March 27, 2009: No, Not Spice World!

[Editor’s note: The title of this blog post is in reference to the abysmal 1997 excuse for popular British entertainment and not to the Austin, Texas based small business inventory and helpdesk conference of the same name.]

I woke up at just around seven this morning and got right to work.  It was pretty early but I was awake and able to be productive so I got right into it.  It was nice because I got a ton of work done before I normally even start working.

Nothing much to mention today.  It was a pretty normal day.  Work, work, work.  It is Friday so my schedule is always pretty much the same on Fridays.  I had a number of phone calls today like I always do.  I don’t know what has changed recently causing everyone to call me constantly but it is driving me crazy.  So much time is wasted trying to get the people on the phone to just email me the information that I need since I have to have it written down for accuracy and in a tangible format for auditing.  Calling me on the phone just delays any work that these people want me to do and makes it more likely for me to make a mistake while doing it both because I am distracted by the people talking about nothing relevant on the phone and because I get backed up with work and have to do multiple things at the same time to keep up.

Important rule of thumb when working with a system administrator – DO NOT CALL THEM.  There is no reason to be calling you system admin especially when there is a significant issue like an outage.  That is the very last time that you want to be cripplying their ability to work efficiently and to think clearly.  I constantly have application managers who want to be on the phone when something is horribly wrong and their constant intervention, nagging and misdirection could easily be classified as active corporate sabotage.  They know that they have nothing valuable to add to the situation but activively keep people who need to work from working.  Why?  I have no idea.  Clearly these are people who didn’t get to be managers by knowing what they were doing or they would never let this happen.

I am working tomorrow even though there is a production freeze in place currently.  I am doing some AIX training which should be fun.  Starting that in the morning and doing my usual weekend patching work immediately afterwards.

Dominica ran out to take of some errands quickly early on this evening.  She hit the post office to get our taxes sent out since they needed to go with delivery verification and all of that good stuff.  She also managed to his a wine store so we have a little wine in the house again which is awesome.  We have pretty much been running on empty since having moved to Peekskill.  She just got three bottles but that is more than we have had in almost half a year.  Hopefully sometime this summer we will be able to make a run to the Finger Lakes and hit a bunch of the wineries and stock up.  One good trip should get us through the rest of the year if we plan it well.

This evening I spent some time working on setting up an OpenVPN server.  I am trying to come up with a good design that is relatively easy to manage and will work well for “roaming” users.  OpenVPN is not a simple system to set up so my first attempt is to set up a packages OpenVPN system such as Endian or Untangle although they are both pretty limited and don’t really seem to have all of the features that I would like to have while having many features that I do not need at all.

I read some stuff that basically said that Untangle was not going to meet my needs at all so I looked seriously into Endian.  I even did several installs of it attempting to get it to work correctly but, in the end, the answer was pretty much that because of the way that both Endian and Untangle base everything that they do around their routing engine and because they significantly modify the underlying operating environment so that it is far more difficult to modify than a stock UNIX operating system that neither were going to work at all as my OpenVPN system would be completely behind the existing firewall and not activing as a firewall itself.  I am very surprised by how difficult it is to find a simple virtual appliance of OpenVPN.  Why is no one making this – at least not a free version.  This seems like it would be an extremely popular system to have.

By the end of the evening I decided that working with Endian was not going to cut it and that my only good choice was going to be building a standard UNIX virtual machine and then installing OpenVPN myself onto it and working from there.  More work than I was hoping to have to do but it appears that I have no choice so that is the route that I have to take.  I did decide that given the type of project that this is it is a perfect opportunity to build a FreeBSD system rather than a Red Hat Linux system to try it out.  It is a really isolated system so having it be on BSD and unlike my other systems should not be a problem at all.

While I was working this evening Dominica put on the horrific movie SpiceWorld with the pathetic Spice Girls.  What a horrible movie.  I have not seen it since I saw it in the theatre with Nate and Emily back in 1997.  Hard to believe that it has been a dozen years since anyone knew who the Spice Girls were.  They totally faded into obscurity except for Slutty Spice or whatever her name (really, who can tell them apart?) was who has now become the poster child for vacuous pointlessness and has become a national embarrassment to the British people (and now to America since she moved here but at least she lives in LA where we send people like that – its nice to have a special place for everyone, I suppose.)

We didn’t stay up too late as I have to work in the morning.  So we went to bed around eleven thirty or so.  Liesl has been going to bed earlier and earlier and getting up earlier and earlier recently.  This is a worrisome trend as it means that she may start sleeping during the day and not at night soon.  She used to fall asleep around one in the morning and has slowly worked herself to falling asleep just after eight in the evening!  She is starting to get Dominica up quite early in the morning.

March 26, 2009: Tax Day for the Millers

I was pretty tired when the alarm went off at six twenty this morning.  But I got up and got right to work.  Luckily today, like yesterday, was a really slow day and I was able to keep up with things just fine.  Unfortunately I had to wake dad up early as he sleeps in the basement where I work so he was not able to get any extra rest even though he is going to be driving all day today.

Dad spent the morning packing while I worked for the office. Dominica got right up and got to work on her classes. She started Perl programming yesterday and dad said that she seemed to really be having a good time learning it.  This morning was another class in Perl programming and she was up early and working on it before nine!

We all tried to go out to breakfast at ten thirty but I spent a bit of the morning on a conference call.  We finally snuck away at eleven in the hopes that dad could be on the road home before noon but no sooner did we all drive out to Pastel’s then I was paged back to the house to get back onto the conference call!

So I drove back as quickly as I could and was on the phone for a full hour.  Then I drove back, now after noon, and ate my lunch rather than breakfast while dad and Dominica (and Liesl) waited for me.  What a pain.

So dad didn’t get on the road until almost one.  Then it was back to work for me.

Dominica took the entire afternoon and worked on our taxes.  What a pain.  It must have been three or four hours of filling out paperwork and hunting down papers that we need.  In the end we have just about everything except for some claims that we need to come up with yet and some paperwork that has to be printed out from online or something like that.  All of this and it is just the paperwork to prepare to send to the CPA!

I am really disgusted by the difficulty in paying taxes in the US.  I’m not really upset about the amount of taxes that we pay.  Yes, I think that it is too high but I can live with it.  But I definitely think that paying taxes should be simple.  Very, very simple.  There should be no surprises, no gotchas, just a simple means of honestly paying your taxes.  As someone who isn’t trying to not pay his taxes I am really offended that the government makes it pretty much impossible for me to know if I am paying what I am supposed to even when I use a CPA.  There is no way for me to be sure that I am not doing something wrong.  It just isn’t possible.  The government doesn’t even set a clear guideline to determine in what state I live let alone how much I owe!

The one really awful thing is that we are absolutely sure that we paid our taxes ahead this year (sending in pre-payment forms during the year) but we are unable to locate any documentation of this.  There appears to be no cancelled checks on my bank account.  So we don’t really know what happened.  Did they get “lost” in the mail like so many things did in Newark?  Did the IRS just not cash them?  Did I lose them between writing them and the mailbox?  I have no way to know.  It is really awful.  So now we have no idea what is going to happen or how you deal with this situation.

At very least the initial tax paperwork has been filled out and things can move forward.  I find the burden and stress of doing taxes to be crippling.  I just can’t get anything done because it is so stressful.

After work we had dinner and watched the final episode of Grace and Favour and then I stayed home with Oreo while Dominica and Liesl went to Stop and Shop to get groceries.  Dominica had to go tonight because we have ten percent off coupons that expire if we do not use them promptly.  So she stocked up.

Liesl loves going grocery shopping.  Dominica wears her in a Moby wrap and Liesl is wide awake checking out all of the stuff going on in the grocery store.  She especially loves looking at the vegetables.

March 25, 2009: Out in Warren

I got up this morning and worked from home for several hours.  It was a pretty busy morning.  I had hoped to have been able to have left home around ten thirty which would put me in Warren, NJ by noonish but I ended up not being able to leave Peekskill until after noon.

I listened to my iPod, the Stack Overflow Podcast Episode 43, on the way out.  It has been a while since I have been able to listen to my podcasts so that was nice.  The drive is just over an hour and a half.

I got out to Warren at twenty after one.  I picked up Dinesh and Harsh and we went straight down to Green Brook to the Hot Thai House and grabbed some lunch.  I only get a chance to get Thai when I am working in Warren.  The food down there was really good.  Very spicy but with a really good flavour.  Lots of kick.

After lunch we came back to the office and I got settled in for a little while but mostly just took care of some emails and had impromtu meetings with whomever I ran into.  I am very out of touch with people in Warren so it is good for me to stop in and see whomever I can when I am there.

At five thirty everyone in the office drove on down to Houlihans on Route 22 to hang out.  We were having a special “party” as a thank you to the people who worked the sixteen hour day when the datacenter went down several weeks ago.

We had a really good time.  We ordered tons of appetizers and beer and hung out at the bar.  There were probably twenty of us or more who went.  The food at Houlihans is really excellent.  Far above the quality that you expect from a chain bar and grill.  I really enjoy eating there.  Today was quite the treat for me as a complete break from my diet.

Everyone took off around eight or eight thirty from the bar.  I was the only person who stayed to have dinner.  Dinesh hung out with me while I ate.  I didn’t want to drink and then drive home on an empty stomach.  Not that I hadn’t had appetizers but I had not had dinner.  Most everyone lives pretty close there so were driving home for dinner but it takes me well over an hour an a half from down there to get home so I wanted to make sure that I had food.  Dad and Dominica ordered in Chinese takeway for dinner.

Dinesh and I left Houlihans around nine to head home.  My drive home went pretty well.  For some reason the battery in my iPod died.  I only used it for two hours before it died and it was completely charged just minutes before I got into the car this morning.  I hope that the battery is not dying on me already.  What a pain that would be!  Maybe there was just some charging problem.

I got home a little after ten thirty.  We stayed up for just a little while.  Tomorrow morning I have to work the early shift starting at six thirty so I need to get to sleep on the early side.

Dominica stayed up until a little after midnight.  I took my Acer Aspire One to bed and posted some updates to the SpiceWorks forums from there before calling it a night.

March 24, 2009: Don’t Watch The Mummy 3

I worked this morning while Dad, Dominica and Liesl visited.  Luckily it was a really slow morning in the office so I got to visit in between things as well.

Our meal schedule was all off today so Dominica cooked a huge breakfast of egg beaters, veggie sausage and soy cheese that we ate during a sort-of brunch window and then skipped lunch.

Work was busier this afternoon so I did not get to visit much.  We ordered in dinner tonight after work was done.  We ordered in Italian which was awesome.  Real cheese for a change!

While we ate dinner we watched The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Mummy 3). Unfortunately, it turned out to be really bad.  Not really entertaining at all.  I was really surprised by how bad it was.  We were not expecting that at all.  The first two films were so good.  And this one even had Michelle Yeoh too but she was not enough to save it.  Dominica thought that it was still better than Indiana Jones 4 which isn’t saying much.  How did this entire genre of films die such a horrible, horrible death this year?  Very sad.

After the movie was over we watched several episodes of Grace and Favour‘s second season before going to bed.  Tomorrow I am going out to Warren for most of the day.  Dad has decided to stay in Peekskill until Thursday.

March 23, 2009: Dad Comes Down to Visit

I got up this morning convinced that I was going to have an awesome weigh-in but ended up coming in .4 pounds over my last weight in which was four days ago.  I do fluctuate several pounds per day so a one day weigh-in is not very telling but I was hoping that after four days that I would have lost enough, especially after my really healthy day yesterday, to have it show up today.

Dad left home around ten this morning.  He is swinging through Leicester, New York to pick up my cousin’s laptop which needs to be reinstalled and from there is heading south to Dansville where he is stopped at Tim Horton’s to pick up a giant tin of coffee for me (ah, the sweet taste of Canada) and from there heading to Peekskill.  We are guessing that we will see him around four or so this afternoon.

There was very little free time today to get any work done around the house.  We never even had a chance to vacuum.  It was a pretty busy day.

The weather got warm enough that by mid afternoon we were able to sneak out for a little walk around the complex with Liesl and Oreo.  We were worried that it was too cold, but Liesl fell right asleep and never complained.

Dad made good time on his drive down and arrived at just after three.  We had just walked in the door from our walk when he pulled into the drive.  It was a good day for a long drive.  No weather problems at all.

Dad brought another big load of our stuff down with him including two huge bags of bedding items, the two SunFire V240 servers that arrived this week, my cousin Sara’s laptop which I need to fix before dad leaves, a load of DVDs and a load of CDs, books, magazines, mail and, the item, our wine fridge!  We are very excited to have our wine fridge again as we have had no place at all to keep wine and our main refrigerator has no spare space at all.  We need all of the space that we can get.  Now we can keep wine in the house again.  Of course, now we have to buy wine to stock into the fridge as well.

Dominica cooked dinner.  We had BBQ Crescent roll things for which I do not have a good name.  They are awesome, though.  She and her mother made them last weekend for the first time.  They are definitely going to be a normal part of our diets now.

We got a chance to visit some this evening.  It wasn’t long before we all migrated to the basement and I spent the evening sitting at my desk attempting to rebuild Sara’s laptop.  What a project that turned out to be.

After several hours of trying to get the machine to stay on long enough to do anything I finally found an operating system CD that would work with it.  Matching OEM CDs is such a pain.

It took several tries but eventually I got Windows loaded and working.  Then it was a matter of updating it and seeing if the laptop would really work.

I ended up working on the laptop until after one in the morning.  What a long evening.  But, once the OS was installed, the laptop kept humming away without any problems all night.  My guess is that there is some serious dust in there someplace causing the CPU to overheat from time to time which is really difficult to diagnose.