Sheep Guarding Llama

Finally Dominica and I got a chance to sleep in some this morning.  It is Saturday and Liesl was up until one this morning so she was happy to sleep in late this morning and we were happy to do so as well.

Once we got up, I got to work for the office.  There is a lot to be done today.  I am still the only person really providing coverage so I am handing one page after another as every alert ends up coming my way.  No rest for the weary.

It was around one in the afternoon when I finally got a break from the office and Dominica and I were able to load Liesl and Oreo into the car and get out on to the road heading from Irving to League City, Texas.  It is a good four plus hour drive down there.  There was some traffic in the Dallas area but the sun is out and the weather is perfect and the drive went pretty smoothly.

I had to respond to a lot of issues via BlackBerry even on the trip down to League City.  We arrived and met Francesca and Garrett at Waffle House and had dinner.  After eating we went on to the Grices’ just for fifteen minutes to change Liesl, feed Oreo, drop off our stuff and then we drove on down to Bayou Vista where everyone else was already hanging out at Joe and Brittany’s house.

I had to set up and get right to work once we arrived as there were issues waiting for me to investigate.  I put in a few hours of working while the family hung out.  At least I am able to set up in the middle of the dining area so that I am in the middle of things.

It was around eleven when we got back to the Grices’ and were able to get to sleep.  Tomorrow Dominica is taking Emily and Madeline to the movies to see the new Chipmunks movie.

Very little to report today.  It is a crazy busy Friday at work.  I got up and got in early again to the office like I did yesterday.  Too much to do to be at home.

For lunch today some of the team drove out to Panera Bread to get their Friday clam chowder in a bread bowl which is awesome.  I picked up lunch for Dominica as well and delivered it back to her on our way back to the office.  It is so handy living so close!

Work was incredibly long today.  At the moment I am the only acting primary SA or senior for our group at work – anyone else who would be in the position for principle support is either off to another team, on to another career, on vacation, busy coordinating relocation, etc.  So I am going crazy with work covering the entire environment.  I will be covering all of Linux for quite a while but the last few days and part of next week, at a minimum, I am covering all of Solaris as well.  Thousands of servers.

So I ended up working an extremely long day today.  I worked until around nine in the evening plus had to do quite a bit of class work for RIT.  My second paper was due for the class tonight so I stayed late at the office to finish it up there in the quiet rather than going home and not being able to get it done because of the noise and interruptions.  Getting it done at the office made things go much faster and actually gave me more time to spend with the family.

When I wrapped up with work and my paper it was raining pretty hard so I had Dominica drive over with Liesl and pick me up at the office.  We just went home and had a quiet evening together at home.  I just had a $2.50 Tony’s thin crust cheese pizza for dinner and hung out with Liesl for a while.

I read a bit in my new “Understanding the Linux Kernel” book but Liesl was very active all evening so there was very little opportunity to read.  Liesl ended up staying up until around one in the morning which is a bit of a problem.  Her schedule is getting later and later making things really tough for us.

Tomorrow morning I have a bit of work to do and then we are hopping in the car and driving on down to League City to spend the holiday weekend with the family.

I was up at six thirty again this morning.  Unlike yesterday, no one woke up while I was getting ready and I left the house at a quarter till eight and no one else was even awake yet.  This is the earliest that I will have physically made it into the Irving office yet.

It was overcast but moderately warm on my walk over to the office.  Manny picked up bagels just minutes before I arrived which was great.  Nice to have bagels right as you arrive at the office.  And Monday is a holiday too so bagels and a three day weekend!  Who could ask for more.

I managed to finally get SGL back up to date today.  That was no small task.  I have more availability to work on it during the day now and things have settled down a lot more so, fingers crossed, it should stay roughly up to date from this point forward.

Today, on my way walking home from lunch going back to the office, I got to meet two of our neighbours whose homes were completely destroyed by the burst pipes in our building this weekend.  I got to get a tour of the damage and the story as to what happened.

Apparently, we were not the only people who had called to report that the pipes had frozen (we had called on Saturday to let them know that the pipes were likely frozen and that we knew that because the washing machines had frozen – they didn’t respond to us telling them that the pipes were frozen until Monday – after the apartments were destroyed.)  One of the guys in a destroyed apartment had called to tell them that water was beginning to leak but no maintenance was deployed – likely because the call came through during the Cowboys game and no one was going to go fix a leak during a Cowboys game in Irving.  So there was clear negligence with having had a full day’s warning and not even investigating in the least and then having actual water leaking and ignoring the emergency!

The apartments in that part of the building had to be condemned by the city of Irving because the apartment building was attempting to force the residents to remain and live in the destroyed apartments (ceilings gone, walls destroyed, no carpeting, no electric, floors under water, no furniture, etc., etc.  The residents were told that the apartment takes no responsibility for what is in the apartments and told them to call their own insurance companies!  We have to call our own now to let them know that there is fraud underway at our complex.

The apartment is refusing to provide any housing whatsoever.  They continue to advertise for new people to move in but claim that there are no apartments for the people whose apartments have been destroyed and even told them that just because they were condemned did not mean that they could get out of their leases and that the apartment was under no obligation to provide housing to its lessees!

The apartment company did offer to let people out of their leases if, and only if, they were out immediately (where are they going to go?) and if they signed a non-disclosure agreement!  And the apartment management is not accepting calls from the displaced residents and are acting like they are not at fault, that this was not complete negligence and that they are not actively and willingly engaged in illegal activity now!  So we are turning everyone away from Tuscan Villas now and have informed my office, which is the closed business to the apartments, to warn everyone off from staying there.

So we are incredibly thankful that we only signed a six month lease and that there is nothing in our apartment.  We will certainly be leaving at the end of six months.  We miss New York a bit now where the state attorney general would have already responded to a situation like this.

Back to work for another busy day.  There is so much to be done. I am going to burn out soon.

Dominica was really stressed today when I got home.  Liesl and Oreo have really been wearing her out.  Not having furniture, a television or anything at all is not helping the situation.

Liesl kept us up really late tonight.  We are getting exhausted trying to keep up with her schedule and me going to work at New York hours.  It is a really tough combination.

Dominica had to spend a lot of the evening in our bedroom with Liesl while I worked in the living room on my homework for RIT.  I have a lot of work that is due and I need to get it done.

Once Liesl finally fell asleep and my work for today was done Dominica ran out to go to the grocery store as there is no other time to really do it.

It was around one in the morning by the time that we finally managed to get off to sleep.

Another awesome day in North Texas.  Sun was up and bright and it was a nice, warm walk to the office.   I was actually up quite early this morning.  I started working from home at six thirty and put in almost three hours before going in to the office around nine after getting my coffee and walking Oreo.  Dominica and Liesl were just up as I was leaving.

I was doing some searching for other things today and noticed that I had an article picked up by Enterprise Storage Forum: RAID Levels Explained.  The same article was picked up by Enterprise IT Planet too.  Another article, Virtualization: An In-Depth Overview was picked up by Small Business Computing.  It is neat seeing that a lot of publications think that I am worth reprinting.  Of course, I don’t get paid for each one, my publisher owns the rights during the republishing period, but it is still encouraging and a nice compliment.  I wish that the told me when they did it so that I could link to them though!

Kind of a busier day at the office today.  Since coming to Texas things have been far busier than they were in New York because I am filling my day with training now that I was not doing previously.  Before coming to the Irving office I was not even aware of who the new people on my team were so I was completely out of the loop.  Now I am right in the thick of things and am tuned in to all of the goings on at the office.

For lunch today I went over to the Chaat Cafe.  The meal was cheap and the food wasn’t bad but it definitely was quite far from what we normally consider to be Indian food.  There was no one visibly Indian working at the restaurant and the food was kind of what you would expect from Indian food prepared in Texas.  Sort of Indian food like but bland and toned way down for the Texan palette.  Not very impressive.  We will probably eat there from time to time but we are not nearly as excited as we were before when we thought that we had real Indian food right in our parking lot.

Back to the office after lunch.  It is overcast today but still pretty warm.  Quite comfortable for being outside without a jacket.

I ended up working relatively late tonight.  Nothing exciting to report.  I walked back to the apartment and we spent the evening in.  We both kind of felt like going out to eat but neither really wanted to go through the effort.  So we just stayed in and had veggie cold cut sandwiches.

Liesl and Oreo are both struggling with the adjustment to living in Texas.  Likely the constant upheaval has contributed quite a bit to them being restless and sleep schedules being all screwed up and everything.  So staying in and getting sleep whenever possible is good.

Liesl actually fell asleep decently early tonight for the first time in probably a week.  Pheww.  We got some quiet time.  I worked from my laptop while Dominica watched HGTV.  Then it was off to bed at a reasonable hour.  Oreo had snuck away and went to bed at like seven in the evening.

Pretty normal day today.  Not too much really to report.  Got up and worked from home a little bit this morning and then walked to the office.  I can’t get over being able to walk to the office.  This is great.  Fifty degrees in January and walking distance to the office.  Make my readers jealous today: check.

The other advantage of walking to the office is being able to carry in my own coffee too.  Good coffee from home instead of the burnt ick that the office has in the little snack area.  Eww.  I’ve been carrying a “to go” coffee container to and from the office every day to be as green as possible.  I need my SpiceWorks thermal mug but it is in storage back in New York still.  This would be the perfect place to use it.  It is very handy that Dominica has the house stocked with “to go” coffee supplies though.  Very easy to make and take coffee every morning.

I worked until after one before taking lunch.  Dominica wanted Thai for lunch so she called in an order to Blu Ginger and I walked over there to pick it up and took it back to the apartment for us to eat there.  On the walk from the restaurant to the apartment some maniac New York transplant driver almost ran me over on my street (inside joke.)  But luckily I was able to run away quickly enough.

I ended up being in the office pretty late today.  With the move to Texas we don’t tend to get stuck as late as we used to but there was some stuff going on today and I just ended up staying late.

I got home and we decided to go out to IHOP tonight to use our free dinner coupons that we had received after the issue that we had last week down in Le Marque, Texas.  It took us a little bit of work to figure out how to get to the IHOP even after we had seen it from the road because it is on a side road but the drive around looking for it turned out to be really fruitful as there were a large number of restaurants and shops hiding on this side road that we got to drive by and check out.

Dinner was good.  We didn’t have any meal to modify to really test out the IHOP as the specials that we had wanted are no longer available but we did enjoy our dinner.  While we were at dinner, Liesl did her very first colouring with crayons!  She thought that that was great fun.  She held a red crayon in her right hand and a green one in her left and attempted to scribble on her placemat.

We also wrote Liesl’s name down for her in crayon and told her that it was her name.  She pointed to it and then pointed to herself several times.  She clearly grasped the idea that the word was her name!  She clapped and clapped after that.  This is a major milestone.

After dinner we stopped by Super Walmart that is right next door there by the highway and Dominica did some really quick grocery shopping while I waited in the car with Liesl and Oreo who had both fallen asleep.  I did some work from my BlackBerry while waiting for Dominica to finish her shopping.

We got home and I had to sign in to the office and do some quick work and then I got some time with Liesl already asleep to actually do some real work.  I did some work moving a Windows 2008 R2 Server around behind the new Vyatta router that I built over the weekend and deployed certificate services in the hopes of getting a PKI infrastructure set up that I can use to back the Vyatta router to do VPNs.  Should be pretty cool once I get it working.