February 3, 2008: Oreo is Famous, Again

While doing some other research today I came across a really nice Introduction to Cron for you UNIX users out there. And this page, which I have found before, on easy ways to do remote file copies via SSH.

I wanted to get up decently early this morning, probably around nine, but when I started to get up Oreo snuggled close and said in his puppy way “don’t get up yet, I want more snuggles” and I just couldn’t resist so I stayed in bed, awake, until almost eleven. Oreo finally, at that point, discovered the sunlight and decided that he would be happy moving out to the living room and laying in a sunspot on the loveseat.

I couldn’t decide what I wanted to work on this morning so I logged into my workstation and got to work on some Brainbench stuff since so much of that is now out of date. Dominica got up shortly after me and decided that she needed to do her homework so it worked out well for both of us. My first project this morning is taking the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 Beta exam from Brainbench. I don’t get any credit for this exam because it is only in beta but because I am a senior admin specifically on RHEL 3, RHEL 4 and RHEL 5 running it both at the office and at home I felt that I really should put in the effort to do the beta because I can provide important feedback to improve these tests for everyone.

The one nice thing about doing the beta exams is that you do get feedback even if it doesn’t officially go on your transcript. You have to take the exam twice so that they get a better idea of how the questions stack up in different configurations. On my first pass through I scored a high masters and ranked in the top percentile of all test takers. The test doesn’t have a means to report any higher than that. So that was encouraging.

One of the best things about doing lots of certifications like the Brainbench is that it really forces you to spend a lot of time researching things that you do not use everyday or possible ever. It basically forces you into a one to two hour crammed study session.

The beta tests took a little over two hours but I feel that it was time well spent. From there I continued on and renewed my Linux (General) certification even though the test is horribly out of date. Even with the test being terribly old and out of date and covering nothing that I do I still pulled off eighth in New Jersey.

I took a bit of a break and hung out with Dominica and Oreo for a little while before going on to the next test. I find that once I get into the testing groove I really like to stick with it. I am the same way about homework, believe it or not.

When we took Oreo outside for his afternoon walk we managed to time our reentry into the building just perfectly to coincide with a fifteen week old Boston Terrier puppy named Barney coming into Eleven80 to visit some people. He was black and white just like our Oreo and so adorable. We took Oreo over to meet him and they were pretty friendly. Oreo is generally good with puppies. He just doesn’t like Bull Terriers that are his size or larger for some reason. Then, while the two Bostons were saying hello, two black and white French Bulldogs came down to the lobby with the exact same markings are the two Bostons. It was like a weird Boston Terrier Convention but with French Bulldogs masquerading as Bostons.

I did a quick image seach on Yahoo! today for: “boston terrier” oreo. And would you believe that our Oreo is not only the first hit but is the only dog who shows up on the first seven plus pages and is almost exclusively the only dog for the first nine pages! Our Oreo is the most famous Boston Terrier named Oreo ever.

I took the Linux (SUSE) exam after that and without even bothering to try, as the test was ridiculously outdated and worthless, I managed to tie for ninth place in the world. What a bad exam. I decided to go on with the Server Administration exam which is a general exam covering the basics of server administration without going into an operating system specific details. I rushed through the test as the day was getting shorter by the minute and Oreo is more and more likely to need lots of attention as the day wears on. But I still ranked fifteenth in the United States and pulled off a Masters so it was fine.

We ordered in dinner from Mi Pequeño Mexico.  I did some more reading in my Prototype book.  We watched two episodes of The Cosby Show while we ate our dinner.  Then Dominica had to go back and work on her homework since she has a paper plus numerous other homework assignments due by midnight tonight.

Later in the evening Dominica sent me down to the Market City Deli to find her some cookies.  I went down and ran into Pam on a mission to find a candy bar.  She was out during halftime of the American football match that is going on today.  When we went back to Eleven80 we ran into Ryan who had been watching the game but was relatively bored as American football is not exactly an exciting sport to watch.  So he decided that he would grab some beer or something and stop up to our apartment sometime soon to hang out.

I put in some time looking at rsync and other backup options tonight as I am trying to determine a solid backup strategy for myself.  Ryan came up and we talked about backups for a little while (Ryan is a UNIX system administrator.)  He likes Bacula and I will be looking into it a bit more thoroughly.  I am no backup expert so it is a hard area to make good decisions in for me.

Ryan and I hung out and enjoyed some New Orleans rum and Coke while he regaled us with tales of his week down in Louisiana helping to rebuild the city.  He took off home on the early side so that he could get some sleep and get to work tomorrow.  I decided to stay up with Dominica to keep her company while she worked on her homework.  We should be in bed at approximately midnight.

February 2, 2008: Lazy Saturday at Home

I had to get up at a quarter to eight this morning to do some work for the office. One of the hazards of supporting London, Belfast and Manama is that anything that happens on the weekend is likely to happen very, very early. So even though I am working at eight here I am working with people for whom it is well into the middle of the afternoon and they have been patiently waiting for me to wake up for hours.

I worked for a little over an hour and then took time to go shower and get ready to face the day. I did the dishes to get the kitchen cleaned up, went over to Airlie Cafe to get breakfast for Dominica and I and made coffee. Dominica was up around ten thirty or so and spent the morning reading R. A. Salvatore’s Path of Darkness series (part of the Drizzt Cycle.)

I learned today that Amazon is in the process of buying Audible. This is interesting as we know a few of the Audible folks who are our neighbours. Audible itself is located at One Washington Square right here in downtown Newark just a few minutes walk out of our front doors. So we will be watching this closely to see how it plays out and what affect it has locally and to our favourite audio book service which we live and die by around here. Audible is a major component of my lifestyle.

Speaking of Audible, I have been waiting a long time for Scott Adams’ two classics, The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future to be available from Audible. I have box on cassette from many years ago but as I have no cassette player anymore that does me very little good. So I am very happy to see them on Audible so that I can listen to them again. (These books are so good that I own them in print as well.) Scott Adams’ new book, Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! is available as well. I bought all of these today along with Louisa May Alcott’s “Jo’s Boys” which is her only major work that I have never read. I also got her lesser known book “Good Wives” which is also a part of the March Sisters Series along with “Little Women” and “Little Men” both of which I read as a child.

Dad installed the new 512MB into the SunFire V100 that only had 128MB before. That should help a lot. The memory install went fine and as soon as it was back online I kicked off a large rsync operation to see how the new memory would affect performance. It made a huge difference and my files were backed up from one location to another in no time at all. Very nice.

Our reimbursement check for Dominica’s dental work came today which was quite a bit of money. She also received her second Netflix movie, Dreamgirls.

Dominica and Oreo spent the afternoon napping in the living room. Dominica didn’t effectively get up today until around four thirty.

Many of my Brainbench certifications have expired over the past several months and I have been lax about dealing with them. So today I started “re-upping” my certifications to get them current again. When you have as many expiring certifications as I do this can be a rather significant process. It is far more certifications than I keep on my resume too since many of the certs which have expired are not IT certifications but are soft skills that are used to build up to larger cumulative certifications. I started today with renewing by Linux Administration (Red Hat) and Linux Administration (Red Hat 9). Both tests are out of date. The first one is so out of date that I have no means of even estimating the era in which is was relevant but it was definitely quite some time ago. Perhaps the popular RH 7.3 was the basis for this test which was before I did any work with Red Hat and instead used OpenLinux and SuSE. The second test was much better but still several years old – it wasn’t that new when I took it the last time more than three years ago. This time, on my first attempt, I scored a Masters and ranked number two in the United States even on a platform version that I have never worked on.

For dinner I just ran over to Food for Life and picked up dinner as take out so that we could eat at home and relax. I finished reading Johanna Rothman’s “Manage It!” while I waited for them to finish up with the food. Once I got back home we watched more of the fifth season of The Cosby Show while we ate. Oreo has decided that his new favourite thing to do while we watch television is to climb into my lap and go to sleep which makes it impossible to get up again. We we ended up watching about two hours before Dominica decided that she really wanted to watch Dreamgirls so, at that point, I was easily able to decide to go back to the living room.

I did some light work in the living room and did some reading but mostly just took time to play with and hang out with Oreo who was being very needy.  After Dominica’s movie was over we watched some more The Cosby Show and went off to bed.

February 1, 2008: Perseveration

Cold, rainy and windy. That is my day today. I had to be up early to do some early morning deployment work to get teams prepped for the work that we will do tonight. Then I covered an early morning conference call. Nothing exciting, just one of those “sit on the phone in case something happens” calls. After that it was time to get into the office.

I discovered a very cool web application today at Ulteo.com. The idea of Ulteo is to provide free, online web applications and even an entire online KDE desktop in your browser. The service is still in beta and there are a limited number of accounts available. But I managed to snag one and am trying out the service. So far it works pretty well. You get free storage and a full desktop loaded with common applications like OpenOffice. It uses Java in your web browser so you can access your new “desktop” from just about anywhere. There is also an option to “share” your desktop which I have not tried yet but am very interested in possibly using as a collaboration tool.

My trip to the office was quite long. It was raining so I brought my hat and umbrella with me. I stopped and ate at Food for Life on the way so that I wouldn’t have to worry about lunch until later. Then I walked to Newark Penn Station through the Gateway Center to stay dry. There is a fair amount of rain coming down and it is rather cold.

Once I got to Manhattan I discovered that it was quite windy and raining much harder over here. I tried using the umbrella and only made it one block before the wind inverted it and I had to give up on it. With all of the construction going on and so many people just lazily making their way indirectly all over the place it took forever to get down to Wall Street and by the time that I made it all of the way to the office I was completely drenched. Drenched and frozen.

Dominica and I checked on the weather and decided that traveling today was just a foolish idea. Everyone that I work with from Toronto was calling in due to the weather first thing this morning. They have seven inches from overnight snow that has fallen in the Toronto area. I talked to dad this morning and the Rochester area doesn’t have the snow but does have quite a bit of ice as it was warmer there and the storm advisory for the region has been extended until midnight. That means that if we were to drive there that we would be driving in the storm the entire way.

So we are staying in Newark this weekend and tonight we have an initial “start up” Dungeons and Dragons game. We have Pam’s brother Feder who has a ton of D&D experience and is going to be Dungeon Mastering a new group for us which means that I actually get to play which is awesome. I have really been wanting to play so I am very excited. It is unfortunate that we have to start so late tonight and then there is that American football game on Sunday that takes away what would otherwise be a perfect day for it as well.

Over her lunch break today, Dominica ran out to Target to do some shopping. It is great that she is able to get things so easily from work. She must go out shopping at least three times a week during her lunch breaks.

Dad discovered that there was a storm heading out way that was due to hit around five this evening. So just after four I called to the New Jersey office and coordinated running home early to avoid another awful walk in bad weather. The timing was perfect and I was able to get home in pretty good conditions and then cover the evening so that everyone else could leave early to avoid the traffic and bad weather and get a start on the weekend.

Another Amazon shipment arrived today. I got the new Pragmatic Programmers “Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!” as well as R. A. Salvatore’s “The Hunter’s Blade Trilogy”.

Our secondary Dungeons and Dragons group got together around eight in the evening. This is the first meeting of our second, smaller group. We are playing a mix of AD&D 2nd Edition rules with D&D 3.5 Edition rules and playing in the traditional Mystara (aka Known World) setting.  We spent the night getting our characters set up so that we can play the next time that we get together.  We broke around eleven thirty to call it a night.  Most of us have something that we need to do tomorrow morning so we aren’t in good shape to go very late tonight.

The word of the day is perseveration.

January 31, 2008: Dancing with the Stars

It was very late before we actually got off to sleep last night. Movies like 28 Weeks Later aren’t great for making you fall to sleep right away. So we watched a few episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and finished off the first season before going to sleep. So I slept in as late as I could this morning just checking my BlackBerry to make sure that no one needed me for a little bit. Oreo loved the movie since it meant going to bed early. No one appreciates an early bed time more than him.

Dominica posted the movie back to Netflix this morning which means that her next movie should be here in just a couple of days. She has Dream Girls in her queue up next. Not something that I am interested in which is good so she will have an opportunity to watch it without me.

It is a bright and sunny day today. This is the perfect day for me to be home with Oreo. He is having such a good time just lounging in the sun. It has been grey all week so this really worked out well for him.

As of this morning my email log processing script has put nine million, six hundred thousand rows of data into the database! That is a crazy amount of data. And thousands more rows are inserted every day.

The office was quite slow today as it often is on Thursdays. I got the first load of dishes done right away this morning. The apartment has been out of control. We have just been too busy to keep up with keeping the place clean recently.

I am registered to go to the Microsoft 2008 launch event (Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008) on March 4th in Manhattan.  That should be cool.  It has been five years since I have had a chance to go to one.  The last launch event was for Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Office 2003.

Dominica made great time getting home and we ate Chinese from Golden City that arrived just minutes after she did.  We ate and watched two episodes of the fifth season of the Cosby Show.  Then we walked Oreo and we headed on over to the Prudential Center for Dominica’s Christmas present to see Dancing with the Stars Live.

The show started just a little after seven thirty.  This was the first time that either of us has set foot into the Prudential Center and the first time that Dominica has even walked up along side of it.  It is a very nice arena but there is no hiding the fact that it is a hockey stadium.  It isn’t very different from the War Memorial (aka Blue Cross Blue Shield Arena) in Rochester where the Americans play when they aren’t at ESL Arena on the MCC campus.

The show was quite enjoyable.  Definitely the best part was the amazing band who played all of the music.  They were really something.  The dancing was really good though and we both had a good time.  My one big complaint about the arena, though, is that the space between the rows is so tight that there was no room to put my feet and my knees were bent backward putting my calves slightly under me all night which was okay for the first hour but without any way to stretch my knee it started getting quite painful.

We came home after the show gloating over all of the people getting into long lines to get their cars just to fight their way onto gridlocked city streets as we walked the two minute walk to the apartment.  Boy is that ever easy.  And completely safe – never were we out of sight of the police.

Congrats to Andy who took his ASP.NET and C# Brainbench certifications tonight.  He is now ranked as the top ASP.NET developer in New York State.

Dominica and I were planning on going to Rochester tomorrow but the weather is not looking good. We will see.

January 30, 2008: First Netflix Movie

I was exhausted this morning, the last few days have been catching up with me, and so decided to sleep in with Oreo for a little while and leave about the same time as Dominica. I was surprised to find that it was decently warm and raining when I got outside. I can’t believe that it is January. (Or February -1 as we say at work.)

I stopped at Cafe Airlie on the way through and got my usual egg, cheese and potato with black pepper on a hardroll and some apple juice for my walk to the train station. It is so warm out that even with a light rain my fleece is a bit too much and I am too warm.

Dominica discovered this bit of disturbia today that occurred along a highway that we drive past on a regular basis. This is right along our normal route between Newark and “back home.” Although now we tend to go out to Williamsport before heading north.
Things were relatively busy at the office today. But busy in big bursts. Really busy bits with large bits of nothing as well.

I learned today that the coach of the New Jersey Giants (an American Football team from Rutherford, New Jersey which is playing in the NFL Super Bowl this year) used to be the coach of the Rochester Institute of Technology, RIT, Tigers. RIT is where I am currently attending for my Masters of Information Technology degree.

My Ruby based email log processing script ran today processing about two million database rows of data. That took several hours of intensive processing. It was 230MB of data sitting in my email account that had to be moved out. But that is a lot of stuff that isn’t stored in there anymore and that is no longer stored on my home storage area network (SAN.) I am very happy with how the script is working.

I did have to make some modifications to the script to get it to process all of the rows correctly. I had not dealt with some older data yet and there were some “end of log” messages, some unnecessary quotation marks and some bad line feeds that needed to be stripped out. But the script is more robust now and is getting better by the day. I think that by tomorrow night that I will most likely be done with all of the archival email processing except, possibly, for one small batch that needs some special oversight. Then I can focus on some reporting tools to dig into all of the data that I have been collecting.

I did some reading in “Practical Ruby for System Administration” today and learned some new tricks for using Ruby as part of by BASH command line. I never think of using Ruby (or Perl, for that matter) in a “one liner” or in-line mode. But it can be extremely useful for that. So I think that this is some good learning for me.

During her lunch break today Dominica went shopping and picked up a folding table for us to use in our apartment. We have been without anything resembling a table for two years now and it is beginning to be a problem. We definitely need a table for our Dungeons and Dragons games. So she picked one up at Home Depot. She also picked up some shoes while she was out. Her shoe collection is getting pretty big.

Dad lost power due to a massive windstorm tearing across Upstate New York today. We were talking over instant messenger when his power went out and he disappeared. It was gone for what seemed like four or five hours but it was on again by the time that I got home from the office.

I had to rush home so that I could help her to unload the car but she got stuck in traffic and I was home almost an hour before her anyway even though we left at almost exactly the same time (she left five to ten minutes before me.) I got home and logged right back into work and put in another hour or so. Then I helped Dominica unload the car, we fed the dog and we ran right over to Food for Life for a quick dinner.

After dinner we came home and I wrapped up the “office” work, started in on my Project Management homework, read some of “Manage It!” by Johanna Rothman which I am trying to finish reading this week and kicked off another long round of email transfers so that I can continue the process of migrating the data into the database. I can’t believe that I am already into the seventh week of my Project Management class. It is amazing to me how quickly the classes just fly by. When I was young they seem to drag on forever. Now I can’t even seem to get a chance to get into one before it is over.

Our first Netflix DVD came via the post today – 28 Weeks Later. It is the sequel to 28 Days Later which is one of the greatest, if not the greatest zombie apocalypse films of all time. Dominica has been extremely anxious to watch it. So I am trying to make time tonight so that we can watch it. If we don’t get to watch it tonight it could be a long time before we get to see it and one of the problems with Netflix and us is that if we don’t get to watch one movie then we don’t get to move on to another movie until we do. This is a problem when there is a movie that we both want to watch like this one. Normally the plan is for Dominica to get movies that only she wants to watch and use Netflix as a method of providing just her with movies so that she can watch them when I am working. It is already apparent how difficult a serialized movie stream will be if we try to watch everything together.

Dominica did some homework tonight as well for her GPS and the New Geography class. I pointed her in the direction of the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference which is perfectly tied in with her class. If you are interested in the content from the conference from 2005 through 2007 you can listen to the talks and panel discussions on IT Conversations for free. Very good stuff. Well worth a listen.

Tomorrow is a doggie-daddy day. Oreo is very excited. He was totally ready for today to be his sleep-in day but had to go to daycare. I will be working from home tomorrow and performing a much needed clean up of the apartment. Tomorrow night Dominica and I are heading to the Prudential Center for the first time and will be seeing the live show of Dancing with the Stars which was one of my Christmas presents for Dominica (yes, she actually asked for that.) The really cool thing about the show is that we will get to see Wayne Newton who will be singing, but not dancing, at the show. On Friday we are thinking about heading north up to my dad’s place to visit for the weekend (surprise dad!) But we will have to see how the weather is going to be. We don’t want to be driving in snow. But we do want to avoid the American football game this weekend.

It was almost nine when we started watching 28 Weeks Later. The movie was very interesting because it takes place in London and specifically on Canary Wharf where I worked while I was there just a couple of months ago. They showed people riding the DLR, getting off at Canary Wharf train station and had tons of footage of the buildings, Citi London and One Canada Square, that I worked in while I was there. There was just tons of shots all over the place that Dominica and I got to go which was incredibly cool. But that didn’t redeem the movie which was a horribly cheesy successor to the first film. This film seemed to be a zombie apocalypse cover for social commentary on the US military today. It was not an enjoyable film in the least. The plot was weak and boring and the gross factor was way too high and unnecessary. And every character in the movie was so horribly stupid and everything relied on so much coincidence and plot holes that it made no sense at all. I would avoid this movie unless you just can’t resist seeing Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs firebombed. And even then, just watch those bits. For those of us who have worked there it is pretty neat to see your office used as the site of a zombie infestation!

After that we popped in an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air to watch before heading off to bed. The final result is that the movie was bad but Netflix is a great deal and we are very excited to be using it now.