August 1, 2008: Scott is…. using Twitter

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.

July 31, 2008: Trying Twitter Again

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.

July 30, 2008: La Ti Da

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.

July 29, 2008: House Inspection

Dominica and my day today really revolves around our house inspection taking place in Peekskill this afternoon.  I had to be up at six thirty to cover the early morning shift today.  Then, at a quarter after seven, I drove Dominica to work in Totowa so that I would have the car later when we need to go to Peekskill for the house inspection.

Driving Dominica to work really cuts into my day.  Her commute is pretty rough as it is and when I take her in it requires me to do her entire commute twice plus deal with getting the car from the valet in the middle of the afternoon which never goes smoothly.

Dominica’s morning was so busy that she didn’t even have time to hop onto her instant messenger to talk to me.  Normally we are on IM all day long.  It is really nice; it makes it seem like we see each other all day.  Really makes both of us working full time not seem so bad.

My day was absolutely crazy as well.  I worked like mad all morning trying to stay on top of things so that I would be able to leave for the house inspection this afternoon.  I was so busy that I did not have enough time to get myself a meal all day.

Yesterday I finished reading Mark Twain’s “A Murder, A Mystery and A Wedding” and today I began reading “The Hacker Ethic.”  Much of the book is material that I have read before in other forms but I have never actually read this book.

The house and mailbox keys that I had left accidentally at the Tocco’s home last weekend arrived today by the post.  Now we can get to our mail again and I no longer must prevail upon the concierge to lend me his keys so that I may lock and unlock the apartment.  Having keys of my own is most convenient.

In order to make it to Peekskill in time for the house inspection I had to leave Newark at one thirty.  Oreo was most lazy today and spent most of his day sprawling lazily upon the couch, practically pouring himself from one cushion to another.  While he is very sad to be home alone, today is most certainly a perfect day for him to have time to himself to sleep.  He is seldom this sleeping – especially after just a single day of daycare.

I picked Dominica up from her office just a little after two and from there we made wonderful time up to Peekskill arriving almost a full half of an hour earlier than our appointed time.  Everyone that we were meeting arrived quite early as well which worked out perfectly so that we were able to begin the inspection by a quarter after three.

Dominica and I were laughing about the fact that we have now made a purchase committment on this house and as we drove to Peekskill we had almost no idea how to get to the complex, and when we had arrived there I still had very little idea what the inside of the house looked like or how it was laid out.  Getting to see the house in the light of having already purchased it made going to see it especially exciting as so much of it involved “discovery” and not just a simple revisiting.

The real estate agent representing the sellers of the first property on which we had made an offer, that is the house at 11 Villa in the Woods III complex also in Peekskill, called our agent today to attempt to justify their incredibly high asking price for the house.  We suspect that this was in the hopes that we were still pining for the property and might somehow be pursuaded to spring for it even at the atrocious asking price.  Our agent was quite happy to have the opportunity to inform the sellers that not only had we had an offer accepted on another property but that we were currently en route to have it inspected!

The inspection went very well.  No major items were found.  Much to our surprise we found that the house has a brand new, quite large and very expensive (and extremely fuel efficient) hot water tank.  Total bonus!

Things that we learned that we are very happy about that we did not remember for sure from our first visit include: there is a good amount of “under the stairs” storage in the basement, the utility room is larger than we remembered and has enough space for a baker’s rack to be placed in there along with quite a bit extra, there is a wood burning fireplace and there is a quite large, pull down attic with about two-thirds of the space already set up for storage.  We will be able to store most of our “where is this supposed to go” stuff up in the attic.  That attic is going to make all of the different to us between having and not having any space.  Our camping stuff and holiday stuff alone will make a major dent in what we have to store around the house.  We are already planning to convert into into total storage up there.  We have just a tremendous amount of stuff that needs a home.

We were both starving when we left the inspection.  Dominica had barely eaten today and I had not had a single meal.  So we ate at our customary Burger King on the Garden State Parkway on our way home.

Dominica spent the evening playing Paper Mario on the Nintendo Wii.  I had to do work for the office to make up for my time away this afternoon.  It was an exhausting evening.  Tomorrow I have to be awake especially early as it is Wednesday and I am traveling out to Warren for the day as I try to do most Wednesdays.  I should be home at a reasonable hour.

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.