My morning walks give me time to reflect on things as well as wake up. I am now on my third day without caffeine and it shows. I have had a headache all three days and it takes me a lot longer to wake up.
This morning during my walk I noticed that it was cool (by Texas standard), only about 70. Few people had sprinklers on, I guess they finally figured out God was watering our lawns and we didn't really have to...yet. We have had a plethora of rain up until about 5 days ago and now we are starting to return to "typical" North Central Texas weather, although for July it is still a few degrees below what we normally see. It has been in the upper 80's to mid 90's and we are used to seeing a few 100 degree days by now. If August and September are normal, we will still be way above normal for the year.
I have commented before about the abundance of rabbits in our neighborhood. I have seen as many as a dozen during my short .5 mile morning walk. Many of them are pretty big for wild rabbits. During the last three days I have not paid any attention at all to the rabbit count...I have been too sleepy to notice.
Speaking of critters, I saw not one, but two hawks in our neighborhood being pestered by much smaller birds. Being a predator, I would not have expected that, but maybe the smaller birds were just too nimble and quick for the larger hawk.
I also have seen more (and bigger) snakes this year than I normally do. I do not know one from another, so I cannot tell you what kind they were, but one was in a local pond and the other two were crossing the road near the pond...but one did not make it. Each one of them was 4-5 feet long.
Yesterday at work I was very steady in the morning and afternoon following and finishing up on two hot open issues. One was eventually closed but the other remains open. It looks like a political battle and I really do not want to be involved any more than I already am. We had a server go down and when the data was restored, some files were missing. That can only mean something in our backup routine is not quite right.
The afternoon was rather uneventful until I got an IM from the Inc Mgr in Costa Rica telling me that he was getting flooded with several calls on various apps hosted in Europe. I made a quick call to the NOC in Stockholm and they verified having trouble getting to some of those applications as well as few others. I informed global Inc Mgr and he did some checking...they found a router that was acting flaky and put in an order to have it replaced.
By the time I went home, nothing needed my attention, so I concentrated on taking care of the dogs and washing up the dishes until my wife got home. My wife called me to let me know she was bringing home pizza and I thanked her.
After she got home and we ate, I began working on hockey puck, her freebie laptop. It has been acting up and the previous night I had found it to have a bad DIMM and the HDD was going south very quickly. I was trying to clone the drive with Clonezilla but I was having difficulties. The CD would intermittently boot, so I went to check to make sure the burn was a good one, and sure enough it was. That left me to believe that the DVD-ROM was going bad and after attempting two other CD's in it, I realized that was the case. One other thing I noticed when I was trying to boot the thing was that the power button was sticking. With all that, it seemed pretty silly to try to fix a 5 year old laptop. Luckily the amount of money we put into it was minimal...about $30 for a refurbed slimline battery (that is still in good shape if anyone wants to buy it). I guess considering the age of the unit and how it was treated before I got it, 6 months is not too bad. I guess I should strip out the 256 megs of PC-133 memory before I chuck it. I already removed the HD...I need to wipe it before I throw it away.
I have another (but much older) laptop my wife could use, but she just told me not to worry about it. We still have the desktop and while that means she and I will be competing for use of the PC, I can still use my little laptop to view mail...I could create an account on it for her since that is what she does the most...read mail, but getting my wife to use Linux is not going to be easy. It was hard enough to get her to switch to Open Office. I guess I cannot blame her...she knew office and was comfortable with it and change can be scary sometimes.
Well, it is something to talk about.
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