Sheep Guarding Llama

Today, finally, I was able to buckle down and really focus on my class all day without any real interruptions.  It turns out that today, not tomorrow, is the final day of my class.  It was an accident that they had told us that the class was going to run an extra day.  So surprise, I have tomorrow “off” in a way.  That works out perfectly, actually.  Not that a day off ever goes amiss but this week I really need it.

I worked all day on my Red Hat training.  The class was good and I am very glad that I got a chance to take it.  I learned a bit and will learn more when I take the time to go back through the material again and try it all out on my own servers.

The plan was for Brian and I to drive Jen up to Croton-on-Hudson early tomorrow morning so that she could catch the Amtrak train, Maple Leaf or Lake Shore Limited, up to Rochester as she is picking up the Mazda PR5 up there.  We bought the train tickets at the end of the day and just minutes after getting the tickets we realized that the Mazda needs a New York State inspection which causes all kinds of issues.  We did some brainstorming and the only thing that we could come up with was that a trip to Rochester was absolutely necessary.

We called Amtrak and cancelled the tickets.  Thank goodness for Amtrak.  They are so awesome.  No charge to us to cancel the tickets.  You never get that from your airline!  Amtrak rocks.

Jen and I quickly started packing the X3 to prepare to depart.  No sooner than we took out the first load than the door closed and locked us out.  Oops.  We had to wait for Brian and Tara to return from the chiropractor to let us back in so that we could keep packing.

We were out the door and on the road from Chalfont, Pennsylvania up to Pavilion, New York by around five.  We wound through the backroads of northwester Philadelphia which was a little interesting.  We found our way to the Northeast Turnpike Extension and drove up to Clark’s Summit where we stopped to get dinner at Damien’s.

The drive up to Pavilion went just fine.  We made good time and this trip was trivial compared to all of the driving that I have been doing so I didn’t mind the extra miles at all.  Going from Philly to Pavilion is little different, but much more interesting, than going from Dallas to Houston.

We got up to dad’s place around eleven thirty or just a little after.  We hung out for just a little while and then it was off to sleep.  This is the earliest that we managed to get to bed all week!  Who would have thought that an extra trip to Rochester would result in extra free time?

It was nice that this gave me at least a little bit of time to go see dad.  I haven’t seen him since December and with his shoulder bothering him it is pretty much impossible for him to get down to Texas to see us.

Tomorrow morning we have to be up and on the road pretty early.  We start driving separately as of tomorrow.  Now the trips start getting very lonely very quickly.

Today is the big day, the day that justifies all of the driving necessary to get up to Philadelphia.  I got up this morning and took my class as long as I could.  There was not a lot of free time, though, before I needed to get all suited up in my brand new, never before worn charcoal grey suit, red power tie and brand new shoes.  I even had a new shirt and only worn once braces.  I looked pretty snappy if I do say so myself.

We left pretty early to drive over to Downingtown which sits west of Philly between Philly, Reading and Lancaster.  It was a bit of a drive, almost an hour to get there.  The meeting there went really well – better than we had expected.  We had the whole crew there, Brian, Jen, Jeff and I.  We overwhelmed them, I think.

After the meeting and tour of the facility in Downingtown we all went out for lunch at Chili’s with the folks with whom we were having the meeting.  Lunch was good and Jeff cut out from there to go celebrate his anniversary.

Brian, Jen and I rushed back to Chalfont so that I could get back to my class.  I signed back in and worked on that for the rest of the day.

After class was over, Jen and I decided that Brian and Tara needed some alone time as they have been stuck entertaining us since the moment we got up from Texas.  So we sent them out to dinner and we just went to Wawa and got sandwiches and hung out at the house watching “television” on Netflix.

We were all out way too late last night.  We were pretty much exhausted this morning.  I was the first one up since I had to get up so that I could get started on my class work with Red Hat.  Most everyone did some sleeping in today.

We were supposed to have a very early morning meeting this morning but that was canceled, thankfully.  Otherwise we would have all had to have been awake at six or seven in the morning.  But because it was canceled I was able to sleep in until five minutes to nine when I jumped out of bed and ran down to get into the class.  Luckily I can just wear pajamas for this.

a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheepguardingllama/4457632151/” title=”Getting Ready for Spicecorps Philly by SheepGuardingLlama, on Flickr”>

I spent the morning just doing my class.  Then during lunch I showered and got dressed as we have a busy afternoon.  I did my class right up to the last second and then we ran out to meet up with DevonIT, a thin client manufacturer in the Philly region.  That was a good talk and we got to sit with the CTO and get his thoughts on the future of desktop virtualization which was very interesting.

From there it was over to Blue Bell, PA to go to SpiceCorps Philadelphia.  This was our fourth meeting which is a pretty major milestone.  We met the posted requirements from SpiceWorks for our anniversary but they decided to add in new requirements that were not listed so this doesn’t count for us.

We had a really good turn out this time.  About a dozen people.  It was a really good group and we had a really good and diverse discussion.  The meeting ran for a few hours and then several of us went out for dinner at a local diner afterwards.  We ended up being out quite late until around two in the morning.  Jeff bailed on us and just went home after the meeting.  Tomorrow is our big day so we all need to get some sleep tonight.

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.