Personal

Hanging By The Pool

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Alison and I hung by the pool today. I took advantage of the pool at my building. She came over and we got some sun and swam. it was a really relaxing afternoon.

I cut my outside time short when I realized I may get really burned if I continue to stay in the sun without any sun block. As a consolation we went to the outback for dinner. Good as always. I just had some cheese fries and crab cake appetizer. I am on a crab cake frenzy this past few weeks. I hope the fad wears off, since they are expensive.

Saturday I just hung out at home and did some work. It was a low key weekend. I like that sometimes.

Surpirse Birthday Dinner Friday

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I forget the name of the restaurant but we all meet in soho for a surprise dinner for Dari. The place was half a block from the Apple store in soho. I just remember the really weird yellow chairs.

The problem with the whole surprise was Dari wouldn’t leave work. So we were late for our reservations. We didn’t want to leave and have her leave at the same time as the group. So we all waited for her to leave. The problem was she never did. By the time alyssa said lets go, Dari was walking out. So what we tried to avoid happened. We all lied and said we were going to dinner some place. then we walked the really long way around the block so we didn’t end up on the same subway as her. It was really funny.

We ended up at the restaurant first, and it was a real surprise. It was fun. I had the chicken with crab cakes appetizer. I got really buzzed off of one kamikaze. I had a second but ended up giving it away since I didn’t want to get smashed. I am a light weight when it comes to alcohol but 1 drink usually doesn’t buzz me. Oh well…

Birthday Lunch At American

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It was Dari & Jennifer’s birthday’s at work friday. We went out to America for a lunch. There was like 22 of us. It was a huge table. it was a nice time out. It was the first of 2 celebrations for their birthday. Dari’s boyfriend had setup a surprise dinner for her so we didn’t want to have her figure out she had a dinner that night, so we went to lunch.

Check out the mob for photos…

Shopping

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Jayson and I went shopping at Macy’s after work today. We are never good shopping together. We make each other spend money. I bought 4 new pairs of paints, 3 shirts, and some socks. For me that was allot. I got so much since they were on sale 50% off. My problem is I bought a type of paints that I never had before. I was not 100% sure on the size and if I will like them. If I do like them I am going to get more… Jayson also spent some $$$ on paints.

He got me buying the dockers paints that are wrinkle resistant and stain resistant. You can pore coffee on the paints and they wont stain. They will dry fast also. Water beads right off of them. I like the fact that I can wash them in the machine and not have to iron them. That will save me $ on dry cleaning. My current khakis get nasty fast. I hope these dockers wear better.

And I said I would not spend allot this month since I want to move. Oh well:(

Birthday Lunch Special At Angelo Maxi’s

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Went with Jayson and Dan to angelo maxi’s steak house for Jayson’s birthday today. It was good food like always. We had the lunch special. For $20.99 you get soup or salad (i don’t eat it) a steak of some kind, and desert. I get the cheese cake. It is awesome for like $26 after tax and tip. It is not an everyday thing, but once in a while it is nice, and allot cheaper than their regular meal at dinner time.

Jury Duty Update

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The powers that be have smiled on me today. Turns out that my case settled out of court. We were just told the good news. I am now waiting to be officially released from jury duty. The cop running the show has not decided to do that yet. I am not sure if we have to wait till 5PM or if we will get out soon. Either way I am out by the end of today. I am happy now.

All I have to do is get my cell phone back!

Jury Duty Sucks

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I am on day two of Jury Duty. Yesterday was going ok until I got put on a Jury. I was in the new courthouse. The AC was on, I had cell reception. I figured I can ride this out. No problem. Then I get put in a room for 4 hours and at the last minute I get selected as an alternate on a jury. I did my best to not be wanted, but they selected me anyway.

My dad picked me up from the courthouse yesterday and we went to dinner. THe commute wasn’t so bad. today will not be so nice. I got a car service to the court house again. That went over well, except for its cost. Going home is more difficult. I don’t know when I will be let go, so I cannot arrange for a car. Taking the rail road will take longer than it would from the city since I would have to go from Jamaica to wood-side back to my train station.

Other problems abound today. My GPRS service was not working on my phone so I could not check email. I figured it would start working eventually today. I will never know since the court house confiscated my phone because it has a camera on it. I can get it back later, but I am now without a phone all day. I had to call the office before and I used our 800# to get a hold of kai. If it wasn’t happening to me, I would think it was funny.

I am now waiting for my trial to be called. They say it can happen anytime between 10AM and 5PM. It feels like I am waiting for the cable company.

The only plus side is that the AC is going in the courthouse and it is comfy. Work will probably be hot and nasty this week without AC.

I am sitting here blogging in the central jury room waiting for my case to be called. I cannot find any outlets to power the laptop so I am keeping it powered down as much as possible. I have the screen brightness down all the way to conserve power. I don’t know how long I will be here. I also don’t know if or when I can charge the laptop up again today.

I have been using my Treo for email. That way I am trying to phase out my blackberry. Since I cannot have the camera phone in the courthouse I am having Jayson fedex me my pager for tomorrow morning. Hopefully I will get it before I leave for the courthouse. With my blackberry I can at least get email when I am out of the office. The Treo was fine yesterday, but they confiscated it today:(

This blog entry was written while listening to Black Balloon from the album “Dizzy Up The Girl” by Goo Goo Dolls

Saturday

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Alison and I met Jayson, Gretchen, Dave, and two of jayson’s friends from New Orleans. We meet at their hotel across from Penn Station. We ate a nearby Pizza place. The out of towners wanted some pizza. We only had a short amount of time before our reservations so we did quick and easy. it was surprisingly good.

I made reservations at the Gotham Comedy Club. it was right around the corner from Best Buy and Outback near my office. It was rated very highly from Zagats. We had a blast. it was really funny.

We sat righ tby the stage but in the corner by stage left. Gretchen got made fun of in the beginning when they were asking where people were from. She was slow to answer so they were making fun of Southerner’s being slow!

We even saw some comedian’s who I recognized from TV. One guy I don’t recall where I remember him from, and another guy I saw on Tough Crowd. All in all we had a blast. We ended up in the hotel bar after the show to hang out for a while. Alison and I took off early since we both had trains to catch. this would be a perfect night to have an apartment in the city. I could have stayed out late and not had to worry. Oh well. The search goes on for a place.

Quick Bits

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Kingston was interesting. I got stuff done, so that was good. I even slept a bit on the train going home. I never do that so you know I was tired. I think I got an hour or more sleep.

I left a key for the real estate person to show my apartment. Maybe I will get luck and they will rent it right away? I doubt it but you never know. I think they may show it today.

I figured out how I can have 1 ftp user account and have 2 sub directories in the users home folder. Each of those sub directories actually redirects the user to different virtual paths. That way I can have two directory trees, one for inbound, and one for outbound. To the user everything looks normal. Next up on the new FTP setup schedule is getting an SSL certificate for the FTP server.

After 2 months of waiting we finally got a hold of a the server we will be sending to our production environment. This will replace an aging server that needs more disk space. I had to lend it out to the dev staff for a while so they could do something with it. After 2 months I got it back and I can move it to our data center. I hope to move that today if possible.

Also today I have to make sure we have a computer and a phone for a new user that starts monday, setup SQL mail for a database machine, and probably 5 other things that I haven’t thought of.

Jury Duty Calls

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Tonight I have to start calling to see if I need to show up for jury duty. I can suck it up and do it, but the problem is we have something major going on at work next week. Wednesday and Thursday we are reconfiguring our NYC office. I am one of the 2 people that knows what we want to do. The other guy is not as technical so I am pretty much it. If I have to show up at the court house one of those days we have problems. I have not yet figured out what I am going to do about that.

I start calling today at 5PM…