December 9, 2005

Today was super, ultra, mega productive day. I have a white board in my room that I keep track of all of my high priority tasks on and today I managed to eliminate a large number of those items. Boy did that feel good.

I got out of bed a little before Dominica left to go to Fuji. I spent the day working in the office. Nothing exciting just a lot of work to do. I ended up having to give Oreo a bath because he was getting stinky. So I bathed him and I washed his bedding. It really always needs to be done at the same time so that he doesn’t pass his doggy smell back and forth all of the time.

Dad came by at 4:30 and we went over to the Omega Grill for our regular Friday Fish Fry. We had to make a quick run to the post office first. I finally got out to getting all of my reimbursement charges from this summer sent out. I really should have done that a long time ago. That took several hours this afternoon there were so many reimbursement to take care of. What a pain that is. You would think that something like that would be simple but it never is.

After dinner I came back home to spend time with the puppy. Dad got a shipment of new equipment delivered to his house today that he dropped off. The first thing to play with was our new router for the house. Up until now we have been using a firewall that I built myself that runs on a PIII desktop machine. It worked fine but a PIII machine uses a lot more electricity than a regular embedded firewall and it takes a lot of space in the server room compared to the tiny, almost hand-held Netgear firewall. We are always battling the evil forces of heat dissipation down in the basement and I am hoping that by removing that PIII from down there that it will help considerably. It is funny that there used to be so much equipment running in the house but as the company has grown we have managed to be able to afford more appropriate equipment that has allowed us to scale back the total amount of equipment even though we have tons more power and flexibility. Just recently we were running eight total processors full time in our server room to do everything that we needed to do. Not including the small embedded processors in things like our firewalls and switches which use extremely little power. Over the next few weeks we are planning on being down to as few as three processors which are capable of handling a significantly larger workload. Boy wouldn’t that be nice.

My super productive day ended just a little before Dominica got home. We started having some problems with our email server and so I started working on that. Not long after I started working in became apparent that one of our Windows 2003 servers was failing and so I set to work trying to deal with that situation. So much for having an easy night after having had such a productive day.

Dominica went to bed around midnight or a little after. No such luck for me. I resigned myself to being up all night and got to work. Being the system admin does have its downsides from time to time. Unfortunately it is very difficult to be productive when you are up so late at night and have not prepared for it. So I am pretty much worthless as far as getting anything useful done while I am waiting for the computers to do things. I am lucky that I can just barely keep writing the dailies here. My eyes really want to close.

Staying up all night working on a system problem is not nearly as much fun as it was when I was in my early twenties. I hate this stuff now. I love the work but not getting to go to bed isn’t my idea of a good time anymore. At least Oreo decided that I needed to have some company and came in to hang out with me around five in the morning. He is so loyal.

I ended up getting to a point where I was able to take a nap for about two hours around six in the morning. Boy was I exhausted.

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