May 14, 2008: Impromptu Move (At Work)

The weather is nice again today.  My day a bit hectic when I found at out eleven this morning that I was being relocated to a different floor of the building.  It isn’t the end of the world but getting moved without any warning can be a problem.  Because there was no warning our clients (there was more than just me being moved without warning) weren’t told that we were moving and would be offline and we didn’t have time to pack or anything.  Fortunately for me I never keep more at the office than I can through in a bag and walk away with so I was in pretty good shape.  I always keep a bag at the office as well.  So I was thoroughly prepared.

The move happened at two in the afternoon without warning.  We were told that there would be warning and boxes delivered for our stuff to be moved in.  But no, just people who showed up and told us to leave immediately.  What a mess.

The move actually went pretty quickly and I found my new cube pretty quickly.  Because I had so little to move (literally two monitors, a computer, the cables, mouse, keyboard and the phone) I was done quite quickly.  The new cube is in a decent location but it is in an area that is designed to be exactly what Lister and DeMarco point out as an example of a company run by bad managers who aren’t thinking at all – a space for knowledge workers kept uncomfortably warm with harsh overhead lighting keeping us from being able to use our computers efficiently and with nothing to block the sounds of people talking all over the place.  It’s everything that corporate space planners do wrong that even a monkey could figure out doesn’t make any sense.  It’s not about saving space – it wastes lots of space.  It is about making work uncomfortable and inefficient.  Why would they want to keep us from working at maximum efficiency?  I have no idea.  But the focus of my job totally shifted today from “getting tasks done” to “socializing”.  The new floor is nothing but a continuous party.

Oreo seemed to be in pretty good spirits when I got home.  Bored out of his mind and very lonely but again he didn’t seem to have panicked at all.  I am home with him tomorrow so hopefully he can make it through Friday and his week will be over.

I was burned out from too much work all week and too much stress.  Nothing stresses me out like politics at work.  But I just have to remember that being inefficient and getting less done doesn’t get me paid less – it actually gets me paid more in the long run.  It isn’t my money being wasted and I shouldn’t be concerned about it.

I ended up having to put in another super long day today working long after I arrived home.  I did fifteen hours on Monday and fourteen today.  Just a normal ten hour day yesterday.  I can’t wait until this week is over and I can catch my breath.

I gave up no even thinking about homework tonight.  What little free time I had between eleven, when work completed, and midnight, when I fell asleep, Oreo and I spent watching the seventh season of The Cosby Show. Oreo appreciated the break from me doing homework.

May 13, 2008: Oreo’s First Day At Home

The weather is back to being amazing today. Warm and sunny. It feels like June outside.

I worked from home for a little while and then took Oreo for a nice long walk in the park to work “everything out of his system” before heading into Manhattan for the day. This is going to be a really difficult day for him being home all alone and not seeing Dominica in days. Because he isn’t going to daycare he has all kinds of energy too. He just wants to play and play.

It was a busy afternoon but I got a bit of work done.  I couldn’t stay late at the office with Oreo at home so I rushed home as soon as I could and wrapped up the day working here.

Oreo fared pretty well considering this was his first time home alone during the working day for a very long time.  I was really worried that he was going to be in a panic all day long but he appears to have done alright.  What a relief that is.  This is going to be a very long week for him one way or another.

I spent the evening working on homework and playing with Oreo.  Sorry to be boring but I am just way too busy to write more.

May 12, 2008: Crazy Weather in Newark

After working until a quarter after five in the morning I was awoken by the office calling me at seven past eight this morning to discuss the same issues that we had just left a few hours before.  So my day started early after having gone very, very late yesterday.  It is going to be an extremely long day.

I ended up working for fifteen hours today.  It was nine in the evening by the time that I actually managed to sign off and call it a day.  I was exhausted.

After working a crazy long day I tried to do what Java work I could on my homework before needing to go to bed.  It was tough to get any done, though, as I was so worn out and because Oreo really needed attention at that point pretty badly.

The weather was completely crazy today.  The temperature really dropped from last week and it was raining from about three or four in the morning and lasting pretty much all day.  For a while in the mid-morning I coul see snow or ice flakes floating past the living room windows!  The south side of Eleven80 was getting only light rain while the north side was getting a pretty serious storm.  It was very strange and had many observers hanging out in the lobby watching the fascinating scene.

Oreo and I went to bed a little early as I had pretty much no sleep last night and needed to crash.  So we turned in around eleven thirty.  I did manage to do a little homework today but not nearly as much as I had wanted to have completed.

Tomorrow Oreo is going to have to face being alone in the apartment during the work day.  He is going to be very upset.

May 11, 2008: Dominica Leave for Houston

Doggy-Daddy Week Begins.

The alarm went off at three thirty this morning. We barely had time to close our eyes, it seems. It was tough getting out of bed to go to the airport. I can’t believe that Dominica was able to get up on just three hours of sleep, shower and get herself ready to fly.

There was some communications issue downstairs this morning as we were trying to leave and the car that we needed before a quarter to five didn’t arrive until after five so we were in a panic driving to the airport. The airport only opens at five so we didn’t want to get there before then but since the airlines are not required to take your luggage unless you are there forty-five minutes before your flight you definitely don’t want to be very late.

So it was a mad dash to the airport. We just barely made it in time and got Min onto her flight. The nice thing about flying first thing in the morning is that everyone is more friendly and there are no lines at all. You can rush right from the front door to the airplane without too much of a hassle.

Oreo and I returned home and returned to bed, as you can imagine that we did. Dominica sent an email from her BlackBerry in Atlanta at seven past ten to let me know that she had completely the first leg of her flight. It was around half past noon when she finally got into Houston.

Oreo was a very sad little doggy all day. At one point he went into the bathroom, which is directly across the hall from the front door, and just lay on the little rug there so that he could watch the front door waiting for Dominica to come home. He really hates when one of us is gone and he can tell that it is Sunday and that the schedule is different from the norm. He gets upset so easily. It’s tough being a little dog sometimes.

I did some cleaning today. I am excited to have some time to myself around the apartment to really get some cleaning done. I did the dishes and got the kitchen cleaned up pretty much right away and started putting things away from all around the apartment. It will take all week to really make a difference but I got a nice start on it today. I will be home more than usual this week as I have to take care of Oreo all week. He is going to be going crazy without any daycare at all. So he will be upset because Dominica is gone and rambunctious because of not playing with the other dogs.

Speaking of other dogs, I found out today that Barney, the little Boston Terrier puppy who lives nearby, is moving into Eleven80 this week. So there are going to be two super cute black and white Boston Terriers living here.

My day was spent doing pretty much nothing but Java homework. The project that I have due at the end of the week is really immense and I have dedicated the whole week to it. While the project is a lot of work and really wearing on me it is also a lot of fun. I am learning a lot from doing it and I am learning to use new tools as well. I am really getting used to the Eclipse IDE and have started using ANT for automated Java builds too. And I am using KDESVN as a front-end to an online Subversion repository.

I worked late into the night. Around two in the morning I gave up for the night and went to bed. Oreo and I snuggled and watched two episodes (episodes two and three) of the first season of The Brady Bunch. The thing that I really like about that show is the bizarre and yet awesome architecture and styling that was popular in 1969. The Brady Bunch is one of those shows, like the movie The Glass Bottom Boat, where a certain extravagant style quite unique to the 1960s can be seen. I love those crazy 60s style mansions. They took on weird colours, angular lines and massive horizontal sprawl. A very different style than ended up becoming popular in later years. Today open space is achieved by going upwards not by going outwards.

As the second episode ended I turned off the lights and prepared to fall asleep after a long day of Java programming and took one last look at my BlackBerry which had recently turned back on after being recharged.

One of the issues with BlackBerrys is that they turn off their radios long before they actually run out of battery leaving you with a day of “running them down” before you can recharge them. And then once you get them plugged in it takes a little while before they have enough internal power to turn the radio on again. This leaves a huge gap of time when you have no cell phone service as a result.

So today was my “day without cell phone service”. It lasted from mid-afternoon until sometime tonight. It is only so bad as I am online most of the day with email and instant messaging and I have the house phone. But once in a while something happens only over the mobile network and I miss something. Today, that was a page from the office. No one emailed my home email or called the home line so I missed the text message until after The Brady Bunch was over.

So at a little before two thirty in the morning I headed out to the living room and logged into the office. The sun was up and people were in the office in London and Belfast so we got right to work. I ended up on a conference call for a very long time.  Oreo came out just a minute or two after me.  He doesn’t like to be alone.  So he lay on his pillow beside me while I worked through the night.

It was around a quarter to five in the morning when we finally wrapped up and signed off of the conference call.  I felt surprisingly wide awake, though, for having not gotten to go to bed until the sun was thinking about coming up.

I was pretty wired so I did a little Java until after five.  The wind picked up and it started raining.  The east-facing windows were covered in rain before I went to bed.  Good morning to be stuck working during the night.

May 10, 2008: Discovering the Hudson Valley

New York’s Hudson Valley has always been a strange place to me.  Being from western New York the lower Hudson Valley (south of Albany) is a place of immense history and importance but appears to serve as nothing more than a traffic corridor between the capital at Albany and New York City at the valley’s southern most extent.  All of New York’s large Upstate cities lie along an east-west corridor along the Erie and Barge Canals with Albany in the east as the capital and oldest city in the state, then Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and finally Buffalo when you reach the state’s western edge.  With the except of Utica, each city grows in size and importance as you head west as well.

The Hudson Valley has no significant cities.  In fact it’s cities are so small that they are actually smaller than New York’s southern tier corridor cities which are minuscule in comparison to the northern “canal” corridor cities.  Along the southern tier are Jamestown, Corning, Elmira, Ithaca and Binghamton.

What really sets the Hudson Valley apart from the bulk of Upstate New York are two things.  The first being that it serves simply as a suburban area for New York City so all traffic and “focus” are towards the south instead of being around local city centers.  The second is that there is no “open space” between the Hudson Valley towns.  Unlike New York farther north, the Hudson Valley is a continuous blanket of population – much like Long Island and Northern New Jersey.  Most of New York State is dense city centers separated by immense spans of countryside and agricultural land, but the Valley hides a large population without the obvious population centers.  The feel is completely unlike New York’s other population regions.

Today our goal is to go to the Hudson Valley and discover this region of our home state.  Dominica is leaving on the six o’clock in the morning flight to Houston tomorrow, flying out of Newark so today is our last day together for a whole week.  So this morning was packing and last minute laundry, flight check in and other miscellany.  Then a little after noon we hit the road north.

We drove up the Palisades Parkway through Bear Mountain State Park and crossed over to the eastern bank going over the Bear Mountain Bridge.  We took Route 9D north along the river through Manitou, Garrison, Cold Springs and up to Beacon.  The area was completely breathtaking.  Those communities are so nice.

We stopped in Beacon and explored its now rather famous main street.  Downtown Beacon is really nice with tons of food options and lots of crowds wandering about exploring the town like us.  We drove around and got a feel for the town and went down to the train station to get an idea of where that was located.  Then we went to the end of Main Street and ate at the Thai restaurant there.  We sat outside since the weather was so nice.  The food was really good too – although I accidentally ordered mine way too spicy.  Not that I couldn’t eat it but it wasn’t nearly as good as it would have been much less spicy.  I will know for next time.

After our dinner we went to the other end of main street to the Beacon Creamery and got ourselves some local Hudson Valley hard ice cream.  It was really good.  We got a small dish of vanilla for Oreo too.  He was really bored by this point having just sat in the car all afternoon.  He was very thankful for his dish of ice cream which he ate on the sidewalk while I held the dish for him.

After Beacon we drove to Fishkill.  Fishkill is one of my “old family” towns.  My mother’s mother’s family lived in Fishkill in the late 1600s into the early 1700s after having moved from Rensselaerwyck (Albany today) to Flat Bush in Brooklyn and then to Fishkill.  Lise Winans is from Fishkill as well.  We didn’t get to see anything but the trailer park and Rail Road Recovery operation on the outskirts of town, though, because they were having some “Rock Around the Clock Block Party” and had closed off the streets.  So we didn’t get to see Fishkill and drove away.  Not a good move for potential home owners since the only parts of town accessible easily from the outside were pretty sad.  We did get to see their impressive prison, though.

We drove back to Beacon and then took Route 9D down along the Hudson River back the way that we had come but instead of taking the Beat Mountain Bridge back to the west side of the river we instead took Route 6 / Route 202 to Peekskill (where furniture VidenovThe Facts of Life is set) and on down through Westchester County.  I have never really driven through Westchester before and Dominica has never seen it at all so it was very interesting to see the New York Metro’s competition for Beverly Hills.  Westchester is very impressive.  We really wish that we could afford to move someplace like Tarrytown.  The commute into the city wouldn’t be bad at all, and the area is just amazing.

It was pretty late by the time that we made it back to Newark.  Dominica had some more packing to do and some things that she needed to do to get ready for her week away in Texas.  So the evening was pretty busy.  Eventually she was able to work on stuff in our bedroom so we watched The Love Boat and then it was time for bed.  It ended up being almost midnight by the time that we actually went to sleep.  The alarm is set for three thirty in the morning so that she will have time to get up and get ready and be to the airport by five.  Her flight leaves at six and the airport opens at five.  So it is a short night for us.