Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up quite early this morning so that I would have time to set up and get all ready for my Red Hat Monitoring and Tuning class that I am taking today.  It is part of the Red Hat Architect program and is actually the first Linux class that I have ever taken.  This may be surprising to many of you as I am a senior Linux administrator and have been working on Linux since around 1997 or 1998 and Solaris for quite a bit longer but I have never actually seen Linux in any sort of academic setting whether a lab, college class or training session like this.  All of my Linux certifications were done purely through my own self study.  I’ve even mostly written and was the approver on a major Red Hat Linux certification long before taking this class.

I spent the day sitting in the living room on the sofa listening to my class through headphones.  Not the most exciting way to learn but the class was good and I am thinking that I am going to be learning a bit in this class.  It has been a long time since I have taken any class so the change of pace is definitely very nice.

After class was over this evening, which turned out to be a bit earlier than I had been expecting, we all ran over to Edibles for some dinner and drinks.  I got to meet Jeff for the first time just before we left Tara’s house to head over there.

We ended up hanging out at Edibles until closing.  It was trivia night which we ended up kind of winning.  There was hardly anyone playing trivia tonight and it was our table of six people versus one girl sitting at the bar playing alone.  She won approximately half of the rounds which was pretty sad.

We are all pretty much worthless today.  Driving all day and not getting to bed until eight in the morning after several days of getting practically no sleep takes its toll on you.

I set up the laptop in the living room and got to work.  I had several hours of “office work” that needed my attention and I had to do it on just two to three hours of sleep.  I was feeling pretty rough today.

Surprisingly most of the crew was up pretty early (early afternoon, that is) after the insanely long day yesterday and long morning this morning.

Once people were awake there was a lot of Oblivion being played, by Brian and Jen, while I worked on my laptop.  Once people were hungry we just ordered in some pizza and hung around at the house.

I spent the afternoon learning some Python testing with the Selenium suite.  I did some web site automation and figured out how to exploit the SpiceWorks community to automatically generate points in a mostly invisible way.  That was an interesting project and definitely taught me a lot about automating web interfaces for testing.  I emailed in the exploit to the SpiceWorks guys so that they could look into a patch to deal with that type of system.  It is not trivial to do and is easily detectable once you know what to look for so it is not really something that anyone else can now do but doing it was very educational for me and useful for them.

Very little to report.  Tired people here.  Off to bed at a reasonable hour.  Tomorrow my Red Hat architecture class begins so I need to be up early for that.

It was unfortunate that last night, while driving across Arkansas, that it all had to be done in the dark as this was my very first time ever being in the state of Arkansas and I more or less had to miss the whole thing.  This morning, though, I got to get up in Memphis which I have also never seen before and we will be driving east through west Tennessee which will all be new to me until Nashville and even the stretch between Nashville and Knoxville will be new even though I have been to both of those cities previously.  I have only ever traveled north to south across Tennessee and never west to east so I get to see a lot of new country.

I worked for a while this morning and was able to wrap up by eleven this morning which put us an hour ahead of schedule.  We got the car loaded and attempted to hit the road right away but Jen had a soda malfunction and we had to get back out of the car and get her and the car cleaned up before we could proceed.

I took the first shift driving (which turned into the only shift) as we headed out east from Memphis to Nashville to Knoxville and from there turned north off of Interstate 40 onto Interstate 81 and went into Virginia at Bristol and up through the mountains.  The weather was great.  It is cold and snowing back in Dallas but we are in the sixties as we drive north.  Not what we were expecting at all.

When we got up into Northern Virginia the GPS foolishly took us east from Front Royal on Interstate 66 over to Washington, DC and, due to massive failure of the GPS system, it actually dropped us off onto the Leesburg Pike in Arlington, Virginia and completely freaked out on us leaving us on our own.  Luckily John and I used to live on the Leesburg Pike and I knew the area a little.

We came up into Philly from the southside via Delaware which did not seem like the most efficient approach up to Chalfont where we are staying for the week.  It was about three thirty in the morning when we pulled into Wawa to get ourselves a late night snack (read: breakfast) which we took back to the house where we arrived at approximately a quarter after four and ate there.

We were so wound up from all of the driving (which I actually did all by myself) that we decided to just camp out at the bar that Brian and Tara have set up and drink rum and Cokes until eight in the morning when it was time to head off to bed.  Not much sleep for me since today is now Sunday (now that the day rolled over) and I have to work today.  So I will be getting three hours of sleep at maximum.

We were all pretty tired this morning.  I got only two hours of sleep last night.  Probably not the best idea just before beginning a very, very long drive and its associated long week.

Brian and Jen decided that today was going to be a day off after all of the work that they have been doing so they spent the day playing Final Fantasy XIII on the PS3.  In fact, Brian played it so much that he is now actually further along in the game than I am even though I have had the game for ten days now!  Jen is dramatically ahead of both of us.

I worked all day as usual.  In the late afternoon I ran over to the office and picked up my Red Hat coursebook that had been delivered there.  I was only physically in the office for fifteen minutes or so.  Then it was back over to the apartment to work from there again.

Work ended at a decent time tonight and we had the car pretty much already packed.  The moment that we thought that I could get away we made a run for it and were gone!

We decided that we wanted the ability to make audio recordings in the car so we had shopped around and found that the Guitar Center nearby carried a Tascam portable digital recorder.  That was our first stop.  That probably cost us thirty to sixty minutes but we are hoping that it will be very valuable on the road today and in the future.

From there we were “on the road” and making good time.  Brian took the first “shift” driving through Texas.  Jen took the back seat.  Brian drove through the daylight and I took over after it was dark.

We discovered that the auxiliary input for the car’s audio system got broken at some point and it no longer plays in stereo.  If you attempt to hook up an MP3 player or something to it you only get sound from the right side of the car which is exceptionally annoying.  I am going to try very hard to get that fixed before driving back down to Texas or I will be very sorry.

We drove on Interstate 30 heading east out of Dallas.  That is a long, lonely stretch of nothing heading out to Texarkana in Arkansas.  Once we were east of Dallas all of this highway was new to me.  I am quite glad that we are going this route as I get to see another very large chunk of Texas, the entire crossing of Arkansas and the western half of Tennessee on this trip – all of which are new to me.  I have never been to Arkansas at all so this gives me another state as well.  I have added many in the past eight months or so.  Jen spent much of her childhood in Arkansas so knows the region pretty well.

For dinner we just picked up food at Taco Bell.

I took over driving in Arkansas and drove us east to the east side of Memphis where we got a room at the Comfort Suites and crashed there.  It was around one thirty in the morning when we got to the hotel room.  I was doing surprisingly well for having just worked all day then driving all evening and into the night on just two hours of sleep after having had a very busy day the day before.  Unfortunately there is not a lot of time for sleep tonight either.  I have to be up tomorrow morning at eight local time so that I can work on some Bahrain software deployments and then Linux kernel patching.  It is going to be a very long day indeed.

Today I am actually off from work.  Not something that happens very often.  My hours at work have been reduced dramatically – not because there is less work to be done but just that there is less budget to pay us with so our hours are going down.  Not down below full time, not even without overtime, just not as much overtime as I have been working for the past year – which has been an insane amount.

I slept in a lot this morning.  I really needed a chance to catch up on some sleep.  It was about ten when Dominica got me up because her cousin Katie had arrived from Arlington and we were getting ready to head out to the Houston Zoo to take Liesl and Garrett to the zoo for the first time. Today is my day to hang out with Liesl all day before heading off to Pennsylvania and New York for over a week.  I am really going to miss her.  This will be the longest that we have been apart in a long time and actually is likely longer than when I was in Germany which was the longest time that we have been apart thus far, I believe.

I showered and packed and we headed out for the zoo.  Knowing that time would be somewhat tight today we decided that I would drive the X3 separately just in case something happened and I didn’t have enough time to go back to League City to get it.

The drive from League City to Houston was fine but once we neared the zoo we got caught in the most insane gridlock that I have ever seen.  We sat for hours without really moving.  Totally caught between just a few streets.

After a few hours of sitting in unmoving traffic I did a quick calculation and figured out that by the time that we would likely reach the zoo that I wouldn’t have even enough time to park and immediately leave again to be able to get up to Kirkwood where I needed to help Brian pick up the printer.

This ended up being a really crappy day.  What was originally a day with Liesl at the zoo quickly deteriorated into me, sitting in traffic, alone in the car while Liesl was off with Dominica and the family in the Sequoia without me.  Now I don’t see her at all before I leave – I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.

The family also decided that the zoo was not really a good option even though they were not under the same time constraints as me.  So they instead drove south down to Galveston to take Liesl and Garrett to Moody Aquarium.

I drove on up to the beltway and met up with Brian and Jen at the hotel.  We packed up the car and got Brian checked out of the hotel.  We had just enough time to get some food before needing to get to the printer pickup so we stopped at Waffle House for quick lunch as I had not had an opportunity to eat all day.

From Waffle House we drove up to Kirkwood to pick up the printer.  We met with some people while there and decided that Jen needed to pack up and join us on the road trip up to New York.  So after picking up the printer we ran Jen home, picked up her luggage, squeezed everything into the car and from there we were already running late to get down to Enet Solutions on the southwest side of the city for SpiceCorps Houston – our fourth meeting in Houston.

We were just a few minutes late for the meeting, although getting there early would have been the smart thing to do.  We had a really good turn out tonight with roughly twenty two people in attendance.  Houston is one of our really good groups.

The meeting went well and we were able to get a tour of the Enet facility including getting to see their datacentre and NOC.  They actually have an apartment inside of the facility for when people need to stay there overnight.  A very cool idea.  It feels like a Japanese hotel – short ceilings, no windows, etc., but it has a laundry station, a little bed with a small television and DVD player and a shower.  Very useful.

We stayed late after the meeting.  There was beer and cookies.  We were the last to straggle out, as is generally the case, and then it was off to dinner with Brian, Jen, Allen, Gustavo and I! We went to Waffle House and got some food.  It was midnight by the time that we left there.

It was very late for us to be setting off but it was the best that we could do.  We were not on the road until around ten or so.  A very late night.

It was an exhausting drive up to Irving.  We got in around three or four in the morning.  We were all very tired.  Brian got his old room and Jen got the master bed.  I slept on an air mattress in the dining room.  It was all a very quick “get something together and get to sleep as quickly as possible” situation.

Tons to do tomorrow.  I will be working all day from the apartment.  Then, as soon as we can, we are all piling into the BMW and heading for Memphis!  What a long day it is going to be.