RIP Sam … 8/21/2003 – 8/28/2007
Archive for August, 2007
So work is nuts this week because I’m squeezing in extra hours while Liz and Laura are down visiting my in-laws. I did 7:30a-6:30p on Monday and 6:45a-7:05p today. Tomorrow is scheduled to be a long day since we’re doing some fail-over testing after business hours. I got frustrated today because the scope of that testing crept significantly from what was originally scheduled when we came up with the date last week. The goal was to perform the tests we couldn’t do without affecting systems already in production (thus requiring an outage window for the production systems). For example, we will be testing LDAP redundancy. It expanded a bit which led to stress on my part since the planning and whatnot really eats into time needed to get other things accomplished before the campus returns to life. I expressed frustration to my manager, but unfortunately was too late to really do anything about the schedule.
At home, I’m feeling lazy tonight. I watched an episode of Modern Marvels on “doomsday scenarios”. They didn’t present much that I hadn’t heard about before, but I did learn what lends plausibility to some of them. It’s shows like that that make you wonder why in creation we want to bring new lives into this world, given how badly we seem to have messed it up.
Home projects? Not much going on. I did some experimenting with Flash video encoding using ffmpeg this past weekend and was pretty pleased with the results. Enough so that I’ll be switching video formats for the UWRF dance theatre website (starting with the 2007 videos). If you’re reading this, any suggestions as to how big a video file is too big? I have one piece up here in two sizes. The video is all compressed so I just need to figure out what size to post. I also need to sort through two CDs worth of still photos from the concert and figure out which ones I want to post on the website.
Work and home … that’s about it. Work has consisted of being application manager for our Xythos Digital Locker implementation (meaning I get to do the installation and configuration of the software) and, as of this week, being the same for our pair of mean fishies. The latter has been more fun than the former, though the Xythos application is going to be a bigger change for our campus. In between these things, I’ve been squeezing in computer lab updates and fixing an occasional office computer.
On the home front, life is pretty good. We entered Laura in a cutest baby contest that was held tonight in town and she took the prize of “happiest baby”, though one of the judges commented that there should have been a category for most laid back. Anyway, we’re pleased and we have a certificate for the baby book. She’s now sleeping more at night, which means fewer sleep interruptions and lately, I haven’t been doing as many feedings. Sometimes I miss them so I get to do an evening bottle or something similar.
Home projects? Nothing much really. I played around a bit with SMTP authentication. Need to tie SSL into it yet. Got some mail graphing going so I have an idea how my software is performing now. It’d be really nice to run some of these systems in virtual machines (ala vmware or whatnot), but I’m not sure my current system has the horsepower for it and I don’t believe that exists for FreeBSD, which would be my preferred platform. MythTV is currently holding its own, though it has locked up at the start of a recording session twice in the past few weeks. It’s working well enough that I’m disinclined to fix (which likely = break) it. I’ve been keeping 1/2 an eye on the mythtv-users list to see what happens as far as a replacement for the Zap2It program guide listings. I’m willing to pay for the listings if someone’s willing to offer them for a price I can afford.
My workstation (zion) is now upstairs so I can spend time with my family rather than being isolated downstairs in my “office”. I’m really looking forward to having the family room down there, whenever that may be (yeah, that’s a ways off). I need to get back into my video projects. I have some DVDs that I need to write off to disc and some editing to get done.
Anyway, I think it’s time to start heading in the direction of bed and cuddling with my wife. 
