Oreo was still really tired today and very itchy still from his weekend in the grass.  We decided to have him stay home again today because he needs time to sleep and for his skin to hear.  Going to daycare would just take more energy out of him that he needs for his body to repair itself.  He was pretty excited when he figured out that he was spending the day with his daddy.

Dominica started the Hewlett-Packard Linux 101 class today.  The class doesn’t officially begun until next week but she is trying to get a jump start on it and had me download Red Hat’s Fedora 9 so that she could do an install with it as the HP Linux classes are based on Fedora.

Today we got our very first items for the forthcoming baby.  We got the Winnie-the-Pooh collection by A. A. Milne in hardcover.  All four books, When We Were Young, Winnie the Pooh, The House on Pooh Corner and Now We Are Six. Normally we would have waited to buy baby stuff but we are up to the stage where we are supposed to be reading to the baby so we wanted something to get started with that is nice stuff that will be long lasting and something that our child will always want to own.  So our child already owns four books!

Also arriving today is the first Business Analyst book on my reading list: Writing Effective Use Cases.  As I am suddenly very responsible for BA education I am taking it upon myself to read, and to some degree define, the ultimate Busness Analyst Reading List.  Everyone seems to agree that this and the BA’s UML book top the list so I am starting with those.  You can’t go wrong with Alistair Cockburn and I am looking forward to this book.

My day at the office ended up being so busy that I didn’t even manage to have lunch.  I started trying to get lunch around one thirty and it was five before I even knew what happened.  I was on a conference call solid from around one thirty until five which really ate away the day.

Dominica decided that tonight she would be cooking so it is vegetarian corn dogs, corn on the cob and macaroni salad for us.  I was really tired after my incredibly long afternoon of supporting a single issue for hours – hours past my “end of day” since I am on the early shift this week.  That will wear you out pretty quickly.

We watched some of the fifth season of Third Rock from the Sun and relaxed for the most part.  At one point, probably around ten in the evening, I took Oreo out for his usual walk around the block.  When we went outside we noticed that all of the streets were blocked off around our building and that the sidewalks were covered in electrical and lighting equipment.  A large tour bus sat on the street.  It was all very strange.

As Oreo and I walk across the street to Airlee we noticed that the half of the building not used by Airlee for their cafe had all of its signage replaced with “Mars Cometh – One Night Only”, a velvet rope was set up and a red carpet was down and a security guard was sitting on a stool in front of the building.  This caught me by surprise as this building has been empty for the entire time that we have lived in Newark and no work has been being done on it.

I asked around and learned that Commerce, behind our building, is being used for the filming of the upcoming movie The Perfect Age of Rock and Roll.  So Oreo and I got to walk through the set just as filming was about to begin.  Working on Wall Street means that I see television and film shoots all of the time but this was pretty neat as the filming is literally happening just a few feet outside of our living room windows and part of the movie is in a building that I eat in several times a week.

Long ago I walked through the filming of Blues Brothers 2000 while I was in Toronto with Kelley’s Heroes for the Santa Clause Parade.  That was either 1996 or 1997.

I was talking to a friend in Toronto, Ontario, Canada today and we were discussing our blogs and blogging in general. So I decided that I would post a link to his here: Distinguished Geek.

I was not ready to be back at work today.  Just not up for it.  Today was a long and crappy day.  Just one thing going wrong after another.  One of those “don’t touch anything” days.  Best to just hide under the desk and unplug the phone.  Except somehow I would get electrocuted unplugging the phone.  So I left it plugged in and plugged my ears instead and hummed quietly to myself while rocking back and forth slowly.  (My readers from the United Kingdom will recognize humourous sardonicism here but for my more “American” readers I will add “j/k”.)

If you are impressed by my use of big words I can tell you that I learned to use the word “sardonic” by reading Timothy Zahn novels.  I never knew the word before that but he uses it almost exclusively instead of sarcastic which isn’t totally correct but they are very similar.  I have used it myself ever since.  It is one of the very few words that I can distinctly remember reading several times, wanting to know more about and researching.

I thought that I would escape the office early today – mostly in an attempt to avoid any further disaster – but actually got stuck doing a twelve hour day when we had a server that needed to be addressed during an evening green zone.  Nothing ever goes as planned.

I got home around seven thirty.  We ordered in Nino’s and spent our short evening watching The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.  It is amazing now looking back on what I feel is a “not all that old of a show” and realizing just how old and bizarre it seems now.  And to realize that my cousin Jeremy was just a babe in swaddling when that show first aired and that the cultural references in it are so rooted in the 1980s that much of it just wouldn’t make any sense.  I realize now that most people who enjoy Will Smith in movies think that he was always an actor and don’t realize that FBoBA was a kitschy sit com based on his rapping career in the duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.

Dominica decided today that she is going to try Netflix.  She signed us up for the $8.99 per month plan which includes unlimited DVD rentals (and we believe unlimited BluRay and HD-DVD rentals once we get a player for those but we need to check on the details) plus unlimited play instantly online movies.  Our deal only lets us have one DVD rented at a time but really we only watch so many movies so it should work out pretty well.  And our plan is to have a computer hooked up to a television in the living room which means that we can easily use the unlimited download service to watch movies that when we don’t have a DVD rented.  At $8.99 per month it seems like we can’t go wrong.  It will be so easy for us to save money that it seems like a pretty safe investment.  The only problem is that it will fuel Dominica’s addiction to just watching “whatever is on” since there will always be something on.  Much more so than if we had television.

The really big upside to the Netflix plan, for us, is that it means that Dominica can easily rent tons of movies that she wants to watch once that we don’t think are things that we will want to own and she can watch them on her own and we won’t feel like we have to watch them together all of the time.  That is a problem for us since she always wants to watch for more material than I do.  It should save us a bit of money in the “mediocre movies that we will only watch once” category which we had been buying a bit for a while because it was about the same cost as renting.  But this is so much cheaper and easier that it should work out.  And not having to go out to a video store is a big deal – especially living in Newark.  I wouldn’t even know how to rent a movie here if I had to.

One thing that is unfortunate about the Netflix service is that they require Windows in order to use it.  I did some research and the videos are delivered using Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology.  Although I wonder what creates the Windows requirement then since Silverlight is supposed to be cross platform supporting Mac and Linux quite well.  Perhaps the requirement isn’t as firm as it seems.  I will attempt to find out.  Our plan is to have a Vista workstation in the living room by March and a new Mac Mini in the bedroom around the same time period.

Dominica ordered our first DVD, 28 Weeks Later, which we should have in two days or so.  She is building up a massive queue of movies that she wants to see.  It will take her years to get through what she has already.  We are very excited about the massive collection of classic movies of which we can take advantage quite easily.

Two more Dungeons and Dragons books arrived from eBay purchases today.  We received “The Complete Mage” and “Monsters of Faerun”.  I also won six additional books on eBay today but it will be a week or two until those have a chance to arrive.  We are building quite the D&D and Forgotten Realms library for our game.  I hope that we get lots of opportunity to use all of this stuff.