19 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing in 4 – 22 days; Fifth Wedding Anniversary 1 Day.

My goal for today is to achieve 300 reputation points (karma) on StackOverflow.  (I started the day with 219.)

Firefox users out there looking to enhance their image searching capabilities (on Windows and OSX, at least, we Linux users are left out on this one) definitely need to check out the free plugin available from CoolIris.  This is really awesome.  CoolIris was formerly known as PicLens.  Once you have the plugin installed do a Yahoo or Google image search and click the little CoolIris icon on one of the images and you will discover a whole new way to explore images online.

I got up at seven today and got ready a bit earlier than usual.  I logged into the office early and went through my mail.  Looking to be a slow day so far.

I starting reading the “No Fluff, Just Stuff 2007 Anthology (Volume II)“, edited by Neal Ford, today.  It has been on my bookshelf for a while and I have been wanting to read it but just have been backed up with other books that keep my occupied.  This is one of the books that I get to read purely for fun rather than for school or consulting purposes.

I did a little working from home early on this morning but was stopped by what appears to be overloaded servers at the office as the connection simply was not working.  My VPN dropped at least five or six times if not more.  Eventually I gave up and ran into the office as quickly as I could.  It was still pretty early compared to when I usually go into the office but normally I am able to get more work cleaned up from home before heading in.

If you are an AJAX gearhead and have not heard yet, Microsoft has announced support for JQuery built in to Visual Studio 2008!  This is awesome.

The Jedi Council Speaks has a new CafePress store where you can buy TJCS gear.

For lunch today Dan, John and I went out to Ulysses on Stone.  It may seem unbelievable but this was actually my first ever trip to Ulysses.  Of all of the places on Stone, Ulysses seems to be the most popular and well known but it is about the only place on the street where I have never been.  So today I got to try it out.  Ulysses is well known as a Wall Street watering hole in the evenings.

We all got the daily special which was the sesame encrusted tuna with wasabi cream sauce.  It was very good.  The price was not all that bad either.

I was supposed to do coffee with Katie this afternoon but she got caught in meetings and I never heard from her.  Shreyash and I ended up going down to Financier for our afternoon coffee.  I am at Financier so often that they say hello to me when they see me on the street.  I am one of their best known customers!

I was very productive today overall.  In addition to other tasks I was able to go through a short introductory tutorial for the Scheme dialect of Lisp and to do quite a bit of discussion work in my Process Management class at RIT.

I was pretty busy with work until a bit after six this evening.  Dan and I walked up to Trinity and then I stopped in at Borders at 100 Broadway  to do some quick shopping.  I picked up the “Ruby Phrasebook” and “Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy“.  Then on to Newark.

I did some distance calculations today about how much walking that I do each day.  The distance from the World Trade Center to my office on Wall Street is .9 miles outside with enough interior walking to take it up to a full mile.  My walk down to Stone St. which I do twice each day is .3 miles in each direction which is a total of 1.2 miles.  My walk from the apartment to Penn Station in Newark is an additional .5 miles in each direction.  So my total daily walk when I go into the city is 4.2 miles.  I’ve been saying that I do closer to two miles each day and people tell me that I am crazy about how long it takes and how far that it is.  But thanks to Google Maps “Walking” directions we now know how far it is and it is much farther than we had thought.

I got home and we ordered in from Nino’s for dinner and spent the evening watching shows on the AppleTV.  While we were waiting for the food to arrive, though, I took the opportunity to do some serious reading and managed to make some really good headway in my new Rails book.  In all I read almost ninety pages tonight which is pretty good for a late night after a long day at the office.

We actually stayed up a bit late tonight.  It was eleven thirty when I took Oreo out for his late night walkies and Dominica went to sleep.  I read until almost one in the morning and then turned in myself.

Tomorrow is our five year anniversary but we really can’t be going anywhere as there is a major change going on at the office and I have to be home all day to support it in case anything goes wrong.  If possible we are going to attempt to go out to Panera for our anniversary dinner tomorrow night but we will have to see how work goes and how tired Dominica is.

Today was extremely busy at the office.  My morning was completely crazy.  It was rather exhausting.  I didn’t have a chance to even eat lunch (or breakfast for that matter) until after two thirty in the afternoon.  Dominica’s day was quite busy as well, and she was quite worn out by the time that she came home.  She did manage to spend her lunch break doing some much needed grocery shopping.

While busy, my day was almost entirely uneventful.  I started listening to Mark Twain’s “A Murder, A Mystery & A Wedding” late this evening.  It has been in my Audible queue for a while.  I really only selected it because it is narrated by Garrison Keillor.  It is pretty short and I do appreciate the importance of classic American literature of which there is only so much.  Mark Twain is a great author.

Recently, Dominica and I have been discussing literature a bit because of the baby on the way.  It is interesting to think about what literature our child may enjoy and experience.  Dominica was a born reader – far in excess of myself.  I liked to read and read many great books but nothing in comparison to her.  I, however, read a greater variety of books and enjoyed more of the classics like “Little Women”, “Johnny Tremain” and “1984”.

When I was young, my literary tastes tended towards classic Americana (in addition to my obvious love of C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicle of Narnia”.)  Authors that I read the most, in my memory, included Louisa May Alcott, Irene Hunt, Madelaine L’Engle, L. M. Montegomery (yes, she was Canadian) and others.  Unlike Dominica or I, though, our child will have access to audio books throughout their life as well which really didn’t become possible for us until we were in our twenties.  The only “books on tape” that I knew as a child were ones that my mother read to me and recorded while she read.  Having commercial books on “tape” wasn’t something that I could afford until I was much older.  Very occassionally we would get a book on tape from the library when I was young like “Lyle the Crocodile” and “The Jungle Book” but those were by far the exception to the rule.

I spent most of the evening working in the living room while Dominica watched Frasier.  It was a pretty lazy night.  Andy was up late working so I stayed up to make sure that he didn’t need anything.  I am working the early morning shift tomorrow but then taking Dominica into work at seven.  Tomorrow afternoon we are going for the house inspection!  Hopefully there will be pictures soon after.

• “Writing Effective Use Cases” by Alistair Cockburn
• “UML for the IT Business Analyst” by Howard Podeswa
• “Software Requirements” 2nd Ed. by Karl Wiegers

The Business Analysis Essential Library from Management Concepts is a complete series on Business Analysis and the Business Analyst as a career which should not be missed:

• Professionalizing Business Analysis: Breaking the Cycle of Challenged Projects by Kathleen B. Hass
• Getting It Right: Business Requirement Analysis Tools and Techniques by Kathleen B. Hass, Don Wessels, and Kevin Brennan
• From Analyst to Leader: Elevating the Role of the Business Analyst by Kathleen B. Hass, Richa Vander Horst, Kimi Ziemski, and Lori Lindbergh
• The Business Analyst as Strategist: Trans Business Strategies into Valuable Solutions by Kathleen B. Hass
• Unearthing Business Requirements: Elicitation Tools and Techniques by Kathleen B. Hass and Rosemary Hossenlopp
• The Art and Power of Facilitation: Running Powerful Meetings by Kathleen B. Hass

My experience with textbooks is rather minimal but I have used three editions of the Whitten/Bentley text (5th, 6th and 7th) and have been very happy with it.  I have used a few other texts throughout my undergrad and graduate studies in systems analysis and feel that Whitten/Bentley is by far the best that I have used directly.

• “Systems Analysis & Design Methods” 7th Ed. by Jeffrey Whitten and Lonnie Bentley

I got some maintenance work done on SGL today. The biggest change is that I am tracking the site using Google Analytics now. So I am quite excited to see how that works. I think that we will find that my traffic profile is a lot better than Word Press Stats suggest. I am also quite interested to see more historical data and geographic data.

Today I finished “reading” “Lost Discoveries : The Ancient Roots of Modern Science–from the Babylonians to the Maya” by Dick Teresi. It is a fascinating book and covers a lot of interesting ground. A great read although, like most things that I enjoy, rather dry.

I began “reading” Simon Winchester’s “Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire” which is an interesting look at the remains of Britain’s once vast empire now reduced to mostly tiny islands scattered to the four corners of the world. Winchester is one of my favourite authors and always has great insight no matter what he is working on. Unfortunately “Outposts” had to be abridged for the audio version and the parts on Hong Kong and the Falkland Islands were left “on the cutting room floor” so to speak. Although Hong Kong is no longer a relic of the empire it was at the time of the original writing.

Today was busy and I was stuck in the office a little late again. But not too bad. I had my now usual falafel lunch from the little Halal truck one block west of here and got through the day.

On the way home I swung into Borders on Broadway and found a book on Ruby that I was looking for: “Practical Ruby for System Administration” by Andre Ben Hamou and APress.  I prefer Ruby to Perl for system administration tasks (and most everything else) and was interested to see what this book might have to offer.  It had a warm reception in some online reviews that I read so I decided that as a full time system administrator who uses Ruby it just seemed appropriate that I should have this book if for no other purposes than knowing whether or not to recommend it to others.

I did some work on my Ruby script for reading in Netgear firewall logs via IMAP and parsing them into a MySQL Database.  My script is working pretty well now.  I updated it so that it now logs to the system event log which is very handy for trouble shooting.  I also set it to run every hour on the hour so that my email mailbox stays clean.  Now I don’t have to worry about manually running it all of the time.

Tonight I started the project of taking all of my old, archived Netgear firewall logs that were downloaded to Thunderbird and saved as an offline folder and put onto my home SAN – my Netgear SC101.  I remounted the offline folder to Thunderbird and began the process of reloading the data onto the email server for processing.  There are scores of thousands of emails to be uploaded.  This is going to be quite a project that will definitely take a few days at the least.  I moved as many as I could tonight before going to bed.

Dominica was in the mood for makizushi sushi and so decided to have some delivered.  I wasn’t very hungry and sushi didn’t really do it for me.  The food was good but I really don’t enjoy sushi all that much.  We don’t get sashimi very often.  It is the seaweed and rice rolls (makizushi) that Dominica really enjoys.  I don’t mind it but it doesn’t get me very excited and I just wasn’t in the mood for it tonight.

We watched a few episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and tried to call it an early night.  We haven’t been getting enough sleep and are starting to get tired.