Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is a very big day for Liesl Lee Miller. She is nine months old.  This morning she has a very large black and blue bruise right in the middle of her forehead.  It is extremely prominent.  Poor little thing.  It does not seem to bother her at all.  She acts as though nothing happened.  She is quite our little trooper.

Because tonight is the second meeting of SpiceCorps New York’s Manhattan Branch (the third overall meeting of SCNY) I had an extra busy day as I attempted to get everything done before I had to leave at four thirty to head down to the city.  If it wasn’t for SpiceCorps I might never make it down to New York at all.

Nothing really big happened today.  Just a lot of work.  I have been so busy this week with all of the stuff that has been going on that I have barely gotten any time to spend with Liesl which is really crappy.  Even being home all day I almost never get to see her.

This afternoon my new Nikon D90 digital SLR arrived from Amazon.  I am very excited.  The D90 is often considered to be the best DX format digital camera on the market today at any price.  Ken Rockwell, THE reviewer of all things DSLR said that the D300 was the best DX format camera ever in early 2008 and by October said that the D90 had replacedit as the best at less than half the price.  He says, “If you’re considering a D300, forget it. Get the D90 instead.”  The D90 not only has some better features than the D300 but actually has better image quality.  This is one amazing DX camera.  And it has ISO 100-6400.  That’s a full stop faster and slower than my former workhorse the D50.

No chance to play with my new toy today.  I got it and opened the box just to see it but that was it.  Did not get time to try out a single picture.  The new camera is, of course, compatible with all of my old lenses so no problems there.  I currently have an entry level Nikon 18-70 and 70-200 that are “pre-VR” kit lenses (but very sharp) and then I have two amazing prime lenses that are ultra-fast: an f1.8 35mm and an f1.4 50mm.  I have a new lens coming to replace the two kit lenses though.

The guys from the forthcoming SpiceCorps Upper Hudson (Albany) group stopped by at half past four to pick me up.  It is great to have a ride into the city.  That saves me a minimum of a half an hour plus about $14.  Awesome.

The ride in went pretty quickly and traffic really was not bad for Manhattan rush hour on Thursday.  It was nice to get a chance to chat in the car with some IT pros before the meeting.  Got us into the IT collaboration mode.

The SpiceCorps meeting went really well.  Katie was there along with several other folks that I now know.  We had a total count of twenty one to twenty five people at the meeting which is an amazing turn out.  At a minimum we matched the number from the Houston group and may have surpassed them.  We had so many that when only about half of the people had arrived we had to move out of the conference room that we were using and into the big open space of the main office.  We also ran out of chairs and had some people standing and some on desks.

I did a presentation on the “SAM Storage Device” today – the HP Proliant DL185 G5 with third party drives running OpenFiler.  It went pretty well.  I did not have nearly enough handouts, though.  I had thought that bringing a dozen or so would be plenty as that gave us a bit of buffer for the number of people that we had expected for the group tonight – which was around ten.  But more than twenty was definitely a pleasant surprise.  We need to get the group website done and have a way for people to post presentation materials on there prior to the SpiceCorps meetings so that anyone who wants them can have instant access to PDFs, PowerPoints, etc.

After the meeting was over, Katie, the guys from Albany and I went to the Heartland Brewery on Union Square for dinner.  It was probably close to ten o’clock when we got over there.  Katie and I both opted for the “seasonal beer voyages” which were seven five ounce tasters of the seasonal microbrews that the brewery had on tap.  It was some seriously good beer.  Very impressive.  Brewed in Brooklyn.  I went for the open face fish tacos.  They were quite good although not the style that I usually prefer.  Very difficult to eat.  They were swordfish which Dominica would not like and I did not like as much as salmon – too heavy, I think.  But quite good overall.

Katie caught the midnigth train back up the Hudson.  The Albany guys drove me home which was very convenient.  They also bought us dinner!  That was seventy ounces of beer on that tab too!!  The ride home was pretty quiet as everyone was starting to fall asleep.

It was well after one when I got back home.  I was very tired as I collapsed into bed.  It was quite a long day.  A good one, though.  Barely got to see Liesl at all today which was very crappy.  She and I need to make some serious time this weekend.

Another crazy day.  My day started with one call after another starting from the moment that I was out of bed this morning.  I was on the phone continuously until well after noon and barely even got a chance to come upstairs to eat with Dominica and Liesl during the lunch hour.  I spent most of the lunch period making quick, short calls as the morning and afternoon seem to be filled with long calls.

I got down to the office downstairs this morning and discovered that Dominica’s laptop had died during the night.  At some point it decided to restart itself and never came back up.  It had put itself into a continuous rebooting loop that never even managed to bring up Windows.  Great, not what I need this week.

I tried to work on the laptop throughout the day when I had some spare time.  At one point it ended up getting even worse and become so bad that it could not even power up.  Argh.  I ended up chatting online with HP tech support and they diagnosed the blink codes from the front panel LED for me (as I could not find the codes online anywhere) and got me back up and running.  It was a very unproductive day, though.

Late this evening Liesl had a major accident.  She was doing something in the dining room while I was still in the basement working and Dominica was cooking in the kitchen that resulted in her falling and hitting the dead center of her forehead extremely hard on the hard corner of the leg of one of our wooden dining room chairs.  Dominica yelled down to me and I came running to find Liesl with a massive purple bump in the middle of her forehead.  It was huge.  I have never seen any person have a bump like that on their heads before.  It was like something out of a movie.  It was so big that it made her head look deformed.  Surprisingly, Liesl seemed to be only minorly upset.  She cried a little when it first happened but once she was sitting in a chair with me watching The Wiggles she was pretty much completely happy.

We called Liesl’s doctor and we iced her head in the meantime.  Her doctored called back in about fifteen minutes and explained that the bump was exactly to be expected and that there was no cause for concern.  He also told us not to ice her head as that was only to make the swelling go down faster and was not going to make it hurt any less but that she would be annoyed by the ice and that that would be the bigger problem so best to just not do it at all.

It didn’t take long before Liesl was back to her old self.  At no point all night did she not look like something horrible had happened, though. She might have felt fine but it definitely looked like it had hurt a lot.  Poor little girl.  It is a rough age.

I stopped working after Liesl got hurt and spent the evening upstairs hanging out with her.  We all watched Speedway with Elvis Presley and Nancy Sinatra which we had started the other night but only made it maybe fifteen minutes into before I got pulled away on a call.  Then we watched Betsy’s Wedding with Alan Alda which is a classic of the early 90s although very few people know it.  It had a good cast and was a well done film with some interesting writing but was never all that popular.  It has been in my collection for a very long time.

While the movies were on Dominica worked on getting Windows Vista Business 32 reinstalled onto her laptop.  That went fine but took a lot of the evening.  It will be at least another day before her laptop is back into full working shape.

I got the rest of my new camera gear ordered this evening.  I have a new 18-200mm Nikon VRII lens coming that will replace my two cheap zoom lenses, a 16GB SDHC card to store all of the big 12MP images and the Nikon GPS unit that attaches right on to the top of the camera so that you can just go anywhere and take all of the pictures that you want and the GPS unit makes sure that the time is right and that the geographic location is stored right in the picture for you.  Perfect for travel photography! Soon everyone’s cameras will do that.  It is a really great feature.  Especially for those of us using services like Flickr.  I also had to grab a new 72mm UV filter for the new lens.  Better safe than sorry.  I can’t wait to try out all of this new gear.

I had a lot to do after Dominica went to bed so I stayed up quite late tonight working on all of the odd work that I needed to catch up on.  I’ve been behind much of the week and want to get caught up before tomorrow.  Tomorrow evening is SpiceCorps NY in Manhattan.  I have some guys from the upcoming SpiceCorps Albany group swinging through in the late afternoon to pick me up which is great.  I can just ride down to the event and don’t even have to bother with the train.  This will save me time, hassle and at least twelve dollars.  Good deal.

Before turning in for the night I got the laptop at least back up to the point where it was able to compress movies again.  So it is back to work churning out new compressions through the night.  I managed to get tons more CDs done as well while I was up late.  Good use of my time.

One of my big projects is preparing my presentation for the SpiceCorps event tomorrow.  I am giving my open storage system talk about which is only a five minute talk or so but it is nice to be prepared with handouts and stuff.  I wish that I had time to work up an entire PowerPoint presentation and have the equipment ready so that I could give a more formal talk but I just don’t have time for that nor do we have a space where that would work anyway.  I expect that we are going to be pretty cramped tomorrow.

Another really busy day today.  My day started on the phone first thing this morning and continued for the entire day.  Barely enough time to eat and every meal is interrupted.  I am falling behind on SGL as well.  Just no extra time for myself.

Very little to report today.  Lots of work.

I did get a chance to order my new camera, a Nikon D90.  We decided, Dominica and I, that we really needed to have a good camera with a higher resolution than my older D50.  Having the additional resolution, not to mention additional pro features, is necessary so that we will be able to make large prints of the pictures that we take of Liesl.  We have been getting lots of great shots of her but are sad to discover that we are far below the resolution necessary to print them at any real size.  We figured that with my upcoming trip to Germany in two weeks and our big trip to Disney World in November and likely a trip to Texas in between that this was the last moment in which to buy one without missing tons of stuff that we will really regret.  We couldn’t afford to upgrade when Liesl was younger and really didn’t grasp how much the resolution would impact the printing of the images but now that we are printing them regularly to use on the walls we are seeing it as a real problem.

I got the camera from Amazon and had it overnighted.  It was out of stock when I placed the order and is supposed to come in to Amazon’s warehouse on August 30th so I should, in theory, have the camera the last day in August.  Just enough time to test it out to make sure that it is going to work for me on the first trip.  I am going to be taking tons and tons of pictures while in Europe mostly because I will be there alone with little else to do.  I plan to see Germany on foot, mainly, and to be carrying the camera the entire time.

I planned to go to bed on the early side tonight.  I went down to the basement at eleven to set up the transfer processes to make sure that the computers were busy through the night and ended up getting asked to cover for a little bit of the overnight shift.  I ended up covering for over two hours going late into the night.  Then, when the regular guy got back to take back over from me, I asked him what he was thinking about doing with the pending relocation to Texas for our team.  Luckily for him I did that as it turns out that because he was overnight support it never occurred to anyone to mention the news to him and he was asleep during the conference calls disclosing the information!  So he has gone an entire week not knowing all of the stuff that has been completely occupying everyone’s thoughts at the office.  So we talked for about an hour as I filled him in on what I knew.  What a shock it was for him.  I bet he ended up having a very long night.

Made amazing progress on CD transfers today.  Those will be done in no time.

I got up and got to work thinking that I would be able to get some free time this morning so that I could go out to breakfast with dad, Liesl and Dominica.  That did not managed to happen.  We ended up being able to go to lunch about fifteen minutes early.  That was as close to breakfast as we managed to get.  For lunch we went to Pastel’s which is right around the corner and just did a quick lunch.

Dad unpacked his car this morning.  This load included tons of DVDs and CDs to be converted.  Now I really have my work cut out for me.  I am trying to work out how I can step up the rate of conversion to keep up with all of this stuff.  I really need more computers.  Dad also brought our teak bookshelf that used to be in the living room area of our house in Geneseo that we got with some of the money from our wedding presents.  Originally this bookshelf was going to go into the dining room area here in Peekskill and new Billy bookshelf units from Ikea were going to be purchased on which to place books in the area behind Dominica’s desk in the basement here, but now we are avoiding all new purchases so the bookshelf, which is rather small, is going behind Dominica’s desk instead.

While dad was here he helped me move the television stand from the basement up to the living room.  We have to abandon our plan of wall mounting all of our home theatre equipment and will instead use the television stand that we had used in Newark for that purpose.  The television stand was going to be used for our theatre in the basement but we are completely giving up on being able to have that.  Not even considering doing anything down there now.  We really are completely regearing everything to make way for the upcoming move to Texas, that we expect will happen.  Still not official, of course, but we have to be planning already.

Dad hit the road after we had lunch at Pastel’s.  The rest of the family left earlier this morning from the hotel so we did not see them today before they left.

The rest of the day was all work for me.  Lots to be done and very little spare time.  This evening, after work, Dominica and I watched The Love Guru with Mike Meyers.  It was cute.  Nothing special.  Just as the Austin Powers movies went down hill as they progressed this movie was probably between Austin Powers 2 and Austin Powers 3 in quality.  They at least figured out that being all gross wasn’t funny and did not make people want to watch the movies again so they left that stuff out of this film but mostly it follows a very AP formula.  Entertaining but bland.  I am glad that we did not purchase it.  It is amazing how often the movies that we rent from Netflix we are relieved to not have purchased.

I have been exceptionally busy with work and have been putting in an incredible amount of time on the phone.  Saturday and Sunday were not all that bad but today was really something.  I am barely able to do a thing with all of the time being spent talking on the phone.  It is really draining me.

Liesl was up during the night so Dominica did not even get a solid four hours of sleep before she had to get up before six this morning to work on our Disney reservations.  I think that she was up until around two last night just preparing for them.  She moved the laptop up to our bedroom and had everything set up so that she could just wake up and work on them.  Today is the ninety day mark before our vacation in Florida begins in November and the food is a major component of that trip so both Dominica and Francesca and simultaneously working on the reservations this morning right at the moment that Disney opens its reservation lines.  You really have to be dedicated to this process if you want to get the right meals at the right time and especially when we have a party of ten and want to do all of the really exclusive things like all three princess meals including one at Cinderella’s castle.

Dominica and Francesca did a great job getting reservations and we have quite the impressive lineup of food at Walt Disney World this Thanksgiving week coming up in late November.  We will be eating at one exciting restaurant after another.  Many that Dominica and I have eat at before and many that are new to everyone.  The restaurant to which I am most looking forwarding to trying is the new Tusker House in the Animal Kingdom.

Today was our day to really visit with the family from Ohio. They have a continental breakfast over at the Peekskill Inn so they ate over there.  We got some sleep and hung out, just dad, Dominica, Liesl and I at the house until everyone over at the Peekskill Inn was ready to come over and visit.

Mostly we all just visited at the house today.  I did have to work so we were unable to actually go anywhere during the day.  That was probably best.  We were able to just relax for much of the day and everyone got a chance to really spend some time with Liesl.

For the most part I was able to actually relax and visit with everyone today.  I had to work solidly in the basement for a few hours in the middle of the afternoon but it was not too bad at all.

After my work was over (or overish, at least) we all drove out to Grandma’s in Yorktown Heights for the early bird special on dinner.  It is a major cost saver to get the early bird at Grandma’s as Dominica discovered recently.

Everyone really enjoyed dinner.  Liesl was in rare form managing to get everyone in the restaurant to pay attention to her.  She really knows how to work a crowd.  She was very happy all through dinner.

After dinner we came back and just relaxed at the house until late.  We just took it easy which was a nice change of pace.  I managed to take some pictures while everyone was there that I hope to be able to get posted in the next few days.

We said our goodbyes tonight.  Liesl is now able to say goodbye as well!  She only gets it out once in a while but it is her first real word that she uses in conjunction with a specific event (people leaving) other than her first word (more) used when she wanted more ice cream and that she has not been using since that first day or two.  She still mumbles out mama or dada from time to time but is not speaking very much.  Just having her say “bye” from time to time is pretty exciting.

We will not see the Ohioans tomorrow.  Grandma, grandpa and aunt Gayle are going to leave directly from the motel and head straight back to Canton, Ohio in the morning.  Dad is staying with us and will likely stay through lunch and then head back home himself.  We still need to unload his car before he goes too.