I tried to sleep in late this morning so that I would have gobs of spare energy for my really long night tonight, but I got called out early and had to get out of bed to go support testing so that the developers could be ready for tonight. It still was not a short night of sleep so it was fine. Just not as much sleep as I had been hoping to have gotten. Liesl got up early and was smacking my head for about half an hour before the phone rang so it wasn’t like I was not already awake.
In the middle of the night last night our shower curtain came crashing down in the bathroom attached to the master bedroom. It started Liesl, Oreo and I awake but somehow Dominica slept through the whole thing. That was rather surprising.
I got great news from some contacts at Hewlett-Packard today. They are able to get me some demo software so that I can run HP-UX on my HP Integrity rx2600 server! This is really awesome. HP-UX is one of those operating systems that is nearly impossible to get direct experience on because it is so expensive both for the hardware and for the software. I am very excited to be able to work on HP-UX on Integrity hardware. I have an older version of HP-UX on a PA-RISC workstation but working on that is not the same as building my own server.
The rain came during the night and it is much colder today and very, very wet. By the time that I got out of bed the heater had kicked on even though we had all of the upstairs windows open. Oops. So I shut some windows and turned the heater way down.
Today Liesl made her first investment into the stock market. She has some money that she received from people when she was born and only so much of it was needed to buy her items that she was not given and what was left over we decided we would invest for her. She obviously did not have enough to open her own brokerage account so she is just putting her money in with ours at the moment. It is a start. Hopefully someday this will turn in to something. The market is perfect now for her to be investing so best to get it in as quickly as possible.
It rained pretty much all day getting colder all day. I heard that back home people were seeing snow! I am very thankful to be living in the Hudson Valley. We really don’t get the snow here at all.
Liesl watched her very first cartoon today. Disney’s Make Mine Music from 1946. Quite the classic. We figure that the early Disney movies that are all music are good ways to give her something to watch while getting her music for those times when she needs to be entertained because both Dominica and I have things that we have to be doing.
Today was a pretty tough day for all of the stuff that we needed to do because I was busy working and Dominica was doing her best to get to the packing so that we could leave as soon as I was done with work.
Oreo is loving the weather today. I put his big pillow by the downstairs door and had the door open even though it was raining and cold. He climbed right in and I covered him up in a big fleece blanket and he is as happy as can be. All snugly in the thunderstorm. He is only ten feet away from me.
I am concerned that the power is going to go off today. That will be rather a significant problem. What a pain that would be.
I did my best to rip tons of DVDs today so that they are ready for Handbrake to convert while we are out of town. My plan is to let two of the computers run the entire time that we are gone doing nothing but video conversions. We should make real progress since the computers won’t be busy doing a bunch of other tasks. I want to get as many of these done as possible before we go to dad’s so that we can drop them off and pick up a new batch to work on.
I finally got a chance to take Oreo out for a walk a little before five. We didn’t manage to get in a long walk but at least a little one. He really appreciates our daily walks. The goose that lives by the house has gotten to know him and they mess with each other every time that we go out. The goose hisses at us constantly and definitely acts like it might take a run at us from time to time.
Tonight is one of the busiest nights ever. I’ve been on conference calls for most of the evening. I have a ton of tickets opened to the data center that need to be worked on tonight. Tonight is a very busy night from a deployment perspective in addition to everything else that we have to do.
The plan is to wrap up the deployments and then prepare the hardware work for the datacenter so that they can work on that while I am on the road. Once I get all of that stuff done then Dominica and I can load the car. Hopefully we will have eaten dinner before then. The plan was to have dinner while I was still at my desk doing deployments.
It is almost impossible that we will be able to leave before seven. I won’t be surprised if we are not able to leave before eight. There is just so much to do before leaving home.
The drive will take three to four hours depending on how the weather holds. We are driving up to Frankfort tonight. So we are trying as hard as we can to be able to get there by eleven tonight.
Once we arrive in Frankfort I have to log back in and get back to work doing the checkouts of the hardware maintenance being done tonight. Because there is so much being done it could easily cause us to get pushed well past midnight. I am going to be so tired by the time that we are done.
So the expectation is that we will get to go to bed between one and two in the morning. Then my alarm is going to go off at a quarter till seven in the morning because I have to log back in to the office and get to work support Bahrain. Tomorrow is a really big release day for them so it is going to be a very long morning.
Once the morning work wraps up I have my regular Saturday work to do. So my plan is that I will be working from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon at a minimum. That might as well be a full day. I am going to be so tired.
We are coming back to Peekskill after Palm Sunday dinner. If all goes well we will be leaving Frankfort around five in the afternoon on Sunday.
I am working with a new DVD tool called DVDFab that Andy turned me on to. So far it is working really, really well. It is working for a lot of media that DVD Decrypter was not able to handle. I have a lot of testing left to do but so far I am pretty encouraged. I will have a better idea of how it is working after we let these two workstations run for sixty-two hours on their own.
I am posting really early tonight as I am going to be way too busy once work is done to be able to post without interrupting other things. So I am posting at around six thirty. My deployments appear to be completed and I am about to do the final prep work so that we can hit the road.