Thanks, I needed that!

(Yes Shannon and Kevin, this is another "work/Lotus" post ;-) )
This weekend has been the first since January that I have been able to just kick back and relax all weekend. The past couple of weeks at the office have been nothing but the old one-thing-after another juggle, but add the new DST rules that go into effect next weekend and that has added greatly to the stress level.
It seems that this change is not a big deal to the desktop and server group at work. Just use SMS to push out the patch to all the workstations and presto, they're done. But since I own Domino/Notes, BlackBerrys and Palms....all of which use dates....all of which need patched in one form or another.....ugh. Now I have to agree with my friend Mike's post on how nice the Lotus patch has worked out and how Lotus needs kudos from us for working hard to get it done! Well done guys! Running the agent on my servers took only about 3 hours of time. I'll probably run them again next week because there are a bunch of remote folks that haven't been patched yet. So with Lotus done, my attention turned to the Palm devices.
The vendor that we use to get email and PIM data to sync with Lotus told me Thursday that they expected admins to upgrade their product FIRST, then the server/desktop OS, and finally Lotus. Obviously, they live in a little universe in which they are the center of it all. So I'm waiting, as are many other of their customers on a fix that will work correctly. And of course with this vendor they just don't issue a patch, they put out an entire new release. And when they issue a new release, server performance goes to hell and nothing works right. Then there are the BlackBerry's. There is one company that just gets it. When they do something, they seem to do it right. I was able to upgrade the BlackBerry server to SP3 without any issue. Plus, they have put out the correct steps on pushing out the patch to users, so all they have to do is click reset when it comes on their screen. Too nice!
So with all those plates spinning in the air this past week, I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to attend our disaster recovery testing on Friday. I did. Of course all I needed to do was wait for the backup server to come on line, recover Domino server data to a couple of servers, test mail flow, and I was done. Waiting on the backup server took the longest. But once it was available for restores it only took about 3 hours of restores, another hour of recovery steps and 1 hour of testing. I was done! Man, I love Domino. Easy to recover.
So that was the "good" start to the weekend. The rest of this weekend has pretty much gone like this:

• Got to sleep in a little yesterday morning
• Woke up, made pancakes for everyone
• Went to Molly's basketball game
• Watched a bunch of movies
• Slept in again this morning
• Watched more movies
• Kids went to Denise's brothers house this afternoon, we got to go running around by ourselves (mini-date)
• Went to Chipotle
• And now I actually get to blog.
  

Yes, it has been a good weekend. Also have started doing something this weekend. I started to switch out all of the lightbulbs in the house with the new fluorescent bulbs that are suppose to save energy. Not that I totally buy all of the "humans causing global warming" thing, but because it makes sense. On that same note, I read an interesting article on the National Geographic website that shows global warming may actually be caused by the sun, and not us. A good read and provides a counterpoint to everything else that is getting thrown around these days.
Well, that's it for now. I've been blog-rambling enough for now. Batteries are recharged for more crap that I know if going to hit the fan at work tomorrow with the Palms and DST. "Once more unto the breach.." Well, that's tomorrow at around 7 am.