Sheep Guarding Llama

Friday is finally here.  I thought that I was going to sleep in a little this morning but ended up waking up early on my so I just got up and got started on the day.

Today Dominica signed up for the Linux/UNIX System Administration program at the O’Reilly School of Technology at the University of Illinois.  It is a “continuing education” certificate program consisting of four, hands-on UNIX administration and scripting classes.  We are very excited about the program.  It is done at your own pace and because she signed up for the entire certificate program all at once we got a fifteen percent discount (probably because of the economy.)  So that saved a lot of money too.  The real benefit will come if Empire State College decides to accept the credits from UofI (they are continuin education credits, not regular credits) towards her associates and/or second bachelor’s degree.  That will save her time and money.

Work was better than it usually is on a Friday for me today.  I got started early instead of late.  Normally on Fridays I start a little late because I have to work so late in the evening but today I got a good head start.

This week I started working with a logo design firm out of London.  I have been thinking about trying to work with one for a while now. We got an incredibly fast turn-around on the designs and after just two days have a block of designs to look at over the weekend!  Very impressive.  So far I am quite happy with the process and the price.  I am guessing that the process will be all complete by the end of next week.

I have been using the Wii Fit for ten days now.  I have no missed a single weigh-in yet and am very proud of myself.  Having the Wii Fit keep track of my exercise and health progress is really great.  It is definitely keeping me motivated thus far.

We are completely out of our food for Oreo today.  So as soon as lunch was over and Liesl appeared to be going to sleep Dominica ran out to Stop and Shop to get chicken and turkey so that she could cook Oreo’s dog food for him.  So I stayed at home taking care of Liesl and Oreo and watching the email for any work that came across my desk.  All of our shopping seems to be done in a state of emergency these days.

Work wrapped up for me on the early side.  I was done for the evening around seven and able to come upstairs and join the family for the evening.  We had dinner and watched some of Major Dad. Then, once Liesl fell asleep, Dominica played some of Paper Mario for the N64 on the Wii’s Virtual Console.  She is most of the way through the game and hoping to be able to complete it soon.  She started playing it a long time ago when we were living in Newark.

I spent the evening continuing to work on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux server builds running on the Xen virtualization environment that I started working with yesterday.  I got quite a lot of work done on that today as well.  It has been a productive week.

I also took a little time this evening to set up Dominica’s class stuff for the O’Reilly School to make sure that everything is working properly and that she has the resources that she needs.  I got her logged in and tested out her access to her curriculum content and checked out her remote shell account works.  Everything seems to work very well.

With Dominica’s classes she is also getting four books.  One of the great things about the O’Reilly School of Technology is that the school is sponsored in part by a major technology publisher (guess which one) and instead of low-quality textbooks so often used by colleges (often because the professor is getting a kickback in return for sacrificing the student’s education value) these classes use really high quality, industry standard reference material from a very highly respected publisher – and the books are included in the price of the classes instead of being an additional cost item.

Dominica is getting “UNIX in a Nutshell”, “The Apache Cookbook”, “Learning Perl” and “TCP/IP Network Administration”.  Almost all of these are titles are ones that we already own but mostly in much older revisions.  “UNIX in a Nutshell”, from 1994, is the first technology book that I ever bought and is a major reason for me being in IT today.  It will be nice to have a new copy of the classic title.  If I remember my book library correctly, “The Apache Cookbook” is the only one of these books that we don’t have already.

Tomorrow morning I have to work at eight in the morning, as usual for a Saturday.  It is supposed to be a short day of work though.  Only a few small items need to be addressed tomorrow.  Then, in the afternoon, Linnea is driving up to Peekskill to visit us.  It is her chance to see our new house and to meet Liesl.  Oreo is looking forward to having company again.

SGL appears to be back to a more normal length today.  Maybe I can keep it up.

I actually woke up on my own this morning before I actually had to get up.  Boy did that feel good for a change!  I finally got more than eight hours of sleep last night and did a little catching up on my lack of sleep that I have been getting recently.

The sun was back out today.  Awesome, loads of sunshine illuminating the house.  Oreo and the plants were exceedingly pleased.

I forgot to mention that last night Dominica finally got a chance to play some more of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None on the Nintendo Wii.  We are very glad that the Adventure Company has decided to start releasing some titles for the Wii and the DS.  There are two Agatha Christie Wii titles ported over from the PC already.  If the first one continues to keep up the quality I am sure that we will be getting the second one as well.

I was supposed to have driven down to Warren, New Jersey today to work out of that office but the weather is still not great and the event that I was going to be going to was rescheduled so I decided not to take the time out for the travel.  Three hours of driving round trip (in good conditions without being in all rush hour traffic) is a lot of extra driving.

Work was pretty much normal today.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Busy most of the day but not too busy.

Dominica made lentil casserole (a very thick stew) for dinner tonight.  It was very good.  Basically a really heavy stew of lentils and carrots.  We watched Major Dad most of the evening.

I spent a lot of the evening working on some Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 server builds.  I have been doing my first large round of server builds on the Xen virtualization platform.  Building servers on Xen is quite the pleasure compared to building them on VMWare Server – at least when it comes to Linux builds which are mostly automated in Xen on RHEL.

I have been working hard trying to get caught back up with SGL.  Once you fall behind on a blog like SGL it is extremely difficult to get caught back up again.  If you are not writing the current day “as it happens” then it is orders of magnitude harder.

Today is a snow day for most everyone in the area.  We got a lot of snow overnight and by mid-morning it was turning to rain and the ground was turning to slippery slush.  We are very thankful that we are traveling nowhere today or tomorrow.  Originally I was scheduled to go into Warren tomorrow but due to weather and some other circumstances at the offices that will most likely be next week instead which is best, that is a lot of driving on slush.

Work was normal today.  We have fallen into such a routine here that there is very little to mention.  One thing that has been going well is our diets.  We are both trying Weight Watchers and using the Wii Fit to track our progress and it is going well.  Eating at home for almost every meal really makes a difference.  It is easy to eat healthy when Dominica is cooking every meal and the idea behind Weight Watchers is really just to make you track and think about what you are eating.  The Wii Fit adds in a really simple way to track progress in weight/BMI and in exercise which motivates in additional ways.  It all fits together really well.

We have been watching Major Dad recently.  Dominica only saw a little bit of the show either from reruns or possibly from its original run.  I mostly forgot the show until we started watching it and it all came flooding back.  I have remembered every single episode.  I must have watched this show religiously all through high school but did not remember very well.  I definitely knew that I had watched the show but had no idea that I would still know every episode.  The show started in 1989 and is a “by the book” 1980s sitcom that ran into the early 90s ending in 1993 (the culture of the 80s, that which the 80s is most famous for producing, actually ran from around 1983 – 1993, prior to 1982 the 80s was more of an extension of the 70s.)  The show had the “benefit” of running before the war with Iraw began in 1991 but was able to deal with the subject directly as the show was about a Marine family.

Tonight was an early “to bed” night.  I need to catch up on some sleep.  I tried to go to bed starting around ten but, around eleven, Dominica and Liesl managed to get to bed before I did.  But I did get to bed before eleven thirty which is quite early for me these days.

I was pretty exhausted when I went to bed last night.  I got a real night of sleep but not enough to do any real catchup for today.  I am still pretty tired.  The weather turned again today and the clear days that we have had recently are gone and a little snow has started again.

Work was usual, nothing worth mentioning.  I have been busy but not impossibly busy.  Just normal busy, I guess.  SGL has been taking a beating recently.  I have been doing a lot of switching from one task to another which makes it really hard to focus on writing SGL every day.  My day usually involves getting out of bed and going to straight to work, coming upstairs for lunch with Dominica and normally spending a while with Liesl, then working all afternoon until six thirty.  After six thirty I can normally come up to the living room and have dinner and visit with Dominica and Liesl (and Oreo) for most of the evening making just periodical stops down to the basement office to make sure that everything is okay at the office.

There is no real way for me to work on SGL, or anything else, while not in the basement office.  I am rapidly pulled from one task to another almost so fast that I get very little chance to sit still for any length of time.  We would love to be able to play video games, read books, write SGL or whatever in the evenings but there is so much to be done that pretty much all that we can do is turn on the television (Hulu or Netflix via the PS3) and put something on in the background.  I am lucky to get to watch half of whatever is on between trips to the basement, kitchen and outside to walk Oreo.

We decided today that since several of the plants are having a horrible time making it in the living room and since there is absolutely no space to spare at all that we are going to move some of them up to the nursery and will open up the blinds in there and start heating that room.  The plants will get dramatically more light up there than they will in the living room or especially the basement.  They will also be warmer as the basement is very, very cold.  The fear, of course, is that by having to heat an additional room that our heating bill will go up quite a bit.  That room was previously kept closed with the blinds down and large cardboard boxes up against the blinds as insulation.  Now it will be a large heatsink sucking the heat out of the house.  I expect it to be a pretty major power loss.

After work this evening, Katie decided to come up to join us for dinner.  She left home around a quarter after six and made it to our house just minutes before seven.  Forty-five minutes is not too bad for traveling from Nyack to Peekskill during rush hour since she was going in the direction of rush hour traffic.

Katie visited around eleven or so before heading home.  Her trip back home to Nyack took only thirty-five minutes which makes sense considering the time of day.

Dominica and I stayed up while Liesl slept in her swing and we watched Secretary which came from Netflix.  After the movie it was definitely time for bed.

Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be pretty bad. Lot’s of snow and slush.  Maybe freezing rain.  I will definitely be at home all day tomorrow.

Well, my short, one day weekend is over.  Time to get back to work.

My day started incredibly early this morning when I was paged out at five thirty.  To make things worse I had decided to stay up until one in the morning last night playing Fable: The Lost Chapters after Dominica had gone to be.  I only play Fable when she isn’t around because she wants to play it as well and does not want me to ruin the story for her.  Then, at three thirty, Oreo got me up to take him out for a walk.  So I had very little sleep when I got paged this morning.

The call that I got at five thirty ended up going until almost eleven.  Five hours on a single phone call.  What a morning.  The upside is that I got in a lot of hours even before lunch time.

I was really tired all day after having gotten up so early and having gotten so little sleep in general.  I tried again to complete Final Fantasy III today and beat the “final” boss with ease just to discover that there is an entire section of the game that exists after the “final” bit and that there is no way of going back to save or of knowing what you are supposed to do.  The storyline just drops away and all quality gameplay is replaced by obtusion.  The game went from mildly interesting to completely frustrating – so much so that I deemed it, after forty hours of play, not worth the trouble of even finishing.  If the game designer gave up at this point I sure am not going to invest any more of my time into it.  It is no wonder that FF3 was kept from North America for so long.  Now we can write it off as having been a product of the “novelty” gaming era.

I tried playing Fable as well today.  But I only got to play for about half an hour before I had to pause the system which ended up lasting for most of the day until the XBOX 360 shut itself off thereby losing the game that I was in progress within.

This evening, before going to bed, I decided to take out Final Fantasy III from my Nintendo DS and popped in Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen which I received for Christmas from the Grices and set it up as my current DS game.  I played about twenty minutes before turning in for the night.