Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning I wrapped up all of the work on both servers that I have been working on all weekend. It is really nice to have them done and ready to go. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to get them ready in time and that things would get pushed off again.

I was up working around half past eight this morning. Dominica slept until almost ten thirty. At nine this morning Andy went over to Marketplace Mall in Rochester to see if he could pick up a Nintendo Wii for us but when he got there he discovered that a lot of people had the same idea and all of the Wiis that they had were gone before he even had a chance to get close. Oh well. No Wii for us until after Christmas this year.

Around one this afternoon the datacentre contacted me and said that we could head straight there to drop off the servers. Dominica decided that she and Oreo would come along for the ride since otherwise we would hardly see each other today. So we loaded the car and left for Scranton around two o’clock.

We made good time and were at the data centre in time to unload, take a quick tour, get back in the car and make it back to the expressway by four! Not too shabby. We drove back down to US 80 and stopped at the Tandoor Palace at Exit 299 for some dinner. The food was excellent but it took a really long time. It ended up eating a lot of our evening but at least we really enjoyed our meals.

We came home and I got to work installing the half terabyte drive into Dominica’s computer. That took hardly any time at all. That will make her computer a ton more usable in the future. Space has been such an issue for her. Of course installing it was the small part. The real time waster was formatting the thing. That took a few hours.

Dominica and Oreo went to bed around ten and I decided to head down to the health club and see about sneaking in a work out. The rumor is (by rumor I mean official announcement printed and and slipped under our doors) that the locker rooms, steam rooms and saunas are done and that we were able to start using them a day or two ago. I am very excited to try out the steam room.

I put in a short forty minute workout and hit the locker room. Note: locker room. Singular. Apparently we have a single unisex locker room. There is a spot where I can only assume there is supposed to be a second locker room but if they call this finished I think the building inspector will want to have a conversation with them. The only part of the area that could even sort of be called done is the drywall. No floor yet, no doors, no lockers. All of the construction equipment is just piled in the middle of the room. It is totally unsafe for people to be walking around in there. Toilets are sitting on the floor next to where they will eventually go. I think their idea of “done” is a bit different than ours. This is two days after this locker room was “done”! I really should have taken some pictures to illustrate just how far from done they are. It looks as though they just walked into a blank space and started to set up shop and hadn’t actually started much yet.

I asked the concierge about the locker rooms, steam rooms, etc. I was told that the locker room labels were scheduled for tomorrow (um, labeled “unisex” and “do not enter”?) But that they had no idea what the “done” was supposed to mean or how we were expected to use coed showers, sauna, steam room, etc. Or if they really were coed or not. All they knew was that all of the residents of 1180 Raymond had received official notice that everything was complete and ready to use and that everyone was confused and asking what they were supposed to do.

I got to bed between three and four in the morning last night and was up and back to work on the server just a little before ten this morning. Not a lot of sleep but not bad.

I got up and immediately got back to work working on the servers getting them ready to go to Scranton. I worked on the SUSE 10.2 box pretty much all day. It took several hours before I finally had it installed. I ran into all kinds of problems and had to do a couple of full installs but I finally got it working and have a really cool 10.2 box now. I am excited to get to start actually using it very soon.

There was very little going on today other than server work and all on a single server. For dinner Dominica and I drove back up to Parsipanny and ate at the vegetarian Indian restaurant that we discovered there on Wednesday. It was not a buffet tonight but the food was very good and we are very happy that we found this place although we still prefer the dosa from Tanjore and really want to get back down there sometime soon.

We did hit CompUSA on the way home so that I could pick up a SATA cable for Dominica’s computer as we have not been able to put in her new hard drive for several days since it didn’t come with a SATA cable and for some reason I don’t have any spares sitting around the apartment. Millions of cables but no SATA cables. It figures.

While we were at CompUSA I discovered that Sierra has decided to re-release a number of their most classic game titles in inexpensive packs that have been updated to work on Windows 2000 and XP! I am very excited. At CompUSA we found the King’s Quest Collection which of course we had to buy even though I all ready own them all. (It is only King’s Quest I-VII, KQ VIII is, I guess, so bad that it is not considered to be canonical.) I went onto Amazon and discovered that other classic series are available including Space Quest (which I have to order!), Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. The only thing that is obviously missing is the Quest for Glory series. I really hope that Sierra brings that one out. If you are into classic adventure gaming you will have to check these out.

We turned in early. I finished watching Dead and Breakfast on Dominica’s Vision M. That turned out to be a pretty funny movie taking after classic Romero zombie flicks but with a Texan flair. Worth checking out for horror movie fans.

Well the Flickr site is pretty much completely labeled and captioned now. I have done my best to go picture by picture and add tags and to put them all into appropriate sets. I am sure that there is a lot missed and a lot wrong but the bulk is done. That was a lot of work.

I did manage to post the awesome shot that I took with the Nikon from my living room window: Manhattan Skyline from 1180 Raymond Blvd., Newark, NJ. That picture is great. I did a search on Google today for “1180 Raymond” and that picture ranked higher than any of the sites from the company that owns the building! But then again, we do get eleven hundred hits a day right now 🙂

It is time for Self Elfing madness. Blame my father for this one. First he elfed himself and sent it to me. So I decided that SGL needed an Elfed Scott Alan Miller. Dominica thought that that was so funny that she decided that we needed an Oreo the Elf as well. It turns out that this is Dominica the Elf. Dominica didn’t know that she had accidentally created an elf of herself and thought that she had made one of Oreo and emailed me the link. But the site was down and I wasn’t able to check it for a full day. So it turns out to not be the elf that Dominica thought that it was.

The weather has been in the sixties the last couple of days here in Newark. I can’t believe that it is December at all. Today it is a bit cooler and I actually had to put on a fleece! It was overcast this morning but partially cloudy this afternoon and still in the fifties. Can’t complain though. NJ weather is awesome.

I got into work around eleven today but it took me forever before I was able to do anything productive because my computer crashed twice before I could even open my email. Oh, the joys of outdated Windows. In many ways I miss Windows NT 4.0 SP6a. That was one seriously solid operating system. It wasn’t flashy and it stayed around long enough to get the kinks worked out of it and everyone knew how to use it and how to fix it. If it just didn’t need to reboot between each network change it would have been perfect! (That rebooting issue was unbelievable.) It is amazing how many shops, even today with the third replacement for NT 4.0 right around the corner, still run on NT 4.0 without any real issues. The biggest problem is aging hardware and not the software at all. If Microsoft had kept up with security fixes for NT 4.0 and gotten it up to SP7 like they had planned or, by now, SP8 I bet there would be a huge market share still running on it. It would be the perfect choice for shops needed 32bit Windows apps but don’t use .NET. Not a huge share of the market but a big chunk. But that would have cost Microsoft a fortune to have done. Oh well.

I got to go to lunch with my team at the office today. It is Friday and I went for fish and chips. I haven’t had good fish and chips for a while. I wasn’t going to get it but scrod is my favourite and I couldn’t pass it up.

Tonight’s plan is for Dominica to work on her A+ certification and for me to work on servers destined for a move to Scranton over the weekend. I don’t have a schedule from Scranton yet of when they can receive a shipment but I am not sure when I will be able to go there either. So we will be playing the weekend by ear.

I have been attempting to contact NJIT about their Master’s of IS program but they have not been in the office and have not called me back. I have been digging on their site and the bottom line is that it really looks like the program is just a blow-off program that is really simple and basic and full of fluff (which is what several of their grads have told me) and not very serious but would not work well for me, even to just get a degree quickly, because they have a bunch of non-IT fluff requirements that they make you do before getting into the program (extra math beyond Calc II, accounting – what does accounting have to do with IT?) It is all just an excuse to get a few thousand extra dollars from you by forcing everyone to take rudimentary bridge classes. So RIT looks like it is going to be the way to go which is a highly respected school. So that makes me happy. But the program will be longer and a lot more work than NJIT’s program.

It was a quiet day in the office today. Not that that wasn’t as expected. But this month is looking to be awesome.

I got to leave the office around half past five which isn’t bad at all. Traffic was awful getting home tonight though. Friday nights are the worst because everyone is driving somewhere or other all of the time. The roads are just packed.

When I got home we discovered an announcement from the building management here at 1180 Raymond – our showers, sauna and steamrooms down in the health club are supposed to be open as of tomorrow! Awesome. But even better than that we noticed that they have manage to procure both an XBOX 360 (which we had been expecting) but also a Sony PS3 for our media center! Oh yeah baby! Playstation 3 for our apartment. Whoo-hoo. How cool is that? They didn’t even tell us ahead of time that they had gotten one. We thought that they would probably put in a PS2 or something but we had no idea that an actual PS3 would arrive – at least not so soon. So we are very excited about that and glad that we are not getting one this year as we can now easily wait until next year and have had time to have played it to be sure that it is something that we would really use.

Dominica decided that she was taking the entire evening off and just playing video games all night. Specifically The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap which is one of her new favourite games even though it really frustrates her because it is quite difficult.

My job this evening is getting servers ready to be shipped to Scranton. This is no small project. There is much work that needs to be done before a server is ready to go and everything has to be in place and just so because once the equipment is located at the data center there then there is no real way to access it again and that can be a real problem as we have discovered very recently with the two big SGL outages.

The wind was really awful tonight. Up here on the higher floors it gets exceptionally windy and very loud. It was so windy that I could hear heavy equipment getting knocked over in the street down below.

I had to stay up quite late tonight working on the servers that are going to Scranton. Not my favourite thing in the world to do but it has to be done. I will feel a lot better once these boxes are safely located in Pennsylvania. Not only will they not be taking up valuable space in my tiny apartment but they will actually be doing some good instead of just being lumps of metal. It takes way too long from the time a new machine gets purchased until it actually gets used.

One of the cool things that I got a chance to do tonight was to do my very first installation of the newly released openSUSE 10.2 operating system. I have been working with the SUSE family of operating systems for many years now – I think I starting using SUSE as my preferred Linux in 2000 – and I am always excited to have a chance to roll out a new version. Tonight I installed the 32bit x86 version. I am hoping that if I have some spare time this weekend that I will have an opportunity to upgrade by desktop machine, which is AMD64 based, to openSUSE 10.2 as well but that might have to wait for another week or so.

While I was waiting for one thing or another (which seems to be my destiny) I managed to spend a lot of time reading Joel Spolsky’s book “Joel on Software” named for the blog from which it is taken. I was able to read almost eighty pages tonight.

One thing that I discovered by staying up so late, maybe for the first time in this apartment, is that my next door neighbour makes a bit of noise at night. I can hear the radio or television or something pretty clearly. I noticed how much I could hear even over the very loud servers that I was working on.

Oreo stayed out in the living room with me the entire time that I was working. He just settled in on the futon and went right to sleep.

I didn’t get nearly as much done as I had hoped that I would but I did manage to make good progress tonight.

Oreo loves his Thursday hanging out with me. Today is his first day to be able to stay at home in two weeks so he is really exhausted. His “day off” last week involved traveling to Rochester and back which was more restful than going to daycare but not nearly the same as just staying in his bed all day like he normally does.

Today is a beautiful day for staying in too. The sun is out and the air is warm. So warm, in fact, that we have one of our windows open to enjoy the fresh air and the apartment is a bit on the warm side! New Jersey is awesome.

Dominica found a great article about a Brazilian businessman traveling in Germany who caught a burglar in his home in Sao Paolo from his web cam and managed to get the police to catch him there red handed.

Today I finally ran a log analyzer on the SGL logs for the first time in a year or two. I am not sure how long it has been but definitely the first time since we moved to the current server and WordPress. I was surprised to discover that we are no longer getting the one hundred hits a day like we were the last time that I checked the statistics. We are now getting over one thousand hits a day! That is roughly a hit every one and a half minutes all day long, every day. Whoo-hoo.

I worked from home until just after noon. Then I drove into Warren for a lunch meeting that lasted for almost two hours. Dominica got out of work just a little after that and went down to the Menlo Park Mall near Edison and did some Christmas shopping while I was at the meeting. Then I joined her and we did some more shopping.

We ran her car over to the BMW auto body shop near Menlo Park and got an appraisal for the bumper damager. We are hoping to be able to get that taken care of very soon now that we finally have the paperwork ready to submit for it.

After checking on the car we came home and spent the evening hanging out with Oreo and watching movies. We watched Ladies in Lavender with Judy Dench and Maggie Smith. That was better than I had guessed that it would be although it was nothing special. Then we watched The Notebook which Dominica has been wanting to see for a while. I wasn’t thinking that I was going to like it but I ended up really enjoying although it is a very sad film. Definitely not a movie to be watched lightly.

I starting a long download of SUSE 10.2 32bit. I am hoping to be able to install it tomorrow on one of the servers heading for Scranton. I am happy that the latest version came out just in time to get it installed before the servers have to go.

Today is a big day for cool links that have been sitting in my email and that I have finally gotten around to checking out plus one that I managed to discover all by myself. So we will start with that one.

Mighty McPilgrim: Plymouth, MA. Discovering America’s Hometown For this film the team over at Might McPilgrim actually took the time to film with real 16mm film and hand splice it together. That is no easy project. You have to give them credit – the final project turned out great. (Mighty McPilgrim is most famous for their short piece: BrokeMac Mountain.)

The Five Stages of a Giraffe in Quicksand was sent to me by a coworker and is one of the funniest clay animations I have seen in a long time.

Jerome Murat doing a live stage performance in France.

In the Old New Thing there was a link to middle schoolers playing classic video games. It really shows how much things have changed since we were all little.

I also discovered through the ZenCast tool from Creative that National Geographic is making some short videos available for free from their website. I didn’t find any way to download these shows directly so you will need to use a podcatching tool to get them easily or else you will have to manually parse the XML feed information to figure out the individual links.

Danielle Ralston managed to track down some photographs of the missionary center in Papua New Guinea where they will be stationed in the middle of next year. It doesn’t show much but it is interesting to see pictures of and in buildings and places where they will be working.

I woke up early this morning just after four and didn’t feel very well (maybe I have caught whatever Bob Crissman had the other day but in a much more mild form.) I ended up being up for almost two hours. I managed to use the time to get the Video Tour of Newark posted on the site which took quite a while with the two huge uploads that I had to do to get the video onto OurMedia. I also converted a bunch of videos that I had downloaded so that I could put them onto the Creative Zen Vision M so that I could check them out once I was able to get back to bed.

I went back to bed just before Dominica got up to go to work and slept for about an hour. I woke up several times over the course of the hour and was pretty delirious. I managed to drag myself out of bed at half past eight and was feeling a little better at that point.

I didn’t go into the office until almost eleven. Things have been really slow and there is nothing to do there anyway. I have just been reading tons of magazines and working on SGL and the Flickr site.

Tomorrow I am working from home for most of the day. In the morning it will be just me and Oreo hanging out. Then I have to go in nearly to the office for a lunch meeting at a nearby restaurant. Then I am heading down to Edison to meet Dominica on her afternoon off so that we can do some final Christmas shopping and attempt to get an estimate on the damage to the BMW. That has been lingering forever now.

I found out from Mary yesterday that she has a new job down in Dansville now. Her mother lives in Dansville so she is crashing there during the week. It is awesome that she has a new job but it is crappy that she just finished moving into a new apartment in Warsaw that is too far away from her new job for her to be able to use the new apartment except on weekends.

I tried contacting NJIT about their totally online MSIS program but was not able to get any information today. Every time that I attempt to contact them there is no one there. Hopefully someone will get back to me quickly.

Dominica and I decided that tonight we were going to go out exploring to find some Indian food in our area. Dominica did some research and discovered the Udipi Cafe not too far away from Newark at the end of US 280. That is a bit far but not ridiculously far so our plan is to head out there as soon as Dominica gets home from work. I will be very hungry by then. I have actually made it for an entire week without having more than a single meal on any given day (although I did some after mean grazing at the Nicklin Christmas Party it wasn’t very much.)

We got home and took Oreo up to the apartment and then set off to find the restaurant. Traffic was bad as it was still rush hour but it wasn’t too bad because it was the expressway almost the entire way. Luckily we are getting to know our way around Newark pretty well so getting to the expressway was easy even when the most direct route was so congested that we had to find another entrance to it.

We finally found the place and were very happy with our dinner. They actually have a “dosa bar” just like an omelet bar on their buffet and everything is vegetarian. The food was very good but there was a lot of stuff that we had never had before so it was a big learning curve for us. People had to help us figure out how to eat some of the stuff but everything was very delicious. We will definitely be going back there again. Dinner was also really cheap. We got a lot of food for not very much money. One of the big advantages of all vegetarian restaurants – all of the costs are lower. If you have one meat item, especially in a buffet situation, the cost skyrockets.

We came home and decided to pretty much just call it a night. I moved some videos over to the Vision M so that I could watch them from bed. I finished converting Dead and Breakfast and moved that over too.

The rails for the servers going to Scranton arrived tonight. I unpacked them and checked them out. That means that I am in good shape for a trip to Scranton this weekend – hopefully on Saturday morning but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. We now have enough rails to move all of our HP DL360 G1 servers to Scranton. I will get as many of those as possible moved right away.