Today is my day to build servers in Geneseo to get ready for the move to Scranton that is coming up very soon. It is going to take a lot of prep time to be ready and today is one of those days.
Dominica and I slept in a little this morning having gotten in rather late last night and not being able to fall asleep as soon as we had gotten home. The drive up from New Jersey was mostly uneventful. We stopped and ate a quick dinner at the Burger King on Livingston Avenue in New Brunswick before we left town. That seemed to work out well because it caused us to hit traffic a little later and eliminated the need to stop for dinner on the road. We didn’t get started until later than we had hoped because I had to go from Warren down to North Brunswick to get Dominica after work and then had to drive back again so we lose a good hour and a half if not more when we have to do it that way. But traffic was great and we made good time the whole way home. We arrived just a little after midnight but didn’t go to bed until after one and maybe closer to two in the morning.
Dad came over at nine this morning and the three of us went over to the Omega Grill for some breakfast. It is funny that Dominica and I are still such good customers of a restaurant in a town where we haven’t lived in months. It is nice getting to go back and just relax and visit.
When we got back to the house the Ralstons had all ready arrived to help for the day and had let themselves into the garage and had loaded their pickup truck full of deck furntiture that they were buying from us. That big truck load did a lot to clean out the garage. Now we have a lot more space to work with in there which we need to deal with all of the stuff that is going in and out of the house. The Ralstons also took the Otis Spunkmeyer oven that I had bought for Dominica a few years ago. She had wanted one and I got it for her for her birthday or something like that but she had never had a freezer large enough to hold a full order of Otis Spunkmeyer cookie dough so she had never even taken the oven out of the box that it had come in. That was kind of depressing but we are very unlikely to ever have enough room to justify having a convection oven designed just for cookies around. So it is one of those items that we really need to just let go of and move on. We are starting to get better with that stuff.
Dad hung around for just a little bit. He took one car load of stuff (during the week he had taken load after load and the garage was all but empty when we got back last night) which really got a ton of stuff moved out of the house. Dominica finished up the laundry that she had started last night and we were off to a really good start on the weekend.
It wasn’t long at all before Francesca, Madeline and Emily arrived to pick up Dominica on their way to Houston. They have a long day of driving ahead of them. They only stayed for a few minutes as they wanted to get right onto the road as quickly as possible.
My goal for the weekend is to get two servers built and ready for production and to get an IP phone set up and ready for Josh whom I expect to see tomorrow afternoon on my way back to New Jersey. I tried to keep my work for the weekend from becoming overly ambitious. Piling up too much stuff is a sure way to fail at everything.
I managed to get the first server mostly built and ready before the Ralstons returned after lunch. I had ordered a pizza from Mama Mia’s but it didn’t arrive before they got back. Once they were back we loaded the futon into their truck and then the air hockey table and Dominica’s old office chair. The futon and the office chair are going to my cousin Sara who is going to need them for college. The air hockey table is going to Art and Danielle’s basement for now.
After the Ralstons took off with their second truck load I set to work prepping the second server for the day. The first server that I built was an HP DL145 G2 running CentOS 4.3 for AMD64. This second one is an HP DL360 running Windows Server 2003 Web Edition. When I started working on this server I got the pleasant surprise of discovering that they had shipped it with 15,000 RPM hard drives instead of the 10,000 RPM drives that I had been expecting. They hadn’t specified which it was coming with but I never imagined that they would ship 15K drives without making a big deal about it. Very cool.
I was extremely happy to have been able to have gotten both servers built today. That was quite the relief. At seven in the evening I drove down to Leicester and picked up Jeremy so that we could go see Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man’s Chest at the Silver Lake Drive-In. We ran up to dad’s house because there were a couple of bins that had gotten moved that needed to be picked up and this was my one good window of time to get them. Dad was busy working on his lawn mower.
It was eight o’clock when we got to Perry. The Ralstons were arriving at the same time as us so that we could all watch the movie together. Unfortunately the show had sold out and we were unable to get in. The Ralstons headed back home and Jeremy and I drove down to Silver Springs to visit with Mary and Jocelyn who were going to go to the movie at nine to meet us because Jocelyn had to work until after eight. Believe it or not after all of the years that Mary has lived in Silver Springs this was the very first time that I had ever seen her apartment! I haven’t seen an apartment of Mary’s since she lived in Lima which was several years ago. In between she lived in Wellsville, New York for a while.
It took too long for people to decide what they wanted to do that we lost any hope we had of seeing the movie someplace else. Everyone was hungry so we drove back up to Perry and got hot subs at the Silver Lake Country Market – everyone, that is, except for Jeremy who as usual just got onion rings. Two orders of them. Then for dessert we walked across the street to the video rental shop that sells ice cream. Weird combination, I know.
I dropped Jeremy off on the way back home. Mary and Jocelyn came over and hung out for a little while. The house in Geneseo is really bare at this point and it is weird trying to sit in the living room as there are no seats that face each other.