February 8, 2005

Dad met me at the house at 8:00 and we went out to breakfast at the Omega. We are there so often that we have an “assigned” table and we know exactly who is going to sit at all of the other tables and what time they will get there. After breakfast it was back to my place to load up our two cars with equipment to take down to Castile. We are delivering four desktops and miscellaneous cabling sundries and a Compaq Proliant 3000 which is a large, behemouth of a server (okay, nothing like the AS/400, but it is still big.) I carried it up the stairs to get it to the car and that was about all that I could handle. My blood pressure shot right up and I got dizzy. I am not as young as I used to be.

We drove down to the Castile school and discovered that there was a lot less wiring done that we had thought was going to be. There was a lot missing and a lot of parts that we needed to pick up. So we went over everything that was there and made a careful list (I had forgotten to bring one of the key components that we needed anyway – so we weren’t going to have everything set up right that second either way) and made plans to be back in a few days. One main wire needed to be run and all of the wires all over the building needed to be terminated. But we did have the termination ends nor the tools to do the work so we were out of luck there.

I got home and discovered that Min was still awake, apparently she had drank too much caffeine while she was at work and was now unable to sleep. It is too bad that she hadn’t figured out that that was going to happen before dad and I left because she missed out on breakfast and seeing the school. She took a quick shower and then she and I headed up to Rochester to get the parts that I needed for the school. We ran to the bank quick to make a deposit (I feel like I never get to do that anymore) and then we headed on over to Home Depot where I always buy my data wiring stuff. While we were there we looked into the carpets because I desperately need to get my office carpeted. It isn’t nearly as expensive as I had thought that it would be (of course, my office is small, rectangular and we would only use really cheap carpet anyway, in there.) We also did some research on insulation for the ceiling and decided to get two mini-rolls of R19 to try out in the server room. That was the heaviest stuff that we found at Home Depot so we will give that a try. That room generates so much noise that we are getting desperate. I also came up with an idea to vent the server room into the garage. During the cooler months, it should work really well to keep the room cool, heat the garage and allow us to close the server room door making it that much more quiet. In fact, the door is probably the biggest thing that we need to get the noise down. Maybe putting curtains up in front of the server window would help out. That six foot wide piece of glass must be transmitting quite a bit of noise with all of that surface area. After shopping we hit IHOP for a completely unhealth, but very delicious lunch – or dinner depending on your perspective. It was about 3:00. I should note, we actually had a polite and competent waitress for once at IHOP. I am sure they fired her right after we left. We hit Borders on the way home. I picked up my first Mac magazine since I have become a pending Mac owner. I don’t know what I was thinking, I am not sure that there is a single article in that magazine, just neverending adds for iPod accessories. The iPod isn’t even connected to Mac in anyway. In fact, my cousin Sara just got an iPod for Christmas but it doesn’t work with their G4 PowerMac, she has to use it on her brother Jeremy’s new HP desktop that runs Windows XP because the Mac just doesn’t support the iPod. To paraphase a famous quote “HP integrates Apple better than Apple integrates Apple.”

Total random but just in case you are having a bad day at the office you can now construct your own micro-claymore to fend off annoying office peoples.

We got home close to 5:00 and since there wasn’t a whole lot of work to be done that needed my attention, I decided to get some sleep. We both went to bed and slept the evening away. I got up around 9:00pm (yeah, NOW my schedule is really screwed up) and headed down to start working on getting more computers ready for Castile. Min headed on off to the hotel.

It isn’t Dawn of the Dead but here is some scary news about catepillars. And your mother always told you that they wouldn’t hurt you!

Leave a comment