Yesterday was Victoria’s winter formal at the High School. Some of her friends came over to our house to get themselves all gussied up for the big dance. My job was to get the boys out of the house so that the girls could concentrate on looking beautiful instead of constantly getting hounded by two boys that think all of Victoria’s friends are their girlfriends and should spend all of their time paying close attention to them. So, I packed the boys up and we took a trip to the beach. We went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was a very good movie. I’ve noticed as the kids(in the movie) mature, each movie has gotten slightly darker. Anyway, I got the kids a box of their favorite candy each(malted milk balls for Brian and sour gummy worms for Will) and we all shared a large popcorn(no butter) and a large (pink)lemonade. Will is beginning to learn that he needs to whisper when he’s at the movie theater, and I only had to take him to the bathroom twice. Brian was completely absorbed in the movie, so all-in-all, it was a good trip. After the movie we, stopped by Wally-World so the kids could look at the toy section. While there, we picked up the Fantastic Four and Star Wars:Clone Wars VolII DVDs.

We got home just before the girls came home from the dance. Will had passed out in the van, so he was asleep when they got home. I really can’t explain to anyone the many emotions that go through the father of a teenage daughter. Those that have been there know what I mean. Victoria was so beautful in her dress… hopefully someone took a picture so I can post it later. Of course, she didn’t notice that I was bursting with pride over how much she’d grown in the past seven years. They had just gotten home from the dance so they were hot and hungry and eager to talk about whatever teenage girls like to gossip about after these events. In any event, each of the girls were absolutely stunning and I’m sure their parents would’ve been just as proud as I was.

Our Thankgiving was nice. We went over to Ruby and LD’s for Thanksgiving Day lunch and, of course, we all ate too much. Larry, Suzanne, and their kids, Megan, Courtney, and Bethany were there as well as Elaine, Scott and their boys, Robert and Andrew. After eating, some of the kids went outside to play for a while. I never realized, but Victoria can really shoot the rock! Her basketball skillz are quite impressive. Brian had brought his brand new Yu-Gi-Oh! cards with him and Will was busy playing with his new Darth Tater. Later the whole lot of them went to Broadway at the Beach to watch Yours, Mine and Ours. I stayed home and did some laundry and the dishes… I wasn’t feeling too well after all the food.
Anyway, Today I had to go back to work while the rest of the family stayed home. Work was slow for once, and I wished I had taken the day off as it REALLY crept along.

While trawling the news at work, I learned that Pat Morita passed away yesterday. I was really saddened to read the news. From characters like Arnold of “Happy Days” to Mr. Miyagi to the Emporer in Mulan, Pat was one of those permanent fixtures growing up. Kinda like Johnny Carson, or maybe Dick Clark. In his honor, I assumed the role of a Japanese-American for the rest of the day. (Inside work-related joke…)

I’m hoping to take Brian to see the new Harry Potter movie this weekend, but I’m not sure what is really in the cards. I wish I could take both boys, but I really don’t think Will can handle a movie of that length. Amy said he went to the bathroom five times during the movie last night. He didn’t quite understand why you couldn’t put the movie on pause while he went to the restroom.

HOME
Will got sick last week. 2 ear infections and tonsilitis. Needless to say, we had our hands full. Amy is still running herself ragged trying to get caught up with her new class. Now she’s coming down with a cold. Brian took a trip this weekend with his lolo and lola to Tennesee to visit his Aunt Jen, Uncle Terry, and his cousins, Eric and Ryan. Victoria has been the ultimate daughter taking up the slack whenever Amy and/or I can’t be around. She’s been a real trooper. I have barely been home the past week or two due to work. Usually when I get home, everyone is asleep…

WORK
We made the big move this past weekend by migrating all of our customer’s email boxes from a 3-node tru64 cluster to a 3-node linux cluster. The migration process lasted about 14 hours if you include the monitoring of email flow after the transition took place and also babysitting the new cluster while the influx of emails come barreling in after building up in a queue for such a long period of time. Everything looked fine all day Sunday… And then Monday came.
One of my fears about this project came true. You see, a decsion was made somewhere beyond my team’s control to hook this blazingly fast linux cluster to an extremely slow disk subsystem. So, while the servers can process tons of email, the disks cannot keep up with the write load and you end up with an extremely tight i/o bottleneck. The only way to alleviate the problem was to throw more disks at it and spread the load out Unfortunately, these disks are not made to take the amount of constant pounding that they are getting, so unless we can find a solution fairly quickly, one or more of these things are likely to fail.
Then today, the mailserver we use for outgoing smtp went on the fritz. Our anti-virus scanner kept bombing out which would basically stop the server from accepting email. Thus, tons of angry customers calling about not being able to send out. So I spent all day building a linux server on better hardware so it could handle the load (The old server was Solaris9 on some very underpowered hardware). So the story still continues….

FUN
My friend, David, dropped by this past Friday night to visit. I hadn’t seen him in quite a few months so it was nice to catch up. He brought his PC with him, so we hooked it up and he, Grady, and I played Ghost Recon until around 5AM. I had forgotten how much I loved that game!!!

If you haven’t seen Batman Begins, I recommend it. It was done quite well, and, in my opinion, is much better than any of the previous Batman movies.

I picked up Tiger Woods 06 last week… Excellent golf game! I like it better than last year’s version. EA did change the way attributes are done. Now you must earn them by way of experience points instead of purchasing them with dollars. It seems to me that the TrueSwing technology has been tweaked a little as well. Swinging the club just feels more natural in this year’s version. There are a few more new features, but I’ll save that for a later post. This one is getting pretty lengthy.

I also picked up NHL06. Nice to have hockey back! A decent game. Definitely better than ‘05, but the computer AI still needs more work. It is tons more competitive playing against a human than against the AI.

Football- My Steelers played well against the new and improved Bengals. Nice to see Big Ben starting at QB. Except for the Indy game on Nov 28th, they may not lose another game.

Hockey- My Pens are still winless at 0-4-0-5. Hopefully they can on get back on track soon before my old hometown loses interest. Sidney Crosby has all the makings of becoming a superstar, but unless we can learn to play a little D, it’s going to be a looooong season.