Sheep Guarding Llama

Liesl, as expected, got us up very early this morning.  I don’t even know what time it was when Dominica got up but it was way too early.  I was awake after a quarter till seven, though, that much I know.  I stayed in bed for a little while but Dominica was exhausted and Liesl was wide awake so I got up with Liesl and we went down to the living room and played for quite some time while Dominica slept in.

Liesl and I had a good time hanging out this morning.  Being up so early allowed me to get a jump on my work for the office as well.  Liesl and I played and talked and she had some of her learning time with her play mat that Dominica usually gets to do with her.

This morning, while in her jumper, Liesl looked at Oreo for the first time and reached out for him.  He was too far away but she is communicating to him that she wants him to come to her in the same way that she reaches out her arms to ask one of us to pick her up.

Dominica definitely appreciated getting the extra sleep.  She got up around nine or so.  I was pretty tired but thankful that I got a morning with my daughter.

This afternoon Liesl began making a new sound.  It is a little like a forced laugh.  From a distance it sounds like a loud giggle but it is a new vocalization that she has not been able to do before.  She did it all through the afternoon and evening.  I expect that her throat hurt by the end of the day.  It is very cute.  She was so excited to be able to show off to us.  She just kept doing it and doing it.  We were even able to get it on video for a little bit and were able to call Liesl’s grandparents so that they could hear here as well.

Dominica finally got a chance to do another one of her lessons in her UNIX SA class today.  We have been so busy recently that she just hasn’t been able to get very much done.

The weather was great today and we all managed to take a nice, long walk pretty early this morning.  The sun was out and it got up to around sixty today.  These walks are really helping with the diet.  Getting a chance to exercise is pretty tough but when it includes getting half an hour to talk to Dominica, taking Liesl out to get air and getting Oreo in his big walk it makes it a lot more possible.

I was pretty busy all day.  Got a lot of work done, though.

Our evening was spent with Dominica and Francesca on the phone planning stuff for Disney World.  I spent the evening trying to get to the bottom of the HP Integrity rx2600.  Boy that thing is complex and poorly documented.  Very frustrating.  It is an amazing piece of hardware but why HP doesn’t have a set of really simple, straightforward guides to it I will never know.  There must be a lot of people who have similar problems and just give up.

I have some theories on what needs to be done with the Integrity and I will document on SGL as I break down the barriers.  I think that the system uses more on the hard drives than I am used to having with Sparc and AMD64 systems.  I need more details as to how this all works under the hood to have some idea as to what is happening.  I know for certain that I am missing a cable that everyone seems to assume that I need so that could easily be the first step.  I hate systems that require special hardware for the most basic of functions.

Liesl fell asleep around eight and I tried to go to bed at ten thirty.  I wasn’t tired enough, though, and ended up not falling asleep for a long time.  Dominica didn’t go to bed until sometime after two in the morning because she was trying to watch all of the available episodes of BBC shows that have been available on NetFlix OnDemand that are going to go away tomorrow because they were just a special promotion or something.

We have a busy weekend coming up.  I am not sure of all of the details but we are going to leave Peekskill on Friday night to drive up to Frankfort because Dominica’s cousin Stephanie’s bridal shower is Saturday afternoon.  I have to work at seven in the morning on Saturday so we have to do the drive on Friday night.  There is no way to do it on Saturday.  So I will work all day Saturday and Dominica will go to the shower.  Then on Sunday afternoon we are having a big Palm Sunday dinner at Dominica’s grandfather’s house which is going to be a full “Thanksgiving” dinner because that was missed this year with everyone being in the hospital with Liesl being born.  This way Liesl gets to attend as well.

Then on Sunday afternoon, after we eat, the plan is to drive out to Pavilion to my dad’s house so that we can deal with picking up the BMW to use for the summer and to get the tires changed on the Mazda so that we are not driving on our snow tires in the good weather.  Then driving back to Peekskill on Tuesday or Wednesday.  It will give us a chance to grab two car loads of stuff while at dad’s as well.

The temperature really dropped last night.  The house was quite chilly when we got up this morning.  I heard some reports from back home that suggested that they may even have seen snow today.  Every time that I hear about snow back home I am reminded how wonderful it is living in the Hudson Valley.

Today was quite busy.  I worked steadily all day and really did not get a lot of time to spend with the family.  I didn’t get a chance to change out of my pajamas all day either.

I managed to find some of my old college roommates on FaceBook today.  I’ve been looking for my original GMI roommate, Jamie Quaderer, for more than a decade now and he finally has an FB account.  Of course, I get the impression that he does not check it very often so we will see how long before he adds me to his friends list.

I decided tonight that it was time to get to serious work on putting together SpiceCorp for New York City.  SpiceCorp is the SpiceWorks User Group.  I sent out emails and did online postings so that I could gather interest in getting people together sometime soon.  Hopefully we will see this go somewhere sometime soon.

Tonight we watched As Time Goes By, which as everyone should know is my all time favourite television show.  We did not get to watch very much of it though.

Between Dominica and I we were pretty much on the phone all day.  I was on all during the day itself and she was on almost all evening.  She and Francesca have been making plans for the big family Disney World trip that is happening the last week of November this year.

Dominica and I have decided, since money is tight and Liesl will not remember the trip, that we are going to stay with everyone at the All Star Music (or whatever it is called) resort.  We had been planning on staying at either Coronado Springs or Port Orleans French Quarter but decided that the cost savings were really worth it.  Not only is it cheaper but it will make things a lot easier for Dominica having the family there to help with Liesl since I will likely be working a good bit of the time that we are there.  We really can’t afford to have me taking extra time off from work.  At least we are going over Thanksgiving so that I have some holiday time to use while we are there.  So it isn’t as bad as it seems me needing to work.

The thing that I am most excited about on this trip is getting to eat at the newly re-menued Tusker House.  Dominica and I ate there before (in the Animal Kingdom) but it was a counter service restaurant back then and we had commented about how it did not feel like it should have been counter service and we thought that Disney should have done something nice with it instead.  Well, they have.  Now Tusker House is an exotic buffet style place with many flavours coming from the amazing restaurants that we love so much at the Animal Kingdom Lodge like Boma.  So we are definitely eating at the Tusker House and reviewing it for everyone.

Liesl, as I have mentioned, is going to bed earlier and earlier these days.  She was asleep around eight or eight thirty tonight.  She fell asleep in Dominica’s arms while she was talking on the phone.  So we are going to be woken up rather early tomorrow, I predict.

Dominica and I went to bed on the early side.  Before midnight at least.  Not exactly early but early for us.

I slept in this morning.  I mean really slept in.  It was awesome.  We went to bed before midnight so it was an early night for us to begin with and then, because the weather has been so nice and warm, we were able to sleep for the third night in a row with the window above my side of the bed open (the window on Dominica’s side has some issues with the wood and needs to be replaced before we can use it again) and Oreo was a super snuggle dog all night too sleeping back to back with me all stretched out for maximum warmth and snuggles.  It made for a very good night’s sleep.

I didn’t get up until a quarter until ten.  Almost ten hours of sleep for me.  I feel very, very refreshed this morning.  Dominica was not nearly as refreshed as Liesl has been getting her up rather early in the mornings for the last week or so with today being no exception.  Oreo stayed in bed with me until after I had showered even.  Normally he will get out of bed between seven and eight in the morning and move himself to the nursery (which he considers to be his own room) to sleep on the air mattress (which he considers to be his own bed.)

It was around ten thirty when Oreo and I came downstairs.  The morning was spent playing with Liesl, taking out the trash, walking Oreo, trying to squeeze in time for coffee and breakfast, etc.  I also had a short conference call at eleven this morning that lasted for about half an hour.

When I took Oreo on his morning walk today he decided to chase the goose that “lives” in our front yard.  The goose was in no mood for these shenanigans today and hissed at Oreo and stood its ground and rose up with its wings out trying to look all big and threatening.  Oreo almost got himself seriously goosed but decided to leave the goose be and to carry on his merry way.  It was a nice little bit of excitement for our little Boston Terrier on a Sunday morning.

Katie arrived just after one to pick up Dominica and Liesl.  Today is Liesl’s first time going to the outlet mall.  Liesl has enjoyed her shopping trips recently to the grocery store and other places with Dominica so much that they decided to attempt a real day of shopping.  Dominica has been trying to get out to a Williams-Sonoma for quite a while now so this will be nice.  Next time that they go shopping I am hoping that they can take the KT-Mobile to Ikea in Patterson (or wherever it is in New Jersey) to pick up a couple of large bookshelves that we are going to mount in the basement to mirror the ones that we already have as we are just beginning to run out of shelf space and need places to put books as they ship down from dad’s house.

After Dominica, Liesl and Katie left to go shopping I put in some time cleaning around the house.  I find it so much easier to clean when it is just Oreo and I at home.  I got important kitchen cleaning done and moved boxes and all kinds of stuff that came from dad’s house last week so that the dining room looks more or less normal again.  I moved the kitchen table all by myself and put the wine fridge into the corner where it belongs.  Now we have space to move around and a place to put our wine that Dominica just picked up the other day.  It is so nice to start getting our real furniture and appliances again.  The house is starting to come together.

After cleaning and redding the next task was to get completely caught back up on Sheep Guarding Llama.  It is nearly impossible for me to keep up during the week so I just took an hour or two and sat down and caught back up.  Having cleaning and blogging out of the way and not hanging over my head makes it so much easier to get to work on other things.

I spent a good chunk of the afternoon working on the HP Integrity rx2600 that I have sitting by my desk.  I am having a terrible time getting into the management processor so that I can do anything.  It requires me to hit Control-Ecf but when I do nothing happens.  I tried the web portal as well as a telnet console and nothing.  So I finally gave up, after two hours or more of working on it, and called Dominica and Katie and asked them to stop somewhere to pick up a USB keyboard as the one that we have here at the house has gone missing.  Dominica’s laptop’s wireless keyboard died recently and she really needs to have a normal, wired keyboard so getting a new USB keyboard isn’t a big deal as she will use it on a daily basis.  Having wireless for your everyday keyboard and mouse is way more of a pain than it is worth.

After giving up on the server I went back upstairs and cleaned the kitchen, did the dishes and vacuumed the floors.  The house is looking pretty good by this point.

I am excited to be wearing a shirt today that I have not worn in about a year because it has been too small for me.  It is fitting just fine today, yay!

Dominica, Liesl and Katie got back from shopping at a quarter until eight this evening.  They were about shopping for more than six hours.  Liesl had a great time and Dominica said that she did really well.  Liesl got some really cool new outfits today including her first formal dress!

Katie was originally going to stay for dinner and a chance to watch some Coupling on Netflix but she had a headache that was getting worse by the time that they got to Peekskill so she decided to just go home and get some sleep.  So instead of ordering in dinner Dominica made something healthy that we ate while watching an episode of Murder She Wrote.

After watching one episode Dominica spent an hour or more on the phone and I went down to the basement to get some work done.  I did a ton of blog writing today and am really happy with my progress.  I also finally got access to the rx2600 console and posted some information about it on SGL so that other people would not have to go through the same headaches that I just did.  Hopefully the information is searchable and useful to some people.  There are very few people out there trying out HP Integrity servers these days.

I got a chance to do some serious blogging today.  It is thirty minutes until midnight as I write this and I have written almost nine thousand words today!  That is a lot of writing.  This might be by biggest blog writing day ever – not including days when I wrote a really long paper for a class which I subsequently posted to SGL.  Those don’t really count.

Dominica was on the phone until after eleven thirty giving me a lot of time to write.  After she was done talking to Francesca I came back up to the living room and we attempted to watch Murder She Wrote but everything that we tried to watch off of NetFlix would die part way through the episode which is really frustrating.  We put in a good hour or more watching half of three different episodes of shows and not getting to finish any of them.  So we switched to Hulu and watched Family Guy and went to bed around one thirty in the morning.

Went to bed on the early side and slept in a little this morning.  It was great.  Didn’t get up until almost nine!  It makes it feel almost like a real weekend.  Almost.

Tony called me from Toronto at ten to get started on the AIX patching and upgrade work that we are doing together this morning.  I was originally expecting him to call at eleven so that caught me off guard a little.  It was a good thing that he called so early as it ended up taking several hours to do the patching and I would have been working all afternoon had we not started when we did.

I am volunteering to do weekend AIX work at the office because AIX is notably missing from my resume (I have it but not nearly as much of it as I would like to have) and because it makes me more rounded and more valuable at work.  I did some AIX work when I was an IT Manager at IBM back in 2000 and 2001 but it has been a while and it will be very nice to work in the huge environment that we have where I am working now.  I am really thankful to have easy access to so many mentors.  It makes learning so much easier.

We worked for almost three hours on the patching.  It would have gone far quicker if I was not training but we wanted to step through the entire process line by line looking at the commands, in case there was anything new to me which there was, and looking at what the corporate standards are for our environment, doing the patching and doing detailed verification and documentation of the process afterwards.  In the future this should go much, much faster although there are some pretty significant time-intensive steps in the AIX upgrade process that we do such as breaking mirrors and re-syncing once the upgrade is complete, disk cloning for safety, several reboots, etc.  Each reboot takes about ten minutes which seems like hardly anything until you realize that you reboot three times or more per several.  So that is over half an hour per server of just waiting for the servers to come online.

After my AIX work was over I was able to go ahead and do my usual Linux weekend upgrade work which took another hour or two.  It was a rather long Saturday or work but it was not too bad.  I enjoyed the chance to work on AIX.  That makes for a nice change of pace.

Dominica gave me an incredible scare this morning.  While I was on the phone working suddenly she screamed through the house that I had to come quickly as it was an emergency.  She didn’t tell me where she was or what was wrong.  So I threw off my telephone headset and ran through the house looking for her or any signs of carnage.

It turned out that she had taken Oreo for a walk and he had started to vomit in the front yard and, while vomiting, had feinted and gone over on his side as if he had had a heart attack.  She left him laying in the yard and ran in screaming for me thinking that he was dead or nearly so.

By the time that I got outside Oreo was up and somewhat weak but not nearly enough to make one panic.  It took a bit to find out from Dominica what had happened.  She was nearly hysterical with panic.  After a few minutes it occurred to me that this chain of events sounded familiar and then I remembered that Oreo used to have this problem, years ago, and that the vet had told us that this was not uncommon in Boston Terriers and that the feinting is caused by a pinched nerve in the neck that gets aggravated when he vomits.  Within fifteen or twenty minutes he was perfectly fine and was acting as if nothing had happened at all.  Boy did he and Dominica manage to scare me, though.  Talk about panic.  I thought that something had happened to Liesl and that Oreo had run away and been hit by a car while Dominica was trying to save Liesl or something.

Dominica got Hex on DVD through NetFlix that she really has been wanting to watch for years so we watched that spread out throughout the day.  It isn’t my type of show.  I really do not enjoy all of the pop-culture voodoo/witchcraft/demon shows that are so popular these days but this is a little better than average – but only barely.  I don’t understand the draw to watch shows like this.  Not really entertaining.  And not well thought out either.  All of the people so obsessed with this stuff don’t even take the time to look up the references that they use so it is just a bunch of “buzz words” thrown together to make it sound like something real but is, in fact, just garbage.  It would be more entertaining, I think, if the people making the shows cared at all about them.  But it is television and that just doesn’t happen.  There isn’t any money in making good shows.

I spent most of the afternoon and evening working on building a FreeBSD 7.1 server on which I am going to run OpenVPN for SSL-based remote VPN access.  I have not installed FreeBSD since, if I remember correctly, the 5.x series.  It has definitely been a while.  I like FreeBSD but just never get a chance to really work with it so this is going to be fun.

After Hex we watched the remaining episodes of News Radio that have been available on NetFlix Play Instantly and are not going to be available for much longer (along with several BBC shows they disappear on April 1st.)  So we are rushing to watch shows that we really want to see before they are no longer available.

Tomorrow Dominica, Katie and Liesl are going out to go shopping at the outlet mall at Woodbury Commons so Oreo and I are going to have the house to ourselves for much of the day.  As much as I miss Liesl when she leaves I do enjoy getting several hours to myself to putter about the house being actually productive.  There is more than enough work around the house to keep me busy no matter how long they decide to stay out shopping.

Our next two weekends are going to be busy.  One week from today Dominica and I are going to Frankfort for Stephanie’s bridal shower on Saturday afternoon.  Because of the timing of the shower and because of my Saturday morning work we will have to drive to Frankfort on Friday evening between when my evening deployments end and when I have to do my hardware checkouts in the wee hours of the morning.  That is going to be a really long day.  Then I will be working from the laptop on Saturday morning.

The weekend after that we are going to Waverly, New York to see Dominica family.  I believe that that is Saturday as wel.  In conjunction with one of those two trips we are planning to go back home to dad’s house for a few days so that we can pick up the BMW for the summer months and get the tires switched on the Mazda so that we are not driving on our winter snow tires in good weather unnecessarily.  That will give us a chance to get two carloads of stuff from his house in one trip as well which will be nice.  Now if only we had space to store all of the stuff as it comes down we would be in really good shape.

I got all of the CDs converted to MP3 that were shipped down in the latest load of stuff from dad’s so they can return now to go into archival storage.  I am making pretty good progress on the DVDs as well.  I try to do one or two per day although there are constant technical challenges with DVDs that make me have to re-encode the same DVD over and over again rather frequently.  It is rather a bit of work.  More than one would expect.