Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 889 – Scott Alan Miller

November 9, 2007: Diwali

Today is Diwali, the Indian Festival of Lights.

Don’t forget that your chance to buy an OLPC XO for yourself while donating one to a needy child in the developing world begins on Monday at six in the morning. The donation is $400USD and half of that amount is tax deductible. Additionally, T-Mobile is providing free access to their network of hotspots for one year for free to donors.

It was quite cold last night but by this morning it had warmed up considerably and I overdressed for my walk to work. I was pretty warm by the time that I had arrived.

It is one week until Dominica and I hop the pond to spend a week and a half in the British Isles. But most everything is ready at this point so we just need to wait it out and soon enough, we will be there.

My morning was incredibly busy and then for lunch I sneaked away with two of my clients for a nice sushi lunch. I am glad that I was able to – my day was really busy and I needed the break.

My afternoon, as it often is on Fridays, was completely jam-packed with work. It is days like today when I really earn my paycheck. I didn’t have time for anything all afternoon. I worked as fast as I could solidly from about two thirty until nine in the evening. It was a really late night and I was burned out by the time that I was done. I was really productive though and just a ton of work was accomplished during that stretch.

It was so late by the time that I was wrapping up at the office that Dominica just went ahead and had dinner at home with Oreo. After work I walked up to Suspenders, the pub on Broadway at the head of Wall Street, and had a fish fry alone. When I left the office on lower Wall I was surprised to find that the day had turned cold and that it was raining.

It seemed oddly appropriate to me to be spending the forth anniversary of the passing of my mother sitting alone in the middle of the deserted financial district in the cold rain eating a fish fry. It gave me a little quite time to myself at least.

Dad emailed me a link to the blog of a friend of ours and my mom’s accordion student. She blogged about mom yesterday on The King’s Ranch and it was really touching. I am being intentionally ambiguous so ignore the poor writing.

November 8, 2007: No More Scaffolding

Today I am home with Oreo. We slept in as late as we could this morning. It wasn’t until after eight that we finally pulled ourselves out of bed. That means that we probably got nine or ten hours of sleep at least. Boy did I need that. I felt much better this morning.

When I took Oreo out for his morning walk we got to see our building, Eleven80, with the scaffolding all taken away. Boy does that make a difference with the appearance of the building and the entire street. We have had all three exposed sides of Eleven80 covered in scaffolding along with our facing side of Catholic Health Services since we first moved in making Raymond, Commerce and the little side Commerce streets all very dark and gloomy. Now, suddenly, there is wide open space around our building and light and a view! It’s like Commerce street is all new again.

The side street, the “other” Commerce, on the east side of Eleven80 still has construction stuff filling the one lane and the big fencing all around it but they are cleaning today as if that is going to be removed in a day or two. It will be great to have the use of that street for the first time and it should, in theory, help to eliminate the traffic congestion on our street which is horrific. Standing on Commerce is a very different experience than it was just four months ago. It is becoming an attractive street. Once the other Commerce is open I will get some pictures of the “new” Eleven80.

Despite some missteps and some backtracking Newark does appear to be making progress. The new stadium really is bringing in the crowds and there are several downtown areas that are showing some serious improvements over the past year. Dominica and I will be in Newark for at least one more year. It will be interesting to see what happens as we move forward.

Still missing from downtown is any sort of good, mid-market eateries. We have fast food and we have deli type restaurants galore (on our block alone are two existing brick and mortar restaurants with identical deli menus and an existing “truck” restaurant with the same men and one more located in our building about to open with nothing on its menu to differentiate it from the restaurants that it faces on the same street!) as well as Subways, fried chicken and pizza. And we have some nice restaurants like the Theater Square Grill, Maize and 27Mix. But we lack normal, everyday type eateries that most people want to go to for dinner most days. We need normal places to eat in addition to what we have. The fringe is well taken care of. It is time to fill in the gaps so that people who actually live here have places to go.

Today involved a lot of cleaning and household chores for me. First and foremost was kitchen cleaning. This week has been busy and the dishes just scaled out of control before we knew what hit us. The kitchen was all but unusable for the last few days and so it is up to me to reclaim it from the clutches of dirty dishes.

Work was fairly busy today and I did not get a chance to run out to grab myself some lunch until well after two in the afternoon. I didn’t have much time so I just called over an order to Food for Life and walked over to pick it up so that I could eat at my desk.

Oreo was very playful today which is good because it means that he is healthy. We played and played in addition to taking a couple of walks. It was nice out today – perfect for walking with Oreo. It was very cold early this morning but as the day progressed the sun was out and warmed this up considerably. It was still a little chilly so Oreo had to wear his little sweater but he likes wearing it because he gets lots of people to stop on the street and tell him how adorable he is.

Dominica got home around six but I was still working. Busy day. We got ready as quickly as we could met Ramona around six thirty to go out for dinner. Traffic was horrible – the curse of the new, thriving downtown Newark social scene – so it took her a while to make it the two miles from the Ironbound to downtown to meet us. We went over to Halsey to 27Mix. It was a happening place tonight. Wall to wall people. Dinner was very good but unfortunately the music was so loud that we really couldn’t talk at all. Not the best to go for socializing. The place is mostly inhabited by the college students from Rutgers and NJIT which are very nearby.

Min and I got home at eight thirty and were tired. Boy are we ever getting old. But Oreo enjoys the extra snuggle time. So it was time to pop in Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and head off to dreamland. I will be on Wall St. tomorrow. Just the usual. No big weekend plans other than last minute preparations for the trip to the UK. My Java class is theoretically having its final on Saturday morning which would be awesome. That would give me an entire week to relax before the trip.

November 7, 2007: Still Learning the Trains

It is Wednesday and that means that I am working out in Warren today. Today was my first attempt at going from Newark to Summit via the NJ Transit line that stops at the Newark Broad Street Station. I actually managed to get onto the wrong train this morning but they were nice enough to let me off right away so it didn’t turn into a disaster. Unfortunately the NJ Transit trains don’t notify you in any way what train they are and if they come at the wrong time then there is no way for you to tell without asking someone working there and often those people are not available as the train only stops for a minute and there are a lot of people getting on and off.

I got to Summit and got the company shuttle there which was very simple to do. This cuts half an hour or more off of the time that it takes me to get out to Warren on the days when I go out there. It is really too bad that I didn’t know how easy this was for the past eighteen months or I might have gotten rid of the car long ago. Going to Warren this way is a bit of a pain but great for once a week. Going to Manhattan is definitely the way to go though by train. I am really learning the advantages of not having a car though. In the past month I have not driven a single time and I don’t miss it at all. Never once have I wished that I even had the option of getting into my car. I don’t even think about it now. It is awesome.

The company shuttles are really nice, for the most part. People have made a big deal about how Google and Microsoft offer these types of shuttle services in the San Francisco and the Seattle (Redmond) areas but they are clearly not the only ones. Maybe their shuttle systems are a bit more intricate because they have larger populations in a single area but the shuttle system that we have here in the New York Metro is pretty decent when combined with the incumbent train system.

I was in Warren today for a “meeting” (sales pitch really) with HP and AMD. That was over lunch and they provided pizza which is really great because I don’t have a car when I am in Warren so getting pizza at these meetings is much nicer than going down to the cafeteria and it is enough to offset the extra cost of the NJ Transit train versus the normal PATH train. (How cheap am I to even realize that?)

The meeting was good and I managed to snag more of the awesome HP Bistro coffee mugs that they give out sometimes. I got one a few months ago and it is Min and my favourite mug and we always fight over it. Now I have two more so we can use them all of the time. This has to be one of the best marketing items ever. Simple, inexpensive (more or less) but very, very nice and useful. “Sure,” you say, “lots of companies give out coffee mugs.” And you are correct. They do. But these are very nice bistro coffee mugs that are much nicer than your average, run-of-the-mill coffee mugs. They are our favourite mugs to drink out of. Much nicer than what we are normally able to buy in the stores. And since we are both big fans of HP (we do own several HP desktops and several HP laptops and several HP servers) it makes it that much cooler to have around the apartment.

We also got two neat travel alarm clock slash thermometer slash USB hub units as gifts from AMD. Which also works out well as we are big AMD fans too. I like their products and I like them as a company and I really appreciate the fact that they do most of their fab work in Dresden and have done a tremendous amount to help rebuild that city. AMD is also considering putting another major fab facility into Upstate NY which would be great. I expect that it would be very near IBM’s fab facility in the middle Hudson Valley region. That is already a hotspot for high end chip research and development. (Kingston, a leader in non-CPU type chip manufacturing is headquartered there as well.)

I spent most of my afternoon in informal meetings as my time in Warren is normally spent catching up with people that I only get to see two or three times in a month. And next week is going to be crazy as I have another HP thing on Tuesday afternoon and then am flying to the UK on Friday evening! So not a lot of “work” was done today but a lot was accomplished. For whatever that is worth.

The shuttle home missed the evening train by about thirty seconds. 🙁 I ended up having to wait at the station for about thirty minutes. But it worked out. There was a nice guy who had interviewed with someone at my office today who was using the shuttle and train to get home and didn’t speak English comfortably and didn’t know the train system and he was stuck with me so I was able to get him to where he needed to go and otherwise he would have been on his own. So it was a blessing, I am sure.

Dominica made fish bites for dinner and had everything mostly ready when I got home so that we could eat right away. I was exhausted today and we had decided that tonight had to be a blow-off night because I was so tired. I had fallen asleep four or five times easily just on the shuttle ride from Warren to Summit! Can’t be stress – I feel great. Can’t be a lack of sleep – I have been catching up all week. No idea why. Must just be one of those days. Lack of caffeine, perhaps.

We watched two episodes of Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and were off to bed early. I am hoping to do some serious sleep catching up tonight so that I can be useful again tomorrow.

Today was the fourteenth biggest drop in the Dow Jones Industrial in history. Not quite a disaster but definitely a huge hit. There were several factors that anyone following today will be acutely aware of – the dollar has become insanely weak and there is a panic that China is going to diversify its currency holdings away from the USD, General Motors wrote down almost forty billion today without much warning and the financial sector has been taking a huge beating do to the subprime mortgages disaster that happened some time ago (a month or two) but is only hitting the street with real numbers recently. The Royal Bank of Scotland is estimating a finance industry wide loss due to the subprime mortgages of approximately one quarter of a trillion US Dollars. (Which, I suppose, is good that at least the dollar isn’t worth so much. Ha ha.) I record this so that later readers can see the juxtaposition of events more clearly.

Another day of “dollar value” battering leading up to Min and my trip to the UK. Can’t win them all, I guess.

November 6, 2007: Planning for the UK

I updated SGL’s WordPress engine to 2.3.1 today. We now have tagging support even though the theme that I am using does not support tags yet. But eventually they will appear for you and it will be very exciting. Trust me.

It was a perfect morning today. Cold and rainy. I had a sesame seed bagel from Airlie and I walked outside in the rain in my black trench coat and Callaway baseball cap. It wasn’t a heavy rain but just enough to bring out the grim, urban look that I like so much. Walking down Commerce with the autumn leaves strewn about in dirty puddles and the half-barren trees shielding only the slightly bit of rain – this is how I love the city.

Work was work. Nothing special. Dominica had a crappy day – finding out that when she was hired they had lied to her about where she was going to be working. They had hired her to work at the same location that she had been working at for the last several months but they claimed that they needed her to temporarily work further away from home. She put up with it because it was only temporary but today she found out that that was not the case and that there were no plans to move her back to the site that she had been hired for. That is in addition to the lack of mobility within the company for female employees.

Ah the perils of working for big businesses.

I ended up working a long day and was quite tired by the time that I headed for home. Dominica didn’t feel like going out tonight so we ordered in some Italian from Nino’s. We watched some Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and pretty much just went to bed. It was a quiet night.

I looked at my Java class and it would appear that there is no more homework being assigned and I am pretty sure that my final exam is going to be made available this weekend on Saturday which would be awesome because it would mean that I will have plenty of time to complete it and even relax for a couple of days before flying off to Europe next weekend.

Dominica put in a ton of work getting hotel reservations today. We are staying at the Holiday Inn Express in Belfast. We have a room for London at the Sleep Inn for our main big of time there. And a night at the Comfort Inn at Heathrow for our last night before flying home. For our opening weekend in the country we had hoped to be able to stay out in the Cotswolds but we were unable to find a place to stay there so our current plan is to stay in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire which is, unfortunately, a major tourist destination getting three million tourists a year but that is also why we were able to find a hotel.

Now if the dollar can just make a bit of a comeback we might be able to afford the trip…

November 5, 2007: New Life for Commerce Street

Time to get back to work. I really enjoyed my relaxing day yesterday. There is some sight chance that I have no more homework for my Java class at RIT. I am pretty sure that there will be one more assignment but the last one was due on Saturday and we had all of Sunday off – a first for this class – and nothing has yet been assigned this morning. And my previous assignment is not graded and reviewed yet so I am wondering if there is enough time for another project before the semester wraps up at the end of next week.

Oreo was ready for daycare this morning. On most days he gets up, eats his breakfast and then crawls back into bed to wait for Dominica to prod him into getting up and moving for the day. But today after breakfast he laid in our “bedroom hallway” and watched us – waiting for someone to take him to daycare so that he can run with his pack.

It was a busy day at the office today. They kept me hopping all day long. I barely had time to eat my lunch which I didn’t manage to get until quite late. Fortunately my workload dropped off almost completely at the end of the day so I was able to make a getaway quite easily.

Dominica and I both commented today on what a difference the Prudential Center (aka “The Pru”) has made in our area of Newark already. Because of the enormous crowds that seem to be descending on downtown Newark every night areas like Mulberry, Clinton, Market and Commerce are full of people all through the night when just a few weeks ago they were deserted after six or seven in the evening. Suddenly what were dark and lonely streets are now lively and populated. Where there was little police presence there is now constant surveillance.

The impact of “The Pru” has made our whole area completely safe. Dominica could now walk Oreo in the middle of the night with complete confidence. At no time are you ever out of sight of an on duty police officer. The parking lots are all manned late into the night with staff and security. Restaurants are staying open later, lights are on more – this place is “happening.”

We were both in the mood to go out tonight so we walked over to Scully’s Publick House for dinner. We have discovered over the past several weeks that the “just getting going” feeling over at Scully’s isn’t changing. At first we were pretty forgiving about the place (other than the disgusting fish fry) based on the fact that they were new and hadn’t “gotten it together” yet. Much of the staff was still in training and had never worked in a restaurant before. But this restaurant is owned by another just a few blocks away so there is very little excuse for not having the overall operations in place. But they are still out of almost everything that you order and the temporary, almost bare, dessert menu has gone from being a sad apology to business as usual. Overall the food is only so-so and there are better pubs just a few minutes farther away. We’ve decided that Scully’s is basing their business on the “one timers” coming in from New York City to see a Devil’s game and that they aren’t looking to impress people enough to make Scully’s a “destination” in Newark. So, for us, it won’t be. It isn’t awful and going there with “the gang” is fine but going there for the food is a waste and a disappointment.

I did some SGL work tonight and managed to recreate almost all of the SGL Podcasts since having moved over from Podomatic about a year ago. There were some shows in the high twenties that had gone amiss. But they are all there now. And number four was categorized incorrectly so it was nearly impossible to find. There are still a couple of early shows missing. Three through five, I believe, that have pages but no audio. At least one of those is truly missing but I believe that I may have files for the other two. Maybe I can get to that later this week.

Dominica and I watched an episode of Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and were off to bed.