Sheep Guarding Llama

After being so busy yesterday, today I dedicated most of the day to playing Wind Waker with the girls which made them exceedingly happy.  We played from first thing in the morning until Dominica made lunch and we took a break and watched 30 Rock.  But we went back to playing Wind Waker after that.  I still focused on all of the little side stuff today and wrapping up discovering all of the map.  I am ready to tackle a lot more the next time that I play.  This was a gaming “utility” weekend.

For dinner we ordered in Chinese from the place that lets us order online.  We are addicted to that now.

This evening we bought the new season of Doctor Who on Amazon VOD and watched the one episode that was available with the girls.  This is the first episode with the new doctor.  The girls thought that that was a great evening.

We got the girls off to bed on the late side then stayed up ourselves to watch the first episode of the fourth season of Downton Abby which we have resisted watching until now.

All in all, it was a very good family day.

It is the weekend.  This morning I was on call and so set up my work laptop and was signed into the office for many hours.  Ended up having to do pretty much nothing but was tied to the bedroom office all morning.  This gave me a lot of time to work on the ownCloud that I was working on last night, though, and I was able to get it fully set up and working beautifully today.

I am really impressed with ownCloud.  Very easy to install and getting it into a usable state, even full of data, was very easy.  I really like it and can see it really getting some market traction.  A great product for a lot of businesses today.  And you can’t beat the price.

Talked to Katie quite a bit this afternoon.  Helped her with some project work that she was working on.

Late afternoon I was finally able to come down to the living room and hang out with everyone.  The girls had been waiting all morning for me to come down and play Wind Waker.  So I did that for the rest of the day.  I mostly did secondary tasks all day, nothing worth noting.  Just sailing around getting little side things out of the way to make my character as strong as possible for the next dungeon which will likely be decently hard.  The girls had a lot of fun.

It is already Friday.  This was a fast week.  During the day Dominica’s new laptop, a little HP Pavilion 10z arrived.  It is a very small, AMD-based dual core unit with Windows 8.1 and only 2GB of RAM but a touch screen and really just meant for her to be able to do basic tasks, surf the web and read her email from the couch.  It is so much small and lighter (and newer) than the old Windows 7 15″ laptop that she has been using.  And the battery should last at least twice as long or possibly much more.

Dominica had the laptop all set up and was using it all day.  This is the first touch screen laptop that we have actually owned ourselves.  I have worked on them before elsewhere but now we have one at home.  I have to admit that they are kind of handy for certain things.  Especially if you work in a dark room where looking at the keyboard can be difficult.  So she seems pretty pleased with it and you really can’t beat the fact that we got it for just $168!

This evening when I got home I had to talk to Katie for a while then I spent much of the evening working on building an ownCloud 7.0.1 server running on OpenSuse 13.1.  That went pretty well and was a fun project.  I have been wanting to try out ownCloud for months but have not had any time to look into it.  It was fun and a good learning experience too.  Did some new stuff.  Not all done tonight but a lot of it was completed.

I had to do some work for the office this evening and am scheduled to work in the morning as wel.

Today is Dominica’s birthday!

I had a very busy day at the office today. It was a good day, but it meant that I never got a chance to take a break to run to the store to get a card or cake for Dominica.  I had been planning to at least surprise her with a cake.  I worked solidly the entire day.

Just before leaving the office I got an email from Symantec telling me to check out the video that they had posted.  They did a corporate video for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and who did they call out to do the challenge as well?  That’s right, me.  The first person called out by Symantec.  Oh boy, now I have to do something.

Later in the day, Pertino called me out for the ALS Challenge as well.

Dominica ordered Italian in for dinner just as I was leaving the office.  That worked out perfectly as they were going up to the door to deliver it just as I was pulling into the parking lot at the house.

We had dinner and watched some 30 Rock.  Then, before it was too late, I ran out to Stop and Shop to pick up cupcakes for the girls and cheese cake for Dominica and a few bags of ice for tomorrow morning.  Dominica will film me doing the challenge in the morning.

Came back home and the girls had their cakes.  We did not stay up too late tonight.

On the drive into the office this morning I finished reading “Founding Brothers” by Joseph Ellis and started reading “History of the World, Updates” by J. M. Roberts.  This is one of those super long books that has been sitting in my Audible queue since easily six years ago.  The book is fifty five hours in length so this one is going to take me a while to work through.  It was a pretty slow start.

Tomorrow is Dominica’s birthday.  We don’t have anything special planned yet.  I will probably get some cake.  Her birthday present is the new HP laptop that we ordered a week ago.  Much newer and smaller than the one that she is using now.  And with a touch screen.  Should be far superior for use while sitting on the chaise lounge.  Do not know when that will arrive, though.