November 13, 2007: Three Days to Europe!

Dominica and I made an attempt at going to the Chinese restaurant on Commerce Street here in Newark that is directly across the street from us as we have not even tried to eat there yet all of the time that we have lived here. It is impossible to tell when this restaurant is open because they have no open or closed signs and there is always activity there. So we went in but it was very uncomfortable as if they were closed but didn’t want to tell us. Not one person in the restaurant would even look at us and it really looked like we had walked into a business meeting or some seedy underground thing like you see in a movie. So we turned around and left and won’t be trying that again. It definitely gave that feeling of just being a front for some underworld crime ring. So we are just going to avoid that place.

We did a quick and simple dinner at Subway next to Eleven80. Eating there is relatively healthy, quite cheap and very quick and easy.

I was doing some searching for pictures of Eleven80 on Flickr and found this great picture of Farty G – Ikea’s box of stinky pajamas. Seriously, how does marketing fail this horribly for such a giant company?

I felt a little better when I got up this morning. Yesterday I was quite under the weather with a minor sinus infection. Normally I get them these days because of the CPAP. It makes me extra sensitive to them and to weather changes.

Today I worked out in Warren. So I got up, stopped at Airlie Cafe for breakfast and walked up to the Broad Street Station of NJ Transit here in Newark. Going this way costs a lot more in walking time getting to the train station. I think that the walk probably takes me at least twenty minutes if not a little more. That station is quite some distance from the apartment at Eleven80. At least it is good exercise. It was raining a bit this morning but rather warm. Incredibly warm when you consider that it is just about December!

As always happens in Warren by day was very busy – mostly with meetings and talking to people that I never get to see. Today Dominica and I realized that we are spending so much time traveling from London to Stratford-upon-Avon that we could actually get out to Paris in far less time on the train.  And somehow, going to Paris for the weekend just sounds like a better plan than going to Stratford-upon-Avon for the weekend.  Stratford would be cool and we would like to go someday but as this is our first trip ever to Europe it would be awfully nice to at least get to set foot upon the continent even if just for the weekend.

I took the shuttle/train home from work and arrived to find my new Blackberry had arrived.  I got it unpacked and fired up and activated and all that jazz.  It works but there is another step to getting it set up that we can’t do until tomorrow evening.  So it is only half setup right now and there is a lot of stuff that I can’t test.  So my review of the unit is pretty minimal today.  So far so good.  It looks nice and the interface is pretty decent.  But that is about all that I have for the moment.

I found out from RIT that my next semester does not begin until December 4th so I am free and clear until then.

November 12, 2007: OLPC XO!

Today is the release of the One Laptop Per Child OLPC XO computer! Even with just two hours of sleep Dominica got me out of bed and made me head out to the computer at a quarter after six in the morning to place one of the very first orders for our very own XO. We are quite excited to get it and see the latest educational technology available.

OLPC XO

I placed the order and went straight back to bed. I felt like crap but it was nice to know that I had been able to place the order for the XO. We were concerned that they may have so much demand for them that they would stop offering them and we wanted to be sure that we would get one.

Vultures are the coolest.

Only four days until we head out to the UK. We are excited and yet there is just way too much to do before then. Eeek!

Dominica is hard at work attempting to find clothes for me to take on the trip. My big job today was to get a mobile phone that will work while we are in Europe. We use Verizon Wireless here in the US which is the big “non-GSM” wireless carrier which means that their phones are pretty much North American use only. So to have cell service in the UK we need to have a GSM phone. I called Verizon and their helpful sales people walked me through pricing and options for traveling with my Verizon phone.

BlackBerry 8830

What we decided was the best approach is to get me a new BlackBerry 8830 Global Phone that works both in the US and abroad throughout the world which, because I am a big Verizon customer with several lines and loads of options, came to just $199 USD after mail in rebates and instant rebate. I will have regular calling available to me while in the UK so people who need to reach me will still be able to although I will have some serious roaming fees so try to keep that to a minimum. I will, however, have unlimited email and web access so feel free to email us as we will be responding from the trains and buses and ferries and whatnot.

So my “old” Palm Treo 700p which was just updated and is now working is going to become Dominica’s new phone replaces her now aging LG flip-phone. She has been wanting a phone with email, full keyboard texting, web, etc. for a while and this lets us do that practically for free. We are switching to a family plan for the voice and will both have unlimited data plans (although she will not have either in the UK and we plan to just rent a phone for her while we are there.) All in all, after all of that jostling and changing and upgrading we are breaking even on the service costs and just spending $199 to get the new phone. Good deal. The phone is being overnighted so that we can get it set up and working tomorrow and have time to test it before actually traveling.

I was pretty under the weather when I got up this morning (I went back to sleep immediately after having ordered the XO.) I woke up with a horrible sinus infection. Just what I need. Although much better today than in a week while we are out of the country. I took a long shower which often helps and I tried to log in to the office from home but my VPN connection wouldn’t cooperate and my BlackBerry was dead so I was kind of stranded.

It was getting late so I decided that it would be better to get a nice, big breakfast with protein on the way in rather than go in and then stop again for lunch. So I stopped at Food for Life and had a breakfast sandwich and then went into the office.

I wasn’t all that productive today. Having a sinus infection makes the world very fuzzy. Although it was probably a very good day for it to happen as it is really a holiday and the markets are closed and only half of the company is in the office today at all and very little is going on. So the fact that I wasn’t the most productive person today wasn’t even noticeable.

I checked the stats for the site today and apparently people have been missing the podcast because the number of people coming to the site is quite high for a Monday. We are above average already and we aren’t even into our big evening crowd yet!

I got stuck a little later than I had planned at the office dealing with some late breaking stuff but it wasn’t too late. Dominica decided to make a run to the grocery store for supplies before going home so the timing was pretty good. She has to cook double batches of doggie food this week so that he has enough food to get him through all of next week too. Dominica is driving Oreo up to her parents’ house on Thursday night after work to drop him off and will spend the night there. She has Friday off from work so that she can drive home and spend the rest of the day getting all the last minute things prepared for our trip.

I am posting early and calling it a day. I am exhausted.

SGL Podcast Episode 56: Back from Hiatus


Download the SGL Podcast Episode 56 in MP3
Download the SGL Podcast Episode 56 in Ogg Vorbis

After several months of silence the SGL Podcast is back on the air. Today’s podcast is relatively short as I discuss the break between episodes, the missing second day at Disney with Dominica, the Newark Renaissance including the new Prudential Center. We also discuss the Apple iPod and Amazon’s new MP3 download service. I also get to make a new travel announcement. Tune in and find out what is happening next at SGL.

On today’s episode we play the follow artists from the Podsafe Music Network:

For more listening options please go directly to the Internet Archive pages hosting this media: SGL 56 MP3. Or check us out at either OurMedia or Podomatic.

November 11, 2007: Email, Ruby, Perl, Podcasting

Oreo made me take him out late before going to bed and then got me up in the middle of the night to take him on a long adventure through Newark.  I’m not sure if he had a tummy ache or if he was just bored and tired of just laying in bed.  But it was a pretty serious interruption to the night and I didn’t sleep very well.

I am so relived to have my Java class over and done with.  I did not need that hanging over my head this week.  This week is going to be more than hectic enough for Dominica and I without having to deal with homework too.  We are going to be spending the rest of this week attempting to get ready to leave for the UK as much as possible although we are definitely in a scramble at this point.

I took the day to work on some serious Ruby scripting that I have been putting off because of the Java class.  Dominica split her day between some Perl that she is trying to learn and working on her program design for Empire State College.  We didn’t go anywhere today at all.  Dominica cooked us a late breakfast and we ordered in our dinner from Golden City.

Dominica also worked on getting iTunes, Audible.com and the iPods set up so that they would be ready for us to take them on the trip with plenty of books to listen to as well as some walking tour podcasts which she is very excited about.

I actually spent a lot more time working today than normal.  I did a ton of programming and managed to finally get the first (and very rough) form of my Ruby logging utility working.  The program takes emailed log files from routers and firewalls that are sent to a central email address and processes them into a few basic components and then connects to a remote MySQL database and uploads log data into the database.  So I had to get IMAP, MySQL, some parsing and a few other things working.  At the end of the day I ran a small test and moved almost thirteen thousand logs over and it worked flawlessly.  I was very happy about the results.

My big project tonight is updating my Zimbra email server from 4.5.0 to 4.5.9 which is a fairly serious update.  That required that I stay up late so that I would only take down the email server when there wasn’t very much mail going through and people weren’t using the server.  I started working on it around eight or a little bit later in the evening.  As I feared that it might, it turned into an all night kind of project.  Anything this critical – who can live without working email – always takes a long time even when things go smoothly.  It ended up taking about seven hours to complete.  Most of the time was spent making careful backups and being sure that nothing was out of place.  Then I got surprised that the new version required a significantly larger amount of space than the version that I have been running so I had to add all new storage to accommodate it before I could continue.  What a night!

While I was working on the Zimbra server I had the opportunity to squeeze off the fifty-sixth SGL podcast!  It is short and not nearly as polished as most of the shows that I do but it has been a long time, since May 19th, since I have been able to get any show completed at all so I am very happy that at least this one was done.  I got it posted to Podomatic and uploaded to OurMedia and the Internet Archive which took a very long time as they have changed their architecture since the last time that I did a show.   I am really hoping that Min and I will do a few shows from the UK but the chances seem slim that more than one or two could be done with our limited time there.  We will definitely be taking a lot of pictures, though.

Don’t forget that the OLPC XO goes on sale tomorrow morning at six!

November 10, 2007: Happy Birthday Luna

I was up before eight this morning. It was fifty-five degrees in our bedroom when I got out of bed and closed the window. Dominica and Oreo were still fast asleep and would be for at least another hour. I closed the window and figured that a load of dishes would help to warm up the apartment so I went to the kitchen and washed all of the dishes, loaded the dishwasher and ran a load and did some other light cleaning around the apartment. Mom would be proud – cleaning first thing on a Saturday morning. I also fired up the computers. These are newer AMD machines so they don’t generate a lot of heat but every little bit helps.

Luna at the Eleven80 Halloween Party

I am on call for the office this weekend so I logged in there – just over ten hours after having logged off my workstation at the office last night.

Today is the last day of the Master’s Java development course. That class just few by. I really thought that there were going to be at least two more big projects if not four and a lot more material covered. I liked the class but mostly it was just a recap of my undergrad Java 1 course which was considered to be at the Freshman level. This class moved a little faster and the homework was definitely longer and more difficult and the grading was a little steeper but for the most part I would have a hard time saying that the class itself was any harder. My last grad class also overlapped with an undergrad class (do you sense a theme here) and was far easier than the SUNY undergrad work that I did. Starting in about two weeks is my third grad class, Project Management, which (I told you that there was a theme) exactly mirrors one of my undergrad classes.

Once Dominica and Oreo were awake I walked over to Airlie Cafe and picked up breakfast for us which we ate in bed while watching an episode of Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century. We watched the episode where our intrepid hero flies off to another planet to save the alien girl in distress.

Dominica spent the bulk of the day working on our backlog of laundry and working on packing for our trip next week. That was a lot of work. I did a bit of cleaning around the apartment, especially in the kitchen, and spent the evening hard at work studying for a couple of hours for my Java final exam which I want to take today so that I can get it out of the way before I get stuck with it hanging over my head for the rest of the week.

It was fairly late this evening when I finally stopped studying and sat down to actually take the final exam. It covered a lot of material that I was not expecting but that I thankfully had studied for and was well prepared for. I ended up getting a 97% on the final and am now done with my Java class. I am free and clear for the next week and won’t have to worry about homework or tests while I am in the United Kingdom. There is still one last homework assignment that has not been graded so I do not have a final grade for the class yet but should have that any day.

Dominica made dinner here out of what we had in the freezer and then baked an apple pie while she was waiting for me to finish the test.

Happy first birthday to Luna who lives in our building!