March 20, 2009: V240s Arrive

I got up earlier than usual tonight.  We went to bed at a decent hour last night which was nice for a change.  So often I am up until two in the morning.

I was surprised to discover that it had snowed in the lower Hudson Valley this morning!  Not very much snow – just enough to really shock everyone.  The weather has been so great for the past week or so with temperatures regularly hitting the fifties or even a few times into the sixties.  Snow was not expected today.

The weather warmed up pretty quickly as the sun came out and was quite bright today.

Got right to work this morning for, as expected, a busy Friday.  I worked all morning and got stuck working through my lunch time because someone called me and several people scheduled their weekend deployments during lunch without telling me ahead of time.  What a pain.

Once things calmed down after the lunch rush Dominica and I decided that we needed to take a walk so we bundled Liesl up and took her and Oreo out for a long walk around Chapel Hill.  We got some really good exercise today.  We did enough walking that Oreo was very soar and limping all evening.  It is good for him, though, as he needs to lose weight and keep up his muscle mass as he gets older.

My early morning work for tomorrow was postponed so I get to sleep in tomorrow which is awesome.  It has been rather a while since I got to sleep in on a Saturday.  I still have to work tomorrow but at least I don’t have to get up earlier than I do the rest of the week which is what normally happens.

Work did not go all that late tonight.  It was pretty good for a Friday.  After work was done and Liesl had gone to bed Dominica and I watched the three latest episodes of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse on Hulu.  That is our favourite new show.  It is the only new show that I watch, in fact.

The two Sun SunFire V240 2U UltraSparc IIIi servers that I got for a steal on eBay arrived today at dad’s house.  I am very excited to get to play with them.  Unfortunately they require serial console connections in order to be set up and dad does not have the requisite cabling so he has to bring the servers down to my place next week so that I can get them tested before it is too late to send them back in case anything is wrong.  These are really nice machines though.  Far nicer than the older SunFire V100 models that I am using now.  It’s a generation newer processor, twice as many processors, eight times the memory and more than double the drive capacity and far more than twice the I/O.  Very nice machines.

We went to bed at a pretty good time.  Did not stay up too late.  Tomorrow Katie is coming over for dinner and to visit.  We haven’t seen her in a while.

Dad is coming down to visit on Monday, I think.  We are still working out the final details of his visit.

I am scheduled to go into Warren on Wednesday of next week.

March 19, 2009: Loving the Music

Even though Liesl decided to stay up late with her daddy last night she was still restless a lot of the night and Dominica did not manage to get all that much sleep.  It was a really good thing that she had turned in so early or she would have been in really rough shape today.

I weighed in this morning and so far I have lost thirty-three pounds since we started using the Wii Fit and Weight Watchers!  I am just two pounds away from my first “Wii goal” which I hope to hit sometime around Monday if all goes well.  No splurging for me.  I am in the home stretch.  That goal just happens to coincide with my lowest weight in recent years which I reached during the crazy diet challenge that we had at Citi in 2007.

Work was not nearly as busy today as it has been recently.  I was very glad to have a day that was not keeping me jumping from one thing to another without any breaks.

My new books, “Groovy Recipes” and “Windows Group Policy Administrator’s Pocket Consultant” arrived today from Amazon.

After work was over we had dinner – Dominica made this awesome cheesy polenta dish that we had for the first time today.  Then we spent the evening listening to music and hanging out in the living room.  I have been working on setting up a SOCKS5 proxy but need to do a bit of special configuration which is quite a pain.  It wouldn’t be so bad but I get so little time to work on it.

We spent the evening listening to music that we downloaded from Amazon’s MP3 service.  We are really loving having all of this awesome music available all of the time.  We are discovering great new artist and finding that we really, really enjoy having classical and jazz music playing all day long.  Because we have all of this great music now we have found that we are able to keep the television off all day long and just have music playing.  Liesl is loving it and now she only falls asleep when we are dancing with her.  It is really improving our lives.  I was finding having the television on so much really draining.  This is so much more uplifting.

I can’t wait until we have a chance to get the CD collection brought down from dad’s house and get all of that converted so that we can listen to that on the network as well.  That will be great.  That is like 1,200 CDs or more worth of music and a ton of it is classical and jazz so it will be perfect.

March 18, 2009: Short Day for Dominica

This morning Dominica got up very early and headed out to ShopRite to do some very much needed grocery shopping as our cupboards are bare.  I stayed at home taking care of Liesl and Oreo while Dominica was out.  It worked out pretty well as Liesl didn’t wake up until just a little before Dominica got home and it gave Liesl and I a little time to hang out during her happy “morning time” which I often miss.

Work was, surprise surprise, quite busy all morning.  I feel like I am getting farther and farther behind each day.  It really is way too much work pouring in right now which is really odd.  I am not sure where the workload is coming from.  I think that it mostly comes down to just a few extra projects that require me to spend a bit of time on the phone and in doing so it causes everything else to back up significantly and then it because “task thrashing” as I constantly switch from one task to another for the bulk of the day.

I have been taking really short lunches whenever I eat and I keep missing opportunities to take walks with the family.  The weather is really awesome today with temperatures in the mid sixties.  Dominica and Liesl went out for their first walk on their own today.  Oreo and I did not get to go because I had so much work to do.

My 1.5TB Seagate USB drive arrived today from Amazon (thanks Amazon Prime!)  It is quite attractive and I got it hooked up right away and started transferring all kinds of stuff off of my existing drives because I am totally out of space to the point where it is causing additional drive performance issues due to a lack of available space.  My computer spent the rest of the day just transferring files.  Hundreds of GB of files moved over by the end of the day. I had to get a bunch of stuff transferred right away because my main drives are so full that it is causing performance problems on a regular basis.

After work this evening we had dinner and then Dominica decided to head off to be really early – not that much after nine o’clock!  Liesl was drowsy so Dominica tried to take her to bed with her but within half an hour or so Liesl woke up and so Dominica got up and brought her downstairs to hang out with me for a while.

Liesl stayed up with me watching the new Knight Rider via Hulu for two hours while Dominica slept.  I held her and walked around the living room for the entire two hours.  She was wide awake and just wanted to hang out.  We got a lot of time together today, though, so no complaints.  It was nice to just have some time together.

Liesl has begun weaning herself all on her own.  She pretty much only eats from a bottle now which, in many ways, is good.  That she did it on her own is the best because she decided that she is ready and just made the decision.  It will make feeding her much easier, in general.  We are going to speak to her doctor soon about having her start some solid food as she is having spit-up issues that often results from getting too many fluids for babies all at once.  She might be ready for cereal of fruit or something.

Liesl fell asleep in my arms and I carried her up to bed around eleven thirty or so.  Oreo went to the guest bedroom and took a spot sleeping on the bed in there on his own around the same time.  He loves that there is an entire room that is his own with a full sized bed in it with pillows and blankets.  He thinks that the entire room belongs to him and he loves it.  Every morning he gets up around eight thirty and goes into that room all by himself to lay in the sun away from everyone.  It is his alone time.

I stayed up for a while working on issues between Microsoft WMI and Live OneCare’s firewall.  Getting WMI and RPC to work consistently through Live OneCare is quite problematic.  I worked on that until around one thirty and then went to bed.

March 17, 2009: Hey, it’s a Tuesday

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.

March 16, 2009: 1.5TB More Storage

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.