Too bad the class wasn’t being held any closer to Knoxville. I would’ve liked to have seen Jen.

The kids seem to be happy with their presents this Christmas. Victoria got a lot of new clothes and some perfume, Brian got his GameBoy and some games, and Will got a Leapster with a couple of games as well. Amy got some jewelry and a Food Saver, and I scored a couple of really nice sweaters and a shirt. It was nice having James and Ann come down to spend Christmas and the kids loved having them here. My sister, Mel called me from Jen and Terry’s house and proceeded to pass me along to everyone that was over there. It was a great conversation, and I have to say that I do miss them all.

Tomorrow night is Christmas at Ruby and LD’s, which is always a good time. I’m sure their house will be packed full with relatives and food will be just as plentiful. Wednesday evening will be dinner at my Mom and Dad’s as they will have returned from Knoxville by then and will be eager to see the kids. Thursday, the boys will be heading up to Raleigh to spend a few days with James and Ann and will be back with us on Saturday. Whew… I hope I got everything

Sometime while I was on the phone with work, my parents called to tell me they were on their way to Knoxville(Jen and Terry’s home)… I really hated missing that call. I really wanted to tell them good-bye, and wish them a Merry Xmas. James and Ann called and told me they were on their way here from Raleigh, so I delayed my shopping excursion by another 2 or 3 hours. I had planned on taking the boys with me, but figured I’d wait until James and Ann got here since it had been so long since they got to really sit back and enjoy the grandkids. Of course, once they arrived, the boys didn’t want to go anymore, but since I HAD to get this last gift, I set off to the beach alone.

Traffic wasn’t too bad and the mall wasn’t overly crowded, so I was able to find a gift, make the purchase, and get back fairly quickly. It’s just that a trip I had planned to take and be back before 1PM became a bunch of changed plans and coming back around 6:30 PM instead. I really should never plan anything, my life seems to go much smoother when I don’t.

And you know what’s really twisted? My throat is feeling kinda scratchy right now…

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.