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.