Sheep Guarding Llama

After being excited that last weekend the Journal News was actually delivered – after loads of calls and letters complaining that they weren’t delivering it – we now have another weekend without a newspaper.  Out of four weeks we have received the paper for which we paid exactly once.  One delivery in a month!  And to make that one delivery happen required call after call as well as emails and website followups.  The amount of effort that we have put into receiving this newspaper, which honestly I detest supporting financially whether the coupons are valuable or not, it is ridiculous that they are not bending over backwards to get it to us. I wonder if their advertisers know what their real circulation is versus their claimed circulation.  I bet we are a household counted on their books even though we never see the paper, and do their advertisers know that even if we were to receive the paper that we literally pull out the coupons and toss the rest directly into the recycling without even so much as opening it?

I am happy that, with this weekend’s failure, Dominica is finally sick of dealing with the newspaper and willing to do without it.  I am glad because it sickens me to pay for a product whose sole purpose is to fill our landfills and cut down our trees.  I am also glad because we don’t have enough space in our small house to deal with a weekly supply of additional items going directly to the recycling bin.  We produce enough garbage as it is and newspapers are surprisingly bulky.  It’s just another thing in the house that makes me upset every time that I see it.  So I am thrilled that they have failed so spectacularly to deliver us their product.  Of course, between the recent article in Westchester Magazine talking about their rapid decline in business and their lackluster attempts at staying in business I would not be surprised at all to learn that they had actually gone out of business and just failed to notify anyone.

I was up early this morning with Liesl.  We got up around seven thirty.  Dominica needed more sleep so she stayed in bed while Liesl and I got up and played for a while.  We went down to the living room and just played for a while.  We listened to the new “99 Essential Bach” pieces that I just bought the other day playing over the new MediaTomb streaming media server that I got working just before heading off to bed last night.  We finally have our music media, if not our video media, running in a permanent, working configuration that we should be able to use for many years to come.  I am very pleased and excited with the progress that we have made.  MediaTomb running on OpenFiler seems like an awesome solution.

Stumbled across a really interesting demographic study on how social media is used by different generational groups.  It is interesting to see how the digital natives and the digital immigrants differ in their approaches to social media.  For example, immigrants use tools like FaceBook heavily to reconnect with lost friends while natives do not even understand conceptually what it is like to lose contact with someone.  This is especially true now that the population has widely begun to understand the important of permanent email addresses and telephone numbers spurred by the permanence of FaceBook and MySpace accounts and blog addresses.  This was good timing on the discovery of this article as yet another “long lost” high school friend, Mike Slane, found me on FaceBook today after having lost contact nearly a decade ago.

Liesl and I hung out for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, before she lost steam and was ready to take a nap.  This is still her morning routine.  Get up, play and back to bed for a nap very quickly.  Then she is good to go pretty much for the entire day.  So I took her upstairs and she snuggled with Dominica for another hour or so before they got up to start their days.  That gave me a chance to go sign in and get started on work for the day.

Work went well today.  I had to build that one server which I do not normally need to do on a Sunday but that is not too bad unless some disaster strikes, which it did not.

Heavy rains and thunderstorms today.  It was actually raining before I got up this morning, which was around seven thirty when Liesl decided that she was tired of being in bed and wanted to go play in the living room with her toys, and continued to rain right into the afternoon.  It was pretty heavy rain too.  Amazingly heavy.  Dominica ventured out in it once to run down to the deli down the street to pick up danishes and the weekly coupons so that she could plan out her grocery shopping.

The rain was heavy enough that I was not surprised when, at just after three thirty this afternoon, our Internet connection dropped.  I gave it an hour with no resolution so I called Optimum and reported the outage.  Once I got through they said that they knew that Peekskill was down and that they expected it up in the normal timeframe which, by that point, would be pretty soon.  It was perfect timing for me since work was pretty much slow and I was hungry.  Since I was completely unable to do any work we decided to get some dinner.

We really wanted to go down to Ossining to try out the fish and chips shop on the water than was just rated the best fish and chips in Westchester County by Westchester Magazine but it was a quarter until six when we were going to head out of the door and they close at six.  It would definitely take us more than fifteen minutes to make it to Ossining.  So scrapping that plan.

We kicked around some options like fish and chips down in Tuckahoe but that is a bit past White Plains and more of a drive than we felt like doing this evening.  If we were going to go that far we wanted to get Indian in White Plains but the place that we want to try there is really famous for their lunch and we didn’t want to try it on the first time at dinner.  So we decided to try the Westchester Diner in Buchanan which is really close to Peekskill.  Buchanan is actually where Indian Point nuclear power generation facility is located.

Dinner was really good at the diner.  We are glad that we found another place to go eat.  They are open twenty-four hours too which is awesome.

After dinner Dominica talked me into ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery.  Back to Peekskill to get ice cream.  Then, because our Internet might have still been out, we stopped by Walmart and picked up the latest series of Family Guy on DVD so that we would have something new to watch although I had already seen almost every episode via Hulu when they were first airing this past season.

Once we got back home we popped in Family Guy and I settled into the recliner with the laptop and got back to work building that server for the office.  It needs to be built by morning and I lost the entire afternoon so I have to do it now.  Obviously our Internet access was working again once we were home.  Several other items came up at the office while I was working so the timing was actually pretty good.  I got a fair amount of work done tonight.

Dominica went to bed on the early side.  I stayed up and watched two episodes of The Wizards of Waverly Place that we managed to get to play from NetFlix on the PS3.  It is always a challenge getting that system to work between the Vista laptop that is having problems, the PlayOn server, the PS3 itself, the Internet connection, etc.  There is just so much to go wrong.

I finally went to bed around one in the morning.  Normal work day tomorrow.

I did a ton of writing on today’s post and, of course, lost it all when attempting to save it.  WordPress has a major deficiency in that when its login times out it does not ask you to log in and then save your work.  It asks you to log in and actively destroys any work that you had just submitted so that you have no means of recovering it.  Very frustrating.

My busy workload continued this morning.  Tons of Linux patching and system updates to do.  I started working as soon as I got up this morning and worked solidly into the afternoon.  I am pretty worn out after my really, really long day of work yesterday.

It has been so hot this week that we decided to fire up the dehumidifier in the basement to attempt to at least bring the humidity levels down in the house even if we cannot make it actually cool.  The air conditioning system is running around the clock just to keep the house at seventy-two during the day.  It is awful.  We need blinds for our big windows desperately.

This afternoon, once my work was finally done for the day, we went out to Pastel’s for dinner.  They love Liesl there and she loves visiting with everyone.  She loves sitting in her high chair in the middle of the restaurant where she can see everyone and flirt.  She was even watching the cooks in the kitchen and making eye contact and giggling at them.  She is so social.

After dinner we hit GameStop and spent all of my saved up GameStop gift cards on a fresh copy of Wii Sports Resort as well as a second controller.  Wii Sports Resort is just recently released and is the sequel to Wii Sports that shipped with the Nintendo Wii.  Resort is supposed to be very similar to the original but with more in-depth play as well as requiring that you have special, high-precision controller extensions that provide more data to the game.  The game itself ships with one of these units and we bought one additional so that we would have two total.

This evening we watched the worst movies that I have seen in years: Confessions of a Shopaholic. This was our bluray disc from Netflix that came today.  I can’t believe that Dominica was willing to sit through the entire thing.  This movie was truly atrocious.   Everything was bad about this movie.  Bad, low budget actors, bad directing, horribly pathetic story writing and even the underlying “moral” was totally crap – that it’s more or less okay, as long as you are cute and into fashion, to be a junkie.  The movie is about a junkie.  She buys clothes rather than taking drugs but it’s exactly the same.  And they make light of it the entire movie.  They make her look like a heroin addict and then act like being a heroin addict and ruining your own life and the lives of people around you is comedy.  Avoid this steaming pile of cinema at any cost.  If you want a movie about heroin addiction get Trainspotting. This attempt to bring serious movies like that to the sad world of fashionistas is just pathetic.

After that travesty we watched some Keeping Up Appearances before heading off to bed.  I love that show.  Classic.

Today’s major project was to get OpenFiler working as a UPNP / DLNA server so that we can use it to serve out media files to devices around the house – most notably the Sony PlayStation 3.  My first idea was to use the software ps3mediaserver from the Google Code project.  I spent most of the day working on that to no avail.  I installed it on my desktop and it worked just fine there which turned out good for testing purposes.  But installing on rPath Linux, on which OpenFiler is built, proved to be completely unreasonable.  There were loads of missing dependencies which do not exist for the rPath platform as well as the system needing the X Window System to be installed in order to handle its console.  X Windows, for a media center console?  Really?

After spending an exorbitant amount of the day struggling and struggling to make ps3mediaserver actually work – it would fire up but would attempt to transcode everything that I threw at it no matter what settings I used to disable this – I finally gave up sometime after midnight, attempted a few other products and finally settled on MediaTomb which was installed and running in, oh, about ten minutes.  Argh.  PS3MediaServer, Fail.  MediaTomb, Win.

So, as of one in the morning, after an entire day of struggling, we now have a working UPNP / DLNA Media Server in our house and the PS3 is receiving media from it.  Because the PS3 is still connected via the wireless connection it is still unable to stream anything because of our large file sizes but that will be fixed as soon as dad is able to help me run the CAT6 cable from the basement to the living room giving us GigE wired to the living room’s PS3 and XBOX 360!  We can’t wait for that.

The next step is transferring all of our existing media over to the new server.  This is going to be no small task.  Our media collection is truly massive – and we are just starting to put it online.  I expect that it will take several days before we can get everything moved over.  I can’t wait to get the small Netgear SC101 SAN device emptied out so that we can “decommission” that and pack it up for dad.  He will be happy to have an additional terabyte of storage on his network.  That is one of the last pieces remaining between us and being able to rebuild Dominica’s Vista 32 laptop as Windows 7 RC 64.

Pretty much a normal work day tomorrow.  I work all day as usual and have one server build that needs to be done during the day.  Other than that it should be a pretty light day.

I’m not exactly sure how I managed to pull it off but even after having been out of town for a week and having several days during which I had no way to post or write anything whatsoever SGL is actually completely back up to date!  Go me.

For some reason, even after getting actual sleep last night, I was completely exhausted today.  Really, really exhausted.  I guess that things just really caught up with me after a very long, hard week.

It is really warm in the lower Hudson Valley today.  Hot and sticky.  And a few times during the day we were suddenly hit with massive rainstorms.  They never lasted more than a few minutes leaving us with one hundred percent humidity and no cooling effect to show for it.

The air conditioning at our house appears to be having a really hard time keeping up with the cooling needs in the house.  It is sometimes struggling just to keep the house around seventy degrees.  With it being so humid it is even worse feeling in the house.  It was so humid today that I decided to hook up the dehumidifier that we have in the basement to see if that would improve things at all.

I managed to get OpenFiler working today.  At least it is working when connecting to it from Vista.  Windows 7 is still having an issue.  I am not sure if it is an account issue or if it is something bigger like and Windows 7 communications issue.  More experimentation will be needed there.

Since Vista is able to connect just fine to the new filer it gave me an opportunity to begin moving all of the data from the old Netgear SC101 SAN system over onto the OpenFiler system.  We have a ton of data to get moved and the sooner the better so my next project is now underway.  We have around 700GB of data to move from the SAN device over to OpenFiler before we can start working the Vista box!

I got my flights booked for my European vacation today.  It turned out to be quite inexpensive too – even doing it at this late of a date.  Just six weeks until I head off to Amsterdam and the round trip flights worked out to be just $535 after all taxes!  I cannot believe that it can be so cost effective to fly to Europe.

I am flying out of JFK on Tuesday, September 8th in the evening after work.  I have enough time to work a full day before leaving.  Hopefully that means that I will be tired and will be able to nap on the flight.  I fly to Dublin where I have a few hours of layover before catching a puddle jumper over to Amsterdam.  I arrive in Amsterdam at two in the afternoon.  It is roughly twelve hours of travel time to go from New York to Amsterdam with my short layover.  It will be a long trip.

I am be returning from Amsterdam on Monday, September 14th at one in the afternoon and will arrive back in New York on the same afternoon at seven.  It is amazing how much the time difference affects you on a flight this long and this directional.

I do not plan to be spending any real time in Amsterdam.  I am really just using it as a launching point for getting in to Osnabruck where I will be spending the week.  Since I look like I am going to be traveling alone my plan is to just take the train rather than dealing with the cost and mental overhead of renting a car and then finding my way about in countries with signs in languages that I do not speak very well.  I can read must signs in Dutch and German without a problem in a pinch but would prefer to avoid it when driving alone for my first time on the continent.

We called down to the Maple Avenue Deli this evening to check about their pizza again and again their oven is off because of the heat.  Their lit pizza sign is still on in the window, of course.  So we skipped eating there and called out to Forno’s for eggplant parm wedges and fried calamari instead.  That was even easier since it is delivered.  We definitely did not want to do anything extra with me working all evening.  I have a lot of work scheduled for tomorrow as well and Sunday is not going to be the lightest day either.  Just one busy weekend.  It is good as this should mean, in theory, that I will not be working as much next weekend when dad is here.

Today was a crazy day at work.  The system updates that we did tonight took my entire evening away.  It was expected and I’m not complaining about the hours.  It was long, though.  I ended up working until around one thirty in the morning!  Exhausting.  Good progress on the system upgrades and this will definitely be making my workload a lot easier going forward.

Boy is it nice to be home again.  I have really missed everyone and my house as well.  I have been away for an entire week.  Now it is time to do some catchup.

I was particularly exhausted today.  This week has really been taking a toll on me.  It has been great and really productive but really wearing me out at the same time.  No rest for the weary, I am afraid.  I had to be up this morning a little early so that I could start getting caught back up with everything at work.

Work was quite busy as expected.  And I was trying as much as possible to spend time with Liesl today too.  I have really missed her.  I definitely do not like being away for so long!  It is going to be really rough when I go away to Germany and the Netherlands in a few weeks.  I will be gone a few days longer then!

Today was Liesl’s first day of really “accepting” being fed solid foods.  She has been eating solid food for a while now but has not liked it and really has been fighting it.  Today she finally started just opening her mouth and letting Dominica feed her while I watched.  She was only willing to do it as long as I was standing right there, though.  She is really liking the mix of cereal and peaches that Dominica has started making for her.

I did a bit of work on my OpenFiler installation today as well.  There is something in the setup that is still eluding me and it is not completely working yet but I can tell that serious progress is being made and I am definitely looking forward to it really being working.  It is going to be awesome having a single system on which to store all of our music and movies.  We really need it up and running too.

Dad is coming soon and is going to help run the cable through the floor from the office in the basement to the living room so that we can wire up the PS3, XBOX 360 and the AppleTV so that they get better speeds.  Right now they are all on wireless except for the XBOX 360 which is not online at all because it does not have wireless which makes it almost impossible to use as almost everything requires Internet access to work or, at the very least, to be patched and updated.

Originally I was thinking that I was going to need to purchase a new Gigabit Ethernet switch to place upstairs to handle the needs of the living room.  Then I thought that I would like to move the wireless unit up from the basement to that space as well since we don’t use any wireless in the basement but do use it on both of the higher floors so it would make sense to get the access point as close as possible to where it would be used.  Then it occurred to me that the wireless access point is, itself, a small Gigabit switch!  I guess I can kill two birds with one stone there and save the money that I would have spent buying a switch.  That’s awesome.  I can’t believe that I hadn’t thought of that before.  It does not give me as many switch ports as I would have liked to have had on that floor (just three – all of which are already accounted for) but it does save a bit of money and simplify the wiring strategy and it makes better use of existing equipment in the house and reduces equipment sprawl and power consumption.  It also means that we do not need to order anything new and wait for it to arrive – we can wire things up the moment that dad is able to run that cable.

Originally dad was going to have come down to Peekskill already and was going to be here all this week.  With his sudden trip to Ohio this weekend that has been changed and he is now coming down next Friday and staying over the weekend and for a few days.  So we will see him a week from tomorrow.  That actually works out well as it will give me a week and a half to continue doing DVD conversions so that I will have even more ready for him to ship back with him and help to clean out the stacks of discs sitting around my office right now.  If I work really hard at it this week I might be able to get everything completed that is in the house so that I only have to work on the “current” set of things rather than having stacks of backlogs here to work on as well.

For dinner this evening we tried going over to the Maple Avenue Deli which is right around the corner.  I discovered this little hole-in-the-wall place one day when the GPS went haywire and sent me driving all over the place in the wrong direction.  It is the closest restaurant to us and very convenient.  We could easily walk there.  It just is in a direction that we would almost never go with our normal driving routine so we did not know about it all of this time.  I believe that we have driven that way.  It would be strange if we never had.  I think that we managed to just never notice this little place before.

We were hoping to try out the pizza from the deli but it is a really hot and muggy evening and the deli decided that they could not run their pizza oven with it being so hot.  So all that they had were deli sandwiches.  And no subs either as they ran out of sub bread.  So just round rolls.  We also got ice cream while we were waiting in the heat.  The deli is not air conditioned.  The ice cream was the saddest, tiniest cones we have ever seen.  We won’t be getting ice cream there again.  I’m not sure how much business they do there but it can not be very much.  No one is going there just for ice cream and with the pizza oven turned off there is nothing but deli sandwiches and potato chips.  Rather slim pickings.  We will try back on the pizza – it would be great to find a good pizza option nearby.  Like every pizza place in downstate New York, though, this place specializes in extremely thin crust pizza which no one I know really likes all that much.  It has to be done incredibly well to be even remotely as good as Upstate’s “normal” crust (not deep dish and not thin crust) pizza which is the standard from Albany to Buffalo.

We watched the movie Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine this evening which was the very first of the Frankie and Annette bikini movies to have a budget of over $1m USD.  Funny to think about how cheap those movies were to make although when you see them it is pretty obvious.  This movies was not part of the standard Frankie and Annette saga and Annette only makes a cameo in this one but Susan Hart and lots of the other regulars are in it.  This one was bad just like the others.  Maybe a little worse.  Silly and somewhat entertaining like all of those weird 1960s “B” movies but definitely not good.

We did some work on our Netflix this evening which has not been working in forever and we managed to get it to work long enough that we were able to watch roughly four episodes of The Wizards of Waverly Place Season One available from the Disney Channel via Netflix On Demand before Netflix completely stopped working via PlayOn on the PS3 again.  We are very confident that the issues are actually with the installation of Vista 32 on Dominica’s laptop where the PlayOn server runs.  We are working to get that laptop prepared to be reinstalled with Windows 7 RC instead of with Vista but in order to do that we really need to get the OpenFiler system working because it is that system that is going to be used to store all of the data that is currently on Dominica’s laptop or on the SAN device that it attached to her laptop.

We tried to get to bed at a reasonable time but that did not work out so well.  Once you are used to going to bed late it is hard to get to bed early even when you are tired.  No luck getting OpenFiler working today but I am hopeful that with some sleep I will be able to fix it tomorrow when I am bright eyed and bushy tailed.

I still have a soar throat from the long drive to Houston.  I can barely talk actually and I am having some extra problems sleeping because of a combination of tickles in my throat and just general swelling and discomfort.