April 1, 2011: April Fool on Me

My morning was really busy and because of that I did not even realize that there was a global April Fool’s joke being played on me.  My day started out super early as today is Non-Farm Payroll Friday and I have to be physically at the office by around seven in the morning.  That meant that I was up around six which is way, way too early for me especially with how busy we have been recently.  I just am not getting any sleep.

We’ve also been struggling with Liesl a lot recently.  She has decided that she no longer wants to sleep in her own bed but wants to sleep with us instead.  She traditionally has always been really good about sleeping by herself and would only come sleep with us once in a while – usually when she was not feeling well.  This is extra tough because Dominica is determined to not have her sleep with us except on special occasions which results in us going through a fight to get her to sleep and then dealing with her screaming a few hours later.  So we go to bed later, then get woken up and eventually she ends up sleeping with us anyway.  So the process is not working out and in a few weeks she is going to go through so much disruption that nothing we do now will matter anyway.

So the big April Fools joke.  Apparently this was thought up by Grey some months ago and he has been plotting this one and getting everyone ready to go long ahead of time.  He came up with it while working with Souder in Dallas around January.  There is this well known picture of me, one that I took of myself leaning on my one hand and in black and white.  I took it in the Newark apartment and liked it so I have been using it as my head shot ever since and it appears on SpiceWorks and in my online publications.

So what Grey did was have people – lots of people – from all over SpiceWorks, Twitter, FaceBook, FourSquare and other social media sites change their avatars to be headshots of themselves in the same position, in black and white.  A very subtle joke that I did not catch on to right away.  Had I not been so swamped with work this morning I might have noticed.  I did notice that Andy in London and Bob in Kansas City had changed their avatars but just two people was not enough for me to put two and two together (technically you need at least four cases for that to happen.)

I managed to have breakfast with Souder today at Panera and he finally pointed out what was going on because I hda no idea what he was laughing about.  Once I realized that it was going on I found thread after thread of people talking about it and as I started to look at people avatars I realized how many there were.  Very funny stuff.

There were even some collages put together by the end of the day of all of the people in the SpiceWorks community that had made the change and posted in certain threads.  Surprisingly, Souder never posted in that thread and so never made it in to the collage even though he had changed his avatar the night before.

It was a very cool “prank” and definitely feels good to see so many people taking the time out to pull this one over on me.  It is really impressive how well it ended up working out.  That was a lot of people to coordinate.

This was, in a way, a continuation of the multiple Scott Alan Millers joke that was played on me at SpiceCorps Houston a couple of years ago.

March 31, 2011: Racking and Stacking

It is rare that I actually get a chance to go and do some old school rack and stack work but after work today I was given my first chance in many years.  The day itself was normal.  In the office, blah blah blah.  Work has become a bit boring, as I think might be obvious in my posts.  It is pretty much the same thing, day in and day out.  It’s fine, just nothing to talk about.  I don’t go home and talk about work either.  Very little ever happens at work these days.

Around a quarter to six I ran over and met Souder to begin the racking work for the evening.  He was there maybe twenty minutes ahead of me.  We looked at how much work there was to be done and realized that there is a ton more than we had originally anticipated and I had not managed to get any lunch today as I was just too busy so we ran over to Rockfish and grabbed dinner before starting work.  It was a really nice evening so we sat outside on the patio while we got dinner.

We ate quickly and were back working on moving the equipment in no time.  I had originally thought that we were just moving a server, plugging it in and taking off.  Twenty minutes tops.  Why oh why do I imagine that anything could go that way?

We had to reconfigure a rack, move tons of equipment that was in the way – including networking hardware with lots and lots of connections, a server and more.  The big item was moving a large UPS which is never fun.  We used wooden rails on the floor, a dolly, etc.  When we plugged the UPS back in we had the excitement of it actually exploding!  There were real flames a bit of the back of the unit actually hit me.  Now that isn’t the type of excitement that you get every day.

It ended up taking all evening to get everything done.  Of course, as with any simple little project, there was some huge disaster.  That one tonight was the main server not being able to restart after the move!  The motherboard appears to have partially died and we got stuck spending a lot of time trying to get that up and running again so that people could work in the morning.  Fun.

We were quite  exhausted when we finally got back to the house.

March 30, 2011: Club Day

For lunch today I had a meeting at La Cima so I got to go over and have lunch there.  It has been weeks since I have had a chance to eat over there from what I can remember.    It was nice to get over there.  I miss it when I am gone for too long.

My big event was a young professionals meet up at the Dallas Tower Club this evening – so today ended up being a double club day for me.  I almost never get a chance to go to downtown Dallas even though it is only minutes away and I look at it every day.  Although I go far, far more often than Dominica does.  In fact, now that I think about it, I can only think of one occasion when Dominica has gone in to the city at all.  She did the same thing when we lived in New York City – she may have gone in to the city no more than five times in the years that we lived there even though I worked in the city every day.

The Tower Club was awesome.  It has been renovated far more recently than has La Cima and it is much larger and higher up on the forty-eighth floor on the Thanksgiving Tower.  It has one of the most commanding views of the city of Dallas.  In 1982 it was the second tallest building in the city and is now the eighth.  It is around the twentieth tallest in the state at 635 feet, fifty stories.  It is amazing seeing Dallas from up so high – it is not the developed city that you imagine.  Looking to the east you really get a sense of the city just stopping.  It just drops off, very weird for such a massive city.

After the networking event we stayed at the club and had dinner there.  It’s good to be a member!  This is my first time, after being a Club Corp member for a year, of taking advantage of a different club other than La Cima.  It was really easy and a lot of fun to get to check out a different crowd.  The Tower Club is far more lively than La Cima – quite a different feel.  And they are much more lounge oriented rather than La Cima that really focuses on the dinning room.

I went home via the “backroads” winding through Dallas to the north.  It gave me a chance to experience Highland Park which is absolutely amazing.  I had no idea that there was an area like that in Dallas.  Very nice indeed.