Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Now that we no longer have the little hamster to worry about we are keeping the house dramatically colder than we used to. When Dominica is around I set the thermostat to 64F but when it is just me I drop it down to 62F. At night, sometimes, I knock it down a little further. We were never able to do that before because the hamster couldn’t handle temperatures like that and had no way to keep himself warm. So he was really making it cost a lot more in utility bills. It is really handy that this winter with heating fuel being so expensive that we are able to run the furnace as little as possible. We have been being very diligent about keeping the extraneous rooms of the house sealed off so as to act as insulators to the main part of the house. We are really fortunate that the house is designed in such a way that the main living areas and areas that we would like to keep warmer are generally away from outside walls. Because it is a townhouse and the living space’s largest border wall is against our neighbor we have a naturally insulated wall on that side that we don’t have to worry about. And almost all of the outside rooms we can close off and not heat and that is a pretty major insulator to the rest of the house. So I think that we have managed to turn this house into a very energy efficient place.

I slept in a little while this morning because the puppy was being really cuddly. Then we got up and got ready to go out. Dad came over just after noon and we took my car over to Lakeville to get it inspected for my new insurance. Only took a few minutes. We have to do the same with Dominica’s car on Monday. We took Oreo along since the sun was so bright that it would keep the car relatively warm even though it was really bitterly cold outside.

We drove up to the city and met with Eric and John at the Distillery on Mt. Hope near the hospital for a late lunch. We hung out there for several hours. We arrived a little after one and didn’t end up leaving until closer to five. John had to get to the airport as he was flying back down to Maryland. Dominica and I are going down there next weekend for the company Christmas party.

I had to get back down to Geneseo to get ready to go down to Castile as I was asked to speak at the PTA meeting this evening. I wanted a little time at home before leaving to get changed and think about what we were going to talk about.

I did manage to finally get the last of my computerized music files backed up today. It took six DVD’s to fit them all. That was quite a chore moving them all and them burning them all. I only have an old 1x DVD writer and that means that it takes about one hour per disc to burn and an additional hour per disc to verify and a little longer than that even to move the files over the network. So it was a really major effort to get all of them backed up.

I left for Castile at 6:30. I got down there a little early but that was good because it gave me a chance to find out what they wanted me to talk about. The meeting started at 7:30 and ran for about an hour and a half. Then there was another hour and a half or so of “meet and greet” where the parents could talk directly to teachers. So I managed to leave the school at about 10:00 which is the same time that Dominica was leaving work.

I tried stopping at a couple of places on the way home but every place had just closed as I was going by. So I got home and played with Oreo for a little bit who was very scared because no one was home with him. Dominica got home a few minutes after I did and we decided to go out to Denny’s to get some dinner since neither of us had eated anything since lunch.

We stopped by the hotel just five minutes before Mary got out of work and drove her over to Denny’s too. We hung out there for about two hours. It started to snow pretty badly and Mary needed to get back home to Silver Springs before the roads got to be too bad.

I got up just as Dominica was leaving for work. It is tough to pull yourself out of bed when the puppy is being really snuggly and he does that a lot. Today he decided to take over Dominica’s portion of the bed and was sleeping right in the spot that was still warm from her sleeping there and he even put his head on her pillow. It was really adorable.

It was a very uneventful day. I worked from home all day long. John Nicklin flew into town today but he is busy all day so I won’t get a chance to talk to him until tomorrow.

I called dad this afternoon and we decided to get some dinner together. It wasn’t until minutes before he was supposed to be arriving here that he realized that his car was in the shop. So I drove over there and picked him up for a change. The weather turned really bad on the way over and we decided just to drive down to Cooks down the hill and get subs down there. Oreo rode along and slept in the car while we were there. The roads were pretty bad so we decided not to drive anywhere extra.

Dominica came home and we just watched some Keeping Up Appearances before going to bed.