… took a lot of energy. This was not a bad year for me, but it did wear me out a bit. The first half was dominated by our trip to Togo and Ghana. It took a lot of preparation to get ready. The trip itself was great, but quite exhausting. Work turned a bit hellish last summer, as we were tasked with replacing the entire server infrastructure at our lab and replacing our Netware systems with Microsoft and Linux. Finally, the holiday shopping season at Laura’s store was intense and tiring. Laura worked long hours and I tried to hold down the fort at home. All in all, though, it was not a bad year. We’re all healthy, we both still have jobs, the kids are doing well in school, and we got to do some pretty cool stuff.
The coolest thing we got to do last year was our trip to Togo and Ghana – back to the village in Togo where Laura and I met all these years ago. It was a lot of fun to show Jacob and Julia the place they had heard about so much, and about which they had so very much no concept. And our
friends in the village were happy to see us, and our children, and to renew the connection. We spent 10 days around Easter in the village, and so there were already many celebrations planned. Easter is a time when many folks return from the city where they live and work to their ancestral villages. So many major celebrations, like weddings and memorials, take place during that time. Our arrival called for yet more celebration and drinking and speeches and feasts and libations for the ancestors. It was fun, it was intense, and it was really interesting.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to me was how relatively easy it really is now to travel to West Africa from the U.S. Ghana has really pretty good infrastructure and the 11 hr flight from JFK to Kotoka is long, but not brutal, like the flight to JoBurg (SA). I think that if you’re in the US, and you want to visit Africa, go to Ghana – no question. Ghana has pretty good infrastructure, low crime rates, decent resources and is politically and economically stable. Of course there are many many other absolutely worthwhile destinations around this vast, warm and rich continent. But from the US, Ghana is the closest and safest.
Talking about travel – I’d like to point out that in 2009 I made 750 Gal (3000 liters) of fuel from used fryer oil. That amount of biodiesel
replaced roughly 17,000 pounds of fossil CO2 regular diesel fuel would have produced. So our relatively carbon-neutral modes of every-day transportation somewhat balance out the roughly 16,000 pound CO2 footprint for our unusually distant travel destination. Most of this (15,000 #) is the plane trip. We drove our borrowed BMW less than 1,000 miles in country and we only had A/C a couple of days at the beginning and the end of the trip.
Work was a bit of a drag last summer. Long hours, lots of weekend work, several nerve-wracking migrations. But all in all it went well. We had to rip out our old Netware servers and replace them with Windows and Linux machines. The OS switch was not the real issue, though. The real challenge was the change away from eDirectory to Microsoft’s Active Directory, and the fact that there were simply no resources allocated to train the people who had to make the switch. We were basically supposed to implement A/D security by trial and error (and Google).
An interesting snag we ran into happened during our mail server migration from Netware-based Netmail to Linux-based Postfix. The folks who sell Netmail make a big deal of how the product is all “standards-based” and it is, but all messages sent ot more than 5 recipients on the system are not stored in the standard(s-based) mbox format, but in a separate, centralized “Single Copy Message Store (SCMS)” which is very efficient, but makes the migration much, much more complicated.
Anyway – after a summer of trial and error and intense use of Google, we now run several VMWare-based virtual Linux (Ubuntu) and WIndows machines on a couple of Ubuntu host systems. And we’re now using Duke’s Enterprise A/D – for better or for worse.
But enough with the geek talk.
Sports: Jacob and I diligently (more or less) pursued or martial arts training in Shito-Ryu Karatedo and we’re working on getting ready for our next belt test. I built Julia a pair of stilts and she can now walk the driveway up and down on her stilts. Jacob has shown quite an interest in archery, so he got an archery set for Christmas. Let’s see if he sticks with it.
As I have discussed previously, I discovered barefoot running last summer, and I alternate that with my martial arts training. I guess at my age, I just need something to keep me on my toes (other than my kids). As soon as I took off my shoes, I got it. It’s just so much more fun to be able to feel the ground you’re treading on. Of course you’re also much more vulnerable to that ground, and so you have to be quite alert while you’re running and avoid any sharp or otherwise harmful objects. And you have to run gently and tread lightly, so as to avoid injury. Yet you can learn to run very swiftly and efficiently that way. Right now, I don’t run much because it’s too friggin’ cold (I know – I’m a whimp). But as soon as ithe temperatures are above 40 F (5C) again, I’m out running again. I have to stay in shape because I want to run the Doughman in May barefoot – especially since I could not get my act together for the 2009 edition. I have a team together for next year, and we will be ready.
What else were we up to?
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