Because Oreo needs to be puppysat during the day or else he gets upset I am taking today as a “work from home” day so that I can spend the day with him. Dominica had called last night while I was driving down to let me know that she and her sister and the girls had arrived safely in Houston. She is flying back late tonight but today is just a Scott and Oreo day.
Work from Home or WFH days are great because I get to sleep in. My commute takes me a full hour and that is a lot of extra sleep right there. Oreo was very snuggly as he was upset that Dominica was gone.
It was a super slow day at the office. I spent some of my time getting Zenoss installed for the first time. I am excited to be trying it out because it has a lot of potential to make my life a whole lot simpler. We have never used a network monitoring package like this before and it has been sorely needed. With the pending move to Scranton just around the corner having a package like this will do wonders, I hope, in keeping things running smoothly and making it easier for us to diagnose problems. Looks like a neat product.
While I worked today I watched several episodes of the second season of Magnum P.I. Oreo loves it when I just work in the living room and watch some “television” with him. He spent most of the day just lounging on his pillow in the middle of the living room.
For lunch and dinner I ordered a pizza from Papa John’s and just ate by myself while I worked and watched my show. It is a very lonely day.
Once the official work day was over I moved the DL360 server that I had brought down from New York with me over and got to work getting it set up. The first thing that I have to do with any of these machines is get a remote insight board added to them so that I don’t have to have a keyboard, mouse and monitor attached all of the time. Those remote management cards are one of the greatest inventions ever. What a huge difference they make even in the smallest of datacentres.
I had some problems with my remote management card and it is going to have to be replaced before this server gets deployed but I eventually managed to get SUSE 10.1 installed onto this machine. That made me feel good and productive. I wish that I could get this much done every day. The server isn’t completely ready but my goal is to only have it completely ready by the time I return to Geneseo in two weeks for my cousin Sara’s graduation party.
The big news for today is that dad has an excavator over on the farm tearing out the parking lot and the basketball court that have been in front of the house since long before I was born. When I was a kid we lived in an old farm house on the same property that dad lives on now but now in a new house. There used to be a blacktop driveway and parking lot (think four or five cars parked up to a curb perpendicular to the driveway) and on the other side of the curb was a large asphalt basketball court with a basketball hoop. When the farmhouse was there it mostly made sense. The driveway came along the side of the house and the parking lot was a great place to park several cars. Really nice when you have company. I am sure eight cars would have gone in that driveway without any effort at all. But now with the farmhouse gone the whole thing is just a weird, and very large, patch of asphalt in the middle of the front lawn. So now it is gone. Soon it will all turn back into the lawn that it probably was in 1930.
Additionally, by the swimming pool, there used to be a cabana when I was a kid which, like the driveway, made a lot of sense with the old farm house there. Back in the late 1980’s my parents gave away the cabana and it was hauled away and is currently a small building located on Route 19 just south of Pavilion on the way to Pearl Creek. What is left of the cabana is a large cement slab that had served as its base. The slab is unsightly and pointless now that the cabana is gone. So that is being ripped out as well. When I was a kid the cabana served as a huge closet and lawn tractor shed – with a shower. All of this cement, blacktop and asphalt is being dumped into the swimming pool and covered over never to be seen again. The last remnants of the old farm house and party complex that it was are vanishing. Not everything was completed today but by tomorrow it will all be gone and another half of an acre of lawn will be added to the sea of green that surrounds dad’s house. Now the barn is only reminder of the farm that existed there when we bought the property in 1976. Even the fencing is all gone now. The pastures are gone.
Dominica called and let me know that she had arrived safely in Atlanta but that her flight from Atlanta had been delayed so she was going to be coming in late tonight. Oreo and I stayed up working on the server until 12:45 in the morning – way too late for a work night as it is – and then we got in the car and drove up Rt1 to Newark Liberty International Airport to pick up Min. It turned out that she was delayed more than she had thought and Oreo and I ended up circling the airport for half of an hour.
On the way back we stopped quickly at a Dunkin Donuts so that we could get some “dinner”. I was sort of hungry but Min was starving having not had any dinner at all.
It was 3:00 right on the nose when we returned to the apartment. Pretty much we went straight to bed. Boy were we all tired.