Personal

Sunday Migraine

by

All in all it was a productive day yesterday and the crowds weren’t so bad. On the down side in the early evening after I wrote my post last night I got a sudden migraine. It was a bad one. I couldn’t even finish dinner. I ended up being able to get up for a little while a few hours later, but had to go lie down again quickly. I ended up sleeping it off and was fine this morning.

Sunday Shopping

by

Today I didn’t listen to my better judgement and I went into Manhattan for some shopping. It is a big shopping weekend so I typically like to avoid the crazy crowds. I do have some stuff I need to get before my vacation so I decided to head out anyway. I first hit Macy’s to check out some luggage accessories. I need a few items before my trip. That Macy’s was a bust. I then headed over to see if my hair cut place was open for a quick cut. It was closed on Sunday.

I then headed to Paragon Sports looking for a computer bag. After much research this week I decided to look at a Timbuk2 Commute 2.0 Messanger bag a try. I really like my Tumi Messenger bag, but it is just too small to carry much more than my laptop and a few items. When traveling, or just going on day trips to the office in NJ I need to carry more stuff. The Tumi just wasn’t cutting it. My Swiss Army bag was big enough but just was too bulky and looked like a monstrous book bag. I heard good things about Timbuk2 before, and while checking out reviews I stumbled upon their site. Their messenger bags looked just as nice as the Swiss Army and Tumi ones I was checking out, and they were 1/3 the price of the Tumi ones. That is the thing with Tumi. I love my bag, and got it on sale and it was still $200. The slightly larger version of the same bag that probibly would have been perfect for me was $300. That is a lot for a bag. The Timbuk2 bag I settled on was less than $100.

So back to Paragon. They ended up having what I wanted but not in the right color. I then headed over to Tekserve who was supposed to carry the brand I was looking for. In the end they did have exactly what I wanted in the color I wanted so I picked one up. Saved me ordering online. I then hit up Best Buy since I am looking for a new monitor. That was a bust too. I then grabbed some Outback to go and headed home.

, ,

Friday Off

by

Today is a half day for my office. Since I took off Wednesday and there was a holiday on Thursday I decided to take off today and have a nice 5 day weekend. I just realized this was the longest I have had off in about a year. I didn’t do anything special today. I just hung out and relaxed. After the hectic two days at my sisters it was nice to relax.

I did go out for a bit to meet up with Danny for drinks and dinner at Stout. He was braver than me and went shopping today.

Not really sure what I am going to do this weekend. I am trying to avoid most stores but I do need some stuff so I shall see how the weekend goes.

Thanksgiving With The Family

by

For the holiday I took off Wednesday and Friday so I could have a long weekend. I ended up getting a cold over the weekend so ended up taking Monday as a sick day also. That meant I was in the office for Tuesday only. Wed. morning I was off with my parents to my sisters for Thanksgiving. We left early enough in the morning (10:30 is early for me) we didn’t hit much traffic. We brought in Pizza for dinner Wed. night. It was a good day. I got to play a bit with Zach and Alexis. Morgan was out with friends most of the afternoon but saw her for dinner.

Thursday was fun. I think I had more fun playing around with Morgan and Zach before breakfast than I did all year. Zach can always put a smile on my face, and Morgan scares me with how smart she is! Dinner was fun, but I am never a fan of holiday meals. Not a huge fan of Turkey. We ate with Carrie’s fine china on several card tables in their family room. They don’t have a dinning room table and the dinning room has been converted into a downstairs play / sleep room for Alexis. For a small kid she has tons of stuff. Speaking of Alexis I did get to have nice bonding time with her Wednesday and Thursday. She generally didn’t cry and she didn’t spit up on me so we are bonding really well.

After dinner (well during desert actually) Michaels dad and I took off for the train to be back in the city at a reasonable hour. My dad gave us a ride to NJ transit. Door to door it only took us about 2 hours. For a trip to my sisters that is really good. In order to make the train I had to eat my piece of Pecan Pie fast, and I didn’t have time for seconds, or to take home left overs.

All in all except for a short period of time Thursday afternoon when I thought I was getting a headache the two days with the family was great.

Racist Puppets

by

Well I told everyone I was going to see racist puppets in Manhattan and for some reason everyone knew I was going to see Avenue Q on broadway. I even told my mom I was going to see a show (she is the broadway show expert on my family and knows I almost never go) and when I told her what I was going to see she said that it was right up my alley, and I would enjoy it. Well with her I left out the racist puppet bit, but she has seen it and knows it was a funny show.

The friend I went with had seen it, but it was good enough to warrant a second time years later. Overall I thought it was a great show. I am not a show person, or a musical fan but this was worth the trip. I think I am off to Amazon to see if I can pick up the sound track because who doesn’t want to listen to hits like the internet is for porn or everyone is a little bit racist! Seriously, I am not kidding. I am going to find this sound track.

Before the show I had lunch at Juniors. It was the first place I have ever been that prepared a Grilled cheese sandwich open. Rather odd, but easily resolved.

Grabbed a drink and hung out afterward. Then it was off to home for dinner and laundry. Now I am writting a bit and off to bed. Thankfully I took tomorrow off so tonight feels more like Saturday night than Sunday night.

The Physical & Digital House Cleaning

by

Over the past month or so I have been cleaning up my apartment and tossing out old stuff I don’t want or need anymore. It is part of what I call my digital summer cleaning. I have taken old school and medical records I got from my dad that he kept when I was a kid and scanned them into PDF files. I am amazed at how many report cards I found. I scanned a ton of old letters I kept (for some reason that I cannot recall other than I am a pack rat) from friends over the past 15 years. Many of the letters I received I had written on the computer so I actually have a complete back and forth correspondence. it is kind of cool reading some of them. Once everything was scanned into the computer I shredded the old paper documents to save space. My wall unit has so much more room now!

On top of that I cleaned up a lot of the files I had on my computer. When trying to open some old letters I sent back in the mid 90’s I realized that the latest version of Word (2008 on the Mac or 2007 on Windows) wont open old Office formats. I had read about that in the past but never ran into the issue much. It was a real pain. That got me onto another kick I have had, move all my old documents to modern (ISO standards when possible) file formats. I already have several PFS Professional Write files from early middle and HS from my Commodore 64 that I still have but cannot open. I didn’t want to be screwed with other files. To solve that problem I built a Windows XP Virtual Machine (well used a copy of one I setup with SYSPREP) and installed an old Copy of Office 2000 on it. I then opened up as many old file format items I could find and printed them as PDF’s. For the past few years that has been my format of choice for archiving stuff. For things I want to be able to read/write in the future I have been saving stuff in the new Office XML format. I am not a fan of it, but I still don’t really use Open Office that much.

Additional things I have been doing is taking old CD’s & DVD’s I have used to make periodic backups of my data and ripping them back into my computer as ISO files. I am putting them all on one hard drive. Drives are cheap. I have been buying Western Digital My Passport portable 320gb drives for like $80. Over time the DVD’s start to rot. About 5 years ago I had already consolidated my old CD archives onto two DVD’s. Now I am putting all the DVD ISO’s onto one drive. I will still make DVD backups but I want a copy on a hard drive for safe keeping. Since I am so paranoid about data retention I also am continuing my habit of copying most of my data (well the important stuff) onto a hard drive at the end of each year. I am not sure if i am going to recycle the drive i use each year. So far I have, but since drives are getting cheap I might just start accumulating old archives on drives.

All of this clean up and organization would not have been possible without my Fujitsu Scansnap 300M scanner for my Mac, Adobe Acrobat 9 for Mac, Cute PDF writter for Windows, VMware Fusion, my brother P-Touch label maker, and my paper shredder (with cross-weave). Save and secure digital storage brought to me by my Drobo Firewire 800!

, , , ,

Friday Off

by

I took today and Monday off. I needed to relax and burn some days off after a hectic month. I tried to avoid work but I had to make 2 calls in the afternoon. I also will admit i checked email a few times durring the day. It was hard not to since I know a lot was going on. It took every bit of self control I had to not reply to most of the messages. I am on vacation so I needed to act like it a little.

I slept in, but got woken up by a caller ID unknown person at around 11. That was not fun, but it wasn’t too early so I can’t really complain.

I meet up with Danny by Union Square for dinner and drinks. I called it a night early. I am thankful for that since I started drinking early. I wasn’t too bad, but lets just say I didn’t follow my self imposed 2 drink maximum that I almost never follow! Overall it was a nice relaxing day.