For me, today is just a continuation of yesterday. Dominica had to get out of bed just a little before 8:00 and I got up just a little after she did. So I got about two hours of sleep before I had to head back into the office to keep working on the downed server that we have. I hate it when this stuff happens. But this is what I get paid for so I really can’t complain.
I spent the entire morning working on the server trying one approach or another. It was 1:00 in the afternoon, sixteen hours after I started, that the server was back up and running again. There is nothing in the world like that feeling of relief that you get working in this field when you are sure that total disaster has struck but you then manage to pull through and have a solution that works and fixes the problem. Okay, there is a lot of prayer involved, but the rush is still there. And people wonder why IT pro’s burn out so easily.
I was pretty much useless the rest of the day. I did a few practicy tests for the CompTIA Security+ exam that I want to take soon. I am hoping that I can schedule it so that I can take that exam at the same time that Dominica is taking her A+ Core exam which might be as early as Tuesday. It would be really nice if we could car pool and get the tests out of the way. I have been working on this particular exam for a really long time and I just keep putting it onto the back burner and forgetting about it and that is really a massive waste of time so I am attempting to buckle down and push my way through it as quickly as possible so that I can focus on moving on to bigger and better things.
Jeremy came over for a little while this afternoon. His parents were out Christmas shopping and he had a few hours in the middle of the afternoon to just hang out so he came over and played some Call of Duty 2 in the living room while I was in the office. Dad came over and we all went to the Omega Grill for dinner. I called dad this afternoon to tell him that since he hadn’t called over to ask me if I wanted to get dinner that I had forgotten to eat today. It has been a joke around here because we have one or more meals almost every day with dad. Dad eats at the Omega Grill so often that his Christmas cards this year are a characature of him sitting in the diner! They are sure to post one of those up on the fridge right along side the pictures of Dominica and I in Disney World.
After dinner we came back and played a little bit of video games before I had to take Jeremy back home. I came back to the house and got an SGL Podcast (#34) out the door. I know that this week has been lean and I didn’t want to keep everyone waiting for another show. I am getting much better at keeping the length down to a reasonable level these past several shows. That should make a lot of people happier. Don’t get any ideas about the blog getting shorter, though, it is a lot easier to just skim over sections that you are not interested in than it is to fast forward through things that get too lengthy.
Dominica decided that she wanted to watch new episodes of Keeping Up Appearances so she took a quick detour over to Borders in Henrietta on her way home to see if they had the show in stock. We have watched the first four DVDs several times and I am pretty sure that there are a number of episodes on the second set of four DVDs that I have never seen. Any that I have seen on there have not been for a really long time. It is not a show that I have seen on television very many times.
Dominica got home but didn’t have any luck finding the DVD that we wanted at Borders. Borders’ prices are really high and their selection is really poor. We almost never manage to find anything there that we want but we have the major disadvantage of Rochester being the city that closes early and has no shops that sell anything outside of the pop culture mainstream so finding things like a BBC comedy on DVD are near impossible. That is one thing that I would really appreciate about living in or near a real city. Shopping out here for anything that isn’t a necessity is a real pain.
We watched some more of the Keeping Up Appearances that we all ready had in the house and relaxed for two episodes before going to bed. I was totally exhausted by the time that we decided to go to bed. In fact, I was totally exhausted all day long today. I can’t believe that I made it through the day. While we watched the show I took apart a computer that I am working on for Castile Christian Academy. That wasn’t too intensive and I was able to handle it while relaxing.
Tomorrow we finally get to go see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that we have been waiting for a year or more to release. We are really excited about finally getting a chance to see it. The Chronicles of Narnia were my favorite books as a child and I know them by heart. When I was very young, probably around age four, my mother read the books to me and recorded them onto cassette tape while she read them so that I would be able to go back and listen to them whenever I wanted to. By age five or so I was listening to those seven books all of the time. That period of my life not only provided my love of the Narnia books in particular but created a real passion for the genre of fantasy and taught me to appreciate the concept of recorded books. Now I get all of my books that way and it makes me much happier than having to sit down and read them all myself. We are going to see the 4:45 showing at Tinseltown’s DLP theatre in Gates with Phil and Kate. We haven’t seen them in months!
Andy worked on installing Debian Linux onto his Apple Mac Mini this evening. He finally decided that Mac OS X just wasn’t very useful for normal things or at least not as useful as Linux. So he switched the machine. He is the only person that I know of to have ever purchased and brand new Mac and to remove the Mac OS from it to isntall something else. But it is neat that he has Linux running on a PowerPC platform. Not many people can say that. It is true that we never use our Mac for anything other than watching DVDs in the living room. It isn’t a bad system but it just doesn’t have the flexibility or ease of use of other systems that we have. It does have a rough learning curve and doing anything on it always takes a lot more effort than should really be necessary.