I haven’t been writing as much as I had expected to the last few days but at the end of yesterday’s update, we moved into the number three position according to the archives. So we are steadily marching forward. Not much longer and I will shut up about it.
Min and I slept in forever this morning. We didn’t wake up until a quarter till eleven! I can’t believe how long I sleep when I am on the CPAP. It is good sleep, real REM sleep. But I never wake up. That is really rough. I seem to be sleeping close to ten hours a night on a regular basis. I hate that. I was hoping that I would only be sleeping four hours or so once I got used to the machine. But that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. I must get three entire sleep cycles if I let myself. Luckily, I am able to wake up with an alarm and that works just fine. Or else I would be in big trouble.
I got a message from a contact that I have that has been looking for some memory for me for one of our servers that is pretty hard to get memory for. He has found enough memory to max out the machine which is pretty cool so I am getting that sent right out. That will make that machine able to function for us for quite some time so that we don’t have to buy a replacement machine down the road anytime soon, I hope.
We have been having unbelievable problems with our one router in the house going down. It has been driving me crazy. It is really rough because it disconnects all of our customers and it cuts off our telephones and stuff. It is really a pain. I have been trying one thing after another trying to get it to work but no luck. So, if you have issues calling us, that is probably why.
Jeremy stayed a little bit later than usual this morning so that we could go out and get some breakfast/lunch over at Denny’s.
I got the notice from Apple today that my new Mac Mini had finally shipped. It has five day shipping on it and it left on Saturday so it should be here on Friday. At least I hope so. That would be nice. I can’t wait to get it and try it out and to have something on my desk other than this laptop. The laptop is okay, but the Mac is a lot smaller and I can clean up the cables a bit and not have to take this thing up and down every time that I am going to go somewhere. And the Mini is only a fraction of the size of the laptop. That is a huge bonus. And it is quieter too. There are a lot of pluses. Of course, we may find that I really hate the Mac, but I think that I will learn to get along with it to some extent. I checked in with FedEx and they said that the machine had been picked up and was in transit – but they hadn’t listed an arrival date yet. There site was horribly slow today. It took five minutes just to get onto the site and put in a tracking number. They need to reduce the number of images that they have on their pages if they can’t keep their bandwidth up.
We had lunch over at Denny’s and then I drove Jeremy back down to Leicester. I hung out down there and played with Taffy and Peter (their dog and cat respectively) for about forty five minutes. Peter is currently a top ten finalist in the Knapp Winery contest to find a “model” for the label of their new wine.
My impromtu project for the day is to do a ton of cleaning (mostly of paperwork) in my office looking for any paperwork pertaining to the Netgear router that we are having a problem with. I know that I have had that paperwork sitting around the office for forever. I never have a good place to file any of this stuff. I need a large filing cabinet in my office, I think. There is loose paperwork everywhere down here. At least this causes me to get a lot of it cleaned up. I do think that I have figured out what is wrong with the router – not that that is necessarily a good thing. I am pretty sure that its memory is going bad. So, I have turned off its logging functions in the hopes that with it no longer logging that maybe it will not use nearly as much memory and maybe that will keep it up and running for a while.
Here is a really creepy story about what can happen when incompetent or lazy medical personnel become involved in accidents. This is a really worrisome story when you think about how often a single doctor could have this kind of impact – convincing people that the obvious is not true. I have heard horror stories, not quite of this level, happening locally where a doctor was willing to let a patient die rather than face the obvious that all of the nurses and lay people around him were aware of. Luckily, in that case as well, a non-medical person took ownership of the situation and saved a child’s life. Far too often, doctors just find it too much of a nuisance to care about people’s lives. I realize that being a doctor can be stressful, but any responsible human being with that kind of responsibility should be decent enough to give up a post if they no longer have the interest of humanity at heart. Of course, we have to consider the fact that in a small town like the one in this article, the examiner could easily have known the patient and acted the way he did intentionally for reasons we may never know. That always has to be considered – especially in cases where people have questioned him like that and he shoots them down.
I got onto the phone with Netgear and it looks like it won’t be any problem just having them send us out a new unit. Boy are they easy to deal with. I am really glad that we work with them because it makes our lives a lot easier.
Well, tonight we learned that Scott is not very good at installing insulation. I get really hot and sweaty too easily and it makes it almost impossible to see out of safety goggles when I do anything. We did manage to complete the insulation in the server room. It will probably take a few days before we have a good idea of how much it is reducing the noise in the house. We will have to have an opportunity to listen to it in a bunch of different situations before we can really tell. I am really hoping that it makes the servers quiet enough that you can’t hear them upstairs in the kitchen. Because of the hardwood floors up there, the sound travels right through the floor making the entire upstairs – because it is one big open room – able to hear everything that happens in the server room.
Once I was wrapping up the server room’s insulation, Min cooked some frozen pizza for dinner and we sat down to watch the original The Italian Job from 1969 starring Michael Caine. We made it about forty minutes into the film and Min decided that she couldn’t stay awake because it was so slow. So we switched to Almost Famous which I have seen about half an hour of before but never the whole thing. It was a really good movie. There were a lot of good people in it. After that we watched the famous Goldie Hawn / Kurt Russell film Going Overboard which was their third film together. I haven’t seen that movie since the 80’s. After watching the movies, we decided to head off to bed and actually try to be able to get up in time to make it to church tomorrow. We have not made it in weeks so maybe we can make it tomorrow.
Speaking of sleep, Andy and Miranda didn’t get up until around 1:00 today. They disappeared almost immediately after getting up to go out and get some food. They came home from “lunch” at 5:00 and said that they were planning on going out to a movie. But they were both tired (twelve hours of sleep will do that to you) and so they went to take a nap. That was around 5:30. I am turning in now and it is almost half after midnight and they are still asleep. It will be interesting whether or not they decide to wake up in the middle of the night or if they just sleep right on through and get up late again tomorrow. So, if you don’t hear much about what is going on with them, that is why. There just isn’t anything to tell 🙂
We did test the server room with the door closed and it does get a lot more quiet than it did before. But, unfortunately, the heat builds up so fast in there that we can’t leave the door shut for any amount of time. We are hoping to vent the server room directly into the garage which should be able to keep it at a decently cool temperature for most of the year.
Well, it is official. With today’s update we have just barely skimmed past the limit to make 2005 Quarter One the busiest ever and we are not even half way through the quarter yet. Whoo – hoo. No one can complain about there not being updates now. I am pretty sure that January was our busiest month ever as well and February is definitely doing well to be in the top four. I guess that now I can stop talking about it because we are past the limit.
Night everyone!