August 23, 2008: Weekend in Frankfort

90 Days to Baby Day! (27 Weeks and One Day Pregnant)

Dominica and I arrived in Frankfort, New York at approximately a quarter past one this morning. We were pretty tired, but the drive wasn’t all that bad. I spent the last two hours of the drive listening to “Attila” on my iPod while Dominica slept. This has become the norm for us.

We grabbed dinner at the Burger King on the Garden State Parkway just before leaving New Jersey. We were both pretty hungry. The total trip was just under five hours. It is amazing how long it takes to go such a short distance.

The new tires really make a difference on the BMW. It is quiet again rather than loud. It handles much better and it rolls more easily. Those old tires really were worn out. I can’t believe that we managed to get thirty four thousand miles out of them! We definitely got our money’s worth from those tires. The Lord was really watching over us to have them go flat yesterday in front of the apartment, though, and not while we were driving for five hours tonight!

I was extremely groggy when I pulled myself out of bed at five minutes before eight this morning. That was definitely not enough sleep for me. No time to spare, however, and I had to be logged onto the office’s remote access system as quickly as possible so that I could get started for the day. There is not a tremendous amount of work to be done today but there is a bit of “sitting around and watching” things that I have to do.

I worked solidly from eight in the morning until almost ten without any break at all. I really “hit the ground running” this morning.

I am up to two hundred and fifty five Twitter posts already. I have not noticed an increase in traffic to SGL since having started using Twitter but I suspect that people are not used to it yet and have not gotten into the habit of hitting SGL more often to see the latest updates. Most people watching my Twitter feed subscribe directly through Twitter and don’t use SGL.

I managed to get lots of reading done in “Presentation Zen” this morning. Plenty of time while waiting for remote machines to re-sync with my desktop.

I completely finished my office work by two in the afternoon. Altogether, I put in five hours of work for the office today. It’s been a busy weekend already.

Dominica and her mother went out to get pedicures this afternoon while I worked. I got a lot done. It was a very productive day.

For dinner, the family went up to Rome to the Franklin Hotel. It was most of our first times eating there and we were really impressed. The food was great. We really loved it and will definitely be going back there.

After dinner we celebrated Joe and Dominica’s birthdays.  Their mother made birthday cake and we ate in the kitchen and then they opened presents.

Then I spent a few hours working on the computer while the rest of the family watched 21 with Kevin Spacey.  I heard most of the moving from the other room and am glad that I skipped it.  Nothing that I was very interested in.  I read the real history that the movie was portending to portray and it was both more interesting and very, very different.  The movie was extremely unrealistic and silly.  Not nearly as interesting as real life.

Around eleven this evening I got a “site down” notification and discovered that one of my servers in Scranton had died.  I logged into the remote management system and contacted the datacenter and worked on attempting to identify and fix the problem until around one thirty in the morning when it was clear that there was nothing that could be done tonight.  The datacenter is just too far away from Frankfort.

I went to bed at one thirty but didn’t fall asleep for a long time.  I sent Dominica to bed closer to midnight knowing that tomorrow is going to be busy.  The current plan is to drive to Scranton first thing in the morning, pick up the bad server, drive to Newark and attempt to repair and/or replace it there.  Then, if that can be accomplished, I will drive back to Scranton to have it replaced right away.

This is going to be awful.

System Outage

We had a datacenter emergency this evening.  The server handling SGL lost a network interface around eleven this evening and we were offline for about an hour.

We also had another really important server completely die tonight.  I worked on that until well after one in the morning.  No luck.

Currently our plans are to sleep, as that is necessary, then to drive to Scranton first thing in the morning and make an assessment of the situation at that point.  I have no idea how bad it is right now and there is nothing that I can do about it from here.  We are preparing for the worst.

Another weekend without any real sleep.  🙁

August 22, 2008: The End of a Long Week

91 Days to Baby Day! (27 Weeks Pregnant)

Dominica discovered that the rental’s front right tire was flat this morning on her way into work.  It had been a little soft when we got the car yesterday and the Nissan’s flat tire warning was on but it wasn’t very soft and it was a short drive home so we didn’t worry about it.  It was making some rattling in the front right corner, though, as if there was a suspension problem.  So we are pretty suspicious that someone had a minor accident with it and didn’t tell anyone.  So she had to deal with another flat tire this morning while our car is in the shop with its flat tire being fixed.

My morning was incredibly busy.  I started just after seven and was caught doing deployments as quickly as I could until well after noon!  What a day.

I had plans to have lunch with Ronak today but I was stuck for so long that we had to cancel those.  I was really disappointed as we were planning to go out for rava dosa which I haven’t had in months and then I was going out for coffee and gelatto with Katie for afternoon tea.  I was looking forward to being on Wall today and getting some different food but instead was so busy that I never got to leave home.

I also had to deal with the DL145 G3 today.  It came sans hard drive and power cable and some screws.  The harddrive wasn’t too big of a deal as I was planning to upgrade to larger drives anyway and the screws… are just screws.  The power cable, though, was $115.61 to get replaced from HP!  Wow, was not expecting that.  So that was rather a pain with which to deal this morning in addition to everything else.  It also keeps me from being able to work on that server for another several days.

I got scheduled to work tomorrow morning.  Originally I had some work to do tomorrow but it was on my own schedule.  Most of it I managed to complete ahead of time anyway so it was not a big deal.  The plan was that I would work late tonight and then sleep and then drive up to Frankfort in the morning.  Now I have to work at eight in the morning so we have to drive up tonight and get almost no sleep.  There is every possibility that I won’t be done until after eight tonight.  The constant requirement of one group to make me work very, very late and another to simply expect me to work very, very early even on weekends without any warning is getting to be a bit much.  I am just exhausted.

I did finally work out the issues with the server and we are getting reimbursed by the company that sold it to us.  It took lots of emails and phone calls to make that happen.  I didn’t need more stuff going on today.  I also had to pay some bills and send out the mail.

It was around one o’clock when I finally made it out to look for some lunch.  I decided that I needed to try something different so I went to Nicki’s on Mulberry.  Still just one block away.  I got a fried flounder sandwich and some hummus and pita bread and sat there alone reading “Attila”.

My afternoon wasn’t quite as bad as the morning but it was still very busy.  No time to relax.

Originally we had hoped that we could have gotten our tired taken care of last evening while we waited.  Dominica had called the shop and they had told her that it would take about an hour.  Then, when we got there, it couldn’t be done yesterday evening and we had to wait about an hour just to get a ride back home.

Today, Dominica spent the whole day just trying to figure out when the car would be done.  She had been hoping to have been able to have picked the car up on her lunch break because there was no good way for her to get the car after work because she had to pick up Oreo from daycare.  I called early this morning and they were going to “look into it”.  Then later Dominica called and they didn’t even remember that they had our car.  She waited an extra hour before taking lunch but they did not get to her car by that point.

Then, Dominica was unable to get an answer at a quarter after five, after she stayed late in the office to get a hold of the shop, as to whether or not the car was going to be done for the weekend.  So she had to leave work late and drive to the dealer just to find out if she could pick up the car or not.  So even if she doesn’t manage to get the car she is stuck in rush hour traffic on a Friday night when we need to pack and get onto the road to Frankfort before it gets too late.

I did a little packing before Dominica got home.  Mostly just getting my CPAP ready.  Not much but it helps.  We are only gone for two days.  There is only so much to pack.  I put all of my electronic “stuff” into my laptop backpack to get that ready as well.  My BlackBerry is out of power so no Twitter updates from the road this evening.

Dominica and Oreo got home around a quarter until seven.  Then Dominica set to getting us ready to travel.  After getting us packed she and Oreo took a nap to wait for me to wrap up for the evening.

I wrapped up my work around eight.  I am going to post before we leave Newark this evening so that you get an update before morning.  I will not be getting online when we reach Frankfort tonight – just going straight to bed.

I am hoping to discover that the load noise being produced by our car recently was caused by the horribly degraded tires.  It is quite possible that the car will be quiet again.  That would be nice.  We are sad that we had to get new tires before moving to Westchester as the New Jersey road are just terrible for our tires and really rip them apart quickly.

WordPress freaked out on me just as I was posting tonight.  I hope that I did not lose too much of the post that I worked on today.  🙁  Once in a while it logs me out but does not tell me and lets me keep working on my post. Then when I click “publish” it does not publish but goes to the log in screen instead and my work is lost.

August 21, 2008: Dominica Turns 30

92 Days to Baby Day! (26 Weeks, Six Days Pregnant)

Happy 30th Birthday to my wife, Dominica.

Dominica was unable to get her birthday off from work because someone else beat her getting in her day off request.  So she had to go to work this morning even though she considered her birthday to be a holiday.

Oreo and I slept in until around seven thirty this morning.  I was pretty tired after having worked until midnight last night.

This morning I finally finished reading “The Zen of CSS Design” and started reading “Presentation Zen“.  Neither book has anything to do about zen; they are not related to each other.

According to NewEgg’s UPS tracking page, my new hard drives and USB CD/DVD drive for the HP DL145 G3 are “out for deliver” which means that I could have them at any time today.  That will be awesome as I need those parts to be able to build the DL145 which is then going to be shipping to dad’s house soon and I wanted to be able to get it ready sooner than later.

It was a busy morning.  Lot’s of requests coming in all day.  Nice sunlight for Oreo; he was happy.

It was a slow day at Dominica’s office so she requested an impromtu half-day of work.  She didn’t know if she would get the time off until the last minute but at noon they let her head home.

Dominica got home around one and discovered as she arrived home that her rear tire was flat.  After attempting to reflate it and inspecting it more closely she discovered that the tire had worn right through and was completely destroyed.  It is a miracle that it hadn’t blown on the highway on her drive home at high speeds right up against the Jersey barriers.

We couldn’t do anything right away so at one forty we went to Airlee Cafe for lunch with Ryan.  We ate and then Dominica dealt with the car most of the afternoon while I worked.  Thank goodness for BMW Roadside Assistance.  They sent someone right out to switch out the tire with the donut and then we drove up to BMW of Bloomfield and dropped off the car for service.  No tires available today but we should have them all set by tomorrow.

The dealer was out of loaner BMWs so they had Enterprise come and pick us up and hook us up with a brand new Nissan Maxima for the day.  Dominica had a choice of a couple different cars but we both like Nissan and she has always wanted to try out a Maxima.  We were quite impressed.  It is a very nice car.

It was six by the time that we got back to Newark.  I had to have some people cover for me at the office while I was out, but I had been able to get everything caught up before I left and almost nothing new came in while I was gone so it really wasn’t too bad.

I worked for two hours after we returned to Newark then we walked over to Food for Life for Dominica’s birthday dinner.  Originally we had planned to go out tonight someplace nice but we were both really worn out by the time that it came to get dinner so we decided that close and simple was more important.  We are doing dinner on Saturday night to celebrate both Dominica and Joe’s birthdays in Utica.

After dinner we watched one episode of The Love Boat and ate some cheesecake from FFL for Dominica’s birthday cake.  Most of the time was spent preparing and feeding Oreo his two meals and then having to take him out for his evening walk.  Heading for bed just after ten.  We are both pretty tired.