The County Fair and dumplings in the shape of...

Yesterday IBM generously gave us a half day off, $10 of food coupons, and free admission to the Olmsted County Fair - designating this "IBM Day at the Fair". This year they even had one of the buildings reserved (presumably now that the new Graham center is open and many of the displays moved over there, the older buildings are now freed up). We wandered around the displays and met up with friends Paul & Anne (and LP) and ate "lunch" I had corn on the cob, Erin had a slice of pizza, and we both had milkshakes from the dairy booth - $14 total. $10 doesn't last long anymore at the fair I guess :(

Other Goings-On

Friday morning the rest of my new server arrived (thanks again Andy and Erin for the "gifts"). So I have started the long migration process - which has been made much easier thanks to my good friend Chris who has loaned me some of his spare drives so I can do the intermediate copying to those (and save an entire copy - when you're talking about 2 TB of data that is a lot of time). So I'm running a whole bunch of copies in parallel with running surface scans of the new drives to make sure they aren't defective. I'm sure I'm consuming quite a bit of power :) but once this is done, the new server will be much more power-efficient.

I have decided I really love my new phone (have I mentioned that before)? I used it to take pictures at the fair yesterday and the picture quality is good! Still not 5.1 megapixel like my other camera but good enough to print if I need to. And I discovered solitaire on there...

Erin and I watched the season finale of Dr. Who this morning - WOW, that show is really great! I wish American TV would take a lesson from what the British do - it is so much better than the junk we have on most channels here.

Last but not least...last night we decided we wanted soup for dinner, and Erin makes great chicken soup - this time he chose dumplings instead of noodles. Well when I walked out to the kitchen to see how it was going, lo and behold were dumplings cut in the shape of NEBRASKA! Yes, my mom got me a Nebraska-shaped cookie cutter many moons ago and here Erin was using it...soup is more fun when you get to eat your home state.