What's a nerd to do?

So what does a died-in-the-wool nerd do on a day like today. Well ...

I spent time with my spouse. It is so nice to have her home for a few days. Nothing can compare with that, but I won't let it stop me from boring you with the rest of my day.

I watched a bit of the CU versus Nebraska football game. Interesting to say the least, even if Nebraska did win. Out here in the part of Colorado known to some as the armpit of Nebraska, the division is probably 60/40 for CU over Nebraska, so some people we a bit unhappy at the ending.

Journeyed down to the church. This evening was Cocoa with Santa. The youth room in the church is decorated as a north pole fantasy with a live Santa to give a small gift bag to every child. Out in the kitchen they had pie and homemade cookies and cocoa and coffee and gingerbread cake with whipped cream for all to indulge in. My better half convinced me to have some coffee while she snarfed sampled the cookies. Got a chance to visit and watch the kids in line as they waited for Santa. The church gets 300-400 kids every year for the event (and probably twice as many adults).

Visited the phone store to investigate the options for our son. He's tied up working in the mountains over the college break and wanted us to check on changing his phone since his current one is on it's last legs. Of course it involves an upgrade in capability and service, just by chance.

Went shopping and spent longer in line waiting to check out than shopping. Makes one wonder why stores can't plan ahead a bit and have enough cashiers on hand for high volume days. Some people abandoned their prospective purchases and left. $$$ out the door if you are a retailer.

And finally the real reason I'm a nerd - I spent most of the day re-writing my backup software for the network here at the house. After upgrading the servers to the latest and greatest Solaris and moving to ZFS based file systems and adding in a few different windows platforms, my old backup software based on ufsdump/ufsrestore just wasn't an option anymore. It isn't a lot of data since the disk farm is less than .5TB, but I like to keep it all backed up to the tape library with copies transported off site for safety. You wouldn't believe the number of times my mania for backups has saved the rear-most portion of my anatomy. I'm getting too old for rear-end-ectomy, so I just do the backups. Time to return to watching the tapes cycle through the tape library robotic loader - excitement beyond belief!