Monday, February 26, 2007

Doings large and small

It's been quite the week for yours truly. My apologies for not posting earlier, but I've either been in no mood to do so, or busy doing other things and haven't had the chance. So this will be a long entry....you're forewarned!

I've been dealing with some issues a family member in Jersey is coming through. It has my entire family in turmoil, and the resulting stress really had me down most of the week. I was at the point where I'd have a headache every morning by the time I got to work. Been spending a lot of time on the phone talking with different family members, and it looks as if the situation is partially squared away for now.

I was running out of my blood pressure meds and needed to go to the doctor's office last Saturday morning to get checked before the prescriptions were renewed. My BP was running high...around 145/90...when I should be at 120/80. I've had a med substituted for another and been advised that I should get a home monitor and check my BP regularly. Between the stress and the BP, I knew I had to make some changes, so I'm going to try to stick to a low-sodium diet, and cut out the alcohol for the time being. Add to that being more stringent about my gym attendance and looking to reduce/avoid those things that add to my stress level.

Going on the wagon isn't much of a big deal...I rarely drink at home and usually limit myself to hitting the local once a week. When I do go out though, I can feel the rise in my BP the next day, so I'll take a break and try to get it within an acceptable range again.

Other than the health update, it was a quiet week at work. I'm trying to help set up a VPN tunnel between my contractor and their parent company's network, which is pretty entertaining as I have little experience with firewalls. My networking expertise is limited to servers and how they interact with gateways and firewalls, so it's a learning experience. I'm also busy getting our servers patched for the Daylight Savings Time switch in a few weeks.

The weekend was fun...took my wife (henceforth known as L.) to the Exchange Street Bistro in Malden Saturday night. I liked it, she thought it a bit pretentious (we got there to find it was half-full...the young lady at the front desk asked if we had reservations, then advised we might have a wait. The wait turned out to be 3 minutes). The food was good (had a 20 ounce pork chop which was delicious), the service excellent. Split a bottle of cabernet and enjoyed dessert (mixed berries over a shortcake biscuit for L, chocolate mousse for me). We definitely want to try it for brunch someday.

My strat-o-matic order showed up Friday...loaded on my PC and spent a good chunk of the weekend replaying the 1964 season. Right now, the Yankees are 7-4..have a doubleheader to play against the Senators when I get home tonight. The blogging and web authoring pieces of the program weren't working...I'll get something up soon.

I tried to replace the fan in my neighbor's museum piece PC yesterday...amazingly, I got the power supply open and removed the old fan, and put the replacement in, even though it had a three prong adapter and the supply only had 2. Plugged it in and the fan didn't work - like a knucklehead I tried to unplug the fan and got shocked for my stupidity. I have to go back to CompUSA tomorrow and see if they have a compatible fan...if not, it's either order a replacement somewhere or put it back the way it was and return to my neighbor. I've already told him the PC is 10 years old and should be replaced.

That's it for a snowy Monday morning...I'll try to get some more posted later.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Bubble Tea Time

G. and I found a new favorite...Boston Tea Stop on JFK St. in Harvard Square. We bought a bubble tea/smoothie combo (green tea for me, strawberry for her) - it was great. Much better than the place we usually go after dimsum at Emperor's Garden.

We walked around for a bit - amazing to me how much it's changed over the years. Made a run to Micro Center, then Trader Joe's, where my bill came to $77.77.

I know I should've played the lottery last night.

Rough sledding

My daughter (henceforth known as G.) came home from a walk yesterday to tell us that someone had been taken out of the local golf course/sledding spot by medivac. Turns out a mother of 3 was tubing, lost control and fell into a marsh. After the snow/freezing rain storm on Wednesday, we went into the deep freeze, so the snow is now iced over and has the consistency of cement. Anyway, it was closed down today, turning away young thrill-seekers looking to crack their heads open...

(WBZ) MELROSE The ice is raising serious concerns about the safety of sledding.

Police in Melrose are preventing sledders from using a popular hill at the Mount Hood Golf course after a woman who was sledding with her three children suffered serious head injuries in a fall.

"We had a near fatal accident due to the icy conditions," said Chief John O'Brien of the Melrose Fire Dept. "It's like cement right now and if you get any type of air, you're landing on cement.

The 39-year-old woman was injured Sunday when she went airborne and landed in a frozen marsh. She suffered head trauma, back injuries, a leg injury and was suffering from hypothermia.

The sledding hill is very steep and fast. When you add the ice, the hill turns dangerous.

"This is the worst I've ever seen," said Henry Hooten, a Melrose resident who has lived on the edge of the course for 40 years.

Chief O'Brien said the area will remain closed indefinitely.

(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Wounded Knee




I almost forgot to post this...this is the aftermath of Lofty Mario's knee replacement, taken about 2 weeks after the fact.

The Year Of The Pig

It's Chinese New Year, so we'll be skipping our dimsum excursion today...it will be a madhouse down in Chinatown. Maybe next Sunday..it's been about 6 weeks since we've been down to Emperor's Garden - usually it's my daughter, one her friends and Bootleg Willy. My wife made the trek once about a year ago and hasn't wanted to return since.

Have a long list of to-dos today...set up the TV so my daughter so hook up her video game system...hit the gym...drive her to Harvard Sq so she can do some shopping at Urban Outfitters...and make a side trip to Trader Joe's. I might've done some of these yesterday, but staying out until 5:30am put the kibosh on that. :-) I blame Bootleg Willy for leading me astray.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Strat-isfaction

I took the plunge today and bought the latest version of the Strat-O-Matic baseball simulation. I still the first board game I bought back in 1977 out in the garage, which I imagine would be worth something if I ever decided to sell. I had bought the computer version faithfully for years, then got away from it a few years ago. I also bought the 1964 season disk, which features two of the closest pennant races in a single year, as well as the end of the Yankee dynasty. Should be a lot of fun - the latest versions of the game have an HTML generator, so I'll probably put my replays up on my Google homepage.

Got my new laptop from work this afternoon...Toshiba with a 1.8GHz cpu and 2 GB of memory. Pretty sweet.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Shoveling slush and other sources of happiness

I'm sitting on the couch with my eyes lightly irritated by the fumes of the Icy Hot recently rubbed on my lower back. I shoveled thrice - the last time removing standing slush on the sidewalk and the cut into my driveway. It's getting cold tonight after today's goulash of frozen moisture, and the slush would've hardened to the consistency of concrete. So I'm waiting on the 2 Advils to kick in, typing this entry and waiting for the Duke-BC game to start.

The weekend was a bit hectic....wound up flying solo to the local on Friday night. They're slowly building up the clientèle the previous owner alienated and there hasn't been any nonsense going around as far as fights go. The new owner has some ideas for specialty nights during the week, while keeping the weekends for dance music. I did get a good one off at his expense Sunday night...I stopped in for a quick pint and they had the VH1 Classic Surreal Life games show on. They were featuring The Hedgehog, Ron Jeremy, and Nick says, "I'm pissed...people always say I look like him." My reply: "Nah, he's much better looking."

I had some hardware maintenance scheduled overnight Saturday at the datacenter...my daughter was over at a friend's for a sleepover, so my wife and I went out to dinner at La Vita Mia's in Saugus before I headed in. It's one of my favorite restaurants...good food and huge portions. Had the chicken saltimbucco over sage risotto and there was enough leftover for dinner Monday night.

The maintenance was more of the runaround from the vendor, whom I won't mention but they rhyme with Hell, which is what dealing with them is like. Five and a half hours and the issue still isn't solved.

Attended the Jon-Erik benefit at The Abbey Sunday afternoon. I caught The Classic Ruins, The Alrighters and The Steamy Bohemians...enjoyed all three greatly. Got to hang out with Carl from The Ruins for a bit, which is always a pleasure. He was kind enough to give me a Ruins shirt for my daughter, who wore it to dance class the following night. Neither one of us had ever seen The Alrighters...hard-to-describe band with a sax/stand-up bass/drums/vocalist setup, playing rootsy type music. They were a lot of fun and definitely worth catching again. The Bohemians did a wonderful set of Kossoy Sisters songs - their finale, the standard "I'll Fly Away", had a good portion of the audience wiping their eyes. Bravo ladies.

I never had the chance to meet Jon-Erik in person, but always found him to be gentlemanly in his role as a moderator on The Noise Board. He had his opinions and argued them intelligently and with humor. His voice will be missed there. Rest easy.

The Good Soldier

It's an extremely messy weather day here in the Boston area...woke up this morning at 5:45 to snow/freezing rain. Since then, it's gone from snow to rain and back again. Schools cancelled and my wife and I decided to work from home.

About 10am I get an email from a developer saying one of the QA servers is running slow, it's been up for almost a year and maybe it could benefit from a reboot. I send out the proper heads-up and reboot the sucker.

It doesn't come back up.

OK...it's QA...I can head to the datacenter (which is a 20-25 minute drive in good weather) tomorrow morning and deal with it. I talk to the QA manager - who informs me they REALLY need the server as they want to roll it out over the weekend.

Dang.

So, I jump in the car and DO THE RIGHT THING. Other than a near spin-out exiting Rte. 93 it was a relatively safe ride, albeit slow. I get to the DC, power-cycle the server (which hung up on its way down) and declare victory. Then it's another slow ride home and finishing up the workday. I've already shoveled the sidewalk twice, and the rain has turned the driveway snow into glop that can't be picked up by the snowblower.

More on the past weekend in another post.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Making plans

Made it to the gym again tonight...that's 6 of the last 9 days. And I've been rewarded with a loss of about 3-8" around my waist. My weight is about the same, maybe down a pound. My routine is cardio every visit, and not doing Nautilus on back-to-back visits.

Got some maintenance scheduled for this Saturday night which is really putting a hitch in my giddy-up for the weekend. I'm planning on attending the Jon-Erik benefit show at the Abbey this Sunday evening, and with my daughter doing a sleepover Saturday, I'm thinking of dinner with the wife that night. Perhaps Magnolia's in Inman Square, which I've wanted to get back to since the summer.

Work has been getting busy, just with getting everything ready for Saturday night. We're replacing some hardware and patching software to get ready for the daylight savings time change, which is early this year (March 11th as a matter of fact).

Not too much else to add right now, I'm tired, but it's a "good tired".

Take care.

Monday, February 5, 2007

Bring on the baseball season

Bearnie Williams and I are waiting patiently for the pitchers and catchers to report next week.

You can't tell from this photo, but I picked up my new glasses this afternoon. They're taking some adjusting to, as the prescription is stronger and the frames themselves are smaller. When I left the optometrist, I was extremely disoriented - I had to remove the glasses as I was walking on some ice and didn't feel particularly sure-footed. It had been about four years since my last exam - I do see a noticeable difference in reading print.

Watched some of the Super Bowl over at Willy's. Not a particularly memorable game...truth be told, the Colts should've blown the Bears out. I thought the Colts OL deserved the MVP award as a group...they were the most dominant unit on the field.

Sunday, February 4, 2007

Young fashioned ways

Let it be known that six months shy of my 50th birthday, I was carded while entering my local. Of course, the doorman is young enough to be my son. One of the former doormen was sitting at the bar and sadly shook his head at the spectacle.

Busy day upcoming...heading out to the gym, then laundry and some housework. I'm thinking of heading over to Bootleg Willy's for the Super Bowl.

Saturday, February 3, 2007

Benefit for Jon-Erik

Just Another Night

It started with Bootleg Willy picking me up and heading up toward Danvers. We were heading up to Tequila's on Rte. 1 to watch the Prides Of Malden: Preacher Jack and the Cherone Bros. Who tribute band, SlipKid.

Between the onset of sleet/snow, needing to stop at an ATM for a cash infusion and looking for parking, we got in late and only caught the last 2 songs by the Preacher. He was playing solo on an electric keyboard - and he was favoring us with a medley of Christmas carols, which seemed a bit odd given it was Feb. 2nd (but as my wife told me today, it was Candlemas). After a short rap thanking the crowd for its time, he switched over from synth to piano and played his finale.

Have mercy.

Preacher Jack pounded out the boogie-woogie good and hard and dirty. Willy and I looked at one another and started laughing...he was great. During intermission, Jack walked by and we said hello and complimented him on the set. He's a very nice guy and told us he'd been playing since he was 12, which gives him 53 years experience. He's definitely worth catching and I'm definitely checking him out again soon.

SlipKid played two good sets, marred by a horrendous sound mix. At times, the drums were the most defined instrumentation coming out of the speakers. It's a shame because the band does a good job with the songs and Gary Cherone sings the hell out of them. We caught the two sets and headed out just before the encore.

We headed back to Malden and hit the locals and finally called it a night around 2. I got home and logged in to check my email before turning in. That's when my cellphone buzzed....I checked the number, didn't recognize it and answered.

It was work.

Sod me.

Turns out there was a problem monitoring some of our application nodes, so the data center called out. I wound up on a conference call, desperately hoping I didn't sound as drunk as I felt. This went on for a couple of hours, until we concluded it was most likely a monitoring issue, not the app, and to work on it Monday. Finally got to bed after 4am.

Fun, fun, fun...another example of the glamorous life of a sysadmin.