April 16, 2019: Getting Lee Set Up

Tuesday. I was up and working for a few hours before anyone else in the house was awake. I got up before eight and didn’t see anyone awake until about ten when Lee got up and came outside to hang out for a while. I managed to work for a while on NTG stuff, and then cleaned in the atrium and did the dishes.

Paul and Dominica had to go down to Las Colinas this morning to scout out hotels and stuff for MangoCon 2019 which is just a month away.

Lee and I got a little while to hang out outside, but once people were up he needed to run to Costco with Paul: time to buy a new Dell Inspiron laptop today. Back into the office for me.

The whole day was super busy. I had a lot of work in the office and was on the phone a lot of the day. And the new laptop arrived and I needed to check it out and get Fedora 30 installed on it. That took several hours.

I also put in a lot of time trying to get some Polycom phones configured so that we could use them. I would never, ever choose a Polycom intentionally, but we had a few that were pulled from a customer environment. It is hard to turn down free. But after a few hours trying to make them work, turning down free got pretty easy. Into the trash they went to make sure that we spent no time storing them and were never gullible enough to attempt to use them in the future. Instead I grabbed a cheap old Cisco SPA that we had had in the girls’ room for a while and had it configured and working in a few minutes. So Lee will be taking that back to Missouri with him.

I had just enough time to get everything done before evening. Fully configuring a laptop with a new OS, all updates, monitoring, and remote access tooling is not actually all that fast.

For dinner we had grilled salmon. Everyone loved it. Paul did the sweet soy salmon. Dominica grilled potatoes and sweet potatoes. And made green beans. And we all ate outside.

Before Lee left I had to spend half an hour with him getting things like his email, instant messaging, and file server set up and showed him around the Fedora desktop. They had to get moving pretty quickly because they want to make at least Oklahoma City or Tulsa tonight so that they can avoid the bad weather than is due to start around tonight.

Paul and Dominica had to get to league as quickly as they could after Lee and Alex left. I had half an hour before scheduled work was due to start tonight. So the girls just did some video games or videos on their own and I was on a support call for several hours, until around nine or nine thirty!

After my support call, I cooked up pizzas for the girls. Then Liesl and I started up Chaos on Deponia and played for quite a while. I set up my old 2012 HP laptop on the bar and worked from that for a while. Did updates, cleaned it up some, installed some of our new monitoring software, etc. I did the dishes, cleaned the kitchen, cleaned the bar, etc.

I set up our wireless DECT company phone in the kitchen so that we can use it when outside in the atrium.

Overall, my evening was super productive between doing support work, cleaning, cooking, office setup, etc.

I made myself a salmon sandwich for my dinner.