Sheep Guarding Llama

I am back in New Jersey and SGL is back online. Life is good. I was a little tired this morning after all of the driving over the past five days but at least that is done now. (200 miles on Friday, 110 miles on Saturday, 200 miles on Sunday, 360 on Monday and 310 yesterday – that is 1180 miles in five days!)

Today we are sending out a special W.O.R.D. to Chris and Eric from Long Island who are now reading the site. Once you start you just can’t stop. SGL is addicting.

Oreo had a great time at daycare yesterday. All of the dogs were dressed up for the holiday and it was like a giant party. Oreo just loves parties. He knows when there is a party going on and he gets so excited. And he really likes wearing his costume so he was having all kinds of fun. Oreo’s Yoda costume won the highly coveted “Most Original Costume” award and he got a special treat bag to take home.

On the way into the office this morning I managed to record the first video blog using the new Kodak V530 digital camera. The one that we got is black and very attractive. It is small and far easier to hold than the old camera – the CX7530. Additionally the new camera captures 30fps at 640×480 instead of 15fps of the old camera. (I believe that all of the old videos were shot in 20fps 320×240 so brace yourselves for some seriously updated video quality.) The new camera also has zoom and focus working while the video is recording which was missing from the last camera. This is a far more versatile unit.

The one thing that really concerns me about the new camera is the battery situation. It uses a Kodak rechargeable battery which in and of itself is a good thing. My Nikon uses a Nikon battery and I am extremely happy with that but the Nikon is used differently (by me) and charging the battery is not a big deal (even though after having had it for a year and using it I have never had the battery even decrease in strength let alone need to be charged!) but the Kodak I carry with me and use all of the time for silly stuff and the last thing that I want to have happen is to have the battery die just when I go to use the camera and then I have to go put it onto the charger and wait three hours or more for the camera to be useful again. There is no way, as far as I can tell, to charge the battery without having it in the camera which is a huge pain. The camera comes with a totally useless base that you would think would be used for charging batteries outside of the camera but that is not what it is for. It apparently just exists to use extra plastic.

In any case I am quite excited to be able to use the new camera and I can’t wait to post the first pics and videos so that everyone can see how it is working. I managed to record a nine and a half minute vlog post this morning while driving in to the office which is much longer than I ever was able to record with the old camera so that is a very good sign. Perhaps the bad flash on the old camera was more of a problem than we thought.

For lunch today I went out with a buddy from the office and looked at a condo that he was interested in and then we headed down to the thriving metropolis of Warrenville to get some Thai from the Thai House. I haven’t managed to get down there for a while. Apparently this is the week of eating places that I haven’t made it to in a while. First the Omega twice yesterday. Then the Thai House. Maybe Tanjore later this week?

Dominica has been furniture shopping and discovered that getting the bookshelf delivered from Ikea that we want will cost as much for the shipping as it will for the bookshelf so we have to go and pick it up ourselves which will be awful. She did find a hall table from Target that she really likes that has to be ordered online which she attempted to do today. We desperately need those two pieces of furniture as we have no space to store anything and there are books and magazines just sprawling everywhere in the apartment and the hall table is critical for giving us a place to put down our keys and stuff. Right now they keep making their way to the kitchen counter and that has become a disaster.

Dominica also managed to find bar stools that we like but we are going to wait on getting those. Too much furniture all at once. We need to pace ourselves. The first thing that we need to do is to get all of these servers wrapped up and shipped off. They take up a lot of space and are really in the way. It is tough having “work materials” in such a small apartment. I am very hopeful to have them all moved out next week. At least most of them. That means, of course, that I have to make a trip back out to Scranton soon. Just what I wanted – more driving.

I am going to post early again tonight. I know that everyone has been SGL deprived and I managed to get a lot done today so enjoy.

Today would have been my grandmother’s 91st birthday. Today worked out to be a really good day for me to spend in Geneseo so that dad and I could hang out today. He has been busy working on the barn roof for the past week but today they are taking off.

Now that we have more or less decided that we are going to keep the house in Geneseo it is nicer coming back and knowing that it is ours and that we can decorate again and do what we want to do with it. We don’t have to worry about having it “ready to sell” anymore (it goes off the market in forty eight hours) and we can start storing stuff in it again and making it a nice place to use from time to time. I brought back my HP d325 desktop (the older 32bit machine that I still have) to set up and use as the house computer so that there is always something there to work with (there was a Mac there but that is just silly.)

I was up at seven this morning – yes after just three hours of sleep. I set up the laptop in the office and got logged in to work and made sure that everything was good. Then I called dad and scheduled breakfast.

Dad picked me up from the house at a quarter past eight and we went over to the Omega Grill for breakfast. It has been seven or eight months since I have been able to eat over there during the week and I haven’t seen the weekday crew in forever. Dad and I ended up hanging out until after eleven! (For those who aren’t local and haven’t been keeping tabs – Min and my Disney pictures are still hanging on the wall.)

After breakfast I went back home and worked for a few hours. There is always plenty to do whenever I am in Geneseo. I really wish that I had two weeks solid at home just to relax and to take care of things around the house. But that sure isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Dad came back over with a full load of stuff from Peoria Heights including several servers, my cameras, etc. We went back over to the Omega and got a late lunch. It was after three by the time I was back home.

I packed up the car. There is a ton of stuff to bring with me back down to Newark. I have plenty of equipment to work on and now I have my cameras to play with so you will be getting lots of new pictures very soon. The new Kodak little tiny camera has arrived as well and I plan to be using that for the video blog as early as tomorrow. It is really cool. I can’t believe how small it is. I think that I am going to enjoy using this camera a lot more than the old one. It is way more attractive at the very least.

I also packed up our Scandanavian “moon chair” that we have been using in the theatre in Geneseo. We need someplace comfortable to sit in Newark. It was about half past five when I finally managed to get onto the road heading south. Later than I had wanted but not by too much.

The drive went well and it took me a bit less than five hours to get down to Newark. I stopped at a McDonalds in New Jersey for some dinner pretty late in the night. I listened to “Mayflower” for the whole drive. I am a good chunk through that book now.

It was ten thirty when I arrived at the apartment and Dominica was waiting at the front with the luggage cart. We quickly loaded it up and got unpacked and went to bed. I was very tired.

SGL is still down today. This is our longest outage in as long as I can remember. Sorry that everyone can’t get in to check out all of the SGL awesomeness these last few days. I know that it makes for a long weekend. 🙂

I had a busy morning this morning and didn’t end up actually driving into the office until around one in the afternoon! I worked until almost seven though and I worked from home all morning so it wasn’t like I didn’t get anything done.

Dad went over to the house in Geneseo and did some more work attempting to get the SGL server back online. He called me at the office and gave me as much detail as he could about what was wrong but it turned out to be pretty major. We kicked around some ideas for getting it fixed including having him pack up the equipment and shipping it to me in Newark but the final decision was that I would just drive back to Geneseo after work tonight to deal with it myself.

I left work a little before seven and ran east out to Newark so that I could get supplies and a car load of stuff to go to Geneseo. Had I known that I was going to go to Geneseo tonight it would have saved at least an hour of driving.

Dominica got home and packed up as much as she could for me. Then she ran over to Food for Life and grabbed us some dinner. I pulled down Commerce Drive just in time to pick her up with the food. We ate and packed the car as quickly as possible and then I headed up US 280 to get up to New York.

The drive took five hours and it was around one in the morning when I arrived in Geneseo. I unpacked just what I absolutely needed for the night and then headed to the server room to work. I worked for three hours and finally SGL was back online. I have no idea how it happened but one of the drive enclosures on our main data storage array had shorted out and was sending garbage back to the RAID controller. Somewhat difficult to troubleshoot. But at least I managed to go to bed knowing that everything was up and running again. That is the worst – having to get sleep knowing that things are down and that in the morning you HAVE to get it working.

Dad is planning on coming over to meet me for breakfast in the morning at the Omega.

I was so exhausted that I ended up sleeping in until about ten o’clock this morning! Boy did I ever need that. I felt much better after getting an extreme night’s sleep. Oreo really appreciated the rest as well. He had doggie daycare all week and now his normal restful weekend is being spent with a small pug with loads of energy and no idea of when to take a break so Oreo is getting more and more tired.

We all just hung out at the house in Arnold for several hours before loading up the car and driving back up to Newark. The drive was much better tonight. It wasn’t raining and traffic was much lighter. It only took us four hours to get home.

This morning there was a wind storm in Geneseo and a tree came down cutting power to the SGL datacenter there. When power was restored SGL did not come back online. Dad tried some stuff today but was unsuccessful at bringing the server back up.

The drive down to Maryland last night was pretty crappy. Traffic was really heavy even as we left Newark and it started to rain before we had even pulled away from the curb at our building. Every time that I have had to drive anywhere for the past eight months it has been raining. It is driving me crazy.

We were in slow moving bumper to bumper traffic for hours. All the way through New Jersey it was awful. It wasn’t until we were in Delaware that we were able to get up any speed and traffic was still terrible there. The highway was moving so slowly that we decided that it had to be faster to take the shorter “local” router down Maryland’s Rt 301. That worked out well at route 301 was actually moving faster than the highway way.

As always driving the 330 my sciatica was horrible by the third hour or so of the drive. The pain is extreme and I can barely keep driving. The seat in the BMW hits me in just such a way that nothing I do makes it stop. Dominica was going to take over driving but she got a shoulder cramp just as I needed her to take over and I ended up having to drive the whole way.

It was late but not too late when we pulled into Stonington in Arnold, MD. Michelle and Frankie had all ready gone to bed but John was up waiting for us with Buddy their three year old pug that we had not yet met. The three of us stayed up for several hours just hanging out in the living room while Oreo and Buddy played. Oreo ended up peeing all over the place trying to establish dominance. What a pain!

It was almost two in the morning by the time we headed up to the guest quarters to get some sleep. This is our first time getting to stay in the guest suite at the Nicklins’ because last time the house was full from the Christmas party and we were the last to arrive and didn’t get dibs. This year we have made our reservations for the Christmas party well in advance and will be getting the guest suite. That is the weekend of December 9th. We will be in Maryland for that entire weekend.

John got us up at a little after seven this morning so that we could help him take his Corvette into the shop. Dominica wasn’t going to go with us but Michelle and her sister had gone to a fashion show and Dominica was going to be alone with the dogs until we got back and we were going to get breakfast so she decided to come along. Good thing that she did because the Corvette shop was in Gaithersburg, MD over fifty miles away to the northwest of Washington. That was well over two hours of total driving. We left Arnold around eight and got breakfast at the Annapolis Double T Diner on the way back and got back to the house after noon.

We spent the rest of the day just hanging out in Arnold. It was nice to get a chance to just visit and relax. Michelle cooked us dinner and John and I ran out and did a little shopping at Blockbuster like we often do when we are down there.

It was well after one in the morning when we got to bed. I have only had a few hours of sleep every day for the past several days and I am really exhausted.