Sheep Guarding Llama

I didn’t get a ton of sleep last night but it can’t be helped.  Today is a really warm day.  The sun is out in force and it is above eighty degrees today.  Tomorrow is supposed to be ninety but that, in theory, will only last for one day.  Looks like tomorrow we will finally have a chance to try out our air conditioning.  Fingers crossed.

Work was not too bad today.  Slowly getting caught up on everything.  This is the busiest period that I can remember.  Crazy busy, in general. 

Liesl has been teething but for the last few days it appears to have stopped.  She was getting Tylenol once or twice per day.  It has been days now since she has had any at all.  Very strange.  She has been much happier but is still very much teething on anything that she can get into her mouth.

I have been selected to be on an expert panel for backup solutions.  It will be a live webcast on May 29th in the morning.  Should be just under an hour.  I am excited.  This should be fun.  My first ever expert’s panel.  I will provide more information when I have it.  I guess that we will be taking backup horror stories and going around the panel discussing what we would do in that situation to get the company backing up in the best way to meet their needs.

Found out today that I most definitely need to box up the DL185 and ship it back to HP.  A huge pain in the butt, but I cannot complain.  Because of the mix up I am getting another $250 knocked off of the price.  So worth a bit of a pain, in my opinion.

The Ralstons are coming to Peekskill tomorrow.  Hard to believe that they are already down to their final weekend in North America!  They are expecting to arrive at our place around ten in the evening tomorrow.  They will be here until they fly out to Morocco on Monday afternoon.

My new desktop shipped from HP today.  Oh the excitement.  I have not had a new desktop in years.  So long, in fact, that I still work on a single-core machine, if you can believe that.  Madness, I know.

This evening Dominica and I both really felt like getting out of the house.  I worked until seven thirty or a little later and then we decided to run out for ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery in Yorktown Heights.  It was after eight when we finally got into the car so we were in a bit of a rush since everything in the lower Hudson closes super early around nine – even restaurants.  Very strange.

Ice cream at Cold Stone was awesome as always.  They have been having marshmallow ice cream there recently which is just awesome.  I got the peanut butter cup thing that they do but with marshmallow instead of chocolate ice cream and it was really amazing.  Dominica was very disappointed that they did not have any bananas for her usual banana split-like ice cream so she tried the cheesecake thing that they do.  It was good but not nearly as good as her usual.

After our decadent ice cream outing (yes, ice cream before dinner) we ran across the parking lot to Panera Bread (yes, “Bread Bread”) and got sandwiches.  We managed to just squeak in and were the last customers served for the evening.  Liesl was getting pretty sleepy at the restaurant.  We figured that we would come home and that she would be done for the night.

We came back to the house.  Liesl woke herself up and wanted to play for about an hour.  So she hung out with me on the recliner while I worked from my laptop.  We watched an episode and a half of The Gilmore Girls before deciding to turn in for the night.  Liesl kept herself up until eleven which is really late for her.  She tends to go to bed between eight thirty and nine thirty.  Dominica and I managed to go to bed at eleven thirty which is pretty good for us.  It is very warm tonight.  Going to be hard to get any good sleep.

The media loves to glorify IT when times are good and scold it when times are bad. We are the whipping boy and the poster child, heroes and villains.

Today is the first meeting of SpiceCorp NY’s Manhattan Branch.  So that means that I need to leave the office on the early side today so that I can catch the train down to Manhattan to make the 6:30 meetings.  This is our second meeting of SpiceCorp NY but the first one in Manhattan.

It was a busy day because I had to complete as much as possible before four thirty.  That left me rushing for pretty much the entire day.  Too much to get done before the end of the day.

My article on Datamation is one of the headliners again today.  Three days in a row.  Awesome!

I was very discouraged to discover that the HP DL185 G5 that we had received was not the correct configuration and that we would need to get a new server sent out and will need to return this one.  Just more “stuff” that needs my constant attention.  Nothing is ever simple.

It is a warm day today.  Not at all what I need on the day that I need to go into the city.  I am always so hot whenever I am doing anything around Manhattan.  I can go for long walks in the hot sun up in the country but once I am in the city the heat just kills me.

Today is important for another reason.  Today is the very last day of our Scranton datacenter.  We have been using Scranton for years now and I have gotten used to driving in and out of Scranton to visit the datacenter.  Going out to Scranton late at night has become one of the few remnants of my old life of being the “on the road” It professional.  Scranton was an important mark along the highway between Ithaca and Washington D.C. as well as between New Jersey and Upstate New York.  I even worked in Scranton itself for Wegmans a few times.  But since 2005 the datacenter has been my only real reason to ever be in Scranton or along the i81 corridor at all.  Now that is going away as well.  It is truly the end of an era for me.  As of tonight everything in Scranton will have been transferred to Toronto.  In a week or two I will be making a final trip to Scranton to pick up all of the remaining equipment to bring back with me or, mostly, just to donate.

I tried to wrap up with work and make it to the Metro North train from Peekskill to Grand Central at twenty after four but that just wasn’t possible.  So I had to grad the train at eighteen after five which was cutting it really close.  It worked out well because I really did need more time at home to get ready and to get more work done before leaving and the early train would have been too early.  The meeting is right on Union Square so it is very easy to get there from the GCT.

The train ride down was very nice and I really appreciated the opportunity to read in my book for a while.  I am busy reading my latest Pragmatic Programmers title.  Always a joy.  It is so seldom that I now have time to just sit and read for an hour with nothing else about which to worry that it was positively fun.

I was only ten or fifteen minutes late when I got to the office on Union Square for the SpiceCorp NY meeting.  We ended up having an awesome turn out.  More people than I had anticipated coming.  We had a total of eleven after three people had cancelled.  Eight of those who came were not also at the NJ Branch meeting a few weeks ago so it was really exciting to have several new people there.

The discussion was really good tonight.  It was a really good group and we covered a lot of good stuff.  Well worth the time coming out.  Got to meet a lot of good people.  These meetings, I think, are going to continue to be a lot of fun and to be really valuable to everyone who attends.

After the meeting, Katie and I went out for fish on Union Square.  We had a really nice dinner.  It is not very often that I get a chance to eat out in the city anymore.  It was a nice change of pace.  Dominica knew that I was going to be really late.  Once I am taking the time to go into the city it is not worth rushing back at all.  Best to just make use of the time while there.

Dinner was great.  Katie had to run early to catch her last train.  I took my chances with not knowing the schedule and went for a later train.  We do not ride the same train but we do ride the same line.

I ended up getting the next train after Katie which was not too bad at all.  I was in Peekskill around twelve thirty and up to the house about one in the morning.  It takes a while to walk from the train, up the hill to the house.  It is a good thirty to forty-five minute walk if you are trying not to get completely sweaty.  It is a rather steep hill to be climbing with a backpack in business attire.

I worked for about half an hour and then headed to bed.  Dominica had stayed up waiting for me to get home reading on her new Kindle.

The shutdown of Scranton went smoothly tonight.  It is officially all done.  SGL readers, the regular ones at least, are aware that SGL moved out of Scranton some time ago and performance jumper measureably when we did.  Toronto is so much faster and more responsive.  It is a major load off of my mind no longer needing to worry about all of the problems that we have had with Scranton.  Now I just need to drive up there and pick up the remaining equipment.  My Netgear router there managed to go for the entire life of the deployment without ever needing to be rebooted a single time.  How is that for impressive?

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.