Howdy! Well since my goal of a full night’s sleep failed (bed by 10:30 up by 4am - 5 1/2 hours) - I figured what a better time to sit down and actually blog a bit about the whole Christmas time, as I have only posted blips and flickr links.
Christmas Eve - We went to Barry and Michelle’s for the evening feast, not feeling my best (read: Lack of Sleep) I only had some potatoes and ham, but hey it was tasty none the less - we had some fun, the dogs came in after dinner and we got some fun pictures of them, Beth took over the camera after a while as my head was killing me, and she got some fun shots. Jordan called in from Iraq to wish the family a merry Christmas - was pretty special for them.
So after things wrapped up there we came home and after a while my headache calmed down, which left me awake, so from about 10->12 I worked on developing some of the pictures in Lightroom, great thing to have digital negatives for is a dark room, so cleaned up various levels from the negatives and printed out some to fit in a set Mom got for Beth and Michael, so Christmas morning we could present them, it came out nice, the ol R340 still works like a charm, of course now it’s low on 4 colors, but that’s to be expected with the photos I print that are 8 1/2 x 11 - not being able to sleep I worked on some gift wrapping for my mom, and eventually got to sleep, then woke up early for the next phase. Christmas Waffles.
Christmas Morning - We had fun, another year @ Beth and Michael’s for waffles, freshly cooked bacon (turkey and pork) as well as tasty sausage, then there was the piles of waffles. I had 6 total, delightful. So the fun continued, Cousins were there, and Dave and Jo, so lots of fam, twas fun! Then of course it was getting late thus it meant Mom needed to get to Work to do her Christmas Givings as well as prepare for the afternoon.
Christmas Afternoon - The plan was originally in my mind 4:30, but it turned out to be 2:30, but I am getting ahead of myself, at around noon I get server alarms that a customer server is offline, however - the server is online, so at first I am thinking “phew false alarm” then I get to looking, their primary server is offline (100+ sites) so my worry is to get investigations going at the DC on Christmas day could mean a long outage - well the response time was 5 minutes for them to reboot it, then took a little longer to run a FSCK on the drives. Logs show it was simply as I predicted “Out of Ram” so I am going to drop off a upgrade path for them Today - but thats another story.
So with my expected nap not going to be possible I printed up song sheets, as well as made copies of the music I was playing, and then headed off with Dad to the mini-Christmas service at the nursing home - Beth and Michael came to lend their voices, and it turned out pretty good, was still a tad rocky from the lack of sleep, and forgot that in practicing I lowered 2 songs down an octave as they were un-godly high lol. So when I looked at the song and tried to lower em in my brain, it half worked - ah the joys of the piano.
Christmas Evening gave me a chance to get some sleep under my belt, and most of the day after Christmas was sleep as well, so really I am getting my body some rest finally - but I still have pending orders that of course came in on Christmas day, but I figure since both are from current customers, and I sent out the newsletter explainin it was the holidays, they’ll be good waiting till today.
All in all a fun Christmas, it really wraps up on Friday with Ron, Harm, Goofball - coming to Bakersfield for Christmas BBQ (Burgers! Yum!) I also am planing one way or another to do the Lights at Calm on Friday so need to send out the invites to folks, but it has been a great week - I got 2 Wii games (Pirates of the Caribbean and Meet the Robinson’s) as well as 2 Shirts - and my favorite The Muppet Movie! - been wanting to see that for some time, and it was in my batch of Mom gifts. Good stuff.
Anywhoo - lots to do, going to try and get a lot of work done today across a lot of projects, as well as get some things around town done so hopefully today will be as productive as I have laid out in my head, if not, well there’s always Friday (hehe) Hope you all had a good Christmas, and soon we’ll be in 2008, craziness. Have a good Thursday folks!
So, while I could sum up bits and bit of the last two days, again, I am sticking to a picture, and a short story - I was laying down after breakfast (sleep is still messed up) - and just before the alarms went off about a customer’s server being down (another story for another time), I heard a noise and had to investigate things - when I got up, I saw this:
The cat climbed into a box in my room which was way too small for her, but she enjoyed it. LoL. More later, going to do a little work on servers, then try to go back to sleep after a 7hr nap. Hope Everyone had a good Christmas.
Ever just have that desire for something? Well I have one right now and it’s chicken, I dunno why, I had Nacho’s for dinner, but that didn’t seem like enough, so at 3am I think I am going to head towards JNB and snag the chicken club. Mmm.
So some updates (aside from the fact that I love chicken) my dad is doing good, he got the results back from his CT scan which basically told the Doc that my dad fought too much in his youth. He found that my dad basically had deformed/damaged cartilage in his nose which was making it hard for the sinus infection he has to clear, so aside from some anti-biotics in his future, they are talking about a 3hr procedure to fix the issue and put in some tubes - which from the sounds of it would make his breathing issues as of late go away. So good news there.
In other news, had Teppanyaki on Friday with the gang, twas tasty (I had chicken then too) - afterwards myself, sis and bro-in-law, and sara went and saw “I Am Legend” and while I think Will Smith did a great job in his role, the story line needed some tweaking, sure sure it could of ended “sort of” the same way, but they lined up some plot possibilities then walked away from them, that and if you like dogs - don’t go. LoL. I don’t want to ruin anything for anyone who wants to go see it, it’s not a “Buy on DVD!” for me, but I may rent it when it comes out.
Coding news, slow going, but going. This week I am going to push forward REALLY hard, and try to just get things finally wrapped up on several fronts - I have a easy project Monday installing a cart, not a TON I have to do until they get me a finalized design on that end, but for the basic install, maybe an hour to get it fine tuned and happy - but the rest of the coding projects, should be fun to push forward and finish up, I want to have the customer sign-up and sign-in done by the end of the week and a skeleton of the admin done.
CentOS 4.6 upgrades came thru last night, final few go thru this morning on 4 other systems, so pretty smoothly, no problems reported. The next few days will be more server fun deploying PHP5 slowly across the board, I am going to do it on a server Wednesday is my current plan, and then another Friday after the clean-up I am sure will need to happen on the first server - also on that list above and beyond PHP5 is MySQL5, but I think on that front after the server migration will be the plan on that as I haven’t even visited that in testing.
Anywhoo - that’s the update - I hope to have Lunch with Mr. Poon this week, and I am trying to come up with something clever for this next Friday - so lots to do, only 120 hours to get it rolling so have a good week folks!
So a busy night. After my internet went out this afternoon, I gave up and just loafed, which means of course more work today, but hey what can you do when they are doing “brief work” on your line that lasts for 4 hours. LoL. So then I hung out with my sister and brother in law here, my packages came… one was pretty obvious that they figured out, the new 26inch LCD TV for the bedroom, the other ones weren’t so easy. I picked up a Xbox360, a Video card and a TV Tuner for the AMD rig, going to build a nice little Vista rig to do media, I got a good card, linux compatible if I get bored, but I want to link vista up with the 360, so we’ll see how that goes.
So I got things setup, signed up for live, then of course it was Nacho time. Tasty. Fun. Exhausting. We played GH3, Rock Band, and just hung out and munched on some grindage (buuuudy!) - twas fun, left around 11:30, but a good nice, relaxing, fun evening - good friends, some I hadn’t seen in a while, Rock Band was new and fun, but not really my cup of tea.
So that leads me up to now, Money issues, only partial payment from the kMan is expected, which made me sad - he had said he’d adjust his budget to accommodate, but I guess he too is having the money flow problems - then one of my big accounts had their card fail, so not sure what’s up there, but I contacted em, and I was assured one way or another it’d be fixed up, so really, nothing to worry about, especially if I go check my Mail and there is a nice pile of checks, which I am hoping for - but all in all, I hope I don’t have to fidget funds again.
I am now waiting for Vista to install, my copy hasn’t really done much, ran it on Parallels but really not much in the realm of speed - so I am hoping as a stand-alone media rig, it’ll do nicely, be able to record some TV, and since most of the shows I watch aren’t in HD to begin with, no major loss, probably just ditch HD cable here at the first of the year, and build a home-brew DVR for the house. So pretty excited, it’s at 40% extracting, and it’s being navigated with my old Apple Keyboard (tee-hee) - so good stuff indeed.
Anywhoo - back to it, need to go over some of my nightlies, have a meeting with the kMan around lunch to get a check, maybe even sneak in some sleep here somewhere, not sure where - but somewhere, and soon I hope so I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, pictures coming soon!
So I got more or less all of RM done last night, well some fine tuning I am sure, but the core is done, the homepage is working short of 1 loop, I started writing it, then got side tracked with dinner and new week weeklies, but it’s all looking good, maybe an hour (being very generous) before it’s done, then tomorrow my time will be split up among a few projects namely in the code realm EE, other depts are billing wrap-up - only like 4 left on the old system, final mail-out of legacy invoices for the year, next year all digital! and last but not least, the continued journey at sorting piles here in my room, I got a big section cleaned out and sorted, I am looking to start putting together a eBay / Garage Sale list soon, as I have a lot of gear I don’t use anymore.
But the week ahead looks good, sure sure, some stress areas already forefront in my mind, but I also want to push towards the release of the Affiliate Program, TN website launch, and closing out the old Credit Card processor for starters, the other canceled services will come soon, but in some cases probably not till after the first of the year, but I am hopeful that things will start to level out, I am hoping 1 customer from the TN side will get things in order this week and we can finalize their bill, it’s just dragging on now it seems, but hopefully this week will produce a final solution to the game we’ve been playing.
Anywhoo - if I am still awake at 3am, I am going to JNB for a Sausage, Egg & Cheese Biscuit Combo with some OJ and keep pushing forward on the morning, but if not I’ll get a few hours in, and get to work on this crazy week. Night All - Happy Post Turkeyday!
Ah the joys of being awake. I am sitting here sipping some hot chocolate, watching the office, pondering what I am doing for this time while I’m awake and alive at this lovely hour.
I have been pondering a XBox360 for a while, but I think I am going to continue to hold off for now, as cool as it’d be, it’s a stress on the budget I don’t need right now, and I have other financial things to focus on right now, I want to get back to building the savings, my hope is more projects are going to roll up, but with the server move push for the first of the year, I am hoping for reduced costs, higher server performance, continue the journey to branch into Windows hosting, good stuff.
I dunno, I am hoping sleep will come soon, I know I shouldn’t be sleep deprived and blog, but hey - its how I roll, so I am going to roll towards bed and hope for sleep to come. Night folks.
So a week done, some crazy stuff for a Friday, got a fraudulent order, they charged someone else’s card over $120 for hosting from me, first thing that was odd, the IP - a server in California - not a ISP, not a proxy, just a server with 1 website - second bit was the Colorado based phone number that didn’t work, and third, I found the person’s address to match - so I called their # in the white pages and left a message, sad folks steal information like that - but Today I got another order, still need to square it away - going to try and do so before I pass out tonight.
Got my short from Old Navy, perfect fit, oh-so-comfy, only thing they changed on this line of shorts (Painter Shorts) is the mysterious 3rd pocket, it’s super small. It made me cry - but then I realized how nice and comfy they are, ah to have good shorts again, hopefully these will last another year and a half like the last pair
Health wise, getting decent sleep, granted the UPS last night claims it detected like 3 outages, so I got in this morning and shut off the annoying alert buzz when it blinks off - I need to do some more checking on it this week probably do that Wednesday or so, do the full test on it and the power-loss test as well, its old, may be ready to be run down and brought back up to calibrate it, I think it’s been a year since it’s last calibration - but tonight, it won’t wake me every hour with 2 beeps.
Affiliate program is coming to FH & TN - the latest upgrade on the billing system allows me to make some cool rules, like client must be active 30 days before payout, so I can make some rules to ensure folks don’t just have friends sign-up to get some free hosting/cash out of me, as that’s the last thing I’d want to happen.
Work - been getting a decent amount of it here lately, not a major problem to keep up, just trying to line up more regular work so the monthly budget looks happier and get a step closer to an apartment, or rent for the house if my parents move out again, ah the joys of parents - but I am hoping with a new server client coming online this month towards the end (when I finish code) and some more coding projects here and there, I hope to get the budget up just enough to start savings for first and last month’s rent and find me a nice place to call my own, so I can move my house worth of stuff to my own house vs piled in my room.
Anywhoo - thats the run down I think, had fun with the McNutt’s and the Sherman at our 2nd weekly dinner @ Denny’s - maybe if we do it again this next week we’ll mix it up and try some place new, who knows - but this next time it’s my turn to pick up the bill, so cheap? LOL have a blessed Sunday folks, I am off to find dinner (yes at nearly 11pm) - I hope it’s tasty.
- not being able to sleep I worked on some gift wrapping for my mom, and eventually got to sleep, then woke up early for the next phase. Christmas Waffles.
