In today’s XKCD, one of the most important comics on the web and a staple of Internet culture, makes mention of the Rochester IHOP where Dominica and I have eaten many times!  Very cool.  I feel that much more connected to XKCD now.

I discovered today that Questionable Content has been unblocked at the office.  That can’t last for long so I will be making use of the time to plat catch-up.  I am hundreds of strips behind.  Maybe even five hundred!

Anticipating your own incompetence is not a good interview strategy.  It is especially bad as the collegiate system so often does such a poor job at training people for the software development field.  Normally we assume that it takes several years away from college/university before a good developer will hit their stride and really learn what software development is all about.

It takes quite some time just before they learn to learn at a pace acceptable in IT because so often college learning is too slow and lenient to represent the ongoing pace of IT.  Believing that a recent college graduate will likely have more skills than you do with several years of actual development under your belt is a sad statement indeed.

Today I downloaded and began using Google Gears on Firefox.  There are not that many websites that yet use Gears so I signed up for an account with Remember the Milk to try out the Gears integration.  Gears is an interesting toolkit from Google that allows a website to have access to your desktop and to work offline.  The design is such that it allows application on the web to behave much more like traditional desktop applications.  It is used, of course, to enhance the Google Doc and GMail applications which is its obvious use.

For lunch, a group of us went out to the Full Schilling on Pearl.  It is very close and handy to the office.

In the news today there was an interesting article about how global warming is reducing the size of glaciers in Switzerland.  The retreating glaciers are leaving behind amazing artifacts including some of the oldest artifacts of their kind high in the Alpine mountains.

I wrapped up almost all of my work by five thirty.  But one team that I was working for had some files that they forgot to make available for me and I ended up getting stuck in the office for quite a long while into the evening waiting for the files to be made available.  So it was well after seven when I finally wrapped up.

Dominica and I decided that it would just be easiest, especially as I need to work tomorrow morning at eight in the morning, if I just picked up some McDonald’s on the way home this evening.  There is a McDonald’s in Newark Penn Station which makes that very easy.

I am going to post early tonight as I just don’t feel like logging on and updating once I arrive home, and since I now have Twitter keeping you up to date there really isn’t that much need.  So I will leave you with this from Questionable Content:

Questionable Content is dedicated to educating the world about our wily, bladed cousins to the North. Australians, on the other hand, have venomous spurs on their ankles which they use to immobilize their prey (drop bears). But you probably already knew that. Wil Wheaton is mostly defenseless, but will charm you with amusing anecdotes about life on the Star Trek: TNG set until you no longer feel like attacking him. Why were you attacking Wil Wheaton in the first place anyway? Are you a polar bear?

Bahrain on our usual Saturday morning deployments. This is really an extension of the Friday night deployments.

I had other, non-deployment, work to be done as well for the office. Never a free weekend for me. I am really looking forward to my four day vacation at the end of the month. What a change that will be!

Dominica slept in this morning. She was pretty tired after staying up so late working on her homework and assignments last night. This is going to be a really long weekend for her as she attempts to complete her final project by Sunday night so that she doesn’t have to take an incomplete in her class. This is her last class for the summer as she is taking the semester off. She is really looking forward to the break.

I worked from before eight in the morning until three thirty on work for the office. I took time off for lunch in there but there was quite a bit of work to be done. It is amazing how much work ends up needing to be done on the weekends.

Another Amazon shipment arrived today. Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals: Fasta Pasta 1 arrived today along with the web design classic title “The Zen of CSS Design” which I am looking forward to reading.

I did coordinate another day of Handbrake compression work. Boy do I work these computers hard. All day and all night they work at maximum capacity. No one can convince me that we have reached the age of unlimited storage and processing power. I need orders of magnitude more storage and processing power than are commonly available today. It will be many years before systems prepared to handle my workload are commonly available and the workload that I will have at that time will be much greater than what I have now. I am taxing my overall system I/O, network capacity, drive I/O and CPU. It’s really amazing.

Most of my afternoon and evening were spent either working on some certification consulting work that I am doing which is extremely intensive or a little bit of my homework that is due this weekend. Mostly that is going to be handled tomorrow as I need to coordinate with my project partner. Doing team based work for online classes that are only ten weeks long is quite difficult. We don’t have enough time to really set up good collaboration tools and get into a routine. We work together a handful of times and have to do all of our work based off of that.

We went to bed around midnight.

Today has that feel of being a lazy day indeed. It was really late when I finally got to bed last night and Oreo was exceptionally snuggly. So we all slept until noon today. Then we got up and pretty much headed straight out to go to IHOP for a late brunch. The IHOP up by UMDNJ is really excellent. They have consistently good food, the wait staff is always excellent and everything is quite fast. Of all of the IHOPs that I have ever been to that one is by far the best. It is truly impressive for an IHOP.

After lunch we came back to the apartment. Before too long I was paged out and ended up doing roughly two hours of work for the office. Dominica and Oreo snuggled up on the recliner and napped the afternoon away there. It is impossible to leave Oreo when he is being so snuggly like that.

Andy was on IM this afternoon and we talked over IM for several hours.

Dominica has been craving another trip to Mompou in the Ironbound all week since we went there with dad last Saturday. So tonight we have been planning on going back again. They will be happy to see us. The manager wonders where we have been if we go too long in between visits.

I have been running Handbrake around the clock on Dominica laptop trying to get as much stuff on DVD as possible transferred over to MP4 so that all of the DVDs can go back into storage and not have to sit around the apartment.  I have a large box of DVDs and books to ship to dad’s house the next time that we go there.

Our schedule is extremely busy over the next several weeks.  This weekend I am doing some homework and quite a bit of web site development work.  I really need to do some testing consulting work as well.  We will see if I am able to get to that or not.  Next weekend is Dominica’s crazy end of semester weekend with tons of project work due which is really going to be tough.  I have a bit of homework due next weekend.  We will see how that goes.  Then the weekend after that is when Dominica is leaving to go to Texas for nine days to be with her sister.  So Oreo and I will be alone for a whole week.  Logistics with him and daycare and my office will be tough.  I don’t have a good plan for that yet.

The weekend of May 26th is the only “free” weekend that we have together for more than a month.  And we probably have stuff going on then too and just don’t know it yet.

Then on May 31st Min and I are heading down to Florida for four days to go to Walt Disney World.  Then the following weekend is out to Louisville, Ohio for my cousin’s high school graduation party.  We are going to be so exhausted going into mid-June.  I can’t believe that Min wanted to go to WDW in the middle of all of that traveling.  She is really going to be missing Oreo going for thirteen days without seeing him over such a short period of time.

We went out to Mompou a little after eight.  Dinner was awesome as usual.  We took the shuttle to the restaurant but walked back.  It was a nice night for a walk and the exercise is good for us anyway.

Dominica pretty much turned in for the night after that just watching some AppleTV.  I stayed up until three thirty in the morning doing web site design work and reading “Agile Java Development“.  It was a very late night but I did managed to get a lot of work done.  It was a very productive night for me.