Sheep Guarding Llama

I haven’t been writing as much as I had expected to the last few days but at the end of yesterday’s update, we moved into the number three position according to the archives. So we are steadily marching forward. Not much longer and I will shut up about it.

Min and I slept in forever this morning. We didn’t wake up until a quarter till eleven! I can’t believe how long I sleep when I am on the CPAP. It is good sleep, real REM sleep. But I never wake up. That is really rough. I seem to be sleeping close to ten hours a night on a regular basis. I hate that. I was hoping that I would only be sleeping four hours or so once I got used to the machine. But that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. I must get three entire sleep cycles if I let myself. Luckily, I am able to wake up with an alarm and that works just fine. Or else I would be in big trouble.

I got a message from a contact that I have that has been looking for some memory for me for one of our servers that is pretty hard to get memory for. He has found enough memory to max out the machine which is pretty cool so I am getting that sent right out. That will make that machine able to function for us for quite some time so that we don’t have to buy a replacement machine down the road anytime soon, I hope.

We have been having unbelievable problems with our one router in the house going down. It has been driving me crazy. It is really rough because it disconnects all of our customers and it cuts off our telephones and stuff. It is really a pain. I have been trying one thing after another trying to get it to work but no luck. So, if you have issues calling us, that is probably why.

Jeremy stayed a little bit later than usual this morning so that we could go out and get some breakfast/lunch over at Denny’s.

I got the notice from Apple today that my new Mac Mini had finally shipped. It has five day shipping on it and it left on Saturday so it should be here on Friday. At least I hope so. That would be nice. I can’t wait to get it and try it out and to have something on my desk other than this laptop. The laptop is okay, but the Mac is a lot smaller and I can clean up the cables a bit and not have to take this thing up and down every time that I am going to go somewhere. And the Mini is only a fraction of the size of the laptop. That is a huge bonus. And it is quieter too. There are a lot of pluses. Of course, we may find that I really hate the Mac, but I think that I will learn to get along with it to some extent. I checked in with FedEx and they said that the machine had been picked up and was in transit – but they hadn’t listed an arrival date yet. There site was horribly slow today. It took five minutes just to get onto the site and put in a tracking number. They need to reduce the number of images that they have on their pages if they can’t keep their bandwidth up.

We had lunch over at Denny’s and then I drove Jeremy back down to Leicester. I hung out down there and played with Taffy and Peter (their dog and cat respectively) for about forty five minutes. Peter is currently a top ten finalist in the Knapp Winery contest to find a “model” for the label of their new wine.

My impromtu project for the day is to do a ton of cleaning (mostly of paperwork) in my office looking for any paperwork pertaining to the Netgear router that we are having a problem with. I know that I have had that paperwork sitting around the office for forever. I never have a good place to file any of this stuff. I need a large filing cabinet in my office, I think. There is loose paperwork everywhere down here. At least this causes me to get a lot of it cleaned up. I do think that I have figured out what is wrong with the router – not that that is necessarily a good thing. I am pretty sure that its memory is going bad. So, I have turned off its logging functions in the hopes that with it no longer logging that maybe it will not use nearly as much memory and maybe that will keep it up and running for a while.

Here is a really creepy story about what can happen when incompetent or lazy medical personnel become involved in accidents. This is a really worrisome story when you think about how often a single doctor could have this kind of impact – convincing people that the obvious is not true. I have heard horror stories, not quite of this level, happening locally where a doctor was willing to let a patient die rather than face the obvious that all of the nurses and lay people around him were aware of. Luckily, in that case as well, a non-medical person took ownership of the situation and saved a child’s life. Far too often, doctors just find it too much of a nuisance to care about people’s lives. I realize that being a doctor can be stressful, but any responsible human being with that kind of responsibility should be decent enough to give up a post if they no longer have the interest of humanity at heart. Of course, we have to consider the fact that in a small town like the one in this article, the examiner could easily have known the patient and acted the way he did intentionally for reasons we may never know. That always has to be considered – especially in cases where people have questioned him like that and he shoots them down.

I got onto the phone with Netgear and it looks like it won’t be any problem just having them send us out a new unit. Boy are they easy to deal with. I am really glad that we work with them because it makes our lives a lot easier.

Well, tonight we learned that Scott is not very good at installing insulation. I get really hot and sweaty too easily and it makes it almost impossible to see out of safety goggles when I do anything. We did manage to complete the insulation in the server room. It will probably take a few days before we have a good idea of how much it is reducing the noise in the house. We will have to have an opportunity to listen to it in a bunch of different situations before we can really tell. I am really hoping that it makes the servers quiet enough that you can’t hear them upstairs in the kitchen. Because of the hardwood floors up there, the sound travels right through the floor making the entire upstairs – because it is one big open room – able to hear everything that happens in the server room.

Once I was wrapping up the server room’s insulation, Min cooked some frozen pizza for dinner and we sat down to watch the original The Italian Job from 1969 starring Michael Caine. We made it about forty minutes into the film and Min decided that she couldn’t stay awake because it was so slow. So we switched to Almost Famous which I have seen about half an hour of before but never the whole thing. It was a really good movie. There were a lot of good people in it. After that we watched the famous Goldie Hawn / Kurt Russell film Going Overboard which was their third film together. I haven’t seen that movie since the 80’s. After watching the movies, we decided to head off to bed and actually try to be able to get up in time to make it to church tomorrow. We have not made it in weeks so maybe we can make it tomorrow.

Speaking of sleep, Andy and Miranda didn’t get up until around 1:00 today. They disappeared almost immediately after getting up to go out and get some food. They came home from “lunch” at 5:00 and said that they were planning on going out to a movie. But they were both tired (twelve hours of sleep will do that to you) and so they went to take a nap. That was around 5:30. I am turning in now and it is almost half after midnight and they are still asleep. It will be interesting whether or not they decide to wake up in the middle of the night or if they just sleep right on through and get up late again tomorrow. So, if you don’t hear much about what is going on with them, that is why. There just isn’t anything to tell 🙂

We did test the server room with the door closed and it does get a lot more quiet than it did before. But, unfortunately, the heat builds up so fast in there that we can’t leave the door shut for any amount of time. We are hoping to vent the server room directly into the garage which should be able to keep it at a decently cool temperature for most of the year.

Well, it is official. With today’s update we have just barely skimmed past the limit to make 2005 Quarter One the busiest ever and we are not even half way through the quarter yet. Whoo – hoo. No one can complain about there not being updates now. I am pretty sure that January was our busiest month ever as well and February is definitely doing well to be in the top four. I guess that now I can stop talking about it because we are past the limit.

Night everyone!

I had a lunch meeting today up at the Cracker Barrel in Henrietta. That was a really funny place for a lunch meeting but it worked. I went there at 11:30 and the meeting went on until about 1:15. It went well, I think. Then I had an afternoon meeting at Starbucks with about an hour in between so I ran over to the hospital and grabbed Eric and we went over to Starbucks early to have some Chantico while I was waiting for my second meeting. The guy that I was meeting with this afternoon, Craig, ended up having to cancel on me so Eric and I just hung out until it was time to head on home. While I was out today, Min and Miranda went out shopping in the South Wedge. Miranda claims that “she won’t absolutely never go shopping with Min again.” So Min must have been on good behaviour today.

On my way home from the city I stopped off at Walmart and picked up some new movies. They have new movies in the really cheap bin and they have a new section of almost as cheap as that movies. I went crazy, again, and picked up a number of new movies including the following: Love Me Tender, Terms of Endearment, Funny Face, The Italian Job, Overboard, Valmont, Impromptu and The Talented Mr. Ripley. We are incredibly close to a full 1000 movies at this point. Only a week or two away, most likely.

So, the other day Josh asked me to have a game tonight because he wasn’t able to see Jo tonight and he thought that it would be a perfect opportunity to play some AoE2. We hadn’t been planning on having a game tonight but I said that we would see what we could do so that he would be able to play. So we scheduled and game and haven’t been able to get a hold of Josh in two days. I finally got a hold of him around 6:30 tonight but he isn’t sure if he will be playing or not. We have the VPN working so that he can play from home. I am really hoping that we can get one or two people to play from home on a regular basis. We did that before with Josh and it worked really well. It would be nice to have about three players playing that way because it allows us to have secret teams and forces us to communicate online.

We ended up playing with just Min, Andy, Jeremy and I. Josh never got back to us. Andy called it a night at 12:30. Jeremy and I played one last fast game and called it a night. I am pretty tired and want to be in good shape tomorrow.

I have one of those 365 day Dilbert calendars sitting on my desk. Having a calendar in that format is really depressing to me. It really helps me see the time passing and boy is it passing quickly. We are already just about half way through the second month of 2005! Where does the time go? It is really true what they say about time passing faster and faster as you get older. I am so glad that I am blogging regularly now because it really helps me get a grip on my life as it goes whizzing by. Just yesterday dad needed me to figure out when something had happened and I went back through my records looking for myself talking about that item and we were able to determine that it had happened two months longer ago than either of us had thought. It is really useful to have you life written down like this. Seems silly, but there is a lot to be said for it. Not to mention all of the typing practice that I get everyday. You may not believe this, but I write this stuff all by myself – no secretaries or typing pool or anything to help out with it.

Tomorrow I have a lunch meeting at Cracker Barrel, Miranda will be so jealous. Speaking of which, Miranda is coming down this evening to visit for the weekend.

I managed to accidentally not get my CPAP machine on before falling asleep last night so I woke up without getting a very good night’s sleep this morning. I overslept and felt like poop. Min woke me up and got me headed off to Castile to work at the school. Dad met me down there. I picked up some McDonald’s on the way since I was running so late and we were starting to overlap with lunch time.

Dad worked on wiring with me until 2:15 or so. Then he had to leave so that he could go take his shift down with Grandma. He got the part that I would have had a problem with taken care of so that worked out well. I stayed for a long time getting everything else working. I was there until after 7:00 but I finally got almost all of the wiring tested and working, the server up and working and three desktops working. That was no small feat. I had to run all over the school all day long. And because the computers were having issues getting onto the network, they were taking absolutely forever to start up and shut down.

I stopped by the Silver Lake Country Market in Perry on the way home to pick up some subs because was really tired and didn’t feel like cooking. So it was closer to 8:00 by the time that I finally got home.

I had to wake Min up when I got in and we went down to the theatre and watched Shark Tales that Min picked up at Walmart today. That movie really wasn’t very good. Definitely not anything like Shrek. It was okay but much more of a little kid’s movie and fairly boring. After that, Min went to bed, she was really tired still, even with the nap. So she went to bed and I watched Darkman which I haven’t seen in a very long time. I didn’t realize that Sam Raimi was in it as much as he was, he was a big character in the beginning.

Well, with my whacky sleep schedule, I am not sure what to include in what day’s updates. So, FYI, I am starting this update at 10pm yesterday, err, Tuesday, to make things a little more coherent. Now, if I could just figure out how to make myself more coherent. I am expecting to hit the record tomorrow or at least by the end of the week for the busiest quarter ever on SGL. As soon as we hit it, I will move a bit out of the main dailies page so that people can handle loading it over dial-up again. It must be murder by now. Luckily, I am able to pull it locally and it is awfully fast! Art’s birthday is only one week away, for those of you who care.

I discovered like the coolest website ever today. Okay, it is actually incredibly boring to anyone but me, but I am really excited. It is ITConversations.com, a Podcasting site that has tons and tons of IT industry content for free download. You can get everything on MP3 and that wacky, proprietary Apple format for the pod. Unfortunately, no Ogg Vorbis, but beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. So, I borred Andy’s iRiver MP3/Ogg player and started downloading mad amounts of audio content. There is some really cool stuff on there and I can’t wait to dig through it all to see what there is worth discovering. I am sure that there will be a huge range of stuff but I am hopeful and finding some stuff that is really worth my time. The thing that I really want is some good stuff to keep me interested while I take walks and stuff. I think (ha ha, listen to me, everyone has an excuse) that if I have good stuff to listen to to keep me occupied that I will excercise a lot more because I can just go out for a walk and listen to IT content while I walk. We will see. I am going to finish writing that book anyday now too.

The big exciting news in business today is that Carly Fiorina (what kind of name is Carly anyway – believe it or not I was commenting to dad and Min on Tuesday about how unprofessional the name Carly was), the CEO of Hewlett – Packard was given the boot. HP’s stock skyrocketted today, even with a bad market. I have been saying that they needed to get rid of her for a long time. She has done nothing but drag that company down. And this is such a critical and strategic time – but them again, when isn’t in the IT industry – to be fooling around with a CEO that makes you company look idiotic.

I worked through the night doing extensive SUSE Linux 9.2 installs onto the computers destined for the Castile school and one to be a testing and demo machine here that is identical to theirs. I have become the absolute master of the SUSE 9.2 install, I seem to be doing it continuously. I have even memorized the IP address and the FTP directory of the nearest mirror so that I wouldn’t have to look it up anymore. I worked on that until 6:00 this morning. While I was waiting for the computers to install, I was researching downloadable audio content online and getting a ton of it from one place or another. I already have a few days worth, I am sure. I am totally obsessive/compulsive, aren’t I? I just realized how much so. Just before turning in for the night, set up a last computer to begin the longest portion of the install cycle (the DVD install portion takes up to 2 hours depending on the machines configuration – the KOffice install takes about 20 minutes and the updates takes about 45 minutes to an hour with a number of lengthy restarts and setups between each step and a long configuration processes after the DVD install that probably takes 30-45 minutes.) I loaded up Andy’s MP3 player with some new content (I had been listen to a couple of interviews while I was working) and headed off to bed. I didn’t actually make it up to bed until just after 7:00am. I went to bed listening to the first portion of Wil Wheaton reading a portion of his newest book at Gnomedex 4 in October. It was a really good talk and I ended up listen to it for over an our. Min came home to find me listening to it lying in bed with my CPAP on. So it was probably 8:15 or so by the time I actually tried to fall asleep.

By 9:30 (yeah, that is a whopping hour and a quarter of sleep) the phone was ringing enough to keep me from wanting to go back to bed. I went down to the office and fixed a couple of computer issues here and there that customers where having and I got some work scheduling taken care of – but the real fun was in doing MORE Linux installs on old desktops. I am guessing that it is taking close to six hours per machine to do an install. That is four a day, max, done serially if I don’t take time off in between. But, it is already quite noticeable that there are a lot less machines sitting around. I have more room in my office, more room in the server room and more room out in the garage. Shelves are clearing up and there is beginning to be space around the house to store things again. It is amazing how much space a giant server, eight desktops, a fax machine and two printers will take up if you let them. This evening I am making a run over to my grandma’s to visit for a little bit, borrow my dad’s staple gun and to drop off the Creative surround sound video game speaker system that I got back in Observatory. Does anyone remember me having that thing set up? Actually, now that I say it, I bet that I bought it while living in Sanctuary because I might have been using it down in the basement there. It is a really cool system that goes underneath your monitor and has two metal poles that go up and behind your head and hold your surround sound speakers back there. It is a totally awesome piece of equipment but I don’t have anyplace that I could put that these days. I wish that I could but that would be awfully silly, I think. The unit is so unwieldy that there isn’t even any way to store it. It doesn’t really fold up in any way so it is totally in the way no matter what you do. But Jeremy is excited about getting to use it and I would like to see there be some use gotten out of it (sounds like Andy and his MP3 player) so I am dropping it off for him tonight. I talked to him last night, just after I had gone to bed and was so disoriented that I could figure out whether it was day or night, and he was really excited to get to use it. So that works out well. Min hates it and I know that she is pissed that I own it. So best to get it out of the house. I take enough heat for the old computers and I am not willing to give those up so I have to give in other places.

It just occurred to me that today is Wednesday and I forgot to take out the trash, again. I have that. Wednesdays are the worst day for trash pickup. You get so caught up in your week and all of the things that are going on you can never remember to get up and go out with the trash in the morning. And I almost never leave the house on a Wednesday morning which only exacerbates the issue because I go straight down to the office and Min goes straight to sleep and the first thing that I know is that it is afternoon and the trash guys and have already been and gone. So it just keeps building up around here. Min is working again tonight, this is the second week of working Wednesday nights that she has done. He manager is on vacation and everyone is taking an extra shift here and there, I guess. So she is sleeping today and working tonight. It is nice that she has gotten an extra day this week and last but it really disrupts our schedules when she works this much.

After listening to Wil Wheaton talk for over an hour this morning (or was that last night, how can one tell), I decided to revisit his weblog which I haven’t been to in three years or so. He just found out that he is going to be playing a role on CSI. I have never seen that show and I am not into those morbid gore shows but I think that I will have to watch for that one. Listening to Wil read excerpts from his bood Just A Geek really gives some insight into Wil and you come to realize that he really was trying to be something more than the loser character on Star Trek: TNG. I think that I am going to pick up his two books, the other being Dancing Barefoot and give them a read.

It looks like I spoke too soon, it is 3:25 in the afternoon and we just hit the point to be the fifth busiest quarter, whoo-hoo. We should hit number four in no time. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were number one by the end of the day. Top three in the very least. Sweet.

I decided to play a round of AoE2 this afternoon. Just to relax. I ended up having one of those really strategic games where you actually manage to kill an opponent but keep his resources going feeding you. So I decided, when dinner rolled around, that I would set the wheels in motion and see how the game could handle playing without me. It went for 30-45 minutes and I was still on top. I had taken a hit but I was still winning. I played for fifteen minutes or so and got my strategy set back up so that I could leave again. Min and I are going down to my grandma’s for a little while to visit. Min hasn’t seen grandma since she went into the hospital a few weeks ago. We went down around 7:00 and stayed until 9:00. We had to get back so that Min could get ready and get off to work for her last shift of the week. After she headed off to the hotel, I went back down to the basement to wrap up the blog for the evening and to check on my AoE2 game. It was still going and I was in really good shape. I think that the computer just gave up. I did manage to not just waste time being silly but actually managed to get some real research done that everyone will be interested in come Friday night.

Here is the official announcement for the week: yes, there is a game this Friday night. Let’s say 8:00 pm. Be here and be set up by then. Bring everything that you need because we don’t have spare anything now that so much stuff went down to Castile. The VPN is working, however, I tested it tonight. That means that people like Josh or Bob could play remotely if they wanted to. If we are going to have very many people, I am afraid that the remote players model is the only one that is likely to really work until someone gets a larger house with a lot of computers and a good network in it.

Well, my whacky sleep schedule yesterday has really messed me up so I am going to call it a night and get off to bed. I am taking Andy’s MP3 player to bed so that I can finish listening to Wil Wheaton’s book reading at Gnomedex 4 from last October. I just have the last half yet to listen to. The first half was just hilarious.

Dad and I are planning on going down to the Castile school in the morning. 9:30ish. No earlier unless there is breakfast involved. There is a bit of wiring to be done tomorrow, it isn’t going to be fun for those of us non-electrician types. And I am especially bad at pulling wires through walls and stuff. I am hoping that there won’t be any of that but we will have to wait and see. It sucks not being handy at all. It is going to be a challenge for me just putting in the ceiling insulation in the server room! That is another project that I have for tomorrow. I was wanting to get that started tonight but I am just too tired and need to get myself into bed.

Dad met me at the house at 8:00 and we went out to breakfast at the Omega. We are there so often that we have an “assigned” table and we know exactly who is going to sit at all of the other tables and what time they will get there. After breakfast it was back to my place to load up our two cars with equipment to take down to Castile. We are delivering four desktops and miscellaneous cabling sundries and a Compaq Proliant 3000 which is a large, behemouth of a server (okay, nothing like the AS/400, but it is still big.) I carried it up the stairs to get it to the car and that was about all that I could handle. My blood pressure shot right up and I got dizzy. I am not as young as I used to be.

We drove down to the Castile school and discovered that there was a lot less wiring done that we had thought was going to be. There was a lot missing and a lot of parts that we needed to pick up. So we went over everything that was there and made a careful list (I had forgotten to bring one of the key components that we needed anyway – so we weren’t going to have everything set up right that second either way) and made plans to be back in a few days. One main wire needed to be run and all of the wires all over the building needed to be terminated. But we did have the termination ends nor the tools to do the work so we were out of luck there.

I got home and discovered that Min was still awake, apparently she had drank too much caffeine while she was at work and was now unable to sleep. It is too bad that she hadn’t figured out that that was going to happen before dad and I left because she missed out on breakfast and seeing the school. She took a quick shower and then she and I headed up to Rochester to get the parts that I needed for the school. We ran to the bank quick to make a deposit (I feel like I never get to do that anymore) and then we headed on over to Home Depot where I always buy my data wiring stuff. While we were there we looked into the carpets because I desperately need to get my office carpeted. It isn’t nearly as expensive as I had thought that it would be (of course, my office is small, rectangular and we would only use really cheap carpet anyway, in there.) We also did some research on insulation for the ceiling and decided to get two mini-rolls of R19 to try out in the server room. That was the heaviest stuff that we found at Home Depot so we will give that a try. That room generates so much noise that we are getting desperate. I also came up with an idea to vent the server room into the garage. During the cooler months, it should work really well to keep the room cool, heat the garage and allow us to close the server room door making it that much more quiet. In fact, the door is probably the biggest thing that we need to get the noise down. Maybe putting curtains up in front of the server window would help out. That six foot wide piece of glass must be transmitting quite a bit of noise with all of that surface area. After shopping we hit IHOP for a completely unhealth, but very delicious lunch – or dinner depending on your perspective. It was about 3:00. I should note, we actually had a polite and competent waitress for once at IHOP. I am sure they fired her right after we left. We hit Borders on the way home. I picked up my first Mac magazine since I have become a pending Mac owner. I don’t know what I was thinking, I am not sure that there is a single article in that magazine, just neverending adds for iPod accessories. The iPod isn’t even connected to Mac in anyway. In fact, my cousin Sara just got an iPod for Christmas but it doesn’t work with their G4 PowerMac, she has to use it on her brother Jeremy’s new HP desktop that runs Windows XP because the Mac just doesn’t support the iPod. To paraphase a famous quote “HP integrates Apple better than Apple integrates Apple.”

Total random but just in case you are having a bad day at the office you can now construct your own micro-claymore to fend off annoying office peoples.

We got home close to 5:00 and since there wasn’t a whole lot of work to be done that needed my attention, I decided to get some sleep. We both went to bed and slept the evening away. I got up around 9:00pm (yeah, NOW my schedule is really screwed up) and headed down to start working on getting more computers ready for Castile. Min headed on off to the hotel.

It isn’t Dawn of the Dead but here is some scary news about catepillars. And your mother always told you that they wouldn’t hurt you!