Today is the beginning of Opentyde – the traditional English season of winter weddings that runs from Epiphany until Ash Wednesday. Opentyde was the only part of the winter calendar when the Catholic and Anglican churches allowed weddings to occur and at one point because quite popular for royal weddings. Today is also known as Wassail Day although last night, Wassail Eve, is the far more famous use of the holiday. Much like Halloween has totally overshadowed All Hallows Day on November 1st.
Newark was so incredibly warm this morning when we got up. We slept with the windows open last night and really we needed to have the air conditioning on it was so warm. There was even a breeze coming in through the window and still the air blowing through was warm. We are projected to be going five degrees over the all time record for this date today. By the time that Dominica and I walked next door to Food for Life to get a late breakfast it was seventy degrees out! Seventy! In January! This must be the warmest day “at home” that I have ever had in January. This is totally nuts (or nvts in Latin – I love that joke.) We checked and it is only fifty-two degrees back home in Geneseo, sixty back home for Min in Frankfort and sixty-five for the Grices in Houston, Texas!
I spent the main part of the day completing work on the Asterisk server that has to be delivered to Scranton on Wednesday evening. That took most of the day but I am very happy to finally have the work done and have the machine ready to be shipped. On Wednesday I am sending one server to Scranton and two machines being decommissioned heading to dad’s place. That is three servers that don’t have to be stored in the apartment anymore. I also did some work today getting web sites moved from hosting in Geneseo to Scranton. My hope is that by the end of the week there will be one more machine in Geneseo being decommissioned before I leave. That would be awesome.
This evening Dominica had to return a dress to Dress Barn so we drove out to Kearny (pronounced Carnie but we have no idea why) and took that back. Oreo was glad to be able to hang out with us. Then we hit Walmart for some quick supplies. While we were there we noticed that they had the Sony PS3 just sitting on the shelf. No one was looking at it. No one was interested. No one seemed to care at all. Pretty funny considering all of the hype about it just a few weeks ago. No one believed me that they wouldn’t sell out. It is true that they did sell out but only by delivering half as many a promised. Given the number that they said was shipping and how few have sold – the number that I said would not sell out has not yet sold even over a week after Christmas even with all of those kids running around with all of their Christmas money burning holes in their pockets. Still no Nintendo Wii to be found, however.
We couldn’t figure out what we wanted to eat for dinner. It took forever for us to settle on IHOP by the hospital. We were all ready out in the car so it wasn’t a big deal to drive over there. Dinner was good and we came home and I wrapped up work on the Asterisk server and Min got down to studying for her exam. She is almost done with the book that she is currently reading which is the Exam Cram that she borrowed from Andy like two years or so ago. The same book that Jeremy had used when he studied for the exam over a year ago.
A week or so ago dad sent me an Internal Kodak commercial (as in a commercial meant just for Kodakers to watch.) It is very funny and cute and hopefully shows Rochester’s prodigal son figuring out how to run a company again after all these years but I don’t think that anyone is going to be holding their breath. Of the things that they mention in the advert being the “hot new Kodak technologies” most of them are things that I can do all ready with the equipment that I have. Sure Kodak will make it more convenient than it has been but that is hardly ground-shaking news. I hope that they figure this stuff out and I am really happy that they finally are semi-officially making fun of Advantix that I have been pissed about for more than a decade (Advantix is to Kodak as Windows ME is to Microsoft.)
We spent the evening relaxing and watching Are You Being Served?. I built a VMWare virtualization server that will be going to Scranton eventually. This is my first DL380 G2 that I am working on. Unfortunately it is SO loud that it makes doing anything else in the apartment pretty much impossible.