December 21, 2007: Driving Home

All I Want For Christmas Is You (in HD.)

Today I am working from Warren so I have a bit of traveling to do. I had to run some errands this morning to get us ready to leave for over a week. There is a lot to do. It was around nine twenty when I finally escaped the apartment with everything turned off and ready to lie dormant for ten days or so.

Dominica went in to work at normal time this morning. She is working a normal, full day but they have a special team pot-luck lunch thing and she took vegetarian meatballs in as her contribution. They were a big hit.

I got to the platform at the Broad Street Station in Newark just in time to miss the train. I had to wait quite a while for the next train to come and it ended up being late too. By the time that I got out to Summit, New Jersey there were no more corporate shuttles running out to Warren. Craptastic.

So I started calling around trying to find a cab company. That took several tries as the place that is recommended by the railroad simply said that they didn’t service Summit today and hung up. The second place that I tried was out of business. Eventually I came upon Suburban which sent out a taxi for me that ended up costing almost sixty dollars to get to work from Summit where the train dropped me off. Not a good start to the day.

It was eleven thirty when I finally got to the Warren office.  I ran around and said hello to everyone, got set up on a workstation for about ten minutes and then we were all off to Figaro III on the north side on Interstate 78 in the A&P Plaza for the team Christmas lunch.  Lunch was awesome.  About two and a half hours and probably five bottles of wine.  I had salmon ravioli in a brandy cream sauce which was really amazing.  Very good food.

The afternoon flew by between the long lunch, getting in late and just running around the office talking to people that I haven’t seen in months.  I haven’t been to the Warren office at all in a month or more as it is and was only there two or three times in the month preceding that.

I stayed in the office until relatively late for a holiday weekend Friday night.  Only one other person from our entire team was later than me and he was stuck supporting an issue.  I worked until just barely after six when Dominica pulled in to pick me up.

The BMW is loaded down with stuff to take to dad’s house.  Between Christmas presents and stuff that we just need to move there is hardly any room in this tiny car.  It is a good thing that we weren’t trying to take Oreo too as there was just no room for that.  Our plan this week is to swap the BMW for the Mazda PR5 which has Nokian snow tires on it that will be perfect for Dominica driving in the snow.  The PR5 is just easier to deal with in bad weather.  And this will give us a chance to put the “for sale” signs back in the windows in New Jersey for a few months.

The weather was perfect for driving tonight and there was hardly any traffic at all as we headed out of New Jersey.  We stopped at the Panera Bread on PA33 North heading up towards Interstate 80 from Interstate 78.  It was a delicious dinner and we picked up a pastry ring to take to dad’s house too.

As we were pulling out of Panera I noticed a “Game Crazy” that was open in the same parking lot.  We needed a Nintendo Wii component cable (a travel one as ours it attached to our bedroom Westinghouse LCD) and a travel remote sensor bar for the Wii so we ran in and picked those up.  We have the Wii with us so that we could play it at dad’s house this weekend.

We took our new route to avoid the Interstate 81 construction zones around Scranton, Pennsylvania which involves take Interstate 80 west to Williamsport, PA and then i180 West to US15 North / Future Interstate 99 up to Corning where we hop back onto i86 and then i390 to Sonyea, New York.  This route seems to cut about an hour off of the journey compared to taking the more northerly route that goes mostly through New York’s Southern Tier.

It was just about midnight as we pulled into dad’s driveway.  We hung out for about two hours before calling it a night.

We unpacked the new OLPC XO (One Laptop Per Child, aka $100 Laptop) and checked it out.  Our first impression was that it was incredibly tiny – much smaller than we had been imagining and we had been imagining that it was going to be pretty small.  It is very cute and very solidly built.  It is impressive to hold.  You feel very confident in its manufacturing.

We powered up the OLPC XO and gave the software a try.  The XO is based on a custom variant of Red Hat’s Fedora operating system using a custom graphical environment known as Sugar.  The laptop is definitely slow but is quite usable.  It has a 1GB flash storage system for it’s main storage and 256MB of system memory which is pretty good for such a lightweight device.  It can take advantage of USB Memory Sticks or Secure Digital (SD) storage as it has one SD slot and three USB ports.

The screen is small but very sharp and impressive.  We have been hearing amazing things about the XO’s screen technology and it was rumored to be quite ground breaking and it certainly is very usable and readable.

We checked out a few of the built in applications like the word processor, the BASH terminal, journal, TurtleArt, Python programming and the oscilloscope.  The last one being an endless source of fun for dad and Min.

We were not able to get the unit online tonight as dad’s wireless isn’t currently hooked up.  We will need to turn that on tomorrow and see what this thing can do.

December 20, 2007: Preparing to Get Out of NJ

Merry Christmas from Straight No Chaser.

I had to get up early this morning and help Dominica pack the car. I saw Oreo off to daycare and I won’t get to see him again until afternoon on Christmas day! That is yet another long stretch without my dog and it makes me very sad.

I worked on Wall Street today. It was incredibly warm and you couldn’t tell that it was late autumn at all. It was bright and sunny and jackets were completely unneeded.

On my walk in and in the office today I finally finished reading “Notes from a Small Island” by Bill Bryson that I had started reading (read: listening to) on the flight from London to Newark a few weeks ago. After that I went on to the next book in the collection, “Neither Here Nor There“.

On my way home from work I swung into Borders and picked up the Icewind Dale Trilogy.  I was supposed to pick up thank you cards but the prices were so high that I decided that that was foolish to blow so much money on cards when people don’t really like cards all that much anyway.

At Newark Penn Station I stopped and grabbed McDonald’s for dinner and walk home with that.  Dominica beat me home (she left work at two this afternoon to drive Oreo up to Albany to meet her parents and drop him off with them.)  She turned on Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and we watched an episode while we ate dinner.

There was a lot to be done tonight as we have to leave in the morning and will not be returning home for more than a week.  Dominica will be driving to work as usual and I will be taking NJ Transit out to Warren.  Then after work Dominica will pick me up from the office and we will drive to dad’s house.  So all of the packing and stuff has to be done tonight so that we can load the car in the morning.

We had a lot of work to do tonight so we ended up being up much later than we had hoped to be.

If you liked the first video, also check out Straight No Chaser (the Indiana University Men’s a Capella Men’s Chorus) singing Stand By Me in a Hardee’s Restaurant in Kentucky. And their cover of BoyzIIMen’s This Is How We Do It. (Much better than the original.) And Rascal Flatt’s God Bless the Broken Road.

You can order Straight No Chaser’s 1998 Archive DVD for shipment in January from a-capella.com

For those not aware, Indiana University is one of the world’s most renowned and respected music performance schools on par with Eastman and Juliard.

Dad, who found the Straight No Chaser Christmas Video, also sent “Crazy Little Dutch Man“. I came across the great Dutch “President Clinton” Commercial.

December 19, 2007: Our OLPC Came Today

It is a cold one today. No sun at all. Last night I stayed up reading and this morning finished R. A. Salvatore’s “Sojourn” which is the third book in the Dark Elf Trilogy. Dominica has been pushing me to finish the book so that she could read it. Tomorrow I am hoping to pick up a copy of the Icewind Dale Trilogy which follows the Dark Elf Trilogy in the Drizzt Cycle.

Andy left for Pittsburgh this morning. I bet he is glad that he has a new GPS unit. Getting around Pittsburgh is one of the toughest things ever. That is one hard town to find your way around in. This will be his first time ever being in Pittsburgh alone since he lived there alone after June, 2000 until late that summer but at that time he did not have a car and never strayed from the path between Shadyside and Oakland along the road that he lived on. So this will be an experience for him being back there after all of these years on his own. He has only been back once or twice since then as it is.

We got an email today from Aer Lingus with deals during the winter to fly from New York to Ireland (Dublin/Shannon) for just $199 USD each way! That is $398 round trip. Talk about cheap.

Dominica and my OLPC arrived today at dad’s house! We are very excited. We are the very first to get one as we ordered ours in the first fifteen minutes of them being available through the Give One, Get One program. So this is a very big deal. Yay!

Dominica’s dad was able to take Friday off from work and so her parents are heading south to Houston on Friday instead of on Saturday which changes our weekend plans a bit. So now Dominica is taking off from work early tomorrow (she did extra time earlier this week so she isn’t losing any normal hours just losing her overtime that she was going to get) and driving Oreo up to just south of Albany to meet her parents and give them Oreo. She should be back to Newark around dinner time when I should be getting back from the office. Then on Friday night we will drive straight up to my dad’s house instead of first going to Frankfort and then going to Peoria on Saturday morning. And now it means that we can play with the OLPC that much earlier.

I did some Christmas shopping for Dominica today over my lunch break.  I can safely write that as she never reads the site.

Before she got home I made coffee for her and ordered in some dinner from Tony’s so that she wouldn’t have to worry about dinner tonight.  Not that she would have to cook but she has a really hard time deciding what she wants to eat and finds it very frustrating.

We ate dinner and watched most of an episode of Buck Rogers but the DVD stopped playing before the end of the episode and we didn’t get to finish it.  🙁  Now we will never know if Buck survives!

Oreo is off to his Christmas party at daycare tomorrow and then in the late afternoon off to join his grandparents in their drive to Houston, Texas.  So tonight he gets a bath and his flea dip.

After Oreo’s bath I worked on my collegiate reading assignments and did some of my weekly homework.  Dominica worked on some laundry and packing.  We are down to the wire for leaving the apartment for another week and a half.  Dominica also started reading “Exile” tonight.

Friday I am going into the Warren office for the team Christmas party.  Dominica will pick me up from the office on her way out of New Jersey and I will take over the driving from there.  We will be at dad’s sometime on Friday night quite late.

December 18, 2007: Diet Fizz

Dominica and I stayed up a little late last night reading. She stayed up until she had finished “Homeland” and I went to bed as soon as she was done. I am almost done with “Sojourn”, though, now after spending the evening reading.

natalie dee

Today a kid who got caught smoking pot lost his copy of Guitar Hero III but his dad made $9,000 when he sold it on eBay. And the post office delivers Christmas card after 93 years. Apparently George W. Bush has been coaching the Japanese government spokespeople on how to appear well informed. A Japanese man attempting to drive to avoid senility fails – both at driving and at avoiding senility but apparently not at avoiding much else. Study from Duke University shows that monkeys can do math as well as college students. However, it can also read: Duke University students only able to do math at the level of monkeys. If I ran Duke I think that I would have kept this out of the news. In Italy it is illegal to give ridiculous or shameful first names to children. I wish that the US would do this. With a significant portion of the population now playing a game of finding the most embarrassing and hurtful names for children to grow up with it is easy to see here why laws like this are an important part of child protection. In Italy where parents probably care more about their children on average the law may seem extreme. But it can go a long way towards protecting children who can’t protect themselves.

Cute giant rat five times the size of city rats has been discovered in Indonesia. This is one cute rate.

Today I discovered Vimeo which is a web video hosting service (a la YouTube or Google Video.) What sets Vimeo apart is that they offer full Vimeo HD. This is full 720P HDTV stuff here. Pretty amazing. I took a look at a few videos and they were pretty impressive.

Today was incredibly slow at the office. Dominica had to go in really early this morning before Doggie Paradise was open so she couldn’t take Oreo to daycare. I would have taken him in later but I do not have a car anymore so that wasn’t a possibility. So I was the dog sitter again today. This worked out well because work was so slow today and Oreo was still exhausted from the weekend and slept almost all day. He isn’t a youthful puppy anymore and he values his sleep. There was a lot of sunlight today so he got to roam around the house looking for the optimal sunning locations. The new chair that sits near my desk gets the early morning exposure, then late morning he moves to the recliner then in the afternoon to the bedroom. He has his day all planned out long before hand.

Dominica got home at a quarter to six. We have a party in our building this evening and we are planning on attending that and getting dinner there. But I got called out from the office at six and had to work for a while before being able to go anywhere. This seems to happen every time that they have an event in the building. The events are so early that I have to work through most or all of them. It is the lot of the system administrator.

I finally got off of the line with the office at seven so that we could run down to what was left of the party. It was one of the “fancy” parties and I think that this is only the second one that we have had so far. It was in the lounge on the second floor and it was catered and had servers and everything. Although it also had a lot of people who didn’t seem to live in the building which makes it a bit awkward.

We hung out with Ryan, Kevin and Pam. There was a lot of food coming around on trays and it took a while to eat but the food was very good. The fried “grilled cheese” sandwiches were amazing and the fried risotto balls were really good too. The seared tuna was tasty and there were a lot of other items. And drinks, of course.

Dominica and I got back around ten thirty. Oreo was fine with us being gone for three and a half hours at the party. He is mellowing a lot as he gets older and gets used to us.