Sheep Guarding Llama

No news scheduled for today.  We are, in theory, supposed to hear something tomorrow although I am hardly holding my breath at this point.  We are past anxious and just trying to ignore the situation for now.  I guess when people are ready for us to start planning we will hear something.

I finally gave in and installed Tweetdeck the other day to ease the management of my Twitter feed.  I tried it once before but had some issues getting it installed or maybe had an issue with Adobe AIR, the RAI platform on which Tweetdeck runs.  Today it installed just fine and I was up and running in no time with Twitter although it was unable to connect to Facebook or MySpace so there is still something unstable about it.

Using Tweetdeck is definitely already making my communications life easier.  I don’t need to use that buggy Twitter webpage anymore and I get updates automatically without having to go refresh the page just to find out that there is nothing there.  I am able to post much fast and keep up with everyone better.  I am very glad that I gave it a try.

Today I played with it some more and finally got FaceBook to connect and start working.  This is making things even easier yet.  Now I don’t have to check in to FaceBook during the day either.

Today was pretty busy with work and I really did not get any chance to hang out with Liesl during the day.  She was apparently really tired – she did cut a new tooth yesterday and got very little sleep – and she was falling asleep before seven this evening!

Dominica IM’s me to tell me that Liesl was falling asleep and that I had better cut out of work early if I wanted to see her.  I did but Liesl was pretty much out by the time that I made it up the stairs.  So no real time together today 🙁

We just watched some of Newhart on Hulu tonight and I worked from my laptop in the living room.  I tried out Digsby this evening which people have been telling me to try instead of Tweetdeck but it appears to have some dependency and incompatibility with Internet Explorer and I could not get it to even work.  Even on a clean install of Vista with a newly updated IE8 it just threw one JScript error after another and would not function at all.  So I call that a fail and I am back to Tweetdeck.

Maybe some news tomorrow.  Fingers crossed.

Up early and working by seven thirty or so.  I was up long before Dominica and Liesl were so I got some time to sit in the basement and do research.  I did some learning about Oracle Beehive today which I have never seen before.  I looked interesting but my verdict at the end was that I would likely lean toward SharePoint over Beehive.

It started raining last night just before midnight.  That was rather unexpected.  It had not felt like rain all day.  It felt mostly like summer yet yesterday morning but by last night and clearly today it feels as though autumn has arrived.  I have a feeling that summer is over.  I am looking forward to the cooler weather.  Overall it was a very good year with tons of rain.  But now it is just starting to get a little crisp outside which is how I like it.  It should be fleece weather in no time.

I set up and tested out Hamachi VPN from LogMeIn today.  I have used it before but it was years ago.  I have not seen it in many generations and LogMeIn has done a lot of interesting stuff with it.  Hamachi is very cool and I think that I am going to be using it a lot more in the near future.  I am just figuring out all of the cool stuff that I can do with it now.  Having three different architectural options makes it a lot more complex to use.

Today I also discovered PeepCode.  PeepCode is a programming screencast company that makes screencasts that teach programming and other IT concepts.  I looked through their catalogue and found lots of stuff in which I am interested.  They aren’t too expensive so I bought one of their Ruby on Rails videos to give them a try.  Unfortunately I am unable to get it to play on the PS3 so we can’t watch them upstairs.  I have to sit at a computer to watch the screencast.

Today, Liesl said her very first sentence!  Early this afternoon I came up the stairs from the basement and Liesl was on the loveseat with Dominica.  When I popped out of the basement Liesl looked at me and said “Hi, dada!”  It was very exciting!  She has said both words before but has never strung words together like this.  She is growing up so fast.

We also discovered that Liesl has cut her third tooth today.  This is her first tooth on the top.  Two exciting developments in one day.  Liesl is very happy to have the tooth as well.  She slept very badly last night.

Liesl turns ten months old today.  Hard to believe that we have had our little girl for so long and yet, in many ways, it seems as if we have always had her here.  It is impossible to imagine life without her.

I worked until seven this evening.  I had tried to get away from the office earlier but I got paged out several times in succession.  So no getting away early for me.

We have our final price for our Walt Disney World trip coming up in late November.  We are staying, on property, and going to the park for less than $200 per day which is amazing as that includes the hotel, park admission and all of the food that we will eat while we are there.  Quite a good deal.  This is actually a very cost effective trip that we are taking.

I got the old G4 Mac Mini hooked up tonight in the living room in an attempt to get it working with the television so that Dominica and I can watch computer based training (CBT) programs there instead of having to watch them alone on a laptop – more a television replacement than anything.  We have a DVI to HDMI cable to try out but we ran into some snags and were unable to hook it up.  I got it working but it would only last for a minute or two before it would drop the signal to the television and be useless.  I think that it is a hardware problem with the Mac Mini.

I have not used the Mini in years.  Probably not since 2005 and certainly not since 2006 when it went into a plastic bin and into dad’s barn for storage.  We only got it down to Peekskill recently and today was the first time plugging it in again.  It is running Mac OSX 10.3 (Panther) which is completely ancient at this point.  Snow Leopard, which is OSX 10.6, is now out.  Unfortunately this hardware, being a PowerPC, cannot run anything newer than Tiger OSX 10.4 which I do not have so the machine is left being rather out of date which is unfortunate as I never really got that much use out of it.  My plan is to set it up down on my desk to use as a terminal workstation to use to connect to UNIX machines when I work on them.

I’ve been struggling hard to keep up with SGL since getting back from Germany.  There has just been way too much going on and I am barely able to stay almost a week behind on everything.  I am doing what I can.  There has not been all that much to report really as we are mostly just waiting around until we find out what is going on with the move to Texas.  At this point we are “on hold” until Tuesday when, hopefully, there will be some additional information.

I got up nice and early this morning – around seven.  I am scheduled to start work at eight this morning so I don’t get to sleep in at all.  I got signed in to work before I even needed to be there and ended up waiting for over an hour before anyone remembered that I had been scheduled to work with them this morning so I could have slept in quite a bit longer without anyone even knowing!

There was a lot of patching work to be done today so I worked most of the day on that.  Not a lot of free time for me.

The Ralstons were online early this morning and Dominica and I got a chance to talk to them on the phone today.  We have only spoken to them once or twice on the phone since they went to the Congo in May – that means that we have spoken more often than we have driven the Mazda during the same time period.

My cough and congestion came back with a vengeance today.  It was bad enough that Dominica made a run to the grocery store to pick up cough medicine for me.  She left around ten thirty to get breakfast and my medicine but disappeared for a very long time.  It was after noon when she got back.  It turns out that there was rather a long wait at the deli.

I wrapped up work around one or two in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day hanging out with Dominica, Liesl and Oreo.

My project first thing this morning was to dramatically clean up my email inbox.  It has been reaching over one hundred messages on a regular basis recently even when I put in a sincere effort to keep up with my mail and that just drives me crazy.  So today I really sat down and attempted to get caught up and for the first time in as long as I can remember I had so little in my email inbox that it all fit onto a single screen – no need to scroll!  This will help with my productivity quite a bit.  Having a lot of email is practically crippling.  You can’t get anything done when you are always scrolling up and down through tons of emails trying to figure out what is related to what and who needs you to take care of what when and whatnot.

Today was really busy at work and I was feeling like I was being run ragged even before lunch time.  Dominica and Liesl went out shopping around lunch so Oreo and I had the house to ourselves.

Early this afternoon we got the news that my salary has been negotiated and that things are all set for the move to Texas again.  This thing is back and forth constantly.  Nothing in writing yet, though, so we are not completely confident that this is done but I have assurance from the top that my salary is being protected.  As far as we know we are still on target to be in Texas as soon as possible, hopefully late this year, but we just don’t know.

The toughest part is, of course, selling or renting the house and we need confirmation as to what is happening so that we can begin that process.  The more lead time that we have the easier that this is going to be.  We are also hopeful that we will be able to sell the Mazda PR5.  We don’t need all of the cars that we have and we could use the money more than we could use the spare vehicle.

After work we watched some of Newhart on Hulu.  I have not seen that show since the late 1980s.  Watching that really takes me back.  I still remember some of the episodes slightly.

After work was finally done and it was evening it was time for Dominica and I to work on a Zimbra update.  Currently we have been running on Zimbra 5.0.13 and we are updating tonight to 6.0.1 which is a rather significant update.  The 5.0 series went as high as 5.0.19 before going to 6.0.  So that is nine updates (there is a pre-6 step in there) being applies tonight.  That means a lot of time doing backups and double checking configurations.

Dominica ended up going to bed around midnight or so.  The update had begun but she was not awake to watch it finish.  I stayed up to babysit the process for an hour or two after she had gone to bed.  This update was not nearly as bad as some that I have done.  The update was fine and email was back online in now time.  Very smooth, really.

It was pretty late when I got off to bed considering that I have work starting again tomorrow at eight in the morning supporting application updates in Bahrain.

Working at home again today.  We were hoping for some additional information this morning at the office but the day started off with a resounding… no news.  Very depressing.  What we really want is some information so that we can begin preparing either for me to start looking for work or for the move to Texas.  One way or another neither situation is helped by us waiting.  We need to be taking action no matter what to prepare for the relatively near future.  Life always feels easier when you are in a position to take some sort of meaningful action.  I may not control my destiny at this point but I would at least like to be productive.

This morning, I needed a break from sitting at my desk, so I drove over to the deli around the corner and picked up breakfast for Dominica and I.  After discovering their awesome croissants yesterday I definitely wanted more of them today.  They were quite delicious again and a nice break from the morning.

I did some brainstorming with a friend at work and he gave me some good advice.  He advised me to go to the business and see if they could help to coordinate things with my division to get things rolling on Texas.  A very good idea.  So I discussed it with my boss and then went to one of my matrix managers on the business side and asked for his assistance in getting this process worked out.  He was glad to help and was hopefully that we will have something positive tomorrow morning.  We have to wait for people in London to talk which makes everything take longer.

It was still a nerve-wracking day.  It is really hard to get things done and to be productive when you are concerned about whether or not you even have a job.

This afternoon I finally got around to installing TweetDeck to use to manage my Twitter.  I really like it.  This is going to make Twitter work far better for me.  Now I can follow it more easily throughout the day and can Tweet far more rapidly.  I was told to try out Digsby as well but I did not get around to that today.  That is on my list to try out in the future.

Dominica got a chance to play some of her Rock Band today.  Liesl was not a happy baby all day and was really driving Dominica crazy.  Liesl was extremely upset yesterday while I was gone all day and apparently that carried over into today even though I have been here.  She does not like it when I am away and I guess that after having been away in Germany so recently that she didn’t know if I was going away for a long time again and got really upset.

We spent the evening just relaxing as a family.