I left home around a quarter ’til eleven.  Dominica, Liesl and Oreo drove me down to the Peekskill train station where I caught the eleven twenty-two express train to Grand Central Terminal.  It has been months since I have ridden the train and it was nice to have some “forced relaxation” time to just ride and not have to worry about anything.  I was so intent on relaxing today that I did not even bring a book with me.  Instead I just loaded up the iPod with podcasts to which I would listen and blissfully pass the time.

This is my first time ever going from the train to the office in Tribeca directly.  Normally I go directly to the Wall Street office.  Getting over to Greenwich Street was actually very nice.  I just took the 7 from Grand Central to 42nd Street / Times Square and then took the E down to Canal.  From there it is just the shortest little walk and there is the office.  It must be ten or possibly even twenty minutes faster to do this than to go to Wall Street and with quite a bit less walking.

By the time that I had arrived in Tribeca there was some work waiting for me so I grabbed a seat on the trading floor and worked for about forty-five minutes.  That went well and then, when everything was caught up, Ronak and I went down to Baluchi’s on lower Greenwich Street near World Trade.  I got a Malabar salmon curry and the food was just amazing.  And it was really cheap too.  I couldn’t believe the prices.  I need to convince Dominica to come into the city and try out the food.  She would love it.

After lunch instead of returning to Tribeca I walked down to Wall Street.  It was a beautiful day for a walk in the city.  Cool breeze and bright sun.  I just love the city in spring.  What a great day to get to take a nice walk.

I worked from Wall Street for several hours.  Today is the last day before the holiday weekend begins so the market closed at two and the office is a ghost town.  I worked until just after five.  Then Dan and I walked across the street to Starbuck – not my choice for coffee but they are friendly and incredibly convenient – and we talked there for forty-five minutes or so.

Then I walked back up Wall Street to the subway and caught the train up to Grand Central Terminal.  From the GCT I got the seven twenty-two train north up to Peekskill.  It was a quiet ride listening to my iPod.  I packed up most everything that I have on my desk on Wall Street.  I had my swimsuit and backpack there still from when I had the gym membership so I brought that home along with some books that I had there and some miscellaneous paperwork.

There is a rumor that we are going to be moving again at the office.  This has become a regular thing and I just plan around it now.  I am not taking anything back to the office just to have to move it.  I have my little desk fan and that is all that I need other than a stack of emergency napkins and a pen.  My desk is completely bare now.  It really looks like I moved out.  If the rumors are true I may be moving back up to my old desk (or nearby) upstairs on Wall Street or possibly over to Tribeca.  I’m not sure which I would prefer and I don’t know for sure that either is happening.

Dominica, Liesl and Oreo all came down to pick me up when I got to the train station.  I was trying to get home early enough that we wouldn’t interrupt Liesl’s sleep schedule.  It turned out, though, that she fell asleep in the car and never woke up again all evening.  So I ended up going the entire day without every actually seeing her except for a tiny bit in the morning before I left

I took Oreo for a walk tonight.  He hadn’t had a real walk all day so I thought that he should get a bit of a walk in.  He puts on weight now so I try to keep him doing a little exercise no matter what.

The walk up the hill went fine but on the way back he walked straight into a little post-like structure.  Fortunately it gave more than a post would and he didn’t break his nose.  Boy did he scare me.  He walked straight into it.  Didn’t see it at all.  It was rather large too.  Bigger than him.

I paid close attention to him after that and it is very apparent that he is now so blind that he cannot be allowed to walk at night at all.  He would run right up to signs and other things because he smelled something and his nose would brush the sign post and he would jump back in surprise because he had no idea that it was there.  It is very sad watching our little boy get older.  It is really tough because he is healthy and has so much energy and it is really hard for him to burn it off and to stay healthy if he can’t see to run around.  He has had a lot of accidents recently where he has turned and crashed right into the wall.  We really have to start watching him carefully.  Poor little boy.

I forgot to mention the other day that I have been hired to do some actual writing.  Finally all these years of SGL have paid off.  I am going to be writing one or more articles for the Internet.com family of publications.  I am quite excited.  I have been wanting to write for a long time (professionally, that is.)  This will give me a nice break from my regular technical pursuits.  It will also be a nice feather in my proverbial cap.  Another means of rounding out my resume.

We spent the evening relaxing and watching As Time Goes By.  Dominica and Liesl went to bed relatively early.  I went down to the basement and spent several hours working on converting DVDs, builing the DL145 G2 into a working server and attempting to fix the DNS problems that we have been having for the past few weeks.  The conversions went fine.  The server build went nowhere.  All kinds of headaches there.

The DNS problem lingered on until four in the morning.  Boy was I tired by the time that I got to the bottom of it.  At first we thought that it was a problem with our DNS server but careful examination proved that that machine was doing just fine.  So then I thought to check out upstream DNS forwarders.  Nope, they were fine too.  Then I thought that it might be a virus/trojan thing.  But after several scans and testing from Linux machines I determined that the issue was across the board.

Eventually I was able to determine that every machine no our home network had the DNS issue except that DNS lookups from the firewall itself were okay.  So I pointed some machines at the firewall for DNS resolution and things started to work.  Okay, so the issue is that DNS packets are not reliably passing through the firewall.

So I updated the firewall firmware, rebooted and voila – DNS resolution working again.  Of course the update and modifications killed the IPSec VPN configuration so I had to start putting that back together and, of course, there were issues.  But by four in the morning both DNS and the VPN were working beautifully and I was able to go to bed happy knowing that I had fixed a major problem that had been really plagueing us recently.

Tomorrow, even though it is a holiday, I will be working covering for everyone who has the day off so that people are not getting paged and allowing people who need to work to keep working.  So I am going to be working all day, but it should be a slow day and will likely be relaxing.

Saturday morning I am scheduled to work for Bahrain as usual.  They tell me that the release this weekend is very small and that it will hardly take any time at all.  Here’s hoping.  Once that is done I have a very large number of patch updates to do on Linux.  Then, once that is complete, we are driving to Waverly, New York to spent the weekend with Dominica’s mother’s family there.  We are spending Saturday night at her cousins’ house.  Then Sunday afternoon we are driving up to Leicester and seeing my family for the evening and then staying at dad’s house.

Most likely we will be returning from dad’s house on Tuesday afternoon.  My plan is to work on Monday from dad’s and to then take Tuesday as my comp day for working tomorrow.  That way I can work there on Monday and we can leave Tuesday in the afternoon so that we can drive back before it gets too late.  We can’t stay too long because we are driving both the Mazda PR5 and the BMW back to Peekskill so Dominica will be driving separately from me.  It will give us a good chance to get a large load of stuff from dad’s but it will make the drive rather difficult – especially for Dominica who gets sleepy and has to take Liesl with her.

Thirty weeks of pregnancy.  I can’t believe how quickly time has flown.  We have just been so busy since having gotten pregnant that we really haven’t had a chance to slow time and take stock of how quickly everything is happening.

After working really late last night, until almost two in the morning, I decided to sleep in a bit this morning and didn’t log into the office until seven thirty or maybe even eight this morning.  I needed it though.  I am not really sleepy today; that was enough sleep for me to be feeling pretty good.

The weather is awesome today here in the New York Metro.  Cool and just a touch of rain with a nice breeze.  What a great change from the warmth.  Autumn is peeking from around the corner and teasing us with our short window of wonderful north-east weather.  An entire region of the country with just one to two months of great weather each year.  It’s a rough existence but we really know how to appreciate the good weather when we finally get it.

I worked from home for a little while this morning – all of the windows open now for the past several days.  The apartment is getting a wonderful airing out and the plants are loving it.  I hit the sidewalk and starting walking to the office just after ten.

For lunch, as is our tradition on Fridays, Katie and I walked over to Financier between Stone and Pearl and got the smoked salmon and brie sandwiches and crab and fennel quiche that they only offer on Fridays.  Determined to make the most of the weather I convinced Katie to skip the crowded cafe innards and to sit on the mostly empty street and to enjoy the seclusion so seldom offered in lower Manhattan, especially during the mid-day lunch rush.  Only one other band of stalwart lunchers dared to brave the elements outside of the cafe.

In reality it was quite nice sitting outside.  We commandeered an umbrella and took shelter beneath it.  Eventually Katie went for her own umbrella for some additional rain protection.  The rain was quite light but just enough to threaten to be a problem should the wind really kick up.  It is so much nicer sitting outside enjoying good coffee and awesome food in a light rain with a nice breeze and only the occasional passerby rather than the usual – elbow to elbow with other tables while sitting in blazing sun in the staggering heat.  This is how cafes are meant to be enjoyed when a sunny morning in the south of France isn’t readily available.

While it was raining, my walk back to the office did not really result in me getting at all wet.  One of the benefits to Manhattan life is that there is always a lee in which one can avoid the elements if one so desires.  I’ll take rain over sweat anyday, though.  No complaints here!

My new Blackberry Curve for the office arrived today to replace my ancient Blackberry that died a few weeks ago.  The new unit is very nice and sleek.  I am excited to be switching over.  I won’t be embarrassed to use this one on the train or at a restaurant.  I’ll also be more careful not to drop it.  The Curve is nicer than Dominica’s Pearl model.  This one is halfway between the 8830 and the Pearl in size but has the full keyboard like the 8830.

I had been planning and hoping to have been able to have gone back out for coffee this afternoon but my afternoon ended up being so busy that there was no chance whatsoever for me to take a break from the office.  Fridays can be like that.  It is very easy for things to get very busy very quickly.  One little issue and the day just vanishes.

One of my friends in the office felt bad for me and went to Starbucks around five and brought me back some coffee.  Not the same as going out, escaping the office and getting some fresh air but at least it helps to keep me awake.

I spent a good portion of the day today working with Chris on issues with the email system.  We were never able to positively determine exactly where the problem was stemming from but we tried many things, many of which resulted in long periods of time sans email access, and eventually got the system to some moderate degree.  After many changes it seemed to be working even more smoothly than before.

Not content to do all of this work and get almost nothing in return for it, I decided that it was high time for a system upgrade.  Generally I avoid doing this because it is so much time and effort dedicated to just updating the email system which really has very little impact but to avoid issues like this in the future I decided that tonight was the night to do it.  I’ve spent so much time with the email system over the last few days that no time is actually going to be as appropriate as this to do the work.  No time like the present!

I started the process of upgrading the email system at eight in the evening.  The first step is to do a backup.  I did that and my first attempt failed due to a network error.  That cost around forty minutes.    It is going to be a long evening.

While waiting for other things to finish over which I had no control, I took the opportunity to perform the SGL WordPress update to version 2.6.2.  Always nice to have things up to date and running with the latest features.

Dominica and I decided that it was going to be so late before I would reach home that we would just eat separately.  I will probably rue this decision as I will probably be in the office so late that there is no more food to be had on my journey home and our trip in the morning will be so early as to preclude getting breakfast on our drive to Peekskill.  She decided to just eat some food that we had in the house.

Tomorrow is Dominica and my Lamaze class up at Hudson Valley Medical Center very near to the new house.  We have to be up around six thirty tomorrow morning so that we can get ready to go.  I have a deployment at seven that I need to do and then we should be on the road around eight.  Poor Oreo is going to be stuck at home all alone all day which is going to be awful for him.  He is going to be very unhappy about how he has to spend his weekend.  Fortunately, he will be completely exhausted from a long week of daycare and should sleep almost all day.

We heard good news about our house process today.  The committment letter from the bank arrived both at our agent and at our attorney’s offices.  My attorney called and said that everything looks good.  The loan is all confirmed and now the only real issue is to set the closing date.  Hopefully we will have the final details by early next week.  The attorney was very happy with our bank and how clearly they wrote the proposal without any stupid issues that keep it from actually working.  We are still looking great to move in mid-October.

One of the nice things about staying at the office really, really late is that it gives me a chance to be all nostalgic for the days when I used to work late in Washington, D.C. and in Pittsburgh.  Back then I would be stuck in the office until all hours of the night waiting for system maintenance, doing work when no one was there to bother me or because I was waiting to see if the waste management plant would run into unforeseen issues.  Sometimes I would be there late just so that I could spend time training and observing the overnight crews.

I’ve always enjoyed working late at night.  Once the office lights turn off and everyone else leaves there is a certain happy loneliness to the office.  Once night falls and I am all alone I can magically picture the loading docks at Washington Hospital Center perfectly.  I can remember every inch of the facility, the walk down the dock, getting into my car behind a roll-off and driving through the dim, back streets of northeast Washington, D.C.  It is so vivid it is like I was just there.  What a huge part of my life that was.

Being in any city at night, on a cool, rainy, lonely Friday night in a business district where no one goes for after hours is always an experience.  Being here on Wall Street really takes me back.  While waiting for backups and updates I can walk around the office and experience the feelings all over again.  Looking out the windows and watching the cars on the FDR zip by or the people milling about in front of St. Maggie’s Cafe at 110 Wall St.

Growing up in the country you don’t get the same feeling at night.  Once the sun goes down and people start going to bed in the country being outside is lonely – completely lonely.  In the city it is a completely different type of lonely.  You can always see people, you are always near people.  It is a shared loneliness.  The quiet of the city at night.

The quiet, dark city might be my very favourite place.  Even Newark is nice once everyone is asleep.  Washington was a bit of a stretch but it had its high points.  Not many, but a few.  Pittsburgh, of course, I will always miss.  A great city, an adventure and tons of work without any real politics.  Just a chance to do great work and be appreciated for it while getting to explore and discover what, so far, remains to be my favourite place to live.

Since I have time to muse – my favourite cities, in North America at least, would be Pittsburgh, Ithaca, Halifax and Montreal.  I miss them all.  I wish that we didn’t have to live in New York City.  Manhattan is great – it has a lot to offer but it isn’t our style.  We are very excited about moving up to the Hudson Valley in the next several weeks, though.  That is really going to change our perspective on the whole experience.  Perhaps not for the better – time will tell.

The process of updating the email system took just forever.  I gave up on any chance of finding food or getting to bed with enough time to get any sleep tonight, but better to just push through and get this done now rather than leaving it for some other time to get exhausted and have it ruin my night.

I had a deployment that needed to be done tomorrow morning and was going to get me up around seven in the morning or earlier but since I was in the office so late I was able to verify before leaving that the package had never been released and so there would be nothing for me to do in the morning.  That will let me sleep in at least half an hour longer now that I was going to be able to do before.  I am going to need it.  Tomorrow is going to be a very long day indeed.

I am posting as I leave the office.  Check the posting timestamp to figure out when that is.

I started working at seven thirty this morning.  My morning really was not all that bad.  I worked for about two hours getting everything caught up and in good order.  There was work to do, but I would not classify the morning as being necessarily busy.

I grab the train and headed off to Wall Street at what seemed to be the most appropriately slow time of the morning when no one was likely to require my attention for a little while.

Friday lunches are always an adventure in Manhattan.  Today, Katie came up from the waterfront and met me on on Stone to eat at Smorgas Chef, an upscale Swedish eatery there.  The food was excellent.  I had warm goat cheese and beet salad to start and my meal was Norwegian salmon and scrambled eggs on toast.  Very tasty. The one thing that was weird was that because the lunch rush was so busy we had to share a rather small four person table with two other people.  It was rather awkward.

Afterwards we hit Financier for coffee and take-home goodies.  I definitely love the food choices that working in Manhattan provides.

I was smart enough to grab take-home treats from Financier Patisserie for Dominica too. You can’t get food like this in New Jersey.

Tomorrow I have an extremely busy day scheduled.  My morning deployments start at eight in the morning and an all-morning conference call supporting a storage migration starts at nine.  In addition to five hours of already scheduled work I also have quite a bit of anytime work to do tomorrow when I have the opportunity.  I am going to be working a full day most likely.  Because I have to spend so much of the time on the phone we decided that I really needed to have a new phone before tomorrow if at all possible.

We shopped around a little and decided to get a Panasonic DECT 6.0 wireless phone system with three handsets and a speakerphone feature – which is actually the most critical feature at this point.  Our old Uniden wireless phone system died some time ago and we have been living with a $10 Walmart special bare-bones phone for the last two years and it is pretty awful.  We will be very happy to have wireless, speakerphone, CallerID, headset, etc.  It will make our lives a lot easier.

We really have to have a new phone soon either way as we will not be able to live with just a single, non-wireless phone once we move into the new house in Peekskill.  Having three floors and a baby will make that just impossible.  We will require there to be phone access throughout the house.

For those who are unfamiliar with the DECT 6.0 standard in wireless phones – this is a 1.9GHz frequency band standard (1.8GHz outside of the US) with a new standard designed just for voice communications.  This frequency range is nice because it does not interfere with the 2.4GHz band used for 802.11b/g/n that we normally use for our WiFi equipment in the house.  The 1.9GHz band also gets greater range than the higher frequency bands get.  If you are using WiFi, and who isn’t these days, and you still need a legacy phone system then DECT 6.0 is a very good choice.  It is also less expensive to manufacture due to the lower technical challenges of making transceivers in this range.  (We do not use a legacy phone system outside of the house, but our Vonage VoIP telephone system comes into the house digitally and then is transferred into legacy in-house analogue wiring.  It is a strange system but it is simple and straightforward.  I would prefer all digital but Vonage does not offer that in any useful form yet.)

Today involved more “trying out” of Twitter.  I am able to use it from my BlackBerry now.  I started using it via the web browser but that was pretty painful.  So I discovered and installed TwitterBerry to see if that would work a bit better.  That makes the Twitter updating process a million times easier and quicker.  Now I might do it all of the time.  I even got Dominica to sign up for Twitter today.  Now she can keep everyone up to date on her comings and goings.  She has tried blogging in the past but was unable to keep it up for any length of time finding it difficult to figure out what to write about.  Maybe with microblogging and having access from her BlackBerry she will be able to stick with it.

So far I had only put a single application onto my BlackBerry 8830 SmartPhone – an SSH terminal application used to access UNIX servers remotely which worked worlds better than a similar application on the sad Palm PDA that I had before the BlackBerry.  After trying TwitterBerry I realized that there is a world of useful handheld applications that I am missing.  So I downloaded the BlackBerry FaceBook application as well.  I am becoming more and more mobile as we speak.  Although we aren’t really speaking.

My evening was quite busy.  There is nothing “special” going on at the office which means that the developments are all running full steam ahead getting deployments ready making my night quite busy.  The more upheaval at work the less work there is for me.  When things are quiet is when I get really heavily loaded down on Friday nights.

My night became a very late one.  At one point I really thought that I would be leaving the office a little before six in the evening.  That was not to be.  One of my deployments ended up keeping me in the office until well after eight at night – constantly dangling the carrot of hope before my eyes thinking that the software to be deployed would be available any minute.  We didn’t end up getting to even begin the installation until ten past eight in the evening.  Dominica was already home and well into watching 27 Dresses while I was still preparing for the work to begin.

I was in the office so late this evening that they shut off the lights on me and, as far as I could tell, all but one other person from my entire floor had left.  It was very lonely, reminding me of my days working at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. where I would often work late into the night in an office where everyone had left hours before.

I got home at a quarter until ten!  What a late day.  I had just enough time to call Emily and to wish her a happy birthday.  For her birthday we bought her an 8.1MP Samsung digital camera.  She has been a bit of a photographer for a while always stealing her mom’s camera so we thought that she should have her own.  She is the same age that I was when I got my first camera.  My first camera was given to me by my parents while on our way to Bar Harbor, Maine for my first ever vacation there.  Emily just got back from her first trip to Maine a few days ago.

It was pretty much straight to bed for us after eating the goodies that I brought home from Financier.  I have to be up early tomorrow to go back to work, unfortunately.

It is amazing to me that when looking online neither Google nor Yahoo seach returns any blogs, but this one of course, ever mentioning ol’ Pavilion Baptist School.  Technorati doesn’t even bother to list SGL but I suppose that PBS is only ever mentioned in passing.  It is sad to see such a major part of so many of our lives reduced to a few lines on the Internet.  No history, no contacts, no nothing.  A seach of the name turns up many automated school search engines listing the school as if it still existed but no real information.  I don’t even know how to definitively discover when the school actually closed.  It just vanished while none of us were watching.

Sadly, even an image search for the school name turns up only picture of or by me.  It’s almost as if the school never existed.

One of my goals, but not a high priority one, is to create the Pavilion Baptist School web site.  We need to have a central repository of news and contact information.  Being from PBS really encourages a lot of people to not be very tech savvy and in this day and age that is the difference between finding lost friends and not.  Those of us who have reconnected have done so almost exclusively through FaceBook – which is extra difficult as FaceBook won’t recognize PBS as a school so we aren’t allowed to have a school group through them.  Although now that we have official email addresses it might help a little.  A few people have found me through my personal web page too but not very many.

I was up bright and early again today.  This is a really long week.  Oreo was so tired last night that he completely forgot about his dinner and just went to bed without it.  We don’t offer him dinner unless he asks as we don’t think that he needs any “extra” food.  His weight is under control but he is very sensitive to weight gain and if he isn’t hungry enough to ask for his dinner then he certainly doesn’t need it.  He knows how to ask for food when he is hungry and isn’t shy about doing so.

Lots of stuff to do today.  Tomorrow is too busy with work and I will be in the office on Wall St. tomorrow so I can’t do the “little things” that need catching up with around here.  This weekend we are taking the nieces camping in Watkins Glen so we need to be ready.  Today is extra laundry, some light shopping and Oreo needs his flea and tick preventative treatment so that he is ready to face the wilds of Upstate New York.

It turns out that Josh is coming down to Clifton, NJ this weekend with the Empire Statesmen but, obviously, we won’t see him as we will be out of town.

I got a call from Craig today.  Craig, who has been missing in action for months now.  Turns out that they are expecting in December!  We have so many people that we know having babies within several weeks of us.  It is really crazy.

Anyway, Craig had some info on a rent controlled apartment up in Inwood (the northern most bit of the island of Manhattan) becoming available so we called and are going over there this evening to take a look at the area and the apartment.  We have only ever driven through Inwood on the highway and don’t really have a good idea of what the area is like.  It had never occurred to us that getting a rent controlled apartment would even be possible as they are rare and highly coveted.  So we are rushing out to see what the deal is.  We already know that Oreo won’t be a problem and that there is a grocery store very nearby as well as a train.

We would love to live up in Westchester but we are nervous about house prices right now.  They are lower than before but it seems like there is quite a bit of a possibility of the prices falling still before they hit bottom and investing in property in the New York area is not an easy prospect.  We definitely don’t want to get trapped having bought something that loses value immediately and then find that we need to move!  We would be in rough shape.  Renting, even if just temporarily, would be very good for us to give us time to get to know the market and the area better.

Inwood would still be closer to our families but only by about half an hour or so and driving into the city isn’t very easy.  The car situation would not be ideal.  But commuting for me would be great.  Almost as good as it is now and almost as cheap.  It would mean that I would have a lot more time at home with the baby – especially if I end up being unable to be at home as much as I am now.

Moving into Manhattan would only make sense for us if the cost was really low which is a possibility.  We will see more tonight when we look at the apartment.  Neither of us has ever looked at a New York City apartment before, let alone a Manhattan apartment.  We don’t know very much about rent control either.  This might be a great opportunity or nothing that we are interested in at all.

Dominica got home a little before six and we pretty much just got ready to go and left around twenty after.  It took about an hour and a half to get from Newark to Inwood.  We took the PATH from Newark’s Penn Station to 33rd Street near NY Penn Station.  There is probably some trick to the train to train transfer but we just popped up in midtown and walked from the PATH to Penn Station to catch the A Train (Express) up to Inwood (200th and Broadway.)

We looked at two apartments that are coming available up there, a one bedroom and a three bedroom.  The three bedroom was a little interesting but, unfortunately, the style of the whole place was totally not our scene.  The prices were amazing and the deal really is quite good.  For people looking to really live in Manhattan it is hard to beat.  For us, though, we would be much happier, we feel, being out in Westchester.  The difference in commute time really isn’t that much different.

We decided to save the effort of taking the PATH and to just catch NJ Transit back between New York and New Jersey.  NJ Transit is more comfortable and we have now figured out how to get the better trains and it barely costs any more.  Plus there is only two stops totally to get us back home so that is pretty easy.

We tried to get a bite to eat at Penn Station in Manhattan on the way home but like everything else down here, it was all closed by the time that we got there.  Upstate New Yorkers have such an incredibly skewed view of the world.  We are used to so many things being open twenty-four hours a day and we are always told how we are from the “sleepy north” and that Manhattan is the city that never sleeps.  Ha!  We are so spoiled in Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, Elmira, Ithaca, etc.  Everything downstate closes early.  New Yorkers are so trapped in their own little universe that they don’t even realize that they have no more late night services than any random city.  Nowhere near what a small, “sleepy” town like Geneseo has to offer.

There was one restaurant still open in Newark’s Penn Station so we ate there.  Now it is a seriously sad statement that we were able to get food in Newark and not in New York.  Our biggest complaint (well, maybe not the biggest) about Newark is how we aren’t able to get any food in the evenings!

There was laundry, email and a few other things that we needed to do before we were able to get to bed.  We were up far later than either of us wanted to be.  We were both totally exhausted coming back from New York.

I am on Wall Street tomorrow.  Dominica has a baby shower for her friend Elaine at the office so she has some work to do for that to do.  After work we are heading north to Frankfort and then taking our nieces camping over the weekend.

Oreo went to daycare today for the first time in about ten days.  I am sure that he was pretty excited.  He has had quite a lot of energy recently since he doesn’t have any dogs to play with when he stays home.  He starts to get pretty rambunctious.  We don’t realize how much “puppy” he has in him still (he is about eight years old these days) until he hasn’t been getting worn out at daycare all week long.  He wants to play a lot and is always asking to go for long walks.

I started into the city in the middle of the afternoon.  I went to the Tribeca office rather than Wall Street today.  All day the weather wasn’t too bad.  All day, that is, until I walked out the door to head into the city.  The rain started just minutes before I headed out the door.  What bad timing.

I made a quick run for the Gateway Center which is located just a block from my apartment at Eleven80.  I managed to not get too wet in that short distance.  There is tree cover much of the way which helped too.

I arrived at World Trade Center and decided to just take the subway up to Tribeca even though the walk isn’t all that long because the rain was going to be a nuisance.  But I forgot that the subway station at the WTC has been moved and I didn’t know where its entrance was or even if that station was still open.  So I decided that hunting around for a station that I knew nothing about was a bad idea and just walked towards Tribeca going up Greenwich as quickly as I could.

Unfortunately the rain started to get pretty heavy as I was walking and I was caught in a long stretch with a subway or any type of cover.  So by the time that I arrived at the trading floors in northern Tribeca I was completely and utterly drenched.

I spent about two hours on the Tribeca trading floors before heading out onto the road again.  This time I knew where the subway stop was and there was no way for me to walk all of the way to Rockefeller Center.  Still there was a bit of rain and I wasn’t exactly dry by the time that I got to the Rock.

For those who do not know, 30 Rockefeller Center, also known as the GE Building, is one of the most famous buildings in New York – partially because of the famous photograph taken during its construction.  It is a seventy story behemoth structure just north of the Empire State Building.  The observation deck at 30 Rock is known as the “Top of the Rock” and is the second most famous views of the city behind only the legendary Empire State Building itself.  Both, though, are much lower than the former World Trade Center’s commanding views.  The new WTC building rising out of lower Manhattan will have some truly amazing views, though, I am sure, when it is finally completed.  (The work on the new building is really coming along.  I can see significant progress in the last few months since I started working in lower Manhattan and traveling through the WTC every day.)

On the sixty-fifth floor of 30 Rock, and commanding views only nominally less impressive than the observation deck itself, is the landmark Rainbow Room.  The Rainbow Room has been one of the most important restaurant venues in Manhattan since 1934 and is world famous.  I have seen the views of New York City from the WTC Towers (in 1997) and from the Empire State Building (in 1994) but this was my first time going above the NBC Studios in the GE Building.  So I have now seen the three most famous Manhattan views which is pretty cool.

I was very excited about the event at the Rainbow Room tonight.  It isn’t every day that technologist get invited to events of this order.  It happens, of course, but being from Upstate New York we don’t even have venues like this so my experience with it is rather limited.

The view from the Rainbow Room was really amazing.  They had an open bar for us when we first arrived and a nice area which basically functioned as a bar/observation deck to use for socializing and meeting up with people.

From there we went into a nice conference room where some really top people including executives from Hewlett-Packard and Intel spoke as well as Diane Greene, CEO of VMWare and eWeeks’ #20 Most Influential Person in IT for 2008.

After the conference portion we headed out into another large space where an amazing, grazing dinner was provided for us as well as several more open bars.  The food was completely outstanding.  Cipriani, famous Venetian restauranteurs who also operate down on Wall Street, “catered” the event (they run the Rainbow Room restaurant as well) and it is clear why they were chosen for this task.  All of the food, as well as the service, was excellent.  The smoked salmon was especially good.

During dinner we were provided an amazing show by the extremely famous performance artist / painter Jean Francois who was flown in just for us.  Jean Francois has been very well known for his live painting work which is truly amazing.  He did two murals for us while we were there (one of John Lennon and one of The Beatles) and it was really something to watch.  Everyone was really amazed.  I got to shake his hand and talk to him for a minute afterward as well.

After the show it was food and drinks for the rest of the evening, until a bit after ten, with IT people mingling throughout the night.  I met some really cool guys from a financial firm in midtown and we hung out most of the night.

After the party was over, one of the guys and I hit the actual Rainbow Room bar for one last drink before heading out into the cold night.  Overall the party with HP, Intel and VMWare was amazingly impressive and a lot of fun.  Originally several people from my office were going to go but with the bad weather and the venue being in NYC and not in New Jersey everyone who was going to go decided against it leaving me there alone.  But it worked out pretty well and I had fun anyway.

It was just a few minutes after midnight when I stepped out of 30 Rock onto the courtyard of Rockefeller Center.  The subway stop that I had used to come uptown was now closed leaving me to fend for myself to find my way back home.  I wasn’t about to pay for a cab ride so I started walking south hoping to run into a subway station.

I had to walk for several blocks before I found anything.  I stopped at some all night pizza joint and grabbed a very tasty slice on NY style pizza.  I finally found a train around one or maybe a little later.  I didn’t know the train schedules or availability up at Penn Station in midtown so I took the subway all the way back down to the World Trade Center even though it was probably going to take longer to get home just to avoid extra travel risk.  The stop that I needed was, as we already learned, closed so I had to get off a bit north of the WTC and walk a bit farther.

At this time of night the trains run pretty infrequently so I got stuck sitting at the WTC Train Station for quite some time before the PATH train arrived to take us back to Newark.  The train ride itself was extra long too as we had to wait at a few stations for other trains to meet us.

It was well after two thirty in the morning when I finally made it back to Eleven80.  Dominica had woken up and wondered where I was and called my cell phone while I was still in the lobby.  It was about three when I finally got into bed.  No catching up on sleep tonight.  A little more homework to do tomorrow but then my schedule relaxes a bit.

I am working from home tomorrow and going onto Wall Street on Thursday which is the first Thursday in the office in as long as I can remember.  On Friday I am heading out to Warren by train (NJ Transit) and Dominica is picking me up from there so that we can drive directly up to dad’s place to spend the long weekend up there.

The weather is cooler, almost cold, today and very misty.

Dominica was doing some oil production research today for her environmental research class and it got me wondering about which countries consume the most oil per capita. The United States is always noted in any headline about how much fuel we consume and how demanding we are on the global petroleum production system. In the list of the largest oil consuming nations per capita, I found, the United States ranks fifteenth. Not number one as people so often lead us to believe. In fact the U.S. is well in line with similar nations around the world. We come in two spots below our Canadian neighbours who have a very similar space and income profile to us.

When looking at oil consumption numbers it is tempting to see the United States as a largely disproportionate consumer by forgetting that the U.S. is a country of over 300 million citizens (with a large unknown “illegal immigrant” population as well) while it is compared principally against relatively tiny countries like Canada, the United Kingdom or France. Additionally the U.S. suffers from the worst “open space” issues of any country with its major cities lying heavily dispersed over a huge longitudinal and latitudinal space.

Canada, the only other nation with an even comparable metropolitan separation, has all of its major cities lie along a single line near the U.S. border and it has only one truly major city, Vancouver, on its Pacific coast leaving the majority of its traffic to occur over a relatively small, confined space giving it much of the profile of a European nation rather than being like the United States. International shipping from American neighbour contries also involves most shipping distance to be covered inside of U.S. borders with almost all significant Canadian destination or origination cities being right on the U.S. border. (A truck shipping product from Montreal to Atlanta, for example, will travel less than fifty miles in Canada but well over a thousand in the U.S.)

The United States also has a disproportionately high military consumption of petroleum products.  This large governmental usage of oil, which most of the population would rather not expend, comes out of our “per capita” statistics and makes the average American appear to expend far more petroleum than we really do.  Taking all this into account the U.S. appear to use disproportionately low levels of petroleum per capita when compared to nations of similar wealth and logistical concerns.

I went into Tribeca for a meeting this afternoon but as soon as I arrived there my BlackBerry service went down and I lost communications with the outside world.  It is amazing how quickly we become completely dependent on having complete communications at all times and have made no plans on how to communicate without it.  We didn’t manage to connect for the meeting so I just grabbed a sandwich in Tribeca and then decided to take advantage of the location and grab the early train home and do my late evening, which went till eight, from home rather than Wall Street.

Today is in the middle of the Tribeca Film Festival which is a pretty big deal and the office in Tribeca is right in the middle of all of the action.  I had to walk through the big “street fair” and got to see many of the festival stands and activities.  Greenwich Street was alive with activity starting all the way south at the World Trade Center site at Barclay.  There was a lot of interesting food available out there and it smelled very good.

Dominica came home and made herself dinner.  I skipped dinner as my lunch was so late.  She spent the evening, right up until midnight, working on her homework and assignments for her class at Empire State.  The class officially ends tonight.  She has already requested an extension but the professor is allowing submissions throughout the weekend.  So her goal, which she accomplished, was to complete all assignments except the final project tonight and have nothing to do over the weekend except for the final project itself.

I spent quite a bit of the evening reading.  I was pretty exhausted this evening and so I finished reading “Herding Cats” and read quite a chunk of “Agile Java Development.”  At midnight Dominica came to bed and we watched two episodes of the seventh season of The Cosby Show.  And then it was time for bed.  I have to be up before eight tomorrow morning as there is work to be done at the office that is scheduled for that time.

My project today, other than going to work as usual and getting a head start on this week’s homework, is to hit the lower Manhattan hot tourist spots with Flat Stanley. Katie is meeting me at lunch time and our plan is to go to Battery Park and see the World Trade Center memorial and the Statue of Liberty and then to go down Wall Street and see Trinity Church, the New York Stock Exchange, Federal Hall and maybe some spots like Tiffany’s. The Branch Brook Park Cherry Blossom Festival is on in Newark next weekend while dad is in town so maybe we will get a chance to go out there with Oreo and Flat Stan and get some pictures there as well. That is definitely one of the Newark highlights.

I grabbed the Kodak V1253 and Flat Stanley and we were out the door this morning. It is so warm that no jacket is needed, not even a fleece. In fact I rolled up my sleeves before even heading outside. The sun is shining and it is just a perfect day.

On the way out of Eleven80 I ran into Kevin and Pam in the elevator. Pam was just walking out to the car but Kevin was on his way to the PATH so we walked and rode in together until Exchange Place when he switches to catch the other line up to Christopher Street. Having Kevin on the train made it possible to take a quick picture of Flat Stanley riding the subway. I guess technically you are not supposed to take pictures on the subway because the Port Authority police think that terrorists don’t know what the train looks like and that having pictures of it will somehow make targetting it easier. Once again just incompetent law enforcement trying to look like they are accomplishing something by doing something counterproductive because they have no idea what to really do. Instead of making terrorist have a hard time – because if you want a picture of the subway you are just going to get one with a cell phone that everyone is holding on their anyway – they just make the regular passengers feel like criminals just for existing.

The morning flew by and before long it was time to take Stanley out for his walk around the city. Katie and I met up at the head of Wall Street at Trinity Church at the corner of Wall and Broadway. Then from there we came down Wall stopping at the major sites and also getting a picture of Stanley with the NYPD protecting the stock exchange. Then it was down to Battery Park to get pictures of the harbor, the statue, Ellis Island, Governor’s Island, Jersey City, etc. We even got to go up to the twenty-seventh floor of Katie’s office which is right on the harbor and get pictures from up there. It was a very productive picture taking day, and it was a lot of exercise as well. I probably did two or two and a half miles just during lunch. That is in addition to my normal walking of around two miles.

I came across a great picture of the very first Curtis C-42 Commando, a Buffalo built plane that was a major contributor to the American war efforts during World War II. In this picture of the very first Commando off the line it can be see flying over rural Western New York in 1942.

I was pretty tired by the time that I got home. I am not used to doing this much walking in a day and especially not out in the sun which always wears on me. I was on the walk home and my next door neighour walked right past me while I was getting Stanley his knish for dinner so I recruited him (my neighbour) to help with the picture and then we rode the train together. So, for the first time ever, I had someone to talk to on the train in both directions. That just never happens.

Dominica called me while I was on my way home saying that she wanted to have McDonald’s for dinner. So I stopped at the McDonald’s in Newark’s Penn Station and picked up dinner just before arriving home.

We took it easy tonight. Watched a little of the fifth season of The Family Guy and then I did a bunch of photo editing and uploading to Flickr. In the end we had forty-two Flat Stanley pictures today that I thought made the cut for the Flickr set.

I am really going to miss the constant presence of Manhattan being just outside the window when we move away from here. Even if we don’t get to spend all that much time actually in the city it is just so amazing having it sitting right there. I love all of the twinkling lights and the passing cars on the bridges leading in and out of the city. I have always liked cities at night. So many people yet so quiet and still. I need to get some pictures of Manhattan at night from our view here before we leave. It is rather unlikely that I will ever have a view quite like this again. This is very much a once in a lifetime kind of opportunity, I’m sure. Nevertheless, we have had it for a year and a half and it will be over two years when we actually leave and I have worked from home a lot during that time and my work area has always had this view so very few people anywhere have had the chance to take advantage of such a view as much as I have.

We turned down our lease renewal. The apartment building offered a deal to those who would renew in March. Personally I think that it was a foolish move asking us to renew so far in advance. We didn’t have enough time to really think about or make any plans to stay or go. So, since we couldn’t guarantee that we needed to stay we effectively guaranteed that we weren’t. Had they extended the offer to a point where we were really able to make a commitment then we might easily have decided that staying in Newark for one more year was going to make sense. But, now we know that the financials just aren’t going to make sense for us next year and this apartment isn’t really an option. The handy thing for us is that now we have seven months to make plans for moving knowing exactly when we are moving. I have never had so much warning on a move before. Our last day in Newark, or at least at Eleven80, is October 31st. Now we just need to figure out exactly to where we are moving come November.

Oreo was very, very happy to be home today. He was so exhausted. Dominica tells me that he played a lot more than usual at daycare yesterday because Lana, the little puppy that he loves to play with, was in playing with another dog and Oreo just couldn’t resist and he played all day. He was all worked up and being crazy last night when he got home. Today he is making up for it. Just sleeping and sleeping. Even on his walk when he saw other dogs he could do no more than take a quick sniff to acknowledge their existence and drag himself along until he was able to do his business and then get back home to go to bed.

At one point late this morning our silly dog was sitting on the loveseat in the living room and was itching the middle of his back with his head turned all the way around. He was in the sunlight and apparently quite comfortable as he just fell asleep right in the middle of itching himself. It was the craziest thing to see. I look over and there he is all passed out in what appeared to be the most uncomfortable position imaginable. He was so sleepy that I was able to take several pictures of him and walk about without him stirring at all.

Dominica came home and we watched the final two episodes of the 2006 season of Doctor Who.  These were some seriously good but sad episodes.  We are definitely looking forward to the next season as well as to checking out Torchwood the Doctor Who spinoff series.  (For those in the know, “Torchwood” used to be a code name for “Doctor Who” used at the study.  You will notice that the letters from Doctor Who can be used to form the word Torchwood.)

After dinner and the show it was time for bed.  We “popped in” some What I Like About You that we watched while we cleaned in the bedroom.  Dominica assembled her new shoe rack and got it put into the closet which cleared up a ton of space and now the closet doors can close.  It also freed up some plastic bins that I need to organize other stuff around the house that has been sitting around waiting for a box into which to go.

I stayed up for a while after Dominica went to bed and did some web site work and Handbrake conversions.  Nothing heavy just some light stuff that needed my attention and that I wanted to get out of the way.  By a quarter after eleven, Oreo was getting quite insistent that I come to bed.  He doesn’t like it when one of us goes to bed early and one stays up.  It makes him nervous or something.

Dad is finally doing a rebuild of his Windows XP workstation today.  It has been been rebuilt in many years – even possibly never although that seems to be a stretch.  I generally recommend complete rebuilds every six to eighteen months with once a year being a pretty happy medium.  I rebuild my Linux box every six months but that is because I want to use the very latest OpenSUSE release.  My Windows machine probably sees a fresh install every nine months or so.  Being in the habit of constantly rebuilding means that you are always keeping things cleaned and you are always prepared to start fresh at any moment.

This coming weekend is going to be busy with homework.  Dominica is almost caught up in her class but still has a little bit that she needs to do plus the steady stream of new work.  This is one of my busy homework weekends just in general.  I am not behind at all but that doesn’t make it any easier.

I go in late on Fridays because I always have to stay late and normally no one needs me in the morning. But my BlackBerry was dead today so I decided to log in and check out my mail before heading in just to be on the safe side. I ended up working for two hours before heading out to catch the train.

Josh didn’t leave the apartment until eleven or so so that gave us a chance to hang out while I did some work. It was before ten when I left and he just dropped off my keys with the front desk. It was a short visit but more than most anyone else does. So far, other than our parents and siblings, only Josh and the Ralstons has come down from back home to visit us here. We have been here for two years now!

I grabbed breakfast from Airlie and got onto the PATH. I learned today that the PATH system is actually older than the New York City Subway and is the oldest underground train system in the New York City Metro area. Josh was planning to hit Food for Life for breakfast before heading off to Jersey City to work.

Work was quite busy. I was going crazy all day and was stuck working until rather late. But nothing that I wasn’t expecting so it was okay.

Before leaving the office, Kevin called to see if Dominica and I wanted to do dinner in Jersey City. He and Pam had run into Dominica on her way home so they had already talked to her. It was about twenty minutes before I got to leave the office so we planned to meet at the Newport/Pavona PATH station in Jersey City. That trip is really easy as it is a direct connection from World Trade Center where I get onto the train.

We all had dinner at Raaz, an Indian restaurant right across the street from the train station. Jersey City is so easy to deal with via the PATH. The PATH is almost a dedicated subway system for Jersey City and Hoboken with commuter connections to Newark and Manhattan.

Dinner was really good. Having lived in Newark for so long (Newark isn’t really a part of New Jersey) we have forgotten about the “New Jersey restaurant bill” problem where every restaurant in the state is happy to bring you food but then never brings you the bill and just forgets that you are there. Since we moved to New Jersey it has been completely consistent that no restaurant will ever bring you a bill no matter how much you try to get one. They just refuse to let you leave and yet they completely stop serving you so they don’t make any more money. In fact, it lowers their tips. And worse than that, in cases like tonight, the restaurant was completely full without any seats available and people were turning around at the door and deciding not to eat there even though there were multiple tables waiting half an hour or more to pay and leave after they were done and bored. It is one of the most bizarre business traditions I have ever seen. In New York the bill comes with dinner and if you want coffee and dessert they take the bill back and add that to it. They never take a risk of you taking up valuable real estate if you don’t want to. They don’t kick you out but they sure don’t do anything to make you stay against your will – and I appreciate that.

After dinner we came home and took care of Oreo. Then it was off to bed. I have a lot of work to do this weekend so I am going to be quite busy. No D&D tomorrow, unfortunately.

Last evening I had planned ahead and charged up the Nikon D50. I haven’t been using it too much recently and I hate not getting to. But today we don’t have any plans that would keep me from just using it all that I want so I decided to take it along with us. So it is all charged up and ready to go.

Everyone wanted to take NJ Transit this morning instead of the PATH. I am not sure why this is. We did the same thing last week with the Ralstons and the PATH was quick and easy and NJ Transit was slow and insanely overcrowded. There are few scenarios where taking NJ Transit from Manhattan to Newark seems to make sense. And it costs more than the PATH, I believe. It is definitely much harder to deal with logistically if nothing else and riding it is far less comfortable as it is not designed to be used like a subway which is how everyone uses it for that stretch.

We got into Penn Station in Manhattan and then it was off to the American Girls Store on Fifth Avenue near Rockefeller Center. Half of us just went to Rockefeller Center and did some window shopping while the girls did their doll shopping. It took over an hour for the doll shopping. While they were doing that I did poke my head into the Nintendo World Store just to be sure that there were no Wiis since Dominica still really wants one even if she won’t admit it but, of course, there are none to be found. If I was a third party software maker for Nintendo I would be canceling any projects I was working on for them too if they aren’t going to bother making the consoles at all. We also found a camera store where I was able to buy an SD card for my Nikon as the card that used to be in it is now in the Kodak camera.

After the American Girls Store the plan was to head for the American Museum of Natural History which everyone wanted to see after watching the movie Night at the Museum. We walked several blocks to get onto the subway and then took the metro over to the 50th Street Station and then caught the northbound line which took as much as half an hour to catch. While we were there we realized that all that we could do to get to 81st Street, where the museum is located, was to ride all of the way north to 125th in Harlem and then come back down on another line because of track and station construction. So after an incredibly long wait at the station we got on the train and headed north.

Once we arrived in Harlem we had a lot of time to stand around on the crowded platform and watch the sewer rats playing down by the tracks. It was at least another half an hour before a train arrived there. We were getting very concerned by this point. We were very happy to finally get to get back onto a subway car again. By the time we got down to 81st it had been well over an hour since we had first gotten onto a subway car. It was ridiculous. We lost a huge chunk of our day just standing around waiting for trains that were very poorly labeled.

We finally got to the American Museum of Natural History and everyone was starving so we decided to just eat right there in the cafeteria. That took forever as well as the place was totally packed with sheeple just standing around in lines, dawdling and not being able to decide what to eat. That took probably forty-five minutes or more just to grab the fastest thing and eat.

We made a mad dash around about two-thirds of the museum attempting to glimpse the most significant parts that were used as inspiration for Night at the Museum which, while loosely based on the AMNH, is not about that museum in particular. We didn’t get a chance to actually stop and see many of the exhibits which was disappointing but that would have taken a lot of time as the museum is very large. The dinosaur stuff is really top notch and quite interesting. We spent more time there then at any other exhibit.

A lot of the exhibits were really poor or just weird. Like all of the mammal exhibits. They didn’t seem to be about education but were like a really cheap and morbid version of a zoo. But zoos have real animals which is much nicer and more interesting. And NYC has several world class zoos so it is quite strange that so much money is going into this exhibition of carcasses. A lot of museum seems to be nothing but evolution propaganda. The only point of huge exhibits is to demonstrate evolution as if it was observed (ergo science) and not assumed. A lot of money is going into promoting dogma rather than research. And to what benefit? Of all of science it seems that evolution has become the only bit anyone cares to teach (sounds like religious fanatics) and chemistry, physics, biology (biology is NOT the study of evolution as people would be lead to believe today but is actually the study of living things,) etc. But we can’t use evolution as a basis for furthering the advancement of humanity. We are using it to pull critical resources away from studies that are good for us and help us advance. We are using evolution as an excuse to stop looking forward and to always look behind.

The museum had some interesting exhibits on the American Indians, the African rainforest and other things but we didn’t get to see them long enough to even know what was there. We just walked through them. Maybe Min and I will make it back sometime to see what there really is in the museum. It is pretty close to us. Sometime when the museum is not full of little kids would be good. Most of the people at the museum seemed to be too young to even grasp why they were there. The rainforest exhibit was really cool, what little we saw, and we definitely want to go back and see that because it is a large scale replica of a portion of the rainforest in the area of Africa where the Ralstons are moving later this year. It is too bad that we didn’t know that that was there a week ago when they were here or we would have gone there so that they could have seen it.

We did the whole museum in about an hour which means that we spent as much time getting to the museum (when we were only half an hour away by foot) as we did in the museum! Everyone was exhausted by this point and we just headed back to Newark. We took the subway down to the World Trade Center this time so that we could take the PATH which proved to be much, much better than taking NJ Transit and much faster.

Oreo had a really long day alone in the apartment but he took it well and was a very good dog all day. We all came back and hung around in the apartment until eight. Before leaving we had dinner delivered from Nino’s since Italian was about the only thing that everyone could agree on. We had wanted to take everyone over to Food for Life so that they could see where we eat all of the time and try the amazing food but no one wanted to not have meat and FFL doesn’t do meat so Italian it was. Nino’s was very good though.

After dinner we all went down to the bowling alley and the media room. Dominica and Francesca played Guitar Hero II while everyone else bowled. I took the camera down and took pictures since I can’t bowl. I got over a hundred pictures while we were down there. The girls seemed to have a good time bowling. We were surprised to find that the bowling alley in our building has “auto bumpers” that come up when the girls would come up to bowl! The system kept track of whose turn it was and it knew when they were up and the bumpers would just pop up. It was very cool. It made it a lot more fun.

After the bowling and the Guitar Hero we all did some karaoke on the PS2 and then it was time for bed. Everyone is getting up early tomorrow so they need to get to bed tonight.