Today Liesl turns three weeks old. It is hard to believe that she has been with us for three weeks now. She and Dominica slept in until around ten thirty this morning. Oreo came down and opened the basement door on his own so that he could come down and sleep on his pillow next to my desk.
Thanks to Leon for pointing me in the direction of this cool video on YouTube of airtraffic globally during a twenty-four hour period. Very interesting. It is really neat to see the US and Europe really heat up as the sun passes over them.
Work was a little more busy this morning but by lunch time it had died down to almost nothing. That seems to be the trend. No one wants to do anything with the holiday right around the corner (just one week to go!) and so everyone knocks off for a long lunch and that is that.
OpenSUSE 11.1 released today. Can’t wait to get that installed and tested out.
New York governor David Patterson has proposed an 18% tax on “sugared beverages.” Personally I think that this is great but I do wish that it would be a broad “tax on food products containing corn syrup” rather than an attack directly on drinks alone and applying to traditional sugars as well as corn syrup. While highly sugared drinks of any sort are bad they are not as harmful as corn syrup which has become ubiquitous in the American diet and, at this point, most Americans are helpless in their struggle to avoid it.
For example, Heinz ketchup (and everyone else’s ketchup, BBQ sauce, etc.) in the US is made from corn syrup but the same products in Canada or the UK are made with natural sugar. Americans are practically forced to eat corn syrup and the taste has become so normal to us that we actually miss it if it is gone. Go to the grocery store and try to get food without corn syrup in it. Just try. Even more bread products are made with it here. Other countries have no idea that we have this skewed diet and that stores and food companies make different products (with the same names) for us than for everyone else. Only really expensive products, like locally baked breads, have any hope of not being made with corn syrup.
I am very excited that New York is the state taking this step, though, as it is New York who is one of the leaders in corn syrup production. It is rather like North Carolina deciding to be the first state to ban smoking – only it was California. Go New York!
I spent a lot of this evening working on an Active Directory migration from an older IBM Netfinity server to a VMWare Server instance running on a new HP Proliant DL145 G3. Any time that you are migrating you main active directory server it can be some amount of a pain.
Dominica made cheeseburger pie (vegetarian, of coure) for dinner tonight. That was really good! She is starting to cook a lot of casserole dishes because they are easy to prepare and a style of food that I really like. Something about the way that I taste food really lends itself to large quantities of a single type of food rather than small quantities of several different foods. People claim that food tastes best in the first few bites and after that it is wasted, but I am the opposite. I get little or no enjoyment from the first few bites and enjoy a single food the more that I eat it (to a point.) So putting the whole meal together in a single dish works really well for me.
Dominica wasn’t feeling very well this evening so she and Liesl headed off to bed earlier than we have been going to bed for weeks – well before midnight. Oreo came down to the basement and hung out with me while I worked on the Active Directory migration. I really want to get this all done in a single night so I decided that it would be best to just stay up and stick with it until it is done.
It is after one thirty in the morning and I am just now heading off to get ready for bed. Oreo has been patiently waiting beside me for the last two hours hoping that I would stop working and go to bed so that he can go and be with everyone all in one place. He does not like it when we are in separate parts of the house.
Shutting down and heading off to bed. Some serious snow due here tomorrow in the late morning. Lots of people from my office were discussing how everyone was going to work from home tomorrow because it was not worth the risk of going into the office and getting stuck – especially during the freeze when there is so little going on. So it is going to be a widespread work from home day for sure.