I did not manage to sleep at all on the flight over to Dublin.  The sun starting coming up about halfway there which is weird as it had just gone down before we left New York.  Ireland is five hours ahead of New York and once I reach Amsterdam I will be six hours ahead.

It was eight in the morning, local time, when we touched down in Dublin.  What a quick trip.  We can, apparently, fly from New York to Dublin in about the same time that it takes for Dominica and I to drive to dad’s house!  That does not take into account the drive time to JFK or the wait time before the flight, of course, but it does indicate that doing a three day weekend in Ireland is really quite doable as long as we are living in the New York area.  If we flew to Shannon rather than Dublin that would cut a bit of additional time off as well as it is on the west coast of Ireland rather than the east coast.  Dublin is more useful for jumping off to Amsterdam, like I am doing, but for visiting Ireland Shannon might be far better.

Overall I was very happy with my Aer Lingus flight and I am absolutely planning on use them again, and often, for our excursions to Europe.  Their prices are by far the best that I have ever seen and we were really afraid that that would mean that flying with them would be really uncomfortable but that was not the case at all.  At least not on this flight.   I have three more flights to go with them this week so I will get a fair amount of experience with them all at once.

It was a stunningly beautiful morning in Ireland as we flew over.  Clear and crisp and bright sunlight spilling everywhere.  I even got to see a castle or large manor estate as we flew over the island.  I got to see the Dublin Ferry taking commuters over to Wales or England too.

Since I am transferring in Dublin getting there early did not do too much for me.  It left me with three hours to kill before the next flight for Amsterdam takes off.  This is where the exhaustion started to hit.  Three hours with no sleep and nothing to do will make you very, very sleepy.

While at the Dublin Airport I got to see the Guiness Store. Andy would be excited. I took a picture for him that is available on the Flickr stream. I was depressed to discover that there was a Starbucks at the airport. You can’t even escape them in Europe.

I had mistakenly not requested a vegetarian meal for the flight last night (I did not know that we were getting a meal at all so I had no idea) so I did not have much to eat.  I hadn’t eaten too much at all yesterday just to make sure that I could handle all of the traveling today – the flights are just the beginning of my journey.  So I was pretty much starved.  I got myself my first cash in Euros at the Dublin Airport – this is my first time ever having Euros at all actually – and once I had cash I hit the little coffee cart in the terminal where I was awaiting my next leg.

I decided to avoid caffeine.  I don’t want to make myself even more exhausted later on when I might really need the energy plus I have a really bad cold developing and that did not seem like the right approach.  Liesl has had a cold for two days and I caught it yesterday.  I could feel it coming on throughout the day and it finally turned into something last night on the flight over.  So now I am traveling with a cold

I got myself a fruit smoothie and a tuna salad and cucumber sandwich.  It was tasty.  Quite good for airport food.  I sat for a while longer and decided that I needed something more so I got an orange juice and an apple turnover.

The flight to Amsterdam was uneventful.  I had an aisle seat, like I did last night, and this time no one directly beside me so it was quite comfortable.  Last night my camera had not fit into the overhead compartment so I had had to fly with it on the floor by my feet but it fit on this leg so that was convenient.  Nothing to watch here so I attempted to rest as much as possible.  I dozed off just a tiny bit and might have gotten twenty minutes of a nap at best.  Not much but it will help get me through the day.

I had been nervous that getting to Amsterdam and dealing with figuring out the train situation and everything else would be complex and difficult since I know no Dutch.  This was not the case at all.

The first thing that I realized as I stepped off of the plane into Holland is that everything, and I mean everything, is in English.  And I don’t just mean that they include English everywhere in addition to the Dutch but that English is the primary language and most signs have the same thing, but small, in Dutch below the English.  But somethings are English only.  Weird.  I had heard that speaking only English wouldn’t be a problem in Holland but this I was not expecting.

Once I was through customs, I know have Irish and Dutch stamps in my passport book, it was time to figure out the train situation.  From the US I had thought that I was going to need to take a train from the airport, Schiphol, to the city center and from there catch the train out to Osnabruck, but this was not the case.  It is actually easier to get a train directly from Schiphol to Osnabruck!  DB (German Road) Railway comes right into the airport.  It could not possibly be easier.

It was so easy, in fact, that it was actually easier dealing with getting an international transfer railway ticket in a foreign country where I don’t speak the local language at all than it is getting tickets on any American railway system of which I know including Amtrak, Metro North, NY Subway, NJ Transit, etc.  Just walk up to the counter and say, I would like a ticket to Osnaburck.  First or second class?  What’s the difference?  Internet access and thirty Euros.  I’ll take second then.  Yeah, that’s what everyone does.  Okay, so track three?  Yup.  Thanks.

That was it.  Had I already known to just get second class it would have reduced the entire conversation to “Osnabruck please.”  “Here you go, thanks.”

The timing was perfect.  I went down to the platform, which was right in the middle of the airport, and waited just about ten minutes before boarding the DB for Berlin.  The ride takes about four hours on high speed rail as there are numerous stops along the way.  But it was comfortable and relaxing.  It gave me a really good chance to see the entire east to west cross-section of the Netherlands.  What an amazing beautiful country!  Small and yet packed full of interesting stuff.  Very verdant and agricultural while remaining highly populated.  Just gorgeous.  I got to see several major cities along the way including Outer Amstel (the south side of Amsterdam) then out to Amersfoort and Apeldoorn.  That stretch was very much urban although there was an amazing amount of trees, parks, fields, etc.  Tons of little neighbourhoods through which we passed were just adorable and I could totally see living here.

The main impression that I got in The Netherlands was that it was a bit of a blending between what we experienced in England in 2007 and what we are used to in the US.  It actually felt a little less “exotic” than England does.  At least to me having grown up in the aftermath of the New Netherlands colony in New York and coming from a partially Dutch background.  So maybe others would not see it as much of a “comfort” location as I do but most Americans would certainly find it to be only mildly exotic and foreign in comparison to most foreign destinations.

I really wish that I had time to get off of the train and explore this beautiful country.  Not on this trip, though, I am afraid.  I will have to save it for another time.  But from the looks of what I am seeing I think that Dominica and Liesl will be very interested in spending a season living in The Netherlands – most likely in a smaller city and away from Amsterdam itself.  Dominica is not a fan of huge cities and there is so much awesome stuff in these smaller towns that there is no reason to limit The Netherlands to its large coastal cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

The train went on through Deventer which was one of the most gorgeous looking towns that I have ever seen.  It sits on a river and, at least near the train line, it is just full of parks and paths and great buildings.  Just amazing.  I tried grabbing some pics from the train but it does not do it the least bit of justice.  I was on the right side of the train so my view was southbound.  Just amazing though.  I definitely want to come back and explore that town.

After Apeldoorn the views definitely became much more rural.  Nothing in Holland or The Netherlands is as rural as what we call rural in America but the cityscapes fell away to villages and cute country homes.  We traveled through a series of small villages and tiny cities before making the crossing into Lower Saxony in Germany at the town of Bad Bentheim.  Here we had to stop for twenty minutes while the police inspected the train and the Dutch crew was replaced with a German one.  Then it was on through Germany.

It was not long before the famous windmills were visible.  Northern Germany has become world famous for its electric generating windmills. They have become the new symbol of the country.

Lower Saxony was definitely less heavily populated than Holland was and the architecture changed towards a more rural feel and, I think, closer yet towards what would feel natural to Americans.  The countryside is definitely very familiar feeling but once in Germany the use of English dropped off significantly and the feel of being in a non-English speaking country started to exist.

We went through Salzbergen and the Rheine – the first real city inside of Germany.  Once we went east of Rheine we were actually traveling through the Teutoburger Wald (Teutoburg Forest) which Osnabruck lies directly in the middle of.

Arriving in Osnaburck I was greeted to an amazing central train station loaded with shops and food.  I stepped outside in the fresh German air and sat down in the plaza to figure out how to get out to the hotel.  The train station is just east of downtown and my hotel is quite a bit to the west of town – still in the city but far from downtown.  I took a picture, Twittered my status – which I have been doing all day as well as uploading camera pics to Flickr – and then decided to just get a taxi to take me to the hotel.  I was really, really exhausted and did not need to get lost trying to walk across the city with all of my luggage.

The taxi ride was quick and relatively cheap.  I got to see downtown Osnabruck in a flash.  I was amazed at the roads full of BMWs and Mercedes Benz.  People really all do drive these here!

We arrived at the hotel and I got checked in.  Pheww.  Finally the travel is over.  Now I can relax in Germany.  I got up to the room, took some quick pictures and jumped into the shower.  Boy did I need that!  I was feeling pretty gross after all of that time on planes, trains and automobiles.

I wanted to keep tonight simple so I just went down to the bar and ate there right in the lobby.  They have some vegetarian (but not vegan) items on the menu which makes it easy.  I got the cheese spatzle which is a lot like the baked macaroni and cheese on which I grew up.  Having had my mother cook spatzle as a kid as well really made this just a delicious comfort food for me.  It really was good.  I enjoyed it very much.  I also got a bowl of tomato soup which seemed to go with the spatzle really well.  I also got a local beer – which comes in a half liter size.  Very good as well.

One things that I love about Europe is that people are so outgoing and friendly.  The other guy sitting at the bar started a conversation with me and we chatted for at least half an hour or longer.  He is a German from Schleswig-Holstein near the Danish border.  This was his first time down to Osnabrucker Land as well.  He was not here to see the Kalfriese, as the battle is known here, but just to explore the history in downtown including the famed signing place of the treaty that ended the Thirty Years War.

After dinner I went back up to the room and got my Internet access enabled.  That is not cheap but I can make telephone calls through it which easily makes it cheaper than using my mobile for anything here.  My mobile Internet access is unlimited but calls are a dollar a minute!

I got my VoIP phone set up and called Dominica. It was about eight thirty here but only two thirty back home.  She and Liesl were just on the road up to Frankfort to visit her parents for the week.  We talked for about half an hour.  Liesl got upset being able to hear my voice in the car while they were driving.  I talked to her a bit and I could hear her trying to talk back to me.  Boy do I miss my little baby   I really wish that my family could have come over here with me.  This is going to be a very lonely trip.

After the call I set up my CPAP and did some uploads to Flickr so that people would have something to look at until I have a chance to point this entry.  I have been trying to upload pictures throughout the day from the mobile phone but only every so often does one actually get posted and I can’t verify that easily until I am back to my laptop so you get what you get during the day.

I went to bed really early by local standard.  Probably around nine although I was losing track of time by then.  I am really looking forward to some sleep tonight although I am concerned that my cold may prevent me from being able to sleep.  Needing to have a CPAP in order to sleep is very difficult when your sinuses get stuffed up.

I have set up a “set” for Germany 2009 on Flickr that you can check out to see how things are going here in Osnabruck this week.

Happy belated 50th Anniversary to Strunk and White.  Every middle school graduate should own a copy.  A home library essential for everyone.

It has been so warm this past week.  We are definitely into the Indian Summer of November.  It has been so warm that even a lot of our neighbours have their windows open. We are having a tough time keeping the house cool enough at night to sleep.

I stumbled upon an interesting looking book today on Amazon, “Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code” from the Children’s Literature and Culture Library (Vol. 27).  I’m sure that this would be a very interesting read, however the $94.50 price tag makes me wonder if it could really be all that valuable to me.

I just barely caught the 7:08 train out of Peekskill.  Having a set time to make the train is probably good for me.  It is going to teach me to get moving in the mornings as there is no time to spare.  It would be really nice if I was able to consistently make the 6:42 train.  I suspect that it is less crowded and with just a little effort I think that making it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  In theory that would get me into the office before 8:30 most days.

Dominica and I are both completely exhausted today.  What a week this has been.

I spoke to RIT today to let them know that I am going to be taking the winter quarter off from school.  I am hoping to be able to return to classes for the spring quarter.  We will have to wait and see.

I paid several of the bills today and noticed that Enterprise has still not returned the wrongfully charged money on the American Express bill.  One more thing that I need to deal with one more time.  It seems like I spend all of my time spinning my wheels trying to follow up with things.

I predict that as society becomes increasinly complex that there will be more and more call for personal valet services which will take the time to deal with these types of hassles for us.  Simple things that everyone needs to do like paying the bills, disputing inappropriate charges, picking up the dry cleaning, maintaining our calendars, taking our cars in for servicing, answering our phones to filter against sales calls (especially those generated through political loopholes), getting our mail, picking up the groceries, fueling the car, putting air in our tired, checking the oil, getting oil changes, washing the car, signing for packages, organizing the maid and food services, etc.  There are so many little, easy tasks that we all have to do so often that it must be a significant drain on our economy just dealing with them all of the time.  They stand between us and productivity.  It would be better, I think, to hire someone to handle them for us.  It would ensure that we are organized and that important tasks are not swept under the rug just because we have gotten busy.

There wasn’t any spare time today so I had to skip both my swimming and my lunch entirely.  I don’t mind skipping lunch too much but skipping my swim time is awful.  I need it for my health, for my stress reduction and just to get a good return on the health club investment.

Things slowed down enough for me this afternoon that I made the decision to just run for home before things got really busy again.  So at about a quarter after two I made a run for the train.  I got stuck waiting for a very long time for the subway which was almost disasterous.  Had it been just one minute later I would have had to have returned to Wall Street and wouldn’t have been able to go home until the middle of the night.  As it was I got to Grand Central Terminal and literally had to run through the terminal to make it to my train.

I got into the Peekskill Station just before four and Dominica picked me up.  We got to the house and I rushed to get logged back in and back to work.  It wasn’t really that busy of a Friday night which was significantly in my favour.  This weekend there is a freeze meaning that almost nothing is going on all weekend and while it doesn’t officially impact tonight it does lessen my workload overall.

The evening was spent in a panic to work on my paper for my class.  I wrapped up almost everything for the office by six.  Dominica ran to the New City Diner to pick up dinner for us as we are both going to be really exhausted by the time that we get a chance to get to bed.

Dominica ate dinner and read the first twenty-seven pages of my paper looks for spelling and grammar errors.  That took a long time.  I continued writing.

The writing went well, I think, and I finally turned in my forty one page, eighteen thousand word paper at eleven at night.  Once I went back and spent some time looking at other people’s papers I began to realize that my scope was completely different from their scope.  The longest paper that I saw was just under eight thousand words with most around five or six and one at just three.  The final was supposed to be a corporate handbook and I took this to mean a publishable book or a regular handbook length and I thought that ~30 pages had been mentioned which I took to mean of content not including the table of contents, bibliography, title page, etc.  I never know if I am doing what the professor wants in any of these classes.

To put my paper in perspective, though, I only wrote the equivalent of less than two weeks of SGL posts.  Two weeks of my daily blogging actually seems like a rather light amount of writing for a graduate paper.  If you’ve been reading SGL for the past two weeks you would have read quite a bit more than I wrote in this paper.

I headed off to bed, shutting down all of the computers in the house, just before midnight.  The alarm is set for five in the morning.  We are hoping to be in Waverly, New York around nine in the morning.

I looked in on my Wikipedia entry on Blam (meaning “Comment Spam”) which is a term that I coined and added to Wikipedia many years ago in the hopes of it becoming a standard term.  My definition remains the top definition for the word and, since that original page creation, the additional word “blammer”, with its obvious meaning, has also been added.  So, at this point, I think that it is safe to assume that I have successfully coined a word in the English lexicon as it has now been used for many years.  Very cool.  I have fulfilled my need to contribute to humanity.

Check out “Good Morning Yahoo“.  This is one of the many ways in which the web is overtaking traditional television.  This is a very neat concept and I am glad to see Yahoo moving in this direction.  They do something similar on Yahoo Finance.  They need to start considering a general “Yahoo Television” section to centralize their new video content services.

Here is a pet peeve of mine – the ongoing deterioration of the English language.  In recent years (or decades) it has become increasingly “cool” to attempt to show off one’s linguistic skills by using “hard” words like ironic or random.  Of course, to even mildly educated people these are common, easy words, but we still find the American mass media unable to correctly use the term random.  In this particular case the use was used to denote an even that was specifically not-random.  Does that make its use ironic?

When visiting the science museum in Ottawa a number of years ago, Dominica and I were astounded by the number of times we heard about the CanadArm – the robotic arm on the space shuttle that most people never think about because, well, it isn’t very important in the grand scheme of things.  It was mentioned over and over as if it was the only thing Canada ever did.  It actually made you feel embarrassed for the poor Canadian kids who had to come here and be berated for having produced nothing ever, in all of history, beyond a space shuttle appendige.  Recently on the Old New Thing, we get this:

“From what I can tell, Canadians are taught that NASA’s job is to launch the CanadArm into space so it can move stuff around.”

Raymond Chen, in The Old New Thing, also lists the things that Americans are often taught as being our nation’s greatest accomplishments.  I found it odd that in his list (in which he claims only what we are taught and not what is accurate) he mentions George Eastmann – he meant George Eastman – as the inventor of the camera but doesn’t mention that this is complete and totally incorrect.  He mentions Henry Ford as being completely incorrect as the inventor of the automobile, but Eastman is so far from being the inventor of the camera that it seems to be the obvious choice for “not correct.”

Having grown up in the Rochester area in the shadow of George Eastman and Kodak (my father worked at Kodak from college graduation until his retirement) I have never even heard it insinuated that Eastman invented the camera or photographic film or photography in general.  A pioneer?  Definitely, but not the inventor of aforementioned technologies.  I wonder what backwater in the US is teaching this concept?  If you were ever taught this, leave a comment.  I want to know where this is coming from.  For your information – the camera was invented a few hundred years before Eastman was even born.

In an old interview from 2007 with George Mannes, which I read today, he makes note of how accurately Hollywood (or television) shows “hot trends” in movies or on television actually are really good indicators of that particular trend being over especially within the financial world.  Most recently we have seen this phenomenon from the plethora of television shows dedicated to house flipping which did not hit the market until after the housing market had crashed and no one could possibly make money flipping houses.  Mannes looks at the greater trends and has determined that Hollywood is consistently so far behind the times as to be a pretty serious counter-market indicator.

The best bit of the interview, though, was when George Mannes recounts the classic story of the investor in 1929 who realized that the market was about to crash when his shoe-shine boy was giving stock tips.  Mannes then goes on to compare shoe-shine boys of the 1920s to the Hollywood producers of today.  I’m convinced that the comparison goes much deeper than the education and skill needed to do their jobs the fact that they are accurate counter-market indicators.

The Black Crayon.

Up at five thirty this morning.  Ugh.  I was not ready to face the day at that point.

I turned on the shower and, while waiting for that to get warm, I logged into the office, cleaned up my email and did an early morning software deployment that had just been requested.  At least nothing will be backed up for me by the time that I reach the office.

We were running late this morning.  Really late and I managed to miss the “late” train that I use as my last ditch train into Summit.  Ugh.  So I had to wait for about forty minutes on the platform waiting for the late-late train to Gladstone.

Today is my test of Kevin’s theory that I qualify, as a “reverse commuter”, to use off-peak NJ Transit tickets (which, are available in round-trip form as well) to save 15% off of my train fare and to allow me to cut half of the painful ticket buying process out of my day.  Additionally, by having pre-purchased my evening return ticket it roughly quadruples my chances of catching the evening express back to Newark.  So the off-peak ticket saves 15% of the cost, 2-4 minutes of ticket buying pain, twenty minutes of waiting on the Summit platform and thirty minutes of riding the local to Newark!  Wow.

For lunch today I just ate at my desk while attending an online web conference from Red Hat.  We learned about Red Hat Linux clustering and memory performance tuning.

I left work on the shuttle all prepared to run from the shuttle to the Hoboken Express line to get myself to Newark nice and early.  My plans were thwarted by a “paid by the hour” NJ Transit assistant conductor who was dilly-dallying on the stairs of the platform blocking our way.  This drives me crazy about life in the New York Metro – half of everyone is in a hurry and the other half have nowhere in particular to be and think nothing of blocking the way for everyone else.  I’m used to Upstate NY where everyone has someplace to be and would still be willing to get out of your way if you needed to go faster than them.  So three of us, all trying to make the same train and all stuck behind the same guy, missed the train.  He, of course, was happy to miss the train as he was on the clock.

I took the next train and Dominica picked me up from Washington Square Park near the train station saving me from a very warm and humid walk home.  We got home to Eleven80 and ordered in some dinner from Nino’s.  We are really going to miss Nino’s when we finally move up to Peekskill.  They have a great menu, take orders online that are consistently correct when they arrive, aren’t too expensive and the food is really good.  They all know us by name now as well.  Not that we will be able to afford to eat out every night once the baby arrives but still, they will be missed.

I have been testing out Google’s new Chrome browser yesterday and today and, understanding that it is still in beta, have come across two really critical sites that do not function at all for me using their V8 JavaScript engine – Zimbra email client and Flickr.  Both sites are, coincidentally I’m sure, products of Yahoo, Google’s biggest competitor.

Dinner arrived just after seven.  Rigatoni vodka for me and stuffed shells for Dominica.  We watched some Frasier. The plan had been for me to work and for Dominica to watch Ratatouille which had just arrived from NetFlix, but Oreo came to bed and snuggled up with me like he was going to sleep and I just couldn’t bare to disappoint him.  He was so worn out and exhausted after playing on the farm this weekend that he actually passed out standing up at daycare today!

So it was an early night for us which was probably wise all around.

The rain is gone and the hot, humid weather is back in force in the New York Metro area. Not only is it hot today but tomorrow and Sunday are set to be even warmer. All week is going to be pretty rough. Autumn can’t come too quickly for me.

We are still pretty excited this morning about the prospects of our new home (pending) in Peekskill, New York.  We are trying to get the engineering inspection done as quickly as possible and then it is time to get the lawyer involved to check over the contracts.  October 15th will come much more quickly that it seems that it would.

One of the big challenges that we are going to have is the issue of moving one large load of stuff from the apartment in Newark as well as moving the huge load of stuff from dad’s house in Pavilion.  The new house is going to be completely filled with stuff for us to sort and find homes for as soon as we move in.  The entire basement will be just stacked from floor to ceiling with stuff until we figure out what to do with it all.

The new house is actually smaller than the house in Geneseo when all of the space is considered together.  The new house in Peekskill is listed at 2,000 square feet – which is large and luxurious when compared to our itsy, bitsy apartment in Newark.  Peekskill has that 2,000 sq. ft. split between three levels (that means two sets of stairs taking up space) and has two bedrooms and two and a half baths.  But the Geneseo townhouse was 1182 sq. ft. for both the main living level and the basement for a total of 2,364 sq. ft. of usable space with only two bathrooms.  So Geneseo had more space with which we could work by one stairway, one powder room and 364 sq. ft.  None of this takes into consideration the two car garage that we had in Geneseo as well in which we stored quite a bit of stuff.  So we are still being forced to squeeze down quite a bit.

Geneseo was also set up with one third of the basement being used for nothing but storage and my office area was lined with heavy-duty shelves that were used for storage as well.  So the percentage of the house used for pure storage was very high.  We are going to have to do some serious “compression” to make everything fit.  It is going to be pretty tough.  Dominica reminds me that there is a pull-down attic but I wonder how much storage that is going to provide.

I was doing some research on my commute from Peekskill to Wall Street today as well.  I have three stations to choose from when leaving Westchester – Peekskill, Cortlandt and Croton-Harmon.  There is a different monthly ticket cost from each station which are, in order, $261, $261 and $221.  The extra drive time to Croton-Harmon may be worthwhile for the cheaper monthly train pass and for the lesser time spent on the train each day.  We will see.  Cortlandt does not have the cost advantage that one would hope that it did.  Travel times are 56 minutes, 51 minutes and 42 minutes – Croton-Harmon also has a non-express line that would take 62 minutes or a semi-express that would be 53 minutes and a few random schedules that fall within that range.

Once reaching Grand Central Station in Manhattan I will need to take the 4/5 Metro line from there down to the head of Wall Street and then walk the length of Wall Street to get to the office.  All in all, the trip is going to take a really long time in each direction.  It is going to make my days really long.

Travel to the Peekskill station is just 1.8 miles from the house.  Croton-Harmon is 9.3 miles.  The Peekskill station could be walkable on nice days – but not very often.  If I am really lucky they will have some parking available for scooters and I will just get myself a Vespa that gets 73mpg and only costs $1,800 and I will use that to zip to and from the train station.  That would work out just fine for most days, I think.

I got a chance to have a nice lunch today.  Ronak and I managed to escape the office around one and went out to Mad Dog and Beans on Stone in downtown Manhattan for some serious American-Mexican fare and mojitos.  The food there was excellent.  The guacamole was by far the best that I have ever had and the grilled corn was amazing too.  The main meal was huge and way too filling and quite good and the mojitos were the best that we had ever had as well.  I am sure that we will be going back to Mad Dog and Beans again.

After eating at Mad Dog we stopped in to the Financier Patisserie to pick up iced coffee to get us through the afternoon.  We both wanted regular coffee but it is just too warm for that today.

In addition to the normal Friday evening work, today there was house-buying work to be done as well.  We found an inspector to look at the house for us.  We are, of course, getting radon and termite inspections done as well.  I called about an attorney as well but the attorney that we are trying to reach was out today so hopefully we will have something more solid come Monday.  I spoke to the bank as well.  It’s been a busy day.

Dominica and I managed to get scheduled for a house inspection for Tuesday evening at three thirty.  It will be tough for us to make, but both of us have already taken the evening off so that we can go so it will only be so bad.

I have been really busy the last several days listening to the latest batch of material from IT Conversations but today I got completely caught up and have decided to move onto a book so I am now “reading” Bill Bryson’s “Shakespeare: The World As Stage“.  Of course, you can get this book via Audible which is now a division of Amazon.

In tech news today, Microsoft did a bold experiment – setting up users in San Francisco who did not like Vista to try out Microsoft’s secret new “Mojave” operating system to see if they liked it better than Vista.  The response was overwhelmingly positive.  Mojave is, not perfect, but very close to what users would prefer as the successor to Vista.  Just one hitch – Mojave IS Vista.  Just like Pepsi is preferred over Coke as long as the consumer isn’t seeing the label, users don’t like Vista unless they can’t see the label.  The marketing and hype has created public sentiment that is based on the marketing and not on the product.  Once the public thinks that Vista is bad there isn’t much Microsoft can do.  Rational product choices are not the hallmark of the American public.  (Not that Vista is faultless, but overall it is a pretty good product and not the garbage that it has been made out to be, by and large.)

The main part of the day was pretty slow today.  I was busy but not backed up.  Five o’clock came and I got pretty busy.  I was in the office until well after seven.  And today is even SysAdmin Appreciation Day!  At least a couple of people in the office remembered and sent me nice emails.

Friday nights wouldn’t be so bad if Saturday mornings weren’t part of the normal work week.  We are not traveling at all this weekend which is great and my work tomorrow is not “scheduled” work meaning that I can do it at my leisure.

It was just a few minutes before eight when I was finally able to leave the office on Wall Street.  Quite a long day for me.  Since it is so late I am going to go ahead and post today’s daily!  Have a good weekend everyone.

While I am busy cleaning out my email, here is Tony West’s New Blog.

Oreo stayed in bed for a solid twelve hours. Just as he was leaving daycare yesterday he played with Lana, the little Jack Russell Terrier puppy there and she really wears him out. He isn’t young anymore. So whenever that happens he sleeps extra but this was a whole new level of sleeping even for him. He was definitely ready for breakfast when Dominica called him in to the kitchen this morning.

For the second day in a row they forgot to get Dominica her car. It was so cold today that she and Oreo returned to the apartment to get him more bundling to keep him warm. It is 16° F today with high winds bring the wind chill a bit below 0°. This is how I think of winter in the northeast.

My walk to the train station was bitter cold. I grabbed a hot sandwich at Airlie on the way in and that kept me warm a little. When I got to the PATH station I discovered that the trains were having a track issue down in Jersey City and that they were not running at this time. The PATH platform was completely packed with people who had apparently been waiting quite some time for the train. There were so many people that people were waiting on the outside of the turnstiles to await the train.

It took me an extra hour to get into the office. The train was packed with people like sardines. It was awful. And we kept getting stuck at different stations. It was not a pleasant ride into work today.

I have decided that the best names for pet cats are American Civil War Battlefields. Some examples of great names for pet cats include: Shiloh, Harper, Vicksburg, Antietam, Appomattox, Boydton, Hampton, Front Royal, Hanover, Hatcher, Manassas, McDowell, Piedmont, Rappahannock, Staunton, Ware Bottom, Totopotomy, Trevilian, Wilson, Winchester, Kessler, Smithfield, Galveston, Murfrees, Chattanooga, Brentwood, Franklin, Memphis, Chusto, Chustenahlah, Buffington, Albemarle, Averas, Hatteras, Roanoke, Valverde, Belmont, Girardeau, Carthage, Marmiton, Meridian, Okolona, Tupelo and Monocacy. Now that you have my list you can each choose one and will forever have a cat with a great, conversation starting name. These names don’t necessarily work well for dogs. It is specifically cats who needs Civil War names.

I came across a great site for the history of the Genesee and Wyoming Railroad which operates between Retsof and Caledonia, New York. In the past few years they have branched out and now serve as far south as Hampton Corners, NY where the new salt mine shafts are located.

For my readers who are from “back home” in Western, New York there has been a lot of interest over the last several years wondering what would become of the giant Foster-Wheeler facility in Dansville, NY. FW was the major employer in the region and the plant takes up a significant amount of the village land area. There has been much concern over the plant closing and what it would mean for the region. Today I stumbled upon American Motive Power who purchased the plant, renovated it and now uses it for rebuilding railroad locomotives. That is the perfect business for that area. I am really happy to see the facility being put to good use.

I discovered today that the Rochester area has the New York Museum of Transportation. I had no idea that this was in Rochester. I would have gone at some point had I known that. The area also has the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum. You only find these things after you move away. I also found a good article with good pictures of the abandoned Rochester Subway of the 1950s.

I stumbled across an amazing picture of a lake in the Faroe Islands that is 30 meters above sea level. This image is really stunning.

I went home and Dominica was cooking for Oreo when I got there. He hasn’t had home cooked food in a few weeks. During the holidays he went onto canned food as he was traveling so much. We are thinking that he is tired of his canned food as he skipped his dinner again tonight. Although it also could be that the cans of food are providing him with more food at breakfast and he just isn’t getting hungry at night like he does when we giving him the smaller, home-cooked portions.

I went down to the deli in the first floor of our building for dinner – grilled cheese and French fries.  We ate our dinners while watching some more of the eighth season of Full House.  Not much more of that show left.

Ryan stopped by for a little while to snag a piece of apple pie from the pie that Dominica baked yesterday.  Dominica thought that Ryan would be appalled by my idea of mounted a 52″ x 20″ Z Scale model railroad diorama on the wall by our bookshelf in the living room but Ryan agreed that it was a good idea and would be cool.  So Dominica lost out on that one

Early to bed and one more day then the weekend!

We got to the airport and checked right in. No waiting at all. The only issue that we ran into was that our carry-on luggage was way too big for British Airways (or probably anyone) so a bunch of stuff had to be switched from my carry-on into Min’s carry-on which was then checked instead. No big deal and Min had planned for that.

We got into the terminal without any hassle from security. This was, in fact, the best airport security experience that I have had in the past six years. They actually were nice and helpful and told you what to do and helped speed you through and everything. It was great. Normally they are mean and cold and make people nervous and slow things down just for the sake of inefficiency but this was a very positive experience.

We decided to eat dinner in the terminal as we had more than enough time. In fact we had about two hours to kill after all was said and done. So we went into the one sit-down restaurant available to us, the Sam Adams Brewhouse. We ordered some simple food – soup and nachos as they were the only semi-vegetarian items on the menu. We asked if we could get some French fries but they said that the kitchen wouldn’t entertain “special requests”. Considering that this is the only restaurant in the terminal that services Air India and they blatantly don’t serve any true vegetarian items and won’t make any compromises this is really a slap in the face by Newark International to one of the regions largest populations. Not offering vegetarian selections in a venue like this is unbelievable. It was a strong statement to us as we sat there noticing that the entire population of the terminal was Indian and of the few of us that weren’t at least we were unable to get real food being ovo-lacto-vegaquarians. At least we were able to eat the soup.

The food that we ordered – all stuff that takes no prep time as it is premade – ended up taking well over an hour for the kitchen to bother making. No one got any food during that time. Meals trickled out of the kitchen very, very slowly. Even with all of the time that we had to kill we had to leave most of our food behind and were only barely able to get the check brought to us so that we could move to our gate. It was unbelievable.

The Sam Adams service was so bad that the person at the table next to us ordered the chicken and brie sandwich. When it was delivered as just chicken on a bun they complained that the brie had been left off and that they wanted to be sure not to be charged for it. They were informed that since the server had never heard of brie that however the kitchen made it was how it was and whatever brie was was on there or didn’t come with the sandwich and that was that. Outright lying and deceit. It was truly unreal. At one point we literally went over an hour, as did the table next to us, without the waitress even looking at us once let alone checking on us.

So we ran to our terminal after that horrible eating experience. I will be avoiding Sam Adams in the future. They like to play themselves off as some “micro-brewery” gone popular but they are as mainstream as mainstream gets just using their name to sell any crap that they can. It isn’t like their beer is even made by them. It is made by contract breweries like the old Genesee brewery in Rochester. If you wouldn’t drink the cheap brands like Genny Twelve Horse Ale or Honey Brown then why would you drink Sam Adams? Exactly. Just a marketing machine that sells beer. Not a brewery.

Our flight ended up being delayed by about an hour because of a traffic problem in Newark that kept the crew from getting to the plane on time. But it wasn’t too long and we knew that it was just a matter of them being driven to the airport and then we would be able to leave. Unfortunately it was getting later and later and that meant that our morning would be getting pushed back more and more too. Our schedule is too tight for their not to be chain reactions involved.

We finally boarded the plane and were off of the ground around ten at night. The seats were a bit cramped but there were some movement options that actually made the trip not too bad. I was actually very surprised by how little the very, very long flight affected me. We really enjoyed that they had a GPS system on the plane and every seat had a little television that would show you the flight speed, altitude, temperature and showed you on a map where you were.

Our flight path carried us directly over Boston, Halifax and St. John’s Newfoundland and then out over the open waters of the cold North Atlantic. There was no more land beneath us until we crossed the Irish coast early in the morning. We flew over the south of Ireland directly over Cork and then over the Celtic Sea and over Wales and down into London.

During the flight we were served a real dinner which for us vegetarians was tortellini in a cheese sauce that was actually very good. Not what I am used to eating in the air. It was hot and came with a small bottle of wine, a nice dessert (lemon crumble or something) veggies and everything. Much better than the Sam Adams restaurant. In the morning they also served breakfast as we were passing over Ireland. I thought that it was bizarrely appropriate that having flown out of New Jersey – a place about as foreign to my family as England is – that the very first foods that I ate as I passed over Europe for the first time were yoghurt from Upstate Farms and processed in Batavia just twenty minutes up the road from the place where I grew up and where dad still lives. And the orange juice that I drank was bottled by a juice company in Akron, Ohio just half an hour or so from where most of my family still lives and where my parents grew up.

And now on to November 17th and England…

We arrive around twenty after nine in the morning but were stranded on the plane for another twenty or thirty minutes as they didn’t have anyone available to drive some stairs over to us to allow us to disembark down onto the tarmac.

We stepped off of the plane into the grey, misty overcast world of London. The first thing to hit us was how awesome the weather was for late November. It was so warm that we only wanted our light fleeces if we were going to be outside for quite a while. It was perfect weather. Both overcast and dark while being nicely warm even very early in the morning like it is now. Everyone in the UK that I had spoken to before leaving mentioned how cold it was and said to dress very warmly. But I am familiar with the British and Irish weather norms and I don’t know what they are talking about. One of the great things about the British Isles is how perfect the weather is all of the time. We are convinced that everyone in the UK thinks of the United States as being all like Los Angeles and doesn’t realize that most of the population of the US lives in places drastically colder than anywhere in the UK ever gets.

At this point I was able to test my new Verizon Mobile / Vodafone service which immediately fired up and worked like a charm. We definitely have phone and Internet service wherever we go so feel free to email us on our trip. But don’t call. (Later on I was able to verify my office’s BlackBerry service as well.)

British customs was quick and painless. Far easier than entering either the US or Canada. Dominica will get to experience re-entrance to the United States where it is very clear that the US government is not happy to have its citizens returning home and very much wished that we would all leave and just stay abroad. It is clear that the current government does not have the support of the people and doesn’t like them much either.

We hopped onto the Heathrow Express which zipped us down to London Paddington Station – one of the world’s most famous railway terminals. It was cool to get to see this landmark in person. From there we caught London Underground (aka the Tube) and zipped just up the street to Marylebone Station where we had about forty-five minutes to kill before catching the train to Stratford-upon-Avon.

Marylebone Station was actually very cool. It is nothing but a bizarre glass enclosure stretching between two ancient industrial buildings. It was really cool and quaint. You never see stuff like this in the states. We got some Pounds Sterling to carry in case we needed cash. I sat at a table in the station and Dominica went into the Ritazza Cafe to get us some pastries and coffee as it was lunch time and we were dying without caffeine. Neither of us slept more than a few hours on Thursday night and last night I was lucky if I slept fifteen minutes all night. Min might have slept for two hours but more likely only one or a little less. Sleeping on planes is tough.

The thing that is so funny about Ritazza being the place that we got our first coffee is that there are no Ritazza Cafes in the states and yet I get their coffee all of the time because they are the company that runs the cafeterias at my office in Warren, NJ. I had no idea that they had regular restaurants in the UK. I did know that they were based here, however. I took some pics to share with my coworkers as it is just entertaining. They actually have quite good coffee – even in the canteen at work. Not what you would expect.

So we got onto the train but it turns out that trains in England run on precise time tables (which through us off as we are used to NJ Transit) and we got onto the wrong train as they are literally spaced three minutes apart and you have to know the exact time to get on! Totally different than back home. Some people on the train helped us out and there was no issue. We just rode the train up to the Banbury, in Oxfordshire, stop and got off and waiting for the train following ours and then got on that one and kept on our way. Banbury is a market town. It is distinctions like this that make England so very different from America. The ancient heritage is a part of everything here.

One of the first things to strike you about England is how all of the buildings are so old. And I mean really, really old. Houses everywhere are hundreds of years old. Houses from eras when most of the United States was unsettled England has tightly packed row houses still in heavy use today. Coming from the US and Canada this is an amazing display of early construction and longevity of buildings. I have never been exposed to anything like this and I think that most North Americans would find it very shocking.

The layout and overall construction of England is so massively influenced first by its medieval heritage and descent from monarchical control and secondly by its entrance into the industrial revolution that it is staggering to behold. In America the memory of the industrial revolution mostly lies in the ruins of old factories and the occasional warehouse in a place that makes little sense today. The revolution is all but wiped from our memory and it definitely does not play any major role in America today. The buildings of that era have long since faded away and their influence on the towns and villages has been marginalized by new construction and changes to infrastructure.

But in England the industrial revolution touches every inch of the landscape. Every little village is full of old factories still in use and the ancient houses and civic structures built to support the industrialization being primary housing vehicles today. In America the use of such old buildings would be unthinkable. I see these buildings as we travel through England and it is hard to really comprehend that they are actual, in use, living structures. This is far from my ken.

The trip from Banbury and north we noticed that the landscaped changed and both Min and I commented on how the landscape was completely indistinguishable from Upstate New York until you saw a village. What is bizarre here for an American is seeing the remote English countryside looking just like Livingston County in New York but then, instead of tiny, rural farming communities, interspersed with massive high density villages that are big enough to easily qualify as cities in the USA. No matter how rural we got the villages were still tight streets with houses all attached and crammed in. It makes for a high population density while still allowing for a great deal of farmland. The other thing that we noticed was that instead of the farms being full of cattle they were full of sheep. Which are much cuter and more scenic.

It was at three ten in the afternoon (that is Greenwich Mean Time, +/-0 or five hours ahead for those of you on the US east coast in cities like New York, Boston, Washington or Atlanta. Eastern Standard Time is GMT -5) when we stepped off of the train into Stratford-upon-Avon. We checked a map and with our luggage it was going to be too far to consider walking to the bed and breakfast where we are staying so we grabbed a cab to take us there. The first thing that I noticed was that the cab was a very nice, new Mercedes-Benz. Very comfortable. And perfectly clean. Not like anything that you would see in the US. Ever.

The bed and breakfast that we are staying at is a little place that recently re-opened with new owners (we think) just to the south-eat of the village center on the lower bank of the Avon River. We checked in and everyone was very friendly. As we entered it felt a lot like any B&B that you might find in Ithaca or Wyoming, New York. But our rooms turned out to be completely different than we were expecting. Everything in them was brand new. The bathroom was brand new. It felt like a brand new hotel even though we could clearly tell that we are in a bedroom in what was originally built to just be someone’s house. The room is immaculately clean and is the first hotel that I have ever been in with an LCD television! We are extremely impressed. And the price is great for the UK and includes breakfast which we will be testing out tomorrow.

One thing that really stands out here is that even though the locals think that this is “cold” the inn still had all of the windows open and tons of fresh air. They just dress appropriately instead of turning on the heat and using trapped air. It is great! Dominica and I both really appreciate this approach. Is it also notable that the air here in the midlands is very clean and that we haven’t seen any insects which is completely different than back home. Here the windows don’t even have screens and are left open all of the time. In New York or New Jersey that would be disastrous.

Our first thought was to get in showers as we both felt awful after having traveled for twelve straight hours (not to mention three hours waiting in the airport, one hour on the ground and one hour in a train station) so we got right to that before doing anything else. I hooked up the laptop just enough to verify that we had Internet access and checked to make sure that our power adapters were going to work. Everything works and we are good to go. That was the last of our big worries (which included being able to get money, use credit cards, get to our destination, have the hotel be okay and have communications working.)

After showering we changed and headed straight out to walk to the village to take advantage of the pubs there. It is hard to express what all we noticed different about the UK than the US. Differences are hard to articulate and are often quite subtle. A few really obvious things included the noticeable “community” here – neighbours are really neighbours. There are lots of people walking on the walking paths to get around the village. People really do get around on foot even out in “the country.” Public transport will get you anywhere you need to go. Teenagers actually all go out and hang around in the village and are part of the general social scene.

Dominica’s client at work told her to definitely try the old Black Swan, now known as The Dirty Duck across the street from the Royal Shakespeare Company. So we went there and had very good English local beer (Flower’s Original Strong Ale) and excellent victuals. The prices were not out of line with what we would see in Newark for pathetic pub food too. So here is one example of the British beating Americans in the pricing game and getting much better products for their money.

We were so exhausted after our long trip and lack of sleep that even though it was only five when we sat down at the pub we were ready to pass out! Dominica had one pint and I had two. She got an amazing vegetarian butternut squash and leek Wellington and I went for the traditional fish and chips. We also got dessert. Dominica going for a chocolate and orange pudding while I went for an egg custard tart a la Lyle in As Time Goes By.

We walked back to the inn, ordered our breakfast and were passed out before seven. The bed was firm and very nice. The fresh air was great and here, it would seem, the ocean keeps the air warm at night so the temperature is still great for sleeping with the windows wide open. I woke up just before midnight and was wide awake. So I decided to take advantage of the situation to get SGL caught up for our first day. Otherwise we will be stuck backlogged the entire time that we are here.

Our breakfast is scheduled for eight forty-five in the morning. I hope to get some additional sleep in before then. Our plans tomorrow loosely include taking a bus tour of Stratford-upon-Avon including going out to see Warwick Castile which, we are told, is one of the finest castles in England. Mostly we are just out here to relax and get a feel for non-London England. So far I am really glad that we did. I can totally see us being happy to live in an area like this – preferably someplace less touristy and not quite so big.

We didn’t have many opportunities to take any pictures today. We were moving all day long and it was dark by the time that we set out for dinner. Hopefully tomorrow though. That is the plan.

I got the few pics that we have uploaded to Flickr and created our UK2007 Flickr Set to make keeping up on the images easy for those of you who don’t subscribe to our Flickr feed to get the pics automatically. I had to install Picassa onto Min’s new laptop to be able to edit them for you. Sorry that there is no podcast today but we knew that that was going to happen. We are hoping to be able to do one tomorrow. Dominica is excited about doing it too so there is a good chance that we will sneak one in at the end of the day.

My Internet connection in SuA is quite weak and uploading images is a major problem. It is unlikely that we will get another batch of pictures or the podcast uploaded until we have access to a stronger connection in London.