Sunday Report

I'm feeling a little off today and definitely don't feel like working, so I'll write in LiveJournal instead. :-)

Despite my preference to sleep in on Sundays, I had to be active shortly after 9 AM so I could attend the pager whilst being the UNIX primary point-of-contact for the day. Sure enough, the pager went off shortly after 9, but it was only an update on activities from the prior evening. And mercifully, the pager stayed quiet until 10 PM when I needed to manually reboot a server which had stubbornly refused to reboot on its own. All handled from the joyous comfort of our basement.

In other exciting news, I scrubbed the bathtub although I didn't get to doing the floor. kent4str installed the new garage door opener almost single-handedly. The new screw-driven opener is much quieter than the prior chain drive opener, but my old car remote doesn't work with the new unit. Bummer.

Nearly 90% of the xmas cards for the season are completed, although I ran out of stamps pretty early. The cards to Canada and far reaches of the US will be turned over to the US Postal Service this morning; once I get stamps, another will follow tomorrow. The remaining cards should be completed Tuesday afternoon and will be dropped at the post office Wednesday. Yay!

Last night, I joined several other UNIX admins in town for the annual LISA conference for dinner. While my own employer didn't see fit to send me this year despite the obvious advantages and the exceedingly low cost (no hotels, meal or travel expenses), I can at least run downtown on my free evenings to commune with fellow sysadmins and learn more about what folks in other fields are doing.

We had a lovely dinner at Mediterra (sp?), a restaurant around the corner from the Marriott Wardman Park. Attendees included LJ'ers jss1113, yesthattom, kazmat, rwgill and ted_badger, among others. There were complications with the bill --so many folks needed itemized original receipts for their expense claims, poor kazmat was doomed to a menu reduced to two items because of food allergies vs. the kitchen's preparations, and yesthattom gracefully endured good-natured ribbing for his recent book writing successes and long-standing LISA engagements. It's like my Friday night happy hour crowd with an even higher geek quotient, if one can imagine. :-) I'll be back for the LGBT gathering on Tuesday night!

And thanks to yesthattom, I can never eat golden delicious apples again. Don't even ask.

Sunday Report

I'm feeling a little off today and definitely don't feel like working, so I'll write in LiveJournal instead. :-)

Despite my preference to sleep in on Sundays, I had to be active shortly after 9 AM so I could attend the pager whilst being the UNIX primary point-of-contact for the day. Sure enough, the pager went off shortly after 9, but it was only an update on activities from the prior evening. And mercifully, the pager stayed quiet until 10 PM when I needed to manually reboot a server which had stubbornly refused to reboot on its own. All handled from the joyous comfort of our basement.

In other exciting news, I scrubbed the bathtub although I didn't get to doing the floor. kent4str installed the new garage door opener almost single-handedly. The new screw-driven opener is much quieter than the prior chain drive opener, but my old car remote doesn't work with the new unit. Bummer.

Nearly 90% of the xmas cards for the season are completed, although I ran out of stamps pretty early. The cards to Canada and far reaches of the US will be turned over to the US Postal Service this morning; once I get stamps, another will follow tomorrow. The remaining cards should be completed Tuesday afternoon and will be dropped at the post office Wednesday. Yay!

Last night, I joined several other UNIX admins in town for the annual LISA conference for dinner. While my own employer didn't see fit to send me this year despite the obvious advantages and the exceedingly low cost (no hotels, meal or travel expenses), I can at least run downtown on my free evenings to commune with fellow sysadmins and learn more about what folks in other fields are doing.

We had a lovely dinner at Mediterra (sp?), a restaurant around the corner from the Marriott Wardman Park. Attendees included LJ'ers jss1113, yesthattom, kazmat, rwgill and ted_badger, among others. There were complications with the bill --so many folks needed itemized original receipts for their expense claims, poor kazmat was doomed to a menu reduced to two items because of food allergies vs. the kitchen's preparations, and yesthattom gracefully endured good-natured ribbing for his recent book writing successes and long-standing LISA engagements. It's like my Friday night happy hour crowd with an even higher geek quotient, if one can imagine. :-) I'll be back for the LGBT gathering on Tuesday night!

And thanks to yesthattom, I can never eat golden delicious apples again. Don't even ask.