Sheep Guarding Llama

Today really was a Monday, literally and figuratively.  I got woken up by the Nicaraguan monitoring office to tell me that a client was down and having major issues.  So I started the day leaping out of bed to go see what was wrong.  Ended up being a major power failure inside the building that led to loads of time being spent determining what was wrong and getting things “working” which took most of the day.

The whole day ended up just being completely crazy and intense.  We all worked so much, it was exhausting.  Thank goodness it wasn’t problems that we had caused.  Major outage days always stress me out until we know it wasn’t us.

So my day was spent completely head down working for clients.  No time to relax in any way.

Dinner for me was homemade fried clams and a giant salad.  The girls had homemade deep fried shrimp and really loved it.  My clams were possibly the best that I have ever had.

This evening, Paul made homemade apple fritters in his deep fryer.

This evening there was at least a little time and we were able to play just a little bit more of King’s Quest before Liesl had to go to bed. She got in about another two hours.  We still have quite a bit more story to play through in the first episode.  It’s quite a good game.

Sunday.  I got up this morning and got straight into Mass Effect: Andromeda.  I’ve been waiting over a year since this game released and much longer since finishing the last title before it in the series so I am very excited to be finally playing this fourth installment.

By the time that I actually got it all set up and working, Liesl had come out to join me and ended up spending pretty much the entire day sitting on the couch with me playing Mass Effect.

Liesl has gotten so good at video games that she helps me out of most of my jams in the game and I often give her the controller to let her take over on tough jumps and pathfinding.  She is so good at the puzzles now.

It was a very full day of gaming fun and we made it really far into the game.  We are well into the meat of it now, so it is really fun as the story and adventure unfold.

Dominica went shopping at Once Upon a Child and got a huge haul of new clothes for the girls.  Liesl especially got a lot of new stuff as she is growing like a weed and doesn’t fit into any of her old stuff any longer.  She needed an entirely new wardrobe.  Some of her old stuff will go to Ciana, and Ciana got a few new things, too.

Dinner was deep fried tofu nuggets in Buffalo sauce, so good.  It was delicious.  Both girls really liked the tofu, too.  It was a hit.  We ate dinner and watched an episode of Star Trek: Voyager.  We are well into the second season, now.

After dinner, Liesl and I played a few hours of King’s Quest (2015) that we started a few nights ago.  We still have not quite completed the first episode, which is good as we don’t own the subsequent episodes, yet.  She is really enjoying it, though.  The graphics, the story.  When we started a few weeks ago, I had tried controlling the game, but find the mechanics of it very frustrating and difficult, especially with the controller and my arthritic right thumb (the one that I broke seven years ago.)  But Liesl is able to fly right through the portions of the game that I find so challenging!  She has already surpassed me in a lot of things in video games, I can’t believe it.  She is so good at playing these.

So we played King’s Quest until it was bedtime.

Tonight Dominica and I talked about her stomach issues for a really long time and we think that we may have finally gotten to the bottom of it.  We has been refusing to track her eating habits and, of course, that would have exposed this a long time ago.  But we finally think that we figured out that in addition to having an onion sensitivity, it seems like she has a carrot family sensitivity too including carrots, parsnips, and cilantro.

So going to start testing that very soon, but it could be the magic answer that she has been looking for.

Rachel hung out for a while this morning.  We were all pretty tired from last night.  So a slow morning getting started.

Paul had more energy than the rest of us, so he got up and made pancakes for everyone for breakfast.  All kinds of pancakes.  Plain, chocolate chip, blueberry, raspberry, blackberry.  Of course, none for me.  More than a month without bread, not losing my diet over pancakes.

Origin has had Mass Effect: Andromeda on sale finally after a year of me wanting it, and as it appears that no additional online content is going to be added to the game, it seems like this is finally the time to buy it.  Only ten dollars for something I’ve been waiting a year since its release and years since finishing the previous installment in the series, Mass Effect 3.

I bought Andromeda and it ended up taking basically the entire day to get downloaded and installed.  At least six hours.

I did some work this afternoon, but by later evening Andromeda was installed and so I managed to play that for a few hours.  I got through the intro and managed to get into the real game.  Looking forward to really getting into the story.  I’m amazed that the old gaming laptop is able to play it so well, but it does have the graphics turned way down and is only rendering a 720p game, which I am watching on the big 4K display.  It really shows how nice it would be to have a new machine that can really push well rendered 4K games.  Someday…

Today is Friday and it is the farewell party at the Abby Underground in Denton.  So Dominica and I are planning on going up there with Rachel this evening to see the concert.  Technically the Underground is going to be open next week, as well, but next Friday’s concert is not of the “local” bands that everyone knows, so tonight is the home town crowd’s last hurrah to the club.

Like most days this week, today was busy and hectic.  A very exhausting day.  I was looking forward to escaping this evening, for sure.

Luciana has discovered that she loves berries with sugar and whipped cream.  She had me make her raspberries tonight.

Rachel ended up driving to our house this evening so that we could all drive up together.  We drove up to Denton at eight and picked up William before heading to the Abby.   Parking was a nightmare.  We had to drive all over downtown trying to find any available parking spots.  It was a mess.  A popular night for going out in Denton.

We got there at eight thirty, luckily getting there while Grrg’s band, also called Grrg, was still playing.  So we got to see the last half of their set.

Loads of people came out tonight.  We had a good time.  Some really good bands towards the end of the night.  We knew lots of people there and made some new friends, too.  Shaolin Death Squad did a great job.

Jaiden’s band was the last one up for the night.  They did an awesome job and the crowd really enjoyed it.  It’s the first time that we have seen his band.

After the concert and closing down the Abby Underground, it was back to the house for some sleep.  We had to take a few people home and grab Taco Bell on the way back, so it was closer to four when we got back.

Thursday.  Today was my day of dealing with Intuit all day in a fruitless attempt to roll out QuickBooks Enterprise.  What should have been a nearly effortless process of simply spending loads of money turned into quite the unbelievable project.  What’s really interesting is that, completely by chance, I had to spend the day working with Intuit trying to roll out QBE for a customer, while Dominica was hard at work with Intuit rolling out QBPro for us!

What really created problems is that Intuit hides how they handle their hosting and don’t make it clear, whatosever, that their hosted product goes through a third party, because my customers, and rightfully so, were not interested in third party hosting and were really looking at it because they thought that they would have end to end internal support from Intuit which, it turns out, is not even remotely the case.

And to add fuel to the fire, the reason that we looked into hosted QuickBooks at all was because Intuit advertises, in several places, that their hosted version comes with a web interface that is clearly not available in their normal product.  This add on was key to making QuickBooks nearly a business class software package.  Third party hosts did not offer this, so getting Intuits deal was unique and hugely valuable for that one feature.  Well, once we talked to Intuit sales, they admitted that that was completely fabricated, the website was flatly lying, and no such feature ever existed whatsoever. It was just made up to sell product.

There were so many things that were technically a disaster and ethically inappropriate, I truly never want to have to deal with this company and honestly, I would not trust them hosting financial data if I had any choice.  Ethics have never been one of their strong suits and they are the pioneers of modern Ghost Ship Software.  But often we have little or no choice due to how accountant works.  But it always makes me wonder why accountants would be comfortable doing business with them, are their concerns around ethics and being able to trust vendors that distant from IT’s concerns?  If so, why?  What makes accountants trusting of dishonest people?

So we had to bail on getting QBE hosted, as that was not going to meet our needs at all.  The licensing and costs were not even close to what we had been quoted, either.  The “things we had been misled about” just piled up and up.  It was insane.  The whole day was just one shoe dropping after another.  It seems that nothing we were told or that was advertised was true.

To make things even more ridiculous we ended up with a trial of the hosted product that we had long enough to log into and realize just had sloppy the hosted product was.  It is bad enough that getting hosted QBE requires an RDP connection to a remote server, but that is a QB problem, and not a hosting one per se.  But pretty basic hosting principles say that when hosting a remote application that you don’t host the full desktop, but only the application.  This is for performance, ease of use, integration, and security.  But that is not what they did, a full remote desktop was provided which is just beyond silly.  But that’s not nearly the bad part.  Today, Windows Server 2016 is fully mature and Server 2019 is due out, as early as next month.  But was the QuickBooks environment running on Windows Server 2016 or even its predecessor Server 2012 R2?  No, nor its predecessor.  In fact, QB was running off of ancient Windows Server 2008 R2, a product so old and so ridiculous that even a small business using it for simple internal functions would be embarrassed if you found it running there.  For a hosting company, let alone Intuit’s sole hosting partner, to be running this and only this speaks volumes about both Intuit’s and their partners view of the software and Intuit’s customers.

So, obviously, we decided to host QuickBooks ourselves and in just a few hours had a vastly more advanced, secure, performant, modern, and respectable hosting environment for our users that costs us far less, takes less effort to manage, and gives us far more protect and flexibility than before.  And it addressed some technical problems that we were going to have to just overlook if we went with Intuit’s own hosting product.

So that pretty much summed up my day. I dealt with that, almost the entire day and it was supremely frustrating.  But, at least, at the end of the day we have a well architected solution that we are pretty pleased with, and was already working well before we called it a day.  Now we have an awesome Windows Server 2016 RDS Application Server, with QuickBooks Enterprise and Sage Peachtree 50 all running and replacing our old VPN. This is actually quite slick.

Dominica’s day with QuickBooks went much better.  Although she had to train their technical support how to access it from Ubuntu, which was pretty funny.  Both she and I had to do Ubuntu and Fedora access to it today, and the QB techs had no idea how that worked.  She did tech set up this morning and had her first QB accounting lessons this afternoon.  So she had a very busy day between doing the kids’ school, QB setup, QB school of her own, and she just got a deal to do a new website that will start next week.  So a very busy day.

Kat was supposed to come over tonight for our nearly regular cheese tray Thursday evening, but she got stuck at work or something and it was too late to come out.  So we will not see her until next week.  So just a quiet evening in.  Dominica and I are planning on going out to Denton with Rachel tomorrow night, so are not too interested in doing anything tonight.  Dominica is not completely sure that she is going, but she is thinking about it.  I am definitely going, as long as work does not need me too much, but as I am Rachel’s driver, I need to go if possible.  And we were out a bit this week already, so no one is really feeling like doing much of anything tonight anyway.

The girls decided that they wanted to watch a show with me tonight, so we snuggled on the couch and watched Netflix’ Nailed It.