The Due Date

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Today is not typically a day I like to think about. I try to go most of the day without hearing people referencing the date. Today also happens to be the projected due date for our baby. We’ve thought about this a lot, and ideally just want a happy and healthy baby. That being said I’ll be perfectly happy if she’s slightly late to avoid this birthday. that last statement is pretty moot at this point because it’s 6 o’clock and so far no labor signs. I don’t want to jinx myself, but it’s already pretty late in the day and labor takes a while.

Now we wait. If the baby doesn’t come on her own I believe they will induce next Tuesday. Let’s hope she decides to show up sometime soon, there are plenty of people that want to meet her.

With today being 9/11 and the due date I really can’t remember much else from work today. I am usually pretty good about remembering high points, but not today.

Does The Domain Name Really Matter?

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Over the years I have used several email addresses and different domain names for websites. In recent years I have been using the powerz.org domain. It was unique and relatively cool 10 years ago, but as I get older and I’m less concerned about anonymity on the Internet and more about people finding me I question if I should be continue to use it. My thoughts are if I’m going to have customized domain name, I might as well have one that represents me and not some silly reference to a TV show from the 90s. To be fair it’s an obscure reference to The Simpsons, and the Simpsons are still awesome however that still does not take away from the fact that any online presence should represent me.

I’m not sure what made me start thinking about this topic. It might have been because I am planning on buying a domain name for my baby when she is born. Let’s not go into the fact that MC thinks it’s not really necessary. She is right by the way, a baby does not need a domain name. I am getting it so down the road when she is old enough she will have one if she ever wants one. I did the same thing for my oldest niece and she actually is using it for her maill right now. But that’s off-topic.

My domain name usage has progressed from using Scott.ac for email and for a time my blog, to powerz.org. there’ve been other ones I’ve played around with for a short period of time. For example I used powerpedia.net for my blog for a while. I loved the Scott.AC domain, but the international domain name kind of confused people. I still have that one, and don’t plan on ever really giving it up. I just don’t want to use it for day-to-day stuff.

I am probably overthinking it. It’s most likely not that big of a deal to have an online presence with one domain versus another. I guess, well I kind of know I’m a perfectionist about this or stuff so I am compelled to go through the painful process of moving things to a new domain. As I started writing this post last week I was planning on moving everything from powerz.org to scottw.net. After getting opinions from several people (Jay was for the move, MC wasn’t) I decided to move ahead with moving my blog to the new domain. I will over time move my non personal mail to the new domain, but i will keep my personal powerz.org mail address that i have been using for years. MC likes the domain name even though it has no real meaning. It just sounds cool, so for personal use i will keep it. That decision made things pretty easy. If i did move my personal email address, the one used as my main google apps account I would have had a lot of work to migrate google services. Some stuff like Google Play purchases can’t be moved. Other things like google voice is a very painful thing to do.

In another post I will talk about the efforts from this weekend to migrate my blog to the new domain and a new hosting provider.

Maybe Our Last Weekend of Rest For a While

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This weekend we have tried to stay low key.  MC spent most of the day yesterday and today on the couch with her feet up.  We did a big batch of laundry today.  Yup, it was that exciting of a weekend.  Amazingly there was still some baby stuff that needed to be washed.

We (MC) perfected our pot popcorn making.  We do it old school, and MC is pretty dam good at it.  Very delicious.  Saturday night we ordered in from Bearburger as a treat.  Tonight we ordered Italian.  We also had a freshdirect delivery.  lots of getting food stores ready in case it is hectic once the baby arrives.

I went out to get waffles again today for breakfast.  The waffle truck was in Forest Hills again.  The line was super long today.  I am glad they are getting business in the area so they will be back regularly but it was a long wait!

The rest of the day (and a big chunk of yesterday) for me was taken up by me tinkering around with my website.  I will write about that in another post soon.

We watched Jeff Who Lives at Home tonight.  It was not as funny as I thought it would be with the cast that was in it.  I would say it was OK, but nothing special.  Other TV watched this weekend was some more episodes of The Layover with Anthony Bourdain.  We have finished all our Top Chef episodes till a new season comes out and we have been trying that show out as a substitute.  So far it has been pretty good.  I have bookmarked some places to  try the next time I am in London, and MC and I did the same thing for if we are ever in San Francisco.

 

4 Year Anniversary

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Today is my 4 year anniversary working at Thomson Reuters. I almost forgot about it.  Usually Colin reminds me but since I am no longer working with him I don’t recall how I remembered but I know it was here.

Time flies because until today it didn’t really dawn on me that I have been at this job for longer than any job with the exception of Partsearch.

My 4 years broken down in numbers goes as follows.  In 4 years I have managed 3 groups, & 6 products or capabilities.  I have had 3 managers, one for over 3 years and then two changes this year.  I have been in 3 offices, and have moved offices 4 times.  After 4 years I still get energized  a little when walking to the office from the subway, so hopefully there will be more years to come.

Friday September 7th

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Not a huge amount to report that I want to write about publicly on the Internet, so I wrote a private blog post. I work from home today because I needed to have some scheduling flexibility. Thankfully in the end I didn’t need it, but it’s good to know it’s available when needed.

I ordered takeout sushi for lunch today. I was also able to play a little bit with Cisco and jabber. One of the guys at work and I tested to make sure that it functions and I can receive chat messages when the app is closed on my iPhone and iPad. It will be pretty cool when we all start using it.

We do not have any specific plans yet for this weekend. We are hoping to be pretty low key, since the baby is due Tuesday. Depending on how MC feels we might get a dinner out one night. Other than that it’s vegging and making sure we get anything we need to do around the apartment done.

Desk Reconfiguration

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At work I have had 5 monitors on my desk.  Let’s not argue the necessity of five monitors. It is a bit excessive. That is why I’ve been thinking about downsizing for a while.  At the time the setup made sense, and I had the equipment on hand so I figured why not.  Recently however my desk is been slightly cramped, and I found myself using my third computer significantly less.  This set up started when I got a new 27 inch display for my laptop.  It was a great needed addition since the extra real-estate is used and I blow text up a lot.  With that addition I had the two 19″ monitors I was using for my Macbook Air free to move to my Mac Mini that I use.  I have that machine mainly to sit on the guest wifi network to do Skype video chats with far flung staff.  I can use Skype on the internal network but it never seems the same.  The 15″ monitors (2 of them) I was using for the Min went towards a Dell desktop I have that I run a specific work app on.  I can run it in a VM but on my older Macbook Air the VM was starved for memory.  Now i may revisit the need for that machine but i like having a dedicated Windows machine around even if I dont use it often.

Since I wasn’t using the windows machine a lot I gave away the 15″ monitors and just have the Dell desktop plugged into one of the Mini’s 19″ monitors.  They take DVI & VGI so I created  poor mans switcher for the monitor.  Longer term i will probably just RDP to that machine.  Surprisingly 3 monitors is not uncommon at work.  Some people even have 4 but i was a bit out there with the 5.

Now I have space on my desk that you can actually see my wedding & engagement photos.  Now isn’t that whats important?

Brunch Out

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Today we meet up with MC’s friend Mary Beth who was in town visiting family and friends. We dont get to see her much with her living out of town so it was nice to meet up.  We meet at the Tick Tok.  I dont recall having breakfast there ever but I have had lunch and dinner a lot when I worked at Redcats.  The food was really good diner food.  i was pleased with the real hash browns.  Most places dont have them and they are way better than the regular breakfast potato options.

After breakfast/brunch we headed over to Home Depot to get some wood for shelves and some other misc stuff.

At home we spent some time figuring out were we want to hang pictures and paintings and stuff.  We have been in the apartment for 9 months and we are finally getting around to that.  We hung some items but still need to find a home for other pieces.  Time is ticking till the baby arrives and we wont have time for stuff like that!

The rest of the day was nice and restful.  Exactly what you want before you go back to work after a 3 day weekend!

Waffles and Resting at Home

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Last weekend while driving to pizza with my parents MC noticed the Waffle and Dinges truck that I love right off of Austin St.  I checked it out and they apparently have been showing up on Sunday’s.  Today I saw they were there again and I went out to pick up waffles for MC and I.  They were great as usual.

After breakfast we were living up our free weekend by continuing to chill out and do some light house work, and laundry.  MC found a new Italian place to try ordering from for dinner.  Turned out to not be so great.  Otherwise a low key day!

Plex On AppleTV

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I have had an AppleTV since the first generation one came out years ago. When the second-generation one came out I pick that up and sold the original on eBay. I have loved the idea of an AppleTV for years. I have even made my own homegrown media center on several occasions. If you read this blog you’ll read about several of those iterations. The problem is in practice I really haven’t had huge luck with the AppleTVs. The second-generation AppleTV I currently have has been replaced with a Mac Mini running Plex media center. That has been my media center of choice for a while. I have tried the Boxer box, and the Roku. with both of those I was hoping to plug into my media centers the a library, and with the Roku to use it as a front end for Plex. neither of those options worked out very well. All along the AppleTV has been powered on but not plugged into my TV. I would plug it in to music, but not really using it for TV. I have been generally lazy and didn’t want to jailbreak it. The Mac Mini has functioned generally well so I was in no rush to try anything different again. since my move I have had some more buggy experiences with the Mac Mini then the previous two years or so I’ve had it. It wasn’t enough for me to go making drastic changes, that is until I read that the Plex team had made a front end for the jailbroken AppleTV. So I gave jailbreaking a shot. At first I thought I had bricked the AppleTV, but after about two days of leaving it plugged in and I forgot about it. I turned on my TV and it had worked. I got really lucky.

After the small drama in jailbreaking, it was trivial to get Plex installed. After it was installed I ran into some problems with choppiness of the video. I fixed that by tweaking some of the bit rate settings. Since then it has been working perfectly. I got even luckier when less than a week after I had configured Plex Apple announced that Hulu is now available on the device. I covered that in another blog post.

For right now the AppleTV is now my main media center. I still have my Mac Mini. It’s needed to run the Plex server, and host all the videos and music on my Drobo. it is just not plugged into my TV anymore. It has been an pre-smooth experience so far. MC likes it that she can stream music again directly to the AppleTV without me having to plug it in or read it up since it is now always attached to the television.

We still have a TiVo, and use it for a DVR. Longer-term I would love to find a way to use Hulu, the Internet, and my AppleTV to replace TiVo and and really expensive cable bill. We are not quite there yet in trying that out.

One of The Last Lazy Saturdays

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Today we cooked breakfast like we have been dong a lot more since May.  MC made omelets.  I think today they were perfect.  It will probibly be the benchmark for all future home made omelets.  We also tried fo-sausage, aka soy sausage.  They weren’t so bad.  Still weirded out by eating soy but i will try those again.

The agenda for the day was relaxing.  We doubt we will have many free weekends when we can just relax so we were enjoying that and doing a little work around the house.

We went out to a Thai restaurant on Austin St.  It was pretty good.  My first time at a Thai place and MC loves it so it was a good night out.  We hit up Martha’s for some desert.  It was super busy at that place but thankfully we didn’t wait to sit, but did wait a while for service.  We had a great night out.