December 31, 2009: New Year’s Eve in Bayou Vista

It is Friday and New Year’s Even here in Bayou Vista.  It is really handy that the family decided that they are all going to come over to Joe and Britt’s house for the New Year’s Eve party tonight so we don’t have to worry about going anywhere.  Very convenient.

I worked today from the house again.  This is my last regular work day working from Bayou Vista.  It is a holiday tomorrow and then we head up to Dallas on Monday morning!  Almost time to head to our new home.

Dominica picked up some Shiner 100th Anniversary Commemorator Texan beer for the New Year’s Eve party for me this evening.  It is a dark, German-style beer that is very good.  I am very happy with the beer that we are able to get here in Texas.  Lots of good, local beer.  People outside of Texas don’t really think about Texas being a place for good beer but it really is.

The party was pretty low key.  Most everyone just played darts all night.  Francesca and I weren’t interested in darts at all so we watched most of Night at the Museum but we were both tired and Francesca fell asleep after about the halfway point of the movie.  Once I was the only person left awake not playing darts or reading I decided that it made sense to just go to bed.  So I was off to bed with Oreo around ten or eleven.

December 30, 2009: Trying to Find Coffee

Today was a pretty slow work day for me.  I worked all day from Joe and Britt’s house.  I have my laptop set up on the kitchen counter and spend most of the day just standing at it or, from time to time, sitting on a bar stool to work at it.  It sounds more uncomfortable than it is.  Work is really slow as it is the holiday week so I am walking around and doing other things quite a bit all throughout the day.

Dominica slept in very late tonight.  I got up with Liesl and brought her downstairs while I worked in the kitchen.  Joe was awake playing PlayStation 3 so Liesl hung out with us.  This morning Liesl really starting playing with her new pop-up PlayHut playhouse that we have set up in Joe’s “den” area just off of the dining room (it is all one big open space so hard to call one room one thing and another another.)  It is really cool watching Liesl explore her little play house and going inside to be alone and play with all of the plastic balls that it stores.

In the fifties here in the Houston area.  In Impfondo it is eight nine degrees today.

After work today I drove up to the north east of Houston to meet Jen for some coffee and sandwiches.  We’ve been trying to get together since we hung out at SpiceWorld Austin and SpiceCorps Houston and this is the one week when we are both in the Houston area with some free time.

Getting around the Houston area, or anywhere in Texas, pretty much, using our BMW GPS is pretty much impossible.  The system is not very old but every single road in Texas has changed in the last two years and nothing is on the GPS.  What little bit is on the GPS is all wrong.  Turns are all messed up even with long time existing roads.  It easily doubles the time to get anywhere as you are always turning around, getting stuck going the wrong way and just getting lost in general.

After coffee with Jen I drove down to the Grices’ and picked up Dominica, Liesl and Oreo there.  It was rather late and we just headed home.  Most everyone was already off to bed by that time anywhere.

December 29, 2009: Workweek in the Galveston Area

I am working from the Galveston area (Bayou Vista and League City) all week.  This morning Dominica and I hung out in Bayou Vista for a while before heading out to get lunch at Waffle House.  We are loving having access to Waffle House now that we are living in Texas.

Low Water in the Bayou Vista Salt Marsh

While I was out in Bayou Vista today I noticed that the water level in the salt marsh there was incredibly low so I thought that I would take a picture. It is neat to see how the slow moving water drops sediments here and is gradually filling in the area making new land where there was none before. Once some saltgrass manages to take hold it is all over and the mud turns into land and the water has no chance to wash it away.

Light rain and fifty one degrees today.  We are not yet used to Texas weather.  New York is quite cold and covered in snow these days.  The lack of winter weather is going to be awesome.

Testing Socket Connections Programmatically

Often we have to use “telnet remotehost.somewhere.com 80” to test if a remote socket connection can be established.  This is fine for one time tests but can be a problem when it comes time to test a number of connections – especially if we want to test them programmatically from a script.  Perl to the rescue:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use IO::Socket;

my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET (
                   PeerAddr => $ARGV[0],
                   PeerPort => $ARGV[1],
                   Proto => tcp,
);

if ($sock) { print "Success!\n" } else { print "Failure!\n" };
close($sock);

Just copy this code into a file called “sockettest.pl” and “chmod 755 sockettest.pl” so that it is executable and you are ready to go.  (This presumes that you are using UNIX.  As the script is Perl, it should work anywhere.)
To use the code to test, for example, a website on port 80 or an SSH connection on port 22 just try these:

./sockettest.pl www.yahoo.com 80
./sockettest.pl myserver 22

You aren’t limited to known services.  You can test any socket that you want.  Very handy.  Now, if you have a bunch of servers, you could test them from a simple, one line BASH command like so (broken so as not to be one line here for ease of reading…)

for i in myserver1 myserver2 yourserver1 yourserver2 someoneelsesserver1
do
  echo $i $(./sockettest.pl "$i" 80)
done

December 28, 2009: Back to Work

Liesl and Oreo got me up pretty early this morning, around six thirty.  Luckily we had been smart and came back to Joe and Britt’s house early last night and had gotten to sleep probably by ten.  I am back to normal work hours today and that means getting up super early every day because they relocated us to a central time zone but our jobs are still based around New York (or in my case London) so all they have done is make it more difficult for us to support our clients during the early hours.  (The early shift now starts at 5:30 rather than 6:30 and the normal day starts at 8:00 rather than 9:00.)  Not dramatically early hours but 5:30 is pretty exceptionally early to be up and doing technical support work when you have to think clearly.  Since our days are ten to fourteen hours long normally having us start in a time zone not aligned with our work just makes it harder for us to do support of this magnitude.

I took Oreo out for his morning walk and he slipped and fell down the top of the stairs inside of the house. Luckily I was right in front of him and realized that he was falling and caught him as he slid down.  He didn’t roll but slid so since I caught him it was more scary for him than dangerous and he did not appear to hurt anything at all other than his ego.  After he went outside he went right back upstairs and asked to get in to bed with Dominica where he curled up and snuggled far away from the dangerous stairs.  Liesl decided that she wanted to get up then so came down to the living room with me so that she could hang out while I worked.

Dominica set up Liesl’s new pop up play house that she got from Joe and Brittany for Christmas at their house last night and this morning was Liesl’s first time getting to play in it.

As of today we officially have an apartment in Los Colinas but we are not going to actually move up there for a week yet.  Dominica’s parents are here until this weekend and this is the last that she will see them until late April when they return for the arrival of baby girl Grice.  Four months is not really all that long.  Dominica is very concerned that she will never see her parents living down here in Texas but, in reality, I have a feeling that with all of the traveling back and forth that she will actually see them nearly as much now just in different way – more longer stretches and fewer really quick visits.

Dominica and Oreo got up around nine.  They came down to join Liesl and I in the living room.  Dominica and Liesl watched some PBS.  Liesl has never seen Sesame Street before or Clifford so she really enjoyed that.  While watching Sesame Street Liesl tried running for the first time as well!

At eleven thirty we drove out to League City to meet the family at Denny’s for lunch.  That ended up taking almost three hours from door to door.  A very long lunch trip.  Work was very slow, though, so it was okay.  I didn’t miss a single thing while I was out.

Liesl Having Breakfast at Dennys

We stopped at the Game Stop next to Denny’s at the mall while we were there and I picked up a copy of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Ring of Fate for the Nintendo DS.  I need Ring of Fate because I accidentally bought Echoes of Time the other day which takes place after Ring of Fate so I need to play them in order.

I dropped Dominica and Liesl off at Francesca’s house and then Oreo and I went back to Joe and Britt’s house so that I could work from there and Oreo could get some time to just relax.  He needs time away from dogs and small children chasing him all over the place.  He just curled up on the love seat and slept the afternoon away.

I returned to the Grices’ house around six after work was done.  I stopped at the other GameStop at Exit 20 on Route 45 on the way up and checked out their used game selection.  Their selection was quite different from the selection at the store that I had already been too and I managed to get Blue Dragon Plus, Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery for the Nintendo DS as well as Wii Fit Plus and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World for the Nintendo Wii.  It was quite a haul of Nintendo system games this week.

I got to the Grices’ at six thirty, just in time for dinner to be ordered from Pei Wei Asian Diner which is Francesca’s favourite restaurant, I hear.  Dominica and I have been looking forward to trying this local Asian fusion place.

The food from Pei Wei was okay but nothing special at all.  Definitely what you would expect from Thai fast food.  It is no wonder we don’t have these in New York or New Jersey – having a local Thai restaurant would totally shut this place out of the market.  The food wasn’t bad at all but certainly not up to even poor non-chain Thai food standards.

The family played a lot of Wii games this evening like Wii Sports Resort.  Everyone really enjoyed that, especially fencing.

Dominica and Liesl went back to Joe and Britt’s house early, around ten thirty, to call it a night.  Dominica spent the evening playing Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days on her DS.  I stayed at the Grices’ until everyone was calling it a night and drove Joe’s car home for him.

Got off to bed around midnight.  A bit of a late night for those of us who work eastern time rather than central time where we live.