Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

It was a very tired morning getting up today with only two hours of sleep.  But there was work to be done, as always, so no way for me to actually sleep.

Rachel and Slim slept in till pretty late, like eleven.  Apparently Slim was supposed to be at work around eight and missed a meeting at ten.  Whoops, adulting fail.  Rachel hung out for a while after he left, maybe another hour or two, before she went off to work.

Pretty relaxed day, other than the busy day in the office.

Today is Dominica’s big FOUR ZERO!

The girls made cards for Dominica, as they usually do.  They love making something special themselves.  Paul went out early this morning while everyone was asleep and got a birthday cake made at Walmart, and a selection of cheesecakes, too.

This afternoon, for dinner, we went to Taco Tuesday at Fuzzy Taco on Midway.  We had thought about going to a few other places, but tacos just won out.

I got my regular fish tempura burrito, and a Estrella Jalisco which was awesome.  Both girls loved the nachos and really like the food here.  Fuzzy Taco is our new taco place of choice.  Dominica gets the fish tacos, because they don’t have onions, unlike the burrito.

After dinner, we went back home and Kat, Rachel, and Rachel’s date Slim were to come over.  Kat ended up having to work and could not make it for the “party”.   But Rachel made it for singing and cake and hanging out for a while.  Our family and our “roommates.”

Rachel hung out for a while and later on her date Slim joined us before it was time to go out.  While she was there, Dominica opened her birthday card from Jenn and discovered that Jenn had sent pictures that she had taken, that neither Dominica nor I had ever seen before, of the two of us together on the day that we met, on June 10th, 2001 at Phil and Kate’s wedding.  Including a picture of the two of us sitting together at the Howard Johnson’s where we had our late night meal with a bunch of other people from the wedding and the waitress mistook us for a married couple when we had just met a couple hours before.

On the late side, since Dominica was tired and just wanted to go to bed after so much cake and stuff, I went out to Denton with Rachel and Slim to go to the Abby Underground on the square to see Jaiden spin some tunes for the evening. He goes by DJ Knights up there.

Rachel drove up and that was rather an adventure.  Her old Honda is in rough shape and the transmission can’t keep the car in fifth gear.  So while driving on the highway, it would just slip out of gear every few minutes which is rather surprising.  Very little still works in that car.

It was late, probably close to midnight, when we got to the underground.  But we had time to grab a drink and see Jaiden.  This is his next to last time performing here for industrial night as the club is being shuttered next week.  We will be back this coming Friday for the last “home town” concert that they are doing here.

We closed down the Abby, then drove some people home, then went out to an after party at Grrg’s place downtown.  It was about eight people, crammed into a very small room.  Mostly just listening to music and a lot of playing darts.  We were there till almost five, then I drove Rachel and Slim back.  So I had the adventure of driving Rachel’s Honda, however I figured out that you could hold the stick in fifth gear and it wouldn’t pop out on you, so I had no issue at all driving the car back to Carrollton; it did not pop out of gear even once for me.  It was very clear, though, that it was trying to pop out and it pushed against me the entire time and the moment I took my hand away it started to come out.  So that car is pretty much done for.

As with most of those “conservative” Japanese cars that people swear by, it’s dead and worthless at far less than 200,000 miles which is not an impressive number at all.  A 1980s American car would do more than that pretty easily.  This echoes everything I ever heard from Honda and Toyota owners – they always brag that their cars last “so long”, being able to top 100K miles without a problem.  The difference being owners of all other car brands think 100K is just warmed up, but they are amazing a car can last so long.  I’ve long believed that people who buy Honda and Toyotas simply believe all cars are crap and fall apart at 50K miles, and since they refuse to drive anything else, they imagine that the short lifespans of their cars is somehow impressive.  It’s bizarre.  But Honda honestly seems to be one of the least reliable cars out there and is just purchased by people with insanely low expectations of what cars can do today (or for the past half of a century.)

So we were pretty exhausted when we got home.  I was totally ready for bed.  Tomorrow is going to be rough.

Monday.  We started off this morning with our Nicaragua office losing power.  From the picture taken from the office, I discovered that there is a Pizza Hut just down the street from the office.

Today is the first day of the girls being back to school full time.  School has started back up in Houston, so it is back up here.  Going to be a rough week getting them back into the swing of school every day.

Today’s fun disaster is that suddenly our datacenter’s IP range was listed by the Internet mafia arm of Microsoft, Spamhaus, who blacklists Microsoft’s smaller competitors at random to try to either blackmail ISPs or just convince small email users to move to Office 365.  So I got to spend the day working on interesting ways to bypass Microsoft refusing to deliver email from us, without just switching to Zoho which has gone up 50% in cost and just doesn’t really make sense at the higher cost.  I like Zoho, but it is just too limiting and too expensive for us.  When it was cheaper, I was okay with the limiting, but at this price, I’m just not up for it.

So it was a hectic day of trying to figure out how to get alternatives to work and what would make sense.  And that was after setting up a Zoho account thinking that we were going to have to go that way in the end.  Now I need to cancel that as it just wasn’t going to cut it.  And it took a lot of work to get it work as they had so many technical problems on their end just trying to get us able to get an account.  That was not an impressive process by any stretch.

This evening Liesl tried playing Kelvin and the Infamous Machine, a new video game that we just got for her.  It looks really fun.  A classic point and click adventure.

But that ate up nearly all of my day.