Food

Busy Days

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The past two days have been busy with meetings and very little tech work, or anything interesting enough to run and write about. I have been feeling like I am not getting anything done, but in fact I am being productive. When I feel like I am not getting allot done I realize I am doing office work, and not tech work! not bad, but just different.

I am trying to save money the remaining week of this month. For that reason I passed up going out with John and Jay to dinner last night, but then ended up going out tonight with other friends! I intend to safe the rest of the week! Really!

I was just finishing up going through my TO DO list and email backlog. I think now (at 10 to midnight) I finally am done. I am off to bed!

Light Friday

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It wasn’t that we were bored today (i actually got allot done) but it was a “relatively” slow day. Case in point Jayson and I were able to sneak out (not really since my boss knew where we were going) and goto the Outback for lunch. In NYC the Outback does in fact serve lunch.

We also got some time to work on a new cabinet we received for our computer room. I have to say that HP rail kits are the easiest I have ever had to install. I cannot believe that IBM still makes you screw things in and do all this work to get a kit in, but HP you just snap it in and you are done in 3 minutes. Now I have to finalize the cabinet layout before we put more gear in it.

Other than that, today was an uneventful day. And you know what? I don’t mind a few uneventful days every now and then!

The Wedding

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I am sitting in my room (super small, but lets not go there right now) waiting to put my tux on. I am supposed to be ready to go in about an hour. Since it will take me like 20 minutes to get dressed I have time to kill. In a minute I am going to run down to the inn bar and fill up my flask. Rich & Amanada got me a flask kit with cups and stuff for a gift. It was exactly what I wanted. I am going to fill it up “just in case” for the ceremony. I wonder how much the bar will charge to fill up a 6-oz flask with JD or Southern Comfort? I will find out.

I am not looking forward to wearing a tie. Rich’s dad helped me get it ready, but I hate wearing them. I know I “clean up nice” in a tux or good suit, but they are so uncomfortable to get into. After a while I get used to it and am fine, but it is that first few minutes that I dread. I hate sweating in them:(

The Picnic

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Well I was going to write all about the company picnic that I was going to on last Sunday. It rained, so we had no picnic. So nothing to talk about. It was rainy and everyone from work that I would hang out with (now that we all had no plans) were either sick or lazy and didn’t want to do anything.

I was with them on the being lazy part, so I did almost nothing productive on Sunday. I played with Sync on my Mac and robocopy for Windows. My goal is to automate backing up of my most important stuff. I have both scripts working. Robocopy can be (and will be) made into a scheduled task to run weekly on my XP box. Rsync needs a bit more work to make it a cron job that runs on a schedule. I may not even do that since my laptop is not regularly plugged into the firewire drive I will use as backup. I may just run the script manually when I want to backup stuff.

The picnic will most likely be rescheduled for the weekend I am away for a wedding. Not a huge loss for me. I always have mixed feelings about all day recreational get togethers from work. The parties usually rock, but the picnic can get a little long. Of course the wedding may end up making me feel the same way:)

Online Food Delivery

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Someone at work gave me a link to a website that takes a bunch of restaurants and lets you order from then for home delivery. This is not new. I do it all the item with some places, and have looked at others. What is new, is that this site has almost 100 restaurants that will deliver to my apartment. This is a vast improvement from my previous options.

The downside is the first order we tried for lunch on thursday gave a credit card error the 4 times I tried to place the order. Because I like the concept I will give them time to work out all the kinks. then I will complain. For now I am cautiously optimistic about this cool new site.

Beer Garden Sunday

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Went to the beer garden again today. I got permission to not goto the beach for my mom’s actual birthday (by her) so I went to the garden when Jay and John called. We had a good time again. We ate sausage, drank (one drink for me since I was not recovered from friday), played cards and hung out. I decided you have a gambling problem when you play poker with rocks when you have no money to play with.

After poker we all played Spades. I haven’t played in years. John showed Jay and Gretchen how to play. We now have a cool hang out and drink card game for no money. I mean if we want to bet we will play holdum. Not sure how exactly to spell it.

I was late for dinner with my family, but so were they. We had a decent meal at a japanese restaurant near my sisters house.

the only other thing to note about today was that I may have destroyed a brand new shirt by getting stuck between the doors on an E train. I had black marks up and down my arm and the sleeve. It was nasty, but I made the train. It was worth it:)

The Beer Garden

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I went to the last Beer Garden in NYC yesterday. John, Zee, Dave, a friend of Johns (forget his name all the time) and I went over to Astoria for the good food and nice alcohol. it was the perfect day for hanging out in the shade while drinking and doing not much of anything else.

We picked out a picnic table in the shade and hung out for hours. The sausage was fantastic. The drinks were cheap (for NYC). We were buying huge pitchers of good beer for $12. I was able to have my Jack & Cokes for $4. We had a good time.

I was so stuffed when I left. I just love BBQ. I couldn’t pass up some sausage and then cheese burgers. We were there for like 5 hours. We had to eat!

It was a great day to be outside!!!

White Castle Sunday

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Sunday I bummed around the house most of the day. it was hot, I was still tired from vegas jet lag. Jayson didn’t need me to help move (thankfully). I went over to the new place in the evening to check it out. We ended up going to White Castle for dinner. I don’t have much “fast food” anymore so it was good. I ate the same amount of meat that both Jay and Gretchen ate combined. Not sure how I did it, but I was full afterward. I could barely walk the subway steps because I was so full. But it was good, so every once in a while it is ok to go crazy!

Their new place is allot bigger than the old one, but it is in Queens. I am over living in Queens. I am all about the easy manhattan commute and living (for now).

Convention Close

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Thursday was the last day of the convention. I missed one of the seminars I wanted to hit, and part of another to deal with a problem at work. I did learn a ton about DNS, and some other Cisco security tools at the seminars I made it to. Some of this stuff is so fascinating.

I hit the pool in the late afternoon. I didn’t get much sun. it was too hot. I ended up by the cafe by the pool for a quick snack, and some reading. it was very relaxing.

Thursday night we had the big Cisco convention party. It was cool. They rented out several rooms and the pool at the Palms. Hung out there with Joe for a while. We even played Halo. They were having a contest. Yes, Xbox at a convention party. it was a Cisco party!!! A bunch of tech guys and you need some sort of game. Joe was killing everyone we played. I was just getting killed. The top 18 players of the night (by highest stats of each 5 minute game played) would win an Xbox. When we left halfway through the party Joe had about 8 of the 16 slots taken up, so he should win a new Xbox to go allong with his other 2 that he has.

We met up with Karen at the Paris, and hung out at the lounge. This is where Jayson and Gretchen got really drunk at after their wedding (or so I am told). We had a few rounds and then we all went off to bed.

A Good Steak

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Wednesday night I went to a meet and greet for Cisco people interested in (or using) IPCC. I met some cool high level tech guys on the team from Cisco, the product manager, etc. I also had some important questions answered for me.

I met up with Pankaj, and we cut out of the meet and greet and hit Morton’s for dinner. I love a good steak. I also love a good steak 2 nights in a row. We had a few drinks waiting for some other people we were meeting up with. It was a good time. I even got to try the Godiva desert I missed the last time I was at Morton’s with Alison. It was fantastic.

I ended up back at the Paris and met up with Joe, Karen and Joe’s folks for drinks at the lounge. I didn’t drink more (i was pretty well off from the Morton’s alcohol) but I hung out with them for a while.