June 16, 2008: Terabithia

Oreo was very tired this morning and did not want to go to daycare at all.  Speaking of Oreo, our Boston Terrier, if you do a Google search for oreo boston terrier our little boy comes up as the first, second, fourth and sixth hits!  He shows up near the bottom of the second page as well.  He is famous.

I worked on Wall Street today.  It is still hot here in the New York metro area but not as hot as it was last week.  It was relatively dry on the walk in as well.  No complaints.

It was a fairly busy day and I worked until around six.  At that time Dominica called to tell me that a horrible storm was approaching the city and that travel was going to be a major problem.  So I grabbed some developers from the office and we headed on out the door to get home before it got bad.

It was a little after seven when I got home.  We didn’t want to have to go outside for anything so we ordered in take-away from Nino’s and watched Bridge to Terabithia that Dominica got from NetFlix.  We had both thought that this was going to be a cool kid’s fantasy adventure type movie, more like The Spiderwick Chronicles, but it turned out to be a horribly sad movie about poorly treated children and dealing with death.  Not a happy movie in the least although it was quite well done.  It also turned out to be a remake of a 1985 Canadian made-for-TV movie starring Annette O’Toole.

What makes the movie even sadder is knowing that it is actually biographical and that it was written about two real life children in Maryland in the 1970s.  The book varies dramatically from the real life events but it based upon them.  In real life the children grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland but the book swings them around to the other side of the city to Virginia.  In the movie they set the events in New Zealand.

After watching that movie, which was good but we were not happy to have watched because it was just so overwhelmingly depressing, we watched a few hours of Third Rock from the Sun to cheer ourselves up.  Then it was time for bed.

June 15, 2008: Father’s Day and the Taconic Parkway

Happy Father’s Day!

I got to sleep in a little this morning which was nice.  I was pretty tired.  Dominica decided that her back hurt sleeping on the floor in the living room so she moved to a couch on one side of the room.  Oreo wanted his own space for a change so he slept on a couch on the side by me just over top of me.  So I ended up having the floor-bed all to myself although I didn’t notice and stayed all curled up in a ball on the one side so as not to take up Dominica’s space.  Dexter isn’t able to sleep with us these days because he gets so nervous and/or excited that he pants and licks and runs around and doesn’t let us sleep at all.  It is very sad because he is so happy to have us visit.  He really misses us but we just can’t get any sleep if he is trying to sleep with us.

Joe made French toast for breakfast this morning.  We had that and donuts from the Friendly Bakery.  They have the best donuts ever.

For a late lunch we had shish-kabobs – which isn’t actually true as the word kebab (or kabab) meants fried meat and can mean grilled meat but certainly doesn’t mean grilled veggies like Dominica and I had.  But we had grilled veggies on skewers anyway.  We also had grilled pineapple which was really good.

While looking up kebabs to make sure that I knew what the word meant, as I thought that it required meat but wasn’t completely positive, I discovered what a Döner kebab is.  It really sheds a foreshadow across the Donner Party.  (A döner is a slab of meat roasted on a skewer – they were sort of the “roasted meat” party.)

Anyway, we left Frankfort around three in the afternoon and drove out to Newburgh on the Thruway making good time and then decided to head east on i84 and then to take the Taconic Parkway down through Dutchess, Putnam and Westchester Counties to see what they were like a ways farther east than we had been last time through.

We quickly discovered that you can see nothing from the Taconic Parkway and that it is an extremely unpleasent road to drive on in the more northern counties as it is so narrow and has so many people driving twenty to thirty miles an hour over the speed limit.  There is no room at all.  We will be avoiding that in the future.

By the time that we got down to Westchester County we had decided that driving on the parkway wasn’t doing us any good.  Just as we decided to get off of the parkway the exit for Peekskill came up.  I looked at Min and said that that seemed fortuitous so we got off and started exploring Peekskill from the east.

We decided that we really were meant to get off at that particular exit and to go to Peekskill as we, at total random, drove right past the development that we had been looking at recently and were really interested in!  We had been saying that it was too bad that we hadn’t bothered to look up addresses before driving because we could have driven past places that we were interested in – and just after saying it I looked to my left, saw the place and turned it.  So we were able to see it anyway, and so far we like it.

This was our first time actually being in Peekskill and not just driving by and we were really shocked to discover that it is just like Ithaca.  It is a similar size (but without the “strip” district with all of the chain stores and restaurants) and without the colleges, but it has the quaint, artsy downtown area, has the waterfront and the high hills on the side much like Cayuga Heights East that looks down on the city.

We went down to the Division Street Grill in downtown Peekskill and had dinner there.  The table that Dominica and I sat at is actually in the picture on the web site.  Just go to the link and we sat at the table in the dead center of the image.  (That is, the center of the image not the middle of where your eye is drawn.  We sat at the small, two person table in the corner by the outside window and the wall.)  The food was really good.  It was a very Ithaca-like experience.

We did a tiny bit of walking after dinner and then drove towards “home” in Newark.  It was around eleven when we got back home.

June 14, 2008: Working in Frankfort

I had to be up at a quarter until eight this morning which left me with around five hours of sleep.  This weekend driving is really killing me.  I need time at home to just relax.  Or, more importantly at this point, time to do some house hounting.  We are getting down to the wire for finding something that we are really interested in if we are going to manage to get something before November.  If we don’t find something in the next eight weeks or so we will be moving in with dad until we are able to find something.

I put in six hours of office work today supporting Bahrain.  I wasn’t expecting this much work to be going on today.  It was exhausting having this after not having enough sleep.

We went out to dinner at the Kitlas as we usually do on Saturday evenings in Frankfort.  They have awesome food and the price is really good.  They have the weirdest location in the middle of nowhere on a back road facing away from everything.  You would never guess that there was a nice restuarant there.  I suppose that the Utica area is a lot more like the Hudson Valley (i.e. the Mohawk Valley is more like the Hudson Valley) that I am used to Western New York being in the way that there is a large population hidden in the landscape making you think that it is far less populated than it really is.  In the Hudson Valley it always feels like you are in the middle of nowhere even though you are in the midst of a massive population right on the fringe of New York City.

We walked up to the Knight Spot after dinner to get ice cream.  That is something that drives me crazy about Newark.  A big city and no way to get ice cream anwhere.  It is amazing how many of the simplest things that you have in any small town that you lose when you come to Newark.

June 13, 2008: Back on Wall

Oreo was very unhappy when Dominica put his harness onto him and dragged him out of the apartment this morning to take him to daycare. He was very tired and probably had some concerns that we were going to leave him there for another long weekend. He seems to be pretty in-tune with what day of the week it is most of the time so he gets suspicious.

I worked from home for a little bit this morning. There is often a rash of work left over from the overnight that I can knock out right away and then go to the office just afterwards. It works out well. Makes the productive day longer and breaks it up a little as well.

It was very hot on the way in but I didn’t feel bad at all. Am I the only person who seems to take the heat better when it is hotter? It’s weird but a few weeks ago going into the office when the temperature was in the eighties was devastating and I would be covered in sweat and feeling awful and sick by the time that I got to the office and once I was there I could barely function. But now that it is really hot and not just playing at being hot I barely sweat at all, feel fine outside and almost enjoy it and get to the office and don’t notice a thing. It’s bizarre but it has always seemed to be like this. Once summer really sets in I just seem to adjust and get along fine. (I only sweat from my head, by the way, not like I am all nasty and sweaty – just somewhat.)

It was a pretty busy Friday with one of those mid-morning HR/Payroll something has gone terribly wrong firedrills that gave Dominica and I a couple hours thinking that I was losing a week’s pay which was really awful timing after having to pay our second round of taxes this weekend. But it ended up being a false alarm and everything is okay and we are figuring out what is going on on Monday. Pheww.

Life is a rollercoaster. A wooden one and sometimes the kid next to you gets sick.

I did lunch with a group of the developers from the office. I love my new digs on Wall Street. My last two Wall Street locations were extremely isolated which was great for productivity. It was easy to get tons done. Now I sit with all of the developers and managers that I support and it is really just a big party. It’s harder to work but a lot easier to hang out. There are business reasons why it makes sense for people who work together to hang out more and to sit close but I cannot imagine that they outweight the work lost by having social hour over dedicated work time. I requested to stay at the old location for the sake of my productivity, though, so I don’t have to feel bad if the company thinks that this location is better for me. Not like I secretly plotted to get moved down here so that work would be less stressful. Good for me. Not like I get paid per package that I install.

Lunch was at Taste of Tokyo in the financial district. Very good Japanese food. I did Udon noodles with tofu and veggies tempura. It was way more than I could eat. Tasty though and healthy. Very healthy.

I almost managed to finish “Dreaming in Code” this morning before leaving for the office. I am down to just the epilogue left to read. “Dreaming in Code” is the telling of the trainwreck of the Chandler project. I remember Chandler from years ago.

For years I heard about Chandler as this undefined and almost mythical project to make email, calendaring and PIM being made that would redefine everything that we thought about personal information. I was never very intrigued since Thunderbird did such a great job with email and Sunbird was a working calendar. One thing that the Chandler project never managed to do for me was to explain what they were doing that would be of any interest beyond just being a nice email application. I even took the time to investigate it and see what the hype was about but quickly discovered it to be just hype as the product was demonstrating no added value over any other email app and was largely vaporware.

That was around 2003 and the project had been going for a few years at that point. “Dreaming in Code” came out in 2007 and at that point the project sure seemed hopeless from how the book sounded. The project seemed to flounder for most of its life just getting farther and farther from its intended vision as they cut features hoping to deliver just a working application and falling drastically short of that. It was strange to read this book about this project that actually had a large number of full time developers working on it. To those of us outside the project it looked exactly like an abandoned college student project where someone had had some vision, cared and then given up when it was harder than they thought.

Somehow, against all odds, the Chandler project seems to be marginally still in existance today. From their web site you still kind of get that feeling of cobwebs of a forgotten project fallen by the wayside. They have a lot of bloggers on their team but no one seems to be doing it regularly which is a bad sign.

The strangest thing is that the web site proclaims that you can download the current release, Chandler 0.7.6, but that Chandler 1.0 is set to release “sometime” during the second quarter of 2008. Uh huh. Second quarter huh? It’s mid-June now. That leaves two weeks. The current version is 0.7.6. A normally numbered project would go to at least 0.9 and hopefully from there to alpha to beta to release candidate to 1.0 official release. So either they plan to jump from a release number normally researved for “rough work in progress” to “finished” without so much as a test user or feature freeze or they are so completely vaporware that they haven’t updated the site in years and the project has even been forgotten about by the people on the payroll. From what I have seen over the past seven years I would guess the latter.

I did download Chandler 0.7.6 from the website just to see what this project was that the book was talking about. I have to admit that the project has come a long way. It now has a really nice looking and working interface. It definitely looks nice. And it installs without any problem. I couldn’t really test it at work as it requires a lot of network connections that I can’t get here. It’s not a web application, you see, it’s a desktop application for web based information (calendar, email, address book, to-do list, etc.) so it is a bit of a vestige in this day and age. If it was web based I could have tested it (and then, perhaps, used it) at work if I liked it since my email is available to me over a nice web interface but since Chandler needs connections often blocked by firewalls – it’s useless to a very large market segment.

Beyond my personal complaints as to Chandler’s chosen architecture (which you should take with a grain of salt as there remain many legacy desktop app people using Outlook, Thunderbird and the like for email – but they are generally the antithesis of power users and, supposedly, the opposite market segment sought by the Chandler project) there is one huge issue. One question that remains to be answered. That is, “How am I supposed to use this thing?”

Chandler’s interface is complex and bulky full of great graphics and wizbang looking widgets but when I fire it up I can’t figure out what I am looking at. If I hadn’t just read an entire book on the application I wouldn’t even have the faintest idea. I can’t imagine the average target “rich desktop” user is going to be willing to put in that much effort. This thing is complex and difficult to use. It isn’t simple like my Zimbra mail and calendar which is much more straightforward (and accessible to me at work, home, my BlackBerry, etc.)  I’m sure that it is loaded with neat, innovative features, but I doubt that anyone will ever figure out what they are if the software even releases.  At its current pace this would be projected somewhere around 2015 or later.

I worked in the office until seven thirty then caught the train back to Newark.  Dominica was already mostly packed and ready to go.  We did the final packing and were on the road around a quarter after nine.

It ended up taking us almost an hour just to leave Newark.  We tried to get onto the McCarter Highway (NJ 21) but found a flailing policeman in a darkened street acting like he was having a seizure (it’s a new form of failing to direct traffic, I discovered.)  He was really just waiting to be run over as he was out of the light and not doing anything involving telling traffic where to go – mostly because he was invisible and partially because he would just stand there doing nothing when you needed to know where to go and then when you would be going against the red light he would just flap his arms like he was on fire.  Newark’s constant reliance on police who create traffic disasters when perfectly good lights are already in place amazes me to no end.  It must be some union thing.

The traffic cop ended up directing us, once Dominica yelled out the window to find out if he was just standing in the road or directing us somewhere – yes she actually had to do that even though we were the only car on the road and he could see me staring straight at him waiting for him to stop standing motionless in the middle of the unlit street – directly into the traffic jam and closed road that I expect the city was employing him to keep from happening.  The city, in its infinite disdain for its residents and commerce in general or just the happiness of the universe, decides to celebrate its local minor leagure baseball team (or is it the high school team, no one seems to know for sure) by shutting down the main thoroughfare through the city to set off fireworks.  They do this every few days I guess as I constantly see fireworks from the living room and can’t fathom what they could be there to celebrate.

As Newark enjoy traffic jams they did nothing to tell the entire highway pouring in to the fireworks zone that they had arbitrarily closed the highway at the last second with no available detour until the ad hoc fireworks display was over.  They just stopped the city so that they could celebrate a team that no one knows that they have winning a game that no one knew they were playing.  Hundreds of cars were stuck, for no reason, on NJ 21 with no where to go.

So it took us an hour to escape the horror that is Newark, New Jersey.  Once we were on the road and into wonderful New York State the drive went pretty well.  We hit some overnight construction delays up on the NY Thruway but New Yorkers drive so much better than people do who travel through Scranton on i81 that it wasn’t a big deal at all.

We ate dinner at the Sloatesburg rest stop.  Just Sbarro as it was the last place with any real food for the night.  We made it just in time before they shut everything down for the night.  We pretty much got the last pizza in the place.

We arrived in Frankfort at two in the morning.  I am getting really tired of these overnight drives.  I have to be up before eight in the morning as I am working for the office, as I often do, on Saturday mornings.  So no rest for me.

June 12, 2008: Moving Out (the Musical)

My desktop was finally repaired part-way through the day today so today is my last day at home this week and I will be on Wall Street tomorrow.  Oreo was getting used to this lazy lifestyle.  He isn’t going to be happy about having to get out of bed tomorrow morning.

We got Bridge to Teribithia through NetFlix today.  I am hoping that we can take it with us to Dominica’s parents’ house tomorrow night to watch there.  It is one of the few movies in the last couple years that I care much to see and if we don’t watch it over the weekend I won’t have very much chance to see it.

The weather held in the nineties again today.  Hot but not beyond reason.

This has been a big week for contacting people from my far distant pass.  Several classmates from Pavilion Baptist School, which I attended from 1981 until the spring of 1990, have managed to track me down online.  I think that approximately half of my elementary class are now able to reach each other.  My original class was just eighteen students in kindergarten and again in first grade with only one person changing between kindergarten and first grade.  Then the class began a steady decline over the years getting a little smaller year after year.  I think that there were about ten students left in my eighth grade class the last year that I was at PBS.  That means that we lost about one a year, on average, all the way from first to eighth.  So the group of us was pretty close-knit, as you can imagine.

Dominica had tickets to see “Moving Out” at NJPAC tonight.  She and a friend’s wife from her work were going to go together but her friend’s wife had some minor surgery today and it didn’t go as well as planned and she wasn’t feeling up to going to the show.  I had too much work and not enough warning to be able to go with Dominica tonight so she figured that she would be going by herself.

At seven I walked Min down to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center so that she could go to the show.  I got back to Eleven80 and fortuitously Pam was walking in the door on the other side off of Commerce as I came in off of Raymond.  We had tried to reach her but didn’t know her cell and the conceirge said that she wasn’t home yet.  I just walked over and gave her the ticket and she went right over and joined Dominica at the show.  It really could not have worked out any better than it did.

So I did some work through the evening while Min and Pam were at the show.  They really enjoyed it.  It worked out well as it definitely wasn’t the sort of show that I would really enjoy.  They both really like it, though, so perfect.  Min said that it was all rock music and dance with a really amazing live rock band performing which was the real highlight.  I’m sure that they were amazing but not being a huge fan (it’s good but I’m no fan) of Billy Joel music and not knowing any of the “story” songs that he has done over the years would leave me pretty bored not knowing what was going on.

We watched a little Third Rock from the Sun and it was time for bed.