Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is a lazy day for Dominica and I. We needed a chance to catch up on lost sleep and to just relax for a while. We slept in this morning and didn’t get up and moving until quite late. Not until almost eleven were we even thinking about heading out to face the day.

We tried doing a simple breakfast right across the street but no one was open so we decided to take a walk over and eat at the Central Ave. Diner that is not too far from Eleven80 here in Newark. Breakfast was good and simple.

I took a few pictures as we walked there and back because the weather and timing were great for capturing a couple of the buildings here in downtown Newark. I managed to get a good picture of the old “S. Klein on the Square” building which I believe is scheduled to be demolished to make way for a new highrise as part of the Newark renovation project. A little research online at Wikipedia turned up that the Newark department store closed its doors in 1976 and has been vacant ever since. It is a very large building. Hard to believe that no one can find anything good to do with it.

I also got a picture of the downtown Baptist Church located just north of Military Park on Broad Street’s east side right in the heart of the city’s commercial district. It has some amazing architecture and I hope that I can get some close ups of some of the more interesting features sometime when I have a tripod and the Nikon with me. Newark has a lot of old, interesting architecture from its heyday as the thriving heart of New Jersey. It is sad to see what has happened to the city in the past forty years.

After coming back to Eleven80, Dominica and I spent the afternoon snuggling with Oreo and watching a bunch of the second season of The Cosby Show. We decided that we really needed to just relax this afternoon. I did a little prep work for my Java homework that is due on Thursday while we watched the show but mostly just relaxed.

Around seven in the evening we decided to head out to the office in the living room and to get to work on some actually homework. I found out that John Nicklin is going to be coming into town in two days so we are hoping to get a chance to get to see him. I don’t think that we have had a chance to see the Nicklins at all since last Christmas! This year has just been crazy for Dominica and I. I know that we always say that but this year has truly been extra busy. Being so far away from friends and family really does take a toll on our ability to visit with people – even those like the Nicklins who are closer to us geographically now than before.

Today was an insanely busy day for Dominica and I. We woke up and pretty much went right over to the Airlie Cafe for some breakfast. Dominica hasn’t had a chance to go there yet so it was nice that she was able to try it out. During the week they are pretty much closed at any time that she would consider going there. That is the big problem with all of the businesses in the area – they only cater to the commuters who come in during the day and they don’t offer services to those of us who live on their street even though we are a very large population. For a coffee shop that makes its money during the lunch rush it seems like staffing it just enough to hit the dinner and evening coffee crowd would be very cost effective as all of the overhead except for the labor is covered earlier in the day.

This is another pictures from the conference room down the hall from my office.  This is looking south from Gouvernors Lane in lower Manhattan at South Street.  This is southern Brooklyn to the left and Governor’s Island to the right.  In the middle is Upper New York Bay.  In the distance you can see the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island.

After breakfast we came back to Eleven80 and I prepared for my midterm exam in my Master’s Java programming class that I am taking. I did some reading and went through class notes provided by the professor. Once I was ready I took my two hour long midterm exam. It was open book and open notes but the only thing that we were allowed to use online were the JavaDocs provided by Sun. I used the whole two hours and feel pretty good about the job that I did. It was a really tough test and was quite demanding. But it is a graduate level programming class so I guess that it should be. This is the first collegiate exam that I have taken since I took a class at TC3 in 2000 or maybe 2001. All of my Empire State College classes and my last RIT class were essay based and didn’t use legacy tests for grading.

After my midterm was over it was past time for us to get ready to go to a friend’s wedding out on Long Island. We got ready as quickly as we could. My friend had lead us to believe that the travel time out to Mount Sinai on Long Island was only about an hour and a quarter for us. Ha ha. I also used his directions to get there instead of Google’s directions. Not a good idea. It ended up taking us almost three hours to get there from Newark.

This was the very first time that either Dominica or I had ever set foot onto Long Island. We got the chance to take the Long Island Expressway over halfway across the island. We crossed into Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, crossed Manhattan on 34th Street and then went into Queens via the Midtown Tunnel which turns right into the LIE. Then we drove all the way across Queens and out to Exit 63 of the LIE and then took NY83 north up to Mount Sinai. It was a very long trip with a lot of traffic and an accident in Flushings.

Because of leaving late and the bad traffic we ended up missing the ceremony itself which really couldn’t have been helped with my midterm being today but we wished that we could have been there. The ceremony was scheduled to begin at six in the evening and we arrived just after the ceremony. It was the perfect time to arrive for just the reception and we were really glad that we were able to make it for that. A few of my coworkers who work in Melville, New York were there and we were able to hang out. We had a really good time.

It was just after midnight when we decided that we needed to leave the wedding and make the drive back to Newark. It was getting late and any later would have been a really tough drive. Oreo was just hanging out in the car being a good boy. He didn’t mind at all although he was visibly bored.

The drive back went well and we were home not long after two. Neither of us were that tired so we watched an episode of The Cosby Show before going to bed.

The weather has finally turned cooler. After a very warm week it is a welcome respite. Although it is very windy today. My walk to the office had quite a headwind. I grabbed a breakfast sandwich from Airlie Cafe on the way into the office. They don’t have a website or I would point you to it. I did a quick search for them but the top hit on Google for Airlie was, as you can probably guess, SGL.

It was a typical Friday but my first one on Wall Street. I took some time to go through the building and find some of the people that I work with every day. It is a large building and I have a lot of clients and coworkers scattered throughout it. I also got a chance today to snag shots of a couple of the views from the office.

This particular view is not taken from my office but from a conference room just down the hall.  I have a nice view but nothing as nice or as wide open as this.  The real advantage to taking the picture from the conference room, though, is that there weren’t as many bright objects so close to the glass causing glare.  This is downtown Brooklyn taken from the corner of Wall Street and South Street in Manhattan.  That is the Wall St. Pier and the Wall St. Ferry in the foreground on the East River.

I worked a long day about eleven hours. This was my first time working quite late since starting on Wall Street. So far I have been coming in early and leaving at my usual time but since it is Friday I didn’t get to leave until after seven so it was dark out and the area was relatively devoid of business traffic. There was still a fair number of people on the street though and I am pleased to discover that my area of Manhattan does not become deserted late at night. So walking there is never an issue.

On my way west up Wall I actually ran into a friend who had left the company that I am currently with less than a year ago. We talked for fifteen minutes or so and caught up. It is funny that I ran into someone that I knew from work here on my very first week in Manhattan. I would never have expected that to have happened especially with as little time as I have had living in this area and how little tim I have been in the financial sector.

As I was walking home a friend who used to live in Eleven80 but who now lives in the Ironbound and her new roomate – who it turns out is someone that I know from Min and my last trip to Montreal – and they picked me up and drove me home. Turns out that Dominica had arranged for about six of us to meet and go out for dinner and they were on their way to Eleven80 to meet us. Good timing.

Four of us from Eleven80 and two people from the Ironbound (I am working hard not to print peoples’ names here, aren’t I?) walked over to Scully’s on Clinton which is a brand new Irish pub just one block from our apartment. We are very excited to have a new restaurant to be able to go to so close to home. One couple that was out with us said that this was their third time at Scully’s just this week (they only opened about five days ago.) We ran into two of our other neighbours there who said that this was their fourth time there! The place was so new that they are still on a partial menu and don’t even have their name posted outside anywhere.

The food was good. We had a really nice time hanging out with everyone. We were there from about eight until almost eleven in the evening. Then we all came back to Eleven80 and all of us but Min went to see the one couple’s apartment while Min went to check on Oreo. Then, while we were down there, everyone decided to just come up and to hang out in our apartment for the evening. So I called Min and she did some frantic cleaning while we were on our way up. She did an amazing job and the place actually looked pretty decent with just ten minutes of warning.

Two more friends from our building came up to the apartment and joined us so there were seven of us (after one took off) hanging out until around midnight or so. Maybe a little later. We had a really good time and, like always, Dominica wants to get everyone together more often – she always says this and then never wants to hang out with people later once she has forgetten how much she enjoys people!

Home today and it is a good thing – I have a serious blister on my foot from all of the walking that I am not used to. It is a beautiful fall day today and for the first time of the season I was able to wear a fleece. No sun today but it is bright and overcast which makes it perfect for working at home where I don’t have tinted windows. I am able to have the blinds up and get real light but I am not blinded or looking at reflections everywhere. No wonder that San Francisco and Seattle are such IT hot spots – they have better light to see monitors by.

For breakfast I just ran right across the street to the Airlie Cafe and got myself an egg and cheese on hardroll and one of their excellent cheese danishes. Oreo is in a great mood today. I think that he is tired after several days back at daycare and he is very happy to be able to just sleep on the futon and have me be in the living room so that he can keep a drowsy eye on me.

I have been reading “Peopleware” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. As I read it I can see why so many people make reference to it. It is unbelievable how much material that I see regurgitated in other management books originated in this classic tome. The original book was published in 1987 and the eight chapters longer version that I am reading is the second edition from 1998. The book is really excellent and any in software development and especially in project management should read it.

My day today was heavy on phone calls, conferences and emails but light on the real, honest work. It happens. Every day is its own balance. Some days no one speaks to me and its all real SA work all day and other days I am just a coordinator.

I grabbed a light sandwich this afternoon at Airlie – I really like their mozzarella sandwich – and just ate at home while I worked. By four it started to rain pretty heavily. It was dark and cloudy all day.

Oreo wanted to go outside around five when the rain was really coming down. I walked him down and opened the door for him. He peered out into the deluge, put one paw tentatively out into the wet, pulled it back and looked at me imploring me not to make him follow through on his former wishes. So I walked him back upstairs and he decided to just hold it until evening.

After work Dominica had an appointment to get her hair done – we have a wedding to attend this weekend. I will probably need to shave my head tomorrow too. On Saturday morning I have to take my midterm for my master’s class at RIT. It is a busy weekend – but what is new?

Around eight Oreo and I were still waiting for Dominica to get home from work so I went ahead and ordered some Chinese take-away from Golden City. General Tso’s Bean Curd and Vegetable LoMein. It takes fifteen to thirty minutes to get the food and I figured that Dominica couldn’t take much longer than that to get home. I didn’t want dinner to be so late that we couldn’t reasonably eat it.

I discovered a cute webtoon today: Dan and Scoti.

It was almost a quarter to nine when Dominica got home.  Her hair is very short but cute and back to her original hair colour.  She got tired of having it coloured.  She got home at the perfect time because I met her in the lobby of Eleven80 as I came down to pick up the Chinese as it was arriving.

We ate dinner and watched The Cosby Show and called it a night.

I accidentally hit my elbow on a door frame this evening.  I was fixing the collar of my fleece as I walked down the hall and I walked right into the doorframe with my elbow around head level.  It was the perfect position to really smash it quite badly.  The pain was really intense but does not feel like it is broken.  I am concerned that it is fractured though.  The pain was incredible and now, several hours later, my fingers are tingling while I write this.  My joint moves correctly but any pressure on it from lifting or compression make it hurt which is not typical of a bruised bone.  But it might be a swelling around the nerve so I am taking an anti-inflammatory and going to bed.  Hopefully that will take care of it.  I don’t need another broken bone – the ankle, rib, wrist, nose and toes should be enough.  Just thinking about it bring a psychosomatic twinge to my toes.

Today is my first morning with badge access to my office on Wall Street so I actually get to go in nice and early since I don’t have to rely on having someone there that I can reach to come down and let me into the office. So I was able to get back onto my five in the morning cycle and to get out the door while Dominica is just starting to get ready for work.

Before going into the office this morning I finished reading Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” which I highly recommend to anyone working in IT, thinking of working in IT or really to just about anyone as so much of it has very little to do with IT at all except for the last few chapters that deal heavily with programming languages and those bits are easy to skip if you are not interested. “Hackers and Painters” is certainly one of the most important works in the field for this decade.

I timed my trip into the office today. It takes about fifteen minutes for me to get from the apartment to the train. And then it takes about fifteen minutes for the train to go from Newark to the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The distance, according to Google Maps, is .4 miles from the apartment to the train.

Then, once I am in Manhattan, it is .7 miles from the World Trade Center PATH Station to the far end of Wall Street where I work. Google Maps won’t quite show the path that I take but this is approximate. I actually go down Church to Cedar and then cross diagonally down Broadway / Canyon of Heroes to the head of Wall Street at Trinity Church and then walk down the length of Wall Street to the very end at the South Street Seaport and the Wall Street Piers.

This morning is cool and drizzly. Perfect for walking. And I am happier now that I know that I am walking about 2.2 miles per day. That is more than I thought that I was doing. No wonder I am feeling it. I walk pretty briskly that entire way.

For lunch I went out for Malaysian with one of the guys that I work with. We walked (yes, walked again) up to Chinatown which, according to Google Maps, was about a mile and a half in each direction for an additional three miles today. Over five total miles. Not too shabby. The food at the New Malaysia was very good. I am loving working in Manhattan.

The afternoon whizzed by after taking a late lunch. On my way home I stopped by the Borders on Broad and Wall by Trinity Church and checked out their technology books section – quite impressive. The section itself is small but very well stocked. I am really going to enjoy walking by here every day (although not as much as Border’s is going to enjoy it!) I already found tons of books that I want to read. I decided to pick something up to read on the subway: DeMarco and Lister’s “Peopleware” which is one of the quintessential software project management books along with “The Mythical Man Month” which I have read before. I managed to read several chapters on the train.

I got to Eleven80 just in time to meet the guys who were going to head up to Min and my apartment to mount our LCD television on to our bedroom wall. So I took them up and we spent an hour or so working on that. It took some doing but now we have our thirty-two inch Westinghouse 720p LCD hanging above our bedroom closets so that it can be easily watched from our bed. It is very cool. Our goal is to have a computer with a built in DVD player in there and the AppleTV. But we will need an HDMI switcher if we are going to do that. For the moment we just have the DVD player from the living room moved in there until we can get the rest of the stuff sorted out. I will probably move the PS2 in there tomorrow. The PS2 is going to be our bedroom system and the Wii is going to be our living room system. And, eventually, we expect an XBOX 360 as well but we can’t totally decide on that quite yet. Because so many of the new devices get so hot and can’t be stored in a cabinet we are hesitant to get them and have to have them sitting on the floor.

Dominica did some light grocery shopping today and spent her evening cooking Oreo’s food for the week. We had some frozen Kashi pizzas for dinner and called it an early night. I had to do some late evening work for the office but that didn’t take too long. For some reason I am feeling really exhausted (probably a lack of caffeine after getting used to having so much – I didn’t even have a coffee all day) and need to get to bed early. We wrapped up the first season of The Cosby Show and started the second season. Watching television from bed rocks. I haven’t had anything like this in my bedroom for a very long time.

When I lived at my parents’ house post-highschool I had a thirteen inch Commodore Amiga computer monitor hooked to my Sony (and later Pioneer) laserdisc player that I could watch from bed but the image was so small that it wasn’t really practicable. Then again when I lived in Greenleaf Meadows in Greece with Josh and Andy for a short time we had two televisions and I was able to have my thirty-two inch Sony Trinitron CRT on top of my dresser in my bedroom but the only device that I ever hooked to it was the original Playstation. It was there that I used to spend hours playing through Suikoden. Not since Greenlead Meadows in 1999 have I had any sort of television in my bedroom.