October 16, 2009: Only Two Weekends Left?

Today is Friday.  We have a really busy weekend coming up as we need to get ready for our trip to Texas next week.

This morning I hit my ten thousandth post in the SpiceWorks community!  Ten thousand.  I became the highest poster ever when I hit around thirty three hundred and that was only several months ago.  I am way ahead of anyone else and just keep making the gap larger and larger.  I was hoping to have hit the ten thousand mark before going to Texas next week as I am speaking at SpiceWorld (as well as SpiceCorps Houston) and thought that it would be nice to not be at “almost” ten thousand before I went.

This morning dad’s place is covered in snow.  He sent up a picture and everything is white on the farm.  Not a deep snow but enough to almost cover everything.  I can’t believe that winter is already rearing its ugly head around here.  This is definitely making me feel even better about moving to Texas really soon.  I will not miss New York winters.  I’ve had enough snow to last me a lifetime or two.  I talked to Brian and he said that there is eight to ten inches where he is in the Poconos today.  Eight to ten inches, in mid-October!

I did some more network testing today and discovered that my network problems are back now that everything is installed again on the rebuilt HP workstation.  This is not a good sign at all.  I did detailed testing all day and finally figured out that the large number of transmit errors only occur under one specific condition – when Mozy Home is running a backup.  The test is not completely definitive that Mozy is actually the cause and not just a trigger but it seems awfully fishy that I cannot reproduce the error with any other software.  The issue did not show up yesterday because Mozy was throwing errors and was unable to connect to its remote server.  Today, when it connected, suddenly we lost our network connection and everything stopped working.

So I have uninstalled Mozy and we are seeing how things work now.  Just what I need – now I have to come up with some alternate backup mechanism after I found one that was working really well for me – more or less.  It was never able to fully complete a backup and apparently it was crippling my network.  So it really was not “working” but in theory it was a great solution.  Oh well, more things to go figure out and probably more money needing to be spent.  Ugh.

It is Friday and ergo it is a really busy day at work.  Just after four this evening Dominica and I were feeling hungry so we ordered in Chinese for dinner.  We always eat out on Fridays as it is just a lot easier.

Tonight ended up being completely crazy.  I ended up working, more or less just like last weekend, all night going past midnight and into Saturday morning.  I started at eight in the morning and worked until two in the morning!  Way too long of a day to be happening so regularly.  We really need the money right now though.  Now more than ever with this relocation coming.  Boy was I exhausted by the end of the night.  I spent many hours on a conference call going until two in the morning!  Not even productive work.  The work that I had intended to do tonight now has to be done tomorrow after I get up.  Not only that but my conference call is scheduled to pick up again tomorrow at nine thirty in the morning!

This afternoon I came to the realization that, if we look at the upcoming schedule, that we may be down to as little as two free weekends between now and when we move out of New York.  It might be a lot more since we might move as early as December 1st or as late as late February.  But December is likely to be the month that we move and in the remaining time in October and November all but two weekends are already spoken for (one in Texas, one in Ithaca, two in Orlando!)  So our time here is getting really, really short.  It does not feel like it at all since we don’t really know when and where we are moving yet but the date is rapidly approaching.  It will be a while until that really sinks in but there is a brewing feeling of panic.

We really need to get this house onto the market!