“Minnet, jag har tappat mitt minne, är jag svensk eller finne, kommer inte ihåg…”

Tonight starts a week long stint of not having overnight support at the office. That means that there is an extremely high probability that I am going to be getting paged out constantly starting around three in the morning. Fortunately I am not too exhausted today and I am working from home tomorrow so the first few days should be alright. The first half of next week will be rough.

It rained this morning but is very warm. I walked over to Airlie Cafe and grabbed my breakfast sandwich and a salad for lunch later on.

I finished reading “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely this morning. It was very good and I highly suggest it even to people without a particular interest in behavioral economics. I have started rereading “The Dilbert Principle” by Scott Adams for, what must be, the fourth time at least.

My afternoon was actually very busy. But not that stressful busy that you worry about. It was a good, productive busy. Busy troubleshooting and finding real solutions to problems. The kind of busy that you feel good about on the train ride home.

My train ride home didn’t come until very late, though. It was well after seven when I finally had the opportunity to head out of the office. Ramona and Winni might have been on their way to our apartment even before I was. I did finish reading “The Dilbert Principle” before leaving the office. Good book progress today.

On the ride home I started reading “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West” by Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan. It started off strong. I probably won’t get a chance to read any more of it until Friday.

I got home and we all ordered in dinner from Nino’s. Then we sat down to play a couple games of Steve Jackson’s Munchkin. Neither Dominica nor I had ever played Munchkin. It was fun and we had a good time. Dinner arrived and we made it through two bottles of wine.

We played until midnight when we realized that it was way too late for Dominica who has to work tomorrow and that now Ramona and Winni will have to walk home rather than taking the shuttle since the shuttle only runs until midnight during the week.

My textbook, “Object Oriented System Analysis and Design with UML“, for my master’s Systems Analysis and Design class arrived today. The class is actually called Object Methods or something like that as it is an object oriented SAD class but, more or less, it is just the master’s version of SAD2 that I took at SUNY Empire State College several years ago. This is one of the only two classes that I will have taken three of during my career at university the other being Java programming (Java Programming and Algorithms in Java at ESC and Java Programming at RIT.) I really enjoyed SAD as an undergrad so I am really looking forward to this class now. It starts officially on Monday. I am really excited about the textbook. It is an insanely expensive book at $160 but I found it used for just $60 but when it arrived today it was the most completely mint, brand-new book ever. It was even still shrink-wrapped and had not even even been opened as if it had been on a shelf and browsed. This was the best deal ever.

Tomorrow is my day at home with Oreo.  That is good because tonight is my first night without dedicated overnight support fielding my support calls during the off-hours.  So I will be on primary support starting at around two in the morning for Bahrain and three in the morning for London and Belfast.  Technically support is needed all night because of the Pacific Rim (Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, etc.) but they don’t really need anything ever.

Before going to bed I fired up the computer in the living room and got all logged into the office and set up so that I could work quickly and easily during the night.  I don’t want to be fighting to log in while attempting to wake up if someone needs me.  And I wanted all of the extra email cleaned up and deleted and anything lingering to be taken care of before the long night began.  I ended up working from midnight until just after one in the morning.  Then it was off to bed.

For those of you following the furlough news for me – there have been some changes proposed and I should know my furlough schedule tomorrow.  I hope.  Dominica and I are currently kicking around the possibility of escaping to Playa del Carmen on the Mayan Riviera in Mexico and potentially some combination to also head down to San Pedro Town in Belize or, to go in a completely different direction, possibly heading east to Croatia.  It is going to depend on timing and our finances.  We would definitely prefer Croatia but a short window of opportunity or the high costs of flights may force us one way or the other.

I worked for a little over an hour and then took time to go shower and get ready to face the day. I did the dishes to get the kitchen cleaned up, went over to Airlie Cafe to get breakfast for Dominica and I and made coffee. Dominica was up around ten thirty or so and spent the morning reading R. A. Salvatore’s Path of Darkness series (part of the Drizzt Cycle.)

I learned today that Amazon is in the process of buying Audible. This is interesting as we know a few of the Audible folks who are our neighbours. Audible itself is located at One Washington Square right here in downtown Newark just a few minutes walk out of our front doors. So we will be watching this closely to see how it plays out and what affect it has locally and to our favourite audio book service which we live and die by around here. Audible is a major component of my lifestyle.

Speaking of Audible, I have been waiting a long time for Scott Adams’ two classics, The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future to be available from Audible. I have box on cassette from many years ago but as I have no cassette player anymore that does me very little good. So I am very happy to see them on Audible so that I can listen to them again. (These books are so good that I own them in print as well.) Scott Adams’ new book, Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! is available as well. I bought all of these today along with Louisa May Alcott’s “Jo’s Boys” which is her only major work that I have never read. I also got her lesser known book “Good Wives” which is also a part of the March Sisters Series along with “Little Women” and “Little Men” both of which I read as a child.

Dad installed the new 512MB into the SunFire V100 that only had 128MB before. That should help a lot. The memory install went fine and as soon as it was back online I kicked off a large rsync operation to see how the new memory would affect performance. It made a huge difference and my files were backed up from one location to another in no time at all. Very nice.

Our reimbursement check for Dominica’s dental work came today which was quite a bit of money. She also received her second Netflix movie, Dreamgirls.

Dominica and Oreo spent the afternoon napping in the living room. Dominica didn’t effectively get up today until around four thirty.

Many of my Brainbench certifications have expired over the past several months and I have been lax about dealing with them. So today I started “re-upping” my certifications to get them current again. When you have as many expiring certifications as I do this can be a rather significant process. It is far more certifications than I keep on my resume too since many of the certs which have expired are not IT certifications but are soft skills that are used to build up to larger cumulative certifications. I started today with renewing by Linux Administration (Red Hat) and Linux Administration (Red Hat 9). Both tests are out of date. The first one is so out of date that I have no means of even estimating the era in which is was relevant but it was definitely quite some time ago. Perhaps the popular RH 7.3 was the basis for this test which was before I did any work with Red Hat and instead used OpenLinux and SuSE. The second test was much better but still several years old – it wasn’t that new when I took it the last time more than three years ago. This time, on my first attempt, I scored a Masters and ranked number two in the United States even on a platform version that I have never worked on.

For dinner I just ran over to Food for Life and picked up dinner as take out so that we could eat at home and relax. I finished reading Johanna Rothman’s “Manage It!” while I waited for them to finish up with the food. Once I got back home we watched more of the fifth season of The Cosby Show while we ate. Oreo has decided that his new favourite thing to do while we watch television is to climb into my lap and go to sleep which makes it impossible to get up again. We we ended up watching about two hours before Dominica decided that she really wanted to watch Dreamgirls so, at that point, I was easily able to decide to go back to the living room.

I did some light work in the living room and did some reading but mostly just took time to play with and hang out with Oreo who was being very needy.  After Dominica’s movie was over we watched some more The Cosby Show and went off to bed.