo townhouse was 1182 sq. ft. for both the main living level and the basement for a total of 2,364 sq. ft. of usable space with only two bathrooms.  So Geneseo had more space with which we could work by one stairway, one powder room and 364 sq. ft.  None of this takes into consideration the two car garage that we had in Geneseo as well in which we stored quite a bit of stuff.  So we are still being forced to squeeze down quite a bit.

Geneseo was also set up with one third of the basement being used for nothing but storage and my office area was lined with heavy-duty shelves that were used for storage as well.  So the percentage of the house used for pure storage was very high.  We are going to have to do some serious “compression” to make everything fit.  It is going to be pretty tough.  Dominica reminds me that there is a pull-down attic but I wonder how much storage that is going to provide.

I was doing some research on my commute from Peekskill to Wall Street today as well.  I have three stations to choose from when leaving Westchester – Peekskill, Cortlandt and Croton-Harmon.  There is a different monthly ticket cost from each station which are, in order, $261, $261 and $221.  The extra drive time to Croton-Harmon may be worthwhile for the cheaper monthly train pass and for the lesser time spent on the train each day.  We will see.  Cortlandt does not have the cost advantage that one would hope that it did.  Travel times are 56 minutes, 51 minutes and 42 minutes – Croton-Harmon also has a non-express line that would take 62 minutes or a semi-express that would be 53 minutes and a few random schedules that fall within that range.

Once reaching Grand Central Station in Manhattan I will need to take the 4/5 Metro line from there down to the head of Wall Street and then walk the length of Wall Street to get to the office.  All in all, the trip is going to take a really long time in each direction.  It is going to make my days really long.

Travel to the Peekskill station is just 1.8 miles from the house.  Croton-Harmon is 9.3 miles.  The Peekskill station could be walkable on nice days – but not very often.  If I am really lucky they will have some parking available for scooters and I will just get myself a Vespa that gets 73mpg and only costs $1,800 and I will use that to zip to and from the train station.  That would work out just fine for most days, I think.

I got a chance to have a nice lunch today.  Ronak and I managed to escape the office around one and went out to Mad Dog and Beans on Stone in downtown Manhattan for some serious American-Mexican fare and mojitos.  The food there was excellent.  The guacamole was by far the best that I have ever had and the grilled corn was amazing too.  The main meal was huge and way too filling and quite good and the mojitos were the best that we had ever had as well.  I am sure that we will be going back to Mad Dog and Beans again.

After eating at Mad Dog we stopped in to the Financier Patisserie to pick up iced coffee to get us through the afternoon.  We both wanted regular coffee but it is just too warm for that today.

In addition to the normal Friday evening work, today there was house-buying work to be done as well.  We found an inspector to look at the house for us.  We are, of course, getting radon and termite inspections done as well.  I called about an attorney as well but the attorney that we are trying to reach was out today so hopefully we will have something more solid come Monday.  I spoke to the bank as well.  It’s been a busy day.

Dominica and I managed to get scheduled for a house inspection for Tuesday evening at three thirty.  It will be tough for us to make, but both of us have already taken the evening off so that we can go so it will only be so bad.

I have been really busy the last several days listening to the latest batch of material from IT Conversations but today I got completely caught up and have decided to move onto a book so I am now “reading” Bill Bryson’s “Shakespeare: The World As Stage“.  Of course, you can get this book via Audible which is now a division of Amazon.

In tech news today, Microsoft did a bold experiment – setting up users in San Francisco who did not like Vista to try out Microsoft’s secret new “Mojave” operating system to see if they liked it better than Vista.  The response was overwhelmingly positive.  Mojave is, not perfect, but very close to what users would prefer as the successor to Vista.  Just one hitch – Mojave IS Vista.  Just like Pepsi is preferred over Coke as long as the consumer isn’t seeing the label, users don’t like Vista unless they can’t see the label.  The marketing and hype has created public sentiment that is based on the marketing and not on the product.  Once the public thinks that Vista is bad there isn’t much Microsoft can do.  Rational product choices are not the hallmark of the American public.  (Not that Vista is faultless, but overall it is a pretty good product and not the garbage that it has been made out to be, by and large.)

The main part of the day was pretty slow today.  I was busy but not backed up.  Five o’clock came and I got pretty busy.  I was in the office until well after seven.  And today is even SysAdmin Appreciation Day!  At least a couple of people in the office remembered and sent me nice emails.

Friday nights wouldn’t be so bad if Saturday mornings weren’t part of the normal work week.  We are not traveling at all this weekend which is great and my work tomorrow is not “scheduled” work meaning that I can do it at my leisure.

It was just a few minutes before eight when I was finally able to leave the office on Wall Street.  Quite a long day for me.  Since it is so late I am going to go ahead and post today’s daily!  Have a good weekend everyone.