Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning was kind of busy for me. I did get to sleep in until Min left for work and then I got up and worked from home for the first bit of the morning. Today my office is supposed to be ready for me in Manhattan but I can’t go in until there is someone there to meet me and let me in and then I have to deal with getting my PC set up (assuming that it works correctly) and then I have to get my security badge sorted out. So once I get into the office the day is mostly a waste so I wanted to be sure that everything that needed to be completed was done so from home before I hiked into the city for the afternoon.

I actually had a very productive morning. I am working on my “new” OpenSuse 10.3 machine and so far I am very impressed with 10.3. I can’t wait to start rolling this out to Castile Christian Academy. OpenSuse 10.3 is fast and solid and very attractive. I have only been using it a few days but already I can tell that it is much better than its predecessors. I use only KDE on a regular basis and occasionally play around in XFCE. KDE has really come a long way at this point but is still in the KDE 3.x family. I am really looking forward to the KDE 4 family which, I expect, will take OpenSuse into its 11.x series.

I had a number of issues at work that were spread out and scheduled ahead of time that I knew that I couldn’t make the trip to Manhattan until lunchtime. Since I didn’t have much time I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to run across the street to the week old Airlie Cafe on Commerce here in Newark. I got the mozzarella sandwich that they have which was light but quite tasty. I also got a scrumptious cheese danish. I can tell that I am going to be addicted to those very soon. I also got a coffee to try it out. It is good but not necessarily as good as what we have at home. Dominica and I are pretty serious about our coffee.

As soon as my lunch was finished and I got the “all clear” from the office I headed out to catch the train over to Manhattan. Having done that as much as I have recently it has come to feel like second nature to run into New York City although it must still seem very strange to Dominica and most of my readers. Today is an odd day for me because as of today I am not a visitor nor a temporary employee in the city but, as of today, I am “working in Manhattan” full time. This is my base city now. And not just Manhattan but Wall Street. And not just Wall Street but Wall Street with a view! (Although that is only temporary.)

The weather was perfect today too. Overcast and breezy. Warm but with a certain chill in the breeze. Just the way I like the city. Perfect for a lot of walking which is what I do now everyday. I am really looking forward to the forced exercise that I will be getting. City life seems to be so much more naturally healthy than suburban life.

My main job today was to get situated so that I can actually be productive out of Manhattan. Changing offices always causes a certain amount of “downtime” and this one has been extreme. Luckily I have been able to continue working from home and Warren all this time or else it would have been a real problem. But now that I have my PC sorted out and my security access sorted I am ready to go. Now I can come into the city early in the morning when it isn’t so warm out and when the traffic (human traffic that is) is so much less. The commute will be much more comfortable. I just need to remember to bring a water bottle with me tomorrow or I will be sorry.

Jenn had a conference in Newark today so she is in town and is going to visit with us tonight at least long enough to get dinner. She arrived at the apartment around three thirty this afternoon.

I was hoping to be able to leave work early so that I could get back and entertain Jenn but no such luck.  I actually left the office later than Dominica did so she was home a bit before me.  Jenn didn’t have a lot of time this evening so to speed things up we all just met at Food for Life and ate dinner there.  We haven’t seen Jenn in over a year and this is her very first time visiting us since we moved to New Jersey!  And she only lives ninety minutes away or so in the Philly suburbs.

Light night for us after that.  Early to bed.  A little The Cosby Show.  That’s all.

Happy White Supremacist Columbus Day. Today, for those outside of the United States who wonder what this “holiday” is all about, is a celebration of a man who lead a military expedition to Hispanola with the apparent goal of reaching India and killing everyone or enslaving them. But due to his massive lack of maritime knowledge and complete disregard for common sense and complete dearth of research into geography or anthropology he arrived in the very near Caribbean where he landed, called it India, and began on his zealous attempt to kill all of the inhabitants as quickly as possible.

Columbus’ landing in the new world was roughly the equivalent to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II only time has allowed a few more people to drive home the “it never happened” and “Native Americans aren’t real people” messages for so long that some people actually think that celebrating Columbus Day as a national holiday is somehow better than the Iranian president claiming that no Jews died in World War II. In fact it is quite the opposite. Questioning something that is obviously true is potentially bad. But only potentially so. But celebrating the holocaust with a holiday is mockery and racism at its most extreme. Today is an American celebration of genocide, of colonialism, of conquest, of war, of racism, of slavery – of Europe’s darkest hour.

“They [the Indians] do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
-Christopher Columbus

This morning was very crazy for Dominica and I. My five o’clock alarm never fired because my phone crashed and had its time indicated as almost seven in the evening! This Palm Treo is total garbage and it turns off the phone portion of its circuitry whenever it feels like and then loses important features like having reliable time. So the phone thought that there was ten hours or so to go before my alarm should go off.

Dominica’s alarm clock, coincidentally, was not working this morning and showed it as just being time for her alarm to go off, that is six in the morning, when it was, in fact, almost seven and time for her and Oreo to be on the road. Oops. She didn’t even believe me that something was wrong with the clocks when I first told her. She sauntered into the bathroom and then saw the atomic clock’s accurate time and started rushing to get out the door to the office.

I logged in from home and got some early morning work done. I thought about not bothering to do this so that I could rush out to the office faster but my email mailbox is completely full from the weekend’s mail and I can no longer respond to mail from my BlackBerry. So I felt that I really had to log in and get that cleaned up before I could start traveling.

So it was later than I had planned which equates to warmer than I had planned when I started walking to the train station. I took the PATH into the World Trade Center and then the subway up to Canal and walked to the shuttle from there. I grabbed a sandwich and enjoyed the moderate morning air before the shuttle shuttled me off to Warren where I am working today.

Today is my first day without a car of my own. The Mazda PR5 was dropped off at dad’s house on Friday and has not moved since. I have always had to have had a car to be able to get to work – ever since I was sixteen. This is quite a liberating experience. I can see why so many people are willing to live without a car. It makes you feel so much more free.

My day was pretty busy as I was one of just four people in the office covering for twenty to thirty people.  Even though a lot of the company had the day off most of it did not and many had no idea that today was a semi-holiday.  So we were kept on our toes all day.

By four in the afternoon I was the only person in the office which meant that I was exceedingly busy.  I had asked my shuttle driver in the morning when the pickups would be and he told me that they were at five, six and seven on the hour with seven being the final shuttle back to Manhattan.  I really wanted to catch the five o’clock shuttle as going any later would put be home insanely late and everyone else had left an hour or two earlier so I didn’t feel too bad about going that early.  I got stuck on a phone support call until five minutes until five so once I was done I literally ran out the door and hoofed it as which as I could from my office down to the shuttle which is quite some ways away.

To my amazement the shuttle had not left yet.  Pheww.  I boarded and was told that the shuttle wasn’t leaving until half past five.  But more importantly – this is the only afternoon shuttle.  The two later shuttle runs are canceled, indefinitely.  So, had I waited for the completely appropriately late six o’clock shuttle – having left myself an hour of buffer just in case something went wrong so that I could still take the seven o’clock shuttle – I would have been stranded at the office!  Talk about bad planning.  I came very, very close to being trapped even after making sure that I knew when the shuttles were running and that I had left to catch an early one leaving two after it “just in case.”  There were several people on the shuttle quite upset to discover how close they had come to being abandoned at the office.

It took over two hours to get home to Newark.  Dominica had spent the time between when she got home and when I did cleaning.  Jenn is coming to visit tomorrow so we are trying to get the apartment in order to some degree.  I got in and we ordered in dinner from Nino’s.  We watched a little of The Cosby Show while we ate.  Then Min went to bed and I headed out to do some work.  I logged into the office and worked for an hour or two.  There were several last minute items submitted for me to work on after I had left the office and I didn’t want them lingering until today.  So I got that all wrapped up and then went to bed around midnight.

Tomorrow I get to actually work, or so the theory goes, from Wall Street in Manhattan.  Almost everything is ready for me there.

Min and I didn’t have to get up all that early today although I think we were up by eight anyway. We are going to be really exhausted by the time that we get back to Newark tonight. We have been getting hardly any sleep the last several days.

I got back to work on the new Active Directory server this morning. I got almost everything done yesterday but ran into some migration problems caused by incompatibilities between Windows Server 2003 and 2003 R2. So I am continuing to work on that today. I also did some standard updates to the older machine just in case I need to keep it up and running for a while longer. I took both machines up to SP2 this weekend. That is a huge update.

Around eleven everyone went down to Perry to get a late breakfast at the Hole in the Wall Restaurant. It is really cool that we came down here to eat on Dominica and my anniversary weekend because it was the old Hole in the Wall Restaurant that the groomsmen and I ate breakfast at before heading off to Wyoming for the wedding!

In the picture here is our waitress from the Hole in the Wall this morning shooting a foul shot.  She played basketball for Perry around 1996 or 1997 when this picture was taken at a game against York Central School.  I mentioned to her that I recently scanned this picture in and that it was online now and she said that she still has the poster of this picture hanging in her room.  I made posters for almost everyone on the Perry team that year back when I still had access to the Kodak Camera Club darkroom complex in Rochester.

After lunch we went back to dad’s and I got back to work on that server.  In between attempts on the server Min and I did a bit of cleaning around in the garage.  She managed to find, after much searching, some luggage that we really need.  We also managed to eliminate an entire plastic bin of stuff that was being stored there.  If we could just work our way through that much stuff on every trip we could eliminate the mess eventually.  That is a tall order though.

I finally found my box of telephone equipment that got packed up and moved from North Brunswick, NJ at some point and lost in the garage.  I have put in a lot of time looking for this stuff.  We will be taking that back down to Newark with us.  Hopefully this will let us get our Vonage phone up and running again so that people can really call us instead of only being able to reach us over the useless Verizon wireless phone.

Last night, I forgot to mention, dad helped me find the Netgear wireless access point that has been missing in the house as well.  I got that set up this morning while I was working on other things.  I got his Linksys WIP300 wireless VoIP phone working too.

My grandparents and aunt Gayle left in the middle of the afternoon.  I had enough to do before we could leave that Dominica really needed to do her homework for the week from dad’s house instead of waiting until we got home to Newark tonight.  So she set up my laptop in the kitchen and worked on that.  That gave me plenty of time to wrap things up and to do some more cleaning in the garage.  Dad went down to Davis’ in Pavilion and picked up pizza for dinner.

It was seven in the evening when Dominica and I finally managed to pull out of dad’s.  Much later than we had been hoping but we didn’t have anything “hanging over our heads” for after we returned to Newark so we felt pretty good about the timing.  It was a very productive weekend – visiting with the family from Ohio, anniversary dinner, worked almost a full day on Saturday, built new server, found missing wireless unit, fixed wireless phone, found missing phone equipment, found missing luggage, Min did her homework, etc.

Route i81 in northern Pennsylvania has gotten to be so bad recently that we decided to take the alternative route going south on NY15 into Pennsylvania where it turns into the new i99 corridor.  We took i99 down to Williamsport where we caught i180 to the east which took us down to i80 and that brought us back onto our normal route around Stroudsburg.  Going this route had no traffic problems and allowed us to pull into Newark right at midnight.  Only five hours of travel time inclusive of a fueling stop with food, drinks and two bathroom breaks.  Not bad at all.

During the trip I finished listening to the 25th Anniversary program of A Prairie Home Companion.  Dominica slept most of the trip.  Oreo was totally zonked.  He got a lot of play time in this weekend with the other dogs and dad playing with him in the back yard.

We also got a chance to talk to the neighbour about the house next door to dad’s.  Unfortunately it is not for sale like we had heard in the rumours.  So we are out of luck there.

Happy Thirtieth Birthday to Andrew T. West
It was a quarter ’till eight when I was in my car and pulling out of the parking lot on the Warren campus and heading west towards home. Much later than I had been hoping. I had kind of been hoping that I would have been done by six, almost two hours earlier. Dominica was way ahead of me but was able to warn me about a horrible traffic jam on i81 in Scranton. So I went twenty miles out of my way to route around it. That didn’t make the trip go by any faster.

Traffic wasn’t too bad for me in New Jersey. I stopped at the Wegmans in Nazareth, Pennsylvania (near Bethlehem, of course) which is right on PA33 and grabbed the last of their cheese pizza slices for dinner just as they were closing up the pizza shop. Dominica never wants to stop for Wegmans pizza while on the road so I took advantage of my lonely drive to get me some of that sweet cheesy goodness.

Once I reached i80 west I hit some solid traffic and was slowed down a bit. I had to bypass i380 and go all of the way out to the PA Turnpike Extension, i476, and double back around the west side of Scranton to reach Clark Summit which I would have reached via i81 normally. Traffic was light on i476 but the construction was a pain.

Interstate 81 is just in horrible shape this year and even after bypassing the worst of it the portion running north from Clark Summit to Binghamton was still quite bad and I lost a lot of time dealing with all of the construction there. After Binghamton the roads and the traffic were fine.

Dominica called to alert me to a detour in Leicester too. There was some sort of accident near the Comstock plant just south of Mt. Morris and the sheriff was rerouting people down to Cuylerville to go around it. When I arrived in Mt. Morris half an hour after her the detour was still there so I went down and came up on Jones Bridge Road to see if there was anything to see. I made it to the corner of Jones Bridge Road and NY36 at the exact same moment that the wrecker with the truck from the accident reached the corner. It was a small, red pickup truck and the damage was pretty serious. That section of NY36 near the Comstock plant (Seneca Foods) has always been really dangerous and a couple of my high school friends and classmates were killed on that stretch many years ago.

It was about one thirty in the morning when I got to dad’s house in Peoria. Dominica had gotten there about half an hour ahead of me. My family from Ohio – grandma, grandpa and my Aunt Gayle – had arrived some time earlier but were already asleep when I got in. She had had a really long drive having left Wallington, New Jersey at half past five and having been on the road ever since then. She and dad were still up and Oreo was a little bundle of energy running all over the house. We stayed up until about two in the morning before getting to bed.

It was a really short night for me. My alarm went off at five fifty in the morning. Dominica and I slept in dad’s office on the floor. So I only had to roll out of bed and fire up the desktop on the desk above my head to get to work. I am really glad that we keep a workstation there so that it is really easy for me to work quickly at times like this.

Work started at six this morning. Nothing like getting moving and working bright and early on a Saturday morning. Oreo was a bit incredulous when I got up off of the mattress on the floor and moved him and the mattress out of the way so that i could start working. But he just rearranged himself and made himself comfortable by my side again and went back to puppy slumber land. Dominica managed to not even wake up, as far as I could tell, even with me turning on the computer and moving the dog around.

Since I was up and working already I took advantage of the early morning silence to do some much needed storage maintenance at dad’s house. I managed to clear 12GB off of one of his machines that has only 18GB to begin with. That machine has been lingering on the edge of being out of space for a very long time. The job took over an hour and that is why it never got completed previously. I just never have time to sit down and deal with it.

It was a long morning of work and I ended up working until around noon which wasn’t too much longer than I had expected. It could have been a lot worse.

This afternoon I discovered that my Windows 2003 Active Directory server that I run at dad’s house has lost one of its mirrored drives and is really on its last leg. Actually, it has been on its last leg for an awfully long time now. I can’t believe how that old thing has limped along. I bought it – a black IBM Netfinity (aka iSeries @Server) 3500 M20 – from IBM’s employee sales back in mid-2001 when Andy and I were still working down in Endicott. No one, at the time, was interested in buying this server both because it was a server and because it used the Pentium III “Flip Chip” which, at the time, everyone thought was crap but quickly went on to displace the weird alternatives and relegate them to the annals of computing lore. So I got a great deal on it. I bought two nice 18GB SCSI Fujitsu drives also directly from IBM. The machine was pretty nice.

The Netfinity started off life as my email server in 2001 running SUSE Email Server II. It spent two years running the SUSE 7 based email system and it did a fine job. At some point, probably in 2003, it was migrated to Windows Server 2003 and served as my Active Directory server replacing the older NT 4 solution that I had had before that. I used it as my very first dedicated virtualization machine too running Virtual PC and later Virtual Server with my email server (a custom built SUSE based system with Horde/IMP, Postfix and Cyrus) running virtualized on top of it. That part was eliminated last year when I moved to Zimbra. And since then it has been serving up AD and CIFS exclusively.

At some point while attempting to upgrade the machine to a full (for it) 2GB of memory I had a bad memory stick actually short out and burn out part of the motherboard. It smoked and I thought that the machine must be dead but it ended up only losing one memory slot! Pheww. That was around late 2003 or early 2004, I think. So the machine limped with a partially burned out mainboard and only 1.5GB of memory. I can’t believe that it still works.

So I was perturbed to discover that one of the mirrored drives had failed without any notification and that now I had a machine very close to death that really needed to be replaced right away. Luckily I had transported a spare server from Newark to my dad’s house just last night! An HP DL380 G2 fully stocked with processors and drives, RAID controller, RILOE, etc. Good deal. And I just happened to transport my copy of Windows Server 2003 R2 at the same time. Talk about perfect timing. Kismet, some would say.

So I spent the available afternoon time doing a full install of Windows 2k3 R2 onto the HP.  Nothing like creating work for myself on the weekends.  🙁  The new hardware is amazing compared to the old though.  Of course it is several years newer but it is also rackmount and having hardware RAID versus software RAID is nice.  The biggest difference is moving to six, hot swappable, 36GB drives instead of two 18GB drives.  That is a big difference.  Unfortunately it is a really loud machine.

I didn’t get nearly as much time to visit as I would have hoped and Dominica and I were both really tired this afternoon.  Min and Oreo took a nap together while my grandmother and aunt Gayle went out for twelve miles of bicycling.

At five thirty we all drove down to Perry and ate a delicious dinner at the Lumberyard restaurant.  It was Dominica and my informal anniversary dinner.  The food was really good.  I always forget how good the food is down there.  We only get to go there once or twice a year if we are lucky.

After dinner Dominica and I drove up to Rochester and visited Andy both to celebrate his birthday and to pick up a load of stuff that he has had there ready for us.  I am collecting my HP dx5150 that he has been using because I am going to be using it at home now as my dedicated Windows XP desktop which I need to really be able to work remotely from home in an efficient way without using Dominica’s space to do it.  Andy is also giving us his wireless keyboard and mouse set for us to use in our bedroom when we hook a computer up to the television / monitor that we have in there now.  And I got his copy of Suikoden V for the PlayStation 2 (which he doesn’t have anymore.)  And lastly we got an older, empty ATX computer case that I am going to fill with parts that I have in Newark to build another PC for the school in Castile.  This was a busy trip.

We got to see Andy’s new apartment.  He has been there for about a month or so but neither of us has been up to see it yet.  He moved just a little bit down the street from his old place but now has a newish townhouse that is quite nice.  The space is used much more wisely than before.  He has a two bedroom, one and a half bath with an extra sink in the master bedroom.  Very nicely laid out.  Nice closet space too.  So he has one room for his bedroom and one for his office.

We all drove down to Borders in Henrietta so that I could take advantage of the rare opportunity to shop in a large computer book section.  There aren’t very many of those in New Jersey.  Not a state of people who read a lot, I guess.  I bought three books while we were there.

After Borders we went to Tim Horton’s and hung out for a little while but had to leave once we were surprised by a freak rainstorm and had left the car windows down for Oreo.  The drive back down to dad’s house took forever in the pouring rain.  We had no visibility and could barely hold the road.  It was really bad.

It was around one in the morning when Dominica and I finally got into dad’s house and got to bed.  We are were very tired.

Congratulations to Phil and Kate Ayers who are welcoming into the world their first child born yesterday, on Dominica and my anniversary, at 9:45am. It is very apropos that their first child be born on our anniversary considering that Dominica and I met at Phil and Kate’s wedding which also happened to be Phil’s birthday.

Before heading off to bed last night I took the time to finish downloading the installation CD for OpenSuse 10.3 KDE. I have been running on OpenSuse 10.1 for a year or more now and I am ready for an update.

Since I have been so anxious to try out the latest incarnation of OpenSuse I decided to just go ahead and get it installed before going to bed. It isn’t that risky for me, even though I am installing to my primary desktop, because I have two separate hard drives and everything important from the system drive is backed up to the data drive and all of the really critical stuff is backed up on my SAN drives. And besides, Linux is known for very smooth upgrades compared to other operating systems. There is very little to worry about.

Since I was up waiting for the install to continue I decided to pay some bills that needed to be taken care of. I figured that I shouldn’t be wasting the time.

I didn’t actually get into the office until pretty late as I got caught doing quite a bit of work from home this morning. To save time I just hit McDonald’s on the road and ate in the car on the way into the office.

My afternoon ended up being crammed with work and I got stuck working quite late. You have to expect that on a Friday night and especially on a Friday night when I am going to be traveling. Dominica left from Nutley at five but hit horrible traffic and called me at the office at seven twenty to let me know that she had just crossed into Pennsylvania. So she has more than a two hour head start on me but I have a tiny distance advantage – nothing to compare to two hours through. Fifteen to twenty minutes of distance advantage at best. She and Oreo will arrive at dad’s long before I do.

I am going to be very tired tomorrow morning when I have to get up at six to start working again.  But at least I get overtime today and tomorrow.  Helps to pay for all of the driving.

It is just after seven thirty right now and I am wrapping up and logging off and heading out to the car.  It is going to be a long night and I will be really lucky if I manage to get four hours of sleep before having to get back to work.  Enjoy your weekends.