Update Oct 09

Haven't updated in awhile…life has been rolling along. We finished up the summer with a short week down at the Outer Banks, NC lazing on the beach, eating shrimp and drinking beer while watching the sun go down. Since then; we've gone on quick trips to Philadelphia and Chicago for Organ Symphony concerts.

Nothing much new going on; Connie's neck/back have been bothering her for a couple of months but she finally got through the wickets at TriCare and is getting physical therapy on it which appears to be slowly clearing it up.

Snow Leopard

Upgraded to Snow Leopard last night (the latest version of MacOS X) with no issues noted so far. Connie wouldn't let me update her yet because Nambu hasn't been upgraded. Oh well…if she wants to be relegated to the dustbin of operating system technology…I'm not going to drag her kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Didn't win the MegaMillions last night…somebody must have stolen my winning ticket when I wasn't looking; so I guess I'll have to go back to work on Monday after all.

Updated the web site with 3 new Organ Symphony Quest pages for Dallas, Cincinnati, and National Cathedral.

Saturday afternoon

Not doing much today; went to the Red Cross this morning to donate platelets, boxed up some old records and put them into the attic, filled out paperwork for my new job starting Monday. Had a Skype conversation with Connie earlier, she's packing to head over to Mumbai in the morning to meet with her Indian distributor.

Monday morning . . .back at work. I miss Connie already but she's probably so busy over in Dubai that she doesn't have time to think about being alone. Spent yesterday cleaning up/reorganizing the computer room/office at home, paying bills, and other exciting stuff. I did watch a couple of movies on TNT that I had never seen . . .the last half of The Da Vince Code (saw the beginning while donating blood one day) and Castaway. I was amazed that Tom Hanks lost as much weight as he did for Castaway . . .by the end he looked 40 or 50 pounds lighter than at the beginning. At the end after he delivered the package to the ranch (the one he had saved the whole time he was on the island) and met the lady owner of the ranch (based on the logo on the back of her pickup) and was standing in the road pondering what to do next . . .I would have guessed it would fade to black as he turned around and headed back to the ranch to introduce himself to her . . .but on reflection the "I wonder what he does next" works just as well. I guess screenwriters leave themselves a setup for a sequel if they can . . . the next one could easily open with him turning around . . . or with him driving off to "next stop Canada" as the lady rancher said.

Isn't technology wonderful?

I gotta tell you . . . technology is cool stuff. Connie left yesterday evening for a week and a half in Dubai, UAE and Mumbai, India. She got there today . . . and discovered that internet access in the hotel room costs $30 a day . . . but paid it anyway since ACP is picking up the tab for the trip. I had set up a Skype account for each of us the other day and installed the Skype app on her MacBook . . . she's pretty amazed that she can be 7000 miles away sitting there in her bathrobe having a video chat with me. Good thing she's got a Mac (all of our computers are Macs) . . . she would have had plenty more trouble both getting online in the hotel room and getting messaging to work on a Windows box.

Me . . .I spent the day on a bike ride, went by the bank ATM for a deposit, got a haircut and bought groceries, had a steak for dinner, and paid the bills/balanced the checkbook. Not nearly as interesting a day as she had (although today yesterday was just the flight . . . she is off to do touristy and Mass things today.

That's about it . . .guess I'm off to bed:-)

Lots o' work today

Did a bunch of updates on the website today; updated the pictures section for our vacation to all of the National Parks (Joshua Tree, Mojave, Death Valley, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon) in southern California back in September. I also updated the Organ quest pages for the Pacific Symphony (Sep 08) and New Jersey Symphony (Jan 09) concerts we attended. Watched the football games while working on those, worked on some paperwork for the new job, and cooked some chicken for dinner. At least the weather warmed up a bit . . .after bruising my ribs falling on the ice up in New Jersey last weekend I'm still pretty sore so have been biking instead of running this week. Yesterday it was like 5 degrees with 20 knots of breeze blowing and it was darned cold even though I had 3 layers of warm clothes on. Today was much nicer . . . high 20's and little wind so it was quite a bit more comfortable. Tomorrow and Tuesday are supposed to be a little warmer still so if it doesn't snow I may go for a longer ride then I did today or yesterday.

New job

Turned in my notice yesterday; after 7 years, 2 different customers, and 3 different customers I decided to move on from Kratos (was SYS Technologies, was RBIS, Ltd). Lots of good experience and colleagues along the way but I'm ready to get back into operational system administration work. It will mean some changes in our carpool arrangements but they're mostly on Connie's part . . .I'll drop her off at the Metro station she'll have to take the train to Union Station and back . . .she's been getting dropped off at the door for a couple of years now and is already missing it terribly. Not too much else new around here . . .it was 5 degrees this morning and had made it up to a whopping 9 by the time I went out and rode the bike . . . fingers pretty much froze by the time I got back.

Connie's all pumped up about some bike race down in Australia . . .she's been geeking out about it all week and I've heard way of the details than I needed:-).

Back to Work

Back at work today; amazingly enough no real new work came in while I was gone for a week and a half. DISA failed to publish the December Gold Disk as  they were supposed to on 12/26 so there won't be any new scans done this week. I did point out a couple of errors on Connie's blog and resolved an issue with the file server's Time Machine © drive getting full; turns out that rsyncx incremental folders aren't seen as incremental by Time Machine © but are fully backed up each time. This sucked up all remaining 80 GB of Time Machine space in like less than a week.

Not doing much . . . I'm off work until 1/5 but have some work to do on the home computer systems. I'm going to add rsync to my file server backup routines and upgraded Connie's Macbook to a "much zippier than the stock Apple drive" 7200 rpm drive today. I'll probably do my Macbook Pro as well; but since it's much harder to change the drive out on the Pro I wanted to do hers first to see what kind of speed upgrade there would be. It's pretty noticeable even in normal browsing type use; and considerably faster when doing drive intensive things.