Today is Tuesday and we are out on the farm in Peoria with dad.  We are having Luciana’s fourth birthday party today.  She had a little party when we were in Spain, just the four of us.  Then last week she had a party in Frankfort.  And today we are having a party at dad’s.  So Luciana has made out pretty well on parties this year.  She might have had to have waited for them but they came in abundance!

Luciana has been anything but patient for this party.  She has been talking about little else since several weeks before we left Spain and to some degree since her birthday in April.

Everyone came over today.  Sharon and Leo, Jeremy and Rachael, Sarah and Steven.  So there were eleven of us for Luciana’s party.  This birthday was Play-doh themed which is what Luciana has been asking for and boy did she get a lot of it.  She was very excited.  She and Liesl (and several adults) played Play-doh all afternoon.

We had a big cookout, that had to be moved indoors because it was raining, with burgers and hot dogs and, of course, a cake.  Luciana had a very nice birthday.

I had to work today, of course, as it is the middle of the week.  After work this evening Liesl and I got down to more Broken Age.  She did great, again, and completed the First Act of it.  The story is great and she really knows how to play it.  She moves through it really quickly.  Much more quickly that I would have.  It is so much fun to watch her play.  And she is so snugly when she plays.  She sits right next to me with my arm around her.  I really wish that we had a good video game setup to take with us when traveling as the gaming is such a good way to spend time together.

Happy 30th Birthday to my wife, Dominica.

Dominica was unable to get her birthday off from work because someone else beat her getting in her day off request.  So she had to go to work this morning even though she considered her birthday to be a holiday.

Oreo and I slept in until around seven thirty this morning.  I was pretty tired after having worked until midnight last night.

This morning I finally finished reading “The Zen of CSS Design” and started reading “Presentation Zen“.  Neither book has anything to do about zen; they are not related to each other.

According to NewEgg’s UPS tracking page, my new hard drives and USB CD/DVD drive for the HP DL145 G3 are “out for deliver” which means that I could have them at any time today.  That will be awesome as I need those parts to be able to build the DL145 which is then going to be shipping to dad’s house soon and I wanted to be able to get it ready sooner than later.

It was a busy morning.  Lot’s of requests coming in all day.  Nice sunlight for Oreo; he was happy.

It was a slow day at Dominica’s office so she requested an impromtu half-day of work.  She didn’t know if she would get the time off until the last minute but at noon they let her head home.

Dominica got home around one and discovered as she arrived home that her rear tire was flat.  After attempting to reflate it and inspecting it more closely she discovered that the tire had worn right through and was completely destroyed.  It is a miracle that it hadn’t blown on the highway on her drive home at high speeds right up against the Jersey barriers.

We couldn’t do anything right away so at one forty we went to Airlee Cafe for lunch with Ryan.  We ate and then Dominica dealt with the car most of the afternoon while I worked.  Thank goodness for BMW Roadside Assistance.  They sent someone right out to switch out the tire with the donut and then we drove up to BMW of Bloomfield and dropped off the car for service.  No tires available today but we should have them all set by tomorrow.

The dealer was out of loaner BMWs so they had Enterprise come and pick us up and hook us up with a brand new Nissan Maxima for the day.  Dominica had a choice of a couple different cars but we both like Nissan and she has always wanted to try out a Maxima.  We were quite impressed.  It is a very nice car.

It was six by the time that we got back to Newark.  I had to have some people cover for me at the office while I was out, but I had been able to get everything caught up before I left and almost nothing new came in while I was gone so it really wasn’t too bad.

I worked for two hours after we returned to Newark then we walked over to Food for Life for Dominica’s birthday dinner.  Originally we had planned to go out tonight someplace nice but we were both really worn out by the time that it came to get dinner so we decided that close and simple was more important.  We are doing dinner on Saturday night to celebrate both Dominica and Joe’s birthdays in Utica.

After dinner we watched one episode of The Love Boat and ate some cheesecake from FFL for Dominica’s birthday cake.  Most of the time was spent preparing and feeding Oreo his two meals and then having to take him out for his evening walk.  Heading for bed just after ten.  We are both pretty tired.

I was still incredibly exhausted this morning and actually slept through Dominica’s early morning alarm. I didn’t even wake up when Oreo got up for breakfast and only barely managed to wake up to kiss Dominica goodbye. I ended up not waking up until eight when the phone rang. And even now I have no idea who called.

On the way into the office this morning I stopped by at the Airlie Cafe to grab myself a bagel and to get a tossed salad for my lunch later on. I have really been crazing salads recently. I guess our ordering in of food so often has cut down the number of salads that I get on a regular basis.

I didn’t make it into the office and had to turn around because I was needed for several thing. So I went back to the apartment and worked for a little bit before going back and and heading to the office again. It is cold in Newark and Manhattan today but not nearly as cold as yesterday. Not quite cold enough for me to need anything more than my fleece and my baseball cap but it was on the chilly side.

Today wasn’t too busy. But it is a Friday. You always get lulled into a false sense of relaxation and then the real work hits when you least expect it.

Dominica took her lunch break and ran the Mazda PR5 up to Nanuet, New York to have the inspection done again. The shop called last night to let us know that the part needed had come in. The car passed without problems and she was back without incident. Nothing like waiting until the eleventh hour. But it is all set now.

My afternoon actually remained fairly slow which is pretty uncommon for a Friday. I had little enough cognitive work today that I decided to listen to “Predictably Irrational” while working as most of my work today was paperwork related. I am finding the book tends to make me want to consider doing a program from MIT’s Sloan School of Business moreso than I considered it before. The author, Dan Ariely, is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at Sloan.

While reading the book there was some discussion on procrastination and the use of external deadlines in helping to keep things moving. This reminded me of something that I had thought of recently – that as a society we have an extremely difficult time accepting other peoples’ workloads unless they have arbitrary deadlines. Let me give an example. If one person, a college student, has a paper due on Monday (today is Friday) and they have to work all weekend on it and not go out with their friends this is acceptable socially. No one expects them to get a bad grade just to go and hang out. But a second person decides not to go to college and instead is self-educating himself and needs to spend the weekend reading, experimenting, etc. But society does not generally accept this person as truly doing something worthwhile and sees the action as purely anti-social. Even if the results of the first situation are purely “cramming” just to get a good grade while losing the information long term and if the results of the second is deep learning, lasting knowledge and direct and immediately career or other goal attainment we still only see the formal as acceptable. Why is this?

I have noticed this particular social problem a lot both during the years that I spent attempting to break into IT without having completed my college degree as well as when I was working from home with a completely flexible schedule. When you have flexibility in your schedule, regardless of the importance of the work to be completed, it is seen by society as being unimportant or, at the very least, you are expected to have done all of it at the very first available moment and no procrastination whatsoever is allowed. This seems to happen regardless of how trivial the college class is (underwater basket weaving taken non-matriculated and audited) nor how critical the self-study or work may be (studying to get a new job in a week or completing work on a book that you are writing and need to finish so that you can make money to eat.)

One thing that I have found that helps somewhat to mitigate this social perception is professional certifications. These certifications provide simple, artificial timeboxes that are seem to be almost as or possible just as acceptable as college tests and allow you to really have an excuse for studying. It is very sad that as a society we see self-education and a lifelong pursuit of knowledge to be so unacceptable. During the Victorian age amateurs were seen as the pinnacle of an art. The top scientists or researchers were proud to be amateurs and would study and research on their own time. Only those who couldn’t reach this level felt the need to be professionals. But today if we don’t have someone cracking the whip to keep us working it isn’t considered polite to read, research, experiment, learn, grow or advance under our own volition. How sad.

At a quarter until five this evening dad IM’d me to say that it was really snowing up there and that it was a good thing that we hadn’t attempted to go up there tonight. It would have been bad.

Since we have time to actually really relax for once I am planning on taking advantage of it this weekend. I am going to do some reading and I hope to play Dragon Quest Swords for the Wii quite a bit. I am really looking forward to that.

I had to work a bit late tonight. Not because of an extra heavy volume of work but just because some stuff got scheduled pretty late into the evening. It was after seven thirty when I finally got the chance to head back to Eleven80.

A friend at work and I were discussing the output of the Solaris pkglist command tonight and we were trying to figure out how some people we knew were getting prettier output out of it than we were. We wanted to know the package name, version and install date in a nice easy list for a particular package. Other people were getting this list and we were sure that it was something obvious. This is what we came up with:

for i in $(ls /var/sadm/pkg | grep pkgname); do echo $i: $(pkginfo -l $i | grep VERSION) $(pkginfo -l $i | grep INSTDATE); done

It isn’t the prettiest solution but it works. So now if you need it (or if I need it) I can just copy and paste it from here. It works quite well if you have a large number of different versions of the same package installed on your Solaris machine.

It was eight thirty when I finally got home. Dominica had made dinner but had to take it off of the stove to wait until I got home and then she was able to finish it. We had soft tacos and watched the next three episodes of Doctor Who that had come from Netflix. What a great show. We are about halfway through the second season of the new series.

We were both up on the early side today. We had to go out to Military Park a few times today so that Dominica could take some GPS measurements for her “GPS and the New Geography” course. She is really getting into the class. It turns out to have been a really good choice for her.

I went down to the deli in our building to pick up breakfast. We ate and watched an episode of Family Ties and then Dominica went off to work on her homework. I decided to take a nap as my migraine was pretty bad and I was not going to be able to get any work done unless I was feeling better. I lay in bed with my eyes covered listening to the News from Lake Wobegon on my iPod for an hour or more. I didn’t really sleep but I felt a bit better after that.

For years I have used the word moreso always believing that that was the standard spelling. Apparently “more so” is more common. However it would appear that the OED (the Oxford English Dictionary – considered the standard for the language) includes it. So I am going to keep right on using it. Possibly even moreso.

This afternoon was spent almost exclusively doing homework for Min and the term paper for me.  I found the topic very challenging but I am hopeful that I have come up with a decent paper.  It is hard to do a paper for a class that you have not done a paper for previously because you are never sure of the expectations and by the time that you know it is too late.

Dominica had to go out to Military Park three times to take her GPS readings and she had to do a lot of mapping with Google Maps.  But the work that she is doing is really interesting and I think that she is learning a lot about GPS and Web 2.0 technologies.  This course that she is taking appears to be relatively writing intensive and seems to really push a lot of though provoking topics.  I think that Dominica is getting a lot out of it.  More than just the value that appears to exist on the surface.  This seems to be one of those highly valuable liberal courses that people talk about but rarely get to take.  So I am excited for her.  It is a lot of work, and she seems to have to work harder for this, her “easy” class than she has to do for most of her advanced standing classes.

My evening was also busy with page-outs to the office.  I was pages several times and had to keep my email on all day to deal with things as they came in addition to the tiny “check out” work that has to be done on Sunday afternoons.  That only takes a few minutes but I did spend a bit of time on conference calls and talking to the support teams at the call center.  Nothing disastrous or stressful.  But a lot of hand-holding and double checking things.  It was a pretty busy Sunday night.

I wanted to go to bed early tonight but Dominica and I did homework until after eleven thirty and after all of that work neither of us was ready to fall asleep yet.  So I decided, since I kept getting paged anyway, to just wait out until midnight logged in to the office watching my email (my “on call” shift ends at midnight when the normal overnight shift begins) and then we would watch an episode of Family Ties so that we can get off to sleep.

Dominica did manage to sneak in some more Christy today.  She finished the television series either last night or this morning and today she managed to watch the first two made to television movies and to start the third.

I did get a chance to learn a bit more about using Handbrake today to do MPEG2 to h.264 conversions.  There is a new version of Handbrake out that is a big improvement over the last (.9.2 now instead of .9.1.)  I am getting the hang of making some good quality compressions.  I have so far discovered in my first test that I can compress a standard size MPEG2 compressed television episode of approximately one gigabyte to less than one third of its original size while actually improving the quality through high quality deinterlacing and deblocking algorithms.  And acceptable quality compressions can be made at closer to one tenth the original size.  I am really impressed with h.264.  I am surprised that there has not been a movement to use h.264 on the DVD carrier media as a stop-gap before BluRay.  A DVD carrying h.264 could carry twice as much content, roughly, as current Video DVDs.  That means that you could have average length movies at extremely high quality or have a single DVD contain ten or fifteen television episodes at the same quality as the originals.

Tomorrow is my birthday.  I have been thirty-two years old for the last three minutes as I write this.  Time for bed.  I can’t stay up late.  I am not as young as I used to be (like when I started today’s post.)

For Valentine’s Day Dominica wanted a Pajamagram. She asked for it weeks ago. I think that she thinks that I forgot but I didn’t. And since I don’t post the dailies until after she should have it it is safe to mention it here. That and she never reads the site. I scheduled the delivery so that it is supposed to arrive tonight. UPS has it “out for delivery” at the moment. Unfortunately Dominica never gets the packages so I have to get it and bring it up to the apartment. Not much of a surprise. (Ryan can sympathize with me.)

Oreo was incredulous this morning when we got him dressed for daycare. He was sure that he was going to get to stay in bed and relax. He is going to be so tired by the weekend. It is a good thing that I have Monday off so that he can sleep some more.

The weather was much improved today. It is still chilly but the wind isn’t so bad and the slush has mostly gone away. The walk into the office was fine and passed quickly. I ate a poptart on the way in. Saves time and money.

Dominica and I were attempting to make some dinner plans for tonight when my team in Bahrain scheduled me to work tonight at eight o’clock. Of course, why would I get Valentine’s Day dinner time free? How silly of me. What was I thinking.

Dad’s old laptop is starting to die. This is the HP Pavilion with the AMD XP 32bit processor. It is overheating something awful and shutting down on him all of the time. Not much use to him anymore. Or to anyone. This is the same unit that I caught my food on the power cord one day and broke the power connector socket so that it almost never works. It is an old laptop and has been around for quite some time. It is ready to be retired from active duty.

Yesterday, Rocketboom’s correspondent in Kenya, Ruud Elmendorp, provided a good, short documentary on how that country is coping with their recent structural breakdown. Good video for everyone but especially good for students looking for good “current events” coverage.

This weekend is going to be a little busy because I have to take my final for my Project Management class. This is the last test that I will have in the class. On the following weekend I will be turning in my final paper for the class. So the next week or so is going to be quite busy with that. But then project management is complete and I get to move on to “Object Technologies” shortly thereafter.

Lunch was falafel pita from the truck outside the office. Cheap and tasty.

I am really looking forward to this weekend. I am just very worn down. It has been a long week. I don’t get a lot of opportunity during the week to catch up no sleep when something happens and I miss sleeping on Sunday night. It really takes a toll on me all week long.

I didn’t get to head for home until six so it was around seven when I finally got home.  I was hoping to be able to pick up dinner on the way home but my mobile phone died on the way home when Dominica called me and we didn’t get a chance to discuss dinner so it had to wait until I was home as I didn’t know what she wanted.  She called while I was just getting to the train to tell me that she had gotten the Pajamagram that I had sent.  I was very happy that it actually arrived today and that she went and checked the package arrivals at the desk.

On my way past “The Spot” – the new upscale dinner club opening just down the street from Eleven80 – I stopped in to see how the progress was coming and they said that they are going to push through the night to get ready.  They are planning on having a party tomorrow night at four to midnight for the Eleven80 people and the NJ Devils to go check the place out.  So we are planning to go there tomorrow night.

I got home and we ordered dinner from Food for Life next door.  I called ahead and then went over to pick it up.  We had very little time to do anything tonight between getting home a little late and then having to work in the middle of the evening.

We watched a few episodes of The Cosby Show and ate our dinner in bed with Oreo who fell asleep as soon as we finished eating.  At eight thirty I went out and took care of the mid-evening work that needed to be completed and then we went to bed very early – before ten.