December 24, 2017: Christmas Eve

This is it, Christmas Eve, the night before the big show.  It’s a big cooking day, the women were busy all day making food.  I hid much of the day upstairs working on Skyrim when I got the chance.  Tonight, of course, once we got the kids off to bed in their new pajamas it was time for the many hours of setting up the house for tomorrow morning.

December 23, 2017: Skyrim

Saturday. Today I took my chance to get some time on the Steam laptop to myself. I have been doing a huge amount of web migrations from A Small Orange over to Hostadillo this week so that NTG can close down their ASO contract and save a few hundred dollars a year and now that that is basically done and things have slowed down for the holiday I am taking some time while the cousins spend time playing together to get my winter week of video gaming started.  This is the only real time that I get to play video games all year, pretty consistently.

So after a few years of playing, I am settling in to try to get to the end of Skyrim.  I have a long way to go.  But it gives me a chance to escape and get some quiet time to myself.

The kids all watched a bit of Coyote Peterson together in the upstairs living room today.  That is one of my favourite shows that they watch on YouTube.

Today, Emily and I went out and picked up Subway for the family for dinner.

December 22, 2017: Web Site Migrations

Friday.

Truman Enjoying the Houston Sun

SW was still down today.  They eventually came half up, but were unable to keep their systems working.

I spent much of my day migrating workloads from A Small Orange over to Hostadillo.  That was a lot of work but is going to save the company a lot of money.

For dinner tonight we got Marco’s Pizza which is what the family in Houston eats now.  We have some Marco’s that have opened up near us in Dallas but we have not had a chance to try them out yet, so we don’t know how they are.

Luciana on the Laptop

The pizza was decent, nothing super exciting but quite good for a chain.

Luciana Always Uses Two Devices at Once

December 21, 2017: Wrapping Day

DuoLingo Streak: 110 Days

Thursday. The Steam Winter Sale started today.

Today is present wrapping day.  Have to get the bulk of that done so that there is time for all of the last minute stuff.

This evening I took all of the little kids down to the playground in the neighbourhood.  It’s a hefty walk to get down there with all of them.

I got some quiet time at the house this evening because the kids all went out to look at Christmas lights.

Using the Internet down here has been horrible.  It’s Comcast xFinity, some of the worst Internet in the developed world and certainly worse than we’ve had in Central America.  It’s ridiculously slow and unreliable.  Nothing ever works.  And no one fixes it because this is just how it always is, everyone has gotten used to it.  This alone is a reason to never live in the Houston area, no reliable Internet.  And it costs quite a bit more than our screaming fast, rock solid Frontier fiber in Dallas.

Spiceworks went down today, like hard down.  Down down, to the point that they are all but out of business.  It’s laughable.  Everything is down, their website, their applications that users use, and they didn’t even have monitoring to know about it.  And all of this after their epic outage a few months ago where everyone found out that they had no redundancy and no failover plan and no IT staff to deal with anything and now, months later, nothing has been addressed.  What incompetence!  It’s ridiculous that anyone has the cluelessness to think that they are in any way a technical organization.

Tonight we watched The Santa Con.