Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my working on Wall Street day. I am excited as I have never actually worked on the street before. I have worked in downtown on the west side of Manhattan but never actually on Wall Street. I like variety. What can I say?

I walked down to Newark’s Penn Station and took the PATH over to the World Trade Center and walked down to Wall Street. It is an easy walk and fairly quick. It is so much easier going to work in Manhattan than it is in New Jersey. Just a short walk and a short light rail ride.

I love working from downtown Manhattan. The office has beautiful views of the southside seaport and when you want to run out and grab food there is a myriad of choices just seconds away from the office door. And no need for a car. Obvious as it may seem the lack of need for a car for even the most basic of ammenities is a very big deal.

I booked Dominica and my hotel rooms in Montreal for this weekend. I have tons of points saved up with Choice Hotels from my consulting position with Dell and Wegmans two years ago when I was traveling on a regular basis and from my first few weeks at my current position when I was living out of the hotel is South Bound Brook. So this weekend we are staying three nights, totally for free, at the Quality Inn in downtown Montreal on the Av du Parc.

Dominica did some shopping during her lunch break today and picked up “under the bed” plastic totes from Target that we are going to use to pack up as much as we can of our apartment so that we can store it underneath our new bed. The bed itself does quite a bit to make our apartment a lot more attractive and we are hopeful that we will be able to move a lot of stuff out of sight too. The apartment is so small that every little bit like that makes a huge difference for our quality of life.

After work today Dominica had a dentist appointment. This is her fourth one so far for the same tooth. There is a lot of work to be done.

SGL had a network outage this morning. Our Internet service provider was hit with a Distributed Denial of Service Attack that kept most people, but not everyone, from being able to get to us for almost two hours from around nine until eleven this morning. SGL itself did not go “down” but the network was unavailable so a large number of our readers saw us as being down.

Dominica is excited has her new, pink, Kodak V1003 digital camera shipped today. There is some chance, although very little, that it will arrive in time for her to be able to take it with us to Montreal.

Dominica didn’t get home until after eight but like a good husband I had managed to time everything almost perfectly for when she and Oreo would get home.  I had ordered in Chinese take away from Golden City and had it all ready just before she called.  I had the dishes done, coffee made and Oreo’s dinner all ready for when they walked in the door.

We ate dinner, watched some of the fourth season of The Cosby Show and it was off to bed.  My car is expected to be finished early in the morning tomorrow so I need to figure out how I am going to get myself to Warren in the morning.

Today is a defacto work from home day for me because the Mazda is in the shop and I have no real way to get into the office. It is the perfect day for it, though, because today is a British bank holiday and my normal workload is decimated. So today Oreo and I are just relaxing and getting stuff done around the apartment in Newark. This works out very well because I can oversee the repair of our air conditioning unit in our bedroom that we just haven’t been able to get fixed for weeks. More than two weeks at this point. The first repair work was scheduled for August 12th when the handyman never showed up.

The guys came by around nine this morning to work on the air conditioner in the bedroom. I put in a bit of time doing my “housewife” chores around the apartment. I did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, took out the trash, did the normal cleaning, did some laundry, etc.

I uploaded some pictures from my little Kodak camera today to Flickr. I have some from South Carolina, Georgia and Toronto that have been waiting on the camera for me to upload them. I got them all labeled and mapped appropriately so that they are useful.

For lunch today I just ran across the street to Queen Pizza II on Commerce to try them out. I can’t believe how long we have lived here and we haven’t tried the pizza place directly across the street! We can even see them from our living room window. The pizza was good. Nothing to knock your socks off but quite tasty. It is quick and cheap to eat over there. The place was packed. It is a happening lunch spot on Commerce. Commerce appears to be the main food street for the downtown Newark lunch crowd.

There is a new cafe going in across the street from us that is set to open in September. We don’t know anything about it yet but I saw them working on it today. We are excited about that. A nice cafe across the street could be very handy and it is taking over a store front that has been empty since we moved in here so that is very positive movement for our street. And the Market Deli that is located in our building is set to open soon adding one more food location to Commerce Street. That is one street where we have really seen some improvements since we first moved in.

The shop called this afternoon to let me know that almost everything for my car had arrived except for the fuel tank which they hope will arrive tomorrow. So I am stuck at home for another day.

For Dominica’s birthday and to prepare for our trip to the UK I bought her a pink Kodak V1003 10 megapixel digital camera for her to carry around and use while we are away. She says that she is working on the ultimate collection of pink electronics.

I ended up having a ton of work to do very late in the day – even though the whole day itself had been amazingly slow – and so spent the evening mostly sitting at my computer. Our new platform bed arrived today so Dominica spent the evening assembling that in our bedroom. We have been sleeping on the floor ever since we first moved to New Jersey a year and a half ago. But Dominica has gotten tired of that and decided that we needed a real bed. It took a few hours to get it all put together but with just a little help from me we managed to get it all assembled and in place. It really makes a huge difference in the way that the bedroom looks. Quite the improvement.

I did some eBay shopping today and Dominica and I decided to buy an HP DC7700 desktop that we got a really good deal on on eBay. eBay shopping is always a risk but this was an extremely good deal so we took the chance. The current plan is that Dominica is going to be getting this new desktop (which is a nice dual core Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz machine with 3GB of memory!) And Dominica’s current desktop will go to dad whose desktop is getting a bit long in the tooth. I believe that he currently has an HP d330.

I was awake around six but didn’t bother getting out of bed until around eight. Dad is supposed to meet us at the EconoLodge around eleven. He called at ten to say that he was seventeen miles south on Rt. 13 and that he would arriving around ten thirty.

We had brunch at the Ramada which was right across the street. They have a very good traditional brunch at a quite reasonable price. We visited until one thirty when Dominica and I absolutely had to hit the road to get to Wallington in time to pick up Oreo from daycare before they closed at seven.

The drive down to New Jersey went horribly wrong. Route 81 was all stopped traffic and nothing was moving. We lost about an hour before we were even ten miles into Pennsylvania. We decided that we didn’t have the luxury of risking continuing on i81 so we took the first exit and hopped onto PA 492 East and took our chances on the back roads running through the Poconos. The backroads weren’t very congested but it doesn’t take much to cause a pretty big delay.

We skipped any stops, including rest stops, that we would normally have made and pushed as hard as we could the entire way from Ithaca to Wallington so that we could get Oreo.  We ended up pulling into Doggie Paradise right on the nose at seven in the evening!  That trip ended up taking several hours longer than it should have.  It was almost double the normal time to go that distance!  But at least we managed to pick up our Oreo.

Oreo was extremely excited to see us when we got him.  We ran to Burger King as it was the most convenient place to eat and then headed straight home to 1180.  We were all quite tired.

We got to 1180 and were very excited to learn, even before heading up to our apartment, that the air conditioner that we have put in six or seven work orders for over the past two weeks has finally been replaced as no one has managed to fix it.  We have been going crazy trying to get this fixed as we have put in several tickets for its repair with no one coming to look at it at all.  And only one of the six times did someone actually do any work and it did improve the unit but it didn’t fix it.  The other two people who came didn’t do anything to it at all as far as we know.  The issue has been that either the thermostat or some other piece of the unit is not working and it shuts itself off long before the room gets cool, even on the coldest setting.

We got up to the apartment and Dominica immediately discovered that the good, working air conditioner in the living room had been replaced and the broken one in our bedroom had not been touched!  Now we don’t even have as good of air conditioning throughout the apartment as we have been limping with for the past month or so.  🙁  So tonight will be another restless, sleepless night for all of us as we attempt to sleep in the very warm bedroom.

It wasn’t late enough to go to bed so I read a little of my book “Solaris 10 Internals” and worked on building a Windows XP Pro desktop on one of the computers that I had dad deliver to us this morning (Compaq EVO D500 SFF.)  Dominica put in some Cosby Show and Oreo went right off to puppy dreamland.

I had to get up at eight this morning to continue working from last night. Today is a jam packed crazy day. I was supposed to only have to work from eight until eleven this morning but work wasn’t done and I ended up having to work right up until the last possible second before Dominica and I had to hit the road up to Ithaca. It was almost one before we were able to get on the road! Talk about cutting it close.

While I was working this morning Dominica ran Oreo up to Doggie Paradise where he will be boarding this weekend.

Traffic was awful almost the entire way through New Jersey.  We lost an hour or more just going through Jersey.  Traffic wasn’t great through Pennsylvania either.

We arrived at the EconoLodge at a quarter until six – just enough time to quickly check in, change and head down to the dock for the MV Manhattan to catch the boat.

The boat departed the dock at seven and they pushed it a bit quickly heading north on Cayuga Lake as a major thunderstorm rolled in over the city of Ithaca.  It was an amazing view from the lake – we could see the storm front as it pushed in from Enfield.  The wall of rain slowly overtook the western hills and the city.  There was heavy lightning and we had a spectacular view.  We only got caught by a small amount of rain but we got to see quite a downpour hit the city.

We had a really good time on the cruise.  It was great to get to see people that we haven’t been able to see in at least a year and a half.  We have been so out of touch since moving to New Jersey.

It was almost eleven when we got back to the EconoLodge and we were right off to sleep.

Tomorrow dad is coming down to meet us for brunch.  We are considering going to Taverna Banfis at the Statler Hotel at Cornell but going to the Ramada across the street is so much easier that we might just do that.

It’s a very early day for me in the office today. I actually woke up before my alarm and got out of bed around five ten this morning. I have been really restless at night recently which might be because it is so warm. We have gone for several weeks now without a working air conditioner in our bedroom and have put in six service requests but we keep getting forgotten about or something. Or maybe it is just really, really broken and no one can fix it. All I know is we can’t get it fixed and we can’t get the bedroom cool enough to sleep comfortably. It’s all we can do to keep from physically sweating all night.

Dominica asked that I point out that she is touching her tongue to her nose.  She says that it is impressive.

I got to play with some new technologies today. I started using Microsoft’s new XPS technology which is roughly an XML based competition for Adobe’s PDF. Interesting but mostly in a “been there, done that” sort of way. Microsoft is several years too late on this one. PDF is an open standard and very widely adopted. Having a standard based on XML is cool but it only gets you so far.

I also got Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 up and running. I have used other versions of Virtual PC previously but haven’t had a chance to play with this latest version yet. Basically, it is exactly the same as far as I can tell. Better support, a little more polished, better performance but the same basic thing.

I installed Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux 4 today too.  It is exactly the same as Red Hat 4 and CentOS 4 which I have worked with extensively but I wanted to test it out and make sure that there were no surprises.

I took the Mazda PR5 into the shop over lunch and discovered that the gas tank is rotted out and that the car is unsafe to drive.  So it is staying at the shop until next week.  I have to work from home on Monday and we will get a status report on the car then and see what needs to be done.

I had a solid morning of work and then a slow afternoon – until five.  Then all heck broke loose and it was one of the busiest Friday nights that I can remember.  A ton of people got stuck working in the office until really late.

Dominica had to pick me up from work today which is a huge pain for her.  Firstly because for once she was planning on going out to happy hour with her coworkers and she had to cancel that.  And secondly because she had to go to daycare and pick up Oreo then drive all the way from the north side of Newark out to Warren to pick me up.  And then she got stuck sitting and waiting for me for several hours.  She arrived at my office a little before seven and it was almost nine when we finally were able to leave.  I was very exhausted after putting in a thirteen hour day.

We took the opportunity of Dominica being at my office and the end of the day to go to Silk Road in Warren for dinner.  Dominica hasn’t had a chance to have Afghan before and I love eating there.  Dinner was excellent.  I got the Mahi Kabob which is salmon and very tasty.  Min got the gulpi which is cauliflower.

My new luggage arrived today.  It is a special travel bag that has space for overnight travel needs in addition to carrying my laptop.  It is designed to be a large carryon so that I can take it to the UK.  Because of my CPAP, overnight flying is very cumbersome.  Our new platform bed arrived today too but we probably won’t have a chance to put that together until Monday at the earliest.

We got home and it was right off to bed for us.  I have to work in the morning, Dominica has to shuttle the boy off to daycare where he will be boarded tomorrow night and  then we are driving up to Ithaca.