July 4, 2008: Test Camping

Dominica, Oreo and I got a little chance to sleep in this morning which is good as it was pretty late by the time that we managed to get to sleep last night.  We spent the morning and the beginning of the afternoon visiting with Dominica’s parents.  Her mother is flying to Houston early this afternoon, from Albany, so that she, Francesca and the kids can drive from Houston to Frankfort over the weekend.

Dominica at our Camp Site

We left Frankfort to head to dad’s house just after Dominica’s parents headed out to Albany.  It was probably just before three when we hit the road with the BMW loaded down with camping gear to test out this weekend.

We met dad at the Omega Grill for dinner around six but the grill was closed for the holiday so we went over to Denny’s instead where my cousin’s friend from high school (York) was working as the hostess.  The same friend that I once sat next to at a McDonald’s near Philly completely by coincidence.

After dinner we went back to dad’s house and got right to work setting up the camping equipment in the back yard.  This was the first time for either of us to really be putting up a tent so it was a bit of an experience but it went pretty smoothly.  No real hassles.  It took about twenty or twenty-five minutes to set it all up.

We had a lot of fun trying out all of the new gear like the ceiling fans and lighting systems.  The built in Coleman florescent lighting system in our tent is really impressive.  It works by remote control – which is great for finding your tent in the dark – and is a regular 15W bulb so it is really bright for such a small space.  You can work in the tent just like it was a house.

The tent is really well ventilated as well with the top and sides being almost completely wide open.  The only real disappointment is that the screened porch area does not have a “floor” so it can’t be used as a part of the main tent.  We were happy to discover that the tent has a handy electrical cord port to make powering the tent even easier since we have to have the CPAP in it.

Our next bits of camping gear will be “in tent” organizers to put our clothes and things on as well as an AC to DC “power system” so that the overhead light is powered via the AC rather than off of batteries.  That will make the packing smaller and lighter and cheaper too and let us use the light all that we want without feeling like we are wasting batteries.  We will likely also get a chargeable D battery system so that we can just charge batteries as they are needed in the tent rather than buying tons of expensive D batteries and throwing them away.  What a waste that can be.

We watched a little television with dad tonight before heading out to the yard to go to bed.  We didn’t want to be out there early at all because the yard is covered in Japanese beetles which are perfectly content to land on your head and to get all over the tent.  We got to see an episode of Eli Stone which dad has been telling us about for a while.  It is his favorite new show, I believe.

Around eleven, Dominica, Oreo and I went on out to the tent to try our first night of camping in our new tent.  This is Dominica’s first ever night sleeping in a tent and my first time since June, 1994 when Eric and I went camping in Pennsylvania.

July 3, 2008: Camping Gear is Fun

Oreo and I have the day to ourselves at home today. The markets in the US are closed tomorrow and today is a short trading day so work was pretty slow, overall. It was a nice, relaxing day leading into a long weekend. I do have work scheduled for Saturday morning so I will be working some over the weekend but not very much. I will be doing that work from dad’s house.

Amazon reports that our huge collection of new camping equipment has arrived at Dominica’s parents’ house already and is waiting for us to pick up tonight and to take to dad’s house tomorrow to test out before doing some “real”camping next weekend in Watkins Glen, New York with our nieces. We are camping at the Watkins Glen KOA and not at the state park as we need electric and wireless Internet access. I have to have my CPAP so there is nothing to be done about the power requirement.

Today’s shipment includes a queen size sleeping bag for Dominica and I, two pink and faux-fur sleeping bags for our nieces, a really nice Coleman LED lantern, LED and Xenon wide beam flashlight, an enamel-ware settings set, air compressor for tires and air mattresses, two wall mount Coleman fans and our screened Weathermaster Elite tent with built in, remote-controlled lighting system. This is seriously luxurious camping. We also have one “regular height” queen size air mattress as well as our ceiling mount chandelier/ceiling fan combination unit already in the car, ready to go, as well as our tarpoline. The only thing that we have to get yet is our second queen sized air mattress. This new one will be a double height unit to make getting in and out much easier.

Everyone that we know (and that Dominica’s mother knows at work) are trying to get on the waiting list to buy our camping gear once we discover that we don’t like camping 🙂  This will be Dominica’s first ever time camping in a tent so we will see how this goes.  I still see all of this as a cost savings over anything else that we would have done so it isn’t as bad as it sounds.

I wasn’t really busy all day but the day was long because so many people were out today. I ended up working a twelve hour day and we weren’t able to leave Newark to head to Frankfort until about eight in the evening.

Traffic on the New York State Thruway was pretty heavy and it took us much longer than usual to get from Newark to Frankfort with the worst bits obviously being nearer to the city.  We stopped at a Thruway rest stop McDonalds to get dinner and save time but, of course, everyone else had the same idea and it took over forty minutes to get our food.  The poor McDonald’s crew looked like they were about to break down and cry from there being so many people in line.

What makes no sense to me is with McDonald’s having an almost hour long waiting line for food why all the other restaurants in the rest stop decided that closing up at regular time was financially advantageous to them.  I would have stayed open and taken the constant McD’s overflow if it was my money.  People often talk about “greedy corporations” but, in reality, corporations are normally a bit more lazy than greedy.  Had a restaurant owner been present rather than a corporate manager those restaurants would have been open for sure.

For the last half of the drive I listened to Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood in their “new” poscast Stack Overflow (episode twelve.)  Dominica secretly listened pretending to sleep and near the end surprised me with the declaration that she enjoyed listening to Stack Overflow because it was two really intelligent people.  Apparently she missed who it was doing the show.  She was shocked to learn that she knew Joel (not in person) and had read some of his articles.  One of the few IT personalities that she knows by name and reputation.  So this is a good sign that we might have found a subversive way to sneak IT learning in without overt objection.

It was almost one in the morning when we finally arrived in Frankfort.

July 2, 2008: Linquistics, Warren, Camping, etc.

Another one of my photographs, from Flickr, is being used in a news article.  You can see a picture that I took of Dominica and my “His and Hers BlackBerries” recently used in an article about “Teen Insomnia Linked to Cellphone Use” on NowPublic.com.

I needed a book that could be carried easily on the train for reading (maybe I need to get an Amazon Kindle device?) so I started reading “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy“.  Unfortunately I bought the book late last year and now the second edition has been published and I am stuck with my first edition, out-of-date, version.  Oh well.  The book primarily deals with the knowledge domain of linguistics, not with video games as you might suppose.  This is a serious book.

Today is my day out in Warren so Dominica dropped me at the train station on her way to the office.  It was a busy day at work today.  Being a holiday week lots of people are out so there is always something to do.  I was so busy, in fact, that I never was able to get lunch and had to wait until I got home.

I got to skip my usual hour to hour and a half long train ride home this evening because one of my team members who lives in Kearny, New Jersey – a main suburb of Newark – had driven in today and was nice enough to give me a ride home.  That saved me half an hour or more.

We spent the evening relaxing and watching Third Rock from the Sun.  Tomorrow I am working from home with Oreo.  Friday is a holiday for both Dominica and I so we are traveling up to her parents’ house after work tomorrow where are new stock of camping supplies will be waiting for us.  We got free, two-day shipping, because we are trying out a membership with Amazon Prime.  We will let you know what we think once we try it out for a while.  Then on Friday mid-day we will drive from Frankfort to Pavilion, NY to spend the weekend camping in my dad’s yard to test out our new camping equipment.

Vote for OrbTrak Right Away!

Voting closes in several hours for the latest Dice Tech Challenge. Thanks to everyone who has voted for Andy so far.  For everyone who hasn’t – please get out and place your vote right away.  He needs every one that he can get.  He is currently in the top two finalist and the voting ends today.  Every vote matters.  Vote for OrbTrak by Andy!

July 1, 2008: Train Coincidences

Today is the last chance to vote for Andy’s OrbTrak in the latest Dice Tech Challenge.  Don’t procrastinate – get out there and vote right now!

I got to sleep in just a tiny bit this morning.  Last night, after Dominica went to bed, I talked to Andy for about an hour and then took the Brainbench Software Business Analyst exam.  I took the BSA certification in 2004 and did fine on it but my certification was out of date and I needed to renew it for some work that I was interested in.

The test is quite a hard one and took me well into the night.  It was long after midnight when I completed the test.  I am very glad that I decided to take the time to do it, though, as I managed to rank number six in the world on the exam by score!  Yay!

I worked from home for just a little bit this morning and then headed on in to Wall Street.  It was warm and humid today.  Pretty uncomfortable for my walk to the office.

On the train this morning I helped a family who were a bit unsure of how to use the PATH train to get to midtown.  I saw them looking confused and offered to help.  It turns out that they are from the Akron, Ohio area near where my family is from around Canton, Ohio, and the one “child” was a college student at Malone in Canton where my grandmother and my aunt both went to college.

While we were talking and I told them that my family was from Ohio they said that the other family in that half of the train car were not only from the same area in Ohio but from Louisville, Ohio, originally, which is the exact village that much of my family, including my father, is from.  So we all got to talking and I gave lots of Manhattan travel directions.  The second family was originally from Louisville but had then moved to Jamestown, New York not that far from where I grew up.  Weird.

For lunch Katie and I met at the Financier Pattiserie at 62 Stone Road.  We got sandwiches and ate out in the street cafe that they have set up there.  It was quite good.  It was not nearly so warm out by the time that we went out for lunch.

Again we spent the evening relaxing.  It is so nice now that we have announced that we are pregnant so that I don’t have to try to hide the fact that Dominica has been going to bed very, very early every day and not doing very much in the evenings because she is exhausted as she is pregnant.  Now, I suppose, the SGL updates make quite a bit more sense.

I did not stay up late tonight as I have to be up early tomorrow to catch the train to Summit.  I will be working in Warren tomorrow.