Work gets in the way

On Tuesday, we found some pretty catastrophic issues.

One of my servers, that runs batch processing, which I have been trying to get people off of for more than a year and a half, passed away on Tuesday. I spent several hours trying to get it running, to no avail. (Disk failure)

There were a number of people impacted by the fact that the box wasn't there anymore, but so far this week, I have had a hard time being sympathetic. I have been telling them to get off for a long time, and finally they got the proper motivation. I did have someone in my office foaming at the mouth about the fact that something wasn't working, and he was supposed to leave on vacation in 2 hours, but he was #6 in line at that point, which I think got him more worked up. I had another person that it took 2 days for it to sink in that the machine was not coming back, I couldn't copy his files from the old box, and he put his stuff in the wrong spot, so we didn't have a backup of it. Fun for him.

Over the weekend, we discovered corruption in the redo logs and archives of a large number of our databases. We also had 2 applications on other boxes with corrupt data. All signs point to the old SAN they were running on having a problem, but the HP SAN guys are still scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened. This SAN was slated for mothballing later this year, I have been working this week to move things off. It takes a long time to move so much data.

Long boring work rant over.

Downtown Sampler Platter

Yesterday and today was the 2nd annual Downtown Sampler Platter. Tara and I went today. (We ditched the girls.) There were a few less restaurants this year, but the food was good, and I got pretty filled up.

I hav e to say, the best things we had were they little fajita from Los Hermanos, and the Chili Cheese Fries from Tommy Burger.

Next year, we will try to remind the people who last year asked us to remind them about this one. (But we forgot.)

Thursday night Age of Empires beating

We took our Age of Empires lumps from Rob and Brian again tonight. I guess we'll have to re-evaluate our strategy again. (Although I think my strategy of getting Rob's attention and having him attack me didn't work out the way I thought it could have.)

After the first game, Drew, Rob, and Brian bowed out. (I suspect Rob and Brian were bored.) Dave, Dad, and I played a game again 1 expert computer, which we won.

Anyway, stay tuned for next week, when we try again.

Visiting the Pulminologist

Yesterday I decided it was time to stop ignoring the bad cough I have had for the past 3 weeks, and go see someone about it. It always got worse at night, Tara doesn't like it at all.

Anyhow, yesterday, I called my doctor's office. The scheduling lady told me I could get in to see him in 3 weeks. I didn't want to wait 3 weeks. She offered to let me see the new PA. I asked about the new PA, she said something about the fact that if he didn't know something, he could give a referral. I got ticked off and declined the appointment.

I asked around at work, Dave P had a doctor he liked around the corner from work. (A witch doctor, I suspect.) That office offered to let me in to see him in 7 days, which was a better offer, but not quite good enough. (But I might still think about switching to that guy.)

Anyway, I talked to Drew, he suggested I go see the pulminologist that got him straightened out a few months back. I called over there, they had an opening for today, which was the best offer I had so far, so I took it.

I went in today, the first thing they did was a spirometry test. The technician said I had a very large lung capacity, and asked if I was a swimmer or a runner. My thought was "Do I look like a swimmer or a runner?", but my response was "no." The test didn't show any asthma symptoms. (In fact, the tech thought the results were very good, even if I still had a cough to go with it.

When the doctor came to poke me, she looked at the test and started talking about lung capacity also. I told her I had a BiPap, and it was set to 11.5 over 9. She was sort of impressed. (And it sounds like they do sleep apnea stuff there also, so she was curious about where I went, who ordered the tests, that sort of thing.) Anyway, I guess what we are saying here, is that I'm either full of hot air, or a big windbag.

The doctor thinks I have acid reflux, like Drew. She gave me a prescription for the same medicine that's been helping Drew out.

She also gave me a thing that listed the different types of things that could help stop acid reflex. My list of things to do:

• Elevate the head of my bed 2-6 inches - I'm not sure I want to sleep uphill, but we'll see.
• Avoid certain types of foods: spicy and fatty foods, tomato and citrus juices, chocolate, and colas. I'm OK with the chocolate and juices, but I wonder what's left when you leave out the spicy food, fatty food, and Dr. Pepper. (Sounds like my potato and rice diet.)
• I'm not supposed to lie down for 2 hours after eating or drinking. I guess my 11pm dinners are now out of the picture.
• Eat smaller meals - I plan to start using one of Ruth's plates. I guess "mass quantity meals" are out of the question.
• Lose weight. She actually circled this one. Then she made out a referral for me to go see a dietitian. Then she told me I should really lose some weight. I'm sure she didn't say that to Drew...
  

The tooth Fairy has been slacking off

Tara pulled one of Kate's teeth on Saturday. The new one had come in, the old one had been pretty loose for a month, and they were competing for the same general space.

Yesterday, Kate complained that the tooth fairy hadn't come. I told her the tooth fairy must have been busy.

Turns out it must have been some sort of Tooth Fairy union-mandated holiday. The tooth fairy didn't even think about taking care of things last night. The tooth fairy snuck in this morning when everyone else was busy doing other things and took care of the business at hand.

For the curious, at our house, the tooth fairy brings half dollars in.

Restaurant Review

I got a double barreled birthday meal day yesterday. For lunch, Drew took me to J Dawgs for lunch. I had a polish dog. It was good.

For dinner, Tara tried to take me to a couple of different places, all of which kind of didn't work out until we stopped at PF Changs. I had the Yunnan Dali Chicken. The waiter indicated it was their hottest dish on the menu at the time. I liked it. (I end up getting something from the specialty menu nearly every time I go there. The waiter said that they rotate the specialty menu every 10 months or so, the next one will be Cantonese. I don't know if that's the case or if he was just making it up on the fly.)

I ate Tara's leftovers just now for lunch.

Thursday night game time

Age of Empires

Drew, Dave and I played against Rob and Brian. Rob and Brian made short work of us.

Afterwards, We planned to Do a 4 on 2, adding an Expert level computer to help us out. Drew ran off to put Anson to bed and appears to have missed the message. We ended up playing 3v3, and got creamed again. Drew took the opportunity to try to figure out how Rob and Brian get built up so fast. (He didn't get it figured out...)

Anyway, I think we needed Dad there.

Dance Festival

Every year on the last day of school, Kate's school has a dance festival. Each grade gets up and does a musical dance number. Last year, the kindergarteners did the Jello Dance. This year, the 1st graders did a dance number.

Last year, I had trouble zooming in to get the picture of her taken. This year I had my new tripod with me to stabilize the camera while I zoomed in. You can see the pictures here are pretty clear, even though I was a little further away this time.
We got there last year early, the other girls went nuts because the thing took so long. (Lots of annoucements, thank yous, etc.) This year, there must have been fewer annoucements, and Tara thinks they had less musical numbers. (Only one per grade.)

Dance Festival

I'm not sure why the quality from YouTube is as bad is it is, but here's a little bit of video of the dance number.

22 years ago today...

I was siting in the front room of the house playing Defender and Donkey Kong on our old (it's old now, at least) ColecoVison. We had that front sun room in the house in Buffalo. It was ki nd of nice sometimes, when the screens were in and you could sit out there. It was kind of cold sometimes when it was the middle of the winter. (But the freezing temperature didn't stop me from sitting there before school playing a round of Donkey Kong...)
There was also the time I dropped the bowling ball down the front steps and took a chuck out of the bottom step. And the time I accidentally flung the bottom of a clarinet and hit Amy square in the head with it. And the time I was being tormented by Drew on the other side of the large plate glass window and put my fist through it.

Maybe the front room wasn't all that fun after all...

There was that crawl space in the basement with the treasures from the 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, and 70's...

Tara, Mom, and Rob called today to wish me a happy birthday. They all seemed to call at bad times. I feel kind of bad, I really didn't have time to talk to anyone. Work had my blood pressure up, and Rob caught me in the 2 minute break between stake meetings. Rob promised to whip me in Age of Empires tomorrow night, which I'm more than happy to oblige him in.

Tomorrow I start annoying my coworkers with one of the birthday presents Tara got me. More on that later. The girls got me just what I wanted - new dress socks.

Starcraft 2

I was oncall, and down in the data center all day. The Ops guys couldn't stop talking about the thing this morning. (I'm glad it was a slow day for them, even if I stayed busy...)

Anyway, I guess Starcraft is still huge in Asia. They have game play conventions and all kinds of stuff. They announced the sequel at a starcraft playing convention last week.

I didn't like Starcraft all that much. The biggest reason was the color schemes they had on a lot of their maps. I had a hard time seeing things, I ended up having to always completely and totally mess up the color settings on my monitor to play the game. One of the guys in the apartment complex (Heisiuki Watanbe) absolutely loved to play. He would be at my apartment at all hours playing the game, rotating through different people. (I think he was here in the ESL program, so his class schedule wasn't heavy, really, but I'm not sure.) I would sometimes come home at 2am, he would be playing, and would be ready to play me for a little while. By then, I think he had been playing for 6 or 8hours sometimes.

Anyway, it doesn't look like there is anything radically different about the new version. Better graphics, a few more types of characters, that sort of thing. It doesn't look like the overall color scheme has changed. Also, I didn't like the Zerg civilization. They were basically bugs.

Anyway, my very early review: I'll pass.

Chores

For Family Home Evening, we talked about chores. We made new chore charts for the girls to try to help motivate them. (We are in the 'motivate' stage right now. That's before the 'plead' stage, followed by the 'threaten' stage, and so on.)

On the charts, I put a section for pulling something out of the chore jar. We populated the chore jar with a bunch of different chores. I got a picture of Cinderella for the chore jar, and was explaining to Emma that I put Cinderella on the jar because she had to do chores.

Emma's response: "Yeah, but she didn't want to do them."

Sometimes it's hard to argue with the impeccable logic of a nearly 4 year old.