Up early and working by seven thirty or so. I was up long before Dominica and Liesl were so I got some time to sit in the basement and do research. I did some learning about Oracle Beehive today which I have never seen before. I looked interesting but my verdict at the end was that I would likely lean toward SharePoint over Beehive.
It started raining last night just before midnight. That was rather unexpected. It had not felt like rain all day. It felt mostly like summer yet yesterday morning but by last night and clearly today it feels as though autumn has arrived. I have a feeling that summer is over. I am looking forward to the cooler weather. Overall it was a very good year with tons of rain. But now it is just starting to get a little crisp outside which is how I like it. It should be fleece weather in no time.
I set up and tested out Hamachi VPN from LogMeIn today. I have used it before but it was years ago. I have not seen it in many generations and LogMeIn has done a lot of interesting stuff with it. Hamachi is very cool and I think that I am going to be using it a lot more in the near future. I am just figuring out all of the cool stuff that I can do with it now. Having three different architectural options makes it a lot more complex to use.
Today I also discovered PeepCode. PeepCode is a programming screencast company that makes screencasts that teach programming and other IT concepts. I looked through their catalogue and found lots of stuff in which I am interested. They aren’t too expensive so I bought one of their Ruby on Rails videos to give them a try. Unfortunately I am unable to get it to play on the PS3 so we can’t watch them upstairs. I have to sit at a computer to watch the screencast.
Today, Liesl said her very first sentence! Early this afternoon I came up the stairs from the basement and Liesl was on the loveseat with Dominica. When I popped out of the basement Liesl looked at me and said “Hi, dada!” It was very exciting! She has said both words before but has never strung words together like this. She is growing up so fast.
We also discovered that Liesl has cut her third tooth today. This is her first tooth on the top. Two exciting developments in one day. Liesl is very happy to have the tooth as well. She slept very badly last night.
Liesl turns ten months old today. Hard to believe that we have had our little girl for so long and yet, in many ways, it seems as if we have always had her here. It is impossible to imagine life without her.
I worked until seven this evening. I had tried to get away from the office earlier but I got paged out several times in succession. So no getting away early for me.
We have our final price for our Walt Disney World trip coming up in late November. We are staying, on property, and going to the park for less than $200 per day which is amazing as that includes the hotel, park admission and all of the food that we will eat while we are there. Quite a good deal. This is actually a very cost effective trip that we are taking.
I got the old G4 Mac Mini hooked up tonight in the living room in an attempt to get it working with the television so that Dominica and I can watch computer based training (CBT) programs there instead of having to watch them alone on a laptop – more a television replacement than anything. We have a DVI to HDMI cable to try out but we ran into some snags and were unable to hook it up. I got it working but it would only last for a minute or two before it would drop the signal to the television and be useless. I think that it is a hardware problem with the Mac Mini.
I have not used the Mini in years. Probably not since 2005 and certainly not since 2006 when it went into a plastic bin and into dad’s barn for storage. We only got it down to Peekskill recently and today was the first time plugging it in again. It is running Mac OSX 10.3 (Panther) which is completely ancient at this point. Snow Leopard, which is OSX 10.6, is now out. Unfortunately this hardware, being a PowerPC, cannot run anything newer than Tiger OSX 10.4 which I do not have so the machine is left being rather out of date which is unfortunate as I never really got that much use out of it. My plan is to set it up down on my desk to use as a terminal workstation to use to connect to UNIX machines when I work on them.