Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 282, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

Another day, another pound lost!  Yay.  I was very excited to discover that for the second day in a row that I had weighed in down another pound.  I won’t keep that up for long but I have just four pounds left to go before I hit my original target weight with Medifast so I am really anxious to get to that mark and move on to my “extra” weight loss beyond what we had originally planned.

I worked from home this morning at Liesl’s request last night.  She asked if I would stay home “a little bit”.  She loves it when I stay home.  Dominica and the girls were packed and out the door a few minutes before ten in the morning so I worked until they left and then went in to the office myself.

For lunch Nicki and I went to Brookhaven and ate there.  My lunch was quite devoid of protein as the closest thing to protein was pan fried eggplant which was very tasty but not a lean, protein meal. I hope that I don’t have to pay for that tomorrow when I weigh in at Medifast.

I had nothing on the schedule for this evening.  I did some work and got my new Linux development server built.  I am hoping to be doing some Ruby on Rails work this weekend and I wanted a new development server on which to get it all installed and set up.  My development server is an OpenSuse 12.1 text-only server.  I also plan on firing up a Git repository server to use for version control of my code.  In the last year or two everyone seems to have migrated from Subversion as the version control system of choice to Git so I want to give it a try and learn how to use it.

Oreo was not too happy about his lonely day today.  I had a bit of cleaning up after him to do, if you know what I mean.

Medifast Status: Day 281, Down ~75.5lbs (24.5lbs to go)

Another pound down.  I am feeling like I am in the home stretch now.  Past the 75% mark of my total hoped-for loss.  Seeing weight come off day to day again is awesome.

Normal day in the office for me today.  Came home at lunch and we ate at the house.  We were supposed to go to a new member reception at Brookhaven tonight but neither of us really felt like taking the effort.  So we think that likely we will skip that tonight and just stay in.

The afternoon was kind of busy and I did not get home until a little on the late side.  Luciana was already in bed and we thought that she had gone down to sleep for the night but it turned out that she got up later on in the evening and stayed up pretty late hanging out with her daddy.

There has been a change of plans and Dominica and the girls are packing tonight and leaving for Houston around the time that I leave for the office in the morning.  So they are going to be down there for four days.

We watched most of one episode of Up All Night but could not even make it through the pilot due to there being so much to do.  Dominica was doing laundry and packing.  I got called and had to work for several hours.  It ended up being a rather frantic night, in reality.

When I put Liesl to bed this evening she asked me to read her the same book that we read last night , “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel“, because she really liked it.  I am so glad that she likes that book.  I have such fond memories of that one from being Liesl’s age myself.

Medifast Status: Day 280, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

In the office today.  I accidentally left the house this morning without getting my morning hug and kiss from Liesl and she was horribly upset.  She ran after me but I did not hear her and she waved to be out of the living room windows.  Dominica said that she cried for forty-five minutes.

I have been doing really well on my diet for a few days now.  I can feel that I am getting back into groove and I am feeling good.  I am really liking the new ab workout roller thing that Dominica bought for me this weekend.  It really works out the muscles under my rib cage and I can feel the burn.  She got me dumbbells as well.  I am trying to do some weight training to tone up as that is critical now that I am doing so well on losing the weight.

I came home at lunch and Dominica made her cauliflower soup which is one of my favourite meals.  I cannot get over how much I like eating that and yet it is so incredibly healthy.  And it is easy to make too, she says.  It is like the miracle food.

Another quiet evening at home.  I had some work to do so we really didn’t watch anything tonight.  The kids were both in bed very early.  I barely get to see Luciana during the week because she often sleeps during my lunch hours, she doesn’t wake up in the morning until after I leave and sometimes she goes to bed within an hour of me getting home at night.  🙁  I can’t wait until her sleep schedule is more like Liesl’s so that we get more time together.

Dominica decided that she wanted to take a nap this evening as she was really exhausted.  She ended up falling asleep and staying asleep all night.  She was asleep as much as thirty minutes before I managed to get Liesl to bed!

Liesl and I read another classic from my childhood tonight: “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.”  This is one of the stories that I remember from my childhood best.  I loved this book and I am sure that dad still has my original copy kicking around somewhere.  The book is actually from 1939 so Liesl might be the third generation in our family with this book.  I wonder if my parents read this one when they were little.  I can still remember mom reading Mike Mulligan to me and I totally remember the entire story now that I read it to Liesl.  This book, like the one that we read last night, really stuck in my mind because of the illustrations that went with them.  Just looking at the pictures as we read really brings the memories flooding back.  Liesl really like the story of Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne, his steam shovel, and how they deal with the coming of the new, more modern types of shovels.

I spent the evening and well into the night working on the DL145 server that I got powered up last night.  It is running well, thus far, and I wanted to make it usable today.  I needed to get a monitor on it and Dominica had the only analogue monitors in the house so I had to take them from her desk to use there.  So while I had the desk cleaned off I took the time to actually clean it getting all of the food and papers and pens and knick knacks that collect there off and to then clean and disinfect the desk.  I also installed some speakers for her that she had been wanting but had not gotten around to plugging in.

I got the server working without a problem.  I was surprised by how out of date the operating system was.  I could have sworn that it was a lot more recent than that.  It was running OpenSuse 11.4 which is two versions behind.  So I got it updated to OpenSuse 12.1 and Xen 4.1.  I am looking forward to being able to work with both of those.  I am happy with how little noise the server is making and how well it is able to run in the server closet without affecting me when I work in the office.  And the server room is not done.  On the long “to do” list is to replace the paper thin, hollow door that is there now with something filled with foam to seriously deaden the remaining noise.  That will make a big difference.  I will likely get acoustic panels and apply some in the server room as well to absorb even more noise.

It was pretty late when I got to bed.  Maybe two or three in the morning.

Medifast Status: Day 279, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

I went into the office this morning.  I’ve been reading Janet Evanovich’s sixth book in the Stephanie Plum adventure series, “Hot Six.”  I will be done with it very soon.  I am only one dozen titles behind in the series now.

I came home late for lunch today and decided to just stay home and work from there this afternoon.  No one needed me at the office and there is always so much to do at the house.  Liesl and Luciana are always very happy when I stay home even if they do not get a lot of chance to see me during that time.

We did a little cleaning in the house today.  My office especially is making good progress towards not being the disaster that it has been.  Still a lot more to do, but we are making progress.

What we really need to do is to paint the living room.  We have a major SpiceCorps event that is going to happen at our house in two weeks and we really want to get the living room painted before that.  And then the day after that my dad is coming down to visit so there is no chance to paint between the two events.  There is not much time to accomplish all of that between now and then, however.  The living room is the last major area of the house needing fresh paint.

I ended up working late this evening on lots of little projects.  The big one is attempting to get the server room up and running.  It has been sitting there for so long without being used except as our wiring closet and handling the one little Netgear ReadyNAS that I have stored in there.  I got one of the HP Proliant DL145 G3 units racked, stacked and powered on but did not get around to actually working on it.  I will leave that task for tomorrow.  This is my OpenSuse/Xen server platform for the house.

Tonight I started reading longer form stories for Liesl.  Traditionally we have been reading pretty short books from people like Sandra Boynton.  We would read several but each was very, very short with very little story.  Liesl is ready for something longer.   So tonight we starting reading some classics from my own childhood.  My dad bought Liesl a lot of books for her birthday and in there were a lot of classics.  The shorter ones, like the Little Golden Books, I have been introducing for a while but now we went on to books that I remember my mother reading to me when I was very little.  Liesl really liked that.

Medifast Status: Day 278, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

Liesl was much better today.  And after yesterday being a day without electronics today she used them very little even though she was no longer grounded and allowed to use them as usual.  She watched almost nothing all day and only used her LeapPad a little bit.

We didn’t do a whole lot today.  A little cleaning, a little exercising, a little just relaxing with the family.  Very low key day.

I ran out to Fry’s early this afternoon and did a little shopping.  I was there to get a power line conditioner that we need for the server room in the house.  The power has always been a problem there and Art thought that getting a line conditioner would clean it up enough to eliminate the problems.  I saw that Fry’s carried what we needed so I ran down there to get it so that I could start using the servers in the house.

On my way back from Fry’s I stopped off at Rockfish and picked up dinner.  Our meal from there is often mahi mahi in a mushroom sauce for Dominica and cedar plank salmon for myself.  Delicious.  We generally get the volcano shrimp appetizer as well to split.  It is a bit of cheating on our diet but not all that bad, all things considered.  What it is is way too expensive as Rockfish is nearly twice the cost of eating at the country club.  The country club costs about the same as just getting groceries and eating at home.  Rockfish, while not expensive, is quite expensive in comparison.

This evening Dominica decided to turn in early while I, for once not feeling tired, decided that I was going to stay up and tackle the last large project that has been sitting on my plate for sometime.  A Ruby on Rails project where the company that had original made the code and left it in a non-working state and had been unable to fix it themselves.  Not the kind of project that I typically do.

It has really been years since I have done work like this.  Back in 1994 and 1995 I spent the bulk of my workload pouring over other people’s Fortran 77 and C code looking for problems.  Not generally the most fun form of work.  It takes a lot of effort to learn someone else’s code and it is no small matter attempting to “load” that code into your brain, get a handle on how it works and then know it well enough, along with knowing how to code well enough, to repair the problem.

The disadvantage of not being the original coder is significant as I don’t know what they intended to do necessary, I don’t have access to their documentation, I don’t have the kind of time that they had or anything.  All I am doing is working from something that doesn’t work and attempting to make it into something that does work.  It is not the same as repairing something that once worked and returning it to a known state.  This is about taking something that never worked and making it do what it was intended to do, very different.  It is not a repair job, it is picking up an engineering project partway through without the resources that the original engineer had.

I ended up working solid on this coding project for many hours.  It turned out that there was a “secret” second, remote database being used that I had been told nothing about and to which I had no access so I could only derive its contents and structure from looking at bits of the code that I assumed were working properly.  I had to pull many crazy tricks like manually editing the database to create my own user so that I could test the system.

At around three in the morning I was finally able to get to the bottom of the problem and it was all resolved!  That’s an awesome feeling.  There were big obstacles to overcome and I pulled it off.  This is when IT is a lot of fun.  When you are given a serious challenge and the ability to just focus on it for a while until it is completed.  It is a real sense of accomplishment.