March 1, 2008: Potty like a Rockstar

We slept in a little this morning and then hooked up the Nintendo Wii (it has been disconnected since we took it to dad’s house just before Christmas) and I played through the first chapter of Dragon Quest Swords. That took between ninety minutes and two hours. My first impression is that DQS is good but not on par with DQ8 from the PlayStation2. DQ8 was one of the greatest games, if not the greatest game, of all time. DQS takes away a lot of the gameplay of DQ8 and replaces it with a simplified action oriented interface using the Wii’s motion sensing remote. It is interesting but the game has been simplified significantly over the former title and I am thinking that this simplification will lead towards a less fulfilling game in general. The graphics appear to be mostly taken straight out of DQ8 and only slightly massaged at best for the Wii. DQS mostly suffers from DQ8 having been such an amazing game. DQS just has a lot to live up to and the expectations might be a bit unfair.

We have been working with Oreo trying to convince him to start using his new potty in the apartment but at this point we have been completely unsuccessful. Yesterday Dominica even got a load of used litter from Oreo’s daycare in the hopes that the smell would encourage him to give the potty a try. But he has decided that he is having none of that. This is going to take a lot of work, I can tell.

First thing this morning Dominica’s crown that she saw the dentist about just a week or two ago fell off while she was eating a chocolate truffle. Just fell off. No warning at all. So she had to make an emergency appointment for the dentist. She managed to get an appointment for three this afternoon.

Oreo and I drove Dominica to her dentist appointment in Kearny and took a nice walk while we waited for her. Her appointment went quickly and the dentist was able to put the crown back on.

We spent most of the afternoon relaxing. Under the guise of needing to test anamorphic playback on his DVD player, Ryan stopped by to borrow our copy of Bride and Prejudice but we are guessing that he is secretly addicted to Indo-Brit pop films and was just looking to borrow it. He said that he would run right back up with it after watching the first five or ten minutes but he didn’t come right back with it so we are pretty sure that he ended up watching it.

Ramona and Winni came over around six to hang out. Winni just got in from Wisconsin late last night. It is a good thing that we didn’t go to Niagara Falls this weekend as the weather turned quite bad and snowed very heavily all night and all morning today down here in New Jersey and was white out conditions and far worse up in the Niagara Frontier region.

At seven we ordered in sushi for dinner.  We hung out until around midnight and decided that tomorrow we are going to go shopping at Toys R Us for Settlers of Catan that Dominica wants to learn how to play.

I played some more Dragon Quest Swords before going to bed and almost managed to complete the second chapter but died at the last second and will have to work on it again tomorrow.

February 29, 2008: Happy Birthday to Eric Millen

Eric Millen, born on leap year day 1976, today celebrates his eighth ever actual birthday. It is hard for people who have birthdays every year to think about how strange it must be to not actually have a day to call your birthday except for every fourth year. And, because of the phasing between the base four of the leap years and the base ten of decades, leapers get only two birthdays during all of their thirties! Think about that. There is just one more birthday for Eric before he faces the big 4-0.

I was still incredibly exhausted this morning and actually slept through Dominica’s early morning alarm. I didn’t even wake up when Oreo got up for breakfast and only barely managed to wake up to kiss Dominica goodbye. I ended up not waking up until eight when the phone rang. And even now I have no idea who called.

On the way into the office this morning I stopped by at the Airlie Cafe to grab myself a bagel and to get a tossed salad for my lunch later on. I have really been crazing salads recently. I guess our ordering in of food so often has cut down the number of salads that I get on a regular basis.

I didn’t make it into the office and had to turn around because I was needed for several thing. So I went back to the apartment and worked for a little bit before going back and and heading to the office again. It is cold in Newark and Manhattan today but not nearly as cold as yesterday. Not quite cold enough for me to need anything more than my fleece and my baseball cap but it was on the chilly side.

Today wasn’t too busy. But it is a Friday. You always get lulled into a false sense of relaxation and then the real work hits when you least expect it.

Dominica took her lunch break and ran the Mazda PR5 up to Nanuet, New York to have the inspection done again. The shop called last night to let us know that the part needed had come in. The car passed without problems and she was back without incident. Nothing like waiting until the eleventh hour. But it is all set now.

My afternoon actually remained fairly slow which is pretty uncommon for a Friday. I had little enough cognitive work today that I decided to listen to “Predictably Irrational” while working as most of my work today was paperwork related. I am finding the book tends to make me want to consider doing a program from MIT’s Sloan School of Business moreso than I considered it before. The author, Dan Ariely, is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at Sloan.

While reading the book there was some discussion on procrastination and the use of external deadlines in helping to keep things moving. This reminded me of something that I had thought of recently – that as a society we have an extremely difficult time accepting other peoples’ workloads unless they have arbitrary deadlines. Let me give an example. If one person, a college student, has a paper due on Monday (today is Friday) and they have to work all weekend on it and not go out with their friends this is acceptable socially. No one expects them to get a bad grade just to go and hang out. But a second person decides not to go to college and instead is self-educating himself and needs to spend the weekend reading, experimenting, etc. But society does not generally accept this person as truly doing something worthwhile and sees the action as purely anti-social. Even if the results of the first situation are purely “cramming” just to get a good grade while losing the information long term and if the results of the second is deep learning, lasting knowledge and direct and immediately career or other goal attainment we still only see the formal as acceptable. Why is this?

I have noticed this particular social problem a lot both during the years that I spent attempting to break into IT without having completed my college degree as well as when I was working from home with a completely flexible schedule. When you have flexibility in your schedule, regardless of the importance of the work to be completed, it is seen by society as being unimportant or, at the very least, you are expected to have done all of it at the very first available moment and no procrastination whatsoever is allowed. This seems to happen regardless of how trivial the college class is (underwater basket weaving taken non-matriculated and audited) nor how critical the self-study or work may be (studying to get a new job in a week or completing work on a book that you are writing and need to finish so that you can make money to eat.)

One thing that I have found that helps somewhat to mitigate this social perception is professional certifications. These certifications provide simple, artificial timeboxes that are seem to be almost as or possible just as acceptable as college tests and allow you to really have an excuse for studying. It is very sad that as a society we see self-education and a lifelong pursuit of knowledge to be so unacceptable. During the Victorian age amateurs were seen as the pinnacle of an art. The top scientists or researchers were proud to be amateurs and would study and research on their own time. Only those who couldn’t reach this level felt the need to be professionals. But today if we don’t have someone cracking the whip to keep us working it isn’t considered polite to read, research, experiment, learn, grow or advance under our own volition. How sad.

At a quarter until five this evening dad IM’d me to say that it was really snowing up there and that it was a good thing that we hadn’t attempted to go up there tonight. It would have been bad.

Since we have time to actually really relax for once I am planning on taking advantage of it this weekend. I am going to do some reading and I hope to play Dragon Quest Swords for the Wii quite a bit. I am really looking forward to that.

I had to work a bit late tonight. Not because of an extra heavy volume of work but just because some stuff got scheduled pretty late into the evening. It was after seven thirty when I finally got the chance to head back to Eleven80.

A friend at work and I were discussing the output of the Solaris pkglist command tonight and we were trying to figure out how some people we knew were getting prettier output out of it than we were. We wanted to know the package name, version and install date in a nice easy list for a particular package. Other people were getting this list and we were sure that it was something obvious. This is what we came up with:

for i in $(ls /var/sadm/pkg | grep pkgname); do echo $i: $(pkginfo -l $i | grep VERSION) $(pkginfo -l $i | grep INSTDATE); done

It isn’t the prettiest solution but it works. So now if you need it (or if I need it) I can just copy and paste it from here. It works quite well if you have a large number of different versions of the same package installed on your Solaris machine.

It was eight thirty when I finally got home. Dominica had made dinner but had to take it off of the stove to wait until I got home and then she was able to finish it. We had soft tacos and watched the next three episodes of Doctor Who that had come from Netflix. What a great show. We are about halfway through the second season of the new series.

Manned Orbiting Laboratory MOL

In 1963 the United States Air Force announced that it would begin work on a project called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory or MOL, as it was commonly known.  The idea of the project was initially to determine the efficacy of putting American military personnel into space.  The cold war was near its peak and the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to get control of extra-terrestrial militarization zones.  As the project progressed, however, the mission became more focused on building a space station for military reconnaissance.  Eventually, by 1969, the funds for the MOL had dried up and then President Nixon pushed to cancel the program to cut back on spending.  The more visible NASA Skylab project would receive some of the funding instead.

On this past February 12th the PBS program NOVA ran an episode called AstroSpies.  Coming out of college in 1967 the MOL was the very first project that my father worked on at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York.  He was on the project from 1967 until its cancellation in 1969.  Dad watched the show when it aired, completely by coincidence because the show he was planning to watch was a rerun and he just flipped over to Nova, and even recognized one of the engineering models shown on the show as having come from his drafter!

The NOVA episode AstroSpies can be viewed online.  Dad was involved in the training of some of the USAF Astronauts as well.  He helped to train Colonel Albert Crews and Colonel Richard Lawyer.

February 28, 2008: Pretty Much No Sleep

I wasn’t very tired when we turned in for bed so I finished listening to “The Titanic Disaster Hearings” by Tom Kuntz. I still wasn’t tired so I started listening to “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariely which only just went to print last week.

Oreo got me up at one thirty needing to be taken outside quite badly. So I lept from bed, dressed and shuttled him to the corner as quickly as possible. It was extremely cold outside and we ran the whole way. By the time that we returned to Eleven80 I was wide awake and unable to go back to sleep.

I lay in bed until two forty and at that point had considered the issues that would arise should I fall back asleep since I need to be up and getting ready by five so I decided that it would be best if I just went ahead and got up. So I did. I went out to the living room and logged on to the office so that I could get a jump on the day since I would be out for a stint this morning.

I worked from three in the morning until seven when we left to take Dominica to work in Totowa, New Jersey. From there I had to drive up to Nanuet, New York by West Nyack. On the way to her office Dominica installed the GPS unit into the car so that I could use it driving to New York today. Believe it or not this is our first time driving anywhere since Christmas! The only movement that the car has done since then is Dominica taking it back and forth to work.

The Garmin GPS worked wonderfully and made it so easy for me to go up to Nanuet which I don’t know very well. I have only been there once before. I went up there once to have the BMW looked at.

The Mazda didn’t pass inspection. There is a light socket that had rotten out and needed to be replaced. But the part isn’t easy to get so they had to order it from Mazda. They are hoping to have the part tomorrow. So the plan is that Dominica will run the car up there on her lunch break now that we know how close she is to the border.

I worked quite hard all morning. It was a busy day. Around two or a little earlier Ramona stopped by on her way home from Manhattan and we went over to Airlie Cafe for some lunch. I have gotten addicted to the salads over there. They have a “design your own salad” service and I do iceberg lettuce, carrots, hard boiled eggs, chick peas, cheddar cheese and Russian dressing. It is really good.

We haven’t seen Ramona in an entire months. She was in Chicagoland for two weeks and then spent the last two weeks sailing from the British Virgin Islands to Fort Lauderdale or somewhere around there. She got back to Newark early this morning.

Ramona and I hung out for the afternoon. She came over and visited while I worked and helped to keep me awake. Oreo’s new potty has arrived from Doggy Solutions. I can’t whether he is excited that a package finally arrived for him or not.

I forgot that I had the car today – quite a rarity and didn’t keep track of the time and it was a quarter to five when I realized that Dominica was still at work and that I needed to run up to pick her up! She gets done with work at five. So I ordered the car and we bundled up little Oreo. It is very cold out today. Low temperatures and very high winds.

Ramona rode up to get Dominica with me. We made really good time and were there before five thirty. The GPS unit really helped. This was my first time driving to Dominica’s office by myself and only the second time going to her office at all since she changed offices and works in Totowa and not in Nutley. I have been to the area before but not to her particular office or its exit.

We hung out at her office for fifteen minutes or so because Al, one of her coworkers, wanted to get a picture taken with Oreo. Oreo is quite the celebrity.

We tried to figure out some dinner plans but Dominica has so much homework that needs to be addressed right away that we weren’t able to do anything. It probably was for the best, however, as I was about to pass out from lack of sleep and Ramona has barely had a minute at home since she has gotten back.

I drove Ramona home and, believe it or not, it was the first time that Dominica and I got to see where Ramona and Chris live! We didn’t take time to go in because Ramona had to do some quick shopping at the corner store so we dropped her there.

We came home and Dominica spent the evening doing her homework. She is doing work for her academic planning class tonight and not for her geography class. I had zero energy left and just passed out on the living room floor with Oreo on his Star Wars Episode I pillow. He thought that that made for a nice evening.

I went to bed early around ten – after having napped since seven or so. We have nothing in particular going on this weekend. I have no classes in session. Dominica will be doing some homework but only her GPS class most likely because she won’t have time to get feedback on her academic planning work before then. No traveling this weekend so we will have some time to relax we hope.

February 27, 2008: Done with Project Management (Class)

I discovered today that a friend of mine from high school at York Central School is a big time opera singer here in Manhattan with rave reviews! I had no idea. I knew in school that she wanted to be an opera singer but she was several years younger than me and I did not keep in contact after graduating and I didn’t keep in contact with anyone that kept in contact with her. So I had no idea. Nice to see the hometown crowd doing well. Not many get to escape the country and really do something.

Dominica and I had been planning to get a nice, new HP machine with Windows Vista on it to use as a media center in our living room. We were going to get a nice graphics card for it and use it as a video game “console” as well. We haven’t bought it yet because we haven’t bought the LCD to attach it to and we can’t until the taxes are done. But we have been doing some thinking about how we use our computers and stuff in the house and what we already own and have invested in and we have decided that we just don’t need the extra power and flexibility and that it would really make a lot more sense for us to just use the Mac Mini that we were already planning on buying in the living room as our media center computer.

The Mac comes with Frontrow which is the same software that powers the AppleTV which we already have in the bedroom. So the two will be relatively identical with the same look and the same interface and the same compatibility. It will save money and space and it will be much more attractive than our original idea. So, for now, that is the plan. Basically we have decided to standardize our own home on the AppleTV and h.264 for now. I can tell that I am getting older. The solution isn’t so flexible as it is simple and easy. But we use our media in such limited ways that it should work pretty well for us. The only challenge is going to be Netflix which currently requires Windows to work. Hopefully they will have Mac compatibility worked out very soon.

Today was very busy at work. I was on the phone from the moment that I got into the office until noon. I had arrived at the office quite early today too. I wasn’t being a slacker this morning and was at my desk a full hour before “normal time” and still people were calling me on my mobile because they couldn’t reach me while I was on the train on my way in. One of the many reasons why I am not a big fan of commuting especially for people in primarily support roles. The unavailability while traveling really impacts things – even when traveling during expected traveling hours or, in my case, hours before that.

Our weekend trip to Niagara Falls has been cancelled postponed. The weather is expected to be bad all week and through the weekend. Driving eight hundred miles (round trip) in deep snow in a rented minivan is not my idea of a relaxing weekend. The scheduling of the snow worked out because Kevin has a lot of studying to do and really isn’t available this weekend anyway. So probably best that the snow caused us to lean towards not pushing to do it this weekend anyway. Maybe we can do it when the weather is nicer and you don’t have to be all bundled up while looking at the falls.

Yesterday and today were highly successful finding-people-from-high-school days. I found several friends that I haven’t spoken to in years. It’s so strange because in so many ways it seems like we never lost touch even though it has often been fourteen years or more. My list of people from school that I am still in contact with is pretty impressive.

Tomorrow is deal-with-the-car’s-registration day. The Mazda needs its New York State inspection and there isn’t going to be any good time to do it so it just has to be done tomorrow morning. So I am going to be driving up to West Nyack, New York to get the car inspected. I have a tentative appointment for a little after eight in the morning. So I have to get up early tomorrow, drive Dominica to work early and then drive on to West Nyack and try to get there as early as possible. Then drive back down to Newark to work at home as it is my work at home day. It will be a long morning. But it has to be done and this will get it out of the way.

Even though I went in early this morning I got stuck late supporting people. That is okay. I am going to be out for a little bit tomorrow morning anyway. I am looking forward to having some quiet reading time tomorrow actually. I don’t often get forced to just sit and read for any length of time and I appreciate the breaks when they come my way.

My grades were posted for Project Management just before I left work and to my very great relief I did quite well on the Project Titanic term paper and have managed to maintain by four point average for the time being. That is a huge weight off of my shoulders. I now have a week or so between classes where I can relax a little bit.

It was around seven thirty when I got back into Newark. Dominica was watching the final two episodes of The Gilmore Girls and wanted to be able to finish them. So I did some cleaning and talked to Andy for a little bit. I ordered in Chinese for dinner from Golden City. I watched the last twenty minutes of The Gilmore Girls with Dominica and then we watched Family Ties. Then it was off to bed. We have to be up early tomorrow.