May 29, 2008: Last Day with Oreo

Well I am finally all caught up with SGL posts. The past few weeks have really taken a toll on that type of stuff. But I am happy to say that today I am back on track and caught up.

This morning I finished reading “Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse” by Anil Hemrajani.

Today is my work from home with Oreo day. Oreo has been really exhausted and is really happy about being home today. He and I both slept in this morning making for a ten hour night or so! We both needed the rest. Then he moved to the living room and slept while I worked not asking for his breakfast until after two in the afternoon.

I ordered some new books from Amazon last night: “Java Persistence with Hibernate” (aka Hibernate in Action, Second Edition), “POJOs in Action: Developing Enterprise Applications with Lightweight Frameworks” and “Spring in Action, 2nd Edition“.

It is a really nice, bright and sunny day so I took Oreo for a nice walk in the park.  Today is my last day with Oreo until Wednesday night – a whole week without my little dog – so I want to spend as much quality time with him as possible.  It is very sad to have to go so long without him.  The original plan was to have him stay at Dominica’s parents’ house with Dexter for the weekend.  But then we realized that we wouldn’t be able to pick Oreo up until next weekend making us go about eight or nine days without him plus once we worked out the mileage and cost it is far cheaper to send Oreo to daycare.  The cost of transferring him involve twelve people hours of drive time and 880 total miles which, when factoring in gas and wear and tear, is quite a bit more expensive than four or five nights at daycare.  And at daycare the money is going to nice people rather than up in exhaust fumes.

Dominica got all of our dinner reservations for Walt Disney World made today.  We have reservations for Boma in the Animal Kingdom Lodge, Artist Pointe at the Wilderness Lodge and the Brown Derby in Disney Studios.  Boma used to be slow and you could just walk in on most days but since we have been telling everyone about it it has become one of the most popular eating destinations in Disney and is nearly impossible to get into these days.

I ended up having a really busy work night tonight so Min and I didn’t get to spend much time together.  We watched a little AppleTV and ate a quick dinner together but I was paged out during dinner and several times after we ate.  As it was I had worked solid until around seven thirty.

My “free time” ended when my networking team got done with a production issue and were able to help me with a networking problem that we had been waiting on all day.  So I got stuck working late into the night trying to get a machine fixed.  So I lost a lot of my last night with Oreo too.  🙁

I worked until one thirty and then gave up for the night.  Tomorrow is Friday and it is going to be an exceptionally long one for me as I have quite a bit of weekend work that needs to be completed and since I am gone for the weekend it has to be done tomorrow evening.  So my night is really going to go late.  Plus it is Friday so it always goes late.

Dominica and I fly out of Newark early Saturday morning so we have to be up around five thirty in order to make it to the airport on time.  I am going to be pretty tired by the time that we reach Florida.  We are guessing that we are not even going to bother going into the parks on Saturday.  We will arrive in Orlando at 11:30 in the morning and should be in the resort around 12:30 via Disney Transportation from the airport.  It will take us a little while to settle in and then we have dinner reservations at Boma at the Animal Kingdom Lodge at 5:30.  It could easily take an hour to go from the Wilderness Lodge to the Animal Kingdom Lodge so it leaves a rather small window to go to the parks.

After dinner it will be rather late for burning a day pass to the parks and so we will be most likely to just go to the Boardwalk and relax for a little while and then will likely spend the evening relaxing at the Wilderness Lodge.  It is a nice resort that you should, in theory, want to hang out at so we will give that a try.  The Animal Kingdom Lodge definitely came through in that department last year.

Saturday we are planning to be up early and to hit the Magic Kingdom first thing, I think.  Dominica has a pretty rigorous schedule planned for most of the time that we are there.  We have dinner reservations back at the Wilderness Lodge’s Artist Pointe on Saturday night so the Magic Kingdom makes a lot of sense since it is so close to the lodge.

Monday morning we are planning on going to Disney Studios which opens early that day.  We want to be among the first to ride on Toy Story Mania which opens this weekend there.  That is the only actual new ride for us this year.  We will have to do the Great Movie Ride while we are there – it is the one truly amazing attraction in Disney Studios.  Then at eleven in the morning we have early lunch reservations at the Brown Derby restaurant in the studios which is the best restaurant in that park.  The menu looks awesome and neither of us has ever tried it.

May 28, 2008: Sick Day

I wasn’t feeling too bad this morning when I got up.  I did some work from home and was feeling slightly under the weather but not really “bad” just not up to par.  I took the train into the office and was feeling fine until I had to walk from World Trade Center to Wall Street out in the sun and the heat.  I got really warm and the sun beating down on my already burnt skull was a bit much for me, I think.

In the office I was really warm and quite uncomfortable.  Far warmer than I should have been as the office was warm but not excessively warm.  Maybe seventy-five degrees.  Definitely not eighty.  But then around noon I got crazy warm and almost passed out.  I felt really awful and was unable to even look at my screen.  I sent a quick email saying that I was sick and going home and stumbled out of the office.

The train ride home was awful.  Trapped on the train with little air and the constant side to side motion was a bit much.  I had picked up a cold bottle of water just before getting onto the train and I sipped that the whole ride home and that got me through.

Once I got back to Eleven80 and turned on the air conditioning I started to feel much better.  I was a little ill all afternoon but it wasn’t too bad.  It didn’t keep me from working for more than the first hour or so.

I worked all afternoon and was feeling pretty decent when Dominica got home from work.  I did a lot of reading today which allowed me to be away from the computer monitors as much as possible which aggravate my eye strain which just makes things worse.  I got quite a bit done.

Dominica came home and we spent the evening relaxing.  It was a short evening and we went to bed quite early.  I think that a good night’s sleep will help get me ready for tomorrow.

May 27, 2008: Back to Work

Time to get back to work after the long weekend.  There was a little bit of work to do this morning getting caught up for all of the people who were still working yesterday causing a little backup of work first thing today.  Overall it wasn’t that much and the rest of the day was rather slow.  Holiday weeks tend to be a little slow up front since the week before doesn’t have the level of prep that a normal week does.

I think that I forgot to mention over the last several days that I finished reading Bill Bryson’s “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” – the memoir of Bill Bryson’s growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s – and “Core Java, Volume One, Eighth Edition” – the 850 page Java reference manual from Sun Press.  I started reading “Core Java” back when I was taking my third Java programming class (my master’s class at RIT) but didn’t quite finish it.  So I went back last week and finished it off.  Amazon just shipped me Volume 2 on Friday which is well over 1,000 pages and I have already read a tiny bit of that.  Pretty dry reading, however.  It will take me a while to get through it.

I am very happy to be done with my spring class at RIT.  I tried to register for the only class being offered in my major this summer at RIT and discovered that not enough students were interested in it and it was canceled.  That is pretty crappy.  I talked to my department head and we are going to see if the class gets reinstated but that is very unlikely.  If not we are going to attempt to get me into a hospital management course this summer or I might just begin work on my master’s thesis now to get that out of the way.  Either way I will be doing something this summer but it could easily not be regular coursework.  In the fall I am scheduled to take “Process Management” which is the second of my Software Project Management sequence.

I am taking this week as pretty much a break from all of my extraneous activities.  I need some down time to just relax, get my brain back together, catch up on SGL, clean the apartment, think about house hunting, do some reading, etc.  I did some bill paying today as well.  Dominica and my move towards more frugal spending to facilitate purchasing a house this fall is going well.  Our goal is not really to save for the house but rather to eliminate all debt, starting with student loans and then the car, which will give us more “real” buying power even if the bank doesn’t necessarily think so.  Our goal is to err on the side of financial safety even if it reduces the amount that we might be able to borrow.  Best to borrow too little and get a smaller house now than to borrow too much and have financial problems or lose the house (like so many people are doing now.)

What is really awesome, and I probably mentioned this but just don’t remember, is that Dominica’s student loans have been put into deferment because she is attending Empire State.  That means that we owe nothing and the loans are not accruing any additional interest while they are in deferment.  So instead of paying them off directly we are able to put the money away into a saving account and gain a little bit of interest on the money in addition to being ready to pay off the loans.  The difference is very little but in the end it gives approximately a two percent interest gain in our favour over the course of several months – maybe as much as four or five!  Sure beats paying out interest as we pay off the loan.  It also allows us to “pay” it more aggressively as we are just setting the cash aside in a savings account where we can access it if needed.  If we “knew” that the deferment would last long enough we would get a CD to put the money into but we need to keep it liquid for now, unfortunately.

Dominica did some shopping for me today over her lunch break.  She picked up clothes for me to wear in Walt Disney World this weekend.  I don’t have much in the way of cool, casual clothing and this weekend is going to be exceptionally hot in central Florida so we need to be prepared.

We ordered in pasta from Nino’s and watched some episodes from the first season of Are You Being Served? on the AppleTV and called it an early night.

May 26, 2008: Driving Back to Newark

Today is actually Memorial Day, but all of our Memorial Day festivities are out of the way now.  Dad, Min and I went out for breakfast at the Omega Grill in Geneseo.

After breakfast we went back to dad’s and I spent the afternoon organizing and cleaning stuff that we have there.  Cataloging stuff that is there so that we can find it again is a huge endeavor.

We hit the road mid-afternoon and took the Interstate 99 corridor south to avoid i81 around Scranton.  That made the trip go much, much faster.  According to the GPS it takes only fourteen minutes longer to go that way anyway if there was no construction on i81.  So now we know that the i99 route is simply faster.  I am not sure that I have ever gone through the 81 corridor without at least fifteen minutes of delays somewhere.  Between never-ending construction and regular major accidents (the two longest traffic jams I have ever been stuck in where both on 81) there is just something always holding things up there.

It was around eleven when we pulled into Newark and unloaded the car at Eleven80.  We are quite tired of driving.  There will be no end to the traveling, though, next weekend is Florida and then the weekend after that is Ohio.  It is really cool that this week is just a four day work week for me and next week is a three day work week.  That will be very relaxing even though none of it is really a “vacation”.  It is good timing for two short work weeks after the last several have been so hectic.

May 25, 2008: Silver Lake Drive In

We slept in a bit again today. We were all very tired. Once again Oreo was up earlier than us to go in search of the sun.

Most of the morning was spent getting ready for this afternoon’s family picnic.  We discovered that dad has a spider infestation in the back yard.  All of the picnic tables, benches, umbrella and even dad were covered in medium sized brown spiders.  I believe that they were wolf spiders but I am not sure.  Right colouring and size.  There were tons of them.  Just everywhere.  It was really weird.

The family came over around one.  Dad grilled in the backyard.  Everyone had hotdogs and hamburgers.  Min and I had tofu beer brats.

After lunch we had the now annual family “sofa on the haywagon” ride around the farm.  Grandma’s old four person sofa, the one that Min and I had in our basement for a while in the theatre room, has been mounted on the old haywagon on the farm for a while and dad drives it around with the Ford tractor.  There is so much awesome scenery on the farm with views of the Genesee Valley, Avon, Geneseo, Mt. Morris, Rochester, etc.  We also got to go right by the new Route 63 road construction and see how that is going to look.

There was a lot of sunshine out in the open yard today and most of us got pretty burnt.  The top of my head was completely fried.  Being bald isn’t always as advantageous as it would first appear.

After the wagon ride I mentioned to Dominica that it was too bad that we didn’t get a chance to go to the Silver Lake Drive In this year.  She asked what was playing so I ran into the office to look up online what was scheduled for tonight.  If something good was on we were going to go and call the Ralstons as they almost always join us on our once per summer trip to the drive in.

Just as I was getting to the web site the phone rang.  As soon as I heard it I knew that it was Art calling.  Sure enough, I was right.  The Ralstons had just checked the movies that were showing and were calling us to see if we wanted to go!  The new Indiana Jones movie and Ironman are showing together tonight so we decided to go to that.  The only movie that I really want to see is Prince Caspian but both of these movies look interesting.

We quickly got the BMW convertible out of the barn and tested it out.  Who wants to go to the drive in in the old Mazda PR5 with the 330 is available?  We were planning to get it out of storage this weekend anyway.  This just made us need to get it out really, really quickly.

Rachael was taking off for the evening and Jeremy had no plans so he decided to come along with us as well.  Oreo always enjoys the drive-in since he gets to hang out in the car with all of us while we eat.

Getting the BMW out of storage went really well.  No problems at all.  We were prepared for at least the battery to be dead or the tires to be flat.  But nothing was wrong.  Everything went very smoothly.  There was a lot of dust and some raccoon prints all over the hood and roof but other than that it was pretty good.

The Ralstons got to the drive-in just a little bit before us.  It is really busy there tonight.  We parked and then went in to the restaurant to get some ice cream like we always do.  As it seems every year, there has been a bit of new construction at the Charcoal Corral since we have last been there.  The back room, where Min and I had our rehearsal dinner, is much expanded and much nicer than it used to be and there is a new building on the east side of the complex.

While waiting for the movies to start Art, Jeremy and I watched a DVD that Art and Danielle picked up over the weekend from the planetarium at the Creation Museum in Kentucky.  They had driven to Tennessee over the weekend and had stopped on their way home as they went by.  The DVD was really well done.  It was a “basics of astronomy” kind of thing but since it spent time on the science of astronomy and no the religious cosmology often tied to it for no reason it actually contained a lot of information rather than religious marketing fluff that we have come to expect from the paradoxically named “secular astronomy”.

The first movie was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull which was absolutely awful.  All six of us, Min, Jeremy, Art, Danielle, Michael and myself were extremely disappointed.  Jeremy, Min and I had heard from Sara this afternoon that she was really upset with it so we had a bit of a warning.  But it was far worse than we had expected.  This movie was totally pathetic and embarrassing.  I felt embarrassed for the actors in it for having to do a movie like this to feed themselves.  It must be really rough being stuck doing B movies like this as that is exactly what this was.  Everything was bad in this movie.  The acting was bad.  The plot was horrific.  The whole thing was one big, cheesy setup for a really bad kid actor to move into the role of young Indiana Jones so that the Spielberg/Lucas trainwreck can continue once Ford figures out that it is better to starve than to go out in public after doing this crap.  This movie was on a massive budget as well.  Whole sections were clearly filmed on a bluescreen with unmatched lighting and lots of characters just composited in.  It was bad when Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow pulled this stunt but that movies hook was that the whole thing was blue screened and that was its only draw.  Here it just shows just how out of touch and lacking in skill Industrial Light and Magic is these days.  Amateur films from Finland five years ago were ahead of this!!  I can honestly say that there was nothing redeeming about this movie at all.  Nothing.  This movie does more than any other to show why I feel that the industry has gone down the proverbial crapper and why it is practically never worth going to the theater to see a movie.  Had Ironman not been showing after this I would have left in the middle.

The second movie was Ironman which, apparently, is a comic book that a number of people know.  I never heard of it but that isn’t uncommon.  I had no idea that it was known enough that any number of people actually knew it though.  Normally I am at least aware of names of things even if I have never seen them.  Even with it being a relatively obscure concept the movie was actually very good and entertaining.  Not my type of movie but still quite enjoyable.  Robert Downey, Jr. did a great job.  Hopefully there will be some sequels because, as with all of these comic book movies, the first movie is nothing but a set up for later movies so it is pretty lacking unless at least three sequels are made.