I’ve been having an interesting week. I went up the Empire State Building a few days ago and took some pictures. I was therefore fairly annoyed to discover a large circular shadow across most of them along with a curious diagonal pattern on a bunch of them as well. I have no idea what this is, or what caused it. Seems no-one else does either.

I put a search thingie in. Currently, it only searches news entries, but I’m going to get it to do everything else when I get round to it. And I’ll improve the results pages.

So it’s November 15th, which means that in exactly a month it’ll be my last day in the office here in NY. In that time, I’ve got quite a lot to do - most of it documentation. The advantage of this kind of thing is that if there’s an issue or an uncertainty with the system I’m designing, I can just write that the solution to that particular bit is “yet to be determined” and leave it to the next guy to figure out how to solve it. This way I can pick and choose the problems that are easy to solve and those that aren’t and conveniently avoid having to think too hard about the problems in the second category. It also keeps the documentation short and that’s a good thing.

Next week is Thanksgiving. I was recently informed that I’ve still got something like 17 days holiday to take this year. I’m taking two weeks at Christmas (between placements) which leaves me with something like 7 days to get through between now and December. Thanksgiving is an obvious time, so I’m taking two days next week. What I’ll do then, I’m not quite sure. I had a plan to go to Washington for a day or two, but that rapidly turned into a rather expensive plan. I could take the bus and only stay for a day, but I’m not sure if that’d be worth it.

I’m going for lunch now. I think I’m going to miss the guy in the Europa downstairs - he always knows what I want for lunch (not hard as I have the same thing every day) and his nametag says “Jesus”. I think the next time I come to NY, I’ll go there for lunch again and see if he’s still there.