Fox and Zoey send their Christmas greetings!

New Words

I will occasionally (sometimes by accident) come up with new words for my wife's amusement. I hereby submit the following new words I've created to be added to the 2010 Merriam-Webster Dictionary.


Electronical - Something that's not only electronic in nature, but also electrical.


Misunderestimate - When it's more than just simply underestimating, it's misunderestimating.


Vapidiot - A vapid idiot. Usually applies to 20-something reality show contestants, or other fake "real drama" TV shows.



Here are the new words for 2009: http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/newwords09.htm

Harmonica Duet

I gave Fox my old harmonica a few months ago. He loves it, and when his cousin Dylan came to visit in October, we gave him one as well. Here are the two boys playing a duet over the phone.

Baby names my wife has rejected.

Number two is on the way, and of course, thoughts turn to potential baby names. I found a bunch that I thought were cool (if a little odd), but Michelle SOUNDLY rejected.

Speed
Sterling
Hudson (Wouldn't that be cool, people could refer to him as "The Fabulous Hudson Rutherford"...yeah, it's kind of dumb, I know. I still like it.)
DeSoto
Drexel
Roland
Bear (I wasn't actually serious about this one, I just wanted to see her reaction.)
Oscar
Felix
Magnus


Fox was so perfect, we both instantly loved it. Hopefully we will find another name like that for the second child. (Oh, and I'm assuming it's a boy...Rutherfords tend to make boys. Also we have a pretty good list of girls names we still like.)

Several of our favorite names were already taken by our friends. Noah, Owen, and Holden are all names we had picked out long ago, but we waited too long and lost out! If you have any suggestions for cool boy names, please post them in the comments. (But don't be upset if we don't use them, we are VERY picky!)

Day 1 of our "Switchover" - an iPhone saved my life.

Some of you know that the last year at my work has been building up to this weekend. We were purchased by a MUCH larger company, and we have been planning for a year to move our networks, databases, phone systems, PC's, and printers over to the new system. Well, this weekend was it. Being the only IT guy on site (thanks, Jeremy!), I knew I'd be here all weekend. But, they sent a systems tech from the Orlando office, and a cabling guy from another office to help me. And "help me" they did. They almost helped me out of a job.

Friday night, after close of business, we started moving over cables. I gave the tech very explicit instructions to unplug ONLY the yellow cables in the TOP HALF of the rack. (We would later be running cables from here to the new switch, so the short yellow patch cables had to go.) You can see those cables below:



Now, do you see those long green and yellow cables in the middle? Those are VERY important - they ARE our current network. And since all of our production databases are sitting in that room, they need to be transferred to the new system in Delaware. This is PRODUCTION data, that HAS to be correct, or someone will lose a head.

Anyway, while I was out of the room, the cabling guy walked into the room to see what was going on. He said to the tech "Don't worry, all of their old systems are being decommissioned, so just unplug everything". The tech decided to follow his directions instead of mine, and just yanked everything out.

I felt a disturbance in the Force, as if dozens of servers were crying out in terror, and then were suddenly silenced. (Actually, I just heard the alarm system beeping a warning.) I ran into the server room and freaked out. After calling an emergency meeting with both "offenders", we tried in vain to figure out where everything went. Nothing worked.

I knew I had a diagram of the network on one of the servers, but it wasn't connected to anything (due to our network collapsing when those cables were pulled). So, I sat down at it, and found the diagram. It was a PDF...and there was no PDF viewer on that server. So, I grabbed my USB stick...but that server was so old, it DIDN'T HAVE A USB PORT. (Thanks for keeping old crappy machines around, Jeremy.) It only had a floppy drive! So, I found a floppy disc (Thanks for not ever throwing anything away, Jeremy.) and copied the file over.

We went searching for another machine with a floppy, but they don't install those in PC's anymore, so it took us 15 minutes of crawling under every desk in the office before we finally found a floppy drive. I logged in, opened up the file...but it was out of date and no longer correct.

My boss called me shortly after that..."We can't move over the databases tonight if the network is down"...I know, I know. I'm running out of options at this point, though. I considered calling Jeremy (Thanks again for moving on to better things, Jeremy), but I didn't want to bug him on a Friday night.

The tech (who I will refer to henceforth as "Mr. Random Unplugger") did have a brilliant idea, though. When he and his boss visited our site a few months ago, they took pictures of all the racks and servers in the room. So, he called his boss, and had him forward those pics to his iPhone. Mr. Random Unplugger then bought up the pics on his iPhone, rotated, and zoomed in on them until we could see exactly which cable went where. We didn't get it exactly right, though. Still no worky.

About an hour after the initial meltdown of our network, we were all still standing there scratching our heads and testing ports. The cabling guy (who I will refer to henceforth as "The Un-cabler"), said "let me see that again", and took the iPhone for one last look. "Ah ha!", The Un-cabler said...I see the problem. We had one cable in the wrong spot...once it was corrected, our network came back to life, data started moving, and I passed out from relief.

OK, I didn't pass out, but it would have been understandable if I had. There has been a TON of pressure on us to get this done this weekend. "Heads will roll", I've been told, if this does not go through.

The crises was averted, so we got back to work. We had to replace those little yellow cables with the 12-foot cables we were shipped...they were being plugged into a new rack off to the right of that picture. We quickly ran into the next problem of the night - we needed 15-foot cables, not 12-footers. The Un-cabler got on the phone and kicked off an emergency conference call. It was decided to drop ship us 15-foot cables by Next Day Air. Also, we had to go ahead and use the 12-footers because the phones and terminals needed to be installed the next morning, and they were depending on those cables to be in place. So we had to just stretch them across empty space and leave them dangling in mid air. It reminded me of this...I wish I had taken a picture.

Anyway, Mr. Random Unplugger and The Un-cabler did indeed prove to be hard workers and good at their jobs as the weekend wore on, but I wanted to kill them that night. In a purely Christian way, of course.

Stay tuned for Saturday's exploits in the next post.

Storytime With Fox

One more Fox video, this one is for his Mommy. While she was away in South Carolina, Fox wanted to read me a story about Mommies. The book is called "Mudpie For Mommy", and it's about a little pig who tries to gather up nice things to give to his Mommy on her birthday.

Merry Christmas from Fox

Fox wanted to say Merry Christmas to his family!

Fox is walking!

Finally, he's walking around by himself. For the past two weeks, he's been learning how to crawl, then walk again. He's gotten to the point where he could walk fine, but had to hold one of our hands just for reassurance.

He had taken a step or two without holding on, but as soon as he realized it, he would either sit down or cry and want to be held. I guess he just didn't have enough confidence in walking to try it by himself, even though we've been encouraging him constantly.

Tuesday night, Michelle covertly videotaped him walking across the living room. He was so engrossed in playing with his toys, he didn't think about what he was doing.

Later, she told him he could walk by himself, and he said "No, I can't!". So she brought out the video camera and SHOWED him the video above. Once he realized that was him and that he could indeed walk by himself, he was OK with it. He's been walking by himself ever since.

He still looks like a little old man when he walks, but he's getting stronger every day.

Silly Band Names

I considered titling this entry "Even More AWESOMENESS", but I realized most of these aren't actually awesome, just odd.

I was cleaning out our office/guest bedroom this week and ran across a list of band names I had compiled - probably about 8-10 years ago.

It was a full page of names I had written out, some from a list someone else had compiled, some from a band-name-generator I used, and some names I just made up.

Here are some of the best:

The Other Dilemmas
Hold the Humility
Delightfully Uncouth
The Knicker-Wearers
Not Just For Whitey
The Fringe Jackets
Mr. Smarty-Pants
The Emperors of the Milky Way Galaxy
The Band That Shot Liberty Valance
The Band From U.N.C.L.E. (My personal favorite)
Mommy Don't Let Your Kids Join The Sanhedrin
Jive Talkin' Turkeys
Last of the Red Hot Doggies
Glass Darkly
Shorn Like Bjorn
The Khaki Slackers
Schrödinger's Cats (This one was for Michael)


I did some Googling on the interwebs, and found that some of these have actually become real bands. Awesome.

So, help me come up with some more silly names. Respond in the comments...

This post is made of AWESOME.

Female readers, you may just want to skip this post entirely. This is for the guys. I felt it was time to celebrate what is AWESOME.

The internet can be a huge time-waster, but sometimes you run across sheer AWESOMENESS. You can click the pictures to see them full size:

Star Wars characters rocking out is AWESOME.



Monkeys (of all kinds) are AWESOME.



Very large jet engines mounted to very small cars are AWESOME.



That little bird is so cool it surfs on the back of a hawk. Yep. AWESOME.



A bus jumping motorcycles instead of the other way around is AWESOME. The huge ball of fire only makes it MORE AWESOMER.



TRIPLE AWESOME.


This guy has guts. AWESOME guts.



Nick Fury's middle name is AWESOME.



Secretariat winning by 31 lengths and destroying all records in his path. Sheer AWESOMENESS.


We sent a ROBOT to ANOTHER PLANET and claimed it in the name of AWESOME.


A guy doing a flip over a barbed-wire fence while throwing an axe. Double-AWESOME.

And before you ask - yes, all I did is steal these random images from the interwebs. But, if you've run across any pictures of PURE AWESOMENESS, post a comment and include them.