journaling: enabled

Well, I spent most of the day up visiting my parents. This morning I did some tidying up in the house … not a lot mind you but enough to make me comfortable leaving it. I also had fun writing out checks for bills (bleh!). I left around 11am. Got up there in time to have ham and cauliflower chowder (yummy!) for lunch. I decided to give my parents my Airport wireless base station as a replacement “dialup server”. It appears to work quite well and I hope is more reliable than the Linux server I had set up for them. I brought the Linux server home with me and will probably use it for testing or something. At the very least, I could use something to take over handling email and such if I need to rebuild my primary server again, which is looking somewhat likely at the moment given the compiler issues I’ve been having.
Anyway … ’nuff on that. I enjoyed seeing my parents again. They seem to be doing well. One thing I don’t like about being up there in the winter is that I inevitably come back smelling like wood smoke because that’s what they use to heat with. I did get my hair cut though so I no longer look quite so odd when I take off my hat. Once I shave, I should actually look presentable again.
I wish I had picked up some more popcorn. I’d like to make some for snacking on during the “Great American Race” … aka the Daytona 500.

Yup. It’s Friday night. I’m glad. I’m tired. I crave the warmth of blankets around me and a pillow under my head. I wish I were better rested. I’ve been having problems sleeping this week. I’m not sure why. My sleep schedule is so out-of-whack that I actually got up at 6:15 or 6:20 this morning and was at work at 7:10. That’s just plain not right for me. I think the fact that I “crashed” yesterday wasn’t good either. I should try to catch up on sleep this weekend.
I’m going to go up to my parents’ house and visit for some time this weekend. I also need a haircut so this will be a good opportunity for that. While I want snow, I’m not sure when I want it to come. Probably tomorrow. I don’t really mind driving in it. I need to get the necessary lumber to do the sofa for flutterbyefred and liz4jc4ever. It should be fun. I’d like to give them some storage space in it since they’re losing a significant amount of room.
Well, bedtime for this rabbit. I hope the women had a safe trip down to DeForest.

I suffered a burn-out this afternoon. I was finally able to leave work at 5:30 and came home and promptly crashed for 2 hrs. Not fun. I am supposed to have statististical analysis of the email survey results done for a meeting tomorrow morning. Unfortunately I’ve decided that Microsoft Excel isn’t up to the task. I will probably end up using SPSS to play with it. It’s been several years since I’ve done any work in SPSS, so this could be interesting. I could probably use a refresher anyway. We just got the latest Macintosh version in at work. I hope that I can find the CD again because I fear that it may have fallen into my trash can and lost. Not good.
I’m not sure if I’m going to work all day tomorrow. I’m seriously considering taking off the afternoon because of what happened today. I could just shut my office door and request no interruptions. It would be nice to be able to get some of these things that I’ve been working on piecemeal taken care of. New computer setups. Some research projects.
I’d like to go to one of the hockey games this weekend … UWRF is in the playoffs again and ranked #4 in the nation. We play St. Scholastica. Anybody interested in going with me? At some point this weekend I’m heading up to my parents for a while … I might even stay overnight up there.

Today has been very disorienting for me I think. I’ve been mixed up as to what day it is all day. I woke up this morning thinking it was Tuesday. At some point today, I found myself thinking it was Thursday. Not so much fun. I didn’t get some of the things done that I need to get done this week… like compiling results from the email survey for a meeting we have on Friday. I did manage to get a really old task for a belligerant user taken care of though.
I did have a professor on campus who just plain pissed me off today. Thankfully he has decided that the best course of action is not to fight our network infrastructure policies. It remains to be seen what else he will fight. Give professors grant money and they think they’re God’s gift to the University. Sheesh.
I managed to get my dishes washed tonight. It took me longer than it should have, but they’re done and I have something to eat off of for several days.
I did some testing of my backup software. The trial copy of the new version I downloaded actually handles having a tape fill up. Regrettably, I have been unable to get the nice GUI for the software to work so I’ve emailed tech support on the problem. Another gripe … companies that require information assuming that you’re a business. The software manufacturer required a company name. Grrr.
Tomorrow is another day … I have three meetings scheduled at this point … 8:30 – 10, 10-11, 1-1:30. Doesn’t that sound like fun? More opportunities not to get things done. I wish Barb were going to be in tomorrow … apparently some bad things happened in the networking services staff meeting this morning … yelling and people walking out and such. Last year we pow-wows to figure out how we could work together better as a department. Right now, it appears that even some of our teams are having issues. Thankfully I’m not directly involved in that one, though it would be nice to be able to help rather than watch helplessly from the outside.
Well, off to bed again.

Well, another weekend is gone. I’m not sure why… but I’m looking forward to warmer weather and no snow. I think it’s because I want to do stuff outside and I’m just tired of cold weather. I didn’t do a whole lot today. I did manage to update the photo archive on the dance theatre site … I haven’t linked it up yet though. I want to do some re-arranging … may as well link the video clips from the same page. Makes sense to me anyway. Visitors can see thumbnails and larger pictures from the pieces before viewing the video.
Tomorrow should be interesting at work. We got word over the weekend from the CIO that one of our projects is being postponed so we can put more effort into making another project go more smoothly. This frustrates other efforts unfortunately. I’m curious to see what the networking services staff feel about this.

Today I got up late. I took flutterbyefred out to lunch at Perkins and did some grocery shopping. I also picked up a Papa Murphy’s pizza for dinner. Yummy. I got to have some fun in the Econofoods parking lot in Hudson … did a complete donut. When I got home, I played on the puter some more then took a soak in the tub … I think I got the water too warm because when I got out I felt like I was going to pass out. My back did feel better though. I think I pulled something earlier this week.
I forgot to post last night. I think it was because I was too tired when I got done with chatting with friends. It was a long week at work, though I finally got to working on a big project with Josh (the new hire) on Friday afternoon.
I’m pondering what to do for backup software on my server. I used to use TapeWare … but unfortunately that seems to require versions of libraries that I don’t have installed with Debian Linux 3.0. I wonder if it would be worth setting up a second server for backups. It would be preferable to get my current one working though. I think I will fight with that some more tomorrow. *grumble*

First a bit about my day. I got a fair amount done in spite of meetings this morning. I pretty much finished another laptop setup and resolved some other issues. I finally kicked a copy protection problem in one of the computer labs too. Glad to have that out of the way. Made for a long day though … left about 6:15 or so. Got home and watched Friends and made some hamburgers.
I hopped onto IRC ‘cuz I haven’t been on in several days and a URL in the topic caught my eye. I think it’s something that is worth reading for most anybody. It’s a website dedicated to a 21 yr. old who overdosed on drugs while in a chatroom. The website includes chatroom logs from the “event”. They’re rather graphic but sobering in the end. I guess it raises the fact that just because something is occurring “on the internet” doesn’t mean it’s not real. In this case, there was even a webcam. I’m not sure what I would have done in the shoes of the other people who were in the chatroom, but unfortunately they didn’t have enough information to prevent the death.
I’m glad tomorrow is Friday. I’ve had enough of work this week. My days have been too long. It’s amazing how tired a person can get from working extra hours even if it’s not particularly physical. I hope I can catch up on sleep this weekend.

I had a nice spectrum of emotion today. I was sad about the situation with Liz, QT and I and how it currently is, but I look forward to the future with hope that we can be happy. I had the joy of finally nailing a problem that’s been frustrating me at work … it only took about 5 hrs of scripting. How important can easy-to-use printers in a computer lab be anyway? It’s not like students have to print out assignments in the digital age, now do they? I experienced frustration in a meeting that dragged out longer than needed (what else is new). I had the joy of delivering a new laptop with MacOS X to a user. I had the fear of a vehicular incident when a deer ran out in front of me on my way home … I missed it by about a truck-length … not sure where its friend went, but it didn’t run into me.
My house is cold lately. Not just physically … but it doesn’t feel cozy either. I’m not sure why. That may be contributing to my boredom and tendency to veg when I’m here. I can work on computer projects … notably my goal of getting Cyrus IMAP working with seive scripts (anybody out there with experience building SASL with MySQL authentication?). I should also finish up the photo archive for last year’s Dance Theatre concert. The concert is coming up April 1-5th. One of my coworkers is working on equipping the theatre with subwoofers so we can have some bass this year. I’m a little skeptical of his thoughts on using computer subwoofers for this … but I guess we’ll see.
It’s hard to believe there are only two more days left in the week. I don’t have any plans for the weekend. I don’t plan on cutting wood or visiting my parents. Not sure what I’ll do.

I don’t know what to do lately. Work is stressful. My personal life is stressful. Tonight I stayed late working on a script problem for the computer labs because it helped keep my mind off other issues in my life. I would have stayed later except I felt like I was burning out. I’m feeling frustrated. I felt like hitting things, but what good would that do. I’d probably end up with a sore or broken hand and if I’m lucky a dent in something that I hit. It would have been nice to put that sort of energy to use.
Tonight I just kinda veg’d in front of the tv. I watched a show on the competition for the Joint Strike Fighter between Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. It was quite interesting … but I guess I’m into that sort of thing. I watched my tape of ‘Pumpkin Chunkin’. It’s an annual pumpkin hurling competition held out on the east coast. Some incredible hardware … including air cannons that can hurl pumpkins nearly a mile. Apparently they put extra lime in the soil for growing their pumpkins so they come out white with really hard shells to withstand the forces put on them. I think that would be fun to watch sometime.
My latest Linux project is getting Cyrus IMAP upgraded. I’m currently running version 1.5.9 or something like that … quite old but doing the job. I’d like to upgrade to something that supports seive scripts. This requires that I build a working version of Cyrus SASL … ideally allowing me to authenticate against a MySQL database. Of course, that part is experimental, so it’s hard to find any instructions on doing it.