September is here. We are on the home stretch to Christmas now. Is today the day that you are officially allowed to start playing Sleigh Bells and Jingle Bell Rock? Isn’t it weird that Christmas songs seem like they are reserved for a very small part of the year but in actuality you hear there during fifteen to twenty percent of the entire year and songs that become popular as Christmas songs get played on the air dramatically more than “pop” songs ever do? I mean “Hit Me Baby, One More Time” was hot for like five minutes but “White Christmas” was a classic for my parents and will be for my great grand kids! People will know “Let It Snow” long after they have no idea who Michael Jackson is. Why am I talking about Christmas? I have no idea. It’s just that season, I guess.
I did a database dump of the SGL database last night for backup purposes. It took a while. If you reduce the database to SQL statements, in text, defining the data it comes to 5.5MB. That is a lot of text.
I went to bed around one last night. Dominica had a lot of work left to do and worked late into the night. But she was able to complete her class work and is now done with the semester. The next semester starts very soon but at least she has all of that out of the way before going into the weekend.
The really awesome news today is that Dominica got a job offer from a pharmaceutical company in Nutley, New Jersey which is closer to Newark. It is a help desk position and she starts in less than a week on next Wednesday morning. It is a mid-length contract and should run until the end of the year. It could be extended past that point but we are only really counting on it until then. We will see what happens in January. But it is very exciting that she has a position to round out the year. Now, I am sure, she is glad that she is only taking a single class this semester as she will have a lot to do. She is taking her introductory class for Java and Object Oriented Programming starting very soon and she needs to completely her A+ certification before the end of the year when the current exams are retired.
We were really happy that Dominica managed to get final confirmation on her acceptance at the new company before she had to leave to travel for the weekend. It is awful having to spend a holiday weekend wondering what is going on with a position. It is a really rude thing to do to someone. Weekends are tough enough to have to sit around wondering what is going on, especially when it is a big life changing thing like a job or something, but a long holiday weekend is even worse. So that is really cool. Now we will be able to enjoy this weekend a lot more.
My own personal excitement for the day was discovering that I had been majorly quoted in Baseline again in Kim Nash’s article “Four Steps to Better IT Hiring“. This was my second timing being quoted in one month. It has been a good month.
I managed to get out of work around half past six and was pleasantly surprised to discover that all of the weekend holiday traffic had gone through ahead of me and the roads were moving just fine. Even at the Delaware Water Gap toll booths where Dominica had been stuck in a mile of bumper to bumper traffic several hours earlier I was able to zip right through.
I made good time the whole way to Ithaca and got to the Statler Hotel in Cornell around ten. Dominica had checked in quite some time earlier and I was able to go right up to the room. We ordered dinner from Banfi’s as soon as I got in. This is going to be an expensive weekend of valet parking and room service!
We stayed up late watching television. I got to see Bridget Jones’ Diary which Dominica used to own on DVD but someone has and we don’t now who. But, after having seen the movie, I couldn’t care less about owning it. What a horribly dumb and boring movie. I was totally unimpressed.
After that we watched a Kathy Griffin comedy special on Bravo. Kathy is really funny. Then it was off to bed.