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I bought the book late last year and now the second edition has been published and I am stuck with my first edition, out-of-date, version.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.

June 30, 2008: Having a Baby!

Dominica and I have been holding out for the last several months from publicly announcing on SGL that we are pregnant but have decided that, since today is our major halfway ultrasound appointment, to go ahead and to let everyone know!  The quick version is that we are due on November 21st and no, we do not know if the baby is going to be a girl or a boy and we are trying not to find out.

We found out that we were pregnant in April on the weekend when we went to Dominica’s parents’ house and my father drove out to visit with us.  We found out the in the morning before driving up there so it was rather an excitable weekend although we hadn’t seen a doctor yet so we did not announce it to our families just yet – although Francesca knew right away.

Today is our third ultrasound appointment although the two previous were just early screenings.  Today is the “big” ultrasound where they do all of the careful measurements and everything and when the doctor knows what the sex is of the baby.  We were, of course, rather nervous about the appointment today even though the previous screenings went well.

Everything went really well today and all indicators point to the baby being completely healthy.  We were successful at not finding out what the sex of the baby is as well.  So we are probably going to be able to be surprised in late November.

We had a bit of a scare about two months ago when an early blood test informed us that Dominica is a carrier of cystic fibrosis.  CF is a common disease among people of European decent and extremely common among those with Celtic backgrounds.  As Dominica is part Irish and I am part Scottish this caused some concern.  CF cannot manifest itself unless both parents are carriers but when they are the chance of it manifesting is 25% which is extremely high.  That is why I had to have blood work done recently.  Fortunately, I am not a carrier of CF so there is only a 25% chance that the baby will be a carrier and an immeasurably nominal chance of CF manifesting – requiring a failure of the known laws of genetics.

For those who follow SGL regularly you may have already realized that we are house hunting with the intent of moving somewhere by November 1st when our current least at Eleven80 in Newark is up.  Our decision to move back to New York State and to move up the Hudson Valley towards better schools, more open space and lower travel time to our parents’ homes are mostly based on the fact that the baby is coming at that same time.  It is causing a bit of a panic, however, that we will need to move “somewhere” just twenty days before the due date!

Our emergency backup plan, should we not manage to buy a house before our time runs out, is to leave Newark and to move in with my dad near Rochester so that we will have a stable home right when the baby comes.  We will stop house hunting for a month or two and then start looking again as soon as we feel that we can handle moving if we were to find something.  My job is alread prepped for the possibility of my needing so physical location flexibility and everyone is on board.  We are hoping that we can find a house before them, though, and be moved in in late October, but buying a house is a long and complicated process so we are trying to be realistic.

Yes, we do have names picked out for the baby whether it is a boy or a girl but no, we are not announcing them.  We do have ultrasound pictures to show but no scanner in New Jersey so we will post them to the Flickr feed as soon as we are able to get them scanned – most likely this weekend if we go to my dad’s house for the weekend.

I got up early, around seven, and started working from home right away so that I would have some time in and all of my work “caught up” before needing to leave for a while to go with Dominica to the doctor’s appointment that she had this morning.  I worked for a little over two hours before we left just after nine thirty.  The doctor is right next door to an IHOP and her office – literally all on the same block – which makes going there extremely simple.

After the appointment we ate a late breakfast at IHOP and then I dropped her off at work.  We are very thankful that my job gives us the flexibility for me to deliver her to and from the office when we need to do so rather than making her run me back to Newark and then to drive herself back to Totowa.  She would never have been able to get to work or else I could not have gone to the doctor’s with her.

I worked the rest of the afternoon and then had to run back to Totowa to pick Dominica up from work as I had the car for the day.  Oreo appreciated getting to spend the day with us either in the car or at home with me in the afternoon.  He had a nice long weekend.  He is only going to be at daycare for two days this week, Tuesday and Wednesday, as Dominica and I both have Friday off from work as it is the Fourth of July.

Dominica and I got back to Eleven80 and I worked for another couple hours since I had had so many long interruptions today.  We got dinner from Blimpie down the street and relaxed most of the evening.

And, of course, please remember to vote for Andy’s OrbTrak contest entry in the Dice Tech Challenge.

June 29, 2008: Us, Camping?

Vote for Andy West’s OrbTrak satellite tracking web application in the Dice Tech Challenge.

Dominica and I both slept in a bit this morning before getting up and doing a bunch of apartment cleaning that was very much over due.  No one has been visiting us recently and we have been letting the apartment go quite a bit as our schedules have been pretty busy and I have not been working from home as much as usual which always leads to a lack of time for housework.

We found out last night that a new and as yet unnamed Boston Terrier puppy, just nine weeks old, has moved onto our floor at Eleven80.  We haven’t met the new puppy yet but expect to do so soon.  There are now three full time Boston Terrier residents in the building but Oreo is the only mature one.

Around noon Ramona and Winni came by to visit with the intent of playing a small Dungeons and Dragons game.  We haven’t seen either of them in at least two months.  Winni is living in New Hampshire now, but is moving to Frederick, Maryland in a few weeks, and Ramona recently moved from the Ironbound, here in Newark, to Flushing in Queens.

The idea today was to play a quick, little D&D Fourth Edition adventure which Winni had put together just so that we could test out the fourth edition rules, but we didn’t have a lot of time in which to play as they needed to get over to Ramona’s old apartment to deal with some final packing and stuff and none of us had seen in each other in quite a while so we just spent the afternoon visiting.

We ordered in lunch from Nino’s as pretty much everyone was in the mood for some Italian.  We ate and opened a bottle of Miles Wine Cellars 2005 Cabernet Frank which everyone really enjoyed.

Winni and Ramona left around six and I went to work on a few things.  Almost right away while attempting to get my dual monitors working on my new OpenSUSE 11 workstation I did something that caused the root directory to just vanish.  So there was little that I could do but to install again.  So I kicked off another install.  Crappy.

Dominica and I have our nieces coming to visit us sometime in the next couple weeks and we are attempting to figure out what we are going to do.  The original plan was to go see “The Little Mermaid” on Broadway but the cost was going to be astronomic – like close to $600 or more – and we have heard that the show isn’t very good.  We thought about doing the Bronx Zoo and the science center but Dominica doesn’t think that she could spend a day walking at the Bronx Zoo.  We considered spending the weekend at a resort in the Poconos but that was really expensive as well.

Our final idea was to take the girls camping.  Dominica has never been camping (not actual camping) and I have not gone since going t Allegheny National Forest near Warren, Pennsylvania in June, 1994.  I have never owned a tent of my own and things have improved a lot since Eric and I went all of those years ago.  We thought that camping would be pretty expensive but we compared it to the price of going to see a show on Broadway or to a night or two in the Poconos and it turns out that buying all new, top end camping gear would be significantly cheaper – plus it is all reusable.

We hunted around and the best Coleman tent is only $175 from Amazon ($250 MSRP) and the types of sleeping bags that we would need are very cheap.  Some nice LED lights and tent fans (to keep cool) all came up to being very inexpensive.  After looking at the cool gadgets to get Dominica got really excited about camping and has been going crazy shopping for cool camping stuff for the last two days.

We were hoping to be able to camp at a New York State state park but have not been able to find any camp sites that will work for us.  We absolutely need electrical hookup (cheesy for real camping, I know) because I cannot sleep without my CPAP so there is no way around that requirement.  We almost didn’t think of that and might have booked a camp site without power which would have been disastrous, but since we know now that we have to have it it means that we know ahead of time that we can take the laptop and watch movies at night and charge our phones and stuff.  It’s not exactly “roughing it” camping but that really isn’t an option at this point in our lives anymore and that wasn’t quite what Dominica wanted to do anyway.  It does mean, though, that we can never camp at Handsome Lake again which I would have liked to have been able to have done again.

So since the state parks aren’t available to us in July when we need to go we decided to look at KOA (Kampgrounds of America) and many of them come with power and wireless Internet access which is extremely cool.  That means that we can keep in full contact with the outside world and that I don’t even have to go off of being “on call” for the weekend.  I will be able to work as usual while camping giving us a lot more flexibility to do this more often.  Plus, I think, that camping with this level of amenities makes camping a lot more attractive to us in general.  We just don’t live lives that allow for us to completely break contact with the outside world.  We won’t have the camera problems that I have had in the past either since we will always have the car near by in which to store valuables where they can be locked up safe.

So the plan is that sometime in the next two to three weeks that the four of us will head out into the “wilderness” to go camping.  Dominica is even excited about camping recipes and cooking over an open fire!

Tomorrow morning we have a doctor’s appointment in the morning.  I will be working from home before the appointment and Dominica will be off until after lunch.  So she just has a half day.  I will just be “out” for about two hours.