Sheep Guarding Llama

I found one of the best YouTube videos ever, the Mippey5 answer to Katy Perry and Snoop Dog’s California Gurls: Minnesota Gurls.  You can get the lyrics here.  Midwest represent!

Another day alone.  Actually, it turns out, that I was not too clear on my schedule and, in fact, this weekend is my only weekend at home alone.  Next weekend I will be traveling, alone still, but not sitting around at home all by myself.  I will most likely be leaving on Friday evening to get somewhere and then start the real run for Annapolis on Saturday morning.  If all goes well that will put me in Maryland early on Sunday morning giving me lots of spare time before having to get up very, very early on Monday morning to drive out to Sterling, Virginia to meet the Ralstons as they are coming in from the Congo.  From there it will be a brisk drive north to Pavilion.  The trip from Sterling to Pavilion takes long than it seems because Sterling is in the middle of the major highways leaving me with the only good option of taking the much slower, but quite scenic, US15 through Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on my way up to Harrisburg before I join the main highways.  It has been many years since I have taken the Gettysburg route.  In some ways it still feels fresh to me but likely it has been eight years!  Yes another sign that I am getting older.

Again today was mostly a work day for me.  I have a lot of hours to recoup this week so I spent much of the day working on that.  It ended up being a rather busy day at the office so I was doing quite a bit of work.

In addition to doing work for the office I also wrong a seven thousand word paper on virtualization and managed to make the paired PowerPoint presentation and record myself reading the entire paper, in conjunction with the PowerPoint presentation with Expression Encoder 3.  It only took sixteen takes to record the thirty five minutes class.  That was a major project but I think that it turned out pretty well.  That took many hours of work.

I managed to finish watched 100 Girls on YouTube.  That was a good movie.  It has been a while since I have stumbled on a movie that held my interest at all.  Of course starring Emmanuelle Chriqui, Katherine Heigl, Jaime Pressly and Larisa Oleynik doesn’t hurt.

I also took half an hour this evening and recorded the first podcast in almost two years.  I have not had time to get it posted yet but I hope to be able to do so soon.  I can’t believe that it has been almost exactly two years since I recorded the Walt Disney World recap for the May, 2008 trip that Dominica and I did while pregnant with Liesl!  It is amazing to think that I started podcasting five years ago!  I was very, very diligent about it before going to work at “the office” down in New Jersey but that was actually a very small window.  I started at the end of the summer in 2005 when I was well into my contract with Wegmans and I was in New Jersey by March of 2006.  I kept it up for a while, especially while living alone in North Brunswick, but it quickly became very difficult to maintain regularly.  I am working on getting the podcast posted but OurMedia, who used to host all of the media for SGL, deleted all of the content that all of us created over the years.  I’m not impressed.  So I am attempting to work with the Internet Archive directly.  So far their technology just keeps failing.  It appears to not have been updated in years.

Speaking of the Internet Archive, one of my favourite things is to check out the Way Back Machine and see how SGL looked over the years.  Check out SGL on the Wayback Machine.  Just click around to a few random dates over the years.  It is amazing to see how the site has changed from year to year.  It is hard to believe that I have been blogging for a decade now!  I was blogging when blogging wasn’t cool.  And then it was really cool.  And now it is not cool again. 🙂

It was pretty late by the time that I got off to bed.  I’ll be in the office tomorrow.  Good night blogosphere.  (Ha ha, whatever happened to that word?  And whatever happened to Technorati – that dysfunctional blog search engine that never parsed any blogs?)

I’ll be on the road to New York in under a week.  The Ralstons return to the new world in one week from tomorrow.

I slept in very late this morning.  I really needed it.  I was completely exhausted.  I’ve been getting very little sleep the last several days and I needed some time to recover.

Since I was completely unable to work yesterday during the day – I did work early in the morning and late at night – I really needed to put in some hours today.  So I started working as soon as I got up and was logged in to the office for much of the day.

It was mostly a quiet, boring day for me involving never leaving the house in any way except to pop downstairs to pick up the mail.  My new book on IPv6 routing arrived today which is great because I am hoping to have time to read it at the club this week.

I worked until six thirty when Jeff and Sarah swung by the apartment to pick me up.  Our plan was to stop by La Cima for drinks and then hit up Benihana for sushi.  But the allure of La Cima was too strong and dinner ended up being there instead.

The main dinning room was filled this evening so we ate in the lounge.  Lakeside was open for dinner but we started out thinking that we were just having drinks so we just camped out in the lounge.  It is rather easy to hang out there because you get a feel for who is coming and going.  Being in Lakeside means that you are mostly locked away.

Dinner was awesome, as always.  Tonight I went for the seared salmon with beet jus from the Celebrations healthy menu.  I would never have thought of doing salmon in beet jus on my own but I love it.  Especially when you flake the salmon and let it really soak in the beets.  My mother would be so proud.  I never liked beets when I was young but I love them now.  Especially beets with endive and warm goat cheese fondue!

After dinner the Pierces dropped me back off at the lonely apartment and I stayed up late working on DokuWiki training materials.  I started watching a movie, 100 Girls, that I found on YouTube tonight.  I only made it about thirty minutes in before YouTube wouldn’t play any further but it looked good so maybe I will attempt it again some time.  Lionsgate publishes a number of their movies to YouTube which is pretty cool.  I had the feeling that this was a newish movie but it is, in fact, from 2000!  You know that you are getting old when ten year old movies feel like they must be new.

This is a quick and dirty Ruby script that I threw together years ago to parse emails and jam their contents, line by line, into a MySQL database. It was originally written to handle NetGear firewall logs hence some of the nomenclature.  Very simple but it did the job quite well.  I’m posting it here as someone asked for an example implementation of doing this and I just found this sitting in the code repo.  The key variables are blanked out, just fill them in as needed.  This uses IMAP to connect to the mail server so be sure that IMAP is available.

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
#Netgear Log IMAP Connector by Scott Alan Miller, 0.3
require 'net/imap'
require 'mysql' 

# Connection Details
usessl      = true
certs       = nil
verify      = false
port        = "993"
server	    = ''
uname	    = ''
pass	    = ''
mbox	    = 'INBOX'
bbox	    = 'TRASH'
db_server   = ""
db_user     = ""
db_pass     = ""
db_name     = ""
subsearch   = ""

# Query Constructors
queryheader = "INSERT INTO events (date_received, subject, details) VALUES ('"
querypiece  = "', '"
queryfooter = "')"

system("echo [nglogger] $(date) Starting >> /var/log/nglogger.log")
imap = Net::IMAP.new(server, port, usessl, certs, verify)
imap.login(uname, pass)
#imap.examine(mbox)
imap.select(mbox)

system("echo [nglogger] $(date) Processing #{ imap.responses["EXISTS"]} Messages >> /var/log/nglogger.log")

# Process IMAP to MySQL Logging
dbsession = Mysql.real_connect(db_server, db_user, db_pass, db_name) # Create MySQL Connection
imap.search(["SINCE", "17-Jan-2008"]).each do |message_id|
	envelope = imap.fetch(message_id, "ENVELOPE")[0].attr["ENVELOPE"]
	msg = imap.fetch(message_id, "(UID RFC822.SIZE ENVELOPE BODY[TEXT])")[0]
	msgBody = msg.attr["BODY[TEXT]"]

   	msgBody.chomp!();
   	msgBody.split(/\n/).each do |msgLine|
		msgLine.chomp!();
                if msgLine != "" && msgLine != "End of Log ----------" && msgLine != nil
			msgLine.gsub!(/\'/, "")  # Remove single quotes from SQL Insert
			query = queryheader + envelope.date + querypiece + envelope.subject + querypiece + msgLine + queryfooter
			dbsession.query(query)
     		end
   	end
	imap.copy(message_id, bbox)  # Copy to Processed Folder
	imap.store(message_id, "+FLAGS", [:Deleted])
end
imap.expunge
system("echo [nglogger] $(date) Exiting After IMAP Expunge >> /var/log/nglogger.log")

I was pretty exhausted when the alarm went off at five thirty this morning.  I did not want to get out of bed at all.  I slowly got up and took a shower.  Then I napped on the floor for fifteen minutes before actually dragging myself out the door.   I had tried logging in to the office from home but there was some problem with my workstation so I was unable to get in.  I had some info that I needed before getting on to the road so I drove over to the office and logged in there and worked for a little bit, restarted my workstation and printed out the info that I needed.  Then it was on to the road to drive down to Austin.

I discovered just about immediately that my work BlackBerry was not working so I was not able to send or receive any emails.  Great.  So much for working from the road.  I also had a long conference call this morning but they never opened the conference bridge so that was a waste as well.  I had expected to have been able to have worked from the car while driving for that call since really I am just listening in and not actually participating in any significant way.

The drive down went fine until I needed the GPS in North Austin.  The BMW GPS, which is pretty useless at the best of times, is completely worthless in Austin.  It never knew what road I was on and kept trying to turn me into businesses rather than on roads.  It kept confusing the highway with the side roads and often would send me into nowhere.  We are so not impressed with BMW’s ability to make a guidance system.

It was around ten when I arrived at the SpiceWorks offices on the northwest side of Austin.  The party officially was to start at noon so I was a bit early.  The plan was that I was going to set up and work from the offices there.  I had my laptop and everything.  But the guest wireless system was not set up so I was really screwed – no computer, no BlackBerry and, just to make things worse, no cell service.  I knew that there was no phone service – we learned that the last time that we were here and Dominica was not able to reach us all afternoon.

So that was not a good start to the day at all.  Now I am out of commission all day and I need to get both my desktop and my BlackBerry fixed on Monday.  Argh.

The party was a lot of fun.  There was tons of food and I got interviewed on the live webcast.  Several people emailed me within seconds of seeing me on the webcast.  It was just a quick five minute interview about having won the Innovator of the Year award last year and what it meant to hit one million users, etc.  I also got interviewed by the camera crew for a documentary that they are doing.  No idea when that will be produced.  That was pretty cool.  That was like a real television shoot, more or less.  Lots of ligths, real cameras, a director, an interviewer, I was mic’d, etc.

I left Austin around six and drove back up to Irving.  I was after nine when I finally got back home.  I logged in to the office and worked until after midnight.  Getting done what I could.  At least I get to sleep in tomorrow so it isn’t so bad.  I’m going to be doing a lot of work over the weekend to make up for having lost so much time today.

Dominica, Francesca and the kids arrived in Frankfort around five.  The drive went pretty well for them today.  They are very tired now.

Dominica woke me up around five this morning to take Liesl and Oreo away.  Oreo was all snugly too, like he knew that he was leaving me.  I gave Liesl a kiss goodbye and they were out the door to get on to the road.  They have a lot of driving to do with a lot of people crammed into that vehicle.  I have a lot more driving to do than they do but their mileage is much, much harder.  They have to make a lot of stops with Clara being so young and neither Liesl nor Garrett is going to put up with all that much.  Plus they have Oreo too – who is a very good traveler but still.

I got up just a few minutes after they left and got ready for work and headed on into the office bright and early.  It is time to start being productive.  I really need to take advantage of this time while they are gone so that I can get caught up on all of the stuff that I need to do.  It is more rare for me to have so much time in which I have nothing to do but to work.  Can’t waste it!  It is going to be ten days before I see them again or maybe more.  We haven’t figured out the logistics of how we are meeting once I get the Ralstons up to New York.  I don’t even know where they are going to be at that point.  Neither they nor I have a car once we get to New York which is going to make a lot of things very, very difficult.  It is pretty silly that we are all driving up there with two cars and yet we have no car!

Work was okay.  I spent much of the day today writing Python which is a very nice change from the usual.  I have not actually worked in Python before.  I’ve written a hello world program and I’ve read books on Python and I’ve worked in many related languages like Perl, Ruby, etc.  So this is fun.  We are now using Python for Linux administration at the office – mostly because it is one of only two languages that are really options because they are the two that are installed on every box and it won out over the other, Perl, because it tends to result in code that is readable by anyone needing to verify or modify it whereas the Perl that we get, even from system administrators, tends to border on having been obfuscated.

For lunch today, Nicki and I went to La Cima.  I drove to work today anticipating a La Cima run.  The weather was great today, though, so I am sorry that I did not get a chance to walk instead.  I’m hoping that I can force myself to work this coming week even though I have the car all to myself.  It will be tempting to just drive myself everywhere.

Work was fine this afternoon.  I got regular emails from Dominica letting me know where they were and how the drive was going.  Liesl is having a really rough time of it which is pretty much making it a rough time for everyone.  Francesca has been driving all day but Dominica has at least managed to not fall asleep which is very helpful.  Nothing harder than trying to drive and stay awake while your passenger is nodding off.

I worked till normal time then Nicki and I went over to La Cima for drinks.  We ended up getting dinner there, in the lounge, while we were there.  It was completely packed tonight.  We couldn’t even get to the bar there were so many people.  That was rather surprising.  They cleared out on the early side and we were there till around nine thirty.

I was fairly productive tonight.  Got a lot done.  I was hoping to get to bed around eleven or maybe even earlier but ended up working until around two thirty in the morning!  So much for getting a lot of sleep tonight.  That isn’t going to be good.

Dominica and Francesca made it to Florence, Kentucky tonight.  They are staying there and heading off to New York first thing in the morning.  They made it most of the way and Dominica never had to drive at all so tomorrow is going to be relatively easy for them.  Northern Kentucky to Frankfort is really not a bad drive at all.

I have to be up quite early tomorrow, around five thirty.  I am driving down to Austin for the one million users party at SpiceWorks.  I am going to be on their live webcast and one of the other community members who I know from the online community flew down from Milwaukee tonight for the party so I will get to see him tomorrow.