Download the SGL Podcast Episode 59 in MP3 Format.
Scott and Dominica continue their trip in the United Kingdom by flying to Belfast, Northern Ireland. This is just Scott doing a recap six months after the trip.
Unfortunately due to severe time constraints this show is going out raw – no editing, no cleanup. You get to hear me in all my unfiltered glory for twelve minutes doing a really quick recap of our time in Belfast. The show really doesn’t do the trip justice as we had such a wonderful time but we had to get the show out and posted before leaving for Disney.
Sorry, no music in this show.
You can stream the show directly for the Internet Archive SGL Podcast Episode 59 page. Or from OurMedia.
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Before this morning I was not acquainted with Flat Stanley. Apparently I am out of the loop, but that is nothing new. I learned of Flat Stanley from a friend back home in Leicester, New York who needed a favour…
It seems that our Flat Stanley hails from Iuka, Mississippi. Iuka is located in the very northeastern corner of Mississippi in Tishomingo County where the state borders Alabama and Tennessee. My friends’ niece lives in Iuka and her class is involved in a Flat Stanley project. So she sent Flat Stanley to my friends in Leicester hoping that Flat Stanley could visit New York City and see the sights such as the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately she did not realize that her family in New York lived so far from the city, about 350 miles, so touring the city with Mr. Stanley was not really an option. This, as you can imagine, is where I come into the picture.
So this morning Stanley traveled down to Newark to visit me. The weather is bad for picture taking today, though, and Katie, who will be my co-tour guide in Manhattan, is out of work today. So we are planning to take Flat Stanley around with us on Monday to get pictures during lunch – with any luck there will actually be sunlight on Monday for us to work with.
Since I work with people from all over the world I decided that this was a perfect opportunity for Flat Stanley to see some exciting places. Other Flat Stanleys and his relatives have been to many exciting places. But I thought that it would be really nice if Mr. Stanley from Iuka, Mississippi could visit some neat places. So I made some “calls”.
Stanley’s first stop on his whirlwind tour was Belfast, Northern Ireland thanks to my friends Sean and Niall who jumped right onto the project immediatley. They got pictures of Flat Stanley at White Star House where the Titanic was built. They have pictures of Stanley in the windows overlooking the dry dock where the Titanic actually was assembled. I think that this is probably Stanley’s first trip to this particular location.
I have some more people in Belfast getting involved taking him to other important Northern Irish locations like the Giants’ Causeway and the word is that he is driving down to Dublin, Ireland tomorrow too. We are starting to get supporters all over the world. We should have a lot of pictures by early next week. If you don’t want to have to check back to the web site all the time you can subscribe through RSS: Flat Stanley SGL Flickr Feed. You can also point your AppleTV to the Flat Stanley set on SheepGuardingLlama on Flickr and AppleTV will connect it as a slideshow. How cool is that?
More Flat Stanley news over the weekend. Dominica and I will be showing him around Newark tomorrow.
It is Friday and that makes it my busy day. My morning was so busy that although I had planned to work from home until nine and then go into the office on Wall Street I didn’t actually manage to leave until one thirty. It may seem that after seven hours that it wasn’t worth going into the office when the day was just about over but, as this is Friday, the day was not even half way over yet. So off to the office I went.
I was pretty hungry as I hadn’t had a chance to eat all day so I stopped off at Newark Penn Station and grabbed some pizza from Triponi Pizza. Then it was on the PATH and into the city. I felt like reading today so I carried “Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager” which is small and easy to carry on the train.
I wanted to take Flat Stanley into Manhattan with me today but it is extremely overcast and foggy today and Manhattan gets exceptionally dark when there is no sunlight. There is no scenary out here. Just fog. And today is just way too busy for me to take a break to go do anything extra. So that will have to wait until Monday.
My afternoon was very busy and I was just bouncing from one thing to another as quickly as possible. I did the regular deployment work until almost seven. Then I settled in to do the “after hours” work that had to either be done tonight or over the weekend. I figured best to get a good bulk of stuff done tonight rather than wait until tomorrow or Sunday to be working on it.
I ended up working until well after nine at night making my day come out to fifteen hours. I was pretty worn out by the end of the day. I did manage to take care of a large volume of work that would not have been fun to have carried into my weekend though. Best to get that stuff over and done with before leaving the office. I really need my weekend time to do homework anyway.
It is good that I stayed in the office anyway, though. There was deployment work that ended up going until nine and a little around eight someone needed me to physically restart a computer here in the office that I could not have done had I left at a normal time and that would have made it quite hard for them to have worked over the weekend. So it worked out well.
Ramona wanted to get together this evening but we are pretty tired. It will be well after ten before I get home and I think that my walk home might be in the rain. So we are planning on breakfast at Airlie Cafe tomorrow morning. Flat Stanley can go with us.
Check out the world’s cheapest GPS.
]]>I worked for a little over an hour and then took time to go shower and get ready to face the day. I did the dishes to get the kitchen cleaned up, went over to Airlie Cafe to get breakfast for Dominica and I and made coffee. Dominica was up around ten thirty or so and spent the morning reading R. A. Salvatore’s Path of Darkness series (part of the Drizzt Cycle.)
I learned today that Amazon is in the process of buying Audible. This is interesting as we know a few of the Audible folks who are our neighbours. Audible itself is located at One Washington Square right here in downtown Newark just a few minutes walk out of our front doors. So we will be watching this closely to see how it plays out and what affect it has locally and to our favourite audio book service which we live and die by around here. Audible is a major component of my lifestyle.
Speaking of Audible, I have been waiting a long time for Scott Adams’ two classics, The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future to be available from Audible. I have box on cassette from many years ago but as I have no cassette player anymore that does me very little good. So I am very happy to see them on Audible so that I can listen to them again. (These books are so good that I own them in print as well.) Scott Adams’ new book, Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! is available as well. I bought all of these today along with Louisa May Alcott’s “Jo’s Boys” which is her only major work that I have never read. I also got her lesser known book “Good Wives” which is also a part of the March Sisters Series along with “Little Women” and “Little Men” both of which I read as a child.
Dad installed the new 512MB into the SunFire V100 that only had 128MB before. That should help a lot. The memory install went fine and as soon as it was back online I kicked off a large rsync operation to see how the new memory would affect performance. It made a huge difference and my files were backed up from one location to another in no time at all. Very nice.
Our reimbursement check for Dominica’s dental work came today which was quite a bit of money. She also received her second Netflix movie, Dreamgirls.
Dominica and Oreo spent the afternoon napping in the living room. Dominica didn’t effectively get up today until around four thirty.
Many of my Brainbench certifications have expired over the past several months and I have been lax about dealing with them. So today I started “re-upping” my certifications to get them current again. When you have as many expiring certifications as I do this can be a rather significant process. It is far more certifications than I keep on my resume too since many of the certs which have expired are not IT certifications but are soft skills that are used to build up to larger cumulative certifications. I started today with renewing by Linux Administration (Red Hat) and Linux Administration (Red Hat 9). Both tests are out of date. The first one is so out of date that I have no means of even estimating the era in which is was relevant but it was definitely quite some time ago. Perhaps the popular RH 7.3 was the basis for this test which was before I did any work with Red Hat and instead used OpenLinux and SuSE. The second test was much better but still several years old – it wasn’t that new when I took it the last time more than three years ago. This time, on my first attempt, I scored a Masters and ranked number two in the United States even on a platform version that I have never worked on.
For dinner I just ran over to Food for Life and picked up dinner as take out so that we could eat at home and relax. I finished reading Johanna Rothman’s “Manage It!” while I waited for them to finish up with the food. Once I got back home we watched more of the fifth season of The Cosby Show while we ate. Oreo has decided that his new favourite thing to do while we watch television is to climb into my lap and go to sleep which makes it impossible to get up again. We we ended up watching about two hours before Dominica decided that she really wanted to watch Dreamgirls so, at that point, I was easily able to decide to go back to the living room.
I did some light work in the living room and did some reading but mostly just took time to play with and hang out with Oreo who was being very needy. After Dominica’s movie was over we watched some more The Cosby Show and went off to bed.
]]>Before leaving the hotel we decided to make plans for tomorrow. The ferry to Scotland that we were going to take is full and we are not able to go that way. So we decided to just fly back to Heathrow. That will give us more time in Belfast tomorrow to actually do a little sight seeing and to relax a little bit more and it will get us to London hours before we had originally planned which will make things much easier tomorrow. It is too bad that we had to cut Wales, Ireland and Scotland from our agenda but now that we really realize how little sunlight there is it would have been a horrible waste of time to have spent all of that time on trains in the dark. It really would have been pointless. We will just have to come back and see those places another time.
After getting ready to face the day we took a long walk uptown to the city hall on Victoria Street and met my friend Owain on his lunch break from the office and we all walked up to a caffe called Roast where we got sandwiches for lunch. The food was quite good and it gave us a chance to take in downtown Belfast a little bit. It is difficult to compare Belfast to an American city because the way that the city is laid out is so completely different from an American city. The layout is very surprising and much “lower” than American cities tend to be with almost no high rises at all. Much like London, Belfast is a continuous sprawl and not a single city with a central downtown.
After lunch we caught a ride with Owain into the office where I thought there would be no work to do but, after getting a tour of the facilities at Belfast’s famous WhiteStar House I ended up settling in to do real work and was actually in the office for quite a long time working until the floor had emptied out and only the night shift support teams were still around. Dominica was, unfortunately, stuck at the office and quite bored. She actually fell asleep for a little while.
Once I wrapped up at the office we rode with Owain back to his flat where we had tea and he changed into more casual attire. We did some investigating into where the best pub around might be – off the beaten path of course and not at all for the tourists – and decided to hit The Dirty Duck in Holywood near where Owain lives. It is funny that we will now have eaten at two pubs called The Dirty Duck within one week of each other while in the UK. In fact it was both of our Saturday evening dinners that were at the two Dirty Ducks!
It took a little driving around to find as the DD was off of the beaten path to be sure but we were very happy that we took the time to seek it out. The pub itself was cozy and comfortable with two fireplaces going. The main area had a wide open window with a view onto Belfast Lough with the twinkling lights of the city of Belfast on the other side. On the hill behind Belfast you could just make out Belfast Castle.
The menu was great and there were lots of items that we wanted to try but all three of us opted for the fish and chips. They also had a good selection of real English cask ale and I was quite happy to discover Old Peculier. Dinner was great. The food was the best that we have had yet in the United Kingdom. Towards the end of our meal a local band got up and played. They were pretty good but we wished that they were playing traditional Irish country music rather than American rock but I suppose that American rock is a bit more authentic in reality.
Again today we didn’t manage to take any pictures. Being this far north this close to late December there is almost no sunlight at all. Even at noon the sunlight is low in the southern sky and it sets before you even realize that it came up. We hadn’t thought previously about how much the latitude was going to affect us in that way. You don’t really realize just how far north you are until you visually register the significant change in the position of the sun.
]]>Download the SGL Podcast Episode 57 – MP3
This is the final episode before Scott and Dominica head out to London. It is a short show covering an overview of the trip including our UK itinerary.
Music in this episode from:
Aaron – Last Goodbye
Ken Campbell – Lady O
For more options, including Ogg Vorbis, check out the Internet Archive’s page for the show. For a limited time you can also get the show from our Podomatic page.
Starting with this episode we are going to start scaling back the audio file options to make the show a bit more reasonable to manage. As the MP3 format of the show is drastically more popular than the OV format we are going to limit the show to just the 128Kb/s MP3 version. The Internet Archive automatically creates lower bitrate MP3 and Ogg Vorbis versions of the show so we are just going to leverage that functionality. Check the IA page for the show for extended show options.
Misc:
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