May 3, 2006: My First Day in Manhattan Since Moving

Today was my insanely early day. I was up and out of bed at 4:30 in the morning. Way too early for the likes of me. This is the earliest that I have had to have gotten up since starting in New Jersey. I am glad that I don’t have to do this all of the time.

I was out the door just before 5:45 and arrived at the office in Warren just after 6:15. That is the fastest that I have ever made that commute. That was awesome driving all that way without any real traffic. I wish that it could be like that everyday.

I had about half an hour to kill so I went down to the pond with the fountains in front of the building and sat there with the ducks and checked my email on my BlackBerry. It was very pleasant out and the ducks were having a good time swimming around the two big fountains there.

I got on the Manhattan shuttle at 6:45. It took a little more than an hour to get into the city via US78 and the Holland Tunnel. The drive was a bit worrisome as the transmission was dying in the shuttle and we really thought that the shuttle was going to die at any moment and leave us stranded in the middle of the highway. But the transmission held and we arrived just fine. The poor driver had to take that piece of junk all the way back out to Warren before he could have it repaired. That had to be really bad. I didn’t hear whether or not he made it.

The shuttle dropped us off downtown and we had to take the subway up to midtown to the SUN event. This is only the second time that I have ever ridden the New York subway if I remember correctly. I am not very enthralled with subways so it is possible that I have ridden it more than I think. I really don’t remember but it hasn’t been very much. I have ridden the Washington and Toronto subways so much that I really don’t remember the NYC one. It sure isn’t as nice as either Washington or Toronto though.

We got up to the Parker Le Meridian Hotel for the event in plenty of time and had quite some time to just sit around having breakfast and talking. I stayed at the event until about noon. I had planned on staying later but there wasn’t a lot of stuff that I wanted to see and I didn’t want to spend the entire day there if possible.

My the time that I got back to Columbus Circle to catch the subway at 59th I discovered the station entrance had been closed so I ended up walking around quite a bit and finally deciding to take a different line from 57th which dropped me off quite a bit farther away from the shuttle pick up than I had been planning on. So I did a bit more walking to get back to the shuttle and ended up missing it by minutes. So I was stuck in Manhattan for an hour with nothing to do.

So I decided to get some lunch and a beer. I walked over to the Greenwich Street Pub and got some Bass Ale and some fish and chips. It was nice to get a chance to just sit and relax for an hour with absolutely nothing to do at all. I used my BlackBerry to keep up with everyone via email.

I caught the 2:00 shuttle back to Warren. On the way back the driver had the misfortune to have a piece of the ceiling of the shuttle come lose and swing down and nail him in the nose while he was driving. To make matters worse it continued to swing in front of him practically blinding him. Someone at the front of the shuttle jumped up and grabbed the loose piece and pulled it out of the way so the driver could safely get the shuttle over to the side of the road. It had hit him hard enough to have given him a nose bleed.

I went into the office for a little while but not too long and then headed back to the apartment. I spent quite a bit of the evening working from home so it wasn’t like having the evening off. I worked until almost 8:00. I popped in Remington Steele and watched a couple of episodes while I did a few things. I experimented with using rsync as a remote backup system to see how that would fare against Microsoft’s backup system. Tomorrow I hope to try out some speed tests to see how it works performance wise.

I also got a chance to finally install Solaris 10 on my SUN SparcStation that I got two weeks ago. I had accidentally left the house for the unit at home and was not able to do the install without it. Dominica had brought that down for me so I finally got to do that. Now the machine is finally working and useful. I am looking forward to getting to play with that.

I got to bed at a reasonable hour – just a little after 10:30. But I was pretty tired.

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