January 29, 2008: Books, Email and Logs

I got up nice and early this morning and got right into the office. I am trying to get myself back on to my early schedule. That always works out so much better for me.

I got some maintenance work done on SGL today. The biggest change is that I am tracking the site using Google Analytics now. So I am quite excited to see how that works. I think that we will find that my traffic profile is a lot better than Word Press Stats suggest. I am also quite interested to see more historical data and geographic data.

Today I finished “reading” “Lost Discoveries : The Ancient Roots of Modern Science–from the Babylonians to the Maya” by Dick Teresi. It is a fascinating book and covers a lot of interesting ground. A great read although, like most things that I enjoy, rather dry.

I began “reading” Simon Winchester’s “Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire” which is an interesting look at the remains of Britain’s once vast empire now reduced to mostly tiny islands scattered to the four corners of the world. Winchester is one of my favourite authors and always has great insight no matter what he is working on. Unfortunately “Outposts” had to be abridged for the audio version and the parts on Hong Kong and the Falkland Islands were left “on the cutting room floor” so to speak. Although Hong Kong is no longer a relic of the empire it was at the time of the original writing.

Today was busy and I was stuck in the office a little late again. But not too bad. I had my now usual falafel lunch from the little Halal truck one block west of here and got through the day.

On the way home I swung into Borders on Broadway and found a book on Ruby that I was looking for: “Practical Ruby for System Administration” by Andre Ben Hamou and APress.  I prefer Ruby to Perl for system administration tasks (and most everything else) and was interested to see what this book might have to offer.  It had a warm reception in some online reviews that I read so I decided that as a full time system administrator who uses Ruby it just seemed appropriate that I should have this book if for no other purposes than knowing whether or not to recommend it to others.

I did some work on my Ruby script for reading in Netgear firewall logs via IMAP and parsing them into a MySQL Database.  My script is working pretty well now.  I updated it so that it now logs to the system event log which is very handy for trouble shooting.  I also set it to run every hour on the hour so that my email mailbox stays clean.  Now I don’t have to worry about manually running it all of the time.

Tonight I started the project of taking all of my old, archived Netgear firewall logs that were downloaded to Thunderbird and saved as an offline folder and put onto my home SAN – my Netgear SC101.  I remounted the offline folder to Thunderbird and began the process of reloading the data onto the email server for processing.  There are scores of thousands of emails to be uploaded.  This is going to be quite a project that will definitely take a few days at the least.  I moved as many as I could tonight before going to bed.

Dominica was in the mood for makizushi sushi and so decided to have some delivered.  I wasn’t very hungry and sushi didn’t really do it for me.  The food was good but I really don’t enjoy sushi all that much.  We don’t get sashimi very often.  It is the seaweed and rice rolls (makizushi) that Dominica really enjoys.  I don’t mind it but it doesn’t get me very excited and I just wasn’t in the mood for it tonight.

We watched a few episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and tried to call it an early night.  We haven’t been getting enough sleep and are starting to get tired.

January 28, 2008: Trying Netflix

I miss a lot of news from back home these days. I had no idea until today that a student from SUNY Geneseo was killed by three drivers on Interstate 390 in three apparently separate hit and run incidents in one night! I mean really, three people do not drive over a person and then run. That isn’t an accident. That is something more. This is ridiculous. I found the RNews feed from the original report. And some updated WHEC news.

I was talking to a friend in Toronto, Ontario, Canada today and we were discussing our blogs and blogging in general. So I decided that I would post a link to his here: Distinguished Geek.

I was not ready to be back at work today.  Just not up for it.  Today was a long and crappy day.  Just one thing going wrong after another.  One of those “don’t touch anything” days.  Best to just hide under the desk and unplug the phone.  Except somehow I would get electrocuted unplugging the phone.  So I left it plugged in and plugged my ears instead and hummed quietly to myself while rocking back and forth slowly.  (My readers from the United Kingdom will recognize humourous sardonicism here but for my more “American” readers I will add “j/k”.)

If you are impressed by my use of big words I can tell you that I learned to use the word “sardonic” by reading Timothy Zahn novels.  I never knew the word before that but he uses it almost exclusively instead of sarcastic which isn’t totally correct but they are very similar.  I have used it myself ever since.  It is one of the very few words that I can distinctly remember reading several times, wanting to know more about and researching.

I thought that I would escape the office early today – mostly in an attempt to avoid any further disaster – but actually got stuck doing a twelve hour day when we had a server that needed to be addressed during an evening green zone.  Nothing ever goes as planned.

I got home around seven thirty.  We ordered in Nino’s and spent our short evening watching The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.  It is amazing now looking back on what I feel is a “not all that old of a show” and realizing just how old and bizarre it seems now.  And to realize that my cousin Jeremy was just a babe in swaddling when that show first aired and that the cultural references in it are so rooted in the 1980s that much of it just wouldn’t make any sense.  I realize now that most people who enjoy Will Smith in movies think that he was always an actor and don’t realize that FBoBA was a kitschy sit com based on his rapping career in the duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.

Dominica decided today that she is going to try Netflix.  She signed us up for the $8.99 per month plan which includes unlimited DVD rentals (and we believe unlimited BluRay and HD-DVD rentals once we get a player for those but we need to check on the details) plus unlimited play instantly online movies.  Our deal only lets us have one DVD rented at a time but really we only watch so many movies so it should work out pretty well.  And our plan is to have a computer hooked up to a television in the living room which means that we can easily use the unlimited download service to watch movies that when we don’t have a DVD rented.  At $8.99 per month it seems like we can’t go wrong.  It will be so easy for us to save money that it seems like a pretty safe investment.  The only problem is that it will fuel Dominica’s addiction to just watching “whatever is on” since there will always be something on.  Much more so than if we had television.

The really big upside to the Netflix plan, for us, is that it means that Dominica can easily rent tons of movies that she wants to watch once that we don’t think are things that we will want to own and she can watch them on her own and we won’t feel like we have to watch them together all of the time.  That is a problem for us since she always wants to watch for more material than I do.  It should save us a bit of money in the “mediocre movies that we will only watch once” category which we had been buying a bit for a while because it was about the same cost as renting.  But this is so much cheaper and easier that it should work out.  And not having to go out to a video store is a big deal – especially living in Newark.  I wouldn’t even know how to rent a movie here if I had to.

One thing that is unfortunate about the Netflix service is that they require Windows in order to use it.  I did some research and the videos are delivered using Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology.  Although I wonder what creates the Windows requirement then since Silverlight is supposed to be cross platform supporting Mac and Linux quite well.  Perhaps the requirement isn’t as firm as it seems.  I will attempt to find out.  Our plan is to have a Vista workstation in the living room by March and a new Mac Mini in the bedroom around the same time period.

Dominica ordered our first DVD, 28 Weeks Later, which we should have in two days or so.  She is building up a massive queue of movies that she wants to see.  It will take her years to get through what she has already.  We are very excited about the massive collection of classic movies of which we can take advantage quite easily.

Two more Dungeons and Dragons books arrived from eBay purchases today.  We received “The Complete Mage” and “Monsters of Faerun”.  I also won six additional books on eBay today but it will be a week or two until those have a chance to arrive.  We are building quite the D&D and Forgotten Realms library for our game.  I hope that we get lots of opportunity to use all of this stuff.

January 27, 2008: I declare today to be Pajama Day

There, I said it. It is Pajama Day. You heard me.

I ended up working until almost three last night. What a late night. Oreo decided that he needed a walk close to two in the morning. That was his sixth time out yesterday, I believe. He varies wildly from only going out once a day to six or seven times in a seven or eight hour period. And then he needed a quick walk at three thirty. Crazy.

I did get a lot of work done by staying up so late though and Dominica stayed up with me reading and reading and reading in her R. A. Salvatore novels. I really got her hooked on those. I need to find the Canticle series that I have stored somewhere at dad’s house so that she can read those too. It has been a really long time since I read those. Those were great books and they were responsible for originally getting me hooked on R. A. Salvatore.

I got up this morning pretty late but not late consider when I actually went to bed. I didn’t get eight hours of sleep or anything. Oreo cam out to the living room with me and hung out until afternoon when he went back to bed to snuggle with Dominica.

I had more server builds to do for the office so I got back to work on that. I wanted to get that done on the early side so that I could relax a bit today. It is a short day with dinner at six thirty and us getting up so late.

I discovered today that one of my Solaris 10 servers is crashing during heavy file transfers because it doesn’t have enough memory (only 128MB!) and it is thrashing until it goes offline. not a good situation. So I ordered another 512MB for it. We will see if that helps. It should make a gigantic difference.

Kevin and Pam stopped by around two thirty with Pam’s brother Feder who is a big D&D player. He is going to be running a second D&D group for us so that I can play too (yay!) and he is going to be playing in our group as well. It will be very good for us to have an experienced player in our group. And it will be very good to have a real DM running a game that I am playing in. I have DM’d at least 95% of all of the D&D that I have ever gotten the chance to play. No one is ever willing to be the DM but me and so I decide to do it even though, in reality, I want to actually play and not DM. So this is very exciting for me. I like being the DM but not nearly as much as I like to be the player.

At five forty five Dominica and I got ready and drove down to Iselin to meet Prashant and Kriti at Nanking Express on Oaktree Road.  We had a nice dinner and we were home by nine.  I did some additional work and then it was time for bed.  Boy the weekends fly by when you don’t have any free time. Dominica managed to finish the Legacy of the Drow quadriligy today which means she has now read ten full books in the Drizzt Cycle.  I am still just at the beginning of book four.

January 26, 2008: Who Gets a Weekend?

I actually woke up and was ready for the day nice and early. I was awake around seven thirty but Oreo was being super snuggly and I don’t get many chances to really snuggle with him without having to get up and go to work so I stayed in bed until a quarter after eight. I got up and came out to the office and worked for an hour or two then showered and walked over to Food for Life and got a late breakfast to bring home to Dominica. I went to get it before eleven thirty but didn’t get back until just after noon.

Dominica finally pulled herself (and therefore Oreo as well) out of bed until four minutes past noon. Thirteen hours of sleep for the two of them. She was happy to wake up to fresh, warm Food for Life. We haven’t managed to get ourselves breakfast from there in a very long time. It was a special treat.

I didn’t have much time before I had to do a one o’clock conference call for the office which took about an hour. That ate up quite a chunk of the afternoon. I only got a little bit of time to relax before Dominica and I got to work taking care of all of the things that just have to be dealt with today. For both of us that is a bit of homework. Me for my Project Management class and her for her GPS and the New Geography class. She is getting anxious to get her Associates degree out of the way. It is crappy that she has so much that she has to do that it is going to end up taking her almost two years to get an Associates degree when she already has a Bachelors from the same university (State University of New York – just two different colleges) but there is just so much work between where she is and another Bachelors that it is worth getting the AS along the way. It will be at least another year or two after that before she could get her second BSc. degree. If it is even worth it after having an AS and a BSc.

I lost a lot of the afternoon as Oreo was having one of his “needy” days. We aren’t sure if this happens just because he really needs a lot of attention or if it is because he is feeling sick or if he really just needs a lot of different things all on the same day. But it meant a couple hours or more of just feeding, walking, playing, scratching, holding him and trying to figure out if something was wrong or if he just felt alone. But he was right with both of us all day so I doubt that.

I have several servers that I need to build for the office this weekend which is keeping me extra busy as well. My day just flew by as I attempted to get everything done that needed to be done. In between everything I did some big updates to my own servers moving all of the Red Hat 4 series machines up to version 4.6. I also did a lot of work, continuing from yesterday, of getting SSH keys distributed and automounted home directories from my Solaris NFS file server and stuff like that. Mostly background work but a lot of it. I may be swamped but I am also quite productive.

Andy and I spent about an hour or more on the phone this evening. We haven’t had a chance to really talk in probably a month. The whole mid-December to mid-January craziness really takes its toll. It is impossible to “stay on target”. If only we had one of those little targeting computers that did that work for us. “Luke, what are you doing with your eyes closed?” “I’m using the force.” “Open your eyes, use the targeting computer. That’s what it is for – for hitting small objects at great distance.”

Ramona called around eight and came over around nine or a little later with ice cream and the makings of major sundays. I had too much work to do to be able to hang out with her and Dominica so they settled in to watch “girl movies” while I worked. They started with High School Musical 2. Which is probably cute and entertaining but I do not exactly have any urge to watch it which is strange as it is normally more my kind of movie that most peoples’ but something about the massive popularity of it doesn’t do it for me. I have lost all interest in “mainstream” life.

My work ended up going pretty late.  I was still working after midnight when Ramona headed back to the Ironbound to go home.  I took Oreo for a walk so that he would be ready for bed.  Dominica went to the living room to keep reading in the Drizzt Cycle.  (Ramona returned the Icewind Dale Trilogy that she borrowed a few days ago so I might be back on track with reading those soon myself.)

Work went until well after one in the morning.  No rest for the weary I guess.  Slow day planned tomorrow.  Work, of course, plus a meeting with Pam’s brother who might be interested in dungeon mastering a game in which I could actually get to play (Dungeons and Dragons that is) and then dinner with Prashant and Kriti down in Iselin, New Jersey tomorrow evening.

Bed didn’t come until long after one in the morning.  But I wasn’t really getting tired until then either and Dominica was quite content to keep reading.

January 25, 2008: Just Another Manic Friday

I knew that today was going to be a crazy day. They told me yesterday that I had an abnormally large number of deployments scheduled for this evening. So I wasn’t exactly excited rolling out of bed this morning. Not that I don’t like deployments – it’s just that I don’t like them when there are so many that you have to start jumping from one to another which makes you likely to get confused and to make a mistake. It isn’t like they get spaced out evenly throughout the day. They hit all at once around five thirty.

I go in late on Fridays because I always have to stay late and normally no one needs me in the morning. But my BlackBerry was dead today so I decided to log in and check out my mail before heading in just to be on the safe side. I ended up working for two hours before heading out to catch the train.

Josh didn’t leave the apartment until eleven or so so that gave us a chance to hang out while I did some work. It was before ten when I left and he just dropped off my keys with the front desk. It was a short visit but more than most anyone else does. So far, other than our parents and siblings, only Josh and the Ralstons has come down from back home to visit us here. We have been here for two years now!

I grabbed breakfast from Airlie and got onto the PATH. I learned today that the PATH system is actually older than the New York City Subway and is the oldest underground train system in the New York City Metro area. Josh was planning to hit Food for Life for breakfast before heading off to Jersey City to work.

Work was quite busy. I was going crazy all day and was stuck working until rather late. But nothing that I wasn’t expecting so it was okay.

Before leaving the office, Kevin called to see if Dominica and I wanted to do dinner in Jersey City. He and Pam had run into Dominica on her way home so they had already talked to her. It was about twenty minutes before I got to leave the office so we planned to meet at the Newport/Pavona PATH station in Jersey City. That trip is really easy as it is a direct connection from World Trade Center where I get onto the train.

We all had dinner at Raaz, an Indian restaurant right across the street from the train station. Jersey City is so easy to deal with via the PATH. The PATH is almost a dedicated subway system for Jersey City and Hoboken with commuter connections to Newark and Manhattan.

Dinner was really good. Having lived in Newark for so long (Newark isn’t really a part of New Jersey) we have forgotten about the “New Jersey restaurant bill” problem where every restaurant in the state is happy to bring you food but then never brings you the bill and just forgets that you are there. Since we moved to New Jersey it has been completely consistent that no restaurant will ever bring you a bill no matter how much you try to get one. They just refuse to let you leave and yet they completely stop serving you so they don’t make any more money. In fact, it lowers their tips. And worse than that, in cases like tonight, the restaurant was completely full without any seats available and people were turning around at the door and deciding not to eat there even though there were multiple tables waiting half an hour or more to pay and leave after they were done and bored. It is one of the most bizarre business traditions I have ever seen. In New York the bill comes with dinner and if you want coffee and dessert they take the bill back and add that to it. They never take a risk of you taking up valuable real estate if you don’t want to. They don’t kick you out but they sure don’t do anything to make you stay against your will – and I appreciate that.

After dinner we came home and took care of Oreo. Then it was off to bed. I have a lot of work to do this weekend so I am going to be quite busy. No D&D tomorrow, unfortunately.