Sheep Guarding Llama

I am guessing that none of you were aware that today was Plough Monday. Well, it is. The first Monday after Christmas (remember Christmas only officially ended on Saturday at dusk – the end of the twelfth day of Christmas.) SGL sure is educational, isn’t it?

I woke up this morning at half past two! I woke up partially because Oreo is the world’s biggest bed hog and I was struggling just to keep from falling out of bed. Oreo spent the entire night sleeping on my pillow and I had to rest my head on my arm. Once I was awake I was able to hear an alarm going off. Unfortunately it was not an alarm in our apartment. As far as I can tell it might not even be an alarm in our building, but I sure can hear it just fine. That kept me awake for a while so I decided that no one was planning on turning it off so I just got up and got moving on the day.

I got ready for work and then checked in with the office. I did some work starting around five and almost immediately had an outage to deal with and there went my morning. In addition to an outage at the office the Scranton Data Center went offline this morning for two hours taking my sanity with it. When it rains it pours. Oh yes, and it is raining quite hard this morning down here. It is still pretty warm but it is really raining.

I decided that with all of the issues going on that I needed to get into the office right away. So I waited until Dominica woke up at half past six and then I drove into the office. I am glad that this is going to be a short week or this would be a really bad omen of me facing a week of no sleep. At least I managed to get almost four hours last night. Better than nothing.

I am only in the office for three days this week which is awesome. Today and tomorrow should be more or less normal days and then Wednesday I will leave for Geneseo right from work with a quick pit stop in Scranton to drop off a server. I can’t wait to get that server into Scranton. One less thing to worry about. I need more stuff to be “just working” at this point.

I had a phone meeting with someone from the Masters of Science in Information Technology program at RIT today.  The plan is for me to begin classes on March 12th which is just a few weeks away at this point (okay, more a smartish-few but still quite soon.)

It was a stinky day in New York City today.  We didn’t notice anything out in our neck of New Jersey.  Apparently Newark is far enough away from NYC and Jersey City to escape the stench.

It was a busy day for me.  I was exhausted too having gotten so little sleep last night.  I left work at four and had a really quick commute back to Newark.  No traffic at all.  It was great.

When I arrived back home I had a package from Amazon.  My book “eXtreme Programming for Web Projects” had arrived which is perfect as I need a new book to start on.

Dominica and Oreo got home and we left almost immediately to go to Food for Life for some dinner.  They have started offering tilapia as a replacement to the whiting that they have always had.  I like whiting but Dominica doesn’t like it at all and is really excited to be able to get their meals with tilapia.

After dinner it was back to the apartment for studying and server building.  This has become the focus of our time and will continue to be so for several weeks more.  I did manage to get two virtual machines built this evening.  That worked out really well.  The new VMWare server is going to work very well indeed, I think.

We decided to go to bed very much on the early side tonight.  I am exhausted from last night and want to be useful at the office tomorrow.

It was a short night for me. Oreo only went out once yesterday and he was up bright and early this morning needing to take a walk in the park. When he is at daycare all week he doesn’t get to go to the park very much and he really loves it now when I take him. He just runs all over smelling everything. He is so funny to watch.

Before going to bed last night I finished reading “The Pragmatic Programmer”. That is an excellent book that I recommend to any programmer.

Once Dominica was awake – a few hours after Oreo and I got up – we drove out to Harrison and looked at some condos there. They are quite nice and not done yet. A little more expensive than we had been anticipating but they were definitely interesting.

After looking at the condos we tried going to the Tops Diner for breakfast but, as always, the place was completely packed. We knew better than to go there but fooled ourselves into trying it. We left immediately and went to the IHOP in University Heights. The weight might be just as long but at least we know that the food will be good.

I spent the day working on the virtualization server and Dominica put in a bit of time studying and playing video games (mostly playing video games.)  Oreo was very quiet all day and pretty much just slept.  He appears to be a little bit sick we think but we aren’t sure.  He might just be tired.

It was a slow evening and we went to bed on the very early side.  Back to work tomorrow.  At least it is a very short week.

Today is the beginning of Opentyde – the traditional English season of winter weddings that runs from Epiphany until Ash Wednesday. Opentyde was the only part of the winter calendar when the Catholic and Anglican churches allowed weddings to occur and at one point because quite popular for royal weddings. Today is also known as Wassail Day although last night, Wassail Eve, is the far more famous use of the holiday. Much like Halloween has totally overshadowed All Hallows Day on November 1st.

Newark was so incredibly warm this morning when we got up. We slept with the windows open last night and really we needed to have the air conditioning on it was so warm. There was even a breeze coming in through the window and still the air blowing through was warm. We are projected to be going five degrees over the all time record for this date today. By the time that Dominica and I walked next door to Food for Life to get a late breakfast it was seventy degrees out! Seventy! In January! This must be the warmest day “at home” that I have ever had in January. This is totally nuts (or nvts in Latin – I love that joke.) We checked and it is only fifty-two degrees back home in Geneseo, sixty back home for Min in Frankfort and sixty-five for the Grices in Houston, Texas!

I spent the main part of the day completing work on the Asterisk server that has to be delivered to Scranton on Wednesday evening. That took most of the day but I am very happy to finally have the work done and have the machine ready to be shipped. On Wednesday I am sending one server to Scranton and two machines being decommissioned heading to dad’s place. That is three servers that don’t have to be stored in the apartment anymore. I also did some work today getting web sites moved from hosting in Geneseo to Scranton. My hope is that by the end of the week there will be one more machine in Geneseo being decommissioned before I leave. That would be awesome.

This evening Dominica had to return a dress to Dress Barn so we drove out to Kearny (pronounced Carnie but we have no idea why) and took that back. Oreo was glad to be able to hang out with us. Then we hit Walmart for some quick supplies. While we were there we noticed that they had the Sony PS3 just sitting on the shelf. No one was looking at it. No one was interested. No one seemed to care at all. Pretty funny considering all of the hype about it just a few weeks ago. No one believed me that they wouldn’t sell out. It is true that they did sell out but only by delivering half as many a promised. Given the number that they said was shipping and how few have sold – the number that I said would not sell out has not yet sold even over a week after Christmas even with all of those kids running around with all of their Christmas money burning holes in their pockets. Still no Nintendo Wii to be found, however.

We couldn’t figure out what we wanted to eat for dinner. It took forever for us to settle on IHOP by the hospital. We were all ready out in the car so it wasn’t a big deal to drive over there. Dinner was good and we came home and I wrapped up work on the Asterisk server and Min got down to studying for her exam. She is almost done with the book that she is currently reading which is the Exam Cram that she borrowed from Andy like two years or so ago. The same book that Jeremy had used when he studied for the exam over a year ago.

A week or so ago dad sent me an Internal Kodak commercial (as in a commercial meant just for Kodakers to watch.) It is very funny and cute and hopefully shows Rochester’s prodigal son figuring out how to run a company again after all these years but I don’t think that anyone is going to be holding their breath. Of the things that they mention in the advert being the “hot new Kodak technologies” most of them are things that I can do all ready with the equipment that I have. Sure Kodak will make it more convenient than it has been but that is hardly ground-shaking news. I hope that they figure this stuff out and I am really happy that they finally are semi-officially making fun of Advantix that I have been pissed about for more than a decade (Advantix is to Kodak as Windows ME is to Microsoft.)

We spent the evening relaxing and watching Are You Being Served?.  I built a VMWare virtualization server that will be going to Scranton eventually.  This is my first DL380 G2 that I am working on.  Unfortunately it is SO loud that it makes doing anything else in the apartment pretty much impossible.

Tonight is Wassail Eve – also knows as Twelfth Night, the last night of the Christmas Holiday season which traditionally began on December 6th with Saint Nicholas Day and would end tonight making it a full month of festivities. But recent American tradition has made Thanksgiving Morn (with the Christmas themed parades which are actually recorded ahead of time putting those localities ahead of everyone else) the beginning of the holiday season and Black Friday the beginning of Christmas shopping but has moved the ending of the season to January 2nd. So the American season is actually a little longer than it traditionally would have been but is focussed totally around shopping and not the holiday itself.

(The term Twelfth Night refers to tomorrow being the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas – Epiphany in celebration of the Magi bringing gifts to the baby Jesus. In easter Christian tradition, this is the actual Christmas day celebration instead of December 25th as we celebrate in the west. But the twelve days of Christmas spans from December 25th until January 6th so the full Christmas covers both gift giving traditions under a single religious celebration.)

In some older English traditions, the winter holiday season begins with All Hallows Eve (Halloween) and runs until Wassail Eve. It was a long holiday season. In some of Latin America, Christmas is considered to run until February 2nd ending in Candlemas. However in the United States and Canada this has been overshadowed by Groundhog Day.

Wassail is the old English term for “Good Health To You” which was derived from the old Norse words meaning roughly “be you” and “healthy”. I have not studied the etymology of hail too closely but my understanding is that it was long the word for healthy in several Germanic languages and is still used that way in even modern American English although not very commonly. The word “healthy” is directly derived from it and even the more common use of hailing someone (Star Trek “Open hailing frequencies”) is from the usage meaning “to wish good health from a distance”.

I got six hours of sleep last night making one of the best nights of sleep for me this entire week. I got into the office and it was a very quiet morning. The phone didn’t ring once the entire time that I was covering the desk. That is how I like it. I like a nice, quiet morning when I can get caught up on things, get my head wrapped around the day, etc. I even got a chance to read some more in the book that I am currently working my way through. I am hoping to finish it today.

Email was slow today. I received little office email and didn’t get any personal email all morning. It was crazy. It ended up being a slow day in general. I never really got the feel that it was slow but just about nothing actually happened all day. It was a weird sensation. I was hoping to get to go out to lunch today with some of the guys but no one ended up going out for lunch today and I went down to the cafeteria again today. I have had egg salad wraps all week!

Well, my plan had been to get out of the office nice and early today but there was no such luck. My “get out early” turned into a very busy evening. I put in a full ten hour day at my desk including eating lunch without leaving my desk.

I did manage to get some decent reading done during the day and I spent a little while teaching myself some C++ programming. I have a cursory knowledge of C++ but I have decided that I need to learn it a little more thoroughly. Nothing real serious, just enough to be able to actually use it from time to time. I wrote a cool little temperature conversion program today to test it out. I made it act just like a normal UNIX utility taking command line parameters, returning version information, outputting its own help page, etc. And it does its work silently just taking in a number and returning unformatted output so that you can use it inline with other tools. You can even pass it a precision parameter and it will modify the length of its output for you. Handy and cool. Not bad for passing the time at work today. I might actually find myself using it myself.

I got home and had to work for about two hours before we were able to go out to Food for Life for some dinner. We came home and watched some of Disney’s Gummi Bears. Both Dominica and Oreo were exhausted tonight. Oreo has been at daycare for four straight days and is totally exhausted. We are looking forward to a laid back weekend of just staying in Newark. We really don’t have any plans for the weekend other than Dominica studying for her exam and me working on the Asterix server that is being delivered to Scranton on Wednesday evening.

Tomorrow is the beginning of Opentyde.  SGL is your source for traditional calendar information 🙂

I heard on the weather report today that we are supposed to hit almost sixty today and on Saturday, just two days away, that we are going to be breaking the all time record by four degrees and coming dangerously close to seventy! Apparently the weather is really throwing off the golf courses in the area as many of them are open and in full swing. I wish I had some time to get out and play some golf. This is perfect weather for it. I can’t believe that it is all ready the first week in January and it isn’t in the least bit skingy! New Jersey is awesome for weather.

I was up at five this morning luckily not sleeping through my alarm. It was nearly impossible to pull myself out of bed, though, as Oreo was in super-ultra-snuggle mode and had been sleeping right beside me sharing my pillow all night. He is a hard dog to leave in the morning. Apparently yesterday he was confused by my leaving for work so early and when Min got up to go to work he walked around the apartment looking for me.

It was another slow morning for me, but things are starting to pick up. I am starting to have work to do in addition to my reading. This morning I also took some time to focus on email housekeeping. My email only gets a really thorough cleaning out when I am facing an email migration. Currently my email runs on a custom built Postfix and Cyrus solution that took an incredible amount of work to put together. That system is aging now and the plan is to replace it, in the very near future, with a Zimbra based system. So I am taking the time to delete all of the email that I don’t think that I will need so that I don’t have to copy all of it over to the new system. For anyone reading this that is on the same email system as me, this is your heads up that it would be a good time to clean out your email.

While going through my old email I found some emails that I kept just as address book entries. I tried emailing several people that I haven’t had contact with in several years. Sadly, few people kept their email addresses from many years ago and I have lost contact with some people. Bob Murphy from Ithaca’s email is gone and I no longer can contact him and Salisa Mohammad from Singapore that I have known since the fall of 2000’s Yahoo account is gone and I can no longer contact her. If you are one of those people who don’t have a permanent email account, please get one ASAP and switch over to it and notify everyone that you know! This is a big deal. In this day and age there is no reason for your email address or telephone number to ever change. We live in a world of persistent contact. There is no longer any reason to lose contact with people. If you are using an email address tied to your Internet service provider, stop now. Get a free ISP neutral account from someone like Yahoo! or Google or someone else that is definitely not going anywhere. Make sure that everyone is aware of the new email address and start really using it. Don’t treat your email address like a street address that has to change every time that you move. It isn’t and doing that is destroying the underlying value of the system. An email address can follow you the rest of your life and keep you in contact with people forever. Don’t throw away one of the biggest value propositions of living in the Internet age. The reality is that it is vastly more work to switch email address when you move or change Internet providers than it is to learn one system that you use forever.

We lost power at the office again this morning! I am not sure what is going on in northern New Jersey this week but this is quite surprising given the awesome weather that we have been having. My office is on a massive battery backed power system so it doesn’t affect us much – the lights just turn on and off for about twenty seconds when the power switches over to generator.

Important Fashion Notice: Contrary to popular belief NASCAR polo shirts with checkered flag collars are not cool and hip. Yes I am serious. No, I am not kidding. If you own one, throw it out. Now. Go. (And no, mullets are not in style again either. Nor were they in style before. And no, even when someone knew who he was, Billy Ray Cyrus was not “cool”.)

Important Fashion Addendum: Just because someone is wearing a NASCAR polo does NOT make koolats somehow acceptable. Calling them gouchos or gauchos just makes it sound like you don’t know what koolats are because that is obviously what they are. And it makes you look like you don’t know how to spell gaucho because that is what they are named after. And it is bordering on racial slur. So just save us all a lot of embarrassment (you for looking like your mother mismeasured before making you prison issue pajamas and me for having to make fun of you in this forum about it) and wear either pants or shorts but not “jams”.

Francesca talked to Dominica earlier this week and Dominica told her that she had to go out and get Guitar Hero II for their Playstation 2. Apparently she listened because she sent us this review today:

“I totally love guitar hero 2.

strike that, i AM a guitar hero.

that is all i can think about. nothing is gettting done at my house, cuz
i am rockin out in the living room as loud as i can. i totally ‘feel’
like i am playing all the rhythms in the whole song. my favorite is
“mother tell your children not to look my way, tell your children how to
blah blah blah…..”

and then there is motley crue and warrant, cherry pie!!!

i cannot get enough. cannot cannot cannot.

i totally love it!!!”

You can’t get much more of a raving review than that. I guess that she likes Guitar Hero II even more than she liked Cooking Mama on Dominica’s Nintendo DS.

Things got plenty slow this afternoon allowing me to escape from the office at a reasonable time. I really like the early shift because I get to escape on the early side.

I got home and spent the evening working either on the new TrixBox server or with Andy as he and Eric are just about ready to deploy the new system to the University of Rochester Medical Center. Andy and I are hoping that the installation can be scheduled this weekend. That would be awesome. What a great way to start off the new year.

Dominica and Oreo got home and we ordered some Dominos Pizza for dinner so that it would be quick and easy. They messed up the order a little and put pepperoni on Dominica’s pizza rather than onions though. That was disgusting but it would have been ridiculous to send it back. So she just picked off the pepperoni and ate the pizza anyway. It is too bad that pepperoni is so unhealthy or we could have at least given it to Oreo but he always has to watch his fat intake so he only got one piece. But he really enjoyed it!

Castile Christian Academy finally got back into touch with me this evening. We have been attempting to get into contact with them for some time but we know that things have been crazy down there and that no one has had much time for dealing with computer related issues. At least now we know that people are still alive there.

Dominica and I went to bed on the early side tonight. Tomorrow is my last early day and I am very tired after having lost more and more sleep all week long. Today was a good productive day for me though. Lots of reading, good TrixBox work and a bit of good work with Andy. Dominica got a tiny bit of studying done but not very much.