Dominica woke me up at ten because Oreo was laying in the middle of the upstairs hallway and was not willing to move.  He had not eaten his dinner and was very obviously extremely ill.  I tried taking him for a walk and he tried but was having a really hard time getting around.  So we decided that he needed to go to the emergency room at the hospital in Bedford Hills.

We were out the door before ten thirty having already called and prepped the hospital that we were coming.  It takes roughly half an hour to get out to Bedford Hills from Peekskill.  We arrived just before eleven.  Only Oreo and I went to the hospital as Dominica needed to stay home and take care of Liesl as well as to cook Oreo’s stew so that he would have good food again as soon as we needed it.

Oreo’s stay at the hospital ended up taking a pretty long time.  We didn’t get to leave the hospital until one thirty in the morning and boy were we tired.  Only a little less than three hours of sleep for me in two days and he has not had much sleep either.

The final verdict, after more blood work, was that Oreo is dehydrated now and has developed pancreatitis which is causing additional problems.  They have him a fluid treatment to help “jump start” his system but he is off food until tomorrow and then only light and bland food for several days.  He is not going to like this.  But, most importantly, they think that he is going to be okay.  He needs time to rest and to work the food out of his system.

So we got home around two in the morning.  Oreo seemed a little better even by the time that we got home.  The extra fluids must be helping already.

Oreo and I went straight to bed.  Dominica was up for a while longer taking care of Liesl and cooking for Oreo.  I have to be up before eight tomorrow morning which is going to be exceptionally painful.

I got up at a quarter till eight this morning.  I felt awful.  I didn’t fall asleep for a long time last night and my night was very restless.  I figure that I got a total of less than five hours if even more than four plus the slightly less than three that I got earlier.  So in two night’s I have gotten about seven to seven and a half hours of sleep.  Enough to function but not enough to feel good at all.

I got right to work by eight.  I ended up not getting the files from the team that I was supporting and was unable to do any work for a while.  Oreo got up just minutes after me and followed me down to the basement so that he could sleep on his Star Wars pillow by my side.  That is a good sign.  Previously he felt that he was unable to go up and down the stairs on his own.  A partial night’s sleep and the fluids must be helping.  I brought down a water dish for him so that he would have one down stairs too.  He has one on the main floor and in our bedroom but I wanted to make sure that he was encouraged to drink as much water as possible.

My morning work ended up being a much larger project than I had anticipated. I was working for about fifty minutes when my virtual desktop as well as my primary desktop got cut off from me due to a massive network outage on Wall Street.  So very quickly my morning turned from a small installation process and some routine patching into a pretty major endeavor just to be able to work let alone to do the scheduled work let alone to deal with the major outage.  Not that I deal directly with network outages but they do impact me and I need to be available when they happen.

I ended up working an entire day today making it a full six day week.  I can’t complain as we really need the money with Oreo’s surprise six hundred dollar day at the vet’s yesterday.  We really appreciate that I am able to get overtime.  It really makes a difference for us.

The new television set arrived mid-afternoon.  It was delivered via a minivan and it took two movers to bring it in to the house.  This thing is huge.  I didn’t get a chance to hook it up until pretty late in the evening.

The first thing that we popped in to test on the new 52″ Samsung LCD was Fable II on the XBOX 360.  We set the 360 to 1080p and were completely wowed by Fable II.  Having completed the game already going back and seeing it on this monitor at full resolution was really something.  It looked like a completely different game!  There is so much detail that we hadn’t seen before.  Very impressive both for the TV and for the game.  Now I am sorry that I played it before getting the new set.  The game is so much more gorgeous than I had realized.  At least when the Knothole Island downloadable content arrives in a week or two I will have this to play it on.

For the time being we have moved the Samsung on the floor in front of the fireplace below the Westinghouse 32″ that is mounted on the wall.  The Samsung is going to take its place at some point but I am not able to wall mount it by myself so we just have to wait until someone is here who can help me.  The TV is just too large for me to be able to lift like that all alone.

Oreo improved throughout the day.  He is definitely feeling much better today.  He is not happy at all about his bland food diet.  He can’t wait to be back on real food again later in the week.

I have a bunch of work that needed my attention today so I spent a lot of time in the basement catching up on Active Directory management issues and other problems.  My plan had been to go to bed quite early, maybe as early as seven, but that didn’t happen at all and I did not even quite make it by eleven.

Katie is coming up to Peekskill sometime tomorrow morning.  She has not had a chance to meet Liesl yet.  Katie has seen the new house but not since we moved any of our furniture in.  She came up to see the house during the time when we had first gotten it but had not moved in yet.

Savanna at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge 2007 from Scott Miller on Vimeo.

I finally got Dominica and my first video from our trip to Walt Disney World in 2007 posted up no Vimeo.  I have been meaning to get this done for forever and just have not gotten around to it.  Now that there will be baby videos coming soon it is rather important that I eliminate any potential video processing backlog and get things completed.

This video was shot using our Canon Elura 60 camcorder from the balcony of our hotel room at the Animal Kingdom Lodge where we stayed for a weekend early last year.  If you have a good video player on your computer such as VLC you can download the original 640×480 video in h.264 (m4v) also from Vimeo.  Original h.264 video of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge.  This version should play beautifully on AppleTV as well and is available via the vlog feed for our subscribers.

Dominica, Liesl and Oreo slept in until around ten.  I was in the living room playing some Fable 2 on the XBOX 360 while I had some quiet time to myself.  Today is my relaxing day for the week and I am taking advantage of it.

I spent the bulk of the day playing Fable 2.  What an awesome game.  I am so glad that Dominica decided that we needed to get that as our one game for the XBOX 360 for “Christmas” as a gift to each other.  I am over halfway through the game now playing as the boy and going for “good and pure”.  Dominica is only about an hour or so into the game and is playing as the girl and has decided to go for “evil and corrupt” so that she can get as different of a storyline as possible from mine as she has watched so much of the game as I have played it.

Dominica spent most of the day shopping and surfing the web from the laptop that we have set up in the living room.  Christmas is always a busy shopping time.  We are so thankful that we live in an era when Christmas shopping is an online affair.  There is no way that we could handle going out to the stores looking for things.  We would go crazy.  It would have to be me doing it all as Dominica can’t go out shopping.  We learned that lesson from the grocery store a few days ago, and the grocery store doesn’t have crazy Christmas crowds.

We were both very thankful that today got to be a “do nothing” day for the most part.  Liesl was a little fussy today but not horribly, and today we began switching her over to cloth diapers.  Cloth diapers are cheaper, better for the environment and better for preventing diaper rash and/or contact dermatitis – which I had as a child.  Liesl has a little bit of diaper rash at this point and so Dominica felt that it was the best time to start switching her over before it got any worse.

We did several loads of laundry and two loads of dishes today plus hand cleaning.  We generate so much stuff that needs to be cleaned every day around here I just can’t believe it.  And several loads of garbage too.

This afternoon Oreo started acting strangely.  We first noticed that something was wrong when he went down to the basement all by himself to get away from us.  He wasn’t acting funny beyond that so we didn’t think much of it.  As the day wore on, though, he started spending more time away from is in the basement and started acting more sluggish and sickly.

I took Oreo out for a walk and he didn’t even make it past the front walk before he was sick twice.  Hopefully this is nothing more than a stomach ache.  I brought him back inside and offered him dinner or a bone and he wanted neither.  I went down to the basement (which is when I managed to get the videos uploaded to Vimeo) and spent a few hours with him while he just lay on his pillow feeling sick.

Later in the evening I forced him to go on a little walk just to make sure that “everything was working” since he hadn’t been eating.  Everything was working (you can work out the details there for yourself) and as soon as he was done I scooped him up and ran him back to the house because it is so cold outside and he is so weak.  So at least we believe that there is no blockage and it appears that he just doesn’t feel well like he has a doggy flu.  He went to bed as usual and seemed to be about the same so we will watch him through the night and judge how he is doing in the morning.

We are not aware of him having eaten anything strange in the last twenty four hours.  He was very happy, alert and perky when I took him on his long morning walk around the top of the hill.  He seemed to be in better than usual spirits, in fact.  He was extremely energetic and after his walk demanded his breakfast and then made me play fetch with him for half an hour or more.  It was surprising how healthy he seemed.  I know that he was still feeling okay at two thirty when Dominica and I had our lunch because he cleaned our dishes in the kitchen (we had mac and cheese for lunch.)

The only possibility for him getting into something that he should not have, as I think about it, was on our morning walk he was spending some time sniffing under a boulder (we have a lot of those here) and with his nose burried in some leaves it is possible that he ate something in there of which I was not aware.  I did not think that he did but looking back it is theoretically possible.

We will just have to wait and see tomorrow.  We were all off to bed around midnight.

Apple has added another feature to the AppleTV: Remote. Remote is a free application that owners of an iPhone or an iPod Touch can download and use to control their AppleTV or iTunes on their computer from anywhere on their network. This sounds a bit silly at first until you realize that you can use your AppleTV to power an all-house audio system and you can control everything that it does from anywhere. It is actually pretty cool. Not a feature that many people would consider paying for but as a free feature it is pretty neat.

Depressingly, Los Angeles is a gorgeous seventy-two degrees today while here in Newark it is ninety-two. Hot, humid, hazy and ugh.

InfoWorld ran an article about the lack of customer support people are getting from Dell and how, now, Dell is flatly refusing to support their products if sold through Best Buy! Customers think that they are buying a Dell and are even being told by Best Buy salespeople that there is a Dell warranty that Dell will service but Dell’s policy is that they just don’t honor those warranties – at all, period. Now we’ve discovered that they have this policy with machine purchased via Best Buy (what are you doing buying a computer there anyway?) but if they can choose when to refuse warranty service then what makes them service machines purchased anywhere? Apparently Dell’s warranty service is seen by them as optional. Maybe they will soon see actually delivering the computer that you bought as optional as well.

Mary called today. I have her new mobile phone number now if anyone is attempting to reach her. She is in Dansville these days rather than Warsaw.

My walk into the office in Manhattan was not nearly as hot as I thought that it was going to be. It is certainly hot and humid here today but it could be a lot worse. Because there is some possibility of rain there is a decent wind that helps to keep things from getting too warm. That is something that really gets to me in Manhattan is the complete lack of air movement. I am especially susceptible to a lack of air movement in keeping cool. Air temperature is not nearly as important to me as humidity and air exchange rate.

I forgot to mention yesterday that both Dominica and I had coworkers who had children born yesterday! Both were people directly on our teams.

Dad had a dentist appointment up in Rochester today and discovered that he has become quite a celebrity. Apparently the story of the little Boston Terrier, rescued from a shelter in Houston, Texas who went through being poisoned and then getting onto the Manhattan news and into a Boston newspaper, who recovered and now lives in a skyscraper with views of Manhattan, spends his days at doggy daycare and rides around wearing goggles in his BMW convertible is quite the story. They tell it to all of the dog lovers and children. So dad is now known as “Oreo’s Grandpa” and all of the patients at the dentist’s office know him (by reputation at least.) He walked in today and they called out “Oreo’s grandpa is here!”

I managed to escape the office at just about six in the evening which isn’t really too bad.  Dominica met me at Food for Life where we ate dinner.  It made the evening quick that we were able to eat so early and without any prolonged decision making or waiting as food was delivered.  We were home before eight.

Dominica spent the evening watching the last half of Stardust which she had rented from NetFlix but had not gotten around to finishing yet.  I recorded the 60th Episode of the SGL Podcast but was so tired and worn out that I was unable to get it posted until the morning.  By nine thirty when I finished the show I went straight to bed.  Dominica was not tired and stayed up for a long time reading.

Dominica is still fighting a really bad cold and we fear that it is now a sinus infection.  Oreo got me up in the middle of the night, around two in the morning, to patrol the perimeter and then to go back to bed.  He can be a very goofy dog.  I will be working in Warren tomorrow so I will be hard to reach.  I plan to return home early so that Dominica can pick me up at the train station on her way home.

The rain that we have been promised all week but have not seen finally came during the night.  Maybe that will cool things down a little bit although the forecast doesn’t seem to think that it will.

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.

Oreo got me up in the middle of the night, as expected, for a walk. This always happens anytime that he has dry food. Dry food doesn’t sit well on his tummy. So I walked him from three thirty until four in the morning. Then it was back to bed. But only until ten this morning when he needed to walk again. We really shouldn’t let him have dry food. It is no more fair to him to make him have to go outside in the cold in the middle of the night than it is to us. And he takes a risk of not being able to wake us up as well. Although I think that he is normally able to do that.

After walking him I started working on the workstation for CCA that I was working on last night. I also worked on changing our router to handle a large set of IP addresses as we have simply exhausted everything in the subnet that we had been using up until now. We had assigned ourselves just fourteen IP addresses and this was working fine until recently when we added the Netgear SC101 SAN device which uses, in our configuration, six IP addresses of its own. It was right around that time that we hooked back up our Cisco ATA unit that works with our Vonage phone system. That was another IP address permanently assigned and taken out of the pool. We went from plenty to being short more or less overnight. So now we have thirty and anticipate that this will hold us for a while. Although the list of machines in the house that use IP addresses isn’t short – the desktops and laptops include the OLPC, the Wii and the AppleTV, the SC101 (6), the three IP phones, the firewall, etc. It is no wonder the world is running out of IP space. Luckily these are all on a private address scheme or we would have real problems.

I joined Linked In today. So anyone looking for me on there, look again. There I am.

Rochester suffered a thirty-six car pile-up by the Rochester International Airport tonight. The region was hit by white-out conditions and wind speeds in the high forty miles per hour range.

Oreo is feeling pretty sick today and has needed to go outside much more often than usual.  We were really lucky that he decided that he needed to take a walk while it was bright and sunny and relatively warm.  Right after we got back from working him it turned into crazy winds and total white out conditions.  He didn’t need to go back out again until after that had stopped.  But for the rest of the evening he had to go out about every twenty to thirty minutes and it was bitterly cold.  We ended up just leaving his harness and sweater on so that we could take him out more quickly.

The Spice Girls, for those few of you who can remember who they are, played the Prudential Center tonight.  What a cold night to go out to a concert.  Later in the evening when I was walking Oreo one time I noticed a small group of women pounding on the doors of Catholic Health Care’s car garage which is used heavily for these events.  The show, Dominica thought, ran late tonight and I am guessing that these were stragglers who were now locked out of the garage because the garage closes early and were in insanely cold temperatures – most likely drunk – trying to figure out how to get their car.  They definitely were not getting into their car tonight.  One of the issues with concerts in Newark – if they run late you have few options.  All of the garages close early.  Even the ones, like that one, that cater to the late night events.

We went to bed at eleven after Oreo’s last “late night” walk.  We are assuming that there is going to be little to no sleep tonight as he has been going out far too frequently.  We tried watching a little of the new Doctor Who series from 2005 via Netflix online download service.  The show was pretty good and the Netflix service works really well.  No technical problems at all once we got the player installed.  We only managed to watch two episodes, though, with Oreo needing to go out so frequently.  We are going to be loving this Netflix service though.  That is so cheap and handy.  Netflix is definitely the “cable killer” with unlimited “on demand”, over the Internet viewing for just a tiny fraction of the cost of cable.  And no commercials either!  They are really demonstrating just how much money their is in the cable system.

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.