Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is an exciting day because my Motorola Q finally arrived. It is really cool. It is going to take a while before I can really determine that it is going to meet my needs but for the moment is it awesome.

I took some time this afternoon and got the Q all set up and working. So far it is great. It has no problem getting email or surfing the web. That is really nice. Those are just the basics, though. I need it to do more and that is where the real questions come in. I need to be able to use SSH on it, hopefully through PocketPutty but some other software will suffice. And I need Jabber Instant Messaging which I should be able to get from iMov liked I used previously on my HP iPaq.

I didn’t get to leave work until almost seven tonight. Dominica cooked dinner at home and had it ready minutes after I walked in the door. That was a nice change. Eating out in New Jersey has become such a chore that I am starting to dread it even though I like the places that we go. It is just so much effort and every night turns into a big thing with us just waiting and waiting for our food and then waiting twice that long for the check or another glass of water or something simple. It just takes the enjoyment out of going out.

While she was out today, Dominica picked up the first season of the Eliza Dushku series Tru Calling that we have looked at now and then. We are both big Eliza Dushku fans (although even Eliza can’t get me to watch Buffy) and have been interested in the show for some time. We just watched the first episode tonight but it wasn’t bad. About what we were expecting, I think. Enjoyable but doesn’t knock your socks off. We will see how it is as we continue through the first season.

I continued working on the server that I had brought down with me on Sunday. Last nigth I got just about all of the software installs done that I had needed to have done and tonight I worked on getting its graphical environments all set up and working properly. I got it built with KDE and XFCE which are my two favourite desktop environments. I also got the NX server built and installed and working. NX is awesome for anyone interested in a high powered remote access system. NX competes with technologies from Citrix, VNC, Microsoft, etc.

I wanted to go to bed early tonight because I have been fighting to get enough sleep recently but Dominica was working on her database homework and needed my help so I ended up staying up until almost midnight. I was really tired by the time that I finally got a chance to go to bed.

I am back to work in the office today and, of course, I ended up sleeping in way too long after having been up way too late last night. So I got a late start on the day.

It was a really slow day at the office today. Now that I am able to do almost any task necessary I get things cleaned up and then there is a void of stuff to do.

Dad sent me an email correcting my description of the work being done out on the farm.

We didn’t put any cement or asphalt into the pool. We pealed the asphalt back, dug a humungous hole, 40′ by 80′ by 10′ and all the cement and asphalt went into that hole. The dirt from the hole, which turned out to be beautiful, is being placed into the pool.

On the way home tonight I accidentally missed my turn onto Mount Bethel and ended up discovering a much faster way from work to Bound Brook! It cuts off several minutes of driving, some of the most congested intersections and reducing the total number of miles that I have to put onto the car. Good deal.

I got home tonight and Dominica and I decided to do something a little different for dinner rather than just going to either the Omega or Tanjore. We decided to drive out to East Brunswick and go to Red Lobster. We don’t go there because we like the fish but because we like the cheesy biscuits that they make. Boy those are good. Going out to eat really kills our entire evening though. I don’t normally get home until after seven and then it is at least thirty more minutes or maybe even an hour before we actually get somewhere to eat. And no restaurant in New Jersey moves with any speed at all. Sometimes it is just a little slow and sometimes it is unbearable. Tonight was actually pretty good but still much slower than a restaurant in Rochester or Buffalo would ever move. Apparently in New York we all have lives to get back to but in New Jersey this is all that there is.

We came right back home after dinner and it was after ten! Talk about getting late fast. We were both pretty tired and decided to go right to sleep. That was a nice theory but it didn’t end up working very well. Oreo wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t stay in bed. Dominica was pretty much out like a light so I went into the living room to be with the dog and make sure that he was okay. I ended up having to spend about two hours with him and then he seemed to be feeling better and was willing to come in and go to bed. Maybe he just had a tummy ache.

While I was up with the dog I took the opportunity to at least work on the server that I had been working on yesterday. I had been hoping to work on this server this evening but had opted for sleep instead. At least now I got it done.

Because Oreo needs to be puppysat during the day or else he gets upset I am taking today as a “work from home” day so that I can spend the day with him. Dominica had called last night while I was driving down to let me know that she and her sister and the girls had arrived safely in Houston. She is flying back late tonight but today is just a Scott and Oreo day.

Work from Home or WFH days are great because I get to sleep in. My commute takes me a full hour and that is a lot of extra sleep right there. Oreo was very snuggly as he was upset that Dominica was gone.

It was a super slow day at the office. I spent some of my time getting Zenoss installed for the first time. I am excited to be trying it out because it has a lot of potential to make my life a whole lot simpler. We have never used a network monitoring package like this before and it has been sorely needed. With the pending move to Scranton just around the corner having a package like this will do wonders, I hope, in keeping things running smoothly and making it easier for us to diagnose problems. Looks like a neat product.

While I worked today I watched several episodes of the second season of Magnum P.I. Oreo loves it when I just work in the living room and watch some “television” with him. He spent most of the day just lounging on his pillow in the middle of the living room.

For lunch and dinner I ordered a pizza from Papa John’s and just ate by myself while I worked and watched my show. It is a very lonely day.

Once the official work day was over I moved the DL360 server that I had brought down from New York with me over and got to work getting it set up. The first thing that I have to do with any of these machines is get a remote insight board added to them so that I don’t have to have a keyboard, mouse and monitor attached all of the time. Those remote management cards are one of the greatest inventions ever. What a huge difference they make even in the smallest of datacentres.

I had some problems with my remote management card and it is going to have to be replaced before this server gets deployed but I eventually managed to get SUSE 10.1 installed onto this machine. That made me feel good and productive. I wish that I could get this much done every day. The server isn’t completely ready but my goal is to only have it completely ready by the time I return to Geneseo in two weeks for my cousin Sara’s graduation party.

The big news for today is that dad has an excavator over on the farm tearing out the parking lot and the basketball court that have been in front of the house since long before I was born. When I was a kid we lived in an old farm house on the same property that dad lives on now but now in a new house. There used to be a blacktop driveway and parking lot (think four or five cars parked up to a curb perpendicular to the driveway) and on the other side of the curb was a large asphalt basketball court with a basketball hoop. When the farmhouse was there it mostly made sense. The driveway came along the side of the house and the parking lot was a great place to park several cars. Really nice when you have company. I am sure eight cars would have gone in that driveway without any effort at all. But now with the farmhouse gone the whole thing is just a weird, and very large, patch of asphalt in the middle of the front lawn. So now it is gone. Soon it will all turn back into the lawn that it probably was in 1930.

Additionally, by the swimming pool, there used to be a cabana when I was a kid which, like the driveway, made a lot of sense with the old farm house there. Back in the late 1980’s my parents gave away the cabana and it was hauled away and is currently a small building located on Route 19 just south of Pavilion on the way to Pearl Creek. What is left of the cabana is a large cement slab that had served as its base. The slab is unsightly and pointless now that the cabana is gone. So that is being ripped out as well. When I was a kid the cabana served as a huge closet and lawn tractor shed – with a shower. All of this cement, blacktop and asphalt is being dumped into the swimming pool and covered over never to be seen again. The last remnants of the old farm house and party complex that it was are vanishing. Not everything was completed today but by tomorrow it will all be gone and another half of an acre of lawn will be added to the sea of green that surrounds dad’s house. Now the barn is only reminder of the farm that existed there when we bought the property in 1976. Even the fencing is all gone now. The pastures are gone.

Dominica called and let me know that she had arrived safely in Atlanta but that her flight from Atlanta had been delayed so she was going to be coming in late tonight. Oreo and I stayed up working on the server until 12:45 in the morning – way too late for a work night as it is – and then we got in the car and drove up Rt1 to Newark Liberty International Airport to pick up Min. It turned out that she was delayed more than she had thought and Oreo and I ended up circling the airport for half of an hour.

On the way back we stopped quickly at a Dunkin Donuts so that we could get some “dinner”. I was sort of hungry but Min was starving having not had any dinner at all.

It was 3:00 right on the nose when we returned to the apartment. Pretty much we went straight to bed. Boy were we all tired.

I got my critical tasks done for the weekend yesterday but there was plenty of work to keep me busy today. I got an IP phone all set up and ready to go for Josh. I am delivering that to him this afternoon. Fortunately setting up the phones takes no time at all and is really easy.

Dad came over at 11:30 and we went over to the Omega for some lunch. I won’t get a chance to see him again for two weeks. I get very little chance to see anyone these days.

I spent the afternoon working frantically around the house. I got most of one large car load packed up and moved out to the garage for dad to pick up during the week and move to the farm. Every load helps – a lot. It is surprisingly easy to pack up your house when you do it in small increments like this. It is the driving back and forth between Geneseo and North Brunswick constantly that makes it all so hard and not being able to do any of the work during the week.

I had been planning on leaving Geneseo around 3:30 but I was being so productive that I decided to wait at least another hour. I had the car all packed and ready to go at 2:30 but when I finally tried to leave the neighbours kept grabbing me and I didn’t manage to get out of Geneseo until ten after five!

I drove east out to Canandaigua and met the Relyea’s at McGreggor’s on Canandaigua Lake. It was a bright and warm Sunday afternoon and the slight breeze off of the lake was perfect. We had dinner and hung out for a little bit. It was nice to get to visit. I also dropped off Josh’s new IP phone so that he could take it home and get it hooked up.

It was after seven when I finally left Canandaigua to drive to New Jersey. At least Canandaigua was somewhat on the way so it wasn’t too bad going over there. I took the route using the New York Thruway out to Syracuse and then south on US81 to pick up my normal route. There was sun as I drove east but once I turned onto US81 everything grew dark and ominous and the lightning could be seen in the distance over Cortland County and to the south.

The rain started around Cortland or a little to the north and continues all through the evening as I drove. The electrical storm was intense and there was a lot of warnings on the radio about it. The rain wasn’t so hard as to impare driving until I reached Pennsylvania then it really started. From Scranton until I got to Wind Gap or so the rain was unbelievable. Some of the hardest rain that I have ever been in. Once I was in New Jersey it let up and the rest of the drive wasn’t too bad. But by that point I was almost home. Once again, you will notice, it rained on a day when I was driving to or from New Jersey.

It was late – after midnight – when Oreo and I finally got home to North Brunswick. Boy were we tired. We mostly unpacked the car and then went right to bed. I am very glad that tomorrow is a “work from home” day. But not as happy as Oreo is about it.

Today is my day to build servers in Geneseo to get ready for the move to Scranton that is coming up very soon. It is going to take a lot of prep time to be ready and today is one of those days.

Dominica and I slept in a little this morning having gotten in rather late last night and not being able to fall asleep as soon as we had gotten home. The drive up from New Jersey was mostly uneventful. We stopped and ate a quick dinner at the Burger King on Livingston Avenue in New Brunswick before we left town. That seemed to work out well because it caused us to hit traffic a little later and eliminated the need to stop for dinner on the road. We didn’t get started until later than we had hoped because I had to go from Warren down to North Brunswick to get Dominica after work and then had to drive back again so we lose a good hour and a half if not more when we have to do it that way. But traffic was great and we made good time the whole way home. We arrived just a little after midnight but didn’t go to bed until after one and maybe closer to two in the morning.

Dad came over at nine this morning and the three of us went over to the Omega Grill for some breakfast. It is funny that Dominica and I are still such good customers of a restaurant in a town where we haven’t lived in months. It is nice getting to go back and just relax and visit.

When we got back to the house the Ralstons had all ready arrived to help for the day and had let themselves into the garage and had loaded their pickup truck full of deck furntiture that they were buying from us. That big truck load did a lot to clean out the garage. Now we have a lot more space to work with in there which we need to deal with all of the stuff that is going in and out of the house. The Ralstons also took the Otis Spunkmeyer oven that I had bought for Dominica a few years ago. She had wanted one and I got it for her for her birthday or something like that but she had never had a freezer large enough to hold a full order of Otis Spunkmeyer cookie dough so she had never even taken the oven out of the box that it had come in. That was kind of depressing but we are very unlikely to ever have enough room to justify having a convection oven designed just for cookies around. So it is one of those items that we really need to just let go of and move on. We are starting to get better with that stuff.

Dad hung around for just a little bit. He took one car load of stuff (during the week he had taken load after load and the garage was all but empty when we got back last night) which really got a ton of stuff moved out of the house. Dominica finished up the laundry that she had started last night and we were off to a really good start on the weekend.

It wasn’t long at all before Francesca, Madeline and Emily arrived to pick up Dominica on their way to Houston. They have a long day of driving ahead of them. They only stayed for a few minutes as they wanted to get right onto the road as quickly as possible.

My goal for the weekend is to get two servers built and ready for production and to get an IP phone set up and ready for Josh whom I expect to see tomorrow afternoon on my way back to New Jersey. I tried to keep my work for the weekend from becoming overly ambitious. Piling up too much stuff is a sure way to fail at everything.

I managed to get the first server mostly built and ready before the Ralstons returned after lunch. I had ordered a pizza from Mama Mia’s but it didn’t arrive before they got back. Once they were back we loaded the futon into their truck and then the air hockey table and Dominica’s old office chair. The futon and the office chair are going to my cousin Sara who is going to need them for college. The air hockey table is going to Art and Danielle’s basement for now.

After the Ralstons took off with their second truck load I set to work prepping the second server for the day. The first server that I built was an HP DL145 G2 running CentOS 4.3 for AMD64. This second one is an HP DL360 running Windows Server 2003 Web Edition. When I started working on this server I got the pleasant surprise of discovering that they had shipped it with 15,000 RPM hard drives instead of the 10,000 RPM drives that I had been expecting. They hadn’t specified which it was coming with but I never imagined that they would ship 15K drives without making a big deal about it. Very cool.

I was extremely happy to have been able to have gotten both servers built today. That was quite the relief. At seven in the evening I drove down to Leicester and picked up Jeremy so that we could go see Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man’s Chest at the Silver Lake Drive-In. We ran up to dad’s house because there were a couple of bins that had gotten moved that needed to be picked up and this was my one good window of time to get them. Dad was busy working on his lawn mower.

It was eight o’clock when we got to Perry. The Ralstons were arriving at the same time as us so that we could all watch the movie together. Unfortunately the show had sold out and we were unable to get in. The Ralstons headed back home and Jeremy and I drove down to Silver Springs to visit with Mary and Jocelyn who were going to go to the movie at nine to meet us because Jocelyn had to work until after eight. Believe it or not after all of the years that Mary has lived in Silver Springs this was the very first time that I had ever seen her apartment! I haven’t seen an apartment of Mary’s since she lived in Lima which was several years ago. In between she lived in Wellsville, New York for a while.

It took too long for people to decide what they wanted to do that we lost any hope we had of seeing the movie someplace else. Everyone was hungry so we drove back up to Perry and got hot subs at the Silver Lake Country Market – everyone, that is, except for Jeremy who as usual just got onion rings. Two orders of them. Then for dessert we walked across the street to the video rental shop that sells ice cream. Weird combination, I know.

I dropped Jeremy off on the way back home. Mary and Jocelyn came over and hung out for a little while. The house in Geneseo is really bare at this point and it is weird trying to sit in the living room as there are no seats that face each other.