Brian and I were pretty much all set to be on the road at seven thirty when I got an email from RIT telling me that I had to deal with some immunization stuff immediately or risk being automatically withdrawn from my classes.  This is a pretty big problem as I have no means of getting this information.  So I lost an hour this morning just trying to get a hold of RIT to find out what the deal was and why they waited so long (three years after my first enrollment) to even inform me that there was any requirement at all let alone that they didn’t feel that my records were up to date.  Springing this on me on the day that I am leaving for work in Canada is pretty crappy and considering that we are moving to Texas on Monday this is near impossible for me to deal with at all.  Dealing with taking my one class is more than I can handle and this is going to be more work than that, I fear.

So it was just after eight when we finally got onto the road heading to Canada.  This trip is just one unexpected delay after another.  Brian and I are seriously exhausted today.  Seriously exhausted.  This is not going to be easy.

The drive from Peoria to Niagara Falls was not bad at all.  It was a nice morning for driving.  Normally we would cross the border at Buffalo which is slightly easier but Brian has not seen Niagara Falls since he was a little kid, like around three years old when he used to live in Buffalo, and wanted to see the falls as he did not remember it so we went up there to take the Rainbow Bridge which provides a view of the falls as you cross the border.

Brian has only been to Canada once, long ago when he was a kid, and just got a passport last week allowing him to go on this trip.  So this is a bit of a treat for him – going into a foreign country.  We drove right from Niagara Falls up to Mississauga where I was stopping by the office to see everyone there before I left the area for good.  The Mississauga office is being “phased out” in the next few weeks so most of these people will not be around for me to see in some alternate location in the future.

Just before crossing the bridge into Canada we stopped at Tim Horton’s and got some coffee to kick start the day.  We had skipped getting coffee earlier due to a lack of time.

We made it just in time to partake of the free pizza that was available to the team for Christmas.  Everyone was attempting to go into one office or another today for the free food.  Canada was a bit of an unexpected location for me but it worked out well.  I got a chance to get coffee and pizza and visit with the Canadians for a while.  It worked out pretty well.

From Mississauga we went into Toronto proper and met someone at Tim Horton’s.  We’ve been to Tim Horton’s a few times today already.  It is definitely a Timmy Ho’s day.

After our coffee meeting we went to a meeting just up the street.  We had thought originally that this meeting would only take about thirty to forty-five minutes but it ended up running to three and a half hours.  Way longer than we had accounted for but the meeting went well and was really valuable so we are glad that we took the time to have it.

We had meant to be out of the meeting and out of Toronto long before rush hour started but because the meeting ran over we were stuck trying to get out of Toronto during the height of rush hour.  Not good.  We had very limited time as it was.  Our goal was to be out to Cayugo, Ontario at six thirty for the very first meeting of SpiceCorps Golden Horseshoe but there was no way at all that we were going to manage to do that.  The travel time out to Cayuga from Toronto is roughly two hours and it was about six when we got into the car in Toronto!  Oh boy.  What a day.

We drove like crazy trying to get out to Cayuga.  What a drive.  You drive out to Hamilton and then you head south into the wilderness and go all the way down to the shores of Lake Erie.  We definitely gave Brian a wild tour of this portion of Canada.  He is not going to be looking to return to this part of the world again for a long time after this.

Luckily we were able to reach someone in Houston who was able to post to the SpiceCorps group on SpiceWorks to let them know that we were on the way but running insanely late.  They then emailed us from the meeting with contact information so that we could call them and coordinate.

We raced as quickly as we could although we were stuck in completely stopped traffic much of the time.  Toronto is notorious for its rush hour gridlock along the lake front area, especially heading out west where the bulk of its suburban population lies.

It was just after eight thirty when Brian and I arrived in Cayuga for the SpiceCorps meeting.  Luckily everyone was able to wait for us.  It was a small group, just five people in addition to us.  The meeting ran for another hour, till nine thirty, and then almost all of us went out to a bar called “The Back Forty” and hung out for about another hour or two before everyone started to head for home.

The group was small but we felt that it was a really good group and that the meeting was pretty valuable.  Getting IT professionals together, especially in the SMB space, is really important.  We are hopeful that this is going to grow and be a vibrant group.

Brian and I were definitely not looking forward to the long drive back to Peoria from Cayuga, Ontario.  In theory the drive is only supposed to be another two hours but that has not been working out too well for us thus far.  We’ve already done six or seven hours of driving so far today after doing nine or so yesterday so we are quite sick of being in the car.

Our first stop was the Tim Horton’s on Route 3 in Cayuga – more coffee!  This was our fourth stop at a Timmy Ho’s just today.  That is a lot of Tim Horton’s coffee.

The drive from Cayuga to Buffalo went fine and crossing the border back into the States was easy.  But once we were to Buffalo we ran into some horrendous snow and the relatively short drive from Buffalo to Batavia was horrible.  We were so fatigued from crawling down the Thruway that we stopped at a rest stop which, of course, had nothing open except for a Tim Horton’s where we got some really late dinner and coffee making it our fifth TH stop of the day.

From Batavia to Peoria was the worst driving at all.  We were struggling to hit thirty miles per hour and had no visibility of the road whatsoever.  The whole drive from Cayuga to Peoria was supposed to be just over two hours but ended up being well over four hours.  It was about three thirty in the morning when we arrived.  Talk about being exhausted.  All of that driving on just two hours of sleep was brutal.  We are so thankful that we had decided that tomorrow we were going to take the train from Rochester to Croton on Hudson – we need the chance to just sit and do nothing.

I showered and finished my packing by five thirty.  I woke up Francesca so that she could drive me to the airport.  I am flying out of Houston Hobby which is the small airport on the southeast side of the city near where the Grices live.  We always use this airport as it is so much more convenient than using Bush Intercontinental.

We left just early enough that there was no appreciable traffic and the trip went quite quickly.  Francesca dropped me off and I was right through security in no time at all.  Allowing one hour at Hobby this early in the morning is definitely fine.  It was as easy as could be to get to my plane.  I had plenty of time to stop by at Subway and to grab a breakfast sub that I ate in the airport at the gate while I waited for my plane.

This morning is my first time ever flying on SouthWest.  They have great prices but do not have assigned seating which I do not like at all.  I like knowing where I am going to sit.  I don’t mind aisle or window seats (I prefer aisle) but I definitely do not want middle seats.  I need a little extra room and like some airspace around myself for air circulation.  The flight today was very sparsely populated so I actually got an entire three seat row to myself which was great.  The flight was over in no time and everything went perfectly.

I hit Budget in the airport and rented a Chevy Cobalt for the day.  I figured that it would be easiest to just have my own car for getting around Austin today.  I have never been to Austin before and do not know the lay of the land so this will be a little challenging but I have my mobile phone with GPS on it so I am hoping that that will save the day and make this relatively easy.

The GPS on my phone did not end up making things easier.  I drove in several wrong directions before realizing that the phone was consistently stating the directions backwards.  I have no idea why but as soon as I used the GPS to provide the street names but drove in the opposite direction (north instead of south, west instead of east) everything was fine and it showed me approaching my destination instead of driving away from it.  I don’t know what that was about.  I did managed to get to the SpiceWorks offices just fine.  I only lost ten or fifteen minutes at most figuring out the GPS.

The drive to SpiceWorks was just under twenty miles but went pretty quickly.  Traffic in Austin is nothing like Houston.  Austin is a much smaller city and a lot more like a desert than Houston which feels more like a swamp.  I did not get much of a chance to actually see the city today although I did drive in a big loop from the airport on the southeast side to SpiceWorks which is on the northwest side.  While there I always felt like I was a pretty good distance outside of the city but when checking the locations on the map I realize that I was actually rather close to downtown the entire day and just never really got a good look at it because of the hills.

I was not sure how to find the SpiceWorks building in the complex that they are in.  Finding the complex was super simple but finding their building was a bit tough.  I lucked out, though, that I parked and immediately as I got out of the car with the intention of wondering around and just looking for the building and saw someone walk right by me wearing a SpiceWorks t-shirt!  I grabbed them and they recognized me after a minute and then took me right in to the offices – which it turned out I had parked directly at.

The SpiceWorks folks set me up in a conference room so that I could work and, when there was time, throughout the day I wandered around the offices talking to all of the people that I talk to so often but have never met previously.  A group of us went out to lunch at a well known TexMex spot nearby.  That gave us a good chance to talk about SpiceWorks and SpiceCorps and to get to know each other.  The food was good too.

It was a good day and well worth the trip over to Austin even if I was exhausted all day.  I was really fighting to stay awake for much of the day.  It was fun and a good use of my time, though.  I am definitely glad that I went over there.  Dominica and I have been interested in Austin for a while anyway as there is a definitely possibility that we will be buying a house there at some point.  Austin is a major tech center – one of the four big IT centers in the United States – as well as being inexpensive and close to most of her family.  Her family keeps moving to Texas making it make more and more sense for us to be there.  Due to the lack of state taxes Texas also has some major financial advantages.  We will definitely be considering Austin when we make the decision about where and how Liesl will be doing her schooling.  We have several years before we need to make that decision but it takes a long time to get to know an area remotely so that you can make good decisions about it.  Right now western Connecticut and Austin are our two big contenders.

My plan was to wait until the very last minute and then head out for the airport but there ended up being some problem with my tickets and I was unable to print them out so I ran to the airport “early” so that I could deal with that.  The ticket issue was nothing really and I was able to print my tickets from the United Airlines kiosk as I entered the airport so I ended up having about forty-five minutes to kill before needing to go wait at the gate for my flight.  I hit the bar near the gate and had a few whiskeys while waiting my flight time.  I spent my time there on my BlackBerry trying to wrap up everything that I could for the office as I had to leave earlier than expected and there were a number of items needing my attention.

My flight from Austin to Washington/Dulles left on time and without any incident.  I sat on the aisle next to a military forensic photographer who travels more than anyone I have ever met.  He too carried multiple BlackBerry devices so that got us talking and we talked over half the way to Dulles.  That made the trip go by pretty quickly.  It would have been even faster if I was not so groggy.

My layover at Dulles was supposed to be really short – just twenty minutes or so.  It ended up being longer as first we had mechanical difficulties and then weather problems in the northeast causing all kinds of delays for everyone.

As always seems to happen at the airport I got to witness someone completely losing their mind and almost going to jail.  Some guy determined not to miss his flight even though his connector got in too late ran past the airport staff and manually opened the “do not enter” doors leading to the tarmac because he was going to get on his plane one way or another.  Alarms sounded, the police were summoned, screaming and belligerent jerkiness ensued.  It took a lot of explaining to make him sort-of understand that just because he was running late and that he had been on planes all day and that, according to him, it was not his fault that he was too late for the plane would make him understand that he was about to be arrested and that people being arrested do not get to board their planes regardless of the fact that the plane might be sitting on the tarmac just several yards away from him.  He seriously asked if he could just get on the plane as the police were on their way to get him!!  It took even more explaining to tell him that the plane he was attempting to board was the broken down plane bound for White Plains, New York and not the working plane that had already left long ago for St. Louis, Missouri that had been gone for so long that no one waiting for White Plains even knew that it had ever been there.

I called Dominica and put her on standby for picking me up.  No way to know when I would be leaving Sterling, Virginia.

My flight ended up being only about one hour late which was pretty good all things considered.  At one point they were not telling us anything but our flight had been removed from the departures list making us pretty confident that it had been canceled and that we were going to need to look for alternative means of reaching New York tonight.  I was intending to get a rental car and just drive up rather than waiting until tomorrow and going through all of this again but we got our flight rescheduled and we were off.

The plane from Dulles to White Plains was a little propeller plane with just one seat on the side of the plane on which I sat.  It was loud and it jerked around a lot as we got caught in some of the big storms hitting the northeast.  The pilots attempted to go around the storms but were unable to really avoid them.  It made for a very rough ride.  It also made the flight longer than necessary as we had to fly around other cities that had all of their planes in holding patterns like Newark, New Jersey.  So the flight was physically a bit longer than originally expected.

Dominica was at Westchester Airport waiting for me when I got off of the plane.  She had arrived just a few minutes before I did and had seen my plane landing so she knew that I was going to be there soon.  She had spoken from Dulles and she knew that my cell phone might die at any time.  That is one thing that I am not happy about with my new Blackberry Tour – the battery dies in under one day of use.  I can never leave the house and be confident that I can make it back with a working phone.  It died while I was out at SpiceCorps in Houston and while I was traveling home tonight – in both cases I had charged it overnight the night before and it discharged completely during the single day while I was using it.  Partially this is because I am using several Internet features plus GPS all which puts a toll on the battery but still.  It is going through the battery way too quickly.  Hopefully with some conditioning this will improve.

Dominica picked me up just a little before one in the morning and we drove back home.  Liesl figured out that I was home when we got to the house and she wanted to stay up and hang out with me for a while.  I ended up being awake until after three in the morning!  What a long day.  I am going to be exhausted tomorrow again as well.  No getting around that!

Dominica and I have nothing at all scheduled today so we are taking the day to just relax.  We entrenched ourselves in the living room with Liesl and Oreo and did our best to do pretty much nothing all day.

I worked on the continuing struggle of getting Linux (Red Hat) to integrate with Active Directory running on Windows.  That is always a big pain no matter how you attempt to do it.  Today I am learning about installing LikeWise Open which is basically a large package of a bunch of standard Linux components all set up to work together to handle AD integration with ease (in the same way that Zimbra packages a bunch of products to make email work in the same way.)

LikeWise ended up being a total breeze to install but doesn’t completely meet my needs so I ended up installing it to give myself some time to consider the alternatives and to think of the limitations or workarounds that may apply.  After a lot of research into methods using WinBind, Microsoft’s UNIX AD Extensions and more it does look as though the LikeWise approach is probably the way to go but I am still not one hundred percent sold.  I wish that I could do some simple ID mapping to make the two really work well together.  I am also experiencing some bizarre home directory behaviour that seems to go against the stated behaviour in the LikeWise documentation so I need to look into that more as well.

Most likely what is going to have to occur is a manual UNIX GID migration to match Windows.  That will be a pain but I think that it will work fine and the home directory problem is something around which I can work without too much of a hassle.  I really want to get all logins everywhere to authenticate to a single backend instead of having one system for email, one for desktops, one for UNIX, one for websites, etc.  That is far too much to remember.

Dominica got the chance to do one of her Linux Administration classes today.  That completed her seventh of eleven classes in this module that she is doing.

We watched a bit of Netflix OnDemand today.  Mostly Murder She Wrote and “The Seeds of Death” episode of Doctor Who from like 1967.  It is one of the old, awful black and white (shades of grey) episodes that was likely pulled from BetaMax because the BBC lost the original.  It was a six part episode.  All of those episodes are so cheesy but they are still fun.  I can’t wait until we work up to the mid-seventies and the eighties.  Those are the episodes that I really liked growing up.

Around eleven I got paged out.  Not for something quick either.  I had to hop right on to a conference call that lasted for quite a long time.  Of course the day could not go by without me having to work.  But we really need the overtime these days so I really cannot complain.  It is quite the blessing to be able to book another couple of hours after Liesl had already gone to bed.  I am not missing any baby bonding time and I still get paid.

When I started on the late conference call it was still clear outside.  Only a few flakes of snow were beginning to drift down although Katie had reported from South Jersey that they were getting a blizzard already.  By the time that I was wrapping things up long past midnight I took Oreo out for a late walk and discovered that there was an inch or two of snow already built up!  The rumor is that we can expect to see as much as thirteen inches by morning.  Everyone is already talking about working from home tomorrow.

One of the guys working with us on the phone conference was working from his car and actually had it catch fire and burn up while he was on the phone.  He dropped off of the call suddenly and never got back to us.  It turns out that he had left his BlackBerry in the car and it burned up with the car.  He managed to call back from the ambulance while on oxygen to let us know what had happened.  He was expecting to have to go to the ER to be checked out.  It did not seem like a matter for any serious concern, but it did lend a bit of excitement to the late night conference call.

Well I get to book a few hours even if I did end up missing out on watching Johnny Be Good with Dominica.  She ended up going to bed without me since I was stuck working so late.  It was around one in the morning when I was finally able to head off to bed.  Not too bad.  We often don’t get to go to bed until after that.

Good luck dealing with the snow everyone.  Tomorrow is going to be a fun day.  All of the kids are definitely having snow days as are many of the adults!

Here is something interesting: as of last year I have now been blogging for a quarter of my life!  That does not seem possible.  One out of every four years is recorded in SGL.  That does not include any of the “looking back” stuff that I do where I go back and fill in old details either. I have not had a chance to do very much of that but I hope to get to that more in the future.  That is harder to do because I really need a list of dates of when things occurred to know when to write about things.

I got to the work for the office just before nine.  I am very glad that I was at least able to sleep in as late as I did.  There was a bit of work for me today so I got right to it.

Dominica and Liesl did not sleep in very long.  They were up around ten and came down to the living room.  Oreo had gotten up with me and spent much of the morning moving from one part of the house to another.  He was very restless today.

I ended up working until after one in the afternoon.  Never a real break for me.  Then I showered and before two Dominica went out to do some shopping.  She went to the grocery store and then on to A.C. Moore to pick up much needed modeling supplies.  She was gone for about two hours.

No sooner was Dominica out shopping than I got paged back to work so I had to work for another hour or more.  Getting paged out every time I am watching Liesl makes it very hard to take care of her.

This evening we watched a few episodes of Murder She Wrote and then watched Journey to the Center of the Earth on BluRay.  Journey was cute and had some good people in it but was very silly.  In some theaters it was shown in 3D and a lot of the show was cheesy computer graphics just for effect.  We enjoyed the movie though and neither of us have ever read the book.  The movie is not based directly on the book but is more of a sequel than anything else.  Both Dominica and I were thinking that we should read it as it is a classic.  So I picked it up from Audible.

Here is something interesting – the nation of Iceland has a population roughly identical to the population of the greater Utica, New York area!  It is hard to believe that there is a country with so much land and a population so small.  It is amazing how much larger the state of New York is in population than Iceland.  Iceland is about a third the size of the population of Monroe or Erie counties.  Roughly ten times the population of Wyoming County.

We actually managed to relax a bit this evening which was very nice.  I spent a lot of the evening working on getting SpiceWorks completely set up and working the way that I wanted it to do.  I recently moved from SpiceWorks 3.5 to 3.6 and am finding it to be working much better for me now.  I have it authenticating to Active Directory now as well.  I have also gone through and done everything that I needed to hit 100% on my SpiceMeter.

There are several features desperately needed yet in SpiceWorks like Solaris compatibility (it falsely reports data from Solaris boxes), Active Directory for all users not just Help Desk users and SSL security instead of open HTTP only.  Progress is being made, though, and SpiceWorks is a pretty nice product for small shops.  Each release has made some good progress over the last one.  I look forward to seeing what they do with it in the future.  The system also pretty slow but they are actively working on the speed issues.  The system is built on Ruby which is very cool.

We were pretty worn out by the end of the evening and went to bed around midnight.  At least that is when we tried to go to bed.  Anytime that I am really tired and looking to get to bed is always the time that Oreo decides that he not only needs to go outside for a walk but decides that he needs to do so twice in a row giving me just enough time in between to take off his harness and leach, my shoes, jacket, etc. so that we have to go through it all again.

Tomorrow I have no work scheduled and we do not have to travel anywhere.  We should be able to relax some tomorrow.