Thirty weeks of pregnancy.  I can’t believe how quickly time has flown.  We have just been so busy since having gotten pregnant that we really haven’t had a chance to slow time and take stock of how quickly everything is happening.

After working really late last night, until almost two in the morning, I decided to sleep in a bit this morning and didn’t log into the office until seven thirty or maybe even eight this morning.  I needed it though.  I am not really sleepy today; that was enough sleep for me to be feeling pretty good.

The weather is awesome today here in the New York Metro.  Cool and just a touch of rain with a nice breeze.  What a great change from the warmth.  Autumn is peeking from around the corner and teasing us with our short window of wonderful north-east weather.  An entire region of the country with just one to two months of great weather each year.  It’s a rough existence but we really know how to appreciate the good weather when we finally get it.

I worked from home for a little while this morning – all of the windows open now for the past several days.  The apartment is getting a wonderful airing out and the plants are loving it.  I hit the sidewalk and starting walking to the office just after ten.

For lunch, as is our tradition on Fridays, Katie and I walked over to Financier between Stone and Pearl and got the smoked salmon and brie sandwiches and crab and fennel quiche that they only offer on Fridays.  Determined to make the most of the weather I convinced Katie to skip the crowded cafe innards and to sit on the mostly empty street and to enjoy the seclusion so seldom offered in lower Manhattan, especially during the mid-day lunch rush.  Only one other band of stalwart lunchers dared to brave the elements outside of the cafe.

In reality it was quite nice sitting outside.  We commandeered an umbrella and took shelter beneath it.  Eventually Katie went for her own umbrella for some additional rain protection.  The rain was quite light but just enough to threaten to be a problem should the wind really kick up.  It is so much nicer sitting outside enjoying good coffee and awesome food in a light rain with a nice breeze and only the occasional passerby rather than the usual – elbow to elbow with other tables while sitting in blazing sun in the staggering heat.  This is how cafes are meant to be enjoyed when a sunny morning in the south of France isn’t readily available.

While it was raining, my walk back to the office did not really result in me getting at all wet.  One of the benefits to Manhattan life is that there is always a lee in which one can avoid the elements if one so desires.  I’ll take rain over sweat anyday, though.  No complaints here!

My new Blackberry Curve for the office arrived today to replace my ancient Blackberry that died a few weeks ago.  The new unit is very nice and sleek.  I am excited to be switching over.  I won’t be embarrassed to use this one on the train or at a restaurant.  I’ll also be more careful not to drop it.  The Curve is nicer than Dominica’s Pearl model.  This one is halfway between the 8830 and the Pearl in size but has the full keyboard like the 8830.

I had been planning and hoping to have been able to have gone back out for coffee this afternoon but my afternoon ended up being so busy that there was no chance whatsoever for me to take a break from the office.  Fridays can be like that.  It is very easy for things to get very busy very quickly.  One little issue and the day just vanishes.

One of my friends in the office felt bad for me and went to Starbucks around five and brought me back some coffee.  Not the same as going out, escaping the office and getting some fresh air but at least it helps to keep me awake.

I spent a good portion of the day today working with Chris on issues with the email system.  We were never able to positively determine exactly where the problem was stemming from but we tried many things, many of which resulted in long periods of time sans email access, and eventually got the system to some moderate degree.  After many changes it seemed to be working even more smoothly than before.

Not content to do all of this work and get almost nothing in return for it, I decided that it was high time for a system upgrade.  Generally I avoid doing this because it is so much time and effort dedicated to just updating the email system which really has very little impact but to avoid issues like this in the future I decided that tonight was the night to do it.  I’ve spent so much time with the email system over the last few days that no time is actually going to be as appropriate as this to do the work.  No time like the present!

I started the process of upgrading the email system at eight in the evening.  The first step is to do a backup.  I did that and my first attempt failed due to a network error.  That cost around forty minutes.    It is going to be a long evening.

While waiting for other things to finish over which I had no control, I took the opportunity to perform the SGL WordPress update to version 2.6.2.  Always nice to have things up to date and running with the latest features.

Dominica and I decided that it was going to be so late before I would reach home that we would just eat separately.  I will probably rue this decision as I will probably be in the office so late that there is no more food to be had on my journey home and our trip in the morning will be so early as to preclude getting breakfast on our drive to Peekskill.  She decided to just eat some food that we had in the house.

Tomorrow is Dominica and my Lamaze class up at Hudson Valley Medical Center very near to the new house.  We have to be up around six thirty tomorrow morning so that we can get ready to go.  I have a deployment at seven that I need to do and then we should be on the road around eight.  Poor Oreo is going to be stuck at home all alone all day which is going to be awful for him.  He is going to be very unhappy about how he has to spend his weekend.  Fortunately, he will be completely exhausted from a long week of daycare and should sleep almost all day.

We heard good news about our house process today.  The committment letter from the bank arrived both at our agent and at our attorney’s offices.  My attorney called and said that everything looks good.  The loan is all confirmed and now the only real issue is to set the closing date.  Hopefully we will have the final details by early next week.  The attorney was very happy with our bank and how clearly they wrote the proposal without any stupid issues that keep it from actually working.  We are still looking great to move in mid-October.

One of the nice things about staying at the office really, really late is that it gives me a chance to be all nostalgic for the days when I used to work late in Washington, D.C. and in Pittsburgh.  Back then I would be stuck in the office until all hours of the night waiting for system maintenance, doing work when no one was there to bother me or because I was waiting to see if the waste management plant would run into unforeseen issues.  Sometimes I would be there late just so that I could spend time training and observing the overnight crews.

I’ve always enjoyed working late at night.  Once the office lights turn off and everyone else leaves there is a certain happy loneliness to the office.  Once night falls and I am all alone I can magically picture the loading docks at Washington Hospital Center perfectly.  I can remember every inch of the facility, the walk down the dock, getting into my car behind a roll-off and driving through the dim, back streets of northeast Washington, D.C.  It is so vivid it is like I was just there.  What a huge part of my life that was.

Being in any city at night, on a cool, rainy, lonely Friday night in a business district where no one goes for after hours is always an experience.  Being here on Wall Street really takes me back.  While waiting for backups and updates I can walk around the office and experience the feelings all over again.  Looking out the windows and watching the cars on the FDR zip by or the people milling about in front of St. Maggie’s Cafe at 110 Wall St.

Growing up in the country you don’t get the same feeling at night.  Once the sun goes down and people start going to bed in the country being outside is lonely – completely lonely.  In the city it is a completely different type of lonely.  You can always see people, you are always near people.  It is a shared loneliness.  The quiet of the city at night.

The quiet, dark city might be my very favourite place.  Even Newark is nice once everyone is asleep.  Washington was a bit of a stretch but it had its high points.  Not many, but a few.  Pittsburgh, of course, I will always miss.  A great city, an adventure and tons of work without any real politics.  Just a chance to do great work and be appreciated for it while getting to explore and discover what, so far, remains to be my favourite place to live.

Since I have time to muse – my favourite cities, in North America at least, would be Pittsburgh, Ithaca, Halifax and Montreal.  I miss them all.  I wish that we didn’t have to live in New York City.  Manhattan is great – it has a lot to offer but it isn’t our style.  We are very excited about moving up to the Hudson Valley in the next several weeks, though.  That is really going to change our perspective on the whole experience.  Perhaps not for the better – time will tell.

The process of updating the email system took just forever.  I gave up on any chance of finding food or getting to bed with enough time to get any sleep tonight, but better to just push through and get this done now rather than leaving it for some other time to get exhausted and have it ruin my night.

I had a deployment that needed to be done tomorrow morning and was going to get me up around seven in the morning or earlier but since I was in the office so late I was able to verify before leaving that the package had never been released and so there would be nothing for me to do in the morning.  That will let me sleep in at least half an hour longer now that I was going to be able to do before.  I am going to need it.  Tomorrow is going to be a very long day indeed.

I am posting as I leave the office.  Check the posting timestamp to figure out when that is.

Oreo went to daycare today.  It is a good thing.  Who knows how crazy he would be if he didn’t get to go in and burn off some of his extra energy.  He has been couped up far too much this week.  He needs some time playing with his doggy friends.

My walk into the Wall Street office today was really awful.  Walking through Newark wasn’t bad at all.  Hot, but it was fine.  I did decide to play it safe and to walk through the Gateway Center, though, which is air conditioned so most of my walk was “inside”.  Normally I just walk outside along Raymond Boulevard.

Once I was into Manhattan the real heat hit.  In Manhattan everything is warmer because of all the people, buildings, vehicles, etc. plus there is seldom any air flow.  The difference in effective temperatures from Newark to Manhattan is staggering.  I was quite uncomfortable by the time I got down to the end of Wall Street.  I did grab an ice cream cone from Mr. Softee to cool me off a little.

If you are a Starbucks Coffee Fanatic (for the record, I am definitely not) then you have probably been waiting on pins and needles to know if your Starbucks is one of the six hundred that are being closed this summer as Starbucks shuts down five percent of its operations.  Well, I found the list and now you know: The Starbucks Doomed 600.  If you are from my hometown, and too lazy to look through the list yourself, Geneseo Starbucks is on the doomed list as are many in Upstate New York – where people have never even begun associated good coffee with the Starbucks brand like they do downstate.  The Starbucks in Geneseo opened right as Dominica and I moved there in 2003 and we said to ourselves that that was a crazy location that couldn’t possibly make money.  I went in there once and there was no one there.  Just a few weeks ago we said “It can’t possibly still be open, can it?  The place is always empty.”  We were right.  Now it is closing.  So now Geneseo will have yet another vacant building.  Although the old “Del Taco” building, now Starbucks, has been an empty building for such a large percentage of its life span that it just seems natural to have that spot be an empty – strangely architected building.

Starbucks in Geneseo was really hurt by the fact that it is on the “wrong” side of the road.  It is in a spot that has so long been ignored that you don’t even realize that there is a business there now that there is one.  Then, just after they went in, Tim Horton’s (with better coffee and more food options) came in in a far more visible location, had a brand new building and was open twenty-four by seven.  So Starbucks just completely lost any mindshare that it might have had.  In Upstate NY, people just don’t “think” about Starbucks.  It doesn’t occur to most people that it is even a coffee option.  Heck, I lived within an easy walk of it for several years and I bet I never went there even once.  Now that I live in Newark I am literally next door to a Starbucks and have only been there two or three times at most.  Being an upstater, it just isn’t something that you do.  Back in Rochester, Eric and I used to make coffee runs to Bruegers, right next door to the Starbucks, and never once even though about going to Starbucks instead.

Now that I have mentioned it… I am seriously missing living right next to the all night Tim Hortons.  Argh.

For those who don’t speak fluent Spanish, “Del Taco” is Spanish for “of the taco”.  Clearly it was intended to be “Mexican food for middle-America where multiculturalism is a foreign concept.”  Ha ha.

While doing a search for something unrelated, I came across a great image of Fall Brook Waterfall in Geneseo on Flickr.  I’ve been to the waterfall a time or two but it has been a really long time.  Never saw it when the foliage was so lush.

By four thirty the humidity had dropped enough that even though it was even warmer than this morning it was actually quite nice outside.  At least it was pretty nice just sitting outside.  Hard walking, like I have to do to get to the World Trade Center to catch the train, is still way too hot.

My day was not overly busy but this lulled me into a false sense of “going home security.”  I thought that I was going to be done really close to five.  All of my work was scheduled to complete right at five.  I was fooled.  The call for the release at four forty-five ended up lasting until almost six thirty!  Argh.

Dominica is feeling very under the weather.  She has a headcold or something similar that is affecting her sinuses.  It might just be allergies.  So her plan is to get home and to get to bed right away in the hopes of getting enough sleep to start getting better.  So I am tasked with getting dinner on my way home which will be from Metro Cafe if I make it in time and from McDonalds if I don’t.

I am exhausted and don’t have the energy to write more tonight and don’t want to leave y’all (to practice my Texan) without an update so I am posting before leaving the office.  I will probably just watch some Third Rock from the Sun with Dominica and Oreo and get to bed early.  I have some unscheduled work to do tomorrow morning whenever I wake up and then, in the early afternoon, we are driving to Frankfort for Garrett’s batism on Sunday.

When the storm started, Dominica and I were in our bedroom watching DVDs with the blinds down when Dominica noticed that it was flashing outside.  We went into the living room to see what was going on and realized that it was lighting all around us.  We even got to see the Blue Cross / Blue Shield building due east of us, in the Ironbound, take a direct hit which was pretty cool.  The storm didn’t last too long but boy was it fun to watch.

Because of last night’s storm today’s weather isn’t nearly so bad.  It was a good ten degrees cooler today outside, which is indeed hot, but not the stifling heat that we have had the last few days.

My desktop is still not working so Oreo and I are home yet another day.  Yay!  He is still very tired and totally sleeping his days away.  He isn’t even playing this week, he is so tired.

Ramona was finally around for a change as she needed to run some errands in Newark so we did a late lunch over at Food for Life.  We haven’t seen each other in about a month or more.  Min and I have been so busy that we haven’t seen anyone at all except for Ryan whom I always run into in the lobby.  Our travel schedule has really put a damper on our social lives.

Lunch was nice but we barely were able to even squeeze it in.  My work kept me on a call for hours and finally I had to have someone else take over some work just so that I could run out to lunch at two thirty as Ramona has to be back to Manhattan around four.  She had to walk Oreo for me and everything just so that we would have enough time to eat.  Today might be the last time to easily see Ramona in Newark as she is planning to move out to Flushings in Queens on Long Island over the weekend.

It was another relaxing night for Dominica, Oreo and I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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