June 4, 2006: Happy 60th Birthday Dad!

My dad turns 60 today. Happy birthday dad!

I was awake early this morning but Oreo decided to be the snuggliest dog ever and I couldn’t get out of bed for several hours. He snuggled right up against me and put his head on my arm so I couldn’t move.

I spent the morning working on one of the new servers trying to get it ready for deployment. There is always a ton of work to be done when I am home over a weekend. I am trying to get this “new” HP DL360 server set up and ready to replace the Asterisk phone system that I built recently on unstable hardware. The old machine was a home built 3U box but this new one is a really nice commercial server that fits into just 1U of space. Now that is nice. One really nice thing is that the Asterisk package that I was using previously was Asterisk@Home 2.7. Since I built the last machine they went to 2.8 and then went to what would have been 2.9 or maybe 3.0 but changed the project name to TrixBox and released version 1.0. And that is what I installed on the new hardware.

Dad came over to the house around 1:00 to get Min and I for his birthday lunch. We went over to the Omega Grill and met the Richardson clan over there. The seven of us had a really nice time at lunch. Now that we are down in New Jersey Dominica and I hardly ever get a chance to see anyone.

After lunch Dominica and I came back to the house and spent the rest of the afternoon working to get ready to head back to New Jersey. Dominica did a ton of laundry this weekend because it is much better to do it in New York than to do it in New Jersey at the laundromat. She kept working on that and on packing for the trip. We don’t know how long it will be before we are back in Geneseo again. We don’t have any scheduled returns until the weekend of July 22nd for my cousin Sara’s graduation party.

I managed to get a lot of work done and have two servers put into position so that I can work with them remotely from New Jersey. That was quite an accomplishment and I am very happy with the work that I managed to do over the weekend.

There was a lot to do and we didn’t manage to leave the house until after seven o’clock. That was a lot later than we had planned but we got more done that we had planned too. The downside is that my schedule was changed for the week and I am working the overnight shift all week starting tonight from midnight to eight in the morning so there is barely time to get to the apartment in New Jersey before I needed to start working. The schedule is tough tonight but the rest of the week it will be great. Because I am working the overnight I get to work from home. That saves me ten hours of commuting! That is awesome.

The drive south wasn’t too bad. We stopped in Clark’s Summit to get dinner at the Waffle House. It is always good food at the Waffle House. We arrived in North Brunswick a little after one in the morning. Boy were we tired when I started working. It is going to be a long night. Dominica decided to stay up with me while I worked. We watched That 70’s Show while I worked to keep me awake.

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