Sheep Guarding Llama

My new article on Datamation is up: The Case for Early Windows 8 Adoption

Dominica was off to work early this morning, leaving just before seven.  I got up around six thirty and Liesl was up around seven thirty.  So I got Liesl her chocolate milk and set her up in the play room so that she could watch the Care Bears while I got ready for work.  We couldn’t find the Care Bears that she wanted on Netflix, then she told me that “no, it is on the green one.”  This took me a while to figure out but luckily I did because she is so smart and was frustrated that I couldn’t understand her.  By “it’s on the green one” she was referring to the colour of the program that we were running.  Netflix is red, Hulu is green!  I switched to Hulu and there were her shows.  Impressive.

I jumped in the shower to get ready for work.  I thought that Kayla was coming at a quarter till nine, not a quarter after eight.  So when I got out of the shower and heard Liesl talking to someone I panicked.  It was eight eighteen and I found Liesl sitting on the windowsill of the front window talking to Kayla who was standing outside.  Luckily she had only been there about three minutes.  I thought that I had another half an hour or so before she arrived.  Oops.

Luciana woke up just as Kayla arrived so I got her up so that I got to see her for a few minutes before I left for work.  In theory Kayla will only be babysitting for a little while since I leave around nine and Dominica should be home just after eleven.  She works just a four hour Thursday, from seven to eleven.

Work was pretty normal today.  Everything was fine and I was set to work through lunch when Dominica said that she was stuck at work (it was nearly noon already) and that she had an issue that was not going to be resolved anytime soon so I had to run home to relieve Kayla so that she could go to her normal job which she works in the afternoon.

So I relieved Kayla as the babysitter around twelve twenty, thinking that I would just be doing lunch at home and that surely Dominica would be home by two since that would be nearly a double length Thursday for her already.  Ha ha, what do I know?

Dominica came home around three just long enough to grab a coffee and talk about plans for the day.  She was home for no more than thirty minutes.  What a crazy day she is having and she is already up to nearly eight hours.

I chatted with Chris over Lync and he said that he could be over shortly to babysit so that I could go help Dominica.  So she returned immediately to work so that she could get as much done as possible while waiting for me to come help.  Not that there is much that I can do to help since the issue is one of hardware failure, but an extra set of eyes and some additional experience can’t hurt, either.

So I worked like crazy to get wrapped up at the office and Chris arrived just after four.  By no later than four forty I was able to take off and run over to Dominica’s office and help out.  It was a frustrating night, hardware failures always are and there is never enough equipment or information around to fix things easily.  We tried everything that we could think of for about another two hours.  They actually left us alone at the office and we had to turn out the lights as we left.  Very weird for her second day.

It was nearly seven when we left, we would have worked longer but Chris could only babysit till seven as he had a client to go see. So that was our cutoff time.

We got home, Chris took off, we hung out with the girls, ate some Joe’s that was ordered in and watched Family Guy and got all caught up on the latest season on Hulu.  We were all exhausted.  Dominica and I were both falling asleep trying to stay awake for Liesl.

We got Liesl in bed by about a quarter after nine, very early for her but it couldn’t be helped.  Luciana had gone to bed around eight.  She loves going to bed, no complaints from her.  Dominica was in bed around nine thirty and I was just before ten.  I have to be up early tomorrow for the non-farm payroll announcement that I cover the first Friday of every month.

So suddenly, instead of working one eight hour day and one four hour day, Dominica has now done eight hours and eleven hours on her first week plus I was there for an additional two!  And not only that but it is our guess and expectation that they are going to have her working there tomorrow as well as they have three major things going on all at once: the continuation of this particular issue, the installation of the large new archival storage system and a cubicle move for Dominica’s workspace (of just two days) where they need her to help identify what to keep and what to toss.  So she could very easily be putting in another two to four hours tomorrow!  And I am guessing that I might be wanted as well during lunch which would be awesome.

 

I am still pretty tired after five straight nights of working very, very late trying to get things working after the big migration.  I slept in just a little this morning and then was into the office, still getting in a little early.  Normally I am home on Wednesdays but since I was home on Monday I am in the office solid for the rest of the week now.

I continued, today, working like mad trying to figure out my email and other access problems.  I finally got access to everything today so I am now actually more capable during the day rather than less.  This is actually quite nice.  I am starting to get used to Windows 8 a little now too having been using it for most of a week.  There is a lot that I don’t like but a bit that I do.  So it was another busy, but successful, day.

Now that I have access to everything I can begin the process of catching up on my emails.  I am so behind from the migration this past weekend, I can’t even begin to describe.  I am way behind.

I got home and we ate dinner tonight.  Dominica made a pasta with pumpkin sauce.  We ate and watched an episode or two of Family Guy then I went into the office and worked with Art on SharePoint and MediaWiki training for a little over two hours.

Tomorrow is Dominica’s second day at her new job and she starts pretty early in the morning.  So she went to bed at around ten, about the same time as Liesl.  I stayed up and worked, as usual, trying to get things done.  So I was up until nearly three in the morning working.  I got a new development server built tonight that, in theory, I can use for my Ruby on Rails projects from anywhere.  I decided to go with Fedora 17 since I was all of the latest and greatest development tools but don’t have any need for an actual desktop making it perfect.

So I was in bed around three.  Dominica gets up just three hours after I go to bed.  Kayla is coming over early in the morning to take over watching the kids from me so that I can go to work.  Starting next week the girls are going to be starting daycare one day a week on Dominica’s short day so that they can get some exposure to other kids.

Dominica was exhausted today after her first day back at work yesterday and then being busy last night.  It really wore her out.  I had to get up and get into the office early-ish today as I have a lot going on and I need to be proactive.

My morning stuff that I had planned got rescheduled to this afternoon, pheww.  I was just too busy to do anything else this morning.

It turns out that all of my work last night did not get me anywhere so no email today.  This is getting stressful.  I am not good at being out of contact for any length of time.

After work I came home and we just spent the evening relaxing.  And by relaxing, that meant me with the laptop working until after midnight.  I got a lot of time with the girls, though, and we managed to finish watching the seventh season of How I Met Your Mother.  I can’t believe how long that show has been on!  It still seems like a relatively new show to me.  Not having normal television really skews your perspective on shows and seasons.

Later on we watched some of the eleventh season of Family Guy and got the kids off to sleep.

Today is a huge day for the Miller family.  Dominica was up before six o’clock this morning so that she could get ready and get in to her new job that started this morning at seven.  It is great that she managed to get a great new job right down the street.  It is only a few blocks away.  So she left right about seven.  I got up right after she left and showered so that I would be ready to handle working a full day, getting ready for a presentation this evening and watching Liesl and Luciana all day.  This will be quite the day for all of us.

I got set up in the office and started working before either of the girls got up.  Luciana was the first up and she came out and played either in my office or around the house quietly to herself for much of the morning before Liesl got up.  It is good to get to see her doing her personal time, I almost never get to see this.

We did pretty well today, the girls and I.  They were quiet and played together most of the day and were very good about allowing me to work when I needed to.  Because it is Monday it is decently quiet at work so getting time with them wasn’t too bad.  We had a really nice time being able to be together all day just us.  It is pretty rare that we get to do that.  They were both so good all day.

I spoke to Dominica throughout the morning.  Pretty exciting that she is at her “new job” now.  It was going pretty well this morning.  She wanted to do some testing so had me set up a VM for her to do a test deployment at home (thank goodness for Technet subscriptions and a large Drobo B800i SAN device!)  She came home at eleven for about half an hour.  Saw the girls, did the test deployment and ran back to work.  Very nice that she is able to come home so easily.  That really makes the job nice.  Everyone is really nice there too, they are putting her at ease and she has a lot of work to do lined up that is just basic “setup” work so she is very comfortable as she has a really good roadmap of work for the month of December.

I was very busy all day trying to balance the tons and tons of work that needs to be done with helping Dominica while she is at work.  Thank goodness that we got things moved and that she has Lync on her phone now, that really makes things easy.  She is able to reach me quickly all day.

Danielle’s computer died and we just cannot get it to work so she ran over to Jeremy’s and got a computer that he had there to try that one.  But that one, too, is not working.  What a pain.

As soon as Dominica got home from work I jumped in the shower and we took the kids to the Carrollton Public Library at Josey Ranch Lake where Chris and I are giving a business seminar this evening.

We got there early and took the girls around to see the library.  Liesl has been scared all day.  We are not sure why.  Maybe anxiety over going someplace new?  Maybe something having to do with going to a library and she thinks that she will be expected to read or something like that?  We aren’t really sure.  We have been talking to her all day about it and she just keeps saying that she is scared.  It might have something to do with needing to be quiet with which she has some major issues.

Once we were in the library, though, Liesl had a very good time, as did Luciana.  Dominica spent the time with them in the children’s area which was really nice.  They got to look at books, play with the toys and just relax and have a nice time.  We really like the library and it is so close to us.

Chris and I, mostly Chris, got things set up and waited.  We ended up having…. no one… show up for the seminar.  Not too surprising really.  Weird time, venue and even topic.  I was skeptical but it was worth the effort to see if it worked at all.  It didn’t, but a good learning experience and relatively inexpensive.

So we got out early and Dominica and I went to the Subway at Josey Ranch to pick up some dinner and went back home and watched more of How I Met Your Mother Season 7.  We watched until Dominica needed to go to bed, which was only five minutes after Liesl went to bed, and I went to work to get more done as there just is not enough time in the day.  I had been working from my laptop all evening but went into my office to be more productive.

I am starting to get the hang of Windows 8 and, as a power user, it really isn’t bad.  But for end users, it must be awful.  Honestly, without knowing how to use the command line, I have no idea how a normal user is supposed to even turn the computer off.  All normal options, the ones that you desperately need, are missing.  For me it is easy, because I’ve always used the command line to turn Windows machines off, so it is not all that unnatural.  But a normal user must be completely lost.

I ended up working until four in the morning.  What a long night.  I am trying to get access to my new email and it is really hard because of the way that it works.  So I tried one thing after another all evening and finally resorted to building a new SSL-Explorer server.  I haven’t used one of those in years.

So it was an exhausting night and I finally managed to get to bed at four in the morning.  That was less than ideal.  Tomorrow is going to be rough.

After yesterday’s crazy day of email migrations and other work, today was a lot more tame.  Still a lot of work being done and both Dominica and I were busy for much of the day but we were able to spend most of it out in the play room with the girls and quite a bit of the day we put on the seventh season of How I Met Your Mother which only just released to Netflix and we saw just how far through the series we could get.

Today I completed the migration of my HP Folio 13 laptop to Windows 8 as well as the migration of my HP dc5850 desktop to Windows 8.  Both went smoothly, the laptop had a little hiccup from some of the pre-installed software but that was about it.  Everything went well and I now have Windows 8 on all of my main machines.  Not my first choice for an operating system but it will do the trick and I will be that much farther ahead of everyone in being used to it.  It does seem to run really well on the bare hardware, at least.