Sheep Guarding Llama

The temperature here in the lower Hudson Valley dropped dramatically last night.  Our bedroom window, the one above Dominica’s side of the bed, got jarred from the major windstorm that we had last night and was unable to be closed.  So our bedroom was cold, cold, cold this morning.  We will need to figure out what is wrong with that window quickly or this is going to turn into a problem.

Today was a really long and busy work day.  I was exhausted and stressed out by late afternoon so I broke out the rum and Pepsi.  Our BluRay of Red Dwarf: Back to Earth arrived today too which is good timing as I need it today.

This afternoon Dominica took the Brainbench Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 exam and passed with flying colours.  She has been nervous about the exam as you never know what material is going to covered on a Brainbench exam and they are very difficult as a rule.  She got a very good score and is currently ranked number nine in New York State on her very first attempt!  Very impressive.  When we move to Texas and she moves her records from NY to Texas she will move up to number five in that state.  I am hoping that she retakes the test, though, as  think that she is well prepared to pull off a master’s certification and move up the rankings into a national spot.

After work was done we sat down and watched the three episodes of Red Dwarf: Back to Earth. It was pretty good.  A relatively appropriate ending to the long running show.  Definitely strange seeing the actors working together again after so long and very weird seeing that show that used to be done with such a low budget on BluRay now.  It looks very different now.

This morning I got up and drove down to the Maple Avenue Deli to pick up breakfast sandwiches for Dominica and I and breakfast potatoes for Dominica.  She loves breakfast potatoes.  While I was there I saw on the news that we have a major wind storm heading our way today and we are under severe wind warnings all day.

Today I finally decided to suck it up and take the time to swap out my Netgear ProSafe FVS336G router for my Prosafe FVX538 router to see if that would help to make a difference with the DNS lookup issues that we have been having.  We have been having horrible problems for quite some time now and it is just too much.  The issues are so weird and sporadic that we are grasping at straws trying to find the culprit.

After making the router change we noticed an improvement in the DNS behaviour.  All very odd and confusing.  At least our network is somewhat workable again even if we don’t know why.  I am convinced that the issue is not with the router itself but perhaps in the way that the router interacts with the environment.  It will take a lot of testing to really have a good picture of what is wrong.

The wind came this evening and it was really impressive.  The woods out back were just swirling and bending for hours.  It was really noisy.

No real news for today.  Pretty much silent on Twitter and SGL.  This week has just been insanely busy and I am way behind on everything.

My new HP Compaq 6735b laptop arrived this morning!  I can’t believe that I ordered it in the middle of the afternoon yesterday and that it is already here before noon.  This is awesome.  I am so impressed.  I bought it through Softmart.  They rock.  This is a really nice laptop.  It is the best AMD-based laptop that HP offers.  Dual core Turion 64 X2 2.2GHz processor, 4G RAM, 500GB drive, 802.11n, BlueTooth, 1280×800 glossy bright screen, DVD burner, etc.  Great unit at a great price with the all out 3 year commercial warranty.  Only way to go.  The unit shipped installed with Windows XP Pro and came with copies of Vista 32 and Vista 64 as well but the really nice thing is that it comes with a coupon to get Windows 7 Business when it releases on October 22nd.  So I am just going to use the unit with Windows XP installed until I get my copy of 7 for this machine.  I already have Windows 7 running on my main desktop and have been using it for quite some time now and Dominica just recently switched to it for her laptop as well and she really likes it too.  So we are going to be completely migrated from XP and Vista to 7 before November!

We ordered a copy of Red Dwarf: Back to Earth on BluRay today.  It is the final three episodes of the entire series made years after the series was completed.  There were eight original seasons and then Back to Earth was done as a short mini-series.  We are very excited to have more RD to watch again after all of these years.  We haven’t seen a new one in so long.

My day was spent mostly getting my laptop working.  Tons of software and configurations to get set up even just to use it for the next few weeks.  I will need to rebuild it again with 7 once we return from Texas.  Until I do the rebuild the system can only see 2.5GB of its 4GB of RAM so I am really looking forward to getting a 64bit OS installed.

Dominica did a Linux server build project today.  She built a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 AMD64 server running on Xen and then installed and configured OpenFire which is an instant messaging XMPP server.  It is great to have OpenFire back up and running again.  We had OpenFire working as a part of the Zimbra installation that we have been using for the last several years but the Zimbra version of OpenFire was extremely limited compared to the real thing and we really missed the functionality.  It was a really good project for Dominica as well.

Sorry, it was a technology heavy day at the Miller household.

My latest article, The Agony and the Ecstasy of RAID, was published by Datamation today.  I am very happy that this one got posted because it is very similar to another article that they ran the day that I submitted this one and I had a feeling that they would not run this one because of the other one.  But they ran it and it is both one of the headlines today and I also have my picture on Datamation’s front page.  Awesome!

Wow am I ever behind now.  Totally, completely behind.  My desktop has been having serious connectivity problems and it is really impacting my ability to get anything done.

Today is my first day really working with Rackspace Email.  We did the migration yesterday and today I am getting used to it and making the transition to this being the center of my life’s communications.  Today I got it hooked up to sync to my BlackBerry which is really awesome.  I have not had this feature previously so having my calendar, contacts and tasks sync from my webmail to my mobile device in addition to my email itself is totally rocking.  I’m not sure that I would pay more for this feature but having it included is a total win.  I’m sure that I will find myself becoming completely addicted to this.

Liesl slept in really late this morning.  She and Dominica did not get up until at least eight thirty which is two hours later than Liesl normally sleeps.  She must have done some serious growing last night to need so much rest.  I am sure that Dominica is loving the chance to sleep in.

I found out today that Rackspace is moving their JungleDisk product into the commercial server backup space.  That should be very exciting.  I will be checking that out soon especially as they are going to support Linux systems and not only Windows and Mac.

I finally got the chance to order my new HP laptop today.  I have a lot of travel stuff coming up really soon and it is really important that I have an awesome laptop that will allow me to really work remotely.  I can’t keep working from my old one for the type of work that I need to do and the amount of it that I need to do.  So I sucked it up and ordered a $1,000 laptop plus a nice docking station to make using it at my desk even easier (moving me up to four screens now at my desk once it arrives!)  I really need to have it by this weekend so I asked them to put a rush on it.  I am hopeful that I will have it before dad comes to visit this weekend because he is getting my old laptop and we are not in a position to be down a laptop in the interim.

No sooner do I get caught up with SGL then I completely fall behind again.  Argh.  Just can’t seem to stay on top of it recently.  Just way too much work going on around here.

Liesl had a really tough night night.  She was up at twelve thirty this morning!  Dominica got up with her and sat with her in the nursery until one thirty.  The she brought Liesl to bed with us.  Dominica then went to bed and I stayed up with Liesl for another hour until two thirty in the morning.  At two thirty Liesl finally fell asleep.

By this point I was completely awake and was not about to fall back asleep again anytime soon.  There is always more than enough work to do so I just headed on down to the basement and got to work.  A very early day but at least it was a real opportunity to be really productive.

This morning I decided that with me being up so early there was lots of time for preparation and planning so I did some email research and testing all morning and by a quarter until eight this morning I managed to migrate the first email domain over to Rackspace hosted email!  A very productive morning indeed.  That was a lot of stress hanging over my head that I was able to just get out of the way.

Today is Dominica and my six year wedding anniversary.  We decided that with all of the stuff that we have going on right now that we weren’t going to do anything for our anniversary this year.  We decided that we would go out for breakfast to Panera Bread this morning.  We haven’t been there in a really long time so it was a nice treat.  We got the spinach and artichoke suffles and the cinnamon crunch bagels that we love so much.

While we were out at Panera we had the laptop with us and tried out the wireless there to test the Hamachi VPN client that I have been setting up recently but have not had a chance to really test.  Hamachi worked really well in the initial test which is very encouraging.  I am excited to get to start using it now.

As we were leaving Panera, Dominica went to get into the car and managed to hit herself in the forehead with the car day really hard.  I looked up just in time to see her reel back from the impact.  She had clipped herself hard with the top corner of the car door right in the very center of her forehead.  She got into the car holding her head in her hands clearly in pain.  She hits herself with things like this pretty regularly so it is difficult to get really alarmed.  You kind of take it all in stride.

When Dominica pulled her hands away there was a pretty surprising amount of blood to be found.  She had an inch long cut that was bleeding a bit.  Nothing to be alarmed about but a lot more than we had anticipated.  She had no idea that she was bleeding and was thinking about bruising, not bleeding.

We had been planning on doing some shopping while we were out this morning but those plans changed in a hurry.  So we just drove back to the house so that Dominica could dress her wounds and relax.

At noon we had a common snapping turtle come right up to our front door and hang out there for a while.  That was rather a surprise.  According to one of the neighbours we have a rather heavy snapping turtle population here.  At one point the neighbour’s cat actually walked right up and didn’t realize that the turtle was there and really scared herself as she practically stepped on the turtle!

Dominica took a nap this afternoon and Liesl came down to the basement and hung out with me.  We managed to get a lot of time together today which was really nice.

For dinner we ordered in Italian for dinner.  We didn’t feel like going out (again) today and just wanted to stay in and relax.  We are working hard to save money right now with the upcoming trip to Disney World in November and the move to Texas in December.  We really need as much money as we can get to get us through all of the upheaval.