Oreo had a restless night and appears to be about the same first thing this morning.  It is pretty difficult to judge illness on a sleeping dog, however, so we will have to take a “reading” later in the day.

Liesl was pretty fussy last night and got us up around four thirty just wanting to be held.  So I stayed up with her until seven thirty or so when she was clearly hungry.  So then Dominica got up and stayed up with her for a while feeding her and I went to sleep.

I finally got up at ten thirty, showered and headed to the basement to work on SGL, check email and messages and to log into the office to get some work done.  The industry freeze starts tomorrow and anything that we are going to get done before it hits has to be done today.  So I am taking advantage of being up while everyone else is asleep to get some stuff done before January.  It is also a chance to get in some hours prior to my big rate cut that is coming on January 1st.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I posted some additional pictures of Liesl on to Flickr.  These few are the first pictures taken with the new Nikkor F1.4 50mm lens.  I took a series of shots of Dominica holding Liesl by the deck door in Liesl’s new striped sweater than her Grandma Tocco knit for her.

I added a bunch of pictures of Oreo to the Boston Commons group on Flickr today.

Oreo came down to the basement just after noon.  He seemed to be feeling slightly better than he did yesterday but it is impossible to really tell.  He stretched and itched and seemed to be walking okay, but he wasn’t hungry and just wanted to lay beside me on his Star Wars pillow and be covered up in his fleece blankets.

Lunch for me today was just cereal.  Dominica and Liesl didn’t leave the bedroom until almost two in the afternoon so I was left eating on my own.

I made breakfast for Oreo and after a few minutes he decided that he would give it a try.  This is his first food in twenty four hours.

Another blog, The Urban Muse, used my growingly famous His and Hers Blackberry image today.  I am just about to top 2,000 views on the image (which does not include views on the image from alternate sites such as this blog.)

The light was pretty good, for a change, this afternoon so I took a nice walk around Chapel Hill and took some pictures with my new 50mm lens.  Now we have a nice set of pictures to show to people to give them an idea of where it is that we live.  No one from back home really has a good feel for what downstate in Westchester is like.  I took seventy-nine pictures while walking and decided to post about thirty of them.

For dinner, Dominica cooked Quorn chicken with broccoli meals, broccoli au grautin and vegetable steamed rice.  We watched a little Hulu on the PS3.  Then, after dinner, Liesl decided to take a long evening nap sleeping on my chest after I fed her a bottle.  She ended up sleeping on my chest for almost eight hours until one thirty in the morning!

While Liesl was sleeping on my chest we all watched the first half of the first season of Reba which neither of us have ever seen.  As far as we can tell the show was really made to be a statement about Texas.  The show is just one shot at Texas after another.

Oh, about today’s title.  Yes, Liesl is sixteen days old going on seventeen.  It just seemed appropriate.  And to celebrate this being a “Liesl Day” (watch The Sound of Music if you don’t get it) you can head over to www.statefarm.com/teendriving and download Modern Music’s new rock rendition of the classic song “Sixteen Going on Seventeen“.  It is a free MP3 download paid for by State Farm.  Good song too.

I am working from home today which is quite the blessing or I would have gotten no sleep at all as I have to get up more than an hour earlier when going in to the office and even then it is a mad rush to get in there. My workstation at the office got damaged yesterday and Microsoft Outlook is not functioning which leaves me rather crippled when in the office but I have all of my faculties when working from home (all of my email faculties at least.)

Oreo is happy to be home today. He really needed daycare yesterday after his long weekend. He gets so bored when he is just in the apartment for an extended period of time. Daycare is so good for him. It gives him a much better life. But after a day of daycare he is always ready to sleep all day if he is allowed to do so. He will have only two more days of daycare before another long weekend since Friday is Good Friday which is a holiday for me and Dominica took a vacation day so that we could spend it together.

The sunrise was really beautiful this morning. People often wonder why we chose to live in Newark but the sunrises over Manhattan are awfully convincing. As we leave winter the sun sneaks out from behind Seton Hall Law School (off camera to the right in this picture) and works its way northward over Manhattan starting from downtown where it is today and heading up towards Harlem. All spring the sunrises just get better and better. I was not well prepared to capture the sunrise this morning but I will try to get some decent images of it as the year progresses. Our windows are really dirty right now which does not help and I am not mastered any sort of focusing with my new Kodak digicam so I probably need to switch to my good Nikon for this type of thing. I did manage to get a high def video of the sunrise on my digicam which turned out better than the picture did, I think. From Vimeo’s page you can view the video (standard or high def) or you can download the h.264 file directly so that you can watch it in QuickTime, MPlayer or VLC. Manhattan Sunrise from Eleven80. If you can’t reach Vimeo you can also get a lower quality version from YouTube.

I managed to do an install of DocuWiki last night while playing Settlers with Dominica. I have been interested in getting it set up for a while and am glad to see it now working. I have a ways to go yet as I would like to get it to attach to Active Directory for authentication. That would be really cool.

Dad reinstalled Mac OS X on the Mac Mini this morning so that he could start with a fresh system (and so that we could remember what the system passwords were as it has been three years since the unit has been used.)

I have a question, why do we call people who pose for a living, models? It isn’t like they are prototypes. I think someone was confused about the term model somewhere along the line. I suppose it is because calling them posers wasn’t as flattering as they had hoped. I suggest that we start calling people who pose professionally posers and see if it is still considered glamorous. That would make people who want to become models someday “wanna-be posers” and people who pretend to be models “poser posers.”

It was a very busy day of work today and it carried me through until six thirty or so after Dominica got home.  We ordered in dinner from Domino’s and watched one episode of Doctor Who that we have on DVD from Netflix (the 2006 season.)  Then Min took her laptop into the bedroom and worked on homework while watched some of The Gilmore Girls.  I talked to Andy a bit who has been out of contact with the outside world for the last two weeks as his Internet connection (over which his phone is transported) from Frontier Telephone has been down.  For his Internet to be down for an entire week is pretty ridiculous especially when you consider the incredible price that he has been paying for it.  He figured out that he can switch to Time-Warner’s Road Runner service and get cable television thrown in all for less than he was paying for nothing but DSL Internet access from Frontier.  In addition to the fact that Road Runner keeps enhancing its service while Frontier’s continues to deteriorate just makes the equation pretty simple to solve.

Today was very busy for me.  I was going crazy all day trying to keep up.  My big challenge of the day is a Veritas Volume Manager project on three servers.  I have worked with LVM on Linux and SVM (aka Solstice) on Solaris but I haven’t used Veritas to any extent so I am doing a bit of learning today.

One thing that I did discover while researching Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) is that Symantec offers Veritas Storage Foundation Basic, which includes VxVM and their associated file systemVxFS, for free.  You can download it and use it for moderately sized workloads which is very cool.  So I will be building some CentOS based virtual servers to install it on and learn more about it.

The weather was bad again today.  Wet and cold and windy.  But it is supposed to break by tomorrow.  But the roads are awful today and just about everyone from the office decided to work from home today.

We have figured out that Oreo is losing the ability to inform us when he wants to be taken outside.  We think that because we live in the city and in a highrise that the time it takes for us to figure out what he needs, ask him, get dressed, get supplies ready, get him ready, go down the elevator and run down the block to his “spot” that he no longer connects those activities to his request.  It is becoming a problem and we are worried about its affects on him.  So we are looking into getting him an indoor doggie potty.  It isn’t going to be fun but it could vastly improve his quality of life. And even if it is a pain it should make bad weather days a lot better on me too not to mention eliminating those nights when I have to get up to walk him over and over again.

Taffy was dropped off at dad’s house today.  He is dog sitting her for the next couple of weeks.  Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo are heading off to Florida for a vacation.

I managed to read everything that I was desperate to read in “Backup and Recovery” by Curtis Preston although I am a long way from finishing the book.  I am leaning towards taking Ryan’s advice and going with Bacula over Amanda for my backup system.  Those were the only two real contenders from the beginning and for my needs Bacula seems to take a slight lead over Amanda.  But not much of one and it is very close.  Bacula looks like it will be a bit more work, though, which is not what I wanted to hear.

Dominica and Oreo got home and she ordered in sandwiches from Big Bite just up on Broad a little way.  We watched some of the new Doctor Who that Dominica is addicted to now via Netflix.  That service really works well.  I can’t believe how well it works.  Really solid.  We are loving it.  And so inexpensive.

I was really exhausted today.  Just too much work going on so I pretty much needed to take the evening off.  We did little more than just relax and head to bed quite early.

We watched a little of The Cosby Show from bed but I wasn’t able to last long and fell asleep during the last episode that Dominica was watching.  I am going into the office tomorrow instead of staying home with Oreo because I was home on Monday because of the weather (and lack of sleep.)

I am working this weekend as we have a major change going on at the office (equipment change, not personnel change) and it is “all hands on deck” as so many systems are being “touched”.  I don’t have to go in but I will be on call and doing light work much of Friday night and Saturday until mid-afternoon.

I wanted to get up decently early this morning, probably around nine, but when I started to get up Oreo snuggled close and said in his puppy way “don’t get up yet, I want more snuggles” and I just couldn’t resist so I stayed in bed, awake, until almost eleven. Oreo finally, at that point, discovered the sunlight and decided that he would be happy moving out to the living room and laying in a sunspot on the loveseat.

I couldn’t decide what I wanted to work on this morning so I logged into my workstation and got to work on some Brainbench stuff since so much of that is now out of date. Dominica got up shortly after me and decided that she needed to do her homework so it worked out well for both of us. My first project this morning is taking the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 Beta exam from Brainbench. I don’t get any credit for this exam because it is only in beta but because I am a senior admin specifically on RHEL 3, RHEL 4 and RHEL 5 running it both at the office and at home I felt that I really should put in the effort to do the beta because I can provide important feedback to improve these tests for everyone.

The one nice thing about doing the beta exams is that you do get feedback even if it doesn’t officially go on your transcript. You have to take the exam twice so that they get a better idea of how the questions stack up in different configurations. On my first pass through I scored a high masters and ranked in the top percentile of all test takers. The test doesn’t have a means to report any higher than that. So that was encouraging.

One of the best things about doing lots of certifications like the Brainbench is that it really forces you to spend a lot of time researching things that you do not use everyday or possible ever. It basically forces you into a one to two hour crammed study session.

The beta tests took a little over two hours but I feel that it was time well spent. From there I continued on and renewed my Linux (General) certification even though the test is horribly out of date. Even with the test being terribly old and out of date and covering nothing that I do I still pulled off eighth in New Jersey.

I took a bit of a break and hung out with Dominica and Oreo for a little while before going on to the next test. I find that once I get into the testing groove I really like to stick with it. I am the same way about homework, believe it or not.

When we took Oreo outside for his afternoon walk we managed to time our reentry into the building just perfectly to coincide with a fifteen week old Boston Terrier puppy named Barney coming into Eleven80 to visit some people. He was black and white just like our Oreo and so adorable. We took Oreo over to meet him and they were pretty friendly. Oreo is generally good with puppies. He just doesn’t like Bull Terriers that are his size or larger for some reason. Then, while the two Bostons were saying hello, two black and white French Bulldogs came down to the lobby with the exact same markings are the two Bostons. It was like a weird Boston Terrier Convention but with French Bulldogs masquerading as Bostons.

I did a quick image seach on Yahoo! today for: “boston terrier” oreo. And would you believe that our Oreo is not only the first hit but is the only dog who shows up on the first seven plus pages and is almost exclusively the only dog for the first nine pages! Our Oreo is the most famous Boston Terrier named Oreo ever.

I took the Linux (SUSE) exam after that and without even bothering to try, as the test was ridiculously outdated and worthless, I managed to tie for ninth place in the world. What a bad exam. I decided to go on with the Server Administration exam which is a general exam covering the basics of server administration without going into an operating system specific details. I rushed through the test as the day was getting shorter by the minute and Oreo is more and more likely to need lots of attention as the day wears on. But I still ranked fifteenth in the United States and pulled off a Masters so it was fine.

We ordered in dinner from Mi Pequeño Mexico.  I did some more reading in my Prototype book.  We watched two episodes of The Cosby Show while we ate our dinner.  Then Dominica had to go back and work on her homework since she has a paper plus numerous other homework assignments due by midnight tonight.

Later in the evening Dominica sent me down to the Market City Deli to find her some cookies.  I went down and ran into Pam on a mission to find a candy bar.  She was out during halftime of the American football match that is going on today.  When we went back to Eleven80 we ran into Ryan who had been watching the game but was relatively bored as American football is not exactly an exciting sport to watch.  So he decided that he would grab some beer or something and stop up to our apartment sometime soon to hang out.

I put in some time looking at rsync and other backup options tonight as I am trying to determine a solid backup strategy for myself.  Ryan came up and we talked about backups for a little while (Ryan is a UNIX system administrator.)  He likes Bacula and I will be looking into it a bit more thoroughly.  I am no backup expert so it is a hard area to make good decisions in for me.

Ryan and I hung out and enjoyed some New Orleans rum and Coke while he regaled us with tales of his week down in Louisiana helping to rebuild the city.  He took off home on the early side so that he could get some sleep and get to work tomorrow.  I decided to stay up with Dominica to keep her company while she worked on her homework.  We should be in bed at approximately midnight.