December 2019 - iWatson Blog

Merry Christmas

Christmas is officially over, and it’s been a good one! Of course, we were spoiled by everyone. Here is a recap of the week events.

Christmas Eve

Jacob and I wanted to go swimming with my boss. My boss usually goes swimming Christmas Eve with his family and We’ve also gone. The Lehi swimming pool is only open until 12p, so we had to hurry. It is like herding turtles when it comes time to get Jacob moving, so we didn’t arrive until 10am. We found out that my boss had to go into work, so we didn’t get to see them. Jacob and I had a lot of fun swimming though. We got dressed and headed out.

My mother and father are buried in the same city, so we decided to go visit their grave site. I don’t go there very often, and it would be embarrassing to count how long it has been. We have a family friend who goes and keeps it nice and pretty!

After the cemetery, we ended up going to visit Lehi Roller Mills and then home to get ready for dinner with Grandma, Aunts, and a Friend. We had a great ham dinner and opened PJs! One of the neighbors passed out Sky Lanterns to the neighborhood and instructed everyone to go out and light them at 8pm. It was super awesome! I’ve seen them in YouTube videos and pictures, but never in person! It was super cool to see and there were a TON going up around us! They went up and eventually disappeared. I did see one falling to the ground after it has burned out. I’m curious what the aftermath looked like after. Good thing they were biodegradable.

We spent the night wrapping gifts to each other and then trying to get to bed. Jacob doesn’t get up super early, so that is a relief. He once slept until 10am, but he only lasted until 8:30a.

Christmas Morning

Aunt J went and picked up Grandma T and they came over here to have breakfast and open presents. We had a blast opening gifts. Jacob totally got spoiled! We already had a ton of legos in our house, and we have a ton more now. He loves putting them together and I get to help every so often.

I received a Ring Doorbell and I can’t wait to install it! I’m a little scared to install it. Having a camera on the front door will be interesting. Watching the boy in the summer will be interesting. I find my tools out in the front yard at time. Considering where we live, It may be overkill.

After opening presents, we went over to Grandma T’s house for presents and then back to our house. We were instructed by Jacob that we weren’t going to leave the house until the next day. He played..played.. and played with his toys some more. I ended up working a bunch.

Day after Christmas (Thursday)

One of my goals this break was to clean my office. It has always been a dumping grounds for stuff. When the house is cleaned, and something needs to be “hidden” it goes in there. I spent a lot of time cleaning the room, which it still isn’t done, but I’ve made a good dent. My time is usually spent on our kitchen table with my laptop. This allows me to spend more time with my wife while she is watching TV. A room where I can get work done where it is quite would be nice. We headed up to Great Grandma’s (Jacobs) to visit with family. Very cool family with a lot laughs!

Saturday….Dentist..

Jacob HATES the dentist and had to have a tooth pulled and a few cavities filled. We had to be to the Dentist at 8:15am. I woke up at 7:50a (I was the first one up), so we had to get Jacob up, ready and off to the dentist. We have a 15-minute drive to the dentist. I don’t think I drove too fast, but we made it there by 8:20a. The place was a total disorganized and we had a hard time checking in and then had to wait until 10am before they could get him back. It went well, but he ended up biting his lip a ton after surgery and it was bleeding pretty good. His lip is super swollen now and looks bad. The dentist instructed us to keep him from walking and keep a good eye on him. It was hard to keep him from walking for 2 hours. Jacob was on the move after about 3 and that is as good as we could do! He was fine and there were no incidents other than the bloody lip!

Sunday

Pretty relaxing day today, so nothing to exciting to report. Church was pretty good. Our neighbor gave a talk. It was great to hear from him (and the others). Jacob switches classes next week (New Year.. New Class) He had some awesome teachers, and he is sad to be loosing his teachers. I’m hoping he is a good kid during class. We finished off the night with some games. We had a great night until we had to put the boy to bed. I’m hoping we aren’t the only ones who have a rough time getting their kid(s) to bed.

I hope everyone has a great New Years Celebration this week. Keep safe out there and if you drink remember not to drive! You have options with Lyft and Uber.

Christmas Month

I am going to do another blog post this week.

Having the holidays over is going to be awesome! There are a lot of festive activities and parties, but it is one right after another! The weekends are usually crammed packed, so you don’t have much down time. Sunday after church are usually my favorite times. We are chilled around here and take it easy.

I have loved every event that we have attended and done this month. Earlier this month, we attended a Christmas Party with my family. Getting together with this side of the family, usually only happens once a year. My family means the world to me and I wish that I saw them more! As I’ve mentioned, my father passed away several years ago (30 years now). We have since found out that he had a daughter before he got married to my mom. It is a crazy DNA story that I will have to expound on sometime. She fits right in with our family. There are a lot of resemblances with her and my family that are spooky. Each get together, we learn more and more about her. So much fun!

This weekend, we were able to meet with Jacob’s birth grandma, J. She lives in North Carolina, so we don’t get to see her very much. She is divorced and has two adult kids that keep her busy! Jacob’s birthmother has made some decisions in her life that aren’t the best. It’s rough to see her go through this troubled time. We have so much love for her and the decision she made to place with us. We just don’t love her decisions she is making now.

We told Grandma J to meet us at Leatherby’s, so we could have food and desert, if she had eaten, since it was going to be late. We show up and see a sign that says, “We are temporarily closed for remodeling….” There was no mention of this online. I look it up now and it still says it’s open! Am I the only one who relies way too much on the internet to tell me what is going on? We ended up going a block or two over to “Crown Burger”. You can’t go wrong with burgers, can you? We had a great visit with J.

Before the meeting with J, we had family photos taken. I was dreading it, but it wasn’t as bad as I though it was going to be. I’m not much of a suit person, but it went better than I thought.

We went through the Christmas In Color display this week in South Jordan, UT. It is a big parking lot filled with Christmas lights synced to music and it is amazing! It is a pretty fun thing to do as a family. Jacob enjoys it. Hopefully the biggest of scrooges can come through with a little Christmas spirit or a song or two stuck in your head. This year, they added vertical lights have this 3D effect to them.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas this year. I hope you don’t get caught up in the whole retail nightmare of Christmas.

Work is fun.

It has been a crazy week at work and with life. I have been working on several projects at work. I currently have at least 4 projects that I am working on. Each one provides a unique learning experience. It’s always so fun (and stressful). For instance, this week I had to try and recover an admin password for an EC2 instance on Amazon. To make things worse we don’t have the public/private let pairs for the machine either.

I can’t go into too much detail, but a little background on this project might help. The client payed someone to develop a system. They parted ways and now something is broken. They are paying us to try and fix the system. I’ve had to play detective piece a bunch of stuff together. The thing that is broken resides on a machine that we need access to. This machine is hosting a website and has passwords I need, and I’m pretty sure this is where the problem is.

I am NOT a professional IT man, and I can hack my way through things. Acting with confidence when mucking around with machines on AWS isn’t my strong point. This is probably something I need to work on. Full Stack developer? Is IT included in that?

I did a lot of research and looking into how to change the password. I found a lot of options, but none with clearly marked prerequisites. They also use a bunch of terms, I have no idea what they are, so when they do list a prerequisite, I fail to catch it. Needless to say, I ended up finding them after I had gone down the rabbit hole.

One thing you may, or may not know about me is, I am a big worry wart. I worry about things going wrong that may not go wrong. If I don’t own the data, I get this super anxious feeling that everything is going to break or blow up. My heart rate always skyrockets. Hopefully I can post a graph from my Fitbit.

Not much in the way of cardio. Mostly stress.

A few attempts at getting the password was made earlier in the week, but nothing that required powering down the server. Thursday at 1pm was going to be the best time to make another attempt. The client had a few demo’s that he was doing. After about two hours of stress (cloning, moving IPs, installing software, etc), I get to the point a where I can run the software that allows me to change the password. EC2Rescue was suppose to be the rescue, but it failed miserably. There was a read/write permission issue. Nothing in the docs said anything about this. I don’t think I missed it… the stress level was elevated after this discovery.

Now it was freaking out out mode. I mounted the two drives from the machine I needed to get to, and luckily I could see files and I searched and found some of the things I needed

Time was running out, so I set the IP addresses back to the old machine and brought it back up. The client had a demo in the morning, so we tested the site/apps to make sure everything was working. A new plan had to be revised, because I didn’t want to waste any more time.

I was able to find some passwords on the drives mounted earlier. The passwords were useful to make the necessary changes to another system. Friday night the build started working. Excitement was in the air! Emailing the client the news brought me great joy! I have one more task to complete this week, but it requires a Mac, iPhone Emulator, and an Xcode expert. I will talk to that guy on Monday. We should be able to get everything working.

It’s been a crazy project, and I hope we get to work with this client more in the future. Coding is my first love, and solving complicated non-coding issues is second. I’ve learned a ton from this project!

Please forgive my random thoughts/posts.

Memories…

Here is a picture of my mom and dad. My father is smoking in the aunts house. Seems crazy now, but we never thought about it back then.

This week my boy wanted to listen to Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas Song. It made me think of my Aunt Margret, who passed away last year. It brought back a lot of memories that I cherish. Memories of hanging out at her house, her laugh, and the many fun things we did with her. When I was a boy, I would hang out at her house a lot. I first heard this song at her house many moons ago. If I could only call her up and tell her how much my boy loves this song, and the memories I have of this song.

While driving to work, I was thinking about the people in my life that try and avoid memories or places that bring up memories about certain people. I’m curious why? My father passed away when I was 15 years old (about 44 days before my 16th birthday). I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a traumatic experience and there was a lot of anger towards his job where he was killed. He died in a work place accident, but of course, I had to hold someone responsible. I wasn’t happy with the place he worked for many years.

My father was a smoker and he smoked in our house (this was the 80’s, it was acceptable…right?). To this day, if someone is smoking around me, it still brings up memories about my father. I hate the smell of smoke, but I cherish those memories of him. A few memories are: Long drives down by the lake to on his way to have coffee with his friends. Sitting in the bowling alley, impatiently waiting while he talked, and talked with his friends. I was an impatient kid. 🙂

My mother has also passed on, from Cancer (as mentioned before), and I’d say there isn’t a day that doesn’t go by where I think of her. The memories are awesome, and I will be sad when they are gone.

All of my grandparents have passed on. My father-in-law has passed. It is so crazy! I’m a bit jealous of my friends that have both sets of parents an grandparents!

One thing I love about Facebook is the memories. We live in a society now where “dropping by” to visit someone is a bad thing. That is one thing my mother and father would do a lot. “Hey lets go see …..”, and we would drive over to their house. No cell phones, and calling their home phone took too long! It was great, but now you don’t see anyone unless you are on Facebook or make prior arrangements.

People tend to only post the “good” things that are happening in their life, but I don’t mind it. I still get to keep up with them. It is hard to tell if they are going through a rough time. If you have a friend who has passed on and they have a Facebook account, it is a bit of a memorial. You have a place to leave memories and photos from the past. There are many times I’ve gone to my parents grave site and spoke to them as if they were there listening to me. If my parents had a Facebook account, I’d probably write a message or two to them. We do have a group where we can post photos of them and share memories.

I asked my wife about this why people try and avoid the memories, and her response was that they may be avoiding the places where they died or the memories about them dying. I can totally understand this. The memories of their death are probably the most traumatic. The experience was tough, but I know that I grew so much from going through my experiences. It was definitely rough, but it is a memory and something I’m never going to forget.

What are your thoughts?

Thanksgiving Weekend

One shot I took at Temple Square. The snow made it look epic!

Thanksgiving weekend is coming to a close. It is Sunday night and in 12 hours, I have to be back to work! I’m not super excited to go back. Another vacation day could come my way, and I wouldn’t care. 🙂 We had a great time. Here is how it was spent….

Wednesday, 11/27/2019, I took a vacation day to spend the day with my boy at home. We hung out in the morning and then about 1pm, he headed upstairs to play. I ended up watching a movie or two and checked on him. He would yell “Go downstairs”, so I obliged. So much for hanging out with him. Later that day, he ha a friend over and they had a bit of a tiff. We went out for desert to intervene (@ Purple Turtle) — All in all it was a great night.

Thursday, 11/28/2019, Thanksgiving was pretty crazy. We met up with Carla, Mother-in-law, and Jessica (Sister-in-law) at The Big Bear Diner. We had a great meal! They ha a modified menu, so it was pretty small. Due to my Menieres disease, I had to avoid the turkey. A big fat burger was what I had (see image). The others had the Turkey dinner. After dinner, we went to see Frozen II, which was SO good! We loved it. My boy even sat through the movie and he was super quiet! Amazing! When the movie was over, I went Black Friday shopping with a friend. We had a great time battling the crowds! It was awesome spending time with the in-laws and with my friend Bill. I even met Glen Stucki at Walmart while shopping. He is a cool guy, you should check him out! Celebrity!

Black Bear Diner Thanksgiving Dinner – Burger – It had a little problem with the meat.

Black Bear Diner Thanksgiving Dinner – Turkey

Friday, 11/29/2019, was a little unplanned. Our friends talked us into driving up to SLC to have a little stay-cation with them! We packed clothes for 1 day if we decided to stay over night. Unfortunately, when we decided to head up, a storm was moving through, so the drive up was a bit crazy! I hate driving in snow, so I was freaking out a bit! We made it though and went to a place called Dave and Busters for some food and games. We checked into a hotel and then took Trax up to Temple Square to view the lights. If you haven’t been, I’d suggest going to view the lights if you do it during Christmas. It’s a beautiful place all year around, but the lights during Christmas are pretty epic!

Saturday, 11/30/2019, We slept in until 9:30a and then decided to go swimming before we checked out of the hotel. About 11:05am, I got a text that said “KSL NEWSRADIO: NB Lanes of I-15 blocked at Lehi. First responders may need to close SB lanes as well for hazmat response. ….“. My friend had also sent an image and another warning (see image). It was insane. So 9 hours late they would re-open the freeway, but it was super crazy! We decided to just have fun instead of going back home, so we went swimming for about 5 hours. For dinner, we ate at our favorite place, Charlie Chow’s, and then went Ice Skating (our boy did, not us). We had a great time, but it was a bit of a crazy day!

Sunday, 12/1/2019, We cleaned up the basement and setup the tree and decorations. It was a pretty relaxing day! The boys schedule was all jacked up from the stay-cation. It wasn’t your typical relaxing day, because of all the cleaning we did. We had fun though. As we brought out the ornaments we were telling stories about how they came to be. When my wife showed Jacob the ornament we bought when we found out we were going to be his parents, he came over an gave us both hugs! It was pretty precious! There were many hugs after that. I’m a grinch, but that warmed my heart! It was pretty cool!

I hope you all had a great weekend! I only touched the surface of what we did. We have some great friends we spent the last 3 days with. It was awesome! I’m thankful for friends and family!