Something about Gene

I have been very sick the past three days and am finally starting to gain my strength. I am back on my feet and it seems that it’s just in time as Corinne, Joelle and Deanne are all in varying stages of the illness. We were not able to spend x-mas with the folks up in Sunland this year, which was a big disappointment as Uncle Charles was getting all Julia Childs on it’s ass (I quote the man) making yorkshire pudding and roast beef. Alas, we will have to get caught up on Saturday, January 2 at Mama’s get together.

Much of the day was spent caring for the kids and seeing to Deanne as she is in the first stage of the flu – such a drag. Still, the kids managed to open some presents and have some fun despite their sniffling and sneezing.

I got to watch some of the Chargers game, which was fantastic! They are playing with such spirit, I only hope that they can stay healthy for the post season.

Hope that you are all having a nice holiday season and staying in good health!

My company is gearing up for holiday shutdown after next week, which means empty offices, little to no availability for IT services and for me, well, I am actually going to get some work done! I will be able to hang up my Change Control hat and focus on getting our SharePoint dev environment up and running. I’ve finally got all the pieces in place and now all that is left to do is piece together the time line, finalize the communication plan, compile some training documentation and fire up the migration. It’s very exciting to see the organization really starting to take an interest in platform as part of the communication strategy, I can hardly wait for the push to 2010.

We wrapped up Chanukah last night, and I’ve got to say, I was ready for it! 8 days of blessings, gifts, chocolate and all the festive cooking! It gets the girls really excited, so it’s a lot of fun, but it’s also a lot of work. The girls received a lot of really nice toys, books and we were able to use the Menorahs that they made last year at the Chabad House. I would have to say that the big ticket item was coloring books this year. Joey got a nice bathrobe and Corinne got some cool bath toys.

Joelle at her Kindergarten class, Deanne did this face painting.

This year has been full of miracles; we still have our house, we have jobs we like and we have our health. That is good enough for me.

Had a lot of fun with Deanne’s folks, her brother Scott and his fiancee Chantal on night 2 of Chanukah here at the house. Deanne and I spent some time getting the house in order and preparing for the evening and what a night!

Deanne made latkes and I prepared a beef stew in the slow cooker. She had tried out the recipe before and it was quite good. The recipe did not call for any sort of cream soup, so the meal itself was kosher. We also had green beans and were tempted to also serve up left over challah and matzoh ball from the night before, but it wasn’t necessary as there was plenty of food for all.

For desert, Art brought over Peach pie and we had juelly donuts. Not quite as traditional as the sufaginyot you can get anywhere on the street up on Fairfax, but still fried in liberal amounts of oil.

We said prayers, hid the girls gifts and got in a few rounds of dreidel before we were all exhausted. All in all, a really fun way to start the Chanukah celebration.

Here is Joelle and Corinne enjoying jelly donuts the day after the second night of Chanukah.

We got news yesterday that Deanne’s mom’s twin brother, Leonard, had passed away. While we are deeply grieved at his passing, we are content with the fact that he is at last at rest.

Leonard, or Lenny, which is how I have always known him, was a kind and gentle man. He was tall and had a very muscular build, kind and a bit shy it seemed. For many years, he worked with kids of all ages, many of whom had come from low income families or poverty. I think that he used athletics to help these kids find confidence in themselves.

He also worked in different athletic programs that helped train kids in excelling in athletics, I believe that some of these kids had even gone to the olympics, so you can imagine that there are some kids out there who will be missing Lenny.

He is survived by his lovely wife Ginny, his son Brian, daughter in law Linda and his two granddaughters. We got the opportunity to spend this last 4th of July with Ginny and Len, it was a lot of fun. We went down to the corner of Pauba and Margarita and watched the fireworks. Len was upbeat and fun-loving as always – and that is how I will remember him. Kind, strong and easy to know.

Alav ha-shalom.

Yesterday I finally got it together to do the reinstall on Deanne’s macbook. She had a 60GB drive which blew up 8 days ago and may be beyond repair. Pisser. The Mac store wanted $220 for a new drive installed. WTF?! I was able to get this off of newegg for $66 rushed. So, set up the hard drive, reinstalled, ran updates. All that’s left is office install. Done.

Next up was the SharePoint 2007 server install that I was hoping to get doen this weekend. I had managed to pull down the office and WSS updates and get them into the install updates folder, commonly referred to as a slipstream install and got the installation going. Going to check back on this in a while.

Next up is the HP media station box that I am handing off to Deanne’s brother – it is a beast of a box with 2 230 GB drives, firewire, rca in and outs, 8 USBs and 2 GB Ram. Heck, it will run the heck out of Ubuntu 9.10, but I figure I am going to put Windows on there as not everyone is all about the *nix, fair enough.

So I install Vista and come back to Ubuntu as usual, but it looks like this process hoses the menu.lst file, meaning it is not easily modified (subtext, I can’t find it). So, the dual boot Ubuntu / Vista box is more than likely going to be an XP / Ubuntu box. Run patches, setup users, I will come back to the office install. Done

My living room is a hardware graveyard

All this is going on while I am taking care of Deanne, who is a bit under the weather, going to the home depot and checking off sundry honey-do list items.

It looks like the service account I was doing the Content Admin service account I was using to setup the SharePoint install does not have an Service Principal Name setup – F@rgh..! So, I dish a ticket to my colleagues out in Chicago and send a nice note to follow up so they have something other than a ticket from me waiting in their inbox. Thankfully, they are very good at what they do.

So today, what is going on today? We’re heading off to Target in a bit for new menorahs, Hanukah candles and some fun new wind up dreidels. Hopefully, going to catch some of the Chargers and the Browns today down at Stephan and Jen’s house and maybe even get some gifts wrapped and clean a little house.