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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.