I left home around a quarter ’til eleven.  Dominica, Liesl and Oreo drove me down to the Peekskill train station where I caught the eleven twenty-two express train to Grand Central Terminal.  It has been months since I have ridden the train and it was nice to have some “forced relaxation” time to just ride and not have to worry about anything.  I was so intent on relaxing today that I did not even bring a book with me.  Instead I just loaded up the iPod with podcasts to which I would listen and blissfully pass the time.

This is my first time ever going from the train to the office in Tribeca directly.  Normally I go directly to the Wall Street office.  Getting over to Greenwich Street was actually very nice.  I just took the 7 from Grand Central to 42nd Street / Times Square and then took the E down to Canal.  From there it is just the shortest little walk and there is the office.  It must be ten or possibly even twenty minutes faster to do this than to go to Wall Street and with quite a bit less walking.

By the time that I had arrived in Tribeca there was some work waiting for me so I grabbed a seat on the trading floor and worked for about forty-five minutes.  That went well and then, when everything was caught up, Ronak and I went down to Baluchi’s on lower Greenwich Street near World Trade.  I got a Malabar salmon curry and the food was just amazing.  And it was really cheap too.  I couldn’t believe the prices.  I need to convince Dominica to come into the city and try out the food.  She would love it.

After lunch instead of returning to Tribeca I walked down to Wall Street.  It was a beautiful day for a walk in the city.  Cool breeze and bright sun.  I just love the city in spring.  What a great day to get to take a nice walk.

I worked from Wall Street for several hours.  Today is the last day before the holiday weekend begins so the market closed at two and the office is a ghost town.  I worked until just after five.  Then Dan and I walked across the street to Starbuck – not my choice for coffee but they are friendly and incredibly convenient – and we talked there for forty-five minutes or so.

Then I walked back up Wall Street to the subway and caught the train up to Grand Central Terminal.  From the GCT I got the seven twenty-two train north up to Peekskill.  It was a quiet ride listening to my iPod.  I packed up most everything that I have on my desk on Wall Street.  I had my swimsuit and backpack there still from when I had the gym membership so I brought that home along with some books that I had there and some miscellaneous paperwork.

There is a rumor that we are going to be moving again at the office.  This has become a regular thing and I just plan around it now.  I am not taking anything back to the office just to have to move it.  I have my little desk fan and that is all that I need other than a stack of emergency napkins and a pen.  My desk is completely bare now.  It really looks like I moved out.  If the rumors are true I may be moving back up to my old desk (or nearby) upstairs on Wall Street or possibly over to Tribeca.  I’m not sure which I would prefer and I don’t know for sure that either is happening.

Dominica, Liesl and Oreo all came down to pick me up when I got to the train station.  I was trying to get home early enough that we wouldn’t interrupt Liesl’s sleep schedule.  It turned out, though, that she fell asleep in the car and never woke up again all evening.  So I ended up going the entire day without every actually seeing her except for a tiny bit in the morning before I left

I took Oreo for a walk tonight.  He hadn’t had a real walk all day so I thought that he should get a bit of a walk in.  He puts on weight now so I try to keep him doing a little exercise no matter what.

The walk up the hill went fine but on the way back he walked straight into a little post-like structure.  Fortunately it gave more than a post would and he didn’t break his nose.  Boy did he scare me.  He walked straight into it.  Didn’t see it at all.  It was rather large too.  Bigger than him.

I paid close attention to him after that and it is very apparent that he is now so blind that he cannot be allowed to walk at night at all.  He would run right up to signs and other things because he smelled something and his nose would brush the sign post and he would jump back in surprise because he had no idea that it was there.  It is very sad watching our little boy get older.  It is really tough because he is healthy and has so much energy and it is really hard for him to burn it off and to stay healthy if he can’t see to run around.  He has had a lot of accidents recently where he has turned and crashed right into the wall.  We really have to start watching him carefully.  Poor little boy.

I forgot to mention the other day that I have been hired to do some actual writing.  Finally all these years of SGL have paid off.  I am going to be writing one or more articles for the Internet.com family of publications.  I am quite excited.  I have been wanting to write for a long time (professionally, that is.)  This will give me a nice break from my regular technical pursuits.  It will also be a nice feather in my proverbial cap.  Another means of rounding out my resume.

We spent the evening relaxing and watching As Time Goes By.  Dominica and Liesl went to bed relatively early.  I went down to the basement and spent several hours working on converting DVDs, builing the DL145 G2 into a working server and attempting to fix the DNS problems that we have been having for the past few weeks.  The conversions went fine.  The server build went nowhere.  All kinds of headaches there.

The DNS problem lingered on until four in the morning.  Boy was I tired by the time that I got to the bottom of it.  At first we thought that it was a problem with our DNS server but careful examination proved that that machine was doing just fine.  So then I thought to check out upstream DNS forwarders.  Nope, they were fine too.  Then I thought that it might be a virus/trojan thing.  But after several scans and testing from Linux machines I determined that the issue was across the board.

Eventually I was able to determine that every machine no our home network had the DNS issue except that DNS lookups from the firewall itself were okay.  So I pointed some machines at the firewall for DNS resolution and things started to work.  Okay, so the issue is that DNS packets are not reliably passing through the firewall.

So I updated the firewall firmware, rebooted and voila – DNS resolution working again.  Of course the update and modifications killed the IPSec VPN configuration so I had to start putting that back together and, of course, there were issues.  But by four in the morning both DNS and the VPN were working beautifully and I was able to go to bed happy knowing that I had fixed a major problem that had been really plagueing us recently.

Tomorrow, even though it is a holiday, I will be working covering for everyone who has the day off so that people are not getting paged and allowing people who need to work to keep working.  So I am going to be working all day, but it should be a slow day and will likely be relaxing.

Saturday morning I am scheduled to work for Bahrain as usual.  They tell me that the release this weekend is very small and that it will hardly take any time at all.  Here’s hoping.  Once that is done I have a very large number of patch updates to do on Linux.  Then, once that is complete, we are driving to Waverly, New York to spent the weekend with Dominica’s mother’s family there.  We are spending Saturday night at her cousins’ house.  Then Sunday afternoon we are driving up to Leicester and seeing my family for the evening and then staying at dad’s house.

Most likely we will be returning from dad’s house on Tuesday afternoon.  My plan is to work on Monday from dad’s and to then take Tuesday as my comp day for working tomorrow.  That way I can work there on Monday and we can leave Tuesday in the afternoon so that we can drive back before it gets too late.  We can’t stay too long because we are driving both the Mazda PR5 and the BMW back to Peekskill so Dominica will be driving separately from me.  It will give us a good chance to get a large load of stuff from dad’s but it will make the drive rather difficult – especially for Dominica who gets sleepy and has to take Liesl with her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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