Sheep Guarding Llama

When my alarm went off at eight this morning it felt like I had not been to bed at all.  Two and a half hours of sleep.  Way too little.  I was very, very tired and quite soar as well.  Dominica and Liesl were still asleep but dad was awake when I went up to the office to see how things were going.  He had not seen the post-it note that I had stuck on the office door telling him that things were fixed so he did not know the state of things and whether or not we would be able to leave as planned.

Luckily this gave me a couple of hours to sign into the office this morning and to make sure that things were running smoothly and that nothing was going to be needed in my absence.  I am only “off” of work for one day but everything falls apart regardless.  Or so it seems.

I was ready to go quite early.  Dominica and Liesl slept until almost nine, I believe.  They needed the sleep.  Dad could have used some more too.  We got the car loaded up and were on the road almost exactly at ten.  Not as early as we had hoped but far earlier than it might have been.  We built in a lot of buffer time so we still had lots of time in case things went wrong and we would still be able to get to the wedding reception without a problem.

We took the longer but more pleasant and scenic southern route taking NY 39 south out of Perry and slinging through southern Wyoming County to Arcade and then south into the Southern Tier counties heading eventually to US 86 and out to Erie, Pennsylvania.  I do not believe that Dominica has gone this way before or, if she has, that it has been a very long time.  We stopped in Arcade to get breakfast but it was ten thirty four – four minutes after McDonald’s stops serving breakfast – so it was lunch for us.  Four minutes.  Bummer.

On our way through Arcade Dominica saw the offices of the Attica – Arcade Railroad which she had never seen before.  It is a bright summer day and there were several AARR people standing around outside.  She was quite surprised that there was a railroad there and wanted to know when we could go on it for a ride.  I rode on the AARR long ago when I was quite young.  It is a short, scenic railroad that sometimes runs steam – which it did the time that I rode on it.  Hopefully my father will be able to figure out exactly when that was.

It was almost three thirty when we got to Alliance, Ohio where our hotel is.  We dropped dad at the hotel and then went to Long John Silver’s for their new Baja fish tacos that we saw advertised somewhere recently.  Dominica has never been to a Long John Silver’s and I have not been to one in a very long time.  Not a place that I frequent but every once in a while it sounds good.  I know that John Nicklin and I hit a LJS in the Pittsburgh area in December, 1999 on a business trip and I know that I have been to one at least once since then, but that is the extent of my definite memory.  We got our food to go.  Four fish tacos for $3.69!  We took them back to the hotel to eat there.

We got checked in to the hotel and unloaded the car.  We ate our tacos which were pretty good.  I liked them but didn’t think that they were all that exciting.  A great value for sure but not exciting.  Dominica really liked hers and thought that it was just as good as the ten dollar fish tacos from On the Border.  I did not feel that that statement could be made but did agree that they were the best priced fish tacos around and that I was happy to eat them and save nine dollars.

I finally got a chance to shower and relax a little.  Dad, in the room next door, managed to squeeze in a short nap.  Boy is it nice to be out of the car for a little bit.  It is also nice to be at the hotel in Alliance.  We stay here often enough that it is very comfortable.  We know our way around and where we are situated compared to the area.  We’ve been using this hotel for years because they are convenient, affordable and accept dogs.  Oreo loves staying here.  It is really too bad that he was not able to be here with us on this trip because of the heat.

Today is definitely a hot one.  We have been having such nice, cool weather all spring and summer thus far.  Today, though, it is in the high eighties here in Ohio.  Much warmer than we have gotten accustomed to it being.  Way too warm for me.

We drove right from the hotel to the wedding reception in Massillon, Ohio.  We arrived right on time.  Still no sleep for me but I was doing okay.

We had a great time at Gwen and Mike’s wedding reception.  This was the very first time that Liesl got to meet anyone from my mother’s side of the family!  Hard to believe that she is almost seven and a half months old and that this is her first time meeting so many people but travel just has not really been an option until now and knowing that we were going to be making this trip kind of held off everyone making a trip just to see her.

It was very nice getting time to visit and Liesl had so much fun.  This is her second wedding and she just loves getting to meet new people and getting passed around be help by one person after another.  She is our little social butterfly.  No doubt about that.  She definitely get’s that from me and me from my mother’s mother.

Mike and Gwen got married in Cancún, Mexico on July 4th which is also my grandparents’ anniversary. My grandparents celebrated their sixty-second anniversary on the day that Mike and Gwen were married. We had really wanted to go to Cancún but there was just no way. We had a prior commitment and with Liesl it just wasn’t possible. Dominica and I had really wanted to have gone to Mexico a few years ago but just never managed to make it happen. Someday I am sure that we will go. Either for a short trip and have Liesl stay with family or wait until she is older and can go with us (once the current national security crisis in that country has subsided.) Honestly, though, Mexico is near the bottom of my “must see” locations in Central America. I would prefer to see Panama, Guatemala, Belize, etc. But prices are good now. Maybe this winter we could sneak away to go down there if the political climate cools off.

We stayed at the party until around ten.  Boy were we all tired.  Dominica drove us back to the hotel in Alliance and it was straight to bed for everyone.  Tomorrow we are going to visit my family in the morning at my grandparent’s house in East Canton and then back to New York in the afternoon.  I do, of course, have to work in the morning so it will be a busy day.

Today begins our long weekend of driving.  Not as much driving and certainly not as much total traveling as the trip to Houston is soon going to be but this is still a very long weekend of driving.  Twenty four hours of drive time.

I did manage to take just a few test shots today with the Nikon D50 and the new 35mm lens that came yesterday.  I will be using it more at the wedding reception tomorrow, I expect.  But I wanted to grab a few additional test shots today and so I walked around taking some outside.  I discovered this little stream in my backyard, much to my surprise, so I took some pics.  I love the clarity on the new lens.  Really sharp.

The day was very normal.  Busy with work trying to get as much done as possible before we hit the road.  Anything not done today has to wait for almost a week until I get caught back up again and have time to get to things.  In addition to normal work I also did all that I could to get Handbrake set up on both machines in the hopes that it would be able to run for the entire time that we are gone.

Dominica spent the day packing and getting us as ready as possible so that we could leave the moment that I was done with work.  We are not taking much of anything with us on this trip.  No spare space to do any moving of stuff between our house and dad’s like we usually do.  Just one bag of DVDs to take so that they can go into storage.

I wrapped up work and we were on to the road around seven thirty.  It is going to be a really, really long night.

We skipped dinner to speed things up and grabbed food and coffee from McDonald’s on the Thruway just south of Albany.  Monica texted me while we were driving to find out when we were getting out to Ohio.  I only get to see my cousins about once a year so we always look forward to getting to see each other a lot.  It is tough being so far away from family.  We are far enough from Ohio that it is really difficult to get out there to see people.  We seem to only ever make it out when there is an event.  This is the first time that Liesl will be meeting anyone from Ohio, in fact!  Liesl is over seven months old now.

We made one additional pitstop during the drive and got Dominica some different coffee because her McDonald’s coffee was old and burnt and she had to throw it out.  Normally we love their coffee.  The decaf at night just was not fresh at all though and she could not bring herself to drink it.

We arrived in Frankfort at a quart until eleven at night.  Ugh.  We dropped off Oreo which was very sad.  We hate leaving him and being without him for the weekend.  I don’t sleep well when he is not around either.  I need my puppy snuggles to sleep comfortably at night now.  I am used to his snoring.

I had to do some quick work before we left because there is a datacenter relocation going on tonight and I have to shut down some servers for it.  We are doing updates to the servers since they are being cycled so that the updated get applied since getting time to restart the boxes is always a pain.  So we figured that we would be in Frankfort for about an hour.

Things went pretty badly with the shutdown process.  I did the updates and brought down most of the boxes and then discovered that something was wrong and that the boxes were not able to start again!  Very bad.  Very, very bad.  I worked for about an hour trying to determine what could be done but after midnight there was nothing to do as the servers needed to be turned off for the physical move.  So I worked until midnight and then we jumped in the car and drove towards dad’s house.  According to my Twitter feed, it was twenty four minutes into the new day when we hit the road.

As you can imagine it was a very stressful drive.  We spent the time strategizing about what would be the best course of action depending on what happened and when with the servers.  We called dad and ran through the scenario of determining that the servers were dead tonight and driving straight to Ohio rather than sleeping first but that did not seem like a reasonable option.

We arrived in Peoria, New York at five past three in the morning.  Exhausted but stressed and wired so no way was I going to fall straight to sleep.  Dad already had beds set up for us and had gone to bed himself.  Dominica took care of putting Liesl to bed and setting up my CPAP so that I could get to bed as quickly as the situation would allow.

I went straight to work to see what could be done to remedy the situation.  When we first arrived the servers had not yet been moved so there was nothing to do.  I caught up on email and kept checking everything that I could to make sure that there was nothing that I could do and then, around four, I tried going to bed myself.

No luck falling asleep.  I was too uptight to fall asleep at all.  Luckily I thought of using a web-based ping utility from bed.  Around four thirty I did a ping and noticed that the machines were responding.  I was up and out of bed like a shot and back up to the office upstairs.  After a really crappy night we ended up with a “best case” scenario – almost – and by a quarter after five all of the machines were back up and running without any problems.  What a relief.  It was a really long night but things worked out pretty well.

So at five thirty, roughly, I fell asleep finally.  Tomorrow is going to be a really rough day.  I need to be awake around eight which is slightly later than I had hoped originally but far better than we had thought that it might be.  Dominica is planning to get up with Liesl which will likely be closer to seven than to eight.  So, if all goes well, I will manage to get two and a half hours of sleep tonight after having worked all day and driven all night with loads of stress.  Ugh.  At least it is over now.  Just have to drive tomorrow.

Today is our last full day at home before we have to leave and get back to traveling again.  It is just a day to get a lot of work completed, things packed and all of the last minute stuff taken care of before we leave.  Starting tomorrow we will be on the road for twenty-four hours.  We will drive twenty-four hours by car for twenty-four hours of being in Ohio.

Today my new Nikon 35mm DX f1.8 lens arrived for my SLR.  I am very excited.  This is my father’s day present from Liesl.  My very first one.  This is my fourth lens for my Nikon SLR and the second really fast one.  I have a fast, fixed 35mm and 50mm along with the slower 18-55mm kit lens and its matching, slow 55-200mm that Dominica bought for me several years ago.

Liesl really started eating solid food a lot more today with some bananas. I took the opportunity to take some pictures with the new lens. Keep an eye on Flickr for lots of new stuff to be appearing.

Nothing really to mention today.  I am very far behind on the site and will do what I can to catch up as quickly as possible.

I am very excited this morning to find that my second article for Datamation, “Debunking the Blade Server Myth“, has been published.  Since this is an unscheduled and unrequested article on my personal thoughts about blades it did not really qualify for the top billing of the day but it is on the front page and my portrait is running on the front page as well.  Today it is the top article in the Data Storage area of the publication.

I posted a link to the article in SpiceWorks and I got a lot of really great feedback from people.  Once you publish something like this the people who have been secretly thinking that blades were a bad idea but didn’t want to be the first person to point out the emperor’s lack of apparel start coming out of the woodwork and feeling that they have voices that need to be heard.  Someone just has to be willing to be the child to point and laugh and the rest just falls into place.

I am very happy with the article personally and quite thrilled with the responses that I have received.  Getting paid to write is pretty cool as well.  I hope that I have time to write more prolifically in the future.  One to two articles per month would be awesome.

Today was my big day on SpiceWorks.  In the evening I finally obtained the rank of Mace!  SpiceWorks ranks its users on “spice” levels from very mild peppers up to habanero and ghost and then on to mace and pure capsacian.  I was one of the first four to make datil, the second person to ever make habanero, the second to make ghost and am the very first to make mace.  I am not alone in the mace ranks.  Very cool.  Perfect timing to obtain mace just two weeks before we kick off SpiceCorps Houston (first person to kick off more than one SpiceCorps and this is my third) and then to visit the SpiceWorks offices in Austin.

Liesl is really crawling now.  She is all over the place.  Now we are busy trying to get the house safe for her.  She can really move from place to place!

Today was mostly a work day and another very late night.

It’s Monday.  We are back in Peekskill and we do not have to be in the car again until Thursday night.  That means three whole days to ourselves at home!  Practically a vacation for the Miller family.  Dominica has been trying to talk me into traveling on Wednesday to break up the driving a bit more but I just can’t bring myself to leave the house so soon again and she doesn’t really want to be away from the house either.  We have been away too much recently and it makes us feel like we just can’t get anything done if we are never here.

Today is Liesl’s big crawling day!  We were so excited.  I was in the basement but heard Dominica gasp when Liesl did it for the first time.  Just a few “steps” at first but she got better very quickly.  I came to the top of the stairs when Dominica yelled and Liesl quickly attempted to crawl over to me.  She is going to be an expert crawler in just a few days.  Two months ahead of her doctor’s schedule for her.

We are working on getting arrangements made about the drive to Texas that is coming up.  Francesca and I spoke for a while today by phone and finally figured out what we are going to do.  Francesca, Madeline, Emily and Garrett are going to come down to our house in Peekskill sometime during the week of July 20th – probably closer to the end of the week but we are not sure about that yet.  Then, on Saturday the 26th, whenever I am done with work for the day, we are going to jump into the Toyota (the five of us, Dominica, Liesl and Oreo are staying home) and hit the road towards Houston.

Our hope is to make good progress and to be able to stop in Chattanooga, Tennessee without being too exhausted.  That is a good, solid drive but nothing that we can’t do.  We will be tired but not overly tired.  And I will get to see a few places that I have never been before although very little as almost the entire trip on Saturday will be parts of the country that I have driven previously.  The new bits will be almost entirely in the dark, unfortunately.

Then on Sunday, the 26th, we will get up early and drive on from Tennessee to Houston, Texas.  This entire drive will be parts of the country that I have never really seen before.  At least parts that I have not driven extensively in daylight.  So we should be in Houston late on Sunday evening with plenty of buffer time in case something goes wrong.

Monday I will be working from the Grice’s house in League City, Texas and recovering from the drive as much as possible.  Tuesday I will also be working from there and then going to SpiceCorps Houston’s first meeting at seven that evening!  Very exciting and a great use of the trip.  After SpiceCorps I will go back and get some early sleep.  I need to be at the Houston airport very, very early on Wednesday morning because I am taking the first flight from Houston to Austin.  I am excited as I have never seen Austin before.

Wednesday I will be in Austin all day.  I am already scheduled to spend a bit of time with the crew at SpiceWorks there.  I don’t have solid plans for the day or how we will be getting me from point to point but that should be worked out very soon.  Hopefully I will not be stuck in the airport all day.  That would be a pain.  But I am prepared just in case.  Then on Wednesday evening I am flying from Austin to Orlando and then from Orlando to White Plains where Dominica will go to pick me up and bring be back home.  It will be a very, very exhausting trip.

I called Verizon Wireless today to see what I needed to have Internet access for my laptop while I am doing all of this traveling.  They went through several things with me and we discovered that we were not using our minutes anywhere near as much as we could be so they dropped us by several plan levels and modified a few things and, in the end, Dominica and I managed to reduce our mobile spending by approximately $60 per month!  We also have an additional $15, roughly, to be saved once I get into a store in person and do a change based on a discount for which I am eligible.  I also found out that I am able to get a brand new BlackBerry Tour, which comes out a week from today, for about $49.  So I just need to call Verizon Wireless back on Sunday and they will ship me my cool new phone.  Dominica is going to get my current BlackBerry 8830 WorldPhone because she does not like her Pearl.

So we are really excited about saving a total of $75 every month.  That is awesome.  I love working with Verizon Wireless.  They have the best customer service ever.  Every time that I call them they are just so pleasant and easy to work with.  They always have good answers for me and work hard to fix stuff.  And they have awesome hours too.  I would really feel guilty going to another vendor just because of how well they treat me.  Plus other vendors don’t have their coverage so it doesn’t matter anyway.  I’ve been with Verizon or someone that Verizon bought for seventeen years now!  That’s got to be almost a record for being with the same carrier continuously.  Almost no one even had a cell phone in 1992 let alone with the same carrier even since then.

This evening we watched more of Big Bang Theory.  Then I ended up staying up until around three in the morning getting caught back up on things, posting to SpiceWorks, writing for SGL, etc.  I turned in my next article today and am very hopeful that it will be published soon.  The publisher who is picking up the option on it was very positive so I am hoping that we might see it tomorrow.