Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

It was pretty crappy having to get up at six thirty in the morning after our long day yesterday.  We were really exhausted this morning but it had to be done.  We got up, packed up, loaded the car, got Liesl ready and were out the door amazingly fast.  Very impressive for us.  You would never know that we were the Millers.

The drive back to Peekskill went fine.  No issues at all.  We stopped in Apalachin, New York to hit the McDonald’s there so that we could eat some breakfast on the road while we drove.  We were in a bit of a hurry so that I could get back to Peekskill in time to work my “shift”.

All in all it was a pretty uneventful day.  Got home around nine thirty.  Drive went quickly.  I got straight to work and spent most of the day working from the basement.

Dominica has been doing a lot of work on clipping coupons and is now getting the Sunday newspaper (which we picked up on the way home) and doing something called “The Coupon Game” using a website that helps her to maximize her coupon value.  So Dominica and Liesl went to the grocery store to do some shopping today.

While the girls were out I did some cleaning around the house.  There was a bit to do.

This evening we broke out the DVDs of The Big Bang Theory which came highly recommended by Andy.  We didn’t really like the first episode but ended up getting into the show after that.  It is pretty good.  They start off trying way too hard to be technical and fail first thing when the supposedly geeky guys go out looking for a fractional T1 line to make their Internet access faster.  A fractional T1 normally caps around 768Kb/s or 1Mb/s at most and is often quite a bit slower than that.  A typical home DSL and Cable line is many times that speed – many times at a fraction of the cost.  So these “smart” kids were going out to spend thousands of dollars a month on a line that most of us get many times over for $40!  Just bad writers using some term they heard ten years before and didn’t understand and thought that they could sound educated by using now.  Ugh.  Sloppy writing for the very first “we’re smart writers” attempt.  But the physics stuff and math stuff isn’t so bad and it improves and the season goes on.