Sheep Guarding Llama

Today Liesl turns three weeks old.  It is hard to believe that she has been with us for three weeks now.  She and Dominica slept in until around ten thirty this morning.  Oreo came down and opened the basement door on his own so that he could come down and sleep on his pillow next to my desk.

Thanks to Leon for pointing me in the direction of this cool video on YouTube of airtraffic globally during a twenty-four hour period.  Very interesting.  It is really neat to see the US and Europe really heat up as the sun passes over them.

Work was a little more busy this morning but by lunch time it had died down to almost nothing.  That seems to be the trend.  No one wants to do anything with the holiday right around the corner (just one week to go!) and so everyone knocks off for a long lunch and that is that.

OpenSUSE 11.1 released today.  Can’t wait to get that installed and tested out.

New York governor David Patterson has proposed an 18% tax on “sugared beverages.” Personally I think that this is great but I do wish that it would be a broad “tax on food products containing corn syrup” rather than an attack directly on drinks alone and applying to traditional sugars as well as corn syrup.  While highly sugared drinks of any sort are bad they are not as harmful as corn syrup which has become ubiquitous in the American diet and, at this point, most Americans are helpless in their struggle to avoid it.

For example, Heinz ketchup (and everyone else’s ketchup, BBQ sauce, etc.) in the US is made from corn syrup but the same products in Canada or the UK are made with natural sugar.  Americans are practically forced to eat corn syrup and the taste has become so normal to us that we actually miss it if it is gone.  Go to the grocery store and try to get food without corn syrup in it.  Just try.  Even more bread products are made with it here.  Other countries have no idea that we have this skewed diet and that stores and food companies make different products (with the same names) for us than for everyone else.  Only really expensive products, like locally baked breads, have any hope of not being made with corn syrup.

I am very excited that New York is the state taking this step, though, as it is New York who is one of the leaders in corn syrup production.  It is rather like North Carolina deciding to be the first state to ban smoking – only it was California.   Go New York!

I spent a lot of this evening working on an Active Directory migration from an older IBM Netfinity server to a VMWare Server instance running on a new HP Proliant DL145 G3.  Any time that you are migrating you main active directory server it can be some amount of a pain.

Dominica made cheeseburger pie (vegetarian, of coure) for dinner tonight.  That was really good!  She is starting to cook a lot of casserole dishes because they are easy to prepare and a style of food that I really like.  Something about the way that I taste food really lends itself to large quantities of a single type of food rather than small quantities of several different foods.  People claim that food tastes best in the first few bites and after that it is wasted, but I am the opposite.  I get little or no enjoyment from the first few bites and enjoy a single food the more that I eat it (to a point.)  So putting the whole meal together in a single dish works really well for me.

Dominica wasn’t feeling very well this evening so she and Liesl headed off to bed earlier than we have been going to bed for weeks – well before midnight.  Oreo came down to the basement and hung out with me while I worked on the Active Directory migration.  I really want to get this all done in a single night so I decided that it would be best to just stay up and stick with it until it is done.

It is after one thirty in the morning and I am just now heading off to get ready for bed.  Oreo has been patiently waiting beside me for the last two hours hoping that I would stop working and go to bed so that he can go and be with everyone all in one place.  He does not like it when we are in separate parts of the house.

Shutting down and heading off to bed.  Some serious snow due here tomorrow in the late morning.  Lots of people from my office were discussing how everyone was going to work from home tomorrow because it was not worth the risk of going into the office and getting stuck – especially during the freeze when there is so little going on.  So it is going to be a widespread work from home day for sure.

With Dominica, Liesl, Oreo and I all being home full time there really is very little news to report.  Liesl is doing very well and we now have her sleeping in her new swing in our bedroom which allows us to sleep in the bed as usual.  This is helping us to get a bit more sleep than we were before and Oreo is very pleased because he can snuggle with us again as always.

My day was a bit busier today than it has been.  Partially because it was somewhat busier at the office but also because Dominica wanted me to place a Christmas order of stuff so I spent some time putting together an online order and that always takes a while when you are trying to check out prices, models, deals and to consolidate things for shipping.

In this latest order, which ‘should’ arrive here by early next week (hopefully), we are getting a few infrastructure items that we need for the house as well.  We are getting a new Netgear ProSafe router which can handle dual WAN links rather than just one and that has built in SSL VPN capacity in addition to the regular IPSec VPN capacity.  Very cool.  I was originally thinking that we would just get an SSL VPN unit and not get a new firewall unit but running two units uses more power and it turned out that getting the firewall was cheaper up front as well.  So we just did that.

We also got a 24 port Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) managed (aka smart) switch.  Right now we don’t have Gigabit capability except for the Apple Airport Extreme which only has three ports which is not very useful.  Having 24 ports means that all of the desktops, video game units, AppleTVs, etc. around the house will have GigE connections which is important for file transfers, streaming media, etc.  All of our desktops and laptops are GigE capable and we have not been able to take advantage of that thus far.

Dominica’s laptop, which runs Vista Business 32, has also been suffering as it only has 1GB of memory and some of that, 128MB, has to be shared with the onboard GPU unit so it effectively only has 896MB of system memory which is far too little for Vista to work.  So we ordered 4GB of memory for her laptop which should make a huge difference in the way that it works.

My desktop, which I am now using to do Pinnacle Studio 12 editing of Liesl videos, is almost completely unable to process video because it does not have a very good graphics card.  The machine is a moderately old HP dx5150 running Windows XP Pro 32 and only has the onboard graphics card currently which is way too little for anything not completely basic.  So I looked around and found a good deal on a dual DVI output, low profile (I use small form factor desktops) Jaton NVidea 8500 GS card.  The card has its own memory (as they all do) so that will free up some of the system memory that is shared with my onboard GPU giving me two advantages – faster GPU and more system memory.  Hopefully this will really make a difference with Pinnacle.  If not I will have to get a faster desktop.  Even tiny video files are too much for it.

I tried to order a fourth Samsung Syncmaster 204B LCD 20.1″ 1600×1200 monitor to match the other three on my desk but to my chagrin discovered that Samsung is no longer selling the monitor and that no one that I could find (like Ingram Micro, Amazon or NewEgg) is even carrying it in back stock.  I love that monitor and it is perfect for the work that I do.  I don’t want to have to switch to a new monitor yet as there is so much more life in these and I don’t want one of my four monitors not to match the others.  So now I am not sure what to do.  Samsung does have an amazing 24″ monitor now that exceeds the specs on these but nothing has been made to directly replace these which, I think, are perfect for IT work.  So I am not sure what I will do now.

Work and shopping, that is mostly how I spent my day.  We didn’t get to bed until almost two in the morning.  It’s been a long day.  We did get a little bit of cleaning done around the house.  We are making progress there albeit very, very slowly.

I slept in until the last possible moment this morning before getting up and running down to the office to get to work.  Not that these is a lot of work to be done.  December is the best time of the year to work in technology support in banking and finance.  It is mostly coincidence that it ends up coinciding at the same time as the Christmas holidays but it works out perfectly to give everyone a chance to prepare for and to enjoy the holiday season and takes advantage of the time when everyone is going to be least productive anyway.

I stumbled upon a really interesting breakdown of the ethnic population density by region in New York State from Wikipedia.

Nothing much to report today.  I worked all day and Dominica watched Liesl.

I talked to Eric Millen tonight.  I managed to call him just minutes after he had been rear-ended while driving home and was still sitting in his car waiting for the police to arrive.

Katie and Dudley are coming over this weekend to bake cookies.

I stumbled across what looks to be a really cool MUD today: BatMUD.  The really cool thing about it is that it uses a very nice Java client rather than just traditional telnet which is a big drag for traditional MUDs.  The client works well and doesn’t compromise the style of gameplay while making playing more enjoyable and fun.

Liesl ended up sleeping on my chest in the living room until two thirty in the morning!  She was so peaceful that we did not want to wake her.  So we stayed up far longer than we wanted to be awake.  We were extremely tired by the time that we got to bed.  Tomorrow is going to be really rough.  Dominica, Liesl and Oreo can sleep in but I have to be up for work in the morning so it was a very short night.

My alarm was set for seven thirty this morning but Liesl was very restless last night and I basically got no sleep at all.  I am pretty sure that Dominica actually got no sleep at all.  So I snoozed until a quarter until nine when I finally pulled myself out of bed and headed down to the office to get to work.

Today is the beginning of the financial industry’s year end freeze so, in theory, my workload drops dramatically starting today.  It needs to after the past two weeks.  We have all really been looking forward to this.  This is the financial and banking industry’s official notification that Christmas is just around the corner.

Oreo ate his breakfast and then got really sick this morning.  Apparently he is not feeling as much better as we had thought that he might be.

I was on eBay this morning and found an amazing deal on Kadee Micro-Trains 55050 Genesee Wyoming Hopper 590002.  So I picked up five of them.  I collect G&W models.  You have to having grown up right next to the railroad.

Work was pretty slow all day with the afternoon being even slower than the morning.  It’s awesome.

Early this evening Dominica went to Stop and Shop to do the grocery shopping leaving Liesl alone at home with me for a few hours.  Liesl just snuggled on my chest and fell asleep so I put on some of the new Knight Rider on Hulu and just let her sleep.  I am getting good at this “dad” thing.

Liesl new swing arrived today.  This is a second swing that we decided was needed because she loves the first one so much.  This one does not use batteries but plugs into the wall and has both a swing and a glider mode for two different motions.  We assembled it tonight and moved it up to our bedroom.  Our hope is that Liesl will really like it and might be willing to sleep in there rather than in bed with us.  We just don’t have enough room in the bed for all three of us and since Liesl wants to be held when she sleeps it pretty much means that one of us has to be half awake holder her all night.  That makes it even harder to sleep since we are keeping the house so warm these days that it is causes us to not sleep very well just because of the warmth.  So we are hoping that this might be a good solution for at least part of the night.  The new swing is much larger than the old one that we have in the living room.

The weather was incredibly warm here today with temperatures almost reaching sixty degrees.  It was so warm that even in a slight drizzle it was completely comfortable walking Oreo without a jacket at all.  Not what I was expecting a week and a half before Christmas.

Oreo did manage to eat his full dinner tonight.  He has barely eaten in days so he was really hungry.  To keep him from gorging himself and making himself sick again just from eating so fast I split his meals into thirds and made him wait between each portion.  That seemed to work and he was happy and perky all evening.