Sheep Guarding Llama

I was awakened this morning to Oreo barking as a crew arrived to power wash the neighbour’s deck.  Oreo, being blind, tends to panic pretty easily now wanted me to get up and investigate any sound going on outside of the house as he has no way to check for himself.

My desktop has hardware issues and I am finally giving up on it.  It has been running for two weeks now, I think, but it blue screens whenever the AVG AV is running.  I could turn that off but that is not a solution.  I know what the problem is, bad memory sticks, but cannot go through the downtime necessary to do hardware tests and get the warranty to cover them.  I need to be working.  So I ordered a new PC and will do the memory test after I have switched over to the new, completely warrantied by HP, PC.

I ordered an HP dc5850 with Vista Business.  It is running a triple-core AMD Phenom II processor – the latest in AMD desktop technology.  I would have preferred the quad core but finances dictate otherwise.  I did get 6GB of RAM, however, which will be very nice.  That is double what I have been using for a long time.  Pretty nice for a desktop.  This new machine probably has roughly four time the horsepower of my current dx5150 desktop with its aging Athlon64 3200+ processor.  The new machine comes with both XP and Vista but I will, almost certainly, run Windows 7 RC on it instead.

I started using Mozy Home online backup today.  I have been very interested in it for a while but just today had the chance to get it installed and to see how it would perform.  I am thinking that I am going to get the pro account.  It is very cheap for home use and looks like it will really do a great job.  Very simple to use and having an online backup is rather important.  It handles multiple computers too which is great.  P.S. If you sign up for Mozy through SGL I get free additional backup space so please, give them a try!

I also started playing with DimDim today too.  DimDim is a service that competes with WebEx and LiveMeeting.  So far it is looking pretty interesting.  I will provide feedback when I get a feel for how it is working.

The HP Proliant DL185 G5 arrived today.  I am extremely relieved to learn that the drive tray that I am testing actually works which we were unable to confirm until the machine was physically in the house.  Both I and, I expect, HP are very happy to learn that this solution is going to work.  The one bad thing of the day is that the rear facing drive carrier does appear to have arrived.  I am waiting for HP to get back to me and see what needs to be done.  Currently the server holds a dozen large format hard drives and the read facing drive carrier will hold two additional drives.

My article on Datamation (Being An IT Manager) got moved from the second headliner yesterday to the top headline today!  I guess that I did okay.  My editor emailed me to let me know that I was getting an average of 5.5 minutes per page which is pretty exciting.  Now I am going to be nervous writing a second article as I need to live up to the first one.  I am hoping to get started writing my next article this week.

Today was busy but I feel as though I am mostly on top of things.  I continue to not feel completely overwhelmed which is really important.  I don’t mind the workload as long as it is not burrying me.

I’ve gotten into the routine of coming upstairs around seven thirty and having dinner and hanging out with Dominica and Liesl until Liesl goes to bed.  Then I go back down to the basement and work until bedtime.  Tonight I ended up on the phone until half past midnight!

Tomorrow is SpiceCorp NY’s first Manhattan meeting and second overall meeting.  Should be fun.  We are expecting about eight to nine people so not nearly as many as the thirteen who showed at the New Jersey branch meeting but a respectable number and a good amount for a start on a single branch.  Katie and I will be attending at six thirty tomorrow.  Should be fun.

Today was destined to be a good day.  First, I got plenty of sleep.  About ten hours, in fact.  I can’t tell you how great it felt to get ten hours of sleep.  It was not quite solid sleep – that would be far too much to ask.  But it was enough sleep and that is good enough for me.  I felt great when I finally got up this morning.  Oreo snuggled all night too.  Liesl was in a very good mood this morning as well.

My first really amazing news for the day was that my very first article was professional published today!  Internet.com’s Datamation magazine published my article “Being an IT Manager: Joys and Headaches” as one of the three headlining articles for the day on their site.  It is very exciting.  And yes, being professional published means that I am being paid to write.  Not just doing it for fun.  I have wanted to be a writer for a long time.  It is relatively hard to break into writing.  So this is a very big deal for me.  Nine years of blogging on SGL finally pay off!

The server that I was expecting on Friday still did not arrive today.  I do not have a tracking number for it so I am not sure when to be looking for it.

What did arrived today is my copy of “Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Pyton” from Amazon.  I am always interested in teaching techniques being used today and the Pragmatic Programmers always turn out good books so I am checking it out.

Lot’s of work to do today, but that is okay because I am feeling much better and I am making good progress.  It is much easier to feel relaxed when you don’t have a mountain of work waiting for you.

Liesl had a pretty weird sleeping schedule today.  She is definitely worn out and has her schedule all messed up.  She has a cold too and is very congested.  She is having a hard time breathing which is making her sleep more poorly than usual.  This is her first time being sick.  She is not very sick – just a normal cold.  Lots of sneezing and coughing.

Because of Liesl’s shifted schedule I actually got a bit more time to spend with her today than usual.  It was very nice getting time with my daughter.  We had a lot of opportunity to play and just snuggle on the recliner today.

I have been going through some of my old books that came from dad’s house this week.  A lot of them are the old Sugar Creek Gang series.  Much like the Hardy Boys.  There are also several children’s “adventure” books like “Trapped in Death Cave“, “Trapped in Slickrock Canyon” and “Danger on Panther Peak“, all of which I read when I was quite young.  I also found my original copy of “The Cricket in Times Square” which was read to my class in second grade by our teacher.  Listening to her read that book to the class is one of my favourite memories from school.  It was one of those moments when I really started to like the idea of books and it was at that point that I really started reading.  I had been reading since Kindergarten, of course, but never really enjoyed it until I started discovering books that were more my style like this one.  In a few years I will be able to start reading it to Liesl!

We watched a doube-header season finale of Murder She Wrote tonight from the end of the fifth season.  Liesl stayed up late or we would not have watched the second half.  Then we tried to go to bed at eleven thirty.  I was actually in bed but got an email that required my response.  So I went down to the basement and ended up working until half past twelve.  Then I went back up to bed.

I wasn’t in bed for ten minutes before my mobile rang.  Back down to the basement again.  I ended up working until two in the morning.  Now I am really tired all over again.  The work was important that I do it tonight.

It was late when we finally go to bed last night but with being able to sleep in a little it was not too bad although there were many interruptions during the night.  So it was a “holding ground” kind of night.  I am still really exhausted today but no more so than yesterday.  I really feel like we are nearing the end of the tunnel and can start to see the light at the other end with this massive lack of sleep.  We have been worrying for weeks about how bad this week was going to be and that was before going through the problems with my desktop that kept dying on me.  That really added to the problems and it was all downhill from there.

I have a full day of work today but it is Sunday and far less stressful than normal days.  Liesl was really exhausted from yesterday and slept for most of the morning until about one in the afternoon.

We managed to actually get some stuff done today and, for the first time in a long while, actually had a little bit of time to relax.  Not a lot of time but a little.

We didn’t do much actually relaxing today but spent most of any freetime just catching up on little things and getting things into place.  We have been so overwhelmed for so long that it seems like the house must be almost falling down by now.

We got an opportunity to go for a nice walk in the evening as well.  We took Oreo and Liesl out and did a good two to two and a half miles.  We have been missing our walks quite a bit recently.  We have not had any chance to take them at all and we have really been feeling the lack of exercise (combined with an excess of less than healthy foods.)  We were definitely feeling better after getting to take our walk.

My goal for this evening was to go to bed at roughly the same time as Liesl.  That did not end up happening but I did get settled in with a pretty solid plan of being in bed by nine thirty.

That also did not happen.  I ended up having a couple of issues come up at work and it was a quarter after eleven when I finally had a chance to break away from the office and get up the stairs and in to bed.  Dominica actually decided to go to bed as well which I was not expecting.

Finally, at least a chance to sleep potentially a normal amount.  And look, SGL is finally caught up as well!

Last night ended up being a night of practically no sleep at all for me.  I don’t sleep very well anymore if I go to bed before Dominica so I didn’t really fall asleep until after three in the morning.  Then, as Dominica was too tired to wake up to her crying, I was doing all of the getting up to take care of Liesl during the night and it was rather a rough night.  We was up more often than once per hour (she actually sleeps through the night but needs pacifier maintenance performed or else she will awaken) so there was almost never a stretch of time when I was able to get any solid sleep at all.  So I slept in much later than I had anticipated this morning as it was the only chance that I had to get anything resembling real rest.

The one thing, for which I am very thankful, is that I finally managed to finish writing the article that I have been working on for Datamation (an online magazine published by Internet.com) last night.  I was going to be really stressed all day today if I did not managed to complete that before going away for the weekend so I pushed to complete it last night before going to bed.  Dominica proof read it for me and I submitted it.  So I have the weight of that off of my shoulders today.  So even though I have very, very little sleep at least I have one less thing to be worrying about.

Once I was finally up it was time to work.  There was a lot of work to be done and I spent many hours working as quickly as I could trying to get enough work done so that we could get on to the road and down to the Philadelphia area as we are planning on spending the afternoon visiting with Jenn and Angelo whom we have not seen since around February.  This will also be our first time seeing their new home which they purchased around June of last year.

I was finally done with work really late, around one thirty.  I ran upstairs and took a quick shower while Dominica got Liesl and Oreo ready to travel.  We were on the road around two thirty.

The drive down to Ambler, Pennsylvania takes us roughly two and a quarter hours.  A lot of the drive in reminiscent for us as it takes us down past Newark (where we lived 2006-2008) and then past New Brunswick (where we lived for most of 2006) and down a route that we have used many times over the past several years and then down through Trenten and into Pennsylvania.

Liesl did really well on the trip down and slept until we were in the last stretch of about fifteen minutes or so and then she was starting to get a little fussy.  Pretty good considering the length of the drive.

We visited for a few hours and watched the Preekness before going out for dinner.   This was our first time seeing their “new” house.  I saw “new” but they bought it months before we bought our “new” house and we have been here for over seven months already – and are still moving in, of course.   It is a really cute and it, what appears to be, a really neat neighbourhood.  They can walk to a lot of stuff from there is “downtown” Ambler.

Dominica and I were really starved.  Min had had breakfast and nothing else.  I had skipped all food for the day because I didn’t want to take the time away from getting my work completed.  

We went to a little Indian place not far from Jenn and Angelo’s house where we got some of the most delicious curry that we have ever had.  We were really excited to have a chance to get Indian cuisine as there is not any Indian anywhere near home that we have found yet and Dominica is really, really missing it.  It was so good that Dominica and I actually ordered another order of it so that we could take it home to have for another meal!

Liesl had a great time at dinner.  She was the hit of the restaurant and the owner and the waiter kept coming over to play with her.  She had a lot of fun.  She is, as always, our little social butterfly and is all about the attention.  She really wanted to try our food too but she just can’t handle solid food yet.

The food was so good that we ate ourselves sick.  We got back to the house and took Liesl and Oreo out for a walk around the block on which Jenn and Angelo live.  It was a pretty short walk but walking Oreo in the dark is nearly impossible as you have to carry a flashlight to have any chance at all of keeping him from just running into things.  It is very difficult.

We visited for another two hours or so and ended up leaving Ambler around ten thirty at night.  Dominica was completely exhausted and slept for a good portion of the drive home.  I was feeling a bit ill from lack of sleep and it was a very difficult drive especially as it started raining rather heavily.  Not a record breaking rain or anyting like that but a good, solid rain that makes it difficult to drive – especially in an all-wheel drive SUV which does not have good traction like a normal rear-wheel drive car.  It tends to slip much more often.

It was just a little after one when we pulled into Peekskill.  It was still raining so we were running to get everything into the house without getting all wet.  Then it was off to bed.  Probably were able to get into bed around two in the morning.  One of these days I will really get sleep but it is not going to be today.

Tomorrow we will be home all day.  I am working the Sunday shift but I do get to sleep in a little bit as the Sunday work is shifted later than the work during the rest of the week.

I was still pretty tired this morning when I got up at six thirty to cover the early shift at the office.  I am definitely glad to be sleeping in my own bed again but having a short night tonight is pretty rough.  I may have gotten five hours of sleep at best.  Liesl has been pretty restless the last several nights.  She is teething these days and she gets very upset if she loses her pacifier during the night so we have to work to keep that in.  So she manages to sleep through the night quite often even though we do not.

Work went okay today.  Busy but it is Friday so that is just how things are.  I was hoping that my new server, a Hewlett-Packard Proliant DL185 G5 would arrive today so that I could get started on testing it out and verifying that the hardware that I bought for it will really work.  Hopefully it will come on Monday.

The big exciting item of the day is Dominica’s new Amazon Kindle 2 electronic book reader which came late this afternoon.  Dominica has been looking forward to this for a long time and was really anxious for me to overnight it so that she would have it today.

As soon as the Kindle arrived Dominica had it unpacked and started downloading her novels.  She really likes reading books about the undead which I don’t understand at all but seems to be a general fad among younger readers of the last ten years.

Dominica ended up spending the entire evening reading her book.  She finished her first book around eleven in the evening and then bought another and stayed up until three in the morning reading it.  I went to bed at midnight but did not really fall asleep until Dominica came to bed at three. So much for going to bed early.  That was not as worthwhile as I would have expected.

The good news is that Dominica really, really loves her Kindle.  She is definitely going to get a lot of use out of it.