September 13, 2007: Another Plus for Newark (27 Mix)

I keep feeling the need to write the word canceled as “cancelled” and I keep seeing other people do it too. So I decided to do some research. It caught me by surprise because my automatic spell checked keeps telling me that it is “canceled” even though my finger instinctively spell it with the double L. So I looked it up and it turns out that both are correct. The single L is the correct British and Canadian spelling while the double L is the correct American spelling. Now you know and knowing is half the battle.

I was tired this morning and didn’t wake up on my own when my phone’s battery died and my alarm didn’t go off. No big deal but it kept me from getting into the office as early as I would have hoped. Really, the biggest issue was hitting rush hour instead of sneaking in before there was any traffic to deal with.

Uneventful day at the office. I did some more classes from the HP Learning Center. Because I didn’t make it in early this morning I worked a normal day today instead of getting to leave early. It was around five thirty when I headed out for home.

I got to Newark just in time to walk in the door to the phone ringing from Andy. He and I talked for about fifteen minutes and then my cell phone rang with the office needing some work to be completed. Dominica and I were already running late for meeting Susan for dinner so I had to rush.

We weren’t too late when we finally rushed out the door. We walked briskly over to Halsey Street and up to 27 Mix where we were meeting Susan. Neither Dominica nor I have been to 27 Mix yet even though it is widely known as one of the hottest eateries in downtown Newark. How we have avoided it all this time we have no idea.

27 Mix was awesome.  Not too expensive and the food was really amazing.  We sat outside on the back patio where a live jazz ensemble played most of the evening.  We haven’t seen Susan in months – maybe even six months – so it was nice to get a chance to do some catching up.

Some of the gang from Eleven 80 stalked followed “showed up” at 27 Mix and grabbed a table diagonal from us.  Several more people from Eleven 80 also ended up sitting at a table roughly between us so we had a total of ten people at 27 Mix all from Eleven 80 to one degree or another.

Dinner was excellent and we walked back home around nine in the evening.  Susan has a new office now in a much nicer building on Military Park which has moved her about two-thirds of the distance from her old office to Eleven 80.  She is now working just one building away from us.  Only the PSE&G fountain separates her office door from our apartment door!

We got back to the apartment and Dominica had a bunch of laundry and packing work to do before she could go to bed.  So she set straight away to working on that.  I had a surprise earlier in the day when I came home discovering that NewEgg had delivered my new hard drives overnight (I ordered them yesterday, did not expedite shipping and did the low cost three day UPS Ground shipping and they arrived in about twenty hours!)  Since the new hard drives were here it only made sense for me to stay up late and get one of the SunFire V100 servers built tonight so that it could be packed and shipped out to Ohio with us tomorrow so that dad can drive it back home with him since it is his house that it is going to.

I set right off installing the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB 8MB UltraATA 100 drives into the V100.  These are the first generation of drives using Seagate’s perpendicular drive technology.  I got them installed and fortunately after having worked on these V100s so much over the past two weeks I was very familiar with everything that was needed to get the installation kicked right off.  I had to download the latest image of Solaris 10 from SUN (version 8/7) but that only took about five minutes.

The entire build process went surprisingly smoothly.  Once the operating system was installed (I just went for the “Core” system which is extremely small and then went for the “locked down” networking option which installed just about nothing) I had to figure out how to get SSH installed so that I could actually use the server.  That took a little while and getting the new Solaris 10 services set up and working took a little bit but it wasn’t too bad.

By the time that everything was said and done it was about one o’clock in the morning.  Pretty late considering I need to be up for work in the morning but I am very happy as to the state of the server and I am relatively confident that it can be taken to dad’s house, plugged in and powered on and that it will be accessible right away.  Hopefully.  Fingers crossed.

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1 Comment

  1. Expensive shipping is a scam, really. Mail is not all that slow generally… though I feel like UPS Ground actually does do its best to delay all its packages to just about the average stated delivery time.

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