March 15, 2005: The Ides of March

I slept well last night, nine and a half hours! I woke up just before Min got home. She worked late today but forgot to tell me that she was going to be working late.

I had to spend the majority of the day working on the instant messaging server trying to get that restored. Not what I had been planning on working on this week but you never get to plan for these things, I guess. It is all a part of the job.

More blasting today. Even louder than it has been. Min isn’t able to sleep through it very well. She ended up having to get up early because of the blasting. It really isn’t very responsible: the level of blasting and noise that they are creating over there without even mentioning it to anyone.

Min and I went and did some grocery shopping this evening so that I will be ready for her to be gone for the rest of the week. We went to Wegmans and Aldis and I ran over to Walmart to pick up The Incredibles. Dad is really anxious to see The Incredibles.

Min cooked her Mexican casserole dish for dinner and made some really fancy salads that were really tasty. We watched Terms of Endearment which I have never seen. That was a really crappy movie. That is what I refer to as a “feel bad” movie. Definitely not my type of thing. I don’t mind dramas, in fact I really like them. And I don’t mind feeling sad in a movie. What I don’t like to feel is indifference. And that is exactly the emotion that I feel when I watch this movie. Not one single character in the movie did I care about or connect with. All of the characters were shallow, mean people and I was happy to see them having terrible, boring lives. But that was all that this movie amounted to, just awful and boring. It was difficult to sit through the entire thing. How it won any awards I will never know. And what a pathetic cast. John Lithgow was the only decent actor in the entire thing and he was maybe on screen for five minutes of this drawn out, over two hour movie. I hope I never have to sit through that again.

After the movie, Min had to head off to work. I won’t see her again until Sunday. 🙁 I am very sad.

Well, at 11:21 this evening, our Jabber server is now back online. There are a couple of good things about the server outage of this past weekend. One is that we managed to upgrade four version of our Jabber server so we are running on a much newer codebase now with some new features. Two is that we managed to consolidate two of our MySQL databases so I have less that I need to manage now. Three is that our single, largest, loudest and most power hungry server has been officially retired leaving us living in a much quieter house than it has been in a very long time. I am glad for the break. And I am very relieved that everyone using the IM services can log back in in the morning. I needed to know that that was working before I went to bed. We also have the cool new feature of being able to connect to the jabber server through the cool Jeti Java based IM client which is really handy for people who are away from their regular desktops.

Tomorrow I plan to be around most of the day. I have a Chamber of Commerce event in the late afternoon so I should be leaving the office around 4:00 or so. Thursday I should be in all day. Friday I will be teaching in Castile for Dominica all day and then heading out to York in the evening to see Jeremy and Sara in their high school musical, “The Music Man”. Tony is planning on going to the show too.

Min took her computer with her tonight. She is going straight out to Frankfort from work in the morning. She will be watching a lot of cable television (can you say BBC America) and playing a lot of the Sims 2 University. Maybe she will be tired of it by the time she gets back here. Four days of that game must be enough to get sick of it. I expect that she will be on the Jabber server most of the time while she is gone so look for her online, those of you with Jabber connectivity through Niagara.

I looked at the total used bulb time on our projector last night. We are happy to report that after almost exactly a year and a half, we have used about 1340 hours on the projector bulb. They claim to get approximately 3000 hours from the bulbs. That means we get almost exactly three years from a bulb at our current usage rates. That is really impressive, I think. Since we don’t have any other television in the house to take any significant load off of the projector. Most people use it as a secondary viewing device but it is our only real one. Min does watch a lot of movies on her computer or on my laptop and she uses Andy’s portable DVD player a lot. But for regular family viewing, the projector is all that we have. And we have gotten much better, over the past year, at getting people to turn the projector off when they are done using it. So I bet we are using it less now, rather than more. So, the bottom line is that the projector is much more economical than we had thought that it would be.

Well, it has been a long and stressful day of trying to get that server back online and working again. I need to get to bed and relax a little bit. I would really like to stay up and read but my old eyes just aren’t up to it tonight. So, I am taking a few minutes to jam-pack the MP3 player with some cool content to listen to as I drift off to slumber.

Okay, goodnight everyone, I will talk to you tomorrow.

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