Boy were we all tired this morning.  Dominica got up at six and called into work.  There was no way that she, being over 28 1/2 weeks pregnant, was going to be able to go into work on that little sleep – even having napped in the car a little on the way home.  Oreo was pretty exhausted as well and was quite glad to have some time to sleep in late.  I slept in until close to eight myself.

I got up and logged into the office before eight.  I thought that there would be a huge backlog of work for me to work on but there was hardly any.  I had about five thousand email messages to sort through but that was actually pretty light considering how long I was away.  (Yes, that is the actual number that were in my inbox.)

Dominica slept in until a bit after ten.  She was feeling pretty tired still and considered going back to bed again but gave up and got ready for work instead.  We thought about having Oreo head into daycare but by the time that we thought of doing that it was too late and it was already “nap time” at daycare and new dogs aren’t allowed to enter after that point.

InfoWorld has an early look at Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8 browser and notices that it consumes more memory than the entire Windows XP operating system!  In other web browser news, Google announced their own Chrome browser today based on the WebKit web rendering engineer.  Chrome is based on the same base technology as Konqueror and Safari.  If nothing else this will add some weight to the third place browser family.  It will be interesting to see the impact of Chrome on the browser market.

I downloaded Chrome and gave it a try today.  So far I am pretty impressed.  It won’t be replacing Firefox anytime soon for me – primarily because it does not work with Zimbra which is my biggest web application, but for normal browsing it is very nice.

Since Dominica did not have Oreo today we decided that she would stop at CheeseBurger in Paradise near her office and bring home something different for dinner.  It is so seldom that we get any variety.  So she got cheddar BBQ veggie burgers and fried pickles for dinner.

My Process Management class at RIT began yesterday but I did not sign in until today.  As of yesterday, my cousin Sara and I are both attending RIT at the same time.  Pretty weird.  Sara is also a graduate of Monroe Community College where I did my Associates degree.  I ordered my books for RIT this evening.  Thank goodness for Amazon Prime or I wouldn’t have them for a week.  I am hopeful that the book will arrive right away because there is only one left in stock!  Oops.

Most of the evening was just spent relaxing.  We needed it.  The past week has been very tiring.  Tomorrow, being Wednesday, is my early day so I need to get some sleep tonight.  My trip to the Georgian restaurant had to be postponed, though, because tomorrow there is a Lunch & Learn with Red Hat at the office.  There were not enough seats for me to get in, however, so I have to buy my own lunch and eat at my desk while listening to the presentation on the phone.  Not quite the same.

The weather was nice this morning for the walk into the office. Cool but not cold which is nice because you don’t tend to overheat during the long stretches of walking.

I had lunch with a colleague over at Chevy’s on the west side of the island near the World Financial Center which was a bit of a hike for lunch time but the exercise is always a good idea for me anyway as was the grilled fish and beans that I had for lunch. So no complaints. We mostly just hung out and were “geeky” talking about IT issues both technical and within the field at large.

Microsoft and Seagate have a cute “Heroes Happen Here” comic series out now. Good stuff.

I am consulting for Previsor / Brainbench again. It has been about a year, I think, since the last time that I consulted for them. This time I get to work on a Web Design certification which should be fun. My work starts on Monday.

This weekend should be pretty slow. My work isn’t scheduled late tonight. I have one small project for eight o’clock tomorrow morning but that isn’t bad. No Dungeons and Dragons this weekend as everyone else is too busy. We might have a New Orleans benefit dinner on Sunday afternoon but we don’t know yet if there is anything for us to eat there as neither Dominica nor I can handle eating much seafood anymore. Strangely scallops seem to be an exception for me which is funny since most of my adult life I haven’t particularly cared for them. Shrimp, lobster and crayfish – the mainstays of Creole cuisine – are definitely out though. I am still okay with lobster bisque, crab cakes and shrimp cakes and once in a great while, possibly but not likely, fried shrimp.

I placed a small Amazon order this afternoon. The free shipping option takes a little while but I figure if I place overlapping orders on a regular basis I get to have a continuous stream of books on their way to me which I can look forward to receiving. I am hoping that one book that I ordered not long ago will arrive today but I don’t think that it did even though it left Jersey City yesterday.

I didn’t have to work that late tonight which was nice for a change. I was able to escape the office at six thirty and hit the road for home. (Or hit the rails, more appropriately.)

I got home just minutes after Dominica and Oreo.  We ordered in some Italian from Nino’s for dinner and watched The Hudsucker Proxy on DVD that Dominica had just gotten last night from Netflix.  The Hudsucker Proxy is one of those truly great films that came out of the cinema renaissance of the early 1990s.  It is one of, if not indeed the, best performance ever given by Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh who are the stars.  Other notable actors include Paul Newman, Charles Durning, John Mahoney, Bruce Campbell, Bill Cobbs, Peter Gallagher, Anna Nicole Smith, Steve Buscemi, Sam Raimi and John Goodman.  It was quite a Who’s Who of 1994 Hollywood.  Dominica had never seen the film and for some bizarre reason we only own in on LaserDisc.  I have seen it so many times on LD that it is hard to imagine that we didn’t own in on DVD but it has been one of those movies that I have told her about so much but haven’t seen myself since we unhooked the last LD player in regular use around 2002, not long after Nate and I bought the first DVD player in our group.

After the movie we pretty much went straight off to bed.  Dominica was really exhausted and was asleep before eleven.  I did a little work but went to bed not long afterwards.  I wasn’t very tired though.  But didn’t feel like staying up late either.  I do have to work first thing in the morning tomorrow so sleeping in late isn’t an option.  Never is these days.  It’s tough getting older and having responsibilities.

I stopped at Cafe Airlie on the way through and got my usual egg, cheese and potato with black pepper on a hardroll and some apple juice for my walk to the train station. It is so warm out that even with a light rain my fleece is a bit too much and I am too warm.

Dominica discovered this bit of disturbia today that occurred along a highway that we drive past on a regular basis. This is right along our normal route between Newark and “back home.” Although now we tend to go out to Williamsport before heading north.
Things were relatively busy at the office today. But busy in big bursts. Really busy bits with large bits of nothing as well.

I learned today that the coach of the New Jersey Giants (an American Football team from Rutherford, New Jersey which is playing in the NFL Super Bowl this year) used to be the coach of the Rochester Institute of Technology, RIT, Tigers. RIT is where I am currently attending for my Masters of Information Technology degree.

My Ruby based email log processing script ran today processing about two million database rows of data. That took several hours of intensive processing. It was 230MB of data sitting in my email account that had to be moved out. But that is a lot of stuff that isn’t stored in there anymore and that is no longer stored on my home storage area network (SAN.) I am very happy with how the script is working.

I did have to make some modifications to the script to get it to process all of the rows correctly. I had not dealt with some older data yet and there were some “end of log” messages, some unnecessary quotation marks and some bad line feeds that needed to be stripped out. But the script is more robust now and is getting better by the day. I think that by tomorrow night that I will most likely be done with all of the archival email processing except, possibly, for one small batch that needs some special oversight. Then I can focus on some reporting tools to dig into all of the data that I have been collecting.

I did some reading in “Practical Ruby for System Administration” today and learned some new tricks for using Ruby as part of by BASH command line. I never think of using Ruby (or Perl, for that matter) in a “one liner” or in-line mode. But it can be extremely useful for that. So I think that this is some good learning for me.

During her lunch break today Dominica went shopping and picked up a folding table for us to use in our apartment. We have been without anything resembling a table for two years now and it is beginning to be a problem. We definitely need a table for our Dungeons and Dragons games. So she picked one up at Home Depot. She also picked up some shoes while she was out. Her shoe collection is getting pretty big.

Dad lost power due to a massive windstorm tearing across Upstate New York today. We were talking over instant messenger when his power went out and he disappeared. It was gone for what seemed like four or five hours but it was on again by the time that I got home from the office.

I had to rush home so that I could help her to unload the car but she got stuck in traffic and I was home almost an hour before her anyway even though we left at almost exactly the same time (she left five to ten minutes before me.) I got home and logged right back into work and put in another hour or so. Then I helped Dominica unload the car, we fed the dog and we ran right over to Food for Life for a quick dinner.

After dinner we came home and I wrapped up the “office” work, started in on my Project Management homework, read some of “Manage It!” by Johanna Rothman which I am trying to finish reading this week and kicked off another long round of email transfers so that I can continue the process of migrating the data into the database. I can’t believe that I am already into the seventh week of my Project Management class. It is amazing to me how quickly the classes just fly by. When I was young they seem to drag on forever. Now I can’t even seem to get a chance to get into one before it is over.

Our first Netflix DVD came via the post today – 28 Weeks Later. It is the sequel to 28 Days Later which is one of the greatest, if not the greatest zombie apocalypse films of all time. Dominica has been extremely anxious to watch it. So I am trying to make time tonight so that we can watch it. If we don’t get to watch it tonight it could be a long time before we get to see it and one of the problems with Netflix and us is that if we don’t get to watch one movie then we don’t get to move on to another movie until we do. This is a problem when there is a movie that we both want to watch like this one. Normally the plan is for Dominica to get movies that only she wants to watch and use Netflix as a method of providing just her with movies so that she can watch them when I am working. It is already apparent how difficult a serialized movie stream will be if we try to watch everything together.

Dominica did some homework tonight as well for her GPS and the New Geography class. I pointed her in the direction of the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference which is perfectly tied in with her class. If you are interested in the content from the conference from 2005 through 2007 you can listen to the talks and panel discussions on IT Conversations for free. Very good stuff. Well worth a listen.

Tomorrow is a doggie-daddy day. Oreo is very excited. He was totally ready for today to be his sleep-in day but had to go to daycare. I will be working from home tomorrow and performing a much needed clean up of the apartment. Tomorrow night Dominica and I are heading to the Prudential Center for the first time and will be seeing the live show of Dancing with the Stars which was one of my Christmas presents for Dominica (yes, she actually asked for that.) The really cool thing about the show is that we will get to see Wayne Newton who will be singing, but not dancing, at the show. On Friday we are thinking about heading north up to my dad’s place to visit for the weekend (surprise dad!) But we will have to see how the weather is going to be. We don’t want to be driving in snow. But we do want to avoid the American football game this weekend.

It was almost nine when we started watching 28 Weeks Later. The movie was very interesting because it takes place in London and specifically on Canary Wharf where I worked while I was there just a couple of months ago. They showed people riding the DLR, getting off at Canary Wharf train station and had tons of footage of the buildings, Citi London and One Canada Square, that I worked in while I was there. There was just tons of shots all over the place that Dominica and I got to go which was incredibly cool. But that didn’t redeem the movie which was a horribly cheesy successor to the first film. This film seemed to be a zombie apocalypse cover for social commentary on the US military today. It was not an enjoyable film in the least. The plot was weak and boring and the gross factor was way too high and unnecessary. And every character in the movie was so horribly stupid and everything relied on so much coincidence and plot holes that it made no sense at all. I would avoid this movie unless you just can’t resist seeing Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs firebombed. And even then, just watch those bits. For those of us who have worked there it is pretty neat to see your office used as the site of a zombie infestation!

After that we popped in an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air to watch before heading off to bed. The final result is that the movie was bad but Netflix is a great deal and we are very excited to be using it now.