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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.