Stressed Day

When you become a prominent player in a big project at work, you have those days where it seems like you should never take a day off. Every time I do take a day off, I end up working twice as hard the following day to make up for what I missed. Today was one of those days. From the first ten minutes of the day, I was off and running. Troubleshoot, fix, find out why it happened. Repeat. (kinda like shampoo??) At the end of the day I didn't make much progress, but things were up and running. We kicked off the Japan project today but I was told that I do not get to be the main person for this one. I guess I should be happy my boss worries that they are putting too much on me. It will be nice to have someone else know what I am working on so I can take more than one day off at a time. I have a bunch of vacation time this year but I always have a tough time finding when to use it.
With one kido gone for a slumber party, we had some one on one with our little man tonight. We went out to dinner at Beef O Brady's and had a good time. I had a cuban sammy, something that I've been missing since we left Florida. My car was having issues and driving my stress to orbital levels. The oil pressure gauge keeps dropping below low (like a broken gauge) each time I come to a complete stop, but when I hit the gas, it seems to be ok. Time to get it checked out before it becomes a bad problem and someone get stuck. I hate car issues, they cause physical, mental and financial stress. I really needed to calm down tonight after it was all said and done.
Busy weekend coming up. Tomorrow we have soccer and then I have to work THREE change windows. Pray to the gods that I can get them all done successfully. Still have those two movies to watch and a yard that desperately needs to be cut and the weeds need to be tamed. Not to mention a menu to plan and groceries to be purchased... deep breath... release....

The Penguin meets a Feisty Fawn and other Tech stuff

This penguin has recently been working with the latest edition of Ubuntu Linux which was just released to beta, version 7.04 code name Fiesty Fawn. This version of Ubuntu is showing some great signs of being what could lead to a larger adoption of desktop linux. I ran two tests. The first test was running the live cd on my Thinkpad laptop. The disc booted up and all my hardware including the built in wireless card and bluetooth card were found correctly. I was able to connect to the home wireless network and work with all the included applications. An internet connection and a copy of Firefox can get me through to most of my daily resources. I love the fact I could use the live cd option to test things out instead of having to worry about blowing away my work laptop with a potentially harmful installation (This is no indication that Ubuntu has a bad installation, I just worry about data loss and toying around with stuff). The second test was on the Dell Dimension E520. When I did this test with Edgy Eft (6.10), it wouldn't boot to the Gnome desktop. This was due to the ATI video card (X600) not being run with the proper driver. In Fiesty however, this was no longer an issue. I was able to get to the desktop. The only problem was the Dell 1450 Wireless USB Network Card. I didn't have any notes with me about how to use the ndiswrapper program to load the windows driver. I will have to give it a try later when life isn't so hectic. Overall I think that the usability factor is dead on for this new release of Ubuntu.

I have been trying to be a good memeber of the Digg community, each day going out and rating new articles. Today a new Digg-like site was launched called Tweako. This is a site that lets the users rate technical guides, how-to's and tutorials of various topics. Being someone in the IT field, I'm always looking for a quick site to find a lot of good information to learn new stuff. This site definitely has potential.

I've been trying out the Democracy Video Player. It is a nice RSS aggregation tool for video podcasts and IPTV shows. I can find all the episodes of my favorite shows like DL.TV and Geekbrief.tv as well as tons of other "channels" with new stuff being added all the time. It's a nice alternative to iTunes but I still need a better RSS tool for regular websites and podcasts that I like to follow.

Grumpy day

Today I had the day off for my pager comp day and I was out of sorts most of it. Started out ugly when I didn't want to get up and help fix breakfast for the little guy. I didn't realize that Kel had been up all night with some stomach issues and didn't sleep well. I was not happy that I managed to only sleep in an extra bit after being woken up.
Spent a couple hours down in the den playing SSX Tricky on the playstation. It is one of my favorite games that we have and I have almost gotten each of the characters in it as far as my abilities can. I've been trying to unlock the final mountain slope but you have to win all the races and it takes a lot longer to pass that. You have to win three different times before you are allowed to move forward.
We went out to O'Charleys for lunch and then had to grab a few things from Wal-mart. If you go to O'Charleys you have to try the loaded potato soup, it's just awesome. We are providing drinks and a snack for soccer this week which was our main purpose of going to the store. Can't get out of there without spending at least $50, and if we go to Target, it gets even worse.
Back to work tomorrow and a long change window that I have to provide assistance for on Saturday night through Sunday morning. We have two movies to watch this weekend: The Pursuit of Happyness and Children of Men. Hopefully we'll find time to watch them, doesn't seem like we're going through movies at Netflix quite as quickly as we used to, but the stack of envelope covers on the fridge seems to show differently. We keep the covers for the days when Blockbuster gives free rentals for each cover envelope as they try to compete with Netflix.

I think we've skipped spring...

We're on our fourth straight day of record temps for this time of year. We set a record at 88 yesterday here in our small town. I won't complain, it's been completely beautiful. Over the weekend I attempted to participate in shutdown day, a day where you turn off the computer for 24 hours and try to reconnect with life, as well as save energy for turning off the computer. I failed within minutes of getting out of bed, but it was because the pager was going off and I had to check out what was wrong. I did make it for 24 hours beyond that though. Didn't even notice the shakes this time around ;-)

Alex did well for soccer on Saturday afternoon. We had to endure team pictures for the spring season and then we had a little bit of time before the game began. There is an aggressive spirit in him this season, but mostly on kick offs and free kicks. He is still all around the field and away from the ball at times, but he's having a good time and that is what really matters. I think his coach is doing great and I try to reinforce some stuff with him outside of practice and games. I'm glad he's found something that he really likes. Morgan seems to want to give it a try in the fall so we'll see how things go.

Did more yard work over the weekend, waking the lawn mower from it's winter slumber. It was quite cranky and it took me about 25 pulls to get it to start up. I still have a manual push mower with the pull start. This little yard still takes quite a bit to finish up but it looks a lot better. The wild onions in the yard tend to stick around after you mow so it can be an eye watering experience. On Sunday, we planted beans, carrots, cukes, corn, green peppers, scallions and yellow squash. I'm hoping that something will take, but if not we gave it a good try and everyone had fun getting things in place. In an attempt to have a functional yard, we reset the soccer goals to go east/west instead of north/south and now we have less chance of having the soccer ball end up in the garden.

Another busy week ahead for work, but I get a freebie day for carrying the pager last week. Unfortunately there is a change that is going to take 4 hours Saturday night into Sunday morning and at least one evening meeting as we get ready to spread our work further around the globe and I start working with our colleagues in Japan.

Thanks for a good season Knights

Tonight the hockey season came to an abrubt end for the Clarkson Golden Knights as they were defeated by the University of Massachusetts 1-0 in overtime. According to an article on ESPN.com, it was only the second time in NCAA men's hockey tournament history that a game has gone scoreless to overtime. First time since 1999 that our Knights were in the tourney and they gave it their all. Hats off to your success Knights and we hope to see you bring back the team next season.

Proud Alumni and other thoughts

Today is a good day in Golden Knight hockey, our Clarkson Golden Knights have won the ECACHL and have the number 1 seed in the East regional of the NCAA hockey tourney. I was watching the selection show on ESPN2 today and the analysts didn't give us much of a chance, calling for us to lose in the first round. It's ok, just a day to be proud when everyone else is pulling for their alma mater to win the big basketball games. Here's to the big sport of the great white north :)

Been really busy with work and such lately, but the hard work is definitely paying off. I am grateful to be recognized for the work that I've done, but now I have set a really high bar for my work. It's going to be tough to hold onto this pace for the long term. I guess I will have to find other creative ways to keep my work at a high level and continue to grow.

I have been able to get some of the garden work done that I've been wanting to do. I built the raised bed box out of three 2x6's and some decking screws. Kel and I worked to sink it in the ground about an inch and then Morgan and I worked on clearing out the grass sod inside the box and replacing it with new enriched topsoil. Alex and Morgan used some of the sod to fill in holes created when I removed some trees to clear up the backyard a bit. We planted two grape plants (one white seedless, one black seedless) and the asparagus plants (2 clusters of 6 plants). I have seeds for carrots, cucumbers, green peppers, sweet corn, yellow squash, scallions and some giant sunflowers. Most of them won't be able to be planted until late April or early May, but it feels good getting outside and enjoying the work. Morgan seemed very happy and mentioned that she felt silly she had been scared to be outside because of dealing with the bugs. I think that we're making strides here. I can't believe it's almost been a year since we closed on the house and made our move.

Tired out tonight as I had to work the sunday window and ended up working 1:30-5 to roll out new software and troubleshoot some issues. Didn't sleep well when I tried to nap beforehand and even though there was good intentions for letting me sleep, it just wasn't in the cards today. Off to get some rest as the pager fun starts in the morning.

Grunt work taking it's toll

I'm now on day 15 straight of work related activities. My new project has officially taken over my life, at least that is the way that it feels. Another double change window weekend (Saturday night work for Europe work, Sunday early am for USA work) with mixed results. This time it was a major installation of application code and patch work being done for the new daylight savings time dates. It's amazing that the three week difference has so many up in arms (an us scrambling to install patches) but computers are like people, they don't like to change things they already know. It's not a big Y2k type thing, but just a lot of extra work to make sure that things are going to work properly. Just what I need, extra work. The major application update didn't work and we ended up having to roll everything back to it's pre-window state. This means that I now have to look forward to at least one or two more weekends worth of work to get it up an running. Life of being a grunt techie. This is what keeps our normal livelihood working. Of late though, I'm not sure that I'm able to take part in that livelihood. Since the beginning of the year I've worked almost every weekend, which puts a damper on what we can do. Lots of overtime for us grunts without monetary gain. It all seems to work out in the end somehow though. Sometimes I just need a little reinforcement saying good work, or thanks we know that you've been working your butt off. Lately those words aren't really there, it's just continuously expected. My team lead told me to schedule a comp day this week because I've had so many days in a roll, so we're gonna stop the count at 18 and take a breather.
On top of all the work fun, the little guy has been sick and fighting off his ear infection. This doesn't translate into good quality sleep at night for me. I have not had a full night of sleep in a few days but I just keep trudging on. Weird dreams come when you've had a lack of sleep and watch a bunch of terrorist inspired movies on tv: Executive Decision, Air Force One, The Borne Supremacy. I woke up this morning thinking of trying to decipher a work code problem, disarm a bomb and save the day all in one foul swoop. At least I still have some imagination left...