Despite all of the stress, I actually managed to sleep in a little this morning which was good. I needed some extra sleep to be ready to handle today. We have no idea what is going to happen.
One nice thing about the HP DL145 G3 that I purchased yesterday is that it is going to replace the IBM NetFinity that I have running at dad’s house. That old IBM is one of the many machines that I purchased from IBM employee sales back when Andy and I worked at IBM in Endicott, New York. That means that it is one of the machines that I have owned since before I met Dominica.
The IBM NetFinity is a dual Pentium III 667MHz / PC133 server with 1.5GB of memory and a 10,000 RPM SCSI hard drive. It is definitely nothing special anymore but it was an amazing machine when I picked it up for $150 or so in early 2001. At the time no one wanted it because it had the much eschewed PIII “Flip Chip” which I thought was great and short thereafter became the industry standard chip form. So the machine ended up being a most amazing purchase for me. It was easily a $1,000+ machine at the time that I purchased it. And it was new as an “open box” item. I added two high school SCSI drives to it and boosted its memory from 512MB to 1.5GB and had quite a little workhorse for many years.
That IBM has been with me through several locations and changes in purpose. It spent some time as my email server, did some virtualization and eventually ended up as a Windows 2003 Active Directory machine which is its current role and has been for many years. The machine is built in the form factor of a desktop workstation and not so much like a server. I am interested to see how this unit manages to perform as a desktop at Castile Christian Academy. A Pentium III 667 is generally around our low end cut-off for performance but with dual processors, tons of extra memory and a faster than usual hard drive this might be a very good machine. Under certain loads it might just outperform the Pentium III 1GHz machines of which we have a fair number these days.
The DL145 also frees up the older DL380 G2 that I have had as the intended replacement for the IBM NetFinity. The DL380 G2 takes up more space, uses more power and makes more noise than the DL145 while having less computational power and storage (but higher drive I/O.) So the plan is to send the DL380 G2 down to Castile Christian Academy to be their new file server as its drive performance is amazing. It is a fully populated unit with dual Pentium IIIs 1.4GHz processors, several gigabytes of memory and six screaming fast SCSI drives. It will be perfect for them. Then dad can scale back to just the DL145 G3 and the SunFire V100 that he already has at his house. Quite a bit smaller than the machines that he has right now.
My day can be summed up in a single word: stress. I waited all day for news about my job but got absolutely nothing. It is twenty past four as I write this and we don’t have any direction at all right now.
We officially ended the day with no good news. We don’t have disastrous news but we certainly don’t have good news. We have made no ground today whatsoever. There was a lot of talk but no progress. The only “positive” thing is that the pass-through vendor admitted to not giving any warning about the pay cut but they are acting like that is not their problem. They are apparently claiming that they have a contract with my consulting firm that allows them to claim anything that they want and bill retroactively for it and change rates retroactively at their whim.
Dominica got home and we talked for a while. Neither of us is really able to get very much done because we are so worried about our finances and whether or not we will be able to get the house still. I did speak to the bank today and they are aware of the situation and are holding tight to see what happens.
Around six thirty we got some news that there is a good chance that things are going to be okay. We don’t really know the details yet and the final word has not come through but it looks like the parties have come to a solution. We won’t actually know anything tonight but hopefully in the morning.
I ended up working late into the evening. Dominica sat at her desk knitting and watching Voltron from Netflix. I ran down to the deli in the building to grab dinner just before they closed at nine o’clock. I came up and we managed to watch one episode of Frasier together, while we ate dinner, before the phone started ringing. It was Mary and we talked for half an hour or so until ten.
I went back to “work” around ten. I have been behind at the office and I wanted to make sure that I was caught up before the morning. Or at least kind-of caught up so I spent some time doing some paperwork. I answered some emails and got some paperwork together for dad.
Oreo came out to the living room and lay on the recliner on a pillow and a pile of blankets. He always wants to be with me.
We have been able to have the windows open all day yesterday and all day today. The fresh air is great. I do get fresh air walking to work but it isn’t the same. I am really appreciating having the apartment aired out a bit. It actually gets far stuffier and mildewy here in summer than in winter because even during a pretty cold winter spell we still tend to open the windows rather a bit – at very least in our bedroom.
Yay, more people following me on Twitter. I am becoming a Twitter celebrity. Okay, not quite. But I do have several people that I have never met following me. I am finding it to be an interesting addition to my regular blogging. I really like the fact that I can put on updates throughout the day to let people know the current status of things without them needing to wait until the next day when the SGL dailies post.