July 8, 2008: The Baby Stuff Starts

I managed to get a bit more sleep last night.  We went to bed around eleven and I listen to half an hour of a talk from the SuperNova conference and then went to sleep.  it was a bit interesting because the talk that I listened to was discussing technological innovation in the Mohawk Valley in the nineteenth century.

Oreo was still really tired today and very itchy still from his weekend in the grass.  We decided to have him stay home again today because he needs time to sleep and for his skin to hear.  Going to daycare would just take more energy out of him that he needs for his body to repair itself.  He was pretty excited when he figured out that he was spending the day with his daddy.

Dominica started the Hewlett-Packard Linux 101 class today.  The class doesn’t officially begun until next week but she is trying to get a jump start on it and had me download Red Hat’s Fedora 9 so that she could do an install with it as the HP Linux classes are based on Fedora.

Today we got our very first items for the forthcoming baby.  We got the Winnie-the-Pooh collection by A. A. Milne in hardcover.  All four books, When We Were Young, Winnie the Pooh, The House on Pooh Corner and Now We Are Six. Normally we would have waited to buy baby stuff but we are up to the stage where we are supposed to be reading to the baby so we wanted something to get started with that is nice stuff that will be long lasting and something that our child will always want to own.  So our child already owns four books!

Also arriving today is the first Business Analyst book on my reading list: Writing Effective Use Cases.  As I am suddenly very responsible for BA education I am taking it upon myself to read, and to some degree define, the ultimate Busness Analyst Reading List.  Everyone seems to agree that this and the BA’s UML book top the list so I am starting with those.  You can’t go wrong with Alistair Cockburn and I am looking forward to this book.

My day at the office ended up being so busy that I didn’t even manage to have lunch.  I started trying to get lunch around one thirty and it was five before I even knew what happened.  I was on a conference call solid from around one thirty until five which really ate away the day.

Dominica decided that tonight she would be cooking so it is vegetarian corn dogs, corn on the cob and macaroni salad for us.  I was really tired after my incredibly long afternoon of supporting a single issue for hours – hours past my “end of day” since I am on the early shift this week.  That will wear you out pretty quickly.

We watched some of the fifth season of Third Rock from the Sun and relaxed for the most part.  At one point, probably around ten in the evening, I took Oreo out for his usual walk around the block.  When we went outside we noticed that all of the streets were blocked off around our building and that the sidewalks were covered in electrical and lighting equipment.  A large tour bus sat on the street.  It was all very strange.

As Oreo and I walk across the street to Airlee we noticed that the half of the building not used by Airlee for their cafe had all of its signage replaced with “Mars Cometh – One Night Only”, a velvet rope was set up and a red carpet was down and a security guard was sitting on a stool in front of the building.  This caught me by surprise as this building has been empty for the entire time that we have lived in Newark and no work has been being done on it.

I asked around and learned that Commerce, behind our building, is being used for the filming of the upcoming movie The Perfect Age of Rock and Roll.  So Oreo and I got to walk through the set just as filming was about to begin.  Working on Wall Street means that I see television and film shoots all of the time but this was pretty neat as the filming is literally happening just a few feet outside of our living room windows and part of the movie is in a building that I eat in several times a week.

Long ago I walked through the filming of Blues Brothers 2000 while I was in Toronto with Kelley’s Heroes for the Santa Clause Parade.  That was either 1996 or 1997.

Business Analyst Reading List

This page is a work in progress.  I am beginning to compile a rather definitive Business Analyst reading list and will be updating this page with books and short descriptions and reviews.

The Business Analysis Essential Library from Management Concepts is a complete series on Business Analysis and the Business Analyst as a career which should not be missed:

My experience with textbooks is rather minimal but I have used three editions of the Whitten/Bentley text (5th, 6th and 7th) and have been very happy with it.  I have used a few other texts throughout my undergrad and graduate studies in systems analysis and feel that Whitten/Bentley is by far the best that I have used directly.

July 7, 2008: Houseplants Doing Well

When we got home last night the first order of business was to take care of the plants.  They hate when we leave for the weekend as they don’t get their regular water and the apartment gets much warmer than usual.  It becomes a perfect breeding ground for plant pests and it takes it toll on the plants.

New Growth Section of Cycas Plant

This time we did pretty well and no plants died.  The one plant, our really resilient one – the Cycas, actually did amazingly well.  Just last week we suddenly noticed that there was some surprise new vegetation happening with it and it grew around four inches while we were gone this weekend!  The mandarin also seems to be doing pretty well with some new leaves coming in now.

After all of the driving I was not very tired – or at least not ready to go to bed.  So I ended up staying awake until after one thirty listening to ITConversations on my iPod Nano.  Then, when I did finally fall asleep, I ended up waking up around two thirty!  It seemed like I had been asleep for a long time but I had not.

Then, at three thirty in the morning, I was paged out accidentally.  Then I had a horrible time getting back to sleep.  So I was up until around four thirty, I think.  Then, of course, I am working the early morning coverage shift this week for someone so I had to be up and logged in and working by six thirty!  So basically I got no sleep at all.

We decided to have Oreo stay at home today as he is just completely exhausted.  This weekend involved a lot of travel, playing outside and grass allergies and he is just worn out.  He really needed a day to just sleep and do nothing.

My day was relatively busy.  Any time that I work the early shift this happens.  I like the early shift because it forces me to get up and to get to work right away instead of just putzing around but it also causes really long days to occur because people at the office don’t have a big board showing that I am on the early shift on a given day so people just expect me to work as late as I usually do even though I’ve been on since six thirty in the morning.

Our Mandarin Plant

In addition to working today I really had to do some house chores as Ramona and Winni are coming over this evening to play test Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition. We will see how much of a game we actually manage to play, but to speed things along Ramona is picking up Food for Life on her way to the apartment.

I did the dishes and got the kitchen cleaned up as well as cleaning around my office area and, of course, I was on plant duty today as the plants always need extra attention after being left alone for three days.

I also completed the Hewlett-Packard Linux 401 class that I have been taking.  It was shorter than the 101, 201 and 301 classes that I have taken in the past.  It may seem strange that I would take a Linux class when I am a senior Linux Sys Admin now and have been for some time but I like to make sure that people are not learning things that I am not familiar with and also I like to see what topics are a priority to students and to companies like HP.  Plus, as this class is free and online on my own schedule, it falls into the category of “how can I justify not taking it?”

I placed a large Amazon order today.  I am doing a bunch of Business Analyst work for a certification process and I need a ton of the top source material in the BA realm so I am ordering a good chunk of the definitive reading list all at once.  Several of the books were books that I had previously wanted to buy anyway so it isn’t all “expense” in the traditional sense but it is several books.  I also got a book on foreign currency trading so that I can learn more about what I support at the office.

Oreo is Glad to Be Back Home

Books ordered today: Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn, Software Requirements 2nd Ed., UML for the IT Business Analyst: A Practical Guide to Object-Oriented Requirements Gathering and More Joel on Software: Further Thoughts on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and … Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity by Joel Spolsky.

Dominica did some grocery shopping today on her lunch break.  She got home around six.  Winni arrived around six thirty and Ramona made it around seven.  We didn’t actually end up with any time to play any D&D.  The evenings are just so short.

We ordered in pizza from Eli’s.  That ended up taking over an hour.  So it was closing in on nine o’clock by the time that we had finished dinner and then it was not that far from bed time.  It is amazing how difficult it is to do anything on a “work night”.

Winni and Ramona left around ten thirty and Dominica and Oreo headed off to bed.  I did a little wrap up work to make sure that things were hunky-dorie at the office before going to bed myself.  There is always something that needs to be dealt with.

July 6, 2008: Last Day Camping in the Yard

Last night’s camping went even better than the night before.  This time we figured out that we needed a little more separation between the air matress and us so we added an extra sheet and that was enough to keep us from getting too humid and sticking to the inflatable bed.  Oreo has decided that this is his new home and he is very happy.  His grass allergy is hitting him pretty hard, though.  This is going to be a long couple weeks for our tired Boston Terrier.

Oreo Skulking Away from the Tent

Our big project today was, of course, to strike the camp site.  This is our first time taking down the tent so we were a bit nervous.  The take down process went pretty smoothly and we were impressed by how easy it all was.  We are scared to do this again at all, which is good as we will be doing it again next weekend.

While we were striking the camp site and packing the car, Oreo took the opportunity to sneak off on his own to the far reaches of the yard and to roll in something stinky.  So he got a bath this afternoon as well.

We ended up getting stuck at dad’s house much later than we had intended because of some emergencies from work.  We had gone out to breakfast around eleven but then there was an emergency and we had to rush back so that I could work for several hours.  We made good use of the time and I managed to do demonstration builds of OpenSUSE 11.0 on an AthlonXP 2800+ based HP D325 and a Pentium III 1GHz based Compaq DeskPro for Castile Christian Academy.  The new desktop build (running KDE4 as we haven’t seen any issues yet) is looking very promising for CCA.

It was so late by the time that we were ready to leave dad’s house that we decided to all go over to the Omega Grill for dinner – our second time today and third time for the weekend and fourth attempt for the weekend.  We ate and then Dominica and I headed south on Interstate 390 directly from there.

It was just a little after midnight when we arrived in Newark.  The trip went pretty well.  No issues and very little excess traffic.  Taking the Interstate 99 corridor through central Pennsylvania really makes a difference in avoiding the traffic jams.  The trip seemed to go by pretty quickly.  Dominica only had to nap for the last portion of the trip and I just listened to ITConversations on my iPod.

July 5: Camping, Sort Of

The verdict is that we really like camping with our new camping equipment.  We didn’t bring quite as much equipment as we had have having skimped on the sleeping bag and going with nothing but a sheet between us and the cold air mattress but we won’t make that mistake next weekend.  Oreo thought that sleeping outside in the tent was the greatest thing ever.  He had a wonderful time.

Colemand Weathermaster Elite Screened Tent

The one thing that we realized is a problem with us camping is that Dominica has to make several trips to the restroom during the night since she is pregnant and being far away from the restroom isn’t very convenient for her.  Oreo also seems to like the proximity of the great outdoors and chooses to go out in the middle of the night causing additional disruption.

We did get very good sleep, however, and were well rested and very happy in the morning.  The tent allowed us so much fresh air – not like any camping that I had ever attempted before.  And for just the two of us (and the dog) the tent is incredibly spacious.  I think that we are very likely to attempt camping on our own in the very near future.  Oreo would definitely enjoy that.  Maybe we will try camping in Maine or Canada although there are lots of state parks that can work as well.

We have most of the gear that we need.  That new electrical stuff, which will be cheap, a power adapter and some organizers for the inside of the tent should do the trick.  We need places to put our stuff that are up off of the floor.  We will be taking “camping chairs” as well to set up in our porch area which we didn’t use at all this time.  Other than that we seemed to be pretty well stocked.  We are not attempting to cook in any way this time so there is a lot of potential problems in that area that we have yet to tackle.

We left the tent set up as we are going to be using it again tonight.  We had wanted to go to the Omega Grill in Geneseo for breakfast this morning but we got up a little too late as I was scheduled to work at ten in the morning.

I worked for several hours taking up the bulk of the middle of the day.  Since we couldn’t go out for breakfast or lunch we ordered pizza from Davis’ Farm Market in Pavilion and dad went down and picked it up.

After lunch the Ralstons came up with Settlers and we played for a while and visited.  They had just a small, mid-afternoon window to see us so we didn’t get to hang out for very long.  Michael went out with his Nintendo DS and played in the screened porch area of the tent.  That is something that we are going to attempt to bring next weekend when we do real camping – our Nintendo DS and Sony PSPs.  That way there is definitley stuff to do while in the tent.  We have games for both systems that we have never even played!

The Ralstons left around four in the afternoon and I worked for another hour or so until we drove up to Geneseo to meet my Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo at the Shang Hai restaurant for dinner.  Then, after dinner, we came back down to Peoria and drove down to the new construction on NY Route 63. We walked around the new intersection to check out how the work is progressing.  It is really coming along quickly.

We looked at about 500 slides from around 1982 to 1984 that dad had mostly from the construction of his house.  Dominica had never seen pictures of what the farm looked like with the old 1904 farmhouse and the cabana, swimming pool, etc.  It was pretty interesting.  Now she understands what a strange childhood I had.  That old house was really crazy.  Dad and I are trying to figure out how to get all of those old slides converted to digital so that we can get them up on line.  Now that the baby is coming it is more important than ever to get all of that history somewhere before it is too late.

We camped back out in the tent again tonight.  Oreo is used to it already and went right on out and climbed on in.  This is his new favorite place to sleep.  He is really exhausted tonight after spending the day playing on the farm.