March 2005 Archives

Tomorrow, I am heading out with the band to Vernal, Utah—home of many, many prehistoric fossils.

I hope everything goes well while I'm gone. There are a lot of projects that have big things happening this week.

Iodynamics is getting so busy it's getting to the point we need to start thinking either about hiring another full time admin/programmer or invest in the technology required to perform human cloning on me.

Friday is the airdate for the second part of the season finalé of Battlestar Galactica. Christine and I have been watching this new series almost feverishly every weekend. It is, by far, the best sci-fi on television right now and great television in general.

Man, this Schiavo situation is ridulous the way it’s monopolizing the media. It seems like Mr. Schiavo and Terri’s parents could have worked something out a long time ago.

I caught a piece of Bill O’Reilly’s Radio Factor tonight and he was saying the best thing Michael Schiavo could do is say, “I’ve done everything I can to do what I think Terri would have wanted, but if her parents and other family members want to take over as her caregiver, then so be it.”

It’s an interesting assertion.

My mom is pleased that Terri Schiavo’s miserable life is going to end soon. She’s made me (and my other siblings) promise to “pull the plug” as soon as possible if she’s ever incapacitated like Schiavo is. She should probably have “D.N.R.” tattooed somewhere on her body.

As I listen and read about what’s going on, I’m alarmed by how different Terri is from what it seems most people think. The less-informed media and public think she’s unconcious, in a coma, and hooked up to a ventilator and a heart pump or something. Meanwhile, people pleading for her life say she’s awake, she recognizes family members, she has some ability to communicate, and could very well swallow and eat soft foods like Jello if she was allowed to do so. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

I think, based on what I’ve heard and read, she shouldn’t die... especially from starvation and dehydration. That’s just inhumane. I mean, if they’re going to practice legal euthenasia, at least get a vetrinarian in there who knows how to do it right!

It’s long past time for a serious update.

Christine’s job

There’s been a lot of acclimation, on everyone’s part, with Christine’s work. There was a period of a couple weeks where every afternoon I had to call and ask Christine if she thought she’d be coming home for dinner. In some cases, she simply didn’t know.

Christine had to go in for a 1 A.M. software deployment last Friday night, but that was planned in advance and she didn’t have to spend the whole evening there. She made it home before 3 A.M. and, for the most part, I understand things went well.

Christine’s boss’s boss took a bunch of the Q.A. and development personnel (and their spouses) out to dinner last week at a nice Japanese restaurant in Provo. It was a really nice gesture on his part to show his appreciation (and appreciation on the part of the company as a whole) for the sacrifices made by the employees and their families.

Christine’s never been one for sitting by when processes aren’t optimized or when there are not processes defined, so she pretty quickly realized things would be a lot easier if the company set up a server for testing. With the help of a tech writer, Christine wrote up a formal proposal for this server and how it would be used to test the server software before it was deployed into the production environment.

This proposal was received warmly by upper management. Today, Christine came home with two American Express gift cards that work like credit cards and are redeemable at any retail or dining establishment. We went to Sears and Christine bought clothes for everyone. It was fun.

Our kids have adapted well to the change in routine. I think we were smart to minimize the time they spend away from home, having my mom watch them — at our house — two afternoons each week, and having me home two afternoons each week.

Having my mom around has been great, too. Since our church schedule changed at the beginning of the year to 3-6 P.M., we had to discontinue our weekly pilgrimage to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner. The kids wouldn’t get to see their “grammy” very often if she wasn’t tending to them on Tuesday and Friday afternoons.

Plus, she uses her magic touch on our house. It always looks better after she’s been there.

The only downside to having my mom around is that she nags me about unfinished projects. She doesn’t appreciate the fact I’ve always got a bunch of projects going on that I’m working on an inch at a time.

Home projects

Now that Spring is starting to wind up, I’ve started a few projects in the yard. That doesn’t mean anything will get finished soon — just that I’ll have more projects to work on an inch at a time.

So, we plan to get the backyard done this year. This is actually several small projects:

• Landscaping in preparation for sod.
• Installing sprinkling system
• Setting up space for garden
• Digging out area for sandbox
• Digging out area for cement pad under shed/playhouse
• Installing sod
• Planting trees
• Planting garden

We’re hoping to get a swingset and some other stuff in as well, but that may not happen until later.

I also have a block retaining wall to get installed in the front yard where I have the lawn terraced. I’ve got about ten feet of it done so far and about 30 more feet to go.

The lawn in the front is currently plagued with a nasty weed infestation. I think it’s the weed responsible for all the sticker thorns that were there before we planted the grass seed, so I want to get those weeds taken care of before they beget more stickers. I’ve been pulling out the weeds by hand, trying to get the whole root, but there’s a lot of them.

There’s still some work I need to do to get the sprinkling system finished in the front as well. I’ve got about a month or so until the secondary irrigation water is turned on.

We need some fence installed between the house and the fence along the east property line and across the driveway on the west side of the house to keep kids, pets, etc. safely in the backyard. I had Home Depot send a contractor out to give us an estimate for a white vinyl six foot privacy fence on the east side and two 5-foot gates on the west side. Their estimate came to nearly $1400 — more than I was expecting. Of course, nearly four hundred of that is core cuts in the driveway. I need to call them and ask them if we can do those ourselves and get that knocked off the bid.

I can’t imagine what it would cost to do a whole yard in vinyl fence. A lot.

The old Subaru

My 1998 Subaru Outback Sport is getting old. The engine still runs great even though it has close to 150,000 miles on it, but other things are giving out. I got the water pump and timing belts replaced a couple months ago and then today I had a wheel bearing replaced because the car was making a “whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh” sound when you drove it. It had gotten so bad yesterday I didn’t know if I was going to make it to Orem and back today, so I took it in to get fixed today rather than take a chance.

Next, I need to get the front struts replaced. After that, the brakes need to be done. The clutch may need to be replaced in the near future as well.

Well, this is it. This is my first Fozzolog entry entry composed and posted from my PalmONE Treo 650. Plus, I am soaking in the bathtub as I compose this message.

I received the Treo on Saturday, but didn't get any phone service from Sprint until today because of the number transfer from Verizon. So far, I am digging it.

What I need to figure out now is how to set up the Treo in "tethered" mode so I can use it as a wireless modem connected to my laptop.

This last Sunday, I decided to take a nap when my son Eli was going to take a nap. We both fell asleep on the bed and then while we were asleep, Christine came in, found us both in similar states, and decided it was worth photographing.

The boys nappin’

I caught a few spare minutes the other day and decided to look at the webalizer stats for my site. The site is growing more popular partly because of my documents about running Linux on my laptop. But, what really got me curious was the sites that were linking to the site.

What didn’t surprise me were all the referrals from search engines. Big whoop. There are also links from a handful of sites that link to sites that offer documentation for running Linux on laptops. No surprise there either. Then, I ran across a LiveJournal page that was referring to the site. It wasn’t anyone I recognized, so I checked it out.

As it turns out, it is a girl in high school in Michigan who was writing about her upcoming visit to the Mall Of America in Minneapolis, MN. She linked to this picture in her online journal and basically said to her friends, “Nyah, nyah. I’m goin shopping!”

I was kind of bored, so I passively clicked through her site and on to friends of hers — mostly other Michigan high school students’ sites. It always amazes me the zeal, passion, and energy these kids put into their writings — even if their grammar is usually deplorable.

I know I had that kind of passion and energy when I was that age (albeit with much better grammar). I wish I could be that way now. I’m sure my website would be more interesting to visit, but in order to exhibit those characteristics (honestly) my life would have to be different, too. I’m not willing to turn my life upside down just for a more exciting perspective on life.

That said, I think there are probably a lot of things I could be writing about that I’m not writing about just because I’m not taking the time to even devote any thought to them. In a sense, I feel my life is just passing me by and I’m a little sad about that.

Having recognized that, I’m going to take a cue from some of these vivacious livejournal teens I ran across and try to experience life a bit more than I usually do. I’m going to try to get more pictures of my family like my kids doing adorable and interesting things and get them up on the site.

Outdoors

We’ve been having some really nice weather the last few days. Today it got up into the 60s. I had the kids this afternoon and we went over to the corn field that is east of our house and tried to fly our kite. It seemed real windy a few minutes earlier when I walked down to Lindsy’s house to get Eli and Lucy, but when we got to the field, there was only intermittent wind and I couldn’t keep the kite aloft. We did better today than we did Monday night, though, when we tried it before.

After flying the kite, I cemented some 1-inch PVC pipe together to put in a new trench I’ve been digging for the last couple of days that will be the main water supply for the sprinkling system in our back yard.

The soil in our yard is so rich and soft compared to what we had in Hyrum (which was 80 percent large rocks and 18 percent clay and 2 percent sand or something like that. It was awful to work with, but the soil here is a joy to dig.

We’re excited to get a garden going this year.

Today, Thom asked me if I was still “busybusybusy.” I said, “Yeah, but it’s settled down into a routine.”

And that’s a good thing, I think.

Today was a challenge, though, and think I met it head-on. This morning I went to work for a company I’m doing some contract programming for. I worked onsite there until 1 in the afternoon. Then I got some lunch and went to another client’s office until 4:30. Things were going pretty smooth all day.

Christine called during the day and said it looked very likely she’d be pulling a late night again at Sorenson Media because they were going to roll out some new software to some servers and they had to get it all tested and then do the deployment at 1 a.m. I asked her if she was going to come home for a while and then go back and she said she was just going to stay there, but she asked me to come see her and bring the kids.

So, I went home and got the kids. It was around 6 p.m. so traffic was a bit on the heavy side. It didn’t help we hit almost every red light possible on the way over. While en route, I got a call from a client who said they were having server issues. I called one of their programmers to see if he could get the server issues resolved. He restarted some services on a box, but that didn’t really help. One of the load-balanced servers appeared to be offline- so we either needed to make sure it was offline for real (i.e. so the load balancer couldn’t get a heartbeat off it) or reconfigure the load balancer so that it wouldn’t try to include the defective server in the load rotation. So, either I had to log into the remote power controller and power off the server or I had to use the Java-based SNMP software to remotely reconfigure the switch. Either way, I needed an Internet connection.

I had promised Christine I’d go get dinner at Subway for everyone, so I did that and when I got back to Sorenson Media, she took the kids into the breakroom while I tried to quickly resolve the situation with the servers by plugging my laptop into a network switch on her desk. Getting a valid IP configuration was my first challenge, but I managed to get something that would work. I disabled the server in the load balancer, but the other server was still having problems and the websites were not coming up.

I determined I needed to head to the colocation facility where the server farm was located and do some hands-on work. This presented a problem because Christine was expected to stay at work until 2 a.m. or later and I was expected to take care of the kids. So, I called my mom. She reluctantly agreed to meet me at our house and take care of getting the kids in bed.

I told Christine what I had arranged and she said not to to do that — she’d go home with the kids.

So I called and managed to catch my mom before she had left for our house and told her not to bother. Christine and I traded cars and I drove to the colocation facility.

There were a couple of problems on that server and I don’t know if they were related or not. One problem was that an Apache access log file had grown to 2 gigabytes in size and Apache didn’t like that. It was spitting error messages into the error log every second. That didn’t explain the error messages that came up when you tried to load the websites, though. That appeared to be caused by a MySQL server that was refusing connections to the server because of "multiple connection errors."

So, I did a flush-hosts on the database server and moved the too-big log file out of the way and restarted things. Everything went back to “condition green.”

I made it home by 10 or so. Christine called back into work and offered to come back in. They said they had more than enough people available to help. I hope they weren’t just saying that.

In conlusion of all this, I have to say I’m pretty impressed with myself. I think I handled things really well and I kept myself relatively cool. A few years ago I would have either started yelling at people for no apparent reason or I would have just started crying or something. Heh heh. No, I think I did a good job of staying cool in the face of advertsity and meeting the challenge head on. I could have been bitter that few people seemed willing to help me, but I think the point was that this was my responsibility.