April 7, 2009: Ordering Stuff

I got a chance to catch up just a tiny bit on my sleep last night.  It was, at least, an improvement.

Work was not nearly as busy today.  I enjoyed having a day to let my brain catch back up and figure out what all is going on and what needs to be done.

It is quite cold today.  It was thirty-eight degrees when I got up this morning and only warmed up a few degrees throughout the day even with the sun shining very brightly.

This morning dad said that the snow plow was going down his road!  The snow plow! In April!  I am so glad that I live in the Hudson Valley.

I had a delivery come from Amazon today.  I got my French-English Dictionary, my travel guide to Germany from Lonely Planet and my beginning French reader to help me with my French reading comprehension.  I have been doing a lot of stuff in French this week and I need to improve my ability to work in the language.

I ordered two 1.5TB hard drives today.  Three terabytes of storage.  That will help out a lot.  I am going to be using them to make backups of everything.  Hopefully they will arrive in time for me to put them to use this week before we leave for the long weekend.

April 6, 2009: Liesl Has Solid Food

We were quite exhausted this morning as we pulled ourselves out of bed. Last night was too short. I got only about four hours of sleep which, after two days of getting no more than that, was simply not enough.

This morning was very busy with work. I was just bouncing from one thing to another as quickly as I could all morning. I am just getting more and more tired.

At noon we had a quick doctor’s appointment for Liesl. She has an appointment every month now because we are getting her immunization shots spread out over six months. They try to do all six of that at once but that is really overwhelming to a baby’s system. The doctor thought that our plan of doing one each month for six months was very smart and they were happy to do that. This was she has one month to recover from each shot before going on to the next one. So the doctor’s visit only took about fifteen minutes.

We made a quick run to the post office to send out some bills and then ran to the vet to pick up some heartworm medicine for Oreo. Then back home so that I could get back to work.

My copy of “The Fox” arrived from Amazon today. It is written by Arlene Radasky who is a Twitter friend of mine.

This evening Liesl had her very first solid food. Dominica made her oatmeal and we took a video of her eating he food in her high chair in the dining room. She did very well for her first food. She is not quite four and a half months old yet so it is very early for her to be eating solid food but she has been showing all of the signs of being ready for it so we decided to start a week or two early.

Liesl definitely enjoyed the taste of real food even if she had a very hard time keeping any of it down. She still has a bit of the reaction to push food out with her tongue so she is not getting a lot of nutrition this way but it is a start.

Katie came over after work today and brought awesome foodies. She brought vegetable pate, fresh pasta, salad and she whipped up a garlic oil sauce for the pasta. Dinner was awesome.

Katie also brought along a $100 bottle of California Cabernet Savignon which was quite good. We enjoyed polishing off the bottle.

We watched two episodes of the second season of Coupling and then Katie headed for home. Duds is staying with Katie’s mom this week since Katie is flying out to California for a week.

April 5, 2009: And the Weekend of Work Continues

I was awaken this morning by Liesl just after seven.  That gave me about five hours of sleep.  The most that I can really hope for these days.  Oreo was in a “I need my daddy” mood all day yesterday and he slept between my legs this morning so I couldn’t move and was stuck waiting for him to wake up so that I could get up which always hurts my back.

I was thinking that today was going to be a nice, relaxing day other than the drive home tonight.  No such luck.  I logged into the office just to make sure that everything was okay since it is a Sunday and very few people work on Sunday so things can easily get missed if no one checks in and I discovered that we had quite a few machines down.  Oh boy.

So I started working at noon.  It took a bit of testing before we realized that the commonality between all of the machines that were not working were that they all ran SAN and that they were all involved in receiving one particular patch from the engineering department that updated the kernel.  So, from that, we were able to rather that the chances were that, like they often do, the engineers failed to take into consideration the SAN software stack and had broken it again.  This is a never ending problem that we had with them.

The work ended up just going for hours and hours.  First we had to do a ton of troubleshooting.  That took a few hours because it was not very apparently what had happened.  By the end of the day there were five us working on the problem.

I worked on that issue until after six (yes, for over six hours) and then, after just a few minutes break, was called out to deal with another issue for another team.  I ended up being “at work” from noon until seven.  What an exhausting day.  Things were not even completely done when I left and some work just had to be saved until tomorrow.  Dominica and I really could not wait any longer to get onto the road.  Our plan had been to leave Frankfort between three and four in the afternoon and we completely missed that window.

So it was around seven thirty in the evening when we finally got into the car and drove out of Frankfort.  We are taking the opportunity to go to Scranton and pick up two servers while we are making this trip.  That meant that we got to take the really nice drive south out of Frankfort and skip the highway pretty much altogether.  I love the southerly drive out of Frankfort.  That part of New York is so gorgeous.  It really reminds me of rural England.

We got down to Scranton around a quarter after ten.  Dominica waited in the car with Liesl and Oreo while I went into the datacenter and helped as we unracked two servers, a DL145 G2 and a DL360 G1.  The DL360 G1 is old and going to be going to Castile Christian Academy.  The DL145 G2 is going to be repurposed as a dedicated backup server running Red Hat Linux and the Amanda backup server.

It was a really good thing that we went to Scranton today, even though it was a bit of a pain to do one more thing today.  One of the two machines that is staying in Scranton for a few more weeks had a failed hard drive that I was able to swap out while I was there.  Only took a minute to fix but would have been quite the disaster later on.

Our plan is to be completely done with Scranton in just a few weeks.  Then I will make one last special trip up there to pick up what remains and that will be that.  I will be very happy when that is all over and done.

It takes about two hours to get back to Peekskill from Scranton.  Less than, but almost, two hours.  We had to make one doggy pit stop along the way.  He tried to be fast.

So it was just around one in the morning when we rolled into Peekskill.  We were very glad to be home.  Dominica tried to go right to bed but Liesl’s schedule was all messed up and she was having problems falling asleep.  I went down and checked on the DVD conversion processes running in the basement.  They were still running and had a lot of work left to do.  I guess that I did a good job loading them up before we left.  My main desktop will still be working for another few days before it completes the work that I left for it!

I did some calculations and my desktop would need to run continuously for about four years in order to convert everything that we have!  Four years of non-stop work.  And that is if I was able to keep it running all of that time and able to keep it completely loaded up with prepped work.  This is no small project!  I can’t wait until we have some local server capacity to help offload some of this work.

We tried going to bed at two but Liesl woke right up and was not about to go back to sleep.  Dominica was really frustrated and unhappy so I got up and stayed up with Liesl until almost three when she finally fell asleep.  This weekend has been way too exhausting for me.

It appears that the Arizona Game and Fish Department has conspired to exterminate the last of the American Jaguar population from the country.

April 4, 2009: Longest Saturday of Work Evar!

The drive up to Frankfort went pretty well.  We finally hit the road at a quarter until eight in the evening and then stopped at the Mobil station just outside of Peekskill on the roundabout to fuel up and to pick up energy drinks and snacks for the drive.  So in the end it was roughly the equivalent of having left right at eight.  Traveling with a baby and a Boston Terrier takes a lot of planning and preparation.  No way around that.  And with me busy working all day and Dominica unable to get anything done because she is taking care of the “kids” its just really hard to be able to just walk out of the door at a moment’s notice.

It was pretty foggy for the first hour of the drive but that turned to rain for the rest of the drive which was not nearly so bad.  We only had to make one quick pit stop on the drive and we arrived in Frankfort around eleven thirty.  Not as early as I had hoped but not too bad.

We unloaded the car and visited for a little while.  I worked from my BlackBerry for a little bit but then had to log in and work until half past midnight doing server checkouts.  We tried going to bed but at one I was paged out again and had to log back in and work for another ten minutes.  So much for sleep.

I didn’t fall asleep right away, as you would imagine, after driving for hours, drinking caffeine on the drive to be safe and then working once arriving in Frankfort.  I dozed off for a tiny bit but definitely saw the clock at a quarter after one and again at three in the morning so could only have gotten an hour in there at best if that.  I was completely awake and out of bed around six thirty because Liesl had gotten up.  So my entire night was only five hours long with me being awake for a good portion of it.  It is going to be a long day.

I got right to work as there is a lot to do this morning.  It was a very busy morning.  And, of course, in addition to having tons of work to do this morning I was working on four servers that I have never touched before and know nothing about which always causes a number of problems.  For example, I was not told their names correctly so we lost some times while I tried to figure out why they were not accessible.

Just to make my morning more stressful I discovered early on that both Scranton and Peoria Heights were down while people were trying to use them.  After a bit of work to figure out what was going on I found out that Scranton had lost power due to an electrical system upgrade and Peoria Heights had just lost power altogether since four thirty in the morning.

Between the never ending morning deployments and the power losses my morning was very long and very stressful.  I really hate power outages.  They are not like losing network connectivity because then you are just down and waiting for things to turn back on.  But when the power goes out you are disconnected waiting for the power to come back on to find out what burned up that you did not anticipate.

InformationWeek had an article yesterday about the demise of IT industry legend Silicon Graphics or SGI.  SGI is famous as the manufacturer of super high-end RISC-based graphics workstations.  SGI products were famous for powering the early days of Hollywood’s three dimensional movie rendering.  SGI also made Irix which, at one time, was one of the big UNIX players.  SGI was also a pioneer in RISC and 64-bit computing with their MIPS line of processors (most famous to consumers as the processor in the Nintendo 64.)

Also in the news today is the rumor that IBM and Sun may announce their merger as early as Monday.  Unlike SGI who is already an almost forgotten piece of IT history Sun is still a major player as the fourth largest server maker in the world and one of the few companies still designing and making their own architecture – the Sparc processor.  I work with Sun equipment every day.  It will be strange to see them vanish as their own, independent entity.  It will also be interesting to see how IBM handles the integration of the Sun product line and customers into its already existing family or products and means of service delivery.

My morning work just went on forever.  Today ended up being a full day of work which is quite unusual for a Saturday.  Normally I put in a half day or a three-quarter day at most but today I really put in the hours.  And they aren’t light hours like you often get to put in during the week.  This is the eating at your desk, wife bringing your cup of coffee after cup of coffee, eyes bugging out of your head, multitasking as quickly as you can kind of overtime.  Saturdays are definitely the day of the week when I do the most work.  Maybe that is because there is so little communications and nothing to do but work.  Very few distractions.  You just sit at your desk and go.

We were extremely pleased to found out from our accountants today that our taxes are pretty much done and they already know that we are not getting a penalty this year!  In fact we do not even owe any taxes.  We have overpaid.  What a relief.  These taxes have been really hanging over us.  We were so sure that we were going to owe and were going to have a penalty.  We have been dreading dealing with the whole thing.  We should be getting back a nice chunk now.  Enough to be a decent investment considering how little we have been able to put away recently.  It will feel good to be saving something for a change rather than just spending.

My work ended up going until after seven thirty this evening!  What an incredibly long day.  I was completely wrecked by the time that it was all done.  Luckily it was not stressful work.  I was not feeling stressed at all by the time that the day was over just really worn out.  Knowing that the taxes are done and that everything is okay with them is making me feel much, much better.  And the work today was low stress while adding a lot of overtime which also makes me feel better even if it does mean not getting a day off.  Not even the remotest semblance of a day off.  But, I suppose, that today was actually kind of a good day to be incredibly busy because Dominica and her mom had Stephanie’s bridal shower to go to for the bulk of the afternoon and this kept me working rather than watching television.

After I was finally done with work (the poor guys who had to do the application check outs are seven hours ahead of me so they were working at two in the morning after putting in fourteen hour days and having to work tomorrow as well) we all drive out to the Kitlas Restaurant for dinner.  Dominica and I both got the potato and crab encrusted halibut which was awesome.  Today was a bad day for my diet!  I need to get back onto the wagon tomorrow.

After dinner Dominica and I drove to Herkimer and went first to Hannaford to get some food for lunch tomorrow (so that we are not tempted to just eat loads of starch as we are having a “belated Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixins” since everyone missed Thanksgiving because we were in the hospital as Liesl was being born) and then we drove to Walmart to pick up some formula.  Then back home.

We got back and watched Speed Racer on television.  The movie was completely awful even though it was loaded with good people.  It was like an experiement in surreal cinematic art that failed horribly.  The entire movie was bluescreened and felt like actors sitting on a sound stage.  It felt more fake than The Wizard of Oz where you really feel the people are walking around on a stage.  This felt like people in a recording booth.  They didn’t even try to make you get drawn into the movie.  The race scenes didn’t even look as good as relatively modern video games.  I was really hating the movie and then they pulled a major twist on me.  They had Ben Miles as one of the race announcers on the Gran Prix!  Ben Miles!  That is so awesome.  So now I love the movie.  The many musical interludes based on the original Speed Racer theme were quite good as well.

As soon as the movie was over it was time for bed.  That was around midnight but I didn’t fall asleep for another hour or two.  No work planned for tomorrow.  We have the Palm Sunday / Thanksgiving dinner at noon and then Dominica and I are driving down to Scranton to pick up some servers from the datacenter.  Then it is back home to Peekskill.  We hope to be home before eight in the evening.

April 3, 2009: Crazy Friday Night

I tried to sleep in late this morning so that I would have gobs of spare energy for my really long night tonight, but I got called out early and had to get out of bed to go support testing so that the developers could be ready for tonight.  It still was not a short night of sleep so it was fine.  Just not as much sleep as I had been hoping to have gotten.  Liesl got up early and was smacking my head for about half an hour before the phone rang so it wasn’t like I was not already awake.

In the middle of the night last night our shower curtain came crashing down in the bathroom attached to the master bedroom.  It started Liesl, Oreo and I awake but somehow Dominica slept through the whole thing.  That was rather surprising.

I got great news from some contacts at Hewlett-Packard today.  They are able to get me some demo software so that I can run HP-UX on my HP Integrity rx2600 server!  This is really awesome.  HP-UX is one of those operating systems that is nearly impossible to get direct experience on because it is so expensive both for the hardware and for the software.  I am very excited to be able to work on HP-UX on Integrity hardware.  I have an older version of HP-UX on a PA-RISC workstation but working on that is not the same as building my own server.

The rain came during the night and it is much colder today and very, very wet.  By the time that I got out of bed the heater had kicked on even though we had all of the upstairs windows open.  Oops.  So I shut some windows and turned the heater way down.

Today Liesl made her first investment into the stock market.  She has some money that she received from people when she was born and only so much of it was needed to buy her items that she was not given and what was left over we decided we would invest for her.  She obviously did not have enough to open her own brokerage account so she is just putting her money in with ours at the moment.  It is a start.  Hopefully someday this will turn in to something.  The market is perfect now for her to be investing so best to get it in as quickly as possible.

It rained pretty much all day getting colder all day.  I heard that back home people were seeing snow!  I am very thankful to be living in the Hudson Valley.  We really don’t get the snow here at all.

Liesl watched her very first cartoon today.  Disney’s Make Mine Music from 1946.  Quite the classic.  We figure that the early Disney movies that are all music are good ways to give her something to watch while getting her music for those times when she needs to be entertained because both Dominica and I have things that we have to be doing.

Today was a pretty tough day for all of the stuff that we needed to do because I was busy working and Dominica was doing her best to get to the packing so that we could leave as soon as I was done with work.

Oreo is loving the weather today.  I put his big pillow by the downstairs door and had the door open even though it was raining and cold.  He climbed right in and I covered him up in a big fleece blanket and he is as happy as can be.  All snugly in the thunderstorm.  He is only ten feet away from me.

I am concerned that the power is going to go off today.  That will be rather a significant problem.  What a pain that would be.

I did my best to rip tons of DVDs today so that they are ready for Handbrake to convert while we are out of town.  My plan is to let two of the computers run the entire time that we are gone doing nothing but video conversions.  We should make real progress since the computers won’t be busy doing a bunch of other tasks.  I want to get as many of these done as possible before we go to dad’s so that we can drop them off and pick up a new batch to work on.

I finally got a chance to take Oreo out for a walk a little before five.  We didn’t manage to get in a long walk but at least a little one.  He really appreciates our daily walks.  The goose that lives by the house has gotten to know him and they mess with each other every time that we go out.  The goose hisses at us constantly and definitely acts like it might take a run at us from time to time.

Tonight is one of the busiest nights ever.  I’ve been on conference calls for most of the evening.  I have a ton of tickets opened to the data center that need to be worked on tonight.  Tonight is a very busy night from a deployment perspective in addition to everything else that we have to do.

The plan is to wrap up the deployments and then prepare the hardware work for the datacenter so that they can work on that while I am on the road.  Once I get all of that stuff done then Dominica and I can load the car.  Hopefully we will have eaten dinner before then.  The plan was to have dinner while I was still at my desk doing deployments.

It is almost impossible that we will be able to leave before seven.  I won’t be surprised if we are not able to leave before eight.  There is just so much to do before leaving home.

The drive will take three to four hours depending on how the weather holds.  We are driving up to Frankfort tonight.  So we are trying as hard as we can to be able to get there by eleven tonight.

Once we arrive in Frankfort I have to log back in and get back to work doing the checkouts of the hardware maintenance being done tonight.  Because there is so much being done it could easily cause us to get pushed well past midnight.  I am going to be so tired by the time that we are done.

So the expectation is that we will get to go to bed between one and two in the morning.  Then my alarm is going to go off at a quarter till seven in the morning because I have to log back in to the office and get to work support Bahrain.  Tomorrow is a really big release day for them so it is going to be a very long morning.

Once the morning work wraps up I have my regular Saturday work to do.  So my plan is that I will be working from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon at a minimum.  That might as well be a full day.  I am going to be so tired.

We are coming back to Peekskill after Palm Sunday dinner.  If all goes well we will be leaving Frankfort around five in the afternoon on Sunday.

I am working with a new DVD tool called DVDFab that Andy turned me on to.  So far it is working really, really well.  It is working for a lot of media that DVD Decrypter was not able to handle.  I have a lot of testing left to do but so far I am pretty encouraged.  I will have a better idea of how it is working after we let these two workstations run for sixty-two hours on their own.

I am posting really early tonight as I am going to be way too busy once work is done to be able to post without interrupting other things.  So I am posting at around six thirty.  My deployments appear to be completed and I am about to do the final prep work so that we can hit the road.