Sheep Guarding Llama

I managed to wake up without an alarm before seven this morning.  That was pretty amazing considering that I went to bed late and have been getting up around eight or later for over a week.  My BlackBerry, which had been set as my alarm, died during the night.  It is a year and a half old and the battery is just about shot.  I am very lucky to get one real day of use out of it.  So almost every weekday I take it to work and plug it in at my desk to charge it and then run it down in between.  Not as useful as it used to be.  Now that Verizon has the iPhone I am seriously considering getting one of those when I reup as Dominica’s Droid X is not very impressive in comparison to my iPod.  The BlackBerry devices have not kept pace and all and I need something a lot more advanced and reliable.  The rollerball on my BlackBerry is completely useless – you can’t reliably select anything.

I got in to work at eight which is pretty early.  I was quite productive this morning.  I grabbed coffee and a danish at the cafeteria and ate at my desk.

At a quarter till eleven I ran back up to Carrollton so that I could be at the house to meet with our landscaper who was coming by to give us a quote on our disaster of a lawn.  I was a little late but there in plenty of time to be able to talk to him and find out what he was thinking.

We need to put in new drainage.  That much is clear.  The yard fills up with water and it just sits there.  That isn’t good.  Even in a very light rain we could take little sailboats out beside the house and sail them around over half of the space there.

The landscaper liked the idea of putting in a patio running alongside the house between our house and the one that we are hoping (but not hopeful) to buy shortly.  That entire side of the house does not get enough sun to support grass and so the plan, we think, is to put in flagstones and make it a complete outdoor seating and entertaining area.  It would be awesome to have places to go and hang out outside.  Oreo loves being able to just lay outside for long periods of time and if he had some actually comfortable outside furniture he could just stay out there baking in the sun without getting over exposed to the grass to which he is allergic.  We need a comfortable place for us to sit while Liesl plays in the yard too.  We hope to be able to be outside quite a bit with this new house.

The backyard needs sod.  A lot of it.  No question there.  We currently really have no grass.  It is awful.  We need to dig out and remove a good chunk of soil that appears to have become “salted” from the runoff from the water softener too.  A load of soil needs to be brought in as well to fill in the gaps and bring the yard up a little bit as it is too low at the moment.

We want the bushed that are blocking the windows of the den to be removed.  They aren’t the best bushes and they are just in the way making it darker than necessary in the house.  We might leave some of the other bushes.  We will see.  Dominica really does not like them.  The trees are absolutely staying, though.  We might add a tree to the front of the house.  It wouldn’t block our view or sunlight from the windows but it would, eventually, shade the living quarters of the house a little bit from the southern exposure and would, eventually, lower the cooling cost of the house and add some interest to the front of the house.

The existing flower bed he had some ideas about switching from the old, crappy wooden box into something curved and made of rocks that would be a lot more attractive.  An actual garden piece rather than the box of clay dirt that it is now.  We will need something done with the flower box on the front of the house too.  We actually have a fair amount of “garden” space around the house that all needs to be addressed.

The last big thing is that we need a new irrigation system as the old one is broken or possibly just missing altogether.  We’ve never really seen any trace of it so we aren’t completely convinced that it actually exists.

He is getting us a quote together and we should know more tomorrow evening.  We are very excited to get some of these big projects moving.  The garage, yard and atrium are the big three that are driving us crazy until they are done.  The atrium being clearly the third place project there.  Until we manage to get it done, we can just ignore it.  But the house is full of boxes that need the garage to be completed in order to be put away and it is really cutting into our space.

I spoke to our contractor at lunch and he is planning to come over this evening so that we can look into getting the garage project started right away.  I hope to be able to work on the indoor gardening this evening as well.  I’m very anxious to get our new plants into place.  We have two nice, large pots to place in the living room and by the front door.  Until we get all of the plants done they are just sitting in the entrance way.

The afternoon at the office was kind of busy.  On my commute today I am continuing to listen to “Pirate Hunter”, the biography of Captain Kidd which continues to be pretty interesting.  It is a very long book.

I got home at six and our contractor was over around seven.  We went around the garage and figured out mostly what needs to be done and the plan that he is going to go over to the house tomorrow afternoon to get started a little after lunch.  Hopefully we can get this all completed very soon.  We are quite excited to have this start tomorrow.

My project for tonight is to empty the garage.  No small task.  So after dinner and watching a few episodes of Big Bang Theory: Season 1 with the family I set to clearing out the garage.  Dominica came out and helped for a while too, especially with the lighter stuff and getting all of the foodstuffs out of the extra fridge so that we are prepared to unplug and relocate it to some place where it will not be so much in the way.  Although I have no idea where it might fit after this.

It took a few hours to get the garage cleaned out.  What a job that was.  I listened to my book for most of the time that I was working.

It was around midnight when I was all done.  Liesl was busying herself watching her new video Leap Frog Letters or something like that.  It is a video for learning the letters and the sounds that they make.  She loves it thus far.  She watched it four times just tonight and already knows the songs and sounds!  She already knew her letters but this is really great.

We put Liesl to bed and Dominica and I watched a little bit of Big Bang Theory again to give me a chance to relax after the exertion.  It was pretty late, after one, when we finally went to bed.

In theory we are supposed to hear back about the house next door tomorrow.  But we aren’t holding our breathe.

Today is housework day.  Originally I was going to be running a UNIX class today but that ended up getting canceled as it was tough on everyone’s schedules.

Before I knew that we were canceling the class today, I got up and worked on Solaris for two hours.  I had meant to sleep in a little more than I did but was paged out by the office at eight in the morning and once I was up I just decided to stay up and to be productive.

I went on to do some serious house cleaning once Dominica and Liesl were awake.  There is a lot of cleaning that always needs to be done.  We did vacuuming – which alone probably took an hour as there was vacuum maintenance to do as well.  And there was at least thirty or forty minutes of down on my hands and knees floor scrubbing with the Little Green.  That never seems to end.  I wind up doing a full cleaning of at least one portion of the carpet on any given day.

I did a little of the dishes then Dominica jumped in and cleaned the kitchen.  The house is looking really good after about two or three hours of solid cleaning.  Feels good to get all of that done.

Jen came over at one because we had failed to convey quickly enough that the class was canceled for today so she was just in time to head on over to IHOP with Dominica, Liesl and I.  So we got lunch and then Jen went back down to the apartment while the Millers headed out to do some serious shopping.  This was our chance to get out and do some shopping that we always need to do and never manage to do.

Our first destination of Academy to try to get some shoes for me.  We ended up getting lost because Dominica was navigating and the GPS took us to the right address in the wrong city.  So we wound up in a really bad part of Dallas while trying to get out to the suburbs.  Oops.

We eventually found Academy and ended up getting quite a haul.  I got two pairs of shoes, two pairs of jeans, a new belt, new wallet and both Dominica and I got new UT slippers to wear around the house.  I have been pretty desperate for new shoes, jeans and belt for about a year or more now.  My old shoes have been in shambles for years now; they are completely falling apart.  I’ve been down to a single pair of jeans for months.  I have been without a belt since the Daddy Dance Off competition in Grapevine.  So this was some important shopping.

We found so much stuff at Academy that we were able to skip going to Casual XL Male on this particular trip which was nice as it was taking us a very long time to get back home.  On the way home we also went to Lowe’s as we had a $10 coupon that needed to be used.

At Lowe’s we bought several more plants, planters, potting soil and other associated indoor gardening paraphernalia.  We are working hard on getting some serious plant life in the new house.

Once we got home we got to work planting plants into the brick planters that separate the living room from the den area where Liesl plays.   We pulled out the ancient, dead whatever plants didn’t make it in there and discovered that the planters are actually incredibly deep, over a foot deep, and full of coil but had had potted plants just sat on top of the soil and some crap and newspapers shoved down in as filler.  It was awesome.

We dug out all of the pots, dead plants, moss, newspaper and more and got it cleaned out to just loose soil.  Then we added in most of a huge bag of Miracle Grow potting soil and transplanted two houseplants into the planter.  That was a bit of work but boy does it look better.  Having those planters full of dead grass and moss looked awful.  Having two, luscious and vibrant plants in there really shows why someone designed that planter in that way.  It looks great.

After doing the first planter we realized that we did not have enough soil to go on to do the second one.  So we decided to go back out to Walmart to get more soil since it was seven thirty at that point and Lowe’s was already closed as it is Sunday night.

It took about an hour to get back out of the house.  Liesl really didn’t want me to leave so we all decided to go out shopping again.  We got what we needed at Walmart and found another plant that we really liked and picked up a movie to watch later.  Then, on the way home, we stopped at Jack in the Box and picked up dinner.

Once we got home we ate dinner and watched Hot Tub Time Machine which Francesca had been raving about.  I had barely heard of it but it had John Cusack who is normally pretty good so we figured that we couldn’t go too wrong.  It was decent.  Not amazing but it was an entertaining movie.  Unfortunately it was not child friendly so we had to put Liesl to bed earlier than she might have wanted but she was pretty tired and did fall right asleep.

It was pretty late by the time that we were done with the movie and so instead of going back and working on the plants again we just decided to head off to bed.

I need to go to work early tomorrow morning as I am coming home early at lunch to meet with the landscaper who is coming to look at our yard and to work up a quote for us on getting our yard into shape.  We are really anxious to make it so that Liesl can actually go outside and play.  One of the big reasons that we bought a house was for Liesl to be able to go outside and, as of this point, the back yard has never been accessible to her.  It’s been cold, so it has been okay.  But pretty soon we are going to be very disappointed if she can’t go outside and play in her enclosed yard.

So you’ve downloaded Solaris 11 Express and you want to try out this awesome new Zones feature.  Zones is Solaris’ powerful virtualization environment and it has been around since Solaris 10 but things change slightly between editions.  In this tutorial we are going to create a very simple, basic zone and go from new install of Solaris 11 to a working Zone that you can access remotely via SSH.  If you don’t have a dedicated machine on which to run Solaris 11, don’t fret, you can do Zones virtualization on top of another virtualization environment.  In my case, I am running Solaris 11 on Oracle’s VirtualBox and then running Zones on top of there.

To get started, we need to create a ZFS mountpoint as Zones now relies on ZFS.  I like using the /zones mountpoint as it is pretty common and very straightforward.  You can, of course, use any mountpoint that you would like – /vm or /images are popular alternatives.  You can use different features, such as compression and deduplication as you feel are applicable for you as well.

zfs create -o mountpoint=/zones -o compression=on -o dedup=on rpool/zones

This should create your mountpoint.  Now we can begin configuring our first Zone.  For our example, we will simply call it myzone.  We will assume that we are on the 192.168.123.o/24 subnet and will add a single network interface that bridges onto this network.  This is a very simple example.  You could do many more advanced things with Zones.

zonecfg -z myzone

Once we run this command we will be dropped into the zonecfg configuration utility which we will use to set features for our zone.  First we will configure the location where the Zone files will be stored.  Generally we want to name this the same as our zone to avoid any confusion.

set zonepath=/zones/myzone

Now we can set our networking to share a connection with the base Solaris environment.  This is the most common scenario.

set ip-type=shared

Now we can add in a network connection.  For this we will need to know the name of the physical connection used in the base Solaris installation.  On my system this is called “e1000g0”.  I will statically set this new server to be 192.168.123.5/24.

add net

set address=192.168.123.5

set physical=e1000g0

set defrouter=255.255.255.0

end

And that is all that we need for a basic configuration.  Now we just need to verify and commit these settings and we are ready to being.

verify

commit

exit

If all has gone well, we can now install and boot our new Zone for the very first time.

zoneadm -z myzone install

zoneadm -z myzone boot

Excellent, we already have a Zone up and running.  Now to enable SSH so that we can reach the machine remotely.

zlogin myzone “svcadm enable ssh”

zlogin myzone “svcadm restart ssh”

To complete the setup of our Zone it will be necessary to log at the console.  This will allow you to step through the setup process as well as to add a user with which you can connect over SSH since the root user is banned from logging in remotely.

zlogin -C myzone

We slept in a little this morning, just until nine thirty.  Liesl’s schedule has been drifting later and later and we have been getting less and less sleep because of it.  Today was our catchup day and as long as Liesl stayed asleep, so did we.

So it was a bit of a rush to get out of the door this morning as we are heading down to Mansfield to hang out with the family.  It is one of Liesl’s second cousin’s birthdays so we are heading down for that.

We had to make a quick pitstop at Walmart for card and gift.  Dominica was on top of things but didn’t want to send me to pick these things up last night as that would be too stressful for me after work to try to make these kinds of decisions.  Best to have her do it today.

It worked out, time wise, as she was able to shop at Walmart while Liesl and I made a quick run back to the house to pick up some stuff that we had forgotten to put into the car.  So it wasn’t wasted time.

We hung out with the family for probably around three hours.  Liesl had an awesome time.  She has gotten completely comfortable now with her second cousins and she just leaves us immediately to go play with them.  There are some older girls that have the best time with her and she, as always, loves having older girls around.  They played with a doll house and explored the house and they even got her outside for quite a long time playing soccer!

It was so adorable watching Liesl run around the yard with the bigger kids chasing the soccer ball.  She loves getting to play with them and being part of the group.  This is so good for her.  Boy is she going to sleep tonight.  She got some serious exercise today.

As we were leaving, Debbie gave us a huge dollhouse for Liesl.  It has never really seen any use and Liesl just loves it.

We got home and put Liesl down for her nap.  She was asleep in the car on the way home too.  The ride is just long enough that she nearly always falls asleep going to and from Mansfield.

The afternoon was pretty empty.  We mostly puttered around. Later on Souder stopped by to drop off my new eight foot ladder and some boxes of Cat5e cabling.  He didn’t hang out for long.  Just dropped stuff off and headed home to sleep.

Watson and Grey came by shortly thereafter and hung out for the evening.  Grey was originally returning to Denver today but had to push his flight off until tomorrow so has tonight off.  We all decided to be adventurous for dinner and discovered an interesting Pakistani restaurant and grocery not far away that does some very brisk business.  We were going to eat there but they were so busy that we had to get the food to go as there were no seats available.  The food was very good though, and very cheap.  We will be back there a bunch, I’m sure.  And great to have a Pakistani and Indian grocery right around the corner.  Very handy.

I did a bit of work on getting Solaris Express 11 up and running.  I ended up working late into the night, until three in the morning, working on Solaris 11 installs, ZFS and Zones stuff to get ready for the class tomorrow.

It is a very cold morning again today in Texas.  This whole week has been quite cold.

I came out into the living room this morning and ever since Dominica took down Liesl’s play hut thing that has dominated the living room the whole space seems so much nicer.  Instead of the “den” being all dark and full of stuff it is not bright and open and most of the stuff in it is pushed out of main view.  The whole public area of the house seems nicer now.  Dominica commented to the same effect last night.

This morning we are waiting to hear about the house although, now that it has gone into a protracted “wait for the bid to be selected” stage we have mostly written it off.  We are assuming that we are not getting it and probably won’t hear about it too promptly.  There were more people out looking at the house this morning.  It has garnered a lot of interest, suddenly.  More people have looked at it this week than have in the months since we started looking at our own house.  Of course, the only angle from which to see the house is from our yard so all of these people trying to get this house instead of us check it out standing in our front yard.

Lunch time rolled around and we did not hear anything about the house.  Since the offers closed at eleven I can only assume that they have been contacting the winners and that that is not us.

After lunch we were contacted by the bank looking for some additional information on our offer for the house.  So apparently we are not completely out of the running.  Although maybe with our answer we are.  Now they are hoping to know something by around Tuesday.  So now we have a fun weekend of waiting to see what has happened.

Of course, on top of not knowing about the house being fun enough, not knowing about the house also impacts our financial situation so we are waiting to begin projects on our existing house while we try to figure out how are finances look in the short term.  Buying a house requires some amount of capital to be in place and ready so we don’t want to overcommit ourselves.  Fun fun.

Lunch was at Rockfish today.  I haven’t been there in a while.

Afternoon was quite busy but worked started to wrap up on the early side and by six I was able to roll out of the office which is great for a Friday.  And very little scheduled for tomorrow either.

Dominica decided to send me out shopping on my way home.  So off to Lowe’s and Walmart I go.

The shopping went pretty quickly.  I picked up the needed supplies and we now have the LED lightbulbs that we need to be able to replace the bulbs that had all burnt out in the hallway, which is very annoying as we use those lights all of the time.  Of course, when I went to change them, we discovered that our stepstool was loaned out and we can’t reach them.

We have  an appointment scheduled on Monday morning with a landscaper to look at our back yard.  It is a total disaster right now – nothing but mud and clumps of clay.  There is barely a patch of real grass and nothing worth keeping.  We need the entire area completely overhauled from top to bottom.  It’s not going to be cheap but it is really making living there tough because except on frozen or very dry, very sunny days it is nothing but a mud pit and we have to give Oreo a quick bath after every trip in or out.  And we can’t pick up anything that he deposits out there because there is so much mud that we can’t go back there ourselves because we have no way to clean up that volume of mud.

We aren’t entirely sure of what we want to do with the yard yet.  Mostly we just want it leveled, drained and sodded.  From there we will figure out what else needs to be done.  We would really like Liesl to be able to go out and play and Oreo to safely be able to walk around and to just be able to enjoy it rather than not wanting to look at the horrid mess.  And we definitely want the two bushes blocking the windows in the den area to be removed as they do nothing but block the light which is not very smart.

This evening we just hung out at the house and watched a made for television Hillary Duff movie Beauty and the Briefcase, I believe it was called.  Not a good movie.  I’d skip it.

We were off to bed at a reasonable time tonight!  UNIX training, originally scheduled for tomorrow, has been postponed.  We will be attempting to do it on Sunday instead.