Today the baby is considered to be full term!  That means that if the baby comes today we are no longer considered to be premature but just simply “on the early side”.  It also means that the possibility of the baby arriving any day is much, much higher than it has been.  We are into the common, healthy labor zone in which we will remain either until little baby Miller arrives or we hit two weeks after the due date (in 35 days time.)  It is not likely that the doctor and midwife would allow us to go for a whole two weeks after due date.  Most likely labor would be induced at one week after the due date.

Dominica and I were really exhausted when the alarm rang at five thirty this morning.  We had, at best three and a half hours of restless sleep.  It was a rough night in a completely bare apartment.  It was a bit strange sleeping in the apartment when there was nothing but one lamp sitting on the window sill, the air mattress on the floor and some garbage bags with our clothes.

I got up and showered and then Dominica got up.  We were hurting pretty badly and Oreo was completely exhausted.  He slept in his car seat which was pulled up next to the air mattress so that he could be close to us since there was not enough room on the mattress itself for him to be with us.

Loading the car took two trips with the valet cart this morning and the car was parked way down the street so that took us extra long as I had to walk quite far with the cart twice.  Today is the last day for the Central Parking Valet Service at Eleven80 as well.  The valets were all given jobs at other locations, I have been told, so that is good.  I am sure that they do not really appreciate having to learn the ropes at a new location and get to know new coworkers, though.

Dominica got off to work a little on the late side.  I went back to the building and got Ramone, the resident manager, to come up around seven fifty to do the move-out inspection.  That only took a minute and went really well.  We were concerned that we would be charge for wall damage from where the television was mounted in our bedroom and where the plants were hung in the living room but we were not.  He said that that stuff was fine and that they expected to be fixing those things.  The only thing for which we may be charged is some carpet stains if they don’t come up with the steam cleaning.  We expect that they will so no big deal.

I headed out from Eleven80 just after eight twenty.  Nadine was working the desk which was very cool that we got to see her as we left this morning.  Leaving was very emotional.  We have been at Eleven80 for a very long time.  We have gotten to really know the place and feel like this is home.  Even though Newark was never really a place where we fit in we have been there for so long that it seems quite strange to be leaving.

For my blog readers from Eleven80 – if you want to find me via email or to get my phone number just go see Nadine.  She has that information for you.

Before heading to the PATH I walked over to Airlie Cafe and picked up breakfast.  It was my last morning to see them as well.  I got my “usual” breakfast sandwich, egg, cheese, black pepper and homefries on a hard roll as well as a cheese danish.  I said my goodbyes and walked to Newark Penn Station to get onto the commuter train to World Trade Center.  It feels very weird doing this for the last time.

Today was an absolutely gorgeous morning.  Crisp and clean air (the views of Manhattan from 1180 Raymond before I left were great – boy am I ever going to miss that) while being bright and sunny.  It is mornings like this that make autumn in the northeastern US so popular.  I had a nice walk to the train station and then from World Trade Center down to the bottom of Wall Street.

I had a large box of Lindt Swiss Chocolates brought to me desk today as a thank you.  Good stuff. Lindt is my favourite chocolate maker.

Today I finally brought my little fan into the office.   I originally bought this fan when I worked out in Warren before they began the crackdown on anyone trying to make themselves productive by being at a comfortable temperature. Then I took it home to keep it from being confiscated as it is a nice little fan that I bought from Walmart and of which many people were jealous.  Since fans are allowed and prevalent on Wall Street I have been meaning to bring my little fan in with me but there is never a time when it is convenient to carry a fan into the office with you.  Today it just needed to be done so that the fan would not be shipped to Peekskill where it would really not do me any good.  So I stuck it into my bag and carried it into the office today.  Now it is set up on my desk and helping to keep me cool while I work.

I decided that I really needed a command line Twitter client today so I whipped one up in Ruby.  I used it extensively today and I much prefer it to other Twitter clients that I have used.  It is also much easier to automate over methods.  Now I can start doing neat, automated Twitter messages without too much effort.  I am even considering making a little service that will read Twitter or Identi.ca and auto-publish to the opposite service.  In that way I could switch to an Identi.ca account but have everything that I do automatically appear in Twitter.  Then people who use either system would keep getting updates.  Even cooler would be if I set up my own Laconi.ca server (which is my long-term plan) and then have a service pull that feed and update Twitter, Identi.ca and maybe some others as well.  A microblogging-blaster.  Maybe this will be a project for next week.  I am talking myself into it as I write about it.  Seems like a neat idea.

I skipped lunch today and at around three in the afternoon Dan and I walked down to NYHRC on Whitehall and did our workout.  He played basketball for a bit while I swam.  I got a pretty good workout today and felt really good about it.  My swimming is definitely improving.  I was really glad to get in to the pool today as I have been missing quite a bit this past week and I don’t want to slack off nor do I want to waste the money that I put into the gym membership.  In theory, Katie is going to be able to start swimming with us soon too.

Dominica left work and went over to Doggie Paradise to pick up Oreo and then to visit some friends who just had a baby a week or two ago before she drives up to Peekskill.

We are so excited about tonight – our first night living full time in our new home.  That is going to be awesome.  I have a pretty light weekend from work too.  I originally had deployments scheduled for tomorrow morning but they were postponed until next weekend.  I will be doing a lot of homework this weekend and a lot of unpacking.

Dad and aunt Sharon are spending the night tonight and hanging out tomorrow morning since we have gotten very little time to actually visit even though they have been here for almost an entire week.  The commute time from Manhattan to Peekskill is pretty grueling and by the time that we would get to Peekskill it was always very late and everyone was so tired.  They are heading back home probably around lunch time at which point I will be getting to work on the homework situation from my new office in the basement.

Beyond the painting, which has been a tremendously huge project we are really hoping that dad will be able to get the Westinghouse 32″ LCD screen that we have mounted in the living room.  Until we have that mounted on the wall above the fireplace we really don’t have any way to watch anything or to try out the Wii Fit or the PlayStation 3.  Our first Amazon shipment, with a PS3 game and our first BluRay content, is supposed to have arrived today as well.  I checked the website and have not seen it listed as “out for delivery” or “delivered” yet so that is not a good sign.  The site still claims that it will arrive today.

Dominica took care of forwarding our mail to the new house today as well as setting up Netflix to go to the new house.  She also added BluRay as an option on our Netflix account.  Now we can really start getting use out of the PS3.

I managed to get in some class time for my RIT class.  There is almost no class discussion going on at this point.  I guess that people are winding down as they prepare for the final.  Unfortunately we have not yet gotten any feedback on the second draft of a final project so we really have almost no direction coming into our last week of the quarter.  This is really rough.  We have had almost no feedback at all for the entire course.  I have no idea whatsoever how I am doing or if I am even on the right track for this very large final project.  This is going to be a rough weekend attempting to do a project completely abstractly while being concerned that I am not even tackling the right problem.

Work at the office wrapped up at a decent time tonight.  I had some paperwork that needed my attention so I took care of that and then decided to just take the opportunity to deal with some work that is scheduled for this weekend.  The more that I am able to get out of the way tonight is less that I have to worry about tomorrow or on Sunday.

Dominica filled up the Mazda today while she was in Wallington, New Jersey.  She paid just $2.19 per gallon!  That is crazy.  We were at almost $4.00 just a few months ago.  This is so cheap.  I am pretty sure that gas is now cheaper than it was when we moved out of Geneseo well over two and a half years ago.  Gas is a big cost of living item and with it being half of what it was recently and lower than it was almost three years ago it does a lot to buffer against inflation.  We have not yet even begun to see what impacts the lower fuel costs may have on the transportation of food and manufactured good either.  There is a real possibility for big cost reductions although a lot of businesses raised prices based on the excuse of high fuel and are likely to be reluctant to bring the prices back down now that people have adjusted.

I called dad at a quarter after seven.  He and aunt Sharon were sitting in the dark hiding from trick or treaters because they didn’t have candy to hand out.  They reported that a package arrived today which is almost certainly from Amazon which should be Heroes Season 2 on BluRay for Dominica and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition for me for the PS3.

My Friday night work went really well.  I burned through a ton of stuff very quickly.  I was quite productive.  I was very happy with the work that I was able to complete tonight.

I wrapped up at the office on Wall Street at eight in the evening.  Late but not all that late.  I am posting before I leave the office as I will not be back online until tomorrow.  I am hoping to be home before ten.

It was almost eight by the time that the maid wrapped up and we were in the process of loading the car.  When we went down to the lobby to get the car loaded we ran into a ton of people on their way to the halloween party and everyone kept asking us to go.  We finally caved in and decided to put in an appearance.

We love the Eleven80 Halloween Party, it is awesome.  It is Eleven80’s biggest event of the year.  A lot of people were really disappointed that they didn’t get to see Oreo compete in the dog costume contest this year.  He won last year and has a really cool pirate (salty dog?) costume this year that Dominica’s mom made for him.  He is the only dog that always has a custom made costume.  He looks so adorable in it.  He was far and away the favourite to win this year but with him being in Peekskill there was no way for us to get him down to Newark in time for the judging.

We stayed at the party for maybe half an hour.  It wasn’t very long.  We did not venture in very far and only made it to the ramp of the bowling alley.  We got to see several people just before leaving so that was good.  It is really starting to hit us tonight that we are leaving and really have been here for a really long time and know a lot of people now.  This is our third Eleven80 Halloween Party.  We were invited back for next year’s party and we will definitely make an effort to come visit.  Oreo would love to be back for an evening and show off his costume.

We hit the road around nine thirty with a very loaded car full of plants and food from the apartment.  It was almost eleven when we arrived in Peekskill!  We had not been planning on having been out this late.  What a long day.  We are not sorry that we delayed and stopped by the party, though, as it was really good to get to say some goodbyes.

Dad and aunt Sharon were still awake when we got to the house although they sure were not going to be awake for much longer.  Oreo had really been missing us all day and spent the day following dad around like, well, like a lost puppy.  We unloaded the car and visited for twenty minutes or so and got to get a first look at how the painting has been coming along.  The upstairs looks awesome.  The nursery is all but done and the master bathroom is done and bits of the master bedroom are done (there is just a master bedroom and the nursery as far as bedrooms go.)  They are hoping to complete the master bedroom tomorrow.

Dominica, Oreo and I arrived back at Eleven80 in Newark at one thirty in the morning.  Wow were we tired.  We pumped up the air mattress and did some quick, last minute packing to be sure that we were ready for tomorrow morning and got to bed sometime around a quarter till two!  The alarm was set for five thirty so this is a very short night.

No sooner than we dropped off to sleep on the not very comfortable air mattress than the phone rang, it was ten after two in the morning, from the valet saying that our car was double parked and blocking the street and that they needed our keys.  We had dropped off the keys so we were pretty confused.  I got out of bed and searched around the completely empty apartment for a few minutes before Kamil, the concierge, found where they had fallen behind a computer monitor on the desk and had disappeared.  So our short, less than four hour night was now a much less than four hour night with an interruption in the middle of it.  Tomorrow morning is going to be rough.

There is very little for us to do in the morning.  We are both going to shower, pack up the few clothes that we have here, deflate the bed, load the car, get Oreo ready for his daycare halloween party and get Dominica off to her final day at work.  (Her finaly official day.  We’ve decided that if she feels well enough come Monday that she is going to work Monday and Tuesday of next week.  Those are the two busiest days for her office when they will miss her the most.  Then she will take her three bereavement days and that will round out the week.  It will be a full five days later before she could work again and there is no way that she will be able to do so that close to the baby day.)  Then, as soon as Dominica leaves for work I am orchestrating the check-out of the apartment.  That is just a brief walkthrough to determine any damage, stains, missing parts, etc. in the apartment for which we will be charged.  Very quick and easy.  Then I will take the PATH from Newark to the WTC for the last time.

After work tomorrow we all just head to Peekskill and shift completely to our new home!

3 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Today was one of the busiest, craziest days in a long time.  So much to tell, I am going to put the headlines for the day here for those without time to keep up.  Today: Dominica’s grandfather passed away, Dominica and I moved from Newark to Peekskill, Dominica got a Playstation 3 and Wii Fit for her belated birthday and my dad and my aunt Sharon came to Peekskill to visit.

Last night, Dominica and I stayed up packing until well after two thirty in the morning.  It was probably around three when we finally got to bed.  Way too late.  Neither of us really slept at all either as we knew that we were not going to really get any sleep and there was just so much to do today.

We were awoken by the building’s fire alarm.  We should have guessed that this would happen.  The universe was not about to let us make it out of Newark without another fire alarm.  So instead of sleeping in until the last minute we were very much awake at six fifty five in the morning with almost no sleep.  This is going to make for a very long day indeed.

Since the fire alarm got woken us up we decided that it just made sense to get up and to get moving since there was just so much to do today.  A crazy amount of stuff.

The movers arrived just before ten which worked out perfectly for us as it gave us almost three hours to work on the apartment and to get all of the last minute stuff packed and ready.  Had they arrived right at eight it might have been pretty rough.

Before the movers arrived I walked over to Airlie Cafe and picked up breakfast.  The owner of Airlie bought breakfast for us as today is the last day that they know for sure that we are going to be in town.  Airlie is one of the few things in Newark that we are going to miss.

I also took the chance while the Mazda was out (Dominica forgot to cancel it for this morning) to load it up with as much stuff as we were sure was going to travel in it.  My office desktops and the bin of our last minute office equipment like my office router and final monitor went into the car so that they would be out of the way of the movers and ready for us to drive them up to Peekskill.

The movers arrived at ten in the morning and got straight to work.  They moved our boxes and furniture all out to their truck in just two hours.  Very impressive considering that they needed to go down sixteen stories by way of the elevator to get between the apartment and the truck.

The biggest problem of the morning arose when the smoke detectors (separate from the fire alarms) started going off on our floor.  They weren’t going off as if there was smoke but the way that they always do in Eleven80 – just beeping every 20 – 30 seconds for no reason.  Two alarms in our apartment and at least three out in the hall were going off.  Each individual beep sent Oreo into a panic.  The poor thing.  We were forced to spend over an hour with him locked in the bathroom with the shower running to cover the sound.  He was completely terrified and shaking horribly.  It was very sad.

At noon we hopped into the Mazda and headed north for Peekskill.  It is a cold and rainy day today.  Not ideal for moving but better than if it was too warm.

We got to the new house and unloaded the Mazda.  We had about an hour to relax before the movers arrived to unload the truck.  The unloading started off pretty smoothly with the basement office getting moved in early.

It was around three thirty, while the unloading had just begun, that dad and aunt Sharon arrived at the house.  They had left Leicester, New York at nine thirty this morning.  So the trip took them almost exactly six hours, but they had spent much of the time driving at no more than thirty miles per hour as they came through southern western New York in heavy snows, especially near Binghamton.  So dad estimates that in good weather the trip will take between five and five and a half hours.  Google Maps puts the trip at just under five and a half.

Just minutes after dad and aunt Sharon arrived at the house, Dominica’s phone rang with her mother calling to tell her that her maternal grandfather, Papa, had passed away last night.  He was at home, apparently watching the World Series, when he just went peacefully.  Dominica was, of course, a mess and unable to continue helping with the unloading of the truck so most of everything was just brought into the living room as I wasn’t sure where a lot of it should go.

Originally Dominica had an appointment with her midwife and clinic at four fifteen this afternoon – less than an hour from when she found out about her grandfather.  So she had to call and cancel the appointment.  That is a bit of a problem because we already had to push off the appointment from last week and she is so far along that not seeing her midwife for any amount of time can be problematic.  It is especially necessary for her to get an appointment as this is the appointment where they make decisions about her job and when she is or is not able to keep working.  Planning and scheduling needs to be done and Dominica is getting stressed not knowing what is going to happen and when.  She was unable to schedule another appointment as the schedule this week is really unknown and she is really upset today and really just can’t make that decision yet.  So that is up in the air right now.

The move wrapped up by five.  We were really happy with the movers from Suddath in Wayne, New Jersey and United Van Lines.  The whole move went very easily and smoothly.  That was so painless!

For dinner we all went over to the New City Diner on Crompond Road.  It was the quickest, easiest place to go – one of the very few restaurants that Dominica and I know how to get to.  After dinner we went down to the Beach Shopping Center so that Dominica could run into the dollar store there to pick up some shower supplies.  While we were at the plaza I ran into GameStop to check out what they had since I am on the hunt for Dominica’s very late birthday present.

We were in luck that GameStop had what we needed so I bought Dominica a Sony PlayStation 3, the PS3 BluRay Remote Control (so that the unit works more like a BluRay Player than a video game console) as well as Wii Fit for the Nintendo Wii which she really wants and almost no one has in stock.  I’ve been concerned about being able to get the Wii Fit for Christmas and now we already have it!

Dominica was very surprised to suddenly have a PS3.  She seems to have been secretly wanting one for reasons beyond its ability to play BluRay movies.  In fact, she seems to not even be that concerned about being able to watch BluRays and is more focused on being able to get some games for it even though neither of us really knows any games that we really would want for it.  I was going to get Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Game of the Year Edition but they did not have any a the store so I will need to get that online tomorrow.

She was very excited to be able to get a Wii Fit as she has been wanting one but they have been sold out everywhere and seem to be pretty much impossible to find.  Even Amazon doesn’t have any.  I had thought about getting it for her for Christmas but I am assuming that she will want to use it some after the baby comes in a few weeks and it will be pretty much impossible to hide from her between now and Christmas.  So I just gave it to her tonight.

We went back to the house and dad and aunt Sharon set about working on the nursery.  There is a lot of painting and wall work that needs to be done this week – especially in the nursery.  There was a wallpaper border in the nursery that was the first thing to come down.  Aunt Sharon actually managed to get the border all down this evening!

Dominica worked on unpacking.  There is a ton of unpacking to do and it will take us a few weeks before we even begin to get through any amount of it, but at least today we have a nice start.  A lot of stuff just needs to be nicely boxed, protected and moved into the attic.

Dominica had called into the office this morning to talk to them about her back.  Her back was really hurting last night while we were packing and she was sure that after a whole day of packing today that she would need tomorrow to recover or else she might be in far worse shape.  So she called her manager first thing this morning and asked what the office situation was like tomorrow.  He said that they were fine so it would be no problem if she took a sick day.  So she is off and we are able to stay in Peekskill tonight!  Now we get to be the first (or among the first at least) people to stay in our new home (since we bought it.)

I spoke to Maids on Call today and scheduled them to come out on Thursday afternoon to Newark to clean the apartment.  That is a real relief.  They will be doing the final cleaning so that we can get out of the apartment on Friday morning.  That is one less thing that we need to worry about before we are done with this very long week.

Tomorrow morning I will be experimenting with taking Metro North from Peekskill to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan and then the 4 & 5 Subway line from Grand Central to Wall Street.  This will be my first time ever riding the Metro North train or using Grand Central Terminal.  So who knows how that will go.  I’m nervous that this is going to be really complex and time consuming which will be awful as the quality of life in our new home is really dependent upon the quality of the commute into the city.

Andy called tonight to let me know that email and instant messaging is down.  I had no idea since I am in the new house without any Internet access (we get hooked up with Optimum Online tomorrow morning if all goes well.)  Talk about awful timing.  Apparently it has been down all afternoon and I was just now finding out.  Craptastic.  (Or, as Katie would say, craptacular.)

I spent an hour or two, while everyone else was working on the house, working with Andy by phone or attemting to use SSH from my BlackBerry to fix the server.  We had no luck doing any repairs tonight but were able to determine that it was not our fault but that the data center had, either intentionally or through gross incompetence, power cycled my entire rack of servers!  Almost all of the servers had been about to flip a full year of uptime this weekend too.  So it was pretty obvious that they had all just restarted a few hours earlier.  Email and IM simply didn’t turn back on.

Andy called the data center several times but couldn’t get anyone on the phone or to get anyone to respond to voicemail.  This indicates that they probably allowed the entire data center to lose power and everyone under the sun is calling them to yell at them and to get things fixed.  What a long day.

The really exciting thing today is that we got to sleep in our new home.  The movers set up our bedroom so we have our bed and everything so we can sleep pretty comfortably.  We tried to get to bed early but didn’t succeed so well.  We went to bed around ten thirty or so.

12 Work Days Left for Dominica; House closing scheduled in 6 days.

Everything is getting so close.  We are really starting to feel the pressure as we need to have everything done very, very soon.  Dominica brought home the boxes last night and the hallway is full of boxes that we need to assemble and fill with stuff.  We had no time to start the packing process last night so we are expecting to be able to start today.  Just a few boxes each day is the plan starting with the books.  Lots of books.

My brain got plenty of sleep but my body definitely feels the two days of swimming.  I do real laps and don’t play around in the pool so I have gotten a bit of exercise the last two days and I feel it.  We have been going to the New York Health and Racquet Club on Whitehall.  They are the only gym that we can find in the area that has a pool and a pool is what I need.  I can keep myself going to a pool day after day but using weight machines or whatever always falls apart eventually.  The pool is also much easier on your body – very unlikely to do any real damage from swimming.

Dominica discovered that HP’s 2133 mini laptop (a.k.a. NetBook) machines have dropped dramatically in price recently.  The HP2133 is extra cool because online all of the other NetBooks that I have seen, this one ships with SUSE Linux installed rather than some form of Fedora.

BluRay Players are finally becoming affordable.  The Samsung BD-P1500 is just a little over two hundred dollars now from Amazon.  Not too bad considering it was well over four hundred for most of the year for an older model.  They are getting into the range where it makes a lot of sense to get one.  If we weren’t in the process of closing on the house I would have ordered this today.  Dominica is very anxious to get a BluRay player and we have been thinking that we were going to hold off until we could just get a Sony PS3 instead but now the BluRay players are so inexpensive that getting one of those and an XBOX 360 is about the same price as the PS3 alone.

Today began another round of layoffs at the office.  I think that this is my fourth or fifth round of layoffs since starting here.  I am not concerned for myself, but I do know people who are affected again this round.  Constant layoffs are no fun.  Everyone always wonders if it will be their department next.  It happens so often that people just keep the idea of the layoffs in the back of their minds all of the time.  It is not good for moral or productivity.

Much like Eastman Kodak through the nineties.  I remember that the layoffs just came and came in waves.  It became a constant culture of layoffs with no end in sight.  It was just business as usual at Kodak after a while and that is what is happening here.  Layoff announcements don’t even invoke a response anymore as everyone forgets when they start and stop.

Oreo is feeling so much better each day.  The steroids are really doing the trick.  Of course, we don’t want to keep him on steroids all of the time as it is not healthy for him, but for the moment it is really helping him get over his horrible allergies.  It is so rough watching his life deteriorate down to nothing but scratching and scratching.  He spends all of his time doing it, and he is very unhappy.

For lunch today, three of us drove out to Pooja to get Indian buffet.  I was starving before going to lunch having skipped breakfast.  Then, of course, I ate too much at the buffet and felt like crap all afternoon.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I caught the express train home and Dominica managed to pick me up as I walked along Broad heading towards Eleven80.  Today was a very easy commuting day.

I was not very hungry after my big lunch and so decided to skip dinner this evening.  Dominica was so tired that she really did not want to have dinner either.  So she just had some oatmeal and vegetables.  We watched a little Fresh Prince of Bel Air and were off to bed by nine thirty!  Crazy, I know.

Tomorrow I am home with Oreo and tonight is my chance to really catch up on some sleep.  Tomorrow Dominica is working an extra hour to cover for someone at the office and so really needs her sleep tonight as working really wears her out.  Luckily it was on a Thursday that they needed her to work extra so that she didn’t have to drive Oreo to and from daycare like she normally has to do.  So in reality her day tomorrow is only marginally longer than normal.  It might actually be shorter.

We found out tonight that the Eleven80 Halloween Party has been scheduled for October 30th which is our very last night staying at Eleven80 before we move completely to Peekskill and give up the apartment.  So we might go now that we know that it is possible.  We had a really good time last year.  Oreo loves getting all dressed up for parties.

Speaking of changes at Eleven80.  We also found out that starting November 1st, there is no more valet parking at Eleven80.  Instead of using valets to park the cars under Military Park the building has worked out an agreement to allow residents to park at 1160 Raymond Blvd. in the garage directly next door to Eleven80 where they can get to and from their own cars anytime that they want.

It may not sound as nice as valet parking but I am positive that this will do wonders for the building.  Having nothing but valet service and having no space in which to operate it really does not work well.  It works better in Manhattan where you need your car only seldom but in Newark you need it far too often to always have to deal with having it taken away and brought around for you.  The new parking does cost 25% more than the old parking but personally I think that it is probably going to be well worth it.

The thing that is awful, in a way, is that the new parking scheme takes effect the instant that our lease is up.  We end at midnight, October 31st and that is when the new parking begins.  I am curious as to the logistics of moving all of those cars from Military Park’s garage which is valet access only to 1160 which requires the residents to drive from one to the other.  I wonder if anyone has thought about that yet.  That is going to be a mess!  I am SO glad that Dominica and I are not coming “home” to Eleven80 that night but driving straight to Peekskill after work.

It is just sad, though, because we were some of the most vocal opponents of the valet scheme.  It just didn’t work and caused problems no end.  The street has been a mess with cars double and triple parked, using side streets, being blocked in, getting left out all night, etc.  The valets were just starting to get into the groove, though, after two years and it has not been so bad for a while.  But the constant parking tickets and other hassles have only gotten worse.  Too bad that we will never get to park in the new garage.  That would have made living at Eleven80 much nicer.

I was awoken this morning by the phone.  It was an renewal operator from Ziff Davis Enterprise trying to renew my Baseline subscription.  This same guy called me at work yesterday and on the train ride home even though I told him that I would be on the train and unable to take his call.  This whole process makes me really upset because I can renew online but they never let you.  In general I don’t do business with anyone who contacts me by phone, especially my mobile phone.

So this morning he convinced me to waste several minutes going through the same information that they already have about me and taking forever to do so because he wouldn’t listen to me at all.  Then, when we got to the end, he tried to renew my eWeek as well.  I explained, over and over, that just like the Baseline subscription, I was already getting eWeek and did not need to renew and that, in fact, I received more than one copy of eWeek each week because someone had called me, screwed up and didn’t listen to me, and that I most definitely would not like to receive a third copy each week.

Instead of paying attention and not renewing my eWeek he went into a diatribe extolling the virtues of eWeek as if having a third copy would magically make its real benefits shine through.  At this point I couldn’t take it anymore.  I informed him that I was not authorizing my Baseline renewal and that I wanted my eWeek canceled.  I’ve had it with these guys.  They aren’t polite, they aren’t informed.  They must get commission because they will do anything to get a subscription out to you.  They are very, very rude.

I tried to contact Ziff Davis’ customer service but their “Contact Us” page goes to nothing but an advertising submittal form.  I did some more searching until I found a general contact link for them.  I am sure that it will go no where but at least I will inform them as to why they lost a customer (or, as they sell me to their advertisers, three customers.)

After being a customer of ten years and always renewing my subscription online they felt that it was worth paying someone to call me and offend me.  Well, that was the last of my paper based IT publications.  I had long ago dropped publications from other companies and was only really enjoying InfoWorld but they switched to all electronic a year or so ago – so I read them online.  I only read eWeek, which was pretty weak in general, because it was handy to have something laying around in print.  No more though.  At least I will have that much less mail to deal with on a weekly basis.  And I was beginning to feel like spending time reading that stuff wasn’t very valuable.  The quality has gone down a lot in recent years as the competition has mostly gone away.

A woman in Sweden, misunderstanding baggage checkin instructions (and not being one to simply “follow the crowd”, placed herself onto the automated luggage handling system and was whisked away with everyone elses’, but not her own, luggage.

I went out to walk Oreo around noon and discovered that our street, Commerce, had been blocked off by the police and that the center of the street was being set up with a large stage. Not something that you see every day in Newark. It is really weird the amount of stuff that they do here for which they do not inform the local residents at all. In fact, living right here on the block where this is going on, I find it hard to find out what event is underway even when it has already begun. Even the concierge in our building have no idea.

On my next trip out, to get lunch at Airlie, someone handed me a flyer in the street for the “event” – their only announcement of their event was to hand out flyers in the street like the people pushing the girlie shows in Manhattan? The flyers claimed that it was an extension of the DNC from a group called “Black by Popular Demand”.

I found out from sources here and there that there was some announcement made last evening that parking on our street would not be available today but apparently those signs were taken down during the night and did not exist this morning. Then, this morning, the police came in and had cars towed away and then put up the “no parking” signs to act as if the people parking there were informed!

I also found out that the businesses on the street, but not the residents, were given a petition to request this event.  But the businesses, who lost a lot of money today since the street was closed during business hours, were told that the event was a block party.  This was strange as the only residents of the entire block are all in one building, Eleven80.  So a block party would normally be inside the building since that is the entire block.  They were also told that it was an afternoon block party with the implication that that would bring in crowds and business in the afternoon.  So the petition passed.

It was not until the street was closed off and a stage was being erected in the middle of the street, and after peoples’ cars were being towed, that flyers started to be handed out and the businesses discovered that instead of an afternoon block party it was an at-night political rally with some seriously immoral overtones.  So instead of making extra money they were losing quite a bit – all for a rally happening after almost all of them would have left town to go home.

I am guessing that they did anything that they could to avoid alerting the residents of Eleven80 to the time and place of the rally because their plan is to have a late night party in the street violating what we believe are the local noise ordinances and causing real disruption to those of us who actually live on this street.  In many ways this is, once again, the residents of the larger Newark area and city haul flexing their collective muscles and sending a strong signal to the tax payers in Eleven80 to remind us that we are not considered to be residents and our presence is not appreciated here.  It is pretty obvious since they selected the street directly in front of our building.  What a ridiculous location if not to make a statement.  With The Spot being a busy late night location in Newark, having the rally where they did had the potential to disrupt one of Newark few, legitimate late night venues as well.

My afternoon was not too busy which was good as I had to do some cleaning around the apartment,  This place has gotten completely out of control.  We have just been so busy recently plus with the number of computers and other equipment flowing through here in the last few weeks it has made things much worse.  There is an extra “work bench” style table set up in the living room by the bookshelf that is not helping things in the least.

Dominica picked up fish tacos on her way home from Totowa today as she normally does on Thursdays.  She got home and we ate our dinner and watched a littel bit of Frasier.  It didn’t take long before the television became difficult to understand because of the noise level coming from the rally outside.  We eventually switched over to air conditioning just to help block out some of the noise but it did very little in that regard.

Luckily Oreo did not need to go for a walk this evening.  Oreo is in a certain amount of danger in Newark at the best of times – Newark natives tend to be deathly afraid of dogs and refer to all dogs, even tiny little snuggle dogs like Oreo as pit bulls and will literally jump from the sidewalk in terror – so having a crowd of Newarkers on the street and trying to take Oreo through could easily lead to someone attacking him or using the opportunity to claim that they were attacked.

I was a bit afraid to go out there myself but wouldn’t have really worried if I didn’t have to have Oreo with me.  Dominica wanted me to take Oreo into the dark of Military Park at night rather than go down Commerce but that didn’t seem like a very good idea either.  But it didn’t become something that we had to decide upon anyway.

Dominica went to bed, or tried to at least, as early as she could.  She cooked Oreo’s stew this evening and that took until around nine.  Then she tried to go to bed but she was not able to fall asleep for a very long time because of the incredible noise levels.  That was pretty crappy.

The convention finally wrapped up at eleven which was better than we had thought having been warned that they were planning to go until midnight.  That would have been really awful.

I spent most of my evening working on a number of minor projects including SparkWeb from Ignite RealTime which I now have running in a preliminary form.  I don’t like it nearly as much as I like regular “old” Spark, the Java IM client, but SparkWeb is a very neat and interesting addition to my application portfolio and will definitely come in handy from time to time.  I also did some desktop management and then, when everything else was wrapped up, I started the setup process of the DL145 G3 server which is being installed with CentOS 5.2 this evening.

Getting the DL145 G3 built was a bit of a chore as there was all kinds of LO100i stuff that I needed to before I could get it started.  It turned out that the version that I had was not functional so I had to flash it to the latest edition which is often a pain.  I did eventually get it working and was able to kick off a CentOS install before heading off to bed.

I took a few pictures of the rally going on down on Commerce.  It was hard to get pictures as it was night time and just as I figured out how to position the camera to get good results the street lights shut off leaving the crowd very much in the dark.

Tomorrow will be my first time going into the city with my new bag.  I am actually looking forward to trying it out.  Carrying everything in my pockets has just been so annoying that having a solution to that problem just makes me feel better about walking into Manhattan.

When the storm started, Dominica and I were in our bedroom watching DVDs with the blinds down when Dominica noticed that it was flashing outside.  We went into the living room to see what was going on and realized that it was lighting all around us.  We even got to see the Blue Cross / Blue Shield building due east of us, in the Ironbound, take a direct hit which was pretty cool.  The storm didn’t last too long but boy was it fun to watch.

Because of last night’s storm today’s weather isn’t nearly so bad.  It was a good ten degrees cooler today outside, which is indeed hot, but not the stifling heat that we have had the last few days.

My desktop is still not working so Oreo and I are home yet another day.  Yay!  He is still very tired and totally sleeping his days away.  He isn’t even playing this week, he is so tired.

Ramona was finally around for a change as she needed to run some errands in Newark so we did a late lunch over at Food for Life.  We haven’t seen each other in about a month or more.  Min and I have been so busy that we haven’t seen anyone at all except for Ryan whom I always run into in the lobby.  Our travel schedule has really put a damper on our social lives.

Lunch was nice but we barely were able to even squeeze it in.  My work kept me on a call for hours and finally I had to have someone else take over some work just so that I could run out to lunch at two thirty as Ramona has to be back to Manhattan around four.  She had to walk Oreo for me and everything just so that we would have enough time to eat.  Today might be the last time to easily see Ramona in Newark as she is planning to move out to Flushings in Queens on Long Island over the weekend.

It was another relaxing night for Dominica, Oreo and I.

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.

Dad came over and we ordered the car and drove up to the IHOP by UMDNJ in Newark.  The crowd wasn’t too bad as we arrived before the bulk of people got out of church and filled the place up.  Sundays at IHOP can get pretty crazy.  Breakfast was very good.  We were quite glad that we had decided to drive up there.  Breakfast in Newark is definitely one of the most lacking services around.  There are almost no options and certainly no good brunch options like we are used to from Ithaca where brunch reigns supreme.

After lunch we drove over to Branch Brook Park with Oreo and walked through the Cherry Blossom Festival.  The weather was slightly colder than yesterday and I think that a lot of people decided to stay indoors as the crowd was pretty light compared to last year.  It was nice for walking though and Oreo had a wonderful time.

We thought ahead to take Flat Stanley with us to get pictures in Newark’s most famous location.  There were several good photo opportunities there.  We didn’t get a lot of time at the park, though, because I was paged out and we had to return to the apartment.  Never any real time that I can get away.

As we were leaving the park Kevin and Pam saw Oreo as they were driving through the park and stopped to chat.  So dad got to meet them as well although we only had a minute as I had to get back home to work.

Dad took a nap in the afternoon and then we just ordered in dinner from Nino’s and relaxed at the apartment.  Dinner was really good.

We showed dad the AppleTV yesterday and today.  He thinks that it looks pretty cool.  We discovered some new cooking and travel video podcasts that we really like too.  We hadn’t played with AppleTV’s built in podcast channel guide before and now we know that there is a huge selection of shows that you can just browse through without being connected to iTunes that really work well.  It’s a lot like having “cable” television as you have tons of channels except it is all on demand so you never wait for anything.

I got up at a quarter till eight and logged into the office and got to work.  I also started doing some cleaning around the apartment.  Dad is coming today and we need to get the place cleaned up.  Not much time to work on that until now and not all that much time now either.

Work went well this morning and didn’t take too long.  I had plenty of time to wrap up and then to drive with Min out to Newark-Liberty International Airport to pick up dad when his flight arrived.  He was right on time at 11:07 this morning.  It was a quick flight and the weather was perfect.  It is a little over eighty degrees here today and Buffalo his a record of eighty-six!

We went straight from the airport to the Seaport Diner in Elizabeth for lunch.  Dad hadn’t eaten before the flight and we had both skipped breakfast and were pretty hungry as well.

The afternoon was spent just hanging out at the apartment.  Dad was in too early to be able to check in to the hotel anyway.  So we just visited until late afternoon when he walked over to the Robert Treat to get settled in.

For dinner we took dad into the Ironbound, where he has never been, to eat at Mompou.  It has been so long since we have been there that they asked us where we had been.  Dinner was excellent and dad really enjoyed it.  It was his first time eating Portuguese too.

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.

On my way in to work this morning I finished listening to Garrison Keillor‘s latest book “Pontoon“. “Pontoon” was okay but definitely not one of his best works. It was slow, hard to follow and rather sad. One thing that Garrison has begun to do recently, which I find very strange, is to take some of his most popular “News from Lake Wobegon” vignettes and to modify them just slightly and to include them in his books. He is definitely getting more mileage from the stories this way but it is strange.

The same thing happened with “Lake Wobegon, Summer 1956“. After reading the book I later heard one of the more memorable scenes from the book abridged and used as an episode in A Prairie Home Companion. And it is always the same episodes that are put onto the collection albums so you hear them several times if you buy the collections.

Most of “Pontoon” is not based on any PHC skits but as you come to the end of the book several of the storylines come together and mash several “New from Lake Wobegon” episodes together into a single, huge scene. In some ways this is extremely interesting because it explains how so many stories in the “News from Lake Wobegon” can happen in such a small space and it provides hours of backstory filling in the gaps and fleshing out the characters and events in some of the well known stories. But it is also strange that after reading a lengthy book that the climax of the book is the bit that you already know and, in some cases, know very well.

Unfortunately that was the last Audible book that I had queued up on my iPod Nano so I will have to get it restocked with books over the weekend. It will give me a good chance to get the latest music from Amazon’s MP3 service moved onto my iPod as well. I have been buying tons of great stuff from there recently. I love that service. And I found that lots of good new stuff was on there today too.

The Spot at 45 Commerce Street in Newark, New Jersey is set to have a little party for us Eleven80 folk tonight. So we are hoping to make it over there this evening to support them. We don’t have final details on this yet so we are playing it by ear.

Dominica is addicted to the idea of taking a cruise. She has been investigating Disney Cruise lines as well as things like the QE2 and the Queen Mary 2 to go from New York to Europe. It would be really cool to be able to take the QE2 before she is retired later this year and moved to Dubai to become a floating hotel.

I found a great reference for beginning BASH programmers today: 10 Seconds Guide to Bash Shell Scripting.

Something that I have not used in a long time that I am returning to recently is “My Yahoo“. I really like the Yahoo start page which acts as a personal portal that I can use both at home and at the office. They have done a lot of work to the Yahoo “My Page” since the last time that I looked at it and I like that it shows me email, weather, RSS subscriptions and more all in one view. I often find that having RSS subscriptions in a dedicated feed aggregator (how is it possible that the standard dictionary does not have that word?) is a problem because I move from machine to machine and don’t want to manage the feeds. My Yahoo fixes that and makes it easy.

Interesting tidbits about Yahoo. At the moment their search engine is considered to be on par with Google competing to be the most useful search engine in the world. Yahoo is more popular, overall, than Google (not for search but in page views) in the United States but Google is more popular globally. Yahoo has recently been the target of a rebuffed Microsoft buyout but could yet still be purchased by them if a better offer comes through.

In the news today is word that researchers believe now that the same genes that allow some humans to resist colds may be the same genes that cause weight gain leading to obesity. I now know why I almost never get a cold!

Another era is coming to a close as Verizon, AT&T and Alltel prepare to shutdown the United States’ last remaining analogue cellular services on Monday. This is estimated to effect hundreds of thousands of customers clinging to antiquated and costly legacy services and will hit extreme rural regions the hardest as digital service is not yet available in all areas where analogue has been available for some time. Analogue cellular devices are more costly to maintain than digital and use more electricity making them environmentally unfriendly. Maintaining two separate systems has been expensive for these large carriers and the government, as of Monday, is no longer requiring them to support the old systems.

Scott Adams commented on Death by Frozen Poop.

Comcast today has stated that even under the FCC’s 2005 Net Neutrality law (providing equal access to the network for all customers) Comcast is claiming that discriminatory blocking of applications and customers on their network is within their purview under the heading of “reasonable network management.” Is it any wonder that net neutrality is critical today if even with it in place companies believe that they can get away with picking and choosing which paying customers get service and which do not?

Mary Lou Jepsen has left the OLPC project to start her own for-profit company to capitalize on technologies that were developed for the OLPC. She is predicting that we are just two years away from the production of the $75 laptop! What amazes me is that we can talk about a $75 laptop but can’t make a $75 desktop! It seems to be that cheap desktops would be far easier to produce. And yet the cheapest that I have seen to date is $199.

The OLPC project is in the news recently as they attempt to test the XO in Haiti in a project giving the laptops directly to students.

Work was busy this afternoon and I was stuck in the office until well after six thirty.

I did some research on the AppleTV based movie rentals and discovered that they are insanely expensive. The idea is great and, in many ways, beats out the Netflix approach by providing a system for people with slow Internet connections to be able to get 720p HD h.264 movies over the Internet by caching to iTunes (downloads could take eight hours or more but you could start it during the night or when you head off to the office) but the cost is so high that it is hard to imagine anyone taking advantage of it. Five dollars for an Internet based movie rental is way too high. For less than the cost of two movie rentals in a month you could have a full subscription to Netflix and get unlimited movies! Only those rare people who can’t watch more than one movie a month are likely to find this to be very useful.

We got home and met up with Kevin and Pam and we walked over to The Spot to check out the scene there. The Spot was very busy – we were very surprised. There was barely any space anywhere. It looks like The Spot is going to be very popular. We hung out there until a little before midnight then came back to Eleven80 to get some pizza.

I walked Oreo and we ordered in some late night pizza from New York Pizzeria and then it was off to bed.

Oreo got me up in the middle of the night, as expected, for a walk. This always happens anytime that he has dry food. Dry food doesn’t sit well on his tummy. So I walked him from three thirty until four in the morning. Then it was back to bed. But only until ten this morning when he needed to walk again. We really shouldn’t let him have dry food. It is no more fair to him to make him have to go outside in the cold in the middle of the night than it is to us. And he takes a risk of not being able to wake us up as well. Although I think that he is normally able to do that.

After walking him I started working on the workstation for CCA that I was working on last night. I also worked on changing our router to handle a large set of IP addresses as we have simply exhausted everything in the subnet that we had been using up until now. We had assigned ourselves just fourteen IP addresses and this was working fine until recently when we added the Netgear SC101 SAN device which uses, in our configuration, six IP addresses of its own. It was right around that time that we hooked back up our Cisco ATA unit that works with our Vonage phone system. That was another IP address permanently assigned and taken out of the pool. We went from plenty to being short more or less overnight. So now we have thirty and anticipate that this will hold us for a while. Although the list of machines in the house that use IP addresses isn’t short – the desktops and laptops include the OLPC, the Wii and the AppleTV, the SC101 (6), the three IP phones, the firewall, etc. It is no wonder the world is running out of IP space. Luckily these are all on a private address scheme or we would have real problems.

I joined Linked In today. So anyone looking for me on there, look again. There I am.

Rochester suffered a thirty-six car pile-up by the Rochester International Airport tonight. The region was hit by white-out conditions and wind speeds in the high forty miles per hour range.

Oreo is feeling pretty sick today and has needed to go outside much more often than usual.  We were really lucky that he decided that he needed to take a walk while it was bright and sunny and relatively warm.  Right after we got back from working him it turned into crazy winds and total white out conditions.  He didn’t need to go back out again until after that had stopped.  But for the rest of the evening he had to go out about every twenty to thirty minutes and it was bitterly cold.  We ended up just leaving his harness and sweater on so that we could take him out more quickly.

The Spice Girls, for those few of you who can remember who they are, played the Prudential Center tonight.  What a cold night to go out to a concert.  Later in the evening when I was walking Oreo one time I noticed a small group of women pounding on the doors of Catholic Health Care’s car garage which is used heavily for these events.  The show, Dominica thought, ran late tonight and I am guessing that these were stragglers who were now locked out of the garage because the garage closes early and were in insanely cold temperatures – most likely drunk – trying to figure out how to get their car.  They definitely were not getting into their car tonight.  One of the issues with concerts in Newark – if they run late you have few options.  All of the garages close early.  Even the ones, like that one, that cater to the late night events.

We went to bed at eleven after Oreo’s last “late night” walk.  We are assuming that there is going to be little to no sleep tonight as he has been going out far too frequently.  We tried watching a little of the new Doctor Who series from 2005 via Netflix online download service.  The show was pretty good and the Netflix service works really well.  No technical problems at all once we got the player installed.  We only managed to watch two episodes, though, with Oreo needing to go out so frequently.  We are going to be loving this Netflix service though.  That is so cheap and handy.  Netflix is definitely the “cable killer” with unlimited “on demand”, over the Internet viewing for just a tiny fraction of the cost of cable.  And no commercials either!  They are really demonstrating just how much money their is in the cable system.

Today was my stay at home day.  Oreo was very tired and slept all day.  There was little sun though so he didn’t get to enjoy his sunspot like he normally does.

Today was quite busy and I was tied to the desk all day.  I barely had time to get ready what with walking the dog and feeding him and getting dressed and everything else.  Dominica was home at twenty till six and our dinner reservations at the Theater Square Grill were at six.  We made it over just in time for our prix fixe dinner.  Dominica had truffle infused polenta and I went for the arctic char which was excellent.

The timing was perfect and it was right in from dinner to the show – which is all in the same building at NJPAC.  We claimed our season tickets, up on the second tier which is rather high but not too bad in Prudential Hall and went off to find our seats.

The seating organization was a disaster and the theater was just telling people to “sit anywhere” even though we all bought assigned seats.  It was really bad.  At one point there were only two people in the entire second tier and they were in our two seats!  What are the chances of that?  And every person who came in after us either took someone else’s seat or had to sit elsewhere because their seat was taken.  I am not sure if a single person made it in and got to sit in their own seats.  Why they felt the need to seat people in places other than their ticketed seats I have no idea.

The show, The Wedding Singer, was pretty good.  The cast was quite good and the venue is a good one.  I wasn’t thrilled with the music and the storyline was changed from the movie in some corny ways that I thought were unnecessary.  The original story was better.  And for some reason they decided to make the musical a bit more adult oriented (i.e. not appropriate for children not “more intelligent”) than the movie and for no apparent reason.  But overall it was a good show and we had a good time.  And it is so easy to get to and from the theatre.

Our season tickets also give us a chance to go see My Fair Lady, Moving Out and Riverdance yet this season.  We are also talking about going to see Yo-Yo Ma and Pink Martini in concert – but not the same concert.  One night apart from each other.  I discovered Pink Martini a few months ago through Amazon’s “if you like so and so then you will probably like Pink Martini” service.

Once we got back home Dominica was right off to bed.  I stayed up for several hours working on my RIT homework.  Best to get it done so that it isn’t hanging over my head tomorrow.

Dominica posted the movie back to Netflix this morning which means that her next movie should be here in just a couple of days. She has Dream Girls in her queue up next. Not something that I am interested in which is good so she will have an opportunity to watch it without me.

It is a bright and sunny day today. This is the perfect day for me to be home with Oreo. He is having such a good time just lounging in the sun. It has been grey all week so this really worked out well for him.

As of this morning my email log processing script has put nine million, six hundred thousand rows of data into the database! That is a crazy amount of data. And thousands more rows are inserted every day.

The office was quite slow today as it often is on Thursdays. I got the first load of dishes done right away this morning. The apartment has been out of control. We have just been too busy to keep up with keeping the place clean recently.

I am registered to go to the Microsoft 2008 launch event (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008) on March 4th in Manhattan.  That should be cool.  It has been five years since I have had a chance to go to one.  The last launch event was for Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Office 2003.

Dominica made great time getting home and we ate Chinese from Golden City that arrived just minutes after she did.  We ate and watched two episodes of the fifth season of the Cosby Show.  Then we walked Oreo and we headed on over to the Prudential Center for Dominica’s Christmas present to see Dancing with the Stars Live.

The show started just a little after seven thirty.  This was the first time that either of us has set foot into the Prudential Center and the first time that Dominica has even walked up along side of it.  It is a very nice arena but there is no hiding the fact that it is a hockey stadium.  It isn’t very different from the War Memorial (aka Blue Cross Blue Shield Arena) in Rochester where the Americans play when they aren’t at ESL Arena on the MCC campus.

The show was quite enjoyable.  Definitely the best part was the amazing band who played all of the music.  They were really something.  The dancing was really good though and we both had a good time.  My one big complaint about the arena, though, is that the space between the rows is so tight that there was no room to put my feet and my knees were bent backward putting my calves slightly under me all night which was okay for the first hour but without any way to stretch my knee it started getting quite painful.

We came home after the show gloating over all of the people getting into long lines to get their cars just to fight their way onto gridlocked city streets as we walked the two minute walk to the apartment.  Boy is that ever easy.  And completely safe – never were we out of sight of the police.

Congrats to Andy who took his ASP.NET and C# Brainbench certifications tonight.  He is now ranked as the top ASP.NET developer in New York State.

Dominica and I were planning on going to Rochester tomorrow but the weather is not looking good. We will see.

Ramona was over first. We couldn’t find Kevin and Pam for a while so Ramona and I walked down the stairs to go find them. It was the first time that I have taken the stairs in our building ever. I have never even seen the stairwells. Not that they are exciting or anything. It was a weird feeling, though, to walk all of the way to their apartment. It really helps you realize just how close we all live to each other. It really is just a matter of being several dozen feet away.

Today’s D&D session wasn’t very long. Just two to three hours. Kevin hardly got to actually play any of it because his character, David the Gnome (a bard), got knocked unconscious within the first few minutes and didn’t get revived until the last moment of the our session for the day.

At five thirty I walked over to the NorCrown Bank building and met Susan to help her move some furniture.  The big item was a heavy, old filing cabinet.  That proved to be a bit of work.  While I was there I got a tour of the new New Jersey Symphony Orchestra offices that are now located in the NorCrown Bank building right across the PSE&G Square from our apartment.  They have a nice new office space over there.

The real challenge was moving the filing cabinet up the three flights of very tight stairs from the street to Susan’s top floor apartment in Harrison.  That took quite a bit of work.  But we managed to do it without hitting the walls even once.  That was quite the accomplishment.

We drove back to Newark and picked up Dominica and then drove down to the Seabra Rodizio on Route 21 just north of Raymond.  It is a Spanish restaurant that we have been interested in trying for quite some time but never think of when we are actually looking for a place to go.

Dinner was good.  I ordered a casserole with seafood that I thought would be safe but ended up having a disgusting half lobster in it (an entire lobster just sawed in half) which was incredibly disturbing and almost made the food inedible.  Susan was nice enough to pull most of the meat out of the lobster for me as I just couldn’t eat the meat and have gone inside a dead lobster.  I need to remember that Spanish restaurants are not places where I can even consider getting any type of fish or seafood.  If it isn’t pure vegetarian then it is out of the question.  But all of the food was really good.

We came home and just relaxed.  It was pretty late by the time that we got home and Dominica has to go to work tomorrow.  Oreo got scared while we were gone, it being much later than our usual dinner time, and he had an accident in the hallway so we had to deal with that too.  The night was very short and Dominica pretty much went straight to bed.

Lunch was leftovers from Mi Pequeño Mexico last night. Their food is really good the day after. They deliver to Eleven80 so we are planning on getting more food from them tonight.

While we ate lunch we watched the remainder of the final season of Full House on DVD. Strangely I had never seen most of the seventh and eighth seasons of the show previously but as we approached the last few episodes of the final season they ended up all being ones that I have seen. I can only imagine that I caught them on cable in hotel rooms over the last few years while working out of town. I saw a lot of Full House in the hotels when I was working for Wegmans in 2004 – 2005. I can’t believe that working for Wegmans was almost four years ago now. This year is my fourteenth year in Information Technology! And we have been in New Jersey for almost two full years now.

We tried watching a BBC show that we got from dad called Hamish MacBeth. Not our type of show though. The hero of the show is a cop and a junkie which makes for a “hard to identify with” lead and it is quite difficult to get into the show for us. The characters in the show were very endearing to us.

Dominica spent a bit of the evening watching the second season of Heroes on NBC online.

For dinner we called in an order to  Mi Pequeño Mexico and had burritos delivered.  It took hardly any time at all and was a very affordable large dinner.  We are vey excited to have a new restaurant that delivers something different to us.  And they are cheaper, faster, easier and healthier than many other choices too.  Yay!

Sleeping in so much made for a really short day today. I had some work that I needed to do for the office before we hit tomorrow morning which is going to be a really busy day so I spent a few hours doing that before heading off to bed. Nothing stressful, just last minute stuff that I wanted to have completed (ducks in a row and all that) as we head into the busy week.

I did some shopping for great Amazon MP3 downloads for my Apple iPod tonight too.  It is awesome that they carry some of my favourite artists like Allison Kraus & Union Station!  There is so much great music to get from there.  One thing that is really awesome is that one of the best songs that we have ever played on the SGL Podcast (Episode 48 – Half of My Mistakes by Radney Foster) was just recently covered by Gary Allan who is one of my all time favourite singers.  So I picked up his version of the song as well because it is just one of my favourite songs too.

We were up until around one in the morning before turning in for the night.

And today’s SGL award goes to: Andrew T. West for the proper use of the word “verily” in a sentence not involving sheep, angels, shepherds or choirs.

Today was busy at work but nothing like Friday. That was awful. Today was just normal busy. But busy enough to keep me tied to my workstation all day long.

Our big excitement today is the expected delivery of our new futon. For some reason it managed to pass the chair and is arriving first even though it was ordered several days later.

I had to make a run out to the post office today. I had a bunch of stuff to mail. The mail… is it really true that we still need the mail? Can’t we do without it at this point? When do we need it? For birthday cards? That isn’t a good enough reason. To mail checks to people? If they can’t use PayPal or some other simple, standard, cheap, immediate form of payment then they really don’t care enough about the money to justify bothering to send it to them. For magazines? Yes, deforestation is a great reason for keeping the post around. So that tons of big companies that I don’t like can pay some guy to deliver their garbage (you all know what I mean) and put it into our mailboxes instead of into a landfill so that we have to deal with it instead of them?

I had to deal with my first ever major issue with an eBay seller today. I had one once that sold me a $6 video game and never sent it to me and just took off with the money. But it was $6. This time it was $210 and a software pirate. Not as bad as the time that Andy got hit for over $1,000 from an online pirate but still pretty bad. Luckily eBay and PayPal have some major mechanism for dealing with this stuff so I am confident that the issue will be resolved quickly.

Dominica got home with Oreo and we immediately ran out to Subway to grab dinner. It was a quick bite and then we walked down to GameStop to do some Christmas shopping. We are loving have a nice GameStop so close. It is hard to believe that such a nice shop can exist on that corner. If anything is a sign of the times changing in Newark it is that store surviving there. Dominica found two games for the girls for Christmas that she has not been able to find anywhere else. We also picked up, used, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for ourselves as well as Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door so that Dominica can go straight on to that after finishing the original Paper Mario for the N64.

On the way home we stopped at Starbucks and got ourselves hot chocolate and gingerbread scones. For some reason, even though we live just one block from a Starbucks, we have only ever been there a few times in the more than a year that we have lived here. This was, in fact, Dominica’s first time into that Starbucks and no more than my third! But perhaps we will be there more often now. Walking to GameStop to do some shopping and stopping off for coffee or other treats is so very handy.

After dinner we came back to the apartment and I did some work online and aided Dominica as she worked on assembling our new loveseat that arrived today from Target and Amazon (some arrangement that I am not clear about.) It wasn’t too bad to put together and in no time it was assembled and set up in our living room. It is a deep chocolate brown simple affair. We have it set between the east facing windows as the center piece of what is now, more or less, a real living room.

We did some shopping on Amazon tonight for Chessex game dice.  We don’t have any here at all and it has become a problem.

And today I leave you with this.

Download the SGL Podcast Episode 56 in MP3
Download the SGL Podcast Episode 56 in Ogg Vorbis

After several months of silence the SGL Podcast is back on the air. Today’s podcast is relatively short as I discuss the break between episodes, the missing second day at Disney with Dominica, the Newark Renaissance including the new Prudential Center. We also discuss the Apple iPod and Amazon’s new MP3 download service. I also get to make a new travel announcement. Tune in and find out what is happening next at SGL.

On today’s episode we play the follow artists from the Podsafe Music Network:

• High Child – I Tell All My Secrets to My Guitar
• Ken Campbell – Tune for November
• Dust Rhinos – Mari Mac

For more listening options please go directly to the Internet Archive pages hosting this media: SGL 56 MP3. Or check us out at either OurMedia or Podomatic.

When I took Oreo out for his morning walk we got to see our building, Eleven80, with the scaffolding all taken away. Boy does that make a difference with the appearance of the building and the entire street. We have had all three exposed sides of Eleven80 covered in scaffolding along with our facing side of Catholic Health Services since we first moved in making Raymond, Commerce and the little side Commerce streets all very dark and gloomy. Now, suddenly, there is wide open space around our building and light and a view! It’s like Commerce street is all new again.

The side street, the “other” Commerce, on the east side of Eleven80 still has construction stuff filling the one lane and the big fencing all around it but they are cleaning today as if that is going to be removed in a day or two. It will be great to have the use of that street for the first time and it should, in theory, help to eliminate the traffic congestion on our street which is horrific. Standing on Commerce is a very different experience than it was just four months ago. It is becoming an attractive street. Once the other Commerce is open I will get some pictures of the “new” Eleven80.

Despite some missteps and some backtracking Newark does appear to be making progress. The new stadium really is bringing in the crowds and there are several downtown areas that are showing some serious improvements over the past year. Dominica and I will be in Newark for at least one more year. It will be interesting to see what happens as we move forward.

Still missing from downtown is any sort of good, mid-market eateries. We have fast food and we have deli type restaurants galore (on our block alone are two existing brick and mortar restaurants with identical deli menus and an existing “truck” restaurant with the same men and one more located in our building about to open with nothing on its menu to differentiate it from the restaurants that it faces on the same street!) as well as Subways, fried chicken and pizza. And we have some nice restaurants like the Theater Square Grill, Maize and 27Mix. But we lack normal, everyday type eateries that most people want to go to for dinner most days. We need normal places to eat in addition to what we have. The fringe is well taken care of. It is time to fill in the gaps so that people who actually live here have places to go.

Today involved a lot of cleaning and household chores for me. First and foremost was kitchen cleaning. This week has been busy and the dishes just scaled out of control before we knew what hit us. The kitchen was all but unusable for the last few days and so it is up to me to reclaim it from the clutches of dirty dishes.

Work was fairly busy today and I did not get a chance to run out to grab myself some lunch until well after two in the afternoon. I didn’t have much time so I just called over an order to Food for Life and walked over to pick it up so that I could eat at my desk.

Oreo was very playful today which is good because it means that he is healthy. We played and played in addition to taking a couple of walks. It was nice out today – perfect for walking with Oreo. It was very cold early this morning but as the day progressed the sun was out and warmed this up considerably. It was still a little chilly so Oreo had to wear his little sweater but he likes wearing it because he gets lots of people to stop on the street and tell him how adorable he is.

Dominica got home around six but I was still working.  Busy day.  We got ready as quickly as we could met Ramona around six thirty to go out for dinner.  Traffic was horrible – the curse of the new, thriving downtown Newark social scene – so it took her a while to make it the two miles from the Ironbound to downtown to meet us.  We went over to Halsey to 27Mix.  It was a happening place tonight.  Wall to wall people.  Dinner was very good but unfortunately the music was so loud that we really couldn’t talk at all. Not the best to go for socializing.  The place is mostly inhabited by the college students from Rutgers and NJIT which are very nearby.

Min and I got home at eight thirty and were tired.  Boy are we ever getting old.  But Oreo enjoys the extra snuggle time.  So it was time to pop in Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and head off to dreamland.  I will be on Wall St. tomorrow.  Just the usual.  No big weekend plans other than last minute preparations for the trip to the UK.  My Java class is theoretically having its final on Saturday morning which would be awesome.  That would give me an entire week to relax before the trip.

Oreo was ready for daycare this morning. On most days he gets up, eats his breakfast and then crawls back into bed to wait for Dominica to prod him into getting up and moving for the day. But today after breakfast he laid in our “bedroom hallway” and watched us – waiting for someone to take him to daycare so that he can run with his pack.

It was a busy day at the office today. They kept me hopping all day long. I barely had time to eat my lunch which I didn’t manage to get until quite late. Fortunately my workload dropped off almost completely at the end of the day so I was able to make a getaway quite easily.

Dominica and I both commented today on what a difference the Prudential Center (aka “The Pru”) has made in our area of Newark already. Because of the enormous crowds that seem to be descending on downtown Newark every night areas like Mulberry, Clinton, Market and Commerce are full of people all through the night when just a few weeks ago they were deserted after six or seven in the evening. Suddenly what were dark and lonely streets are now lively and populated. Where there was little police presence there is now constant surveillance.

The impact of “The Pru” has made our whole area completely safe. Dominica could now walk Oreo in the middle of the night with complete confidence. At no time are you ever out of sight of an on duty police officer. The parking lots are all manned late into the night with staff and security. Restaurants are staying open later, lights are on more – this place is “happening.”

We were both in the mood to go out tonight so we walked over to Scully’s Publick House for dinner. We have discovered over the past several weeks that the “just getting going” feeling over at Scully’s isn’t changing. At first we were pretty forgiving about the place (other than the disgusting fish fry) based on the fact that they were new and hadn’t “gotten it together” yet. Much of the staff was still in training and had never worked in a restaurant before. But this restaurant is owned by another just a few blocks away so there is very little excuse for not having the overall operations in place. But they are still out of almost everything that you order and the temporary, almost bare, dessert menu has gone from being a sad apology to business as usual. Overall the food is only so-so and there are better pubs just a few minutes farther away. We’ve decided that Scully’s is basing their business on the “one timers” coming in from New York City to see a Devil’s game and that they aren’t looking to impress people enough to make Scully’s a “destination” in Newark. So, for us, it won’t be. It isn’t awful and going there with “the gang” is fine but going there for the food is a waste and a disappointment.

I did some SGL work tonight and managed to recreate almost all of the SGL Podcasts since having moved over from Podomatic about a year ago. There were some shows in the high twenties that had gone amiss. But they are all there now. And number four was categorized incorrectly so it was nearly impossible to find. There are still a couple of early shows missing. Three through five, I believe, that have pages but no audio. At least one of those is truly missing but I believe that I may have files for the other two. Maybe I can get to that later this week.

Dominica and I watched an episode of Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and were off to bed.

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.