Sheep Guarding Llama

The packing continues unabated today. I slept in a little more than I did yesterday but didn’t manage to catch up on the missing sleep.

There is nothing exciting to report for today. We packed. Dad and Min focused mostly on the packing and I focused on getting the applications that have been running out of the downstairs datacenter switched to Scranton. That was no small project. That took many hours. And it is a scary process as well.

At six this evening I began the major migration process and it took only two and a half hours for us to move the big live application from one location to the other. It was stressful but it went really well and about as smoothly as could have been hoped for.

It was a weird feeling shutting down the old servers tonight. It was around ten o’clock this evening that the two Compaq Proliant 800’s were powered down for decommissioning. Those two sibling servers have been sitting side-by-side chugging away with no more than forty-eight hours of downtime for just over seven years. They were purchased in February, 2000 in Rochester were moved to Ithaca a few weeks later, move to Pittsburgh in late March and were a primary staple in Andy and my totally bare apartment. Andy used to sleep with his head right by one of the servers. Then in late April they were relocated to Rochester again when they went into production from our then Rochester Data Center. A year or two later they moved to Washington, DC where they put in a lot of time. They continued to run from there along with the IBM Netfinity server that we added alongside them. That was probably late 2001. Then in 2003 those three servers along with others that had been added over the years moved from Washington to Geneseo where they sat until today.

For seven years I have been able to think about those two Proliants sitting there humming away. After seven years we didn’t have to replace a single memory stick, CPU, power supply or hard drive. Each server had four hard drives – each having spun around approximately 26.5 billion times! And not one hardware failure. No hardware maintenance has even had to have been performed on either machine. The Windows NT 4 operating system that they have been running on was the same image that was originally installed on those boxes in the spring of 2000! Practically nothing ever went wrong with those boxes. They were the best investment ever. It was sad and lonely feeling to power them down without knowing if they will ever be powered on again. They are like old friends that have hung around through thick and thin always ready to power a database and serve an application.

Altogether I was able to shut down three servers tonight.  That took a lot of the “hum” out of the townhouse.  It is amazing how loud those things can be.  The silence was strange.  The one remaining server doesn’t leave until tomorrow but is pretty quiet on its own.

We were so exhausted from yesterday and today and Min and I decided that we needed to get to bed very early.  We were asleep by not much later than ten!

Chemist at NY’s Cornell University have identified the contamination in Menu Foods’ tainted pet food supply as aminopterin – a former cancer drug, abortion drug and illegal rat poison.  The wheat gluten that contained the poison was identified as coming from China.  Andre Rosowsky who is a chemist at Boston’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute speculated that a rare and highly controlled substance like this would not reasonably find its way into wheat gluten unless it was put there intentionally.  At this point it looks very likely that the pet deaths were intentional.

I managed, somehow, to wake up without an alarm at a quarter to eight this morning. Less than four hours of sleep. I didn’t feel all that great but I managed to pull myself out of bed just the same.

I had a lot of work to be done for the office this morning so I got right to work on that. I don’t have the day off today – I am just working from Geneseo. But we are bound to be more productive being here all day rather than in Newark.

Dominica slept in for several hours as she didn’t get much sleep last night either. Dad came over mid-morning and once I got a window in which I could escape from sitting directly in front of the computer we took it and all ran over to the Omega Grill for a really late breakfast or fairly normal lunch.

Between being a normal office day and having one email disaster after another to deal with I was very busy all day long. I hardly had any chance to get anything done around the house.

After lunch there was a lot of packing and work to be done.  The whole day was extremely busy as we expect all of the weekend will be.  For dinner we just ran over to the Shang Hai in Geneseo and had the buffet.

Today is email day for me. Specifically the old email that I have been working off of for the past several years is starting to experience some significant problems and the new email that I have been working on for the past few weeks isn’t totally tested yet so I am stuck switching the email over sooner than I had anticipated. That always makes for a hectic day. But at least it forces me to move forward sooner than later and keeps me from being able to procrastinate. But it is going to make tomorrow morning that much busier than I had been expecting.

I had to work a little late this evening. It was close to seven o’clock in the evening before I was able to get out of the office. I got home and Dominica packed while I did some very necessary work to prepare for the server migration this weekend. That ended up taking about two hours before we were able to load the car and leave. By this time I was really hungry as I had not had a chance to eat all day except for the Slim Fast drink that I had as I was getting into the car this morning on my way to the office.

We went to the first McDonald’s that we could get to easily and ate dinner. By the time we got off the highway, found the restaurant, ate and returned to the highway we burned enough time that effectively we did not leave until after nine thirty. Very late for a drive back to Geneseo.

The trip was pretty mundane. Kind of sad being the very last time that we will ever drive to our “home” in Geneseo. The house in Geneseo has been our home longer than anyplace else since either of us was in high school. It was actually home and not just a building.  We had lived there for three and three quarter years thinking almost the entire time that we would be keeping the house for a very long time yet.

It was around three in the morning when we pulled into Geneseo.  There was some fog on the drive and just a touch of rain but very little and nothing to write home about (technically my dad reads this so, in a way, I did write home about it.)  Dominica went pretty much straight to bed but I stayed up and worked for about an hour.  I was exhausted when I finally managed to get into bed.

For some reason Yahoo Travel has a page of pictures of hotels with a really old picture of me right in the middle of it all! The Internet is a strange place indeed.

But even better is the fact that one of my photos was used as the main picture for Come Visit Canton! My family will be very proud to know that a photo that I took when I was young is now on the visitor website for my family’s home town!

The RIAA, the lawsuit driven arm of the music recording industry, sued a woman for intentionally providing stolen music via the file sharing on her home computer.  Their evidence is based solely on IP assignment records from the woman’s ISP.  The case has been dragging on for two years and it appears that the RIAA is attempting to make it financially impossible for the woman to continue to defend herself.  Today the judge involved in the case told the RIAA that they would not be allowed to drop the case at this point – they will either have to consent to the woman’s right to trial by jury in which case the RIAA is expected to lose based on precedent or to have the trial dismissed with prejudice which means that the RIAA loses and could be counter sued in civil court and would very likely have to pay a heap of legal fees for dragging on a case and then walking away.  It would mean basically admitting that it was a trumped up charge and that they were trying to work through intimidation.  This is a huge loss for the RIAA.

The RIAA is having a really bad day as they are now taking a beating after having lost the Capital vs. Foster lawsuit where they are now being told that they have to produce a lot of records to the defendant.  And then, if it wasn’t all bad enough for the RIAA, now the University of Nebraska is suing the RIAA directly for wasting their time trying to make the university track network traffic of its transient network population.  Perhaps the RIAA should concentrate on making music instead of suing its customers.  No wonder music remains so expensive.

Not much to report today.  I worked as usual and came home.  We spent the evening at home hanging out with Oreo and watching the third season of The Facts of Life.  My textbook for my Master’s class at RIT arrived today so I had reading and homework to catch up on.  I ended up staying up until two in the morning working on that but it needed to be done.  At least I am mostly caught up at this point.  I think as long as I keep on top of it this weekend I will be okay.

Tomorrow night Dominica and I are heading for Geneseo.  We will be in Geneseo for three days doing all the packing that we possibly can as quickly as possible.  It is going to be a long, busy weekend.