After a long, tiring weekend I am back to the grind. Today is the last day of me working and Dominica getting to “stay home” although even today she has to run around taking care of some paperwork. She is also dealing with finding someone to stay with Oreo or finding him a place to go during the day so that Dominica can go to work tomorrow. Originally I had planned to stay home with him tomorrow so that we would have an extra day to worry about him being alone but I am going out to Ohio on Thursday evening for Uncle Bill’s funeral on Friday morning so I am using my “work from home” day to allow myself to work from the hotel in Canton, Ohio.
Andy starts his new job today in Rochester. This is quite the busy week for everyone. I think Miranda probably drove back to North Bay, Ontario today but I am not positive. She might have left yesterday.
My reading spree continues this week. Today I managed to finish reading “Pragmatic Version Control – Using Subversion, 2nd Edition” that I started late last week. PVC is the first of the three books of The Pragmatic Programmers’ “Pragmatic Starter Kit” with the next installment being their book on unit testing. I am hoping to be able to go out and maybe pick up the next book in the series this evening.
I need to go out tonight and do some shopping for network cabling for Scranton. We don’t have very much going in to Scranton right away but I really want to make sure that we are doing everything “the right way” now that we are moving to such a large datacenter. I am hoping that we will be able to get enough coloured cabling to be able to colour code everything that we do to make it really simple to work on down the road. We are starting very small with just a single server going into Scranton this week and the bulk of our long term networking equipment. We have two routers and a new switch all going in. I will be very happy if we can get SGL relocated to Scranton by the end of the month and I think that our regular readers will be happy also as the site should load in roughly half of the time that it currently takes.
Another project that I have this week is my first attempt at building an AMD Geode based computer for CCA. This really shouldn’t be much of an undertaking because the Geode is based on the AMD Athlon which I have worked with many times before but this is the first time that I will be building a computer using a solid state hard drive instead of a mechanical hard drive and I will need to do some stuff to make it work well. So there will be a little bit of a learning curve.
I was seriously tired this afternoon in the office. I got eyestrain and a headache from trying to stare at the computer screen for so long. I was so completely ready to go home by the time that the end of the day rolled around. Dominica had gotten home from going down to Princeton to take care of her paperwork for her job tomorrow at half past four. That shot a big chunk of her afternoon but at least she is all set and able to start working tomorrow. She has to go quite early tomorrow as she has her orientation starting at half past seven in the morning which is an hour earlier than she will normally have to go into the office. She isn’t used to getting up early in the morning so this is really going to be a shock to her system. This will take us back to when we lived in Geneseo and she was always the one getting up early and I was always the one sleeping in with Oreo.
It was a dark and rainy day all day today. I was so tired and useless that I decided that I needed to get out of the office on the early side. There is so much going on this week that I need some time just to get everything done.
Dominica didn’t have any luck finding a dog sitter for Oreo this week. She called a ton of places today and no one even called her back. This is the problem with pointless holidays – the weekend becomes so long and everyone takes a vacation in conjunction with it that you end up in a situation where all kinds of businesses fail to function properly. In this case the pharmaceutical company that Dominica is starting with tomorrow “hired” her on Thursday but because of people in the middle who took vacations on Thursday and Friday they weren’t able to get her paperwork processed promptly so she didn’t have a confirmation on the job until the end of day on Friday. Now it is Tuesday, the first work day since she found out that she had a job and the only day between getting confirmation and starting, and in this one day that is all that she has she is not able to find anyone who is able to even return a phone call! It feels like six days have passed since she got the new job but only a handful of “work hours” have passed and I keep feeling as if many, many businesses just don’t realize that Friday at four in the afternoon, when the last stragglers sneak out of the office for the long weekend, on a holiday weekend is just one hour before nine in the morning on Tuesday! There is no “work time” between those hours. But people act as if you have a whole week to take care of things during that time and act like you won’t need paperwork, phone numbers, contact information, directions, travel time, etc. I can’t believe how many times I was expected to relocate over a weekend when there wasn’t any “final confirmation” made on Friday and I was supposed to be at some unknown location reporting to some unknown person many hours away from my home at eight in the morning when the only person in the whole universe who knew anything about where I was supposed to be was never in the office until between nine and ten and would only be coming in to work that day if we were lucky! Argh.
It is going to be such a busy night and I don’t want to have to worry about getting back to SGL this evening that I am going to go ahead and post as I leave the office. It is a long post anyway. That way I can save something for tomorrow. It is a quarter to six and I am leaving the office now. I am way too tired to be useful.