March 17, 2009: Hey, it’s a Tuesday

I was really exhausted after last night and this morning I slept in until way too late.  Antoni woke me up when he called and thought that it was pretty hilarious that I was still in bed.  I was rather tired all day.

Today I bought two Sun SunFire V240 2u UltraSparc IIIi servers from eBay.  Got an amazing deal on them.  The V240 is a two rack unit, dual processor RISC server with up to 16GB of RAM and four, hot-swappale Ultra160 SCSI drives.  Very nice units.  I will be replacing the SunFire V100 servers with these which is a pretty significant upgrade.  The V100 is a very nice unit but the V240 is big, faster and far more expandable.  The V100 is very limited in many ways although awesomely small, light and power efficient.

Today was another long and busy day.  At least the economy seems to be doing well this past week.  After our latest major slide things were looking like they might get rough for a while but the banks are stabalizing at the moment and overall things aren’t too bad although mostly that is just a reflection of our lowered economic expectations these days.

This afternoon Dominica finally got some time to work on her class.  She was able to finally complete the third course in her certificate program.  Only one more to go now.  She also went ahead and did the first lesson in the next course.  There are fifteen in total.  She is definitely on the home stretch now which is awesome.  She is learning a lot and becoming a lot more confident.

Tony got his ASP.NET certification today from Brainbench and ranked #29 in the State of New York!

My main project of the evening was working on setting up a Squid Proxy that is running on my OpenSUSE Linux desktop for testing some stuff.  I don’t work with Squid all that often so every time that I do there is a learning curve.  That and I never work on the same types of project twice so it is always an adventure.

This evening we skipped watching television (read: Hulu or Netflix) and just listened to Mozart and some jazz from Amazon MP3 downloads.  It is so nice have access to good music again.  I really appreciate having it as a break from having shows on.  We are also having to worry more about having the television on because Liesl is more aware of it and will watching it if we are not careful.  So we have to watch it when she is asleep or do things to keep her engaged while it is on.

Liesl is really growing.  She is getting “so big” and has become so interactive with us.  She gets totally excited whenever I come upstairs from work.  She reaches out her arms to me and kicks until I pick her up and carry her around for a while.  Her favourite thing is for me to hold her on my right hip and to walk around with her until she falls asleep.

I ordered some books from Amazon today – the MSPress Pocket Consultant’s Guide to Group Policy Objects and the second Groovy book from the Pragmatic Programmers.

Dominica and I have noticed that our living room furniture is wearing out at an incredible pace.  The love seat that we bought in 2007 or 2008 for our apartment in Newark is really wearing quickly.  We knew that it was not going to last for a long time but we were hoping that we would get a bit more use that this out of it.  The right side of the love seat, which we use the most, is already worn down so much that you can feel the springs when you sit.  The other seats are not going to last for very long.  We have also noticed the corners are starting to wear out where we bump into them often.  The ottoman is really showing some wear on its corners.  It is sad to have your furniture wear out when you still think of it as being new.

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