Sheep Guarding Llama

Tonight is Dominica and my big Christmas shopping night. We have a lot that we need to get done and not very much time to do it in so we decided to make tonight a big time shopping night and to just run up to the city and get as much done at once as possible. We left just after 5:30 and ended up shopping until just before 10:00. We were very efficient and even shopping in parrallel at one point so we actually did really well. Dominica made a list and we were able to spend very little time in any individual store. This is how shopping should be. Once big push and then it is all over.

While we were out I made it to Best Buy to pick up some hard drives that I need for the servers that we are building. I managed to pick up seven 160GB drives while I was there for dirt cheap. That worked out really well for me. Dad had told us that Media Play was going out of business and that we should stop by there and see if there was anything good on sale. So we made an effort to get enough done so that we could go there before they closed. Boy are we glad that we did. They had an entire section of British television that was on sale and we made out like bandits. We managed to complete our Red Dwarf collection picking up the third, fifth and sixth seasons! We also got the complete series Chef! which is awesome. And we got the first two seasons of Allo, Allo and got the last half of Keeping Up Appearances. Everything was 20% off and that made it super affordable compared to normal. None of this stuff is anything that we can ever get any kind of discount on at all. So this was really great. And now we have tons of new BBC programming to watch.

We grabbed some McDonald’s while we were out. We almost never eat there anymore since we realized that the Geneseo McDonald’s really does a horrible job with their food quality, they are always having staff issues and the prices are thirty percent higher than any other McDonald’s in the area. And to top it all off, they don’t take credit cards when everyone else does. They are also the only non-twenty four hour McDonald’s in Livingston County! Definitely not earning our businesses. It is actually less expensive for us to eat at the full service Omega and get much healthier and tastier food than it is to eat at the local McDonald’s. Tom Wahl’s isn’t cheap but isn’t any more expensive and their food is tons better. So we have been avoiding it whenever possible and saving our eat at McDonald’s for when we are away from Geneseo and get a better deal.

After shopping we came home and watched most of the first DVD of the second set of Keeping Up Appearances. Most of the episodes in the second half of the series are new to me which is awesome. The downside is that the show got seriously stale and every single character is just saying the same old lines over and over again. They actually get so bad that they repeat the same scenes over and over again. The show is good but it is definitely not meant to be watched very much at a time. It really shows how little creativity existing in the writing staff. It is really too bad because the characters were really original but they stopped doing any character development after the first or second season and it really shows.

Today begins the two week countdown to Christmas. You know even with there having been so much snow on the ground all ready this year I am not particularly feeling like we are approaching Christmas time. I haven’t seen any Christmas specials yet and haven’t really heard any music playing except for quick excerps here and there. And they always starting playing the music and putting up the advertising so early that it loses all of its impact anyway. But, one way or another, we are rapidly approaching the Holidays. Dominica and I are planning on doing most of our shopping tomorrow. We tend to wait until pretty much the last minute. It wouldn’t be us if we didn’t.

Today Dominica and I drove down to Silver Springs to worship at the Letchworth New Life Fellowship church there in the middle of town. It is almost directly across the street from Mary and Jocelyn’s apartment. Church starts early down there which is always tough for us on Sunday mornings. It is hard enough making it to the north side of Perry for 10:55 at LaGrange but getting all of the way to Silver Springs for 10:30 is a little beyond us.

After church we stopped at the Silver Lake Country Market in Perry and grabbed subs for lunch. We have a busy day and didn’t want to spend too much time out on the road and we figured that that would be fast and easy. It is always entertaining to stop there because they are like a general store and sell just about everything in the world that no one could ever need in there. So much junk that it is hysterical.

We came home and spent the afternoon with our puppy just hanging out. Phil and Kate called and rescheduled out trip to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because they had to run over to sign the papers for their new house! They are very excited to be finally buying a house. They have been trying to get one for quite some time now. So we decided to wait until the 8:15 show tonight to see the movie. Originally we were going to see the movie and then go out for dinner. We switched the order and decided that we would meet them at Friendly’s on Spencerport Road and then go to see the movie after that. So we got more time to hang around at home with Oreo. He is going to go over to dad’s house while we are at the movie so that he doesn’t panic from us being gone for too long. He is getting better but we are going to be gone longer today that he is used to yet so we wanted to make sure that he was comfortable and dad enjoys having him from time to time.

We went up and met the Ayers at the Friendly’s on Spencerport Road next to Nick Tahou’s. We had a good time hanging out although I didn’t get to see them as much as Min did because my stomach was bothering me. They got a chance to show us pictures of their new house that they had just closed on. They are moving up to the north east side of the city on February 15th. The are really excited. It will take a while before owning a house really becomes a reality to them. I can vouch for the fact that even having lived in my own house for over two years that it really seems strange to own a house of your own.

After dinner we rushed over to the theatre to catch the movie. We, of course, went to Tinseltown to watch the movie in Rochester’s only DLP theatre. We figured that the place would be totally packed but, in fact, there were only about twenty people there. So we got totally choice seats. Even so we did get stuck with a family right behind us who had to explain every little detail to their child but at least they weren’t saying annoying stuff.

I know that everyone is waiting to hear what we thought of the movie. Well wait to now more… the bottom line is: This may be the single best book to moving picture conversion ever done. We were totally thrilled with the movie. It was amazing. The effects were great and the adaptation was simply perfect. I am so happy that they managed to make such a faithful compliment to one of the greatest works of literature ever written. For any of you who are fans of the Chronicles of Narnia you must go see this movie. And if you are not a fan, which of course means that you have never read the books, then you should probably not even worry about reading the books first as the movie is so incredibly faithful that you really won’t even miss anything. And believe me when I tell you that I am not one to go easy on movies for not following the original print faithfully.

I grew up with the Chronicles of Narnia. My mother read me the entire series (there are seven of them) when I was about four years old. She used to read me a chapter each night before going to bed. When she read them to me she would record them on a Radio Shack cassette tape recorder. One of those silly portable jobs that were popular around 1980. Boy were those silly tape recorders. They had a terrible little built in microphone but I think that she actually used a plug in microphone. The recording quality was autrocious but it was both my introduction to “adult” fiction as well as my first introduction to the genre of fantasy. It was a major turning point in my life. I have a lifelong appreciation for literature because of those books. Going through them “live” the first time was important but then I listened to the tapes of the entire series over and over again over the next several years. I must have listened to each book twenty times or more. For years I would listen to them almost daily. I developed the desire to listen to all of the books that I wanted to read from that experience. It took a long time before having audio recordings of a large number of books became practical but recently I have reverted to that paradigm and now I see how it happened. All those years ago the seed was planted. I loved those books. I knew each one of them by heart. I knew every character and their significance within the story. I knew how each character related to every other character. So it means a lot to me that Disney has pulled through and created such a wonderful screen adaptation of the books. It is almost as if they took a piece of my imagination and brought it to life for me. Just for me.

For me, today is just a continuation of yesterday. Dominica had to get out of bed just a little before 8:00 and I got up just a little after she did. So I got about two hours of sleep before I had to head back into the office to keep working on the downed server that we have. I hate it when this stuff happens. But this is what I get paid for so I really can’t complain.

I spent the entire morning working on the server trying one approach or another. It was 1:00 in the afternoon, sixteen hours after I started, that the server was back up and running again. There is nothing in the world like that feeling of relief that you get working in this field when you are sure that total disaster has struck but you then manage to pull through and have a solution that works and fixes the problem. Okay, there is a lot of prayer involved, but the rush is still there. And people wonder why IT pro’s burn out so easily.

I was pretty much useless the rest of the day. I did a few practicy tests for the CompTIA Security+ exam that I want to take soon. I am hoping that I can schedule it so that I can take that exam at the same time that Dominica is taking her A+ Core exam which might be as early as Tuesday. It would be really nice if we could car pool and get the tests out of the way. I have been working on this particular exam for a really long time and I just keep putting it onto the back burner and forgetting about it and that is really a massive waste of time so I am attempting to buckle down and push my way through it as quickly as possible so that I can focus on moving on to bigger and better things.

Jeremy came over for a little while this afternoon. His parents were out Christmas shopping and he had a few hours in the middle of the afternoon to just hang out so he came over and played some Call of Duty 2 in the living room while I was in the office. Dad came over and we all went to the Omega Grill for dinner. I called dad this afternoon to tell him that since he hadn’t called over to ask me if I wanted to get dinner that I had forgotten to eat today. It has been a joke around here because we have one or more meals almost every day with dad. Dad eats at the Omega Grill so often that his Christmas cards this year are a characature of him sitting in the diner! They are sure to post one of those up on the fridge right along side the pictures of Dominica and I in Disney World.

After dinner we came back and played a little bit of video games before I had to take Jeremy back home. I came back to the house and got an SGL Podcast (#34) out the door. I know that this week has been lean and I didn’t want to keep everyone waiting for another show. I am getting much better at keeping the length down to a reasonable level these past several shows. That should make a lot of people happier. Don’t get any ideas about the blog getting shorter, though, it is a lot easier to just skim over sections that you are not interested in than it is to fast forward through things that get too lengthy.

Dominica decided that she wanted to watch new episodes of Keeping Up Appearances so she took a quick detour over to Borders in Henrietta on her way home to see if they had the show in stock. We have watched the first four DVDs several times and I am pretty sure that there are a number of episodes on the second set of four DVDs that I have never seen. Any that I have seen on there have not been for a really long time. It is not a show that I have seen on television very many times.

Dominica got home but didn’t have any luck finding the DVD that we wanted at Borders. Borders’ prices are really high and their selection is really poor. We almost never manage to find anything there that we want but we have the major disadvantage of Rochester being the city that closes early and has no shops that sell anything outside of the pop culture mainstream so finding things like a BBC comedy on DVD are near impossible. That is one thing that I would really appreciate about living in or near a real city. Shopping out here for anything that isn’t a necessity is a real pain.

We watched some more of the Keeping Up Appearances that we all ready had in the house and relaxed for two episodes before going to bed. I was totally exhausted by the time that we decided to go to bed. In fact, I was totally exhausted all day long today. I can’t believe that I made it through the day. While we watched the show I took apart a computer that I am working on for Castile Christian Academy. That wasn’t too intensive and I was able to handle it while relaxing.

Tomorrow we finally get to go see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that we have been waiting for a year or more to release. We are really excited about finally getting a chance to see it. The Chronicles of Narnia were my favorite books as a child and I know them by heart. When I was very young, probably around age four, my mother read the books to me and recorded them onto cassette tape while she read them so that I would be able to go back and listen to them whenever I wanted to. By age five or so I was listening to those seven books all of the time. That period of my life not only provided my love of the Narnia books in particular but created a real passion for the genre of fantasy and taught me to appreciate the concept of recorded books. Now I get all of my books that way and it makes me much happier than having to sit down and read them all myself. We are going to see the 4:45 showing at Tinseltown’s DLP theatre in Gates with Phil and Kate. We haven’t seen them in months!

Andy worked on installing Debian Linux onto his Apple Mac Mini this evening. He finally decided that Mac OS X just wasn’t very useful for normal things or at least not as useful as Linux. So he switched the machine. He is the only person that I know of to have ever purchased and brand new Mac and to remove the Mac OS from it to isntall something else. But it is neat that he has Linux running on a PowerPC platform. Not many people can say that. It is true that we never use our Mac for anything other than watching DVDs in the living room. It isn’t a bad system but it just doesn’t have the flexibility or ease of use of other systems that we have. It does have a rough learning curve and doing anything on it always takes a lot more effort than should really be necessary.

Today was super, ultra, mega productive day. I have a white board in my room that I keep track of all of my high priority tasks on and today I managed to eliminate a large number of those items. Boy did that feel good.

I got out of bed a little before Dominica left to go to Fuji. I spent the day working in the office. Nothing exciting just a lot of work to do. I ended up having to give Oreo a bath because he was getting stinky. So I bathed him and I washed his bedding. It really always needs to be done at the same time so that he doesn’t pass his doggy smell back and forth all of the time.

Dad came by at 4:30 and we went over to the Omega Grill for our regular Friday Fish Fry. We had to make a quick run to the post office first. I finally got out to getting all of my reimbursement charges from this summer sent out. I really should have done that a long time ago. That took several hours this afternoon there were so many reimbursement to take care of. What a pain that is. You would think that something like that would be simple but it never is.

After dinner I came back home to spend time with the puppy. Dad got a shipment of new equipment delivered to his house today that he dropped off. The first thing to play with was our new router for the house. Up until now we have been using a firewall that I built myself that runs on a PIII desktop machine. It worked fine but a PIII machine uses a lot more electricity than a regular embedded firewall and it takes a lot of space in the server room compared to the tiny, almost hand-held Netgear firewall. We are always battling the evil forces of heat dissipation down in the basement and I am hoping that by removing that PIII from down there that it will help considerably. It is funny that there used to be so much equipment running in the house but as the company has grown we have managed to be able to afford more appropriate equipment that has allowed us to scale back the total amount of equipment even though we have tons more power and flexibility. Just recently we were running eight total processors full time in our server room to do everything that we needed to do. Not including the small embedded processors in things like our firewalls and switches which use extremely little power. Over the next few weeks we are planning on being down to as few as three processors which are capable of handling a significantly larger workload. Boy wouldn’t that be nice.

My super productive day ended just a little before Dominica got home. We started having some problems with our email server and so I started working on that. Not long after I started working in became apparent that one of our Windows 2003 servers was failing and so I set to work trying to deal with that situation. So much for having an easy night after having had such a productive day.

Dominica went to bed around midnight or a little after. No such luck for me. I resigned myself to being up all night and got to work. Being the system admin does have its downsides from time to time. Unfortunately it is very difficult to be productive when you are up so late at night and have not prepared for it. So I am pretty much worthless as far as getting anything useful done while I am waiting for the computers to do things. I am lucky that I can just barely keep writing the dailies here. My eyes really want to close.

Staying up all night working on a system problem is not nearly as much fun as it was when I was in my early twenties. I hate this stuff now. I love the work but not getting to go to bed isn’t my idea of a good time anymore. At least Oreo decided that I needed to have some company and came in to hang out with me around five in the morning. He is so loyal.

I ended up getting to a point where I was able to take a nap for about two hours around six in the morning. Boy was I exhausted.