Sheep Guarding Llama

Very busy day today.  I got up and worked all day getting everything done for the office that I possibly could during the day.  Dominica spent the day doing last minute packing and getting us ready to be away from the house for an entire week.  It is not very often that we leave for so long.  It takes a lot of work to be able to go anywhere, especially with a baby, for so long.

Spoke to our real estate agent today.  She says that we are pretty much screwed on selling the house.  It is going to be really, really tough to get it sold without taking a massive loss simply because there are literally no comps on the market.  Our closest comp is us buying our own house one year ago!  How awful is that?  Nothing has really moved in this market at all.  And our complex is at the top of the townhouse market in the area so other complexes used as comps makes us look less expensive than we really are.  We bought our house from people selling in a panic as well so they took a big loss on the house too making it look even cheaper!  So we are in rough shape.  The house should be worth well more than we paid for it, especially as we have done a bit of work to it to make it much nicer than when we bought it.  We will see.  We are setting up a time for our agent to come and work out a plan with us once we get back from Texas.

I wrapped up work as early as I could getting done around five thirty.  Things really slowed down at the end of the day which was great as we really needed to be on the road as quickly as possible.

The drive up to Albany went smoothly.  We skipped eating dinner on the road as there just was not any spare time.  So we got to the Comfort Inn by the Albany Airport and the Toccos pulled in just minutes after we had arrived ourselves.  Perfect timing.  We made the switch giving up our little Boston Terrier for the week.  It is very sad leaving our doggy again.  We miss him horribly when we are away from him.

The Toccos only stayed for a few minutes.  They have to work tomorrow so they drove back to Frankfort right away.  We got checked in to the hotel and ordered in some local pizza as we were starving.

My office was very slow this evening which was perfect.  I did not even have to log in from the hotel and work.  Awesome.  We ate dinner and got off to bed early as we have to be up very, very earily tomorrow in order to get to the airport and catch our flight.

I had been planning on sleeping in until the last possible minute this morning since I was scheduled for a conference call at nine thirty.  But I didn’t really get to sleep in as I was paged out at eight this morning because they were already awake and wanting me to work!  Of course, even when I schedule work I still have to get up early.

So I spent the morning working.  This is the last weekend at home before out big trip to Texas so there is just a ton to be done.

Today is Friday.  We have a really busy weekend coming up as we need to get ready for our trip to Texas next week.

This morning I hit my ten thousandth post in the SpiceWorks community!  Ten thousand.  I became the highest poster ever when I hit around thirty three hundred and that was only several months ago.  I am way ahead of anyone else and just keep making the gap larger and larger.  I was hoping to have hit the ten thousand mark before going to Texas next week as I am speaking at SpiceWorld (as well as SpiceCorps Houston) and thought that it would be nice to not be at “almost” ten thousand before I went.

This morning dad’s place is covered in snow.  He sent up a picture and everything is white on the farm.  Not a deep snow but enough to almost cover everything.  I can’t believe that winter is already rearing its ugly head around here.  This is definitely making me feel even better about moving to Texas really soon.  I will not miss New York winters.  I’ve had enough snow to last me a lifetime or two.  I talked to Brian and he said that there is eight to ten inches where he is in the Poconos today.  Eight to ten inches, in mid-October!

I did some more network testing today and discovered that my network problems are back now that everything is installed again on the rebuilt HP workstation.  This is not a good sign at all.  I did detailed testing all day and finally figured out that the large number of transmit errors only occur under one specific condition – when Mozy Home is running a backup.  The test is not completely definitive that Mozy is actually the cause and not just a trigger but it seems awfully fishy that I cannot reproduce the error with any other software.  The issue did not show up yesterday because Mozy was throwing errors and was unable to connect to its remote server.  Today, when it connected, suddenly we lost our network connection and everything stopped working.

So I have uninstalled Mozy and we are seeing how things work now.  Just what I need – now I have to come up with some alternate backup mechanism after I found one that was working really well for me – more or less.  It was never able to fully complete a backup and apparently it was crippling my network.  So it really was not “working” but in theory it was a great solution.  Oh well, more things to go figure out and probably more money needing to be spent.  Ugh.

It is Friday and ergo it is a really busy day at work.  Just after four this evening Dominica and I were feeling hungry so we ordered in Chinese for dinner.  We always eat out on Fridays as it is just a lot easier.

Tonight ended up being completely crazy.  I ended up working, more or less just like last weekend, all night going past midnight and into Saturday morning.  I started at eight in the morning and worked until two in the morning!  Way too long of a day to be happening so regularly.  We really need the money right now though.  Now more than ever with this relocation coming.  Boy was I exhausted by the end of the night.  I spent many hours on a conference call going until two in the morning!  Not even productive work.  The work that I had intended to do tonight now has to be done tomorrow after I get up.  Not only that but my conference call is scheduled to pick up again tomorrow at nine thirty in the morning!

This afternoon I came to the realization that, if we look at the upcoming schedule, that we may be down to as little as two free weekends between now and when we move out of New York.  It might be a lot more since we might move as early as December 1st or as late as late February.  But December is likely to be the month that we move and in the remaining time in October and November all but two weekends are already spoken for (one in Texas, one in Ithaca, two in Orlando!)  So our time here is getting really, really short.  It does not feel like it at all since we don’t really know when and where we are moving yet but the date is rapidly approaching.  It will be a while until that really sinks in but there is a brewing feeling of panic.

We really need to get this house onto the market!

I was pretty tired when I got up at eight this morning.  Only five hours or sleep or less.  Dominica got right up at around seven thirty and took a shower so I got to hang out with Liesl this morning.  We played for about an hour which was nice.  It is great having a Liesl with whom to start the day.  She is very much a morning person at this stage.  She wakes up and is instantly excited and happy.  No “wind up” period for her.  Hopefully she keeps that throughout her life.  Dominica has a rough time kick starting the day and that makes life a lot more rough.

We had a serious cold front move in today.  It was overcast and drizzly most of the morning and then, around noonish, the snow started!  Yes, snow, on the ides of October!  Who would have guessed.  And this is down in the normally mild Hudson Valley.  Generally far warmer than back home.

Today was pretty busy at work.  Quite busy indeed.  I took a rather short lunch to hang out with Dominica and Liesl.  We had Dominica’s awesome taco salad with chipotle ranch dressing and watched an episode of the seventh season of The Gilmore Girls.  We have not watched that show in quite a while but never finished the final season so I don’t know how it ends.  I’ve seen six and a half seasons thus far and would kind of like to just wrap it up.  That is a lot of that show to have watched without having finished it.

I can’t believe that today is Thursday.  Where has this week gone?  I am very happy to have my desktop back up and working today!  At least mostly working.  Mozy backup still does not work at all and I am still getting a few packet problems but very few.  Few enough that I think that everything is fixed.  I am just having a really hard time being absolutely, completely sure.

The big news in the US, and I guess around the world, today was the story of a six year old boy who went flying in a giant helium balloon from Fort Collins, Colorado to Denver.  The balloon crash landed and no one was found inside.  It was an all afternoon news event with people following the story pretty intently.  Later, long after the balloon crashed, we finally learned that the boy had been hiding in his parents’ attic the entire time and apparently his brother and he had made the story up.  The military had helicopters out chasing the balloon and everything.  It was rather a costly search and rescue operation underway that took most of the day.  Quite the elaborate stunt to have pulled.

Today I got my invite to Google Wave.  Wave is the hot, new email and instant messaging replacement technology that Google has been touting for some time.  It is about bringing traditional modes of communication together in a new, collaborative way. This is just a developer’s preview so it is not even up to Alpha status yet so lots of bugs but it is working enough to give us an idea of how the thing will work.

I’ve got four friends who are on Google Wave at the moment so I got a chance to check it out for about half an hour or so this evening.  Definitely interesting but a long way to go before it is really useful.  The hardest part is dealing with the overwhelming about of information streaming at you in a very confusing manner.  You see people typing to you live and you can interject things into past portions of the conversation and do weird things that make it very difficult to follow.  It will definitely take a lot of getting used to before I am able to use it on a regular basis.  But lots of great ideas in there.  I will keep reporting on it as I get a chance to really test it out.

Work went really late tonight.  It was eight before I was able to call it a day and take the laptop upstairs to hang out with the family!  That worked out alright, though, since Liesl had decided to take a late afternoon nap and slept from four or five until seven thirty.  So I wasn’t missing my evening with her really.

This evening Dominica and I watched the next three episodes of Torchwood which we have on BluRay from Netflix.  That show is pretty good.  It really does a pretty good job of carrying on the tradition of Dr. Who in a new setting.  We are really enjoying it.  Unfortunately they put very few episodes onto each disk which makes no sense at all to me since the entire season would easily fit onto just one or two disks lowering the production costs by quite a bit.  I can’t figure out the logic of spreading the show out onto several disks and only putting two or three episodes on each one.  BluRay disks have tons of storage space and can easily fit a lot of episodes.

Up early and off to work.  My new motherboard for my HP dc5850 desktop arrived from the courier this morning around nine thirty.  Boy do they ever deliver early.  That worked out well so we were able to schedule the day around that pretty easily.

I worked all morning and the HP tech arrived early in the afternoon.  The motherboard replacement went smoothly and early test showed nothing wrong.  It would appear that I have my desktop back again.

[Later Data: It turns out not to have been the hardware at all but was actually some problem caused by Mozy Home.  I was very surprised to learn that it was software causing the issue.  Even though HP has come and gone I feel really stupid for having them work on the hardware when it was actually a software problem.  It was really difficult to tell what it was.]

So I spent much of the afternoon and evening doing a fresh install of Windows 7 64bit on my dc5850 desktop.  That went smoothly and I was able to get just about all of my software reinstalled so that I was able to get back to work again after several days without my desktop.  I have missed having my desktop on which to work.

Originally we had planned to take Liesl in for her flu shot at a quarter until seven this evening but the doctor’s office called early and asked us to come right in at six.  So we ran in as quickly as we could and got her in and out quite early.  She was very upset right when she got the shot but was a happy baby again just seconds afterward.  What a good baby she is.  Since we were already out and about we went to Pastel’s for dinner.  The timing was perfect.

After dinner we went to Stop and Shop and did some grocery shopping.  Liesl had a really good time being out shopping with both of her parents.  That does not happen very often.  Liesl was out cold by the time that we got back to the house.

After work wrapped up we relaxed and watched The Dukes of Hazzard.  It was a short evening.  But a lot of work got done and it was a productive day overall.