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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.