January 23, 2007

I have been waking up throughout the night the last several nights – most likely from the combination of stress and oversleeping – and I decided to just get up at half past four this morning. That is actually a good time for me to get up because it lets me get ready for work rather leisurely. It ended up being a good thing that I was up as I was paged out before I was even able to leave the house.

I was looking up some airline and flight information today and was amazed to find that it is cheaper and much faster to fly to New Delhi, India than it is to fly to some destinations in Argentina and only barely farther than going to Uruguay! It is really amazing how far South American destinations are from the US. It is also pretty amazing how far north we are in the US. Flying from Miami instead of Newark would be completely different, obviously. But still, Peru which is as far west as South America goes is still east of us here!

Dominica found this great historical tidbit: Today Tulsa, OK is digging up a fifty year old car. No one knows why the city of Tulsa decided to pull a bizarre stunt like this or what they thought the point would be. This had to cost them a fortune when they first did it and now it is just a novelty. That money could have been invested somewhere or something useful could have been done with it. Just think, someone on that city council looked at that car and said, “Well we COULD use this money to give twenty thousand meals to the city’s homeless OR we could bury this car and look like idiots!” And we all know which way that decision went.

Two new books came in the mail last night: “No Fluff Just Stuff Anthology 2006” and “Software Fortresses”. I am looking forward to reading them soon. I am really enjoying having discovered Amazon and eBay for used books. Technology books are great used because serious technologists, in general, take really good care of their books.

I got a chance to play around a little with a product called FreeNAS today. FreeNAS is a FreeBSD based software package for building your own Network Attached Storage device. I am playing around with the idea of building one to have in Newark as a place to back up all of my files to. This is especially interesting as I have previously purchased hard drives that would be perfect for this that are not currently being used. This would make good use of them very quickly and inexpensively. Too bad I don’t have any free time with which to work on projects like this these days.  FreeNAS looks to be really cool and I think that it is going to be really nice once I get a chance to put some time into it.  It has a lot of really important (and obvious) features lacking from low-end NAS products that you usually can buy like NFS, AFS, Union and other file sharing systems.  NFS is the option that is most obviously lacking from similar products elsewhere.

I went to lunch at Baja Fresh with the guys today.  I was not all that impressed with Baja Fresh.  The food was okay but nothing special at all but extremely overpriced.  It was like $12 for two tiny tacos, some bland rice and a little helping of pinto beans and a medium soda.  This would have been $4 at Taco Bell which may seem like an unfair comparison but I enjoy the food at Taco Bell more.

I had hoped to be able to head for home around three thirty but got stuck until just after four.  Traffic was light as it is at this time of day and I got home early enough to be able to lie down for half an hour and get a little rest.  I didn’t nap, just laid down for a little bit.  It helped though.

I only got a little rest before I had to work again.  I had about half an hour of work that had to be done after I got home but I had to wait around until after six thirty before they were ready for me to do it which helped contribute to a long day.

Dominica and I both felt like going to IHOP tonight but since I had to work so late the cars were both taken to the garage by the time that I was available to go anywhere so we decided against that.  We just ordered in some Eli’s Pizza and took it easy.  We finished watching the second season of Diff’rent Strokes and moved on to the fifth season of Monarch of the Glen which dad tells us is the worst season that they have but it leads up to his favourite season so there is something to look forward to.

Once again it was an early night for us but not as early as it has been the last several nights.  We went to bed a little after ten.  Oreo is loving this new “longer night” schedule.

Leave a comment