The original plan was to be up at seven thirty, or so, this morning and to be heading down to Castile Christian Academy by eight thirty.  That did not happen at all.  I was really exhausted and slept for ten hours.  I did not wake up until Dominica woke me up at eight thirty five!

I got ready pretty quickly but it was still almost ten o’clock by the time that we got down to Castile to get started for the day.  The sleep was probably important as my back is killing me today from all of the lifting of the rack and the computers yesterday.  It just feels like muscle spasms in my lower lumbar, nothing to be alarmed about, but that does not make it hurt any less.  I can barely walk today, let alone stand up straight.

Today was spent mostly in a panic trying to get enough stuff done so that the computer lab would remain usable after we have left this afternoon.  We delivered down two more computers from dad’s house this morning which means that all of the “built” machines that he has had in storage for the school are back at the school (unless there are even more about which we do not know) and the only machines that he is still storing are the machines which are in parts and need yet to be assembled before being delivered to the school.  Those are for another day.

Dad managed to get the wiring in place to allow us to hook up the new server.  That ended up being a project that required the entire day.  We use NIS for authentication at the school so I had to migrate the NIS system and the NFS system and get the workstations authenticating to the new server.  That really was not that bad.  The NFS was more of a problem than the NIS which worked like a charm the first time.

The big thing that we do not have working again, yet, is the Internet access through the Dansguardian proxy.  For now, Internet access is just turned off.  Hopefully that will be simple to fix remotely.  There was just no way that I was going to be able to deal with that today in addition to everything else.

Dad and Dominica went out to Lorraine’s for lunch again and brought food back to eat at the school while we kept working.  Good food even if it does not mean a break in the work.

By the end of the day, the total “dead” count was twenty-two computers!  That is a lot of computers for a little school with very limited resources to lose.  We left with seven computers functioning in the computer lab and running OpenSUSE 11.  It is enough to get them through but the real hope was to have computers running in all of the classrooms and in support areas but there just isn’t any cabling yet to support that and, apparently, not enough computers either!

We also got the wireless up and running again which is important and now the kindergarten room is online once again.  All progress is good.

We got to shut down the old server, a Compaq Proliant 3000, which was ancient and in horrible condition.  To its credit, it was a salvaged machine and has been running at the school for about four years now and doing so under pretty tough conditions.  It was mounted onto a shelf built just for it about eight feet in the air in the janitor’s closet at the school where it got no air circulation and was subject to all kinds of dirt and humidity.  It is really amazing that it lasted so long.  Currently, it is being considered to just leave it up there as it is so dangerous to bring it down and there is no further use for it.  It has 4.3GB hard drives and PC66 memory!

We ended up staying later than we had intended at the school, but it was necessary to get enough done so that they could keep working.  It was probably around four thirty when we left although I did not check the clock.  It was so late that we decided that we would have dinner with dad at Lorraine’s before getting onto the road to drive all evening.

From dinner in Castile Dominica, Oreo and I got in the car and drove down to Varna, New York to drop off a switch that we needed to deliver today.  Getting to Ithaca didn’t take as long as we had thought that it would and we were there in no time.

From Ithaca to Newark took a few hours and we decided to risk the route down Interstate 81 which is under construction.  Dominica was right that being late on a Tuesday night it would not be very busy.  That was definitely the right route to take from Ithaca.

We arrived in Newark around one in the morning.  Pretty late but not nearly as late as it could have been.  We unpacked the car, watered the plants and got right off to bed.  Dominica has to be up at six tomorrow and I am on the early shift at work so I have to be up early as well.

I woke up around five this morning.  I tried falling back asleep but had no luck at that.  So just a little after five thirty I got up and got ready to face the day.  I showered and got dressed and then logged in to dad’s computer and worked from his office for about two hours while I waited for everyone to wake up and get ready.  I had some work that needed my attention so this did give me a chance to do some catchup.

It was probably around nine thirty when we finally managed to head down to Castile.  Not nearly as early as we had wanted to have gotten started but sleep is important too.

The big challenge of the morning was getting the server cabinet down to the school.  Dad got it mounted onto the trunk of his car last night so there was not that much work to do today except to drive it down and to set it up.

It took quite a while to drive down to the school.  Dominica and I followed behind dad as he drove to make sure that nothing went wrong with the rack.  This is a full size server cabinet – larger, in fact, than that used in most data centers as it has a very large cooling area on the side which is not common.  So we had to drive quite slowly.

We worked down at the school from around ten until three thirty.  It does not sound like that long of a day but when you are moving computers around or setting up a rack that whole time, it gets pretty exhausting pretty quickly.  Our goal for this trip to the school was to fix their server which was failing every few days and to get the computers that they currently have onto their network again as many were now broken and to update everything that we could to OpenSUSE 11.

What we discovered when we arrived was that a very large number of the computers taht we thought that we would be using around the school were not able to function up to our bare minimum specs (which really are very low) or simply could not handle an install of OpenSUSE.  Today we managed to identify approximately eighteen machines at the school that were not going to be useful to use in any way.  Not good.  That number is just from the computer lab and the computers that we were bringing in from home.  It does not include any of the ten or so machines scattered around the school most of which appear to be similar to those unusable.

Since we were going through computers like they were going out of style, dad made a run to his house to pick up as many of the computers that we had there that were earmarked for the school as he could.  He managed to bring back seven machines.  Only two left that are ready to come down to the school so we will attempt to get those tomorrow.

Dominica worked on setting up workstations in the computer lab.  Dad worked on setting up the server cabinet and figuring out what wiring had been done and what state it was in.  By the end of the day the verdict was that we were in pretty rough shape overall.  We only had about four workstations set up in a lab that used to have ten, and we are down to nine monitors in the lab as well.  We have a lot of workstation work to do tomorrow.

Dad managed to get the rack set up and we moved the Proliant DL380 G2 into the rack before leaving but as the cabling is not terminated, nor do we know to where the cabling runs, we are stuck without any way to wire up the rack which may prove to be quite a problem.  Dad has a plan for tomorrow but we really have nothing that we can do today.  This means that tomorrow I have to backup the current server, bring it down and migrate to the new one without ever having both online at the same time.  Fun.

For lunch dad and Dominica ran over to Lorraine’s and brought food back for me.  One of the perks of working at the school is getting food from Lorraine’s on Main Street in Castile.  They have awesome food and it is so inexpensive!

Tomorrow is clearly going to be a really long and tough day at Castile when we come back.  There is so much left to be done.  A lot of the work is in deciding what things we are able to finish and which things we are not.  Tough choices.  I really wish that we had time to get things done and do it right.

We got back to dad’s around four.  We were all really tired after the work today.  We decided to pretty much just relax this evening and to get to bed early. Dad went down to Davis’ Farm Market in Pavilion and brought back pizza for us and grilled cheese for Dominica.

We watched Freaky Friday, the new one with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.  Then we watched Agent Cody Banks.  It is weird being at dad’s house and trying to pick out movies to watch from our collection.  We have so many movies to which we have not had regular access in over two years so we really begin to forget that they are there.  There are so many movies in the collection that I have no memory of having; it is really weird.

We went to bed around ten thirty or so.  Tomorrow is going to be a long day and sleep is important.  Tomorrow, after working at Castile all day, Dominica and I will be driving down to Ithaca to make a quick delivery and from there heading back down to Newark.  It is going to be a very, very long day.

At very least the weather has been great. Sunny and cool with a nice breeze.  The school still gets really hot, though, even with the windows open and a fan in the doorway.  So tomorrow we are bringing a window fan to force some air into the computer lab.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain

Dominica and I slept in this morning.  I love long weekend with no schedules.  It was around nine thirty when we dragged ourselves out of bed.

We had thought about camping out in the yard last night.  Dominica’s parents had brought up our tent and camping equipment that we had been keeping at their house so that we could camp, but because of my high blood pressure yesterday we decided that it would be best if I was not trying to set up a tent and Dominica can’t really help at all being as pregnant as she is.  So we decided to just sleep in the house.

We drove over to Geneseo for brunch at the Omega Grill.  It is nice and cool today so Oreo was quite comfy waiting for us in the car.  No sunlight today.  Very overcast with just a hint of drizzle.  Probably best that we did not attempt to campt last night as the tent and all of the supplies would be getting pretty soggy today and I do not think that we would be all that thrilled.

After brunch we went through the car wash.  Dad has been washing the car a bit recently as he drove through a pile of manure that was sloshed onto the road earlier this week and it sprayed the underside of his car.  It is not very bad, though, and Dominica and I really can’t smell anything unless the car is warm and in the garage.

Before I was born there was a “manure on the road” incident with a new car in the early seventies.  The speed was higher and the amount of manure was “higher” and the resulting spray was pretty significant and was never able to be completely removed from the car!  Dad has had a fear of having a car coated with manure ever since.

After brunch we returned to dad’s house and I spent most of the afternoon working on my homework for RIT.  The homework really is not bad, so far, with this particular class.  However we have not yet received any feedback from our work so it is impossible to tell how the process is going.  I could be doing very poorly and just thinking that the class is relatively easy.  I have my first large project due on Friday so I am going to be pretty busy this week working towards that.

Once I was finished with my homework it was time to dinner.  Dominica didn’t feel like pizza – tomato sauce is giving her heartburn these days – so we decided to go back over to Geneseo to go to Denny’s.  We had dinner and then came back home.

My evening was spent building the HP Proliant DL380 G2 that will be heading down to Castile Christian Academy tomorrow morning.  I installed OpenSUSE 11.0 on it and got it mostly working.  There is a lot of work to do yet but at least it is at a point where I can actually install it – I hope.

Dad spent the evening getting the full size server cabinet, also heading to CCA, mounted onto the truck of his car.  That thing is huge and heavy.  What a pain that was.  At first we tried to lift it up to put it onto the car but that was not going to work.  So then he brought it up on an hoist and the car was backed under it and the rack lowered onto the trunk of the car.  It seems like it is going to work.

Dominica watched some Keeping Up Appearances while we were working.  Once we were all able to converge on the den in the basement we put on Jhoom Barabar Jhoom and watched that.  This is only the second time that Dominica and I have watched it and it was dad’s first time.  He has been experimenting with Indian and almost-Indian films this week.  Earlier in the week, before we came up, he watched the English language Indian film Bride and Prejudice which is a Bollywood take on Jane Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

Tomorrow is going to be a long day down in Castile, New York.  We are driving down in the morning delivering the rack and the server along with some spare equipment and whatever we can fit into the car.  There is a lot of stuff that needs to be taken down there and a ton of work to be done at the school.  Dominica is planning on going down with us too and will probably spend the day running errands, taking care of Oreo and, if we have enough parts and equipment, putting female RJ45 jacks onto the ends of CAT5e cabling.

The school has been without any computers at all for a few weeks now as the server that handles their NIS system – logins, as well as their remote home directories died and they are unable to do anything at this point.  It is pretty awful.  The timing was horrible in that we were in the process of trying to get new equipment in to replace the old and have just been waiting for the wiring to be in place so that we could install it.  In the end we had already scheduled this trip for this weekend and the server died just before we could go down.  So tomorrow morning we will also be discovering if there is any way that the server can be salvaged, but that seems to be rather unlikely.

We all headed off to bed a little after midnight.  Hopefully we will be able to get up early tomorrow and get moving.  There is just so much work to be done and such a small window in which to do it.  We only have Monday and Tuesday to work at the school and it will be unlikely that we will be able to return to the school again this year or early next year because of the baby.  Then Tuesday evening we have to run to Ithaca on our way back to Newark to drop off something.

Tomorrow is Dominica’s 30th Birthday.

Happy Birthday Joe Tocco!  He is 23 today.

Dominica could not sleep very much last night as she was very upset about Sadie’s passing yesterday.  She was awake much of the night and she accidentally woke up Oreo at four o’clock this morning when then proceeded to wake me up as well.  Being awake that close to when my alarm would go off, at five thirty, made me unable to go back to sleep.  So I have been awake since shortly after four in the morning.

Today is my working in Warren day.  I took the train out to Summit, New Jersey, but today it was the “big” double-decker train and not the normal train that I ride.  Because of this, or at least that is my story, Summit’s train station appeared from a different angle and I was unable to find the Summit Train Station sign until it was too late and the doors were closing and I missed my stop!  Argh.

I rode the train one extra stop to Chatham, New Jersey, bought a ticket to return to Summit and took the next train back.  Missing the station was not really a very big deal as I lost no more than fifteen minutes, but it did cause a minor panic and cost me $1.75.

On the train this morning I finished reading “The Sex Lives of Cannibals” and began reading “Attila: The Barbarian King Who Challenged Rome” by John Man.  Sex Lives was very interesting; I really enjoyed it.  Looking forward to Attila.

Today was quite a busy day.  The morning just flew by – I barely noticed.  Lunch time came and three of us went out to Chipotle in Bridgewater.  I got a little car sick on the ride from a combination of being tired, being way too warm and riding in the back seat.  I felt a little ill all afternoon.

Today Jeremy and Tim were at Castile Christian Academy working on the electrical wiring that needs to be installed so that we can get the new computers installed for the new school year.

Michael has a new “photography” blog: CongoBoy.

I got to leave the office by car with a friend driving me to Newark just after five so I was actually home well ahead of Dominica.  I ordered in dinner from Nino’s so that it would arrive shortly after Dominica and Oreo would get home.  Dominica is really looking forward to trying the rigatoni in vodka sauce that I got on Monday and I am looking forward to having it again.  It is really delicious.

Dinner arrived and we settled in to watch some of The Love Boat.  We made it through one episode then I had to go work for the rest of the evening.

Ryan stopped by a little before ten and hung out for half an hour or less during which time I continued to work as there was much to do.  I worked until midnight.  It was a long day, but I got a ton of work done that otherwise would have been left until this weekend.  This weekend we are going to Frankfort to see Dominica’s family for her birthday.

For Dominica’s birthday I attempted to get her an Acer Aspire One laptop in pink but that color has not yet released (only sapphire blue and seashell white are available at the moment.)  So, rather than settling for something that she would like less than that we decided that it would be more prudent to order one the moment that they are available.

I was pretty tired when I pulled myself out of bed at six thirty this morning considering the fact that I did not fall asleep until sometime after one in the morning.  I am covering the early morning shift today for someone at work so it is just this one day this week.  It fit perfectly into my schedule to cover this shift today except that I had not planned on working so late last night.  So today I am very tired, but that really isn’t anything new.

Tomorrow is 08-08-08.  Just interesting.  In just over three years we will have 11-11-11 which is the coolest.  That is, if a date can every be cool based on the recurrence of numerals within it.  It is on the boundary of cool at the very best, I think.

My morning was incredibly busy as I worked on the same project that had kept me up so late last night.  I have been determined to get to the root cause of this major issue that we have had at the office.  It has been going on for two or three months and has caused countless issues and I would be so happy to have it resolved.  Not just for the sake of getting it resolved but also for the opportunity to show up the “escalation” people who are supposed to have been able to fix this for us quite easily but have been unable to even grasp the core of the issue after two months with it.  This is my first serious bought with the problem but it is a tough one indeed.

By mid morning I actually had the solution to the issue and was quite gleeful indeed.  What a relief if was to figure that mystery out, and quite a rush as well.  This has been plaguing all of us for quite some time.  It is quite the feather in our administration team’s caps as well as the engineering team who claim to be our next level of escalation have been completely lost in this issue and unable to come up with a single clue.

Not one hour after completely embarrassing the engineering team, again (first time was two months ago, then someone else on my team showed them up pretty bad yesterday, then again this morning) their manager called me to tell me that they had decided not to offer me a position on their team.  Ha ha.  Talk about being a soar loser.

It is sad, of course, to not be offered a position for which you interview.  In this case, though, it is a bit embarrassing to be turned down by a team that so conspicuously can’t do their own jobs and need me to do it for them as it is!  The issues of the last few days were nothing compared to the issue that I resolved for them a few months back and that issue did not involve a “problem” that they could not solve but a massive architectural disaster that they had caused.

Oh well.  After this morning it would have been embarrassing to have gone to work there anyway.  People that I work with, that I really respect, have no respect for this team and would not be at all impressed if I was to switch over there.  In hindsight (with the wine of sour grapes, of course) staying exactly where I am seems like the far better decision anyway.  I am thankful, in some ways, that the decision was not really mine to make as I was far more likely to make a poor one.

Most of my evening was spent supporting Jeremy remotely as he worked to install a dozen computers at dad’s house with OpenSUSE 11 Linux.  It is actually a rather challenging project because the computers are so old with the slowest being a Celeron 433 and the fastest being a few Pentium III 1GHz and several different speeds in between.  Anything without a PC133 memory interface is being considered “obsolete” and will not be used for installation at the school.  Even a PIII 667 will do the trick – it is amazing how much performance one can eek from a Pentium 3 with enough PC133 memory.  But fall back to the older memory systems and the performance is just too slow, in my opinion, for desktop use.  The PIII 667/133 has been my “drop dead line” for desktops for six years at least.  That machine had just enough performance to make it the longest lived useful desktop platform of which I know.  These days, having the 1GHz machine is quite noticably better, however, and we are trying to get as many of those installed as possible.

I worked the early evening with Jeremy on the installs and then spent the late evening writing a script that can be run against the machines to take them from the raw install state to a finished product.  I am used to using RPM and YUM on Linux but now I am automating with Zypper which is similar to YUM but a little different.

I got to bed at a reasonable hour and listened to a little more of “Shadow fo the Silk Road.”  I am now halfway through the book.

If you need more cool stuff, check out the face on this girl after performing a pretty incredible landing into a pond.

Dominica decided that she was going to take the train up to Utica this weekend to visit her family before her sister, the girls and Garrett head back for Houston, but when she went to buy the tickets the train was sold out.

Today was my day at home with Oreo.  I just scrounged around the kitchen for food here today.  It’s cheaper and easier than going out I suppose.  Healthier, that’s for sure.

I was decently busy today.  Dominica’s day was actually a little slow it seems.  She needed that.  Her week has been pretty crazy.  Her job now is doing email / ticket support primarily rather than being tied to a phone.  This changed a few months ago.  She likes this as the work is a little less “real time” and there isn’t a phone ringing for her to “jump on” every few seconds.  But because she can work at her own pace and doesn’t have to wait for the work to trickle in she actually works much harder and, when the emails or tickets get caught up or the phone people call behind, she jumps back to the phones to help out.  So she can get exhausted easily.

Dominica brought home fish tacos from On the Border for dinner.  It is a common Thursday night treat for us since she works very near to an On the Border restaurant.  Her drive home was terrible, though, because of traffic from Bruce Springsteen whom I guess is playing at the Meadowlands tonight and American Idol is filming or something in Newark’s Prudential Center right next door.  So traffic is a mess everywhere and Newark is, of course, gridlock.

Once Dominica got home, we watched some of the second season of Frasier and relaxed for most of the evening.  I didn’t get to see much more than half of the first season, but I have just been far too busy to spend time watching that so Dominica has been watching it without me.

After Dominica went to bed around nine I stayed up working until almost midnight.  We are trying to get things moving at the school so that we have computers updated and ready for the kids when they return in late August.  More importantly, really, is getting computers ready for the teachers and staff.  Getting everyone else onto and using the computers regularly is actually more important because it forms a critical support structure for the kids to have computers at their disposal.

I played around with Twitter again tonight.  Haven’t tried it in over a year.  Microblogging is kind of interesting and I see it taking root within Facebook now as well.  I will see how Twitter works out.  Now there are badges so that I can add my Twitter feed to SGL.  Maybe I can do that this weekend.  That might make it more worthwhile for me to try.  I already blog so much I don’t want to be sending people elsewhere to see my microblog updates.

I can’t believe that July is already over.  This year is flying by.  The house move in October and the baby in November are going to be here before I know it.

I woke up early this morning. At a quarter after five I woke up and found myself not to be sleepy at all. I tried going back to sleep but had to luck. So I got up at five thirty and got started on the day. I did a little reading and a little writing. I hopped onto the office network since I had work coming up at eight in the morning. One of the advantages of working my weekends with people in Bahrain is that we are often able to start early as long as I am awake. Today we were able to start at just a quarter after seven which worked out perfectly.

Dominica got up at eight thirty which was very surprising for a weekend day. This is a good sign that she won’t be exhausted all week. Her shifting weekend sleep hours are really tough for her to make up for in a week of sleep. She watched License to Wed while I was working. Oreo was sleepy and didn’t want to get out of bed so they just snuggled in for a while.

I finished reading Simon Winchester’s “Outposts”. It is a fascinating look at the remaining British Crown Colonies as visited by Winchester in the 1980s. It seldom that we, as Americans, think about far flung British possessions such as Saint Helena, Pit Cairn Island, Ascension or others. And yet there are populations there, cultures and history.

Breakfast for me this morning was coffee and pop tarts. Doesn’t get much better than that. After her movie Dominica went on to watch the television show Dexter that she picked up for herself on DVD. I have seen one episode of it and it was okay but I am not into murder, serial killer, gross-out shows. Even light hearted ones, if such a thing exists. I am really tired of entertainment involving unhappy subjects. That really is not entertaining. I have no idea why people enjoy that. It isn’t like a thriller. At least a thriller is suspenseful and “scary”.

It was a busy morning for work with Bahrain. I was expecting the usual one hour of work but we started early and they ended up needing me for support into late in the afternoon. I ended up working more than eight hours!

I took the ASP.NET 2.0 Brainbench exam today scoring a Masters and ranking at number five in New Jersey and tying for thirty-fifth in the nation. I then took the older ASP.NET exam based on version 1.0 and also scored a Masters tying for ninth in New Jersey.  My final test for the day was the ASP.NET Fundamentals exam.  I know have all of the ASP.NET tests done and out of the way.

Dominica decided that it was a lazy day and she spent the entire day in bed with Oreo watching DVDs.  Oreo loved it.  It is often that he gets to spend the entire day actually in bed.

I listened to some IT Conversations tonight – Bill Buxton from Microsoft and Jon Udell talking about “Sketching User Experience“.

My evening project was working on an OpenSUSE 10.3 32bit AMD workstation (HP d325) for Castile Christian Academy.  While I worked on that I started listening to Garrison Keillor’s latest book “Pontoon“.

I ended up working until after one in the morning.  Dominica watched almost the entire first season of Dexter in, more or less, a single sitting.  Only two more episodes to go to save for tomorrow.

Due to the length of the course it was split into six days (one day per week) and the videos have been split into a dozen parts.

Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 1a
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 1b
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 2a
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 2b
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 3a
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 3b
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 4a
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 4b
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 5a
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 5b
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 6a
Technical Web Design with XHTML and CSS by Scott Alan Miller Day 6b

Xvid videos in 320×240, perfect for playback on Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Creative Zen Video, etc. Videos hosted courtesy of OurMedia and the Internet Archive.

This class does not cover any theory of aesthetics in web design. Nor does it cover server administration or management. The goal of this class is to take the student from only a basic knowledge of the web to possessing the skills necessary to pursue a career in professional web design.