journaling: enabled

This weekend was interesting. Closure provided on one front while a beginning on another. On Saturday, Liz and I went down to Prairie du Sac for Sam Hagstrom’s funeral. It was rather heartbreaking and I confess the only reason I didn’t break down crying during “Children of the Heavenly Father” was that the old ladies behind me were singing off-key enough (flat enough?) that it distracted me. There may be difficulties next time that hymn comes up at church though. I admire Sam’s parents, my friends Dan and Trish, for their strength through Sam’s life here on earth and now even more as he’s moved on to the life everlasting. I truly believe that you need to be a parent to even begin to understand how painful what they’re going through is. I’m a new parent. I can cry just imagining it. I cannot comprehend what they’re going through. I admire their strength of faith, family and love. I have two links to share related to this. The first is actually an LJ cut (have tissues ready)…
God’s Lent Child

RIP Sam … 8/21/2003 – 8/28/2007

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.

I don’t normally make political commentary, but the actions of certain (high) government offices worry me. Between creative interpretation of words written by Congress, an insistence that the chosen course of action cannot be wrong and an apparent disregard for the very document that created our government, I’m really concerned as to how the intended order will be restored. This morning a line/scene from Star Wars: Episode 3 came to mind: “This is how democracy dies, to thunderous applause.”

edit: apparently there’s some debate over whether she said “democracy” or “liberty”

As some of you may have heard, Liz and I welcomed Laura Kay into our world
at 7:16pm Tuesday night. She weighed 7 pounds, 12 ounces and was
19-1/2 inches long.
http://www.digitalsilk.net/baby/

Okay … maybe it’s not that amazing. The review at work today went pretty well. There are still some loose ends to tie up and that should be accomplished with a 15-minute meeting tomorrow. Work is crazy busy as usual.

liz4jc4ever is seriously bummed about the job thing. She’s been frustrated at her inability to do common things in the house due to pregnancy and getting turned down for a job that she had both phone and in-person interviews for has been quite the blow. It doesn’t help that she is working at that school tomorrow. If it were meant to be, it would have happened. I’m doing my best to be a supportive husband.

This weekend should a nice to get out of the house for a while and away from the stresses here. I get to go golfing for the first time ever (mini-golf not withstanding). Should be interesting. Will try and post my score next week.

here is something for dittrich to ogle (though I’d imagine the gas mileage is less-than-stellar). I should get to bed now, being as I didn’t really get a good night’s sleep last night and tomorrow is going to be a long day.

My wife just flipped me off. We were talking about ‘finger talking’ as my mother puts it and she thought of the Larry the Cable Guy joke about the typist who has Tourette’s.
So as many of you know, liz4jc4ever and I are expecting our first child next month. Wow … ‘next’ month. Less than 6 weeks. I’m looking forward to it though. I’ve even started ‘practicing’ holding our cats… okay, I did that before too, but I’m enjoying it more now because I’m picturing myself several weeks from now holding a creation that’s part Liz and part me and all about love. I’m sure I won’t be ready for it. I’ve been told nobody is. But I’m not sure I can think of anything I’ve looked forward to more.
We don’t know gender yet. I think Thumper will be a girl. Liz thinks Thumper will be a boy. Hopefully one of us will be right! The cats won’t know what to make of her. Hopefully she won’t abuse them too badly when she starts moving around (of course the cats should be smart enough to get out of reach on their condo).
I guess you could say I’m ‘quietly expectant’, since I don’t really say much about it and contemplate my impending fatherhood (not ‘doom’ as some have put it). I enjoy feeling the movements (and seeing them for that matter). We recorded a video of the belly the other night. If I can compress it without loosing too much quality, I might post it online for friends’ viewing (if Liz consents of course … it is her tummy after all).
This weekend is our first baby shower. It sounds like I will get to go golfing with the father-in-law while the wife parties. I’ve never been golfing. She’s never been the center of attention at a baby shower. Firsts for both of us I guess. It’s also likely the last time we’ll be more than an hour from home until July. We’re not inclined to travel far in the last few weeks.
I’ve been thinking I need to host another geek’s night sometime in the near future. I’ll post again if we decide to go ahead with that. For now, goodnight.

I haven’t posted in a while so I thought I’d drop a line. Work has been interesting. We’re gearing up to do a Xythos (Digital Locker?) implementation. I’ve been told that at some point I will be the manager of this application but I feel curiously out-of-the-loop considering that. I have a notion what’s going on but it feels like I’m missing something, which is odd because I can’t really identify what it is that I think I should be aware of.
So my annual review is being done this week. I had a short meeting with my manager last week to go over how the process is supposed to work and the more complete review meeting is happening on Thursday. I’m not sure how to feel about it since it’s probably the first proper review I’ve had. Some of you may know my manager (initials M.A.M.) and may have even had her for a course, but I never did. I’m supposed to go over my review sheet from my last review and write down how I think I did at my job. On the plus side, I can’t be doing too poorly since said manager told me in no uncertain terms that I should not apply for this job, including a promise to write a ‘poor letter of recommendation.’
As far as other excitement at work, we had a scheduled power outage this weekend to replace a power transformer. Thankfully I didn’t have to go in for it, but checked some stuff from home when asked and went in early Monday morning to handle any early problems. There have been a couple of power-related problems, including a few computers that got left plugged in/on and apparently got killed by something (likely power-related).
Today was one of those days with some frustrating problems. I installed a new version of our task management software two weeks ago and it appears that we can’t add new agents to it. I’ve done a little back-and-forth with support, but no real progress so far. I also had the ‘opportunity’ to deal with some printing problems over in the publications office. Haven’t solved those yet either.
I also got some additional confusion yesterday regarding a major software suite. A few weeks ago, one of the speech & theatre professors indicated he thought he had secured funding to upgrade 8 copies in one lab to a recently released version. Yesterday a different professor in the same department indicated he thought we were upgrading this software in both the computer labs it’s located in. I should probably re-visit that issue tomorrow.

One of this evening’s accomplishments…
this morning:
/home – 65% full, /usr – 83% full, /data 39% full

this evening:
/home – 66% full, /usr – 50% full, /data – 40% full

What did I do? I basically swapped partitions for /usr and /home and moved my web stuff from /home to /data. Now I have enough free space on /usr to do upgrades. Also … a little w00tage in the future of FreeBSD … announcement here.