January 1, 2020: Happy New Year!

Wednesday. Today begins the twenties. One hundred years ago today, the Roaring Twenties began, kicking off nearly a century of iconic “decades” like the world had never seen. Before 1920, the decades preceding it had mostly run together. The 1890s, the 1900s, the 1910s had been largest the same, one after another. The 1910s were punctuated by the Great War, but the culture and world in general was little changed until the war was over and the dust had settled. But the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, up through the pop eras ending in the 80s were all so iconic, each decade standing out as completely unique from the decades preceding or following. The 1990s were so bland and ran so completely together with the 2000s that it seems to have ended.

I got up, made coffee, and got straight into working on Windows 7 to Windows 10 migrations. These next two weeks are like the last minutes leading up to midnight for Y2K for those old enough to remember that. Windows 7, the most iconic desktop operating system of the era, goes fully out of support two weeks from today. But much more importantly, the free upgrades that Microsoft has built into the licensing scheme expire for Windows 7 in two weeks. So absolutely everyone who has put off upgrading has to do it very, very quickly.

I was just going to help out doing migrations today, I have loads of other work to do, but our head migration engineer, who is the only person who was scheduled to work today, had his in laws get into a car accident, so I took over the primary migrations from him. So my slow day became quite busy. Good thing that I was around.

I ended up at my desk the entire day. A very, very long day. Again. This is the story of my week. There is just too much to do and literally not enough hours in the day.

So of interest, 2020 means that Sheep Guarding Llama has been being written for twenty years! Now that is something to think about. It’s mind boggling to think that I’ve been writing this for that long. That these past couple of years have been hard to keep up with it is not so surprising when you think about just how long I have been going without major issues!

Paul went out and did some grocery shopping early in the day. And this evening he went out to shoot pool. It is probably pretty lonely around the house with me working this much. It is essentially like I am not even here. This is just a ridiculous amount of work and I am easily on the phone for nearly eight hours a day!

Rachel texted me around half past midnight to see if I wanted to watch a movie or something. She said she’d be right over. I waited a few hours, but she had fallen asleep. Worked out as I had so much work to do anyway.

I ended up working until four o’clock in the morning. But I knocked out some big project items that really needed to be done. So I am happy. And I feel good. It is four and I am not feeling exhausted or anything.

Dominica is all packed up. She and the girls are driving back up to Dallas tomorrow morning after rush hour. So they are hoping to leave around nine in the morning. That would put them back here just before two. I an hopeful that she will run in and pick up some Carl’s Jr on her way back.

The Oculus Rift S down in Houston ended up being in continuous use from when I set it up until it was packed up to go into the van tonight. And the plan is to set it up in the living room once it gets here because everyone wants to use it so much. It is definitely the hit of Christmas. I have a feeling that it will stay in regular use for a long time. We put in a lot of time researching this to make sure that this is something that we felt that the kids (and the rest of us) would really want to use for a long time.