Sheep Guarding Llama

I did some serious sleeping-in this morning.  Dominica and Liesl had gotten up and had gone down to the living room for hours before I got out of bed.  Oreo had left me and was in the nursery laying in the sunlight when I finally pulled myself out of bed around eleven this morning!  Boy did that feel good except for the fact that, like anytime that I sleep for this long, my sinuses are killing me.  Argh.

Dominica was able to work on her UNIX Administration class while I was still sleeping.  She completed her third lesson in the final course so she is not twenty percent of the way through this final course.  Her goal is to have the course, and the entire UNIX Administration program, completed by the end of the month.  Once she is done with this she is thinking about taking the Database Administration program as well which is shorter than the one that she is completing now.  She really enjoyed her last database design class from SUNY Empire so this might be fun.

I got pretty much straight to work for the office.  I had been watching my BlackBerry all morning from bed so I knew that nothing was going on but I have my usual patch management weekend project to do today so I wanted to get started on it as soon as possible.

I put in a couple of hours working and then the family decided to take a nice walk.  We bundled up Liesl as it is not quite fifty out today and took her and Oreo for a nice, long way winding through Chapel Hill.  We did a few loops around so that we walked much farther than any one path through our side of the complex.  It was a good forty minute walk, I would guess.

As always, Liesl was asleep before we were even out of the parking lot.  Oreo had a great time but completely wore himself out and was limping by the time that we returned.  He tends to do this to himself.  He is a bit irresponsible when we go out for our walks.  He just cannot contain himself.  He is going to sleep the rest of the day.

After our walk I did some more work and Dominica took care of Liesl.  Then, when I was done working, Dominica set about baking and I took care of Liesl for quite some time.  Then we took turns showering and watching Liesl before Katie came to visit.

I had a tiny bit of spare time today and downloaded SimpleMedia, a Java-based UPnP Media Server.  I am trying it out on my Windows XP desktop to stream music and movies up to the PlayStation 3.  I loaded it up with over 8GB of music that I have ready on my desktop and it started working instantly.  Now Dominica has access to thousands of songs that she can play anytime upstairs.  This will make it so much easier to not have the television on just for “something to do.”

The music streaming works perfectly but the videos had problems.  As near as I can tell the problem with the videos is coming from a lack of bandwidth which must be caused by the PS3 being on the wireless.  We have 802.11n hooked up but there are non-802.11n devices on the wireless network so the PS3 is not getting the bandwidth that it could be getting.  There is also a bit of wireless interplay coming from neighbouring networks.  The real solution is that we need to get the CAT6 cabling run through the floor and up to that area of the house and we will be on GigE instead of wireless which will solve all of those problems quite easily.

Katie arrived around six thirty or so.  She and Dominica made dinner which included some leftover pollock chowder, cheese ravioli and an apple/pear crisp.  We opened a bottle of wine, the last one from the bad batch that we received from Marketview Liquor in Rochester, and, of course, it was vinegar like the others.  So we threw that out and opened the very last bottle of wine in the house, Lone Star Chardonnay which was so unlike any chardonnay that any of us had ever tasted that Katie and I were wondering if they weren’t bottling Niagara and just calling it Chardonnay.  I had no idea that a chardonnay grape could taste so much like a new world grape.

After dinner we watched several episodes of Coupling. Katie loves the show but only can get it from BBC America which only shows a few of the episodes, random ones from different seasons, and plays them out of order.  Just another reason why Hulu and Netflix are SO much better than cable television which costs orders of magnitude more.

Katie took off around eleven thirty and we went to bed before midnight.  A very early night for us.  Tomorrow Dominica is planning to go to a candle party that Katie is hosting in Haverstraw.  Oreo and I will be staying home.  There is just too much work to be done to be able to really go anywhere.  At least it will give me a chance to do a bit of work.

My “I’m a Pepper” SpiceWorks t-shirt arrived in the mail today.  I earned it from being really active on the SpiceWorks forums.

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.

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.

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.