I looked in on my Wikipedia entry on Blam (meaning “Comment Spam”) which is a term that I coined and added to Wikipedia many years ago in the hopes of it becoming a standard term.  My definition remains the top definition for the word and, since that original page creation, the additional word “blammer”, with its obvious meaning, has also been added.  So, at this point, I think that it is safe to assume that I have successfully coined a word in the English lexicon as it has now been used for many years.  Very cool.  I have fulfilled my need to contribute to humanity.

Check out “Good Morning Yahoo“.  This is one of the many ways in which the web is overtaking traditional television.  This is a very neat concept and I am glad to see Yahoo moving in this direction.  They do something similar on Yahoo Finance.  They need to start considering a general “Yahoo Television” section to centralize their new video content services.

Here is a pet peeve of mine – the ongoing deterioration of the English language.  In recent years (or decades) it has become increasingly “cool” to attempt to show off one’s linguistic skills by using “hard” words like ironic or random.  Of course, to even mildly educated people these are common, easy words, but we still find the American mass media unable to correctly use the term random.  In this particular case the use was used to denote an even that was specifically not-random.  Does that make its use ironic?

When visiting the science museum in Ottawa a number of years ago, Dominica and I were astounded by the number of times we heard about the CanadArm – the robotic arm on the space shuttle that most people never think about because, well, it isn’t very important in the grand scheme of things.  It was mentioned over and over as if it was the only thing Canada ever did.  It actually made you feel embarrassed for the poor Canadian kids who had to come here and be berated for having produced nothing ever, in all of history, beyond a space shuttle appendige.  Recently on the Old New Thing, we get this:

“From what I can tell, Canadians are taught that NASA’s job is to launch the CanadArm into space so it can move stuff around.”

Raymond Chen, in The Old New Thing, also lists the things that Americans are often taught as being our nation’s greatest accomplishments.  I found it odd that in his list (in which he claims only what we are taught and not what is accurate) he mentions George Eastmann – he meant George Eastman – as the inventor of the camera but doesn’t mention that this is complete and totally incorrect.  He mentions Henry Ford as being completely incorrect as the inventor of the automobile, but Eastman is so far from being the inventor of the camera that it seems to be the obvious choice for “not correct.”

Having grown up in the Rochester area in the shadow of George Eastman and Kodak (my father worked at Kodak from college graduation until his retirement) I have never even heard it insinuated that Eastman invented the camera or photographic film or photography in general.  A pioneer?  Definitely, but not the inventor of aforementioned technologies.  I wonder what backwater in the US is teaching this concept?  If you were ever taught this, leave a comment.  I want to know where this is coming from.  For your information – the camera was invented a few hundred years before Eastman was even born.

In an old interview from 2007 with George Mannes, which I read today, he makes note of how accurately Hollywood (or television) shows “hot trends” in movies or on television actually are really good indicators of that particular trend being over especially within the financial world.  Most recently we have seen this phenomenon from the plethora of television shows dedicated to house flipping which did not hit the market until after the housing market had crashed and no one could possibly make money flipping houses.  Mannes looks at the greater trends and has determined that Hollywood is consistently so far behind the times as to be a pretty serious counter-market indicator.

The best bit of the interview, though, was when George Mannes recounts the classic story of the investor in 1929 who realized that the market was about to crash when his shoe-shine boy was giving stock tips.  Mannes then goes on to compare shoe-shine boys of the 1920s to the Hollywood producers of today.  I’m convinced that the comparison goes much deeper than the education and skill needed to do their jobs the fact that they are accurate counter-market indicators.

The Black Crayon.

Up at five thirty this morning.  Ugh.  I was not ready to face the day at that point.

I turned on the shower and, while waiting for that to get warm, I logged into the office, cleaned up my email and did an early morning software deployment that had just been requested.  At least nothing will be backed up for me by the time that I reach the office.

We were running late this morning.  Really late and I managed to miss the “late” train that I use as my last ditch train into Summit.  Ugh.  So I had to wait for about forty minutes on the platform waiting for the late-late train to Gladstone.

Today is my test of Kevin’s theory that I qualify, as a “reverse commuter”, to use off-peak NJ Transit tickets (which, are available in round-trip form as well) to save 15% off of my train fare and to allow me to cut half of the painful ticket buying process out of my day.  Additionally, by having pre-purchased my evening return ticket it roughly quadruples my chances of catching the evening express back to Newark.  So the off-peak ticket saves 15% of the cost, 2-4 minutes of ticket buying pain, twenty minutes of waiting on the Summit platform and thirty minutes of riding the local to Newark!  Wow.

For lunch today I just ate at my desk while attending an online web conference from Red Hat.  We learned about Red Hat Linux clustering and memory performance tuning.

I left work on the shuttle all prepared to run from the shuttle to the Hoboken Express line to get myself to Newark nice and early.  My plans were thwarted by a “paid by the hour” NJ Transit assistant conductor who was dilly-dallying on the stairs of the platform blocking our way.  This drives me crazy about life in the New York Metro – half of everyone is in a hurry and the other half have nowhere in particular to be and think nothing of blocking the way for everyone else.  I’m used to Upstate NY where everyone has someplace to be and would still be willing to get out of your way if you needed to go faster than them.  So three of us, all trying to make the same train and all stuck behind the same guy, missed the train.  He, of course, was happy to miss the train as he was on the clock.

I took the next train and Dominica picked me up from Washington Square Park near the train station saving me from a very warm and humid walk home.  We got home to Eleven80 and ordered in some dinner from Nino’s.  We are really going to miss Nino’s when we finally move up to Peekskill.  They have a great menu, take orders online that are consistently correct when they arrive, aren’t too expensive and the food is really good.  They all know us by name now as well.  Not that we will be able to afford to eat out every night once the baby arrives but still, they will be missed.

I have been testing out Google’s new Chrome browser yesterday and today and, understanding that it is still in beta, have come across two really critical sites that do not function at all for me using their V8 JavaScript engine – Zimbra email client and Flickr.  Both sites are, coincidentally I’m sure, products of Yahoo, Google’s biggest competitor.

Dinner arrived just after seven.  Rigatoni vodka for me and stuffed shells for Dominica.  We watched some Frasier. The plan had been for me to work and for Dominica to watch Ratatouille which had just arrived from NetFlix, but Oreo came to bed and snuggled up with me like he was going to sleep and I just couldn’t bare to disappoint him.  He was so worn out and exhausted after playing on the farm this weekend that he actually passed out standing up at daycare today!

So it was an early night for us which was probably wise all around.

I got to Summit and got the company shuttle there which was very simple to do. This cuts half an hour or more off of the time that it takes me to get out to Warren on the days when I go out there. It is really too bad that I didn’t know how easy this was for the past eighteen months or I might have gotten rid of the car long ago. Going to Warren this way is a bit of a pain but great for once a week. Going to Manhattan is definitely the way to go though by train. I am really learning the advantages of not having a car though. In the past month I have not driven a single time and I don’t miss it at all. Never once have I wished that I even had the option of getting into my car. I don’t even think about it now. It is awesome.

The company shuttles are really nice, for the most part. People have made a big deal about how Google and Microsoft offer these types of shuttle services in the San Francisco and the Seattle (Redmond) areas but they are clearly not the only ones. Maybe their shuttle systems are a bit more intricate because they have larger populations in a single area but the shuttle system that we have here in the New York Metro is pretty decent when combined with the incumbent train system.

I was in Warren today for a “meeting” (sales pitch really) with HP and AMD. That was over lunch and they provided pizza which is really great because I don’t have a car when I am in Warren so getting pizza at these meetings is much nicer than going down to the cafeteria and it is enough to offset the extra cost of the NJ Transit train versus the normal PATH train. (How cheap am I to even realize that?)

The meeting was good and I managed to snag more of the awesome HP Bistro coffee mugs that they give out sometimes. I got one a few months ago and it is Min and my favourite mug and we always fight over it. Now I have two more so we can use them all of the time. This has to be one of the best marketing items ever. Simple, inexpensive (more or less) but very, very nice and useful. “Sure,” you say, “lots of companies give out coffee mugs.” And you are correct. They do. But these are very nice bistro coffee mugs that are much nicer than your average, run-of-the-mill coffee mugs. They are our favourite mugs to drink out of. Much nicer than what we are normally able to buy in the stores. And since we are both big fans of HP (we do own several HP desktops and several HP laptops and several HP servers) it makes it that much cooler to have around the apartment.

We also got two neat travel alarm clock slash thermometer slash USB hub units as gifts from AMD. Which also works out well as we are big AMD fans too. I like their products and I like them as a company and I really appreciate the fact that they do most of their fab work in Dresden and have done a tremendous amount to help rebuild that city. AMD is also considering putting another major fab facility into Upstate NY which would be great. I expect that it would be very near IBM’s fab facility in the middle Hudson Valley region. That is already a hotspot for high end chip research and development. (Kingston, a leader in non-CPU type chip manufacturing is headquartered there as well.)

I spent most of my afternoon in informal meetings as my time in Warren is normally spent catching up with people that I only get to see two or three times in a month. And next week is going to be crazy as I have another HP thing on Tuesday afternoon and then am flying to the UK on Friday evening! So not a lot of “work” was done today but a lot was accomplished. For whatever that is worth.

The shuttle home missed the evening train by about thirty seconds. I ended up having to wait at the station for about thirty minutes. But it worked out. There was a nice guy who had interviewed with someone at my office today who was using the shuttle and train to get home and didn’t speak English comfortably and didn’t know the train system and he was stuck with me so I was able to get him to where he needed to go and otherwise he would have been on his own. So it was a blessing, I am sure.

Dominica made fish bites for dinner and had everything mostly ready when I got home so that we could eat right away. I was exhausted today and we had decided that tonight had to be a blow-off night because I was so tired. I had fallen asleep four or five times easily just on the shuttle ride from Warren to Summit! Can’t be stress – I feel great. Can’t be a lack of sleep – I have been catching up all week. No idea why. Must just be one of those days. Lack of caffeine, perhaps.

We watched two episodes of Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and were off to bed early. I am hoping to do some serious sleep catching up tonight so that I can be useful again tomorrow.

Today was the fourteenth biggest drop in the Dow Jones Industrial in history. Not quite a disaster but definitely a huge hit. There were several factors that anyone following today will be acutely aware of – the dollar has become insanely weak and there is a panic that China is going to diversify its currency holdings away from the USD, General Motors wrote down almost forty billion today without much warning and the financial sector has been taking a huge beating do to the subprime mortgages disaster that happened some time ago (a month or two) but is only hitting the street with real numbers recently. The Royal Bank of Scotland is estimating a finance industry wide loss due to the subprime mortgages of approximately one quarter of a trillion US Dollars. (Which, I suppose, is good that at least the dollar isn’t worth so much. Ha ha.) I record this so that later readers can see the juxtaposition of events more clearly.

Another day of “dollar value” battering leading up to Min and my trip to the UK. Can’t win them all, I guess.