September 23, 2008: CCA Day 2

59 Days to Baby Day! (31 Weeks and Four Days Pregnant)

The original plan was to be up at seven thirty, or so, this morning and to be heading down to Castile Christian Academy by eight thirty.  That did not happen at all.  I was really exhausted and slept for ten hours.  I did not wake up until Dominica woke me up at eight thirty five!

I got ready pretty quickly but it was still almost ten o’clock by the time that we got down to Castile to get started for the day.  The sleep was probably important as my back is killing me today from all of the lifting of the rack and the computers yesterday.  It just feels like muscle spasms in my lower lumbar, nothing to be alarmed about, but that does not make it hurt any less.  I can barely walk today, let alone stand up straight.

Today was spent mostly in a panic trying to get enough stuff done so that the computer lab would remain usable after we have left this afternoon.  We delivered down two more computers from dad’s house this morning which means that all of the “built” machines that he has had in storage for the school are back at the school (unless there are even more about which we do not know) and the only machines that he is still storing are the machines which are in parts and need yet to be assembled before being delivered to the school.  Those are for another day.

Dad managed to get the wiring in place to allow us to hook up the new server.  That ended up being a project that required the entire day.  We use NIS for authentication at the school so I had to migrate the NIS system and the NFS system and get the workstations authenticating to the new server.  That really was not that bad.  The NFS was more of a problem than the NIS which worked like a charm the first time.

The big thing that we do not have working again, yet, is the Internet access through the Dansguardian proxy.  For now, Internet access is just turned off.  Hopefully that will be simple to fix remotely.  There was just no way that I was going to be able to deal with that today in addition to everything else.

Dad and Dominica went out to Lorraine’s for lunch again and brought food back to eat at the school while we kept working.  Good food even if it does not mean a break in the work.

By the end of the day, the total “dead” count was twenty-two computers!  That is a lot of computers for a little school with very limited resources to lose.  We left with seven computers functioning in the computer lab and running OpenSUSE 11.  It is enough to get them through but the real hope was to have computers running in all of the classrooms and in support areas but there just isn’t any cabling yet to support that and, apparently, not enough computers either!

We also got the wireless up and running again which is important and now the kindergarten room is online once again.  All progress is good.

We got to shut down the old server, a Compaq Proliant 3000, which was ancient and in horrible condition.  To its credit, it was a salvaged machine and has been running at the school for about four years now and doing so under pretty tough conditions.  It was mounted onto a shelf built just for it about eight feet in the air in the janitor’s closet at the school where it got no air circulation and was subject to all kinds of dirt and humidity.  It is really amazing that it lasted so long.  Currently, it is being considered to just leave it up there as it is so dangerous to bring it down and there is no further use for it.  It has 4.3GB hard drives and PC66 memory!

We ended up staying later than we had intended at the school, but it was necessary to get enough done so that they could keep working.  It was probably around four thirty when we left although I did not check the clock.  It was so late that we decided that we would have dinner with dad at Lorraine’s before getting onto the road to drive all evening.

From dinner in Castile Dominica, Oreo and I got in the car and drove down to Varna, New York to drop off a switch that we needed to deliver today.  Getting to Ithaca didn’t take as long as we had thought that it would and we were there in no time.

From Ithaca to Newark took a few hours and we decided to risk the route down Interstate 81 which is under construction.  Dominica was right that being late on a Tuesday night it would not be very busy.  That was definitely the right route to take from Ithaca.

We arrived in Newark around one in the morning.  Pretty late but not nearly as late as it could have been.  We unpacked the car, watered the plants and got right off to bed.  Dominica has to be up at six tomorrow and I am on the early shift at work so I have to be up early as well.

September 22, 2008: CCA Day 1

60 Days to Baby Day! (31 Weeks and Three Days Pregnant)

Dad's New Pickup

I woke up around five this morning.  I tried falling back asleep but had no luck at that.  So just a little after five thirty I got up and got ready to face the day.  I showered and got dressed and then logged in to dad’s computer and worked from his office for about two hours while I waited for everyone to wake up and get ready.  I had some work that needed my attention so this did give me a chance to do some catchup.

It was probably around nine thirty when we finally managed to head down to Castile.  Not nearly as early as we had wanted to have gotten started but sleep is important too.

The big challenge of the morning was getting the server cabinet down to the school.  Dad got it mounted onto the trunk of his car last night so there was not that much work to do today except to drive it down and to set it up.

It took quite a while to drive down to the school.  Dominica and I followed behind dad as he drove to make sure that nothing went wrong with the rack.  This is a full size server cabinet – larger, in fact, than that used in most data centers as it has a very large cooling area on the side which is not common.  So we had to drive quite slowly.

We worked down at the school from around ten until three thirty.  It does not sound like that long of a day but when you are moving computers around or setting up a rack that whole time, it gets pretty exhausting pretty quickly.  Our goal for this trip to the school was to fix their server which was failing every few days and to get the computers that they currently have onto their network again as many were now broken and to update everything that we could to OpenSUSE 11.

What we discovered when we arrived was that a very large number of the computers taht we thought that we would be using around the school were not able to function up to our bare minimum specs (which really are very low) or simply could not handle an install of OpenSUSE.  Today we managed to identify approximately eighteen machines at the school that were not going to be useful to use in any way.  Not good.  That number is just from the computer lab and the computers that we were bringing in from home.  It does not include any of the ten or so machines scattered around the school most of which appear to be similar to those unusable.

Since we were going through computers like they were going out of style, dad made a run to his house to pick up as many of the computers that we had there that were earmarked for the school as he could.  He managed to bring back seven machines.  Only two left that are ready to come down to the school so we will attempt to get those tomorrow.

Dominica worked on setting up workstations in the computer lab.  Dad worked on setting up the server cabinet and figuring out what wiring had been done and what state it was in.  By the end of the day the verdict was that we were in pretty rough shape overall.  We only had about four workstations set up in a lab that used to have ten, and we are down to nine monitors in the lab as well.  We have a lot of workstation work to do tomorrow.

Dad managed to get the rack set up and we moved the Proliant DL380 G2 into the rack before leaving but as the cabling is not terminated, nor do we know to where the cabling runs, we are stuck without any way to wire up the rack which may prove to be quite a problem.  Dad has a plan for tomorrow but we really have nothing that we can do today.  This means that tomorrow I have to backup the current server, bring it down and migrate to the new one without ever having both online at the same time.  Fun.

For lunch dad and Dominica ran over to Lorraine’s and brought food back for me.  One of the perks of working at the school is getting food from Lorraine’s on Main Street in Castile.  They have awesome food and it is so inexpensive!

Tomorrow is clearly going to be a really long and tough day at Castile when we come back.  There is so much left to be done.  A lot of the work is in deciding what things we are able to finish and which things we are not.  Tough choices.  I really wish that we had time to get things done and do it right.

We got back to dad’s around four.  We were all really tired after the work today.  We decided to pretty much just relax this evening and to get to bed early. Dad went down to Davis’ Farm Market in Pavilion and brought back pizza for us and grilled cheese for Dominica.

We watched Freaky Friday, the new one with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.  Then we watched Agent Cody Banks.  It is weird being at dad’s house and trying to pick out movies to watch from our collection.  We have so many movies to which we have not had regular access in over two years so we really begin to forget that they are there.  There are so many movies in the collection that I have no memory of having; it is really weird.

We went to bed around ten thirty or so.  Tomorrow is going to be a long day and sleep is important.  Tomorrow, after working at Castile all day, Dominica and I will be driving down to Ithaca to make a quick delivery and from there heading back down to Newark.  It is going to be a very, very long day.

At very least the weather has been great. Sunny and cool with a nice breeze.  The school still gets really hot, though, even with the windows open and a fan in the doorway.  So tomorrow we are bringing a window fan to force some air into the computer lab.

September 21, 2008: Getting Ready for CCA Tomorrow

61 Days to Baby Day! (31 Weeks and Two Days Pregnant)

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain

Dominica and I slept in this morning.  I love long weekend with no schedules.  It was around nine thirty when we dragged ourselves out of bed.

We had thought about camping out in the yard last night.  Dominica’s parents had brought up our tent and camping equipment that we had been keeping at their house so that we could camp, but because of my high blood pressure yesterday we decided that it would be best if I was not trying to set up a tent and Dominica can’t really help at all being as pregnant as she is.  So we decided to just sleep in the house.

We drove over to Geneseo for brunch at the Omega Grill.  It is nice and cool today so Oreo was quite comfy waiting for us in the car.  No sunlight today.  Very overcast with just a hint of drizzle.  Probably best that we did not attempt to campt last night as the tent and all of the supplies would be getting pretty soggy today and I do not think that we would be all that thrilled.

After brunch we went through the car wash.  Dad has been washing the car a bit recently as he drove through a pile of manure that was sloshed onto the road earlier this week and it sprayed the underside of his car.  It is not very bad, though, and Dominica and I really can’t smell anything unless the car is warm and in the garage.

Before I was born there was a “manure on the road” incident with a new car in the early seventies.  The speed was higher and the amount of manure was “higher” and the resulting spray was pretty significant and was never able to be completely removed from the car!  Dad has had a fear of having a car coated with manure ever since.

After brunch we returned to dad’s house and I spent most of the afternoon working on my homework for RIT.  The homework really is not bad, so far, with this particular class.  However we have not yet received any feedback from our work so it is impossible to tell how the process is going.  I could be doing very poorly and just thinking that the class is relatively easy.  I have my first large project due on Friday so I am going to be pretty busy this week working towards that.

Once I was finished with my homework it was time to dinner.  Dominica didn’t feel like pizza – tomato sauce is giving her heartburn these days – so we decided to go back over to Geneseo to go to Denny’s.  We had dinner and then came back home.

My evening was spent building the HP Proliant DL380 G2 that will be heading down to Castile Christian Academy tomorrow morning.  I installed OpenSUSE 11.0 on it and got it mostly working.  There is a lot of work to do yet but at least it is at a point where I can actually install it – I hope.

Dad spent the evening getting the full size server cabinet, also heading to CCA, mounted onto the truck of his car.  That thing is huge and heavy.  What a pain that was.  At first we tried to lift it up to put it onto the car but that was not going to work.  So then he brought it up on an hoist and the car was backed under it and the rack lowered onto the trunk of the car.  It seems like it is going to work.

Dominica watched some Keeping Up Appearances while we were working.  Once we were all able to converge on the den in the basement we put on Jhoom Barabar Jhoom and watched that.  This is only the second time that Dominica and I have watched it and it was dad’s first time.  He has been experimenting with Indian and almost-Indian films this week.  Earlier in the week, before we came up, he watched the English language Indian film Bride and Prejudice which is a Bollywood take on Jane Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

Tomorrow is going to be a long day down in Castile, New York.  We are driving down in the morning delivering the rack and the server along with some spare equipment and whatever we can fit into the car.  There is a lot of stuff that needs to be taken down there and a ton of work to be done at the school.  Dominica is planning on going down with us too and will probably spend the day running errands, taking care of Oreo and, if we have enough parts and equipment, putting female RJ45 jacks onto the ends of CAT5e cabling.

The school has been without any computers at all for a few weeks now as the server that handles their NIS system – logins, as well as their remote home directories died and they are unable to do anything at this point.  It is pretty awful.  The timing was horrible in that we were in the process of trying to get new equipment in to replace the old and have just been waiting for the wiring to be in place so that we could install it.  In the end we had already scheduled this trip for this weekend and the server died just before we could go down.  So tomorrow morning we will also be discovering if there is any way that the server can be salvaged, but that seems to be rather unlikely.

We all headed off to bed a little after midnight.  Hopefully we will be able to get up early tomorrow and get moving.  There is just so much work to be done and such a small window in which to do it.  We only have Monday and Tuesday to work at the school and it will be unlikely that we will be able to return to the school again this year or early next year because of the baby.  Then Tuesday evening we have to run to Ithaca on our way back to Newark to drop off something.

September 20, 2008: The Toccos Come to Peoria

62 Days to Baby Day! (31 Weeks and One Day Pregnant)

“If there’s anything unsettling to the stomach, it’s watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.” – Marlon Brando

Dominica and I really slept in this morning.  We were totally exhausted after all of the driving last night and did not get up until a bit after eleven.  Eleven seems like a ridiculously late time to be dragging oneself from bed in the morning but when you consider that we did not get to sleep until after three in the morning it really is not all that bad.  This is why traveling on a two day weekend is so tough for us.  We spend all weekend just recovering from the trip itself.  We are so excited to actually be having a four day weekend again.  This is great.

SGL had some work done in the data center last night.  It was supposed to begin at two in the morning but we had some network problems occurring in the late evening and, I assume, some during the night before the scheduled work began.  Then, instead of meeting the thirty minute projected time slot or even meeting the two hour reserved work time zone, the data center was up and down for about eight hours with what appear to have been some blips in service going as late as maybe one in the afternoon!  So some of you may have noticed us as being unavailable during this morning.  It was not our fault.  It was our incompetent data center.

Right in the middle of our data center having one outage after another, which they seem to get in waves, we have been talking to them about making a change to our service plan.  They are not willing to budge on some really simple requirements that we have even though we have stuck with them and have been treated pretty poorly over all after two years or working with them.  So, the plan is, even after trying hard to help out a small business in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that we will be moving SGL to Toronto in the very near future.

We are really thankful for Twitter, or microblogging in general, which allows us to so easily post travel updates while we are on our way from Newark to back home.  We don’t have to email a list of people or anything or call anyone upon arriving.  We just tweet when we are leaving, tweet at major points along the way and tweet when we arrive.  Anyone interested in our status or progress can just log into SGL or just look at Twitter and see what the latest is.  It makes checking in on people, especially people traveling late at night, simple and casual.

The Toccos are coming out to meet us today for an early dinner.  Dominica called them, but they were not going to be arriving until early afternoon so we went to the living and just visited with dad for a while.  We had thought about running over to Geneseo to get some lunch at the Omega Grill but it was so late and dinner was going to be really early so we decided against it.

The Toccos arrived around two in the afternoon.  We visited for almost two hours and then we headed on over to Perry to go to the Lumber Yard for dinner.  The Lumber Yard has really turned into a pretty regular stop for us when we are home.  It is definitely one of dad’s favourite places to go eat.  We have been eating there since I was very little.  I can remember eating there easily twenty five years ago.  In my memory, of course, it seemed like quite a fancy place and very much “an occassion” to go there to eat.  In reality, it is a moderately casual place – a fancy family restaurant with a bar off to the side.  With rare exception, restaurants in rural Upstate New York only get so fancy.

Dinner was really good, as always.  The soup and salad they have at the Lumber Yard are excellent.  Dad and I really love the seafood soup that they do there.  It was a little more salty than usual and Dominica decided that she did not want her cup so I ate it as well. Her father even went for seconds.  For dinner Dominica had the stuffed grouper, I had the stuffed salmon and dad had the prime rib.  I am not sure what the Toccos decided to have.

The Toccos left pretty much as soon as we arrived back at dad’s house.  It was around five thirty and it was going to be after eight before they reached home so they wanted to get started with as much sunlight as possible.

This evening I noticed that my blood pressure was incredibly high and that I was not feeling very well.  My ears were ringing and I was starting to feel light headed.  We decided to just have a relaxing evening.  So dad downloaded In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, which is the Jason Statham movie based on the video game Dungeon Siege.

The movie was very silly but somewhat enjoyable.  It was roughly what I had imagined that it would be.  I really wanted to know what a movie based on Dungeon Siege would be like.  It was entertaining but nothing special.  I was quite impressed by the image quality of the Amazon UnBox (aka Video on Demand) download.  It was really something.  I’m sure that we will consider using UnBox for some of our movie rentals once we move to Peekskill and have the opportunity to consider hooking up a computer to our viewing system.

We went to bed around midnight.  We were all really exhausted.  My blood pressure had come down some after relaxing for a while.  We aren’t sure if it was because of stress, a lack of sleep, the driving last night, all of the caffeine last night during the drive, more caffeine today than usual, too much salt at dinner or what.  Hopefully it will be better tomorrow.

September 19, 2008: TGI Long Weekend

63 Days to Baby Day! (31 Weeks Pregnant)

“Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.” – Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Andre Morellet.

I had to do some quick research on this quote since it is often misquoted as: “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”  There appears, in my cursory search, no actual original reference document pointing to the more famous quote and that it is actually a bastardization of the original letter referring to rain and wine.  It is still a good quote regardless of who actually first said it.  I prefer the version without the word living.  The fact that there are two so common versions of the quote leads on to question its authenticity anyway.

The weather is awesome today.  Temperatures are not set to break seventy degrees all day.

Oreo and I got up a little before eight and went to the living room to work and to charge up energy laying in the sun (I will let you surmise which of us will be doing which.)  Because of continuing market volatility there is still very little to do at the office and today is promising to be a nice, slow day leading into my four day weekend.  This is, I believe, only the second four day break from the office that I have had since starting this position in March of 2006!  The other four day weekend was this past June in Walt Disney World.

During overnight trading in the foreign markets, the global economy seems to be recovering in a very serious way after a very rough week.

This morning I tested the new theory that yawns can be contagious between humans and dogs.  Oreo was sitting in the middle of the living room and I looked over at him and yawned right at him – fake yawn but decently convincing – and before I was done yawning he yawned as well!

Katie and I had lunch at Asian Fusion at 11 Stone Street in downtown Manhattan.  I had the pad thai.  It was okay, nothing special.  Overall the whole restaurant experience was not really worthy of lower Manhattan.  If this was a Thai restaurant in Warren, New Jersey I would not find a compelling reason to choose it over the competing Thai restaurants so it really does not cut it here in New York City.

The afternoon was pretty slow, as expected.  Today is the slowest Friday, actually, that I can remember so far this year.  It was great.  I was able to leave the office only a little after six – once I knew that there was not going to be any evening surprises.  Ronak and I were even able to step out to get some hot chocolate at Leonardis before the end of the day.  They have awesome hot chocolate on Hanover Square.

I took the train home and arrived in Newark around seven.  On my way home I noticed that 87 octane “unleaded” gas is just $3.29 per gallon in New Jersey!  That is pretty cheap after what it has been this past year.

I got to the apartment and found Dominica and Oreo asleep on the bed.  Dominica had packed up our “suitcase”, which is actually a duffle bag thing, and was exhausted and took a nap.  Oreo is always obliging when it comes to naps.

It took us until after eight thirty to get everything ready, the plants watered, the computers shut down, the windows closed and the car packed so that we could leave for our long weekend.  It is pretty rare that we leave Newark for four whole days.  It always makes us nervous in case we have forgotten something important.

The drive through Jersey had a surprising amount of traffic for how late it was on a Friday night.  We stopped at a McDonald’s along the route for some dinner.  We had been hoping to have been able to have stopped at a Panera Bread but we forgot to keep looking for one and bypassed the only corridor that has anything other than fast food and were stuck in our dinner choices.

Overall the trip was uneventful.  Dominica was pretty tired and slept for a good portion of the drive.  I was really exausted making it a pretty hard trip but I listened to quite a bit of IT Conversations podcasts that I had stored up on my iPod and when those ran out I listened to some of the “News from Lake Wobegon” podcast.

I also listened to a bit of the beginning of J. Maarten Troost’s “Getting Stoned with Savages” which helped to pass the time.  “Stoned” is the follow up to Troost’s really interesting book “The Sex Lives of Cannibals“.  In both books he and his girlfriend and then wife pack up and leave Washington, D.C. to live in the islands of the South Pacific (techicnally can an island along the equator be in the “south” Pacific – how Northern Hemisphere-centric is that?)

It was around two in the morning when we arrived at dad’s house in Peoria, New York.  Oreo was so stiff as he struggled to get out of the back seat of the BMW.  He slept soundly the entire drive.  My right foot, which has been having months of ongoing issues due to something rather like tendinitis, really hurt on this drive.  Normally driving does not seem to aggravate it but today it was really bad.  I was in some serious pain by the time that we got home.

Dad was up waiting for us.  We all sat up in the living room talking for what was probably close to an hour.  While we were awake I put an ice pack onto my right heel to see if that would help relieve some of the pain.  We have no idea if the issue is due to inflamation of some sort or not.