Sheep Guarding Llama

I was really exhausted after last night and this morning I slept in until way too late.  Antoni woke me up when he called and thought that it was pretty hilarious that I was still in bed.  I was rather tired all day.

Today I bought two Sun SunFire V240 2u UltraSparc IIIi servers from eBay.  Got an amazing deal on them.  The V240 is a two rack unit, dual processor RISC server with up to 16GB of RAM and four, hot-swappale Ultra160 SCSI drives.  Very nice units.  I will be replacing the SunFire V100 servers with these which is a pretty significant upgrade.  The V100 is a very nice unit but the V240 is big, faster and far more expandable.  The V100 is very limited in many ways although awesomely small, light and power efficient.

Today was another long and busy day.  At least the economy seems to be doing well this past week.  After our latest major slide things were looking like they might get rough for a while but the banks are stabalizing at the moment and overall things aren’t too bad although mostly that is just a reflection of our lowered economic expectations these days.

This afternoon Dominica finally got some time to work on her class.  She was able to finally complete the third course in her certificate program.  Only one more to go now.  She also went ahead and did the first lesson in the next course.  There are fifteen in total.  She is definitely on the home stretch now which is awesome.  She is learning a lot and becoming a lot more confident.

Tony got his ASP.NET certification today from Brainbench and ranked #29 in the State of New York!

My main project of the evening was working on setting up a Squid Proxy that is running on my OpenSUSE Linux desktop for testing some stuff.  I don’t work with Squid all that often so every time that I do there is a learning curve.  That and I never work on the same types of project twice so it is always an adventure.

This evening we skipped watching television (read: Hulu or Netflix) and just listened to Mozart and some jazz from Amazon MP3 downloads.  It is so nice have access to good music again.  I really appreciate having it as a break from having shows on.  We are also having to worry more about having the television on because Liesl is more aware of it and will watching it if we are not careful.  So we have to watch it when she is asleep or do things to keep her engaged while it is on.

Liesl is really growing.  She is getting “so big” and has become so interactive with us.  She gets totally excited whenever I come upstairs from work.  She reaches out her arms to me and kicks until I pick her up and carry her around for a while.  Her favourite thing is for me to hold her on my right hip and to walk around with her until she falls asleep.

I ordered some books from Amazon today – the MSPress Pocket Consultant’s Guide to Group Policy Objects and the second Groovy book from the Pragmatic Programmers.

Dominica and I have noticed that our living room furniture is wearing out at an incredible pace.  The love seat that we bought in 2007 or 2008 for our apartment in Newark is really wearing quickly.  We knew that it was not going to last for a long time but we were hoping that we would get a bit more use that this out of it.  The right side of the love seat, which we use the most, is already worn down so much that you can feel the springs when you sit.  The other seats are not going to last for very long.  We have also noticed the corners are starting to wear out where we bump into them often.  The ottoman is really showing some wear on its corners.  It is sad to have your furniture wear out when you still think of it as being new.

Today was no less busy that I have been over the past week.  Another day of getting up and go go go all day long.  At least I did not get so busy that I forget to book my time for the week.  I hate when that happens.  Then it takes a month before I end up getting paid again.

I have been doing so much “work” on the SpiceWorks forums over the past week that I have won myself a T-shirt!

I ordered a new, external hard drive today.  A Seagate with 1.5TB.  This is the largest storage device that I have ever owned.  Currently I own one .25TB drive, three .5TB drives and two .75TB drives but this is at least double the size of the next largest drive – and I still imagine that I will eat through all of the available space in no time at all.  I am currently using 1.75TB just for media storage and I am severely limited by it.  It is crazy that I can use so much but I really do.  All of my drives are completely full to the point that I cannot transfer video from my camcorder or anything.  It is quite a problem.

So this new hard drive is a stop gap measure to provide some desperately needed additional storage until a more permament solution can be afforded.  I am thinking that this drive will be attached to my desktop and that very soon an additional 1.5TB external drive will be purchased which will get attached to Dominica’s laptop.

Speaking of Dominica’s laptop – it gave us quite a scare tonight.  It refused to book after she updated a software package on it and we were sure that we were going to have to completely rebuild it which is not at all what we wanted to spend out evening doing.  It turned out, though, that it was my iPod which was plugged into the laptop that was causing the problem and interrupting the boot process.  Once I took the laptop elsewhere to be worked on it booted fine – because the iPod is plugged into the docking station.  It took me a while to put two and two together to figure out what was happening.  Dominica is definitely thinking about doing a bigtime backup of her system now, though!

After my long day of work was finally over and I was able to come upstairs and relax I put in several hours trying to get to the bottom of some really crazy WMI issues that I am having with a lot of workstations.  The problems appear to stem from using Microsoft’s Live OneCare firewall product.  It appears to block WMI communications no matter what I do or how I configure it.  It is very frustrating.  I burned most of the evening working on that.

We have been so busy the last several weeks that there has not been a spare moment to work on the model trains at all.  For a little while there we were getting lots of time to work on them and it was going really well.  Now that we finished the initial diorama we haven’t even had a chance to get started on the beginnings of any of the building models or the layout itself that we are going to do.  Parts of it are sitting all over the house completely in the way because we want to do it but just don’t have the time.

Dominica really wanted to go grocery shopping today as we are extremely low on foodstuffs but Liesl never took any type of nap all day and even if she had I really had no spare time with which to have watched her at all.  So I suppose that that kind of worked out but only barely.  She is really hoping that she will be able to make it out of the house tomorrow to get food.  We are scraping the bottom of the barrel here trying to put meals together and one of the things that we are running out of is our vegetables which is pretty bad.  You don’t want to get into a situation where all there is to eat is junk food and snacks!

It was really late by the time that I was finally able to get away from everything and head off to bed.  I can tell that tomorrow is going to be another really long day and I am going to be pretty tired.

We have not heard anything from my cousin Sara yet who has been threatening to come down and visit this week.  She could come down as early as Wednesday or possibly not at all.  Dad is thinking about coming down in a week from today.  Liesl has a lot of visitors recently.  She is getting spoiled.

I slept in a lot this morning.  I really needed the sleep.  I was in bed long before midnight and did not get up until around ten thirty.  It really felt great.

I made it down to the living room and everyone was just hanging out and visiting.  We decided that none of us really wanted to go anywhere today so we just stayed in and had lunch at the house.

Dominica’s parents left for Frankfort around two in the afternoon.  It was a good day for driving.  Weather was very good.  Liesl was not happy to see them go.  She really likes having lots of people around and being the center of attention.

Right after the Toccos left I got paged out and had to work for a couple of hours on a conference call.  I think that it may be as much as six weeks since I have had a single day off from work.  I am really starting to get burned out.  I really appreciate the overtime but one day of not having to log into the office would be really, really nice.

Dominica attempted to wrap up her third class in school this evening but ended up having a couple of problems that required her to wait for feedback from her instructor so that disrupted her a bit.  I spent several hours working on the one problem that she had to figure out what had happened.  We ended up burning most of the free time that we had today on this which was incredibly frustrating.

The alarm went off at twenty after six.  Five hours of restless sleep at best for me.  I feel mostly like crap.  I brushed my teeth and then dragged myself down to the basement to be logged in and working by six thirty!  I can’t believe that I am working at six thirty on a Saturday morning.  And after working until the wee hours of the morning yesterday.

The Toccos are coming down to Peekskill today so in between things for work I needed to do some cleaning.  My initial office work wrapped up at ten but there was more to do after that that required some paperwork that I did not receive yesterday as planned.  I emailed several people hoping that someone would have it for me today.

My next task was to do some cleaning.  That lasted until around eleven thirty when the Toccos arrived.  Since Ramona was here last weekend until Monday we actually had the house in pretty good shape so it was not all that bad to make it presentable again.

Today I finally made the call that the second palm tree, the “healthy” one, was finally past the point of no return and had to be thrown out.  So I carried it out to the dumpster and tossed it.  The palm trees did very poorly in the move from Newark to Peekskill.  They were so large that they really got abused and once here they were competing for the little sunlight that we get which is practially nothing compared to how it was in Newark.  The cycas is doing quite well, the mandarin is hanging on, the tree in the nursery seems to be okay but I can’t be sure and the ivy is impossible to read.  All of the plants are hungering for sunlight but there is nothing that we can do about that.

Liesl was very excited to have her grandparents here visiting her. She was little miss social all day.  Oreo and Dexter were quite happy to have another Boston Terrier with which to play.  They get along so well – especially now that they are both getting older.  They are more snuggle oriented rather than play oriented these days.

Dominica’s parents brought along Dominica’s “new” cedar chest that came from her papa’s house.  It is a really nice, sturdy piece of modern furniture.  It is not what we were expecting at all.  It is actually a very normal piece of furniture that we plan to use in the main living area of the house – most likely as some combination of seating and storage.  It is very heavy-duty.  We had no idea what to expect but this is definitely a really nice piece of furniture that we are going to appreciate having around to be able to use.  We had not realized that this was a relatively new piece before.  We are always desperate for additional storage space so this will help a lot.

This afternoon we all went out for a nice walk as the weather is great.  The sun is out and it is in the fifties outside.  We made it up to the top of the first hill and we realized that Dexter had had all that he could handle as he was still on his drugs from the drive (he is terrified of traveling in the car and has to be drugged to keep him from getting too upset and having a heart attack.)  So we walked back to the house and dropped him off and then set out again which was great for Oreo as it gave him a longish normal walk before embarking on a really long walk.  What a happy dog he was.

So our real walk was the big look of Chapel Hill from our house, all the way around to the nature trail in the front of the complex and then the long way down by the back entrance and back to the house.  It is a nice, long walk without any backtracking and a good climb as well.  We all got some good exercise and Oreo had a wonderful time.  Liesl slept, of course.

For dinner this evening we went out to the New City Diner in Yorktown Heights.  Dinner was very good, as always.  Dominica and I decided to slurge on our diets and each got some dessert to take home for later.  We were not able to eat it with our meals as it was too much food all at once.

After dinner we came back to the house and everyone watched As Time Goes By.  Dominica’s parents have never seen the show so it was nice to have such a great, classic show to be able to introduce them to.

We all went to bed on the early side tonight.  We were really tired.

I got to sleep in a little late this morning because it was Friday and because I did not get paged out at all.

This morning was pretty busy but by lunch time I had enough of a break that I was able to come upstairs and actually hang out with Dominica and Liesl for a while.  Dominica had a chance to actually work on her class today.  She is almost done with her third course.  Just two more lessons left to go after today.

This afternoon my “new” Hewlett-Packard Integrity RX2600 server arrived that I won on eBay on Sunday.  It came in a very large box on a palette which is a bit of a problem because we now need to figure out how to get rid of the palette which is rather large and in the way.

The server is pretty awesome.  It looks like it is brand new.  Even with the cover off there is no real sign of dust.  It has dual Intel Itanium 2 1.5GHz processors with 6MB cache per processor and 10GB of RAM.  The server did not come with any hard drives so I had to order those separately today.  I ordered two HP/Seagate 72GB 15,000 RPM Ultra320 SCSI drives that I will install and use in a RAID 1 configuration.  This will be an extremely fast server once I have CentOS installed on it.  I am very excited to get to try it out.

I was able to get away from the office a little after Dominica had started to eat dinner so I mostly got to eat dinner with her tonight.  Our replacement BluRay for Don’t Mess with the Zohan came today so we were able to watch that.  It was a really dumb movie and yet entertaining.  There were some really funny parts as their often are in Adam Sandler movies.  We enjoyed it.

We needed something to watch since I could not go to bed as the work for the office was not yet done (again) so we looked through Dominica’s movie queue from NetFlix and found Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life which Dominica has never seen (or else it would not be in the queue.)  So we put that on and she tried her best to force herself to watch it even though it is completely not funny in the least.  What a horrible movie.

I spent the evening building a RHEL 5 Linux server on VMWare Server 2.0 to use as an OpenVPN server and a Nagios monitoring machine.  This is my first time installing either of these on Linux so I got to do some learning tonight which was nice.

I got stuck working on late hardware maintenance for the office until just after have past midnight.  I am really getting tired of all of this really late night Friday night work coupled with insanely early Saturday morning work.  I have to be working before seven in the morning tomorrow!  That is only six hours of sleep at best if I could fall asleep instantly once the work was done.  It is far too little sleep to be scheduling week after week.

It was a little after one when I finally got in to bed and I did not fall asleep for a while.  Tomorrow is going to be an exhausting day.  Alarm set for twenty after six in the morning.  Then deployments for my team in the Middle East.  Once those are done it is time to do some serious cleaning because Dominica’s parents are leaving Frankfort early in the morning as if they were going to work so that they can be down to Peekskill for the weekend to see Liesl.