Vote for Andy!

Andrew West (a.k.a. Loopy) after having achieved a ranking of #4 in the last Dice Tech Challenge, is now one of the top two finalist in another Dice event and he desperately needs your vote in order to win.  Go check him out at:

Vote for OrbTrak

Every vote helps.  We are counting on the SGL community to help pull him through.  Tell your friends.  Get people involved.  It only takes a second to vote.

Andy’s OrbTrak web application tracks the current location of four of the night’s most interesting artificial satellites as they orbit the earth.  A handy guide for finding them for yourself.

Andy’s last Dice Tech Challenge entry was SpyHop: The IHOP Finder.

June 24, 2008: Class at Madison Square Garden

I got to sleep in just a little bit this morning.  I worked from home until nine thirty then took the PATH not to the World Trade Center, where I usually go via the PATH train, but up to the 33rd Street Station in Manhattan at the end of the yellow line (I usually take the red line.)  From the 33rd Street Station I just had to walk one block west to 2 Penn Plaza at Penn Station and Madison Square Garden where I was taking a class all day today.

The class ran from ten thirty to two thirty in the afternoon.  We got lunch and coffee there.  Then, after class, I just went “downstairs” into Penn Station and took NJ Transit back to Newark where I worked until the end of the day.  It was a nice change of pace and it was interesting seeing a bit of New York City that I almost never really get to see.  I am in Penn Station on a regular basis but I almost never get to see the part of the city immediately surrounding it.

My afternoon was pretty slow.  Dominica came home and cooked dinner.  We watched a little Third Rock from the Sun and she was asleep by nine.  I walked Oreo and talked to Mary for a while.  Mary has been living in Warsaw for the last few years but is moving to Dansville on July 15th.  She just started working at Walmart in Batavia this week.

I got caught back up on SGL today.  I got a bit behind over the weekend.  I also managed to keep a ton of Handbrake jobs running over the last few days.  Having HandBrake Helper running on my Linux workstation has made that portion of the work a positive dream.  It works so well.  It is extremely simple but it has been doing its job flawlessly.  It has really sped up the overall process making the workload not so much to bare.  I can’t wait until I get it expanded and get it working on Windows as well.  Having it on my Windows XP Pro desktop will really make a difference.  I just need a little time to be able to sit down and work on it again.

Dominica scheduled some house hunting this weekend.  We are going back up to Westchester on Saturday afternoon to look at more houses.  We are hoping that we will have an opportunity to talk to a bank before then but it is tough squeezing things that like into the day to day schedule.  You would think that working for a bank would make that a breeze but that isn’t always the case.

I am working out in Warren tomorrow so I will be a little harder than usual to reach.

June 23, 2008: Oreo Being Needy

It was tough getting out of bed this morning but I do enjoy doing the early morning shift.  I like getting up and getting the day out of the way – although the reality is that the day just gets longer if you start early, but still, I like it.

Overall today was pretty uneventful.  Oreo stayed home today which was probably good since he was a little upset that he didn’t get to see me at all yesterday.  I was gone before he got up and home long after he went to bed.  It was like I was just gone.

Oreo was super-needy dog today.  He needed me to take him for six walks rather than his usual one or two and he wanted to play over and over and over again.  He just needed all kinds of attention.

Dominica got home nice and early (since she didn’t have to go to doggy daycare to get Oreo) and cooked dinner.  I was able to knock off of work more or less early – only putting in a twelve hour day.  Not bad for having started so early.

It was a relaxing evening and off to bed fairly early.  I have to work at an alternate location in Manhattan tomorrow so I will be pretty hard to reach most of the day.

June 22, 2008: In Ithaca for a Change

I was up at four thirty this morning. That is pretty early for me.  I got ready to go quickly but got paged from the office at ten after five in the morning.  Not a great way to get started for the day.  That delayed me from leaving until well after six.  Then I discovered that our regular overnight valet has left us and so it ended up taking an additional half an hour or more to get the car brought around.  I had been hoping to have used that time to go out and find some breakfast but I had forgotten that today is Sunday and there is no way to eat in downtown Newark on a Sunday morning.  So I was stuck.

It was almost seven when I finally got out onto the road towards Binghamton.  I couldn’t got the “fast” route through Scranton because the highway has been “closed” indefinitely due to extremely inefficient road work that has lasted nearly a year now.  So I drove up the Garden State Parkway (GSP) to US 17 and took that on the slow and winding, but scenic, route through northern New Jersey up through Rockland and Orange counties out to Sullivan and into Binghamton from the east.  It adds roughly forty minutes to the trip compared to the supposed time that it takes to go through Scranton if Interstate 80 was open.

I picked up John Stephens, a.k.a. The Surfing IT Wizard, and we drove up to Ithaca.  It was just after ten when I got to Binghamton and almost eleven when we pulled into Varna on the east side of Ithaca.  Almost four hours of car time!  The GPS was great and took us on some crazy backroads between Owego and Varna which shaved a few miles, minutes and gallons off of the route that I used to know.  I have known a good route through that area for a long time now but this taught both John (an Owego native) and I a few new tricks that even we didn’t know collectively.

This was John’s first ever time riding in a convertible!  Hard to believe.  We left the top down all day as the weather was very nice.  I had hit some severe rain coming through the western Catskills that slowed me down earlier but everything was bright and clear heading north.

We worked for an hour or so kicking off some long running tasks and getting ourselves settled in for a long day then ran up the street to the Nice ‘n’ Easy to pick up some snacks.  We got chips and energy drinks and ordered a pizza and went back to work.

Today was a very productive day and quite a successful one.  We got loads of good work done and didn’t leave Ithaca until well after eight at night.  A very long day but the work had to be done at some point.

I dropped John off around nine at his apartment and then headed to the local McDonald’s to get myself some dinner as it was going to be very late as I headed down the highway.  It was probably nine thirty or so when I got back on to US 17 and started the long, lonely drive home.  I hooked up the iPod that I had thought to take with me and finished listening to Scott Adam’s latest book “Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!” which I recently got from Audible.com.  That kept me awake until I got home around one thirty in the morning.  Boy was I tired.

I got to bed around two.  I have to be “at work” at six thirty tomorrow morning a I am covering the early morning shift just for that one day.  Then Tuesday I have a class that I will be taking in Manhattan up at Madison Square Garden which will make for an interesting change of pace.  I will be in Warren on Wednesday which is, supposedly, my new schedule.

June 21, 2008: Mary Poppins

I was awake for an hour and a half in the middle of the night last night which didn’t do much for getting me a good night’s sleep, but being awake gave me an opportunity to babysit the Handbrake jobs running in the living room on all three computers, to read an issue of eWeek and to read a chapter in the book that I am currently reading, “POJOs in Action” by Chris Richardson. For those not down with the lingo, a POJO is a “Plain, Old Java Object.” The term is used in reference to using lightweight frameworks for enterprise Java servers as opposed to the non-Java Object method formerly proposed under the old J2EE architecture using EJB 1.0 and 2.0 (EJB is Enterprise Java Beans.)

Dominica and I got up at nine forty this morning which didn’t actually leave us very much time to get into the city and to get to Planet Hollywood to meet everyone for lunch. It would be plenty of time if we didn’t need to feed and walk Oreo as well. It is supposed to be very warm in the city today which will make all of the walking around a bit uncomfortable.

We left Eleven80 at five till eleven. It was the earliest that we could manage to get out of the apartment after both of us showered and got ready to go and fed and walked Oreo. We took NJ Transit from Newark to Penn Station in Manhattan as that is sometimes easier, especially on weekends, than trying to use the PATH to get into the city. This ended up being our first time riding on one of NJ Transit’s newer, double-decker trains. Those are much nicer than the old cars that I always have to ride out to Summit.

We made it just in time to meet everyone at Planet Hollywood in Times Square on 45th and Broadway. I don’t think that either Dominica nor I have ever eaten at a Planet Hollywood before. Nate and I ate at the Hard Rock Cafe in Washington, D.C. once in 1993 (it was awful) but that is the closet that I have ever been. It wasn’t bad at Planet Hollywood. They handled the large group really well and we were in and out in an hour.

From lunch we went to the ToysRUs store to kill half an hour. Then it was down to the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street – right across from the 42nd Street Subway Station – to see Disney’s Mary Poppins.

The musical was surprisingly long and the story diverged quite a bit from the Disney original. I really feel that the characters were modified quite a bit as well with a lot more of the story focusing on Mrs. Banks and far less on the children or Mary Poppins herself. It was a rather different feel that the movie gave.

After the show we had to zip back to Newark to rescue poor Oreo who had to spend the day alone in the apartment. He doesn’t like that. Between our travel time, lunch and the show he was alone for almost seven hours. It doesn’t seem that long when it is in the middle of the day like that but it doesn’t take much before a long time goes by. He did fine, though. He has gotten a lot better at being left alone from time to time as he has gotten older. He hasn’t panicked about being alone in over a year, I don’t think.

The evening was short as I have to be up at four thirty in the morning tomorrow.  We watched National Treasure 2 and then Third Rock from the Sun and went to bed quite early.  Tomorrow is going to be a very long day for me.  NT2 was quite good.  I liked the first one better but I think Dominica preferred the second one.