It was nice to be able to sleep in. Went into work not tired at all. Meeting went OK, probably better than I expected, but about right. After that got some other things sorted out, rebooted a server, checked some others, and that was about it. Finished off the night by watching The Green Mile. Good movie, with some rather funny quotes.

Sunday started off with heading over to Salem Baptist again. Of course right as church finishes I get a page about avalon being up, which unfortunately has a corresponding "down" page that came in while my phone was being quiet during church. Turns out it actually did reboot so the full backup didn't really finished. Since at this point we pretty much had to redo the partial fulls from earlier in the day, I figured out how to create a new client from scratch and set that up and kicked off fulls. A short time later the web server went down, although at this point I wasn't going to go in to fix that. So I watched Hannibal, which was very disappointing. He's way too predictable, and the movie doesn't really seem to have a plot other than maybe to scare people. If they wanted to do that I'd say to put some scary stuff in there or at least some suspense. After that movie the web server was still down, and since I needed to reconnect network cables to a machine anyways I headed in to work. Turns out the web server didn't just crash, it was bad. One of the CPUs was 58C with the fan spinning at a 1600RPM, and the other was 73C with the fan spinning at 5800RPM. Neither all that great. It wouldn't even boot in SMP, so I booted it with a UP kernel and it seems sorta stable. Hopefully it'll stay up until it's yanked out of the rack and looked at. Plugged the ResNet and AcadLabs interfaces into Avalon which was nice. While I was there the full backups of it finished as well so I kicked off backups on everything else as well. It'll be nice to have recent backups again. Went home and finished off the night by watching The Fifth Element. Definitely worse than Hannibal, but not quite as boring since it was funny. And then there's Bilbo flying around in a space ship... Finished off the night dealing with some other unfortunate work stuff. Sometimes users just don't deserve being treated half as nice as we treat them even when we tell them to go away.

Today was much too long, or maybe it's just that the amount to do changed enough that I got bored. Maybe it's the not playing in the snow. Anyways, I was tired this morning. Looked outside and saw many inches of snow covering the driveway and steps, which would have been cool if I didn't have to go to work. My brother couldn't get out of the driveway since the minivan doesn't quite have the same running-stuff-over capability as my car, so he had to shovel a bit. Another thing I like about my car is it has pretty decent ground clearance, but also is small enough I can fit in the front row parking spots that nobody else can fit in since half the people can't park. Not complaining there. :) Work went OK. I think I got this big problem sorta resolved, but the question is still why did it happen in the first place. The fix is enabling something we disabled close to a year ago, but the problem has only been happening a month. And only to a select group of people. Oh well, at least we have a solution to make faculty happy. Avalon restore is still going. Apparently word never got out that Ms were up, so told the Help Desk about that. Not sure where that got dropped - it sounds like there was a misunderstanding somewhere along the way so it just sounded like confirmation of what happened before and not news. At this point it's sorta like watching paint dry. I swapped tapes before I left work today, bringing it to the point of not needing any more swaps until after it's done. I think the one drive still needs cleaning though. Now we just have to hope it goes reasonably quick and doesn't crash. For lunch Mike J and Tenley and I ordered Davanni's which was good, and we didn't have to drive anywhere either. After work I came home, and watched The Silence of the Lambs. I hadn't seen it before, but was sorta disappointed since I thought it was supposed to be scary. I was more bored than anything, although it did have some interesting character development and revealing as the movie went on. A lot better than a lot of movies I've seen.

Friday. Can we pretend that day didn't exist? Note my "Thursday" entry was posted at about 3am. After I posted that I finished up work and went to bed, to get up at 9. The morning wasn't so bad, other than being horribly tired. Lunch was pizza in market since Junk had a bunch of flex left over. That was good. I think I was on either my second or third bottle of dew by then though. The beginning of the afternoon was decent, swapped more tapes out, the usual. Then something happened to Usonia2. Not sure what actually triggered it, but it was unresponsive, even through RPC. So grab the 4th bottle of dew and out the door and heading to the server room. It was so screwed up that even being off the network for 20 minutes still hadn't made it usable, but it was enough for me to plug the network cable back in and shut down file services for macintosh. Of course that caused the machine to instantly come back to life. Have I mentioned before that Microsof'ts AFP service sucks? I'll be glad to see that go away in hopefully a few short months. Anyways, that brought me a bit past 6 and by then it was Mike's turn to watch Avalon so I headed home, and promptly went to bed sometime before 8pm. That has to be like a record in the past few years. Woke up at like 9 am on Saturday when it was time for me to start watching Avalon again. Seemed to be OK with the tapes it had, so went back to bed for a while. Eventually got up even though I was tired, and cleaned the house a lot. Got the living room all cleaned out. Of course without the boxes the antenna needed a new home, so out came the paddle bits and new holes in the wall and floor. Rerouted the cable line from a wall jack to downstairs in the closet, and ran a coax line from the attic down to the closet as well. The big monster antenna that was in my living room now sits up in the attic, where it gets me better reception anyways. Rerouting that meant redoing the cable bundle across the floor, which was good because now it's secured to the wall on both ends and to the carpet in the middle, so it won't be dragged back and forth anymore. Of course now if I want to connect the cable to the rest of the system in any way, I need to deal with the ground loop issue. My sub can buzz pretty loud if a ground loop gets into the system... So I ran to Home Depot, and grabbed a clamp, a couple terminals the right size for the rack, splices, and a 500ft roll of #14 green copper wire. 500ft is way too much (I need maybe 20ft), but they didn't sell shorter lengths (well, I could have bought a bunch of 8" pieces for more than the spool, but....) and the price wasn't too bad. If anyone needs green wire though, let me know. In hooking stuff up I connected the real ground first, and then the cable line, followed by the antenna. At this point there's a decent buzz from the ground differential over the digital audio line apparently leaking through the audio components on it's way to ground. Bonding the rack in though eliminated it, which is good. That effectively brings the ground levels of everything going into or out of the systems to the same level, hopefully relatively close to actual ground, and through wiring that can handle some differential. Involved in the Home Depot trip was also a trip to do some grocery shopping for tomorrow, which wasn't too bad. I need to start consolidating what I need and making fewer trips though. Finished off the day by watching Final Destination. Weird movie, funny seeing that famous Minnesotan getting decapitated. Well, I've been up for a long time, and tomorrow is a long day. For all you people asking about the Superbowl stuff and then signing off IM, basically my schedule is church, possible run into work for a couple minutes to swap tapes, and then I'll be home. So show up whenever after that (which should be early afternoon), and bring whatever you want. I should be stocked enough with snack stuff, but variety is the spice of life (OK, I definitely need more sleep). If you have any more questions you probably know my phone number, and I'll probably be on IM either on the computer or my cell (or both as usual), so bug me as needed.

Started off the day with my cable modem being flaky and had to reboot it to get on the net. Stupid thing. As for work, the chkdsk finished, but Windows sucks and would just hang on boot as long as those drives were connected. Tried it on different machines, and worked fine to the point of importing a foreign disk, then kernel panic, memory dump, and no boot with the drives. Then came the last-ditch effort. Burn a Knoppix cd, drop it in the machine, and boot. Hmm. There's an icon on the desktop for each partition, click and there are all the files (well, most of them). Worked without any problems with the RAID controller, the dynamic disc partitioning, and NTFS format devices. Granted there's the little fact that 1/8 the data randomly selected from the array was missing (hey, when 2 drives "fail" in a RAID5 you get as much data as possible), and then with the windows chkdsk one partition was dead, but the home volumes were mainly intact. 30 seconds configuring an apache server to serve out to one other server, and a few minutes configuring a accesshandler for another apache to allow people to access only their files and lots of people are happy they can get to their projects. And why do I like linux so much again? Anyways, while this was going on the new machine came in so picked that up and brought it to Mike and he started building it. I don't know much of the specs since the papers aren't here and I have hardly touched it, but it's a cool box. Too bad we had to put windows on it. Anyways, lunch was C1 with Ross and Junk. Food was ready in like 2 minutes which is always good. After lunch was longer term planning, getting restores sorta planned, and scheduling for the next few days. Between the 3 of us there's gonna be someone there pretty much 24 hours a day. I get 1-10 tomorrow, so get to sleep in a bit, but that's gonna confuse me I think. I got to stay sorta late today and got the first restores going. We're getting the stuff that wasn't recoverable (big chunks at least) up first, and we'll deal with the rest later. It wants 3 different full backups, so the backup server is confused, and this will be an interesting process over the next few days. After work came home and watched The Core. About as good as people were saying... It was an interesting general idea, and they did throw a lot of technology at it and the visual and audio effects were well done, but the story and technical aspects were completely implausible. Hit a problem, make up a random answer that contradicts other things to get around it. Somehow manage to kill off almost all the main characters (don't worry if you haven't seen it, it's not worth worrying about spoilers) in those random answers or just because they're annoying (maybe George Lucas could learn something about what to do with a certain character here). Anyways, not worth watching unless you want completely mindless entertainment.

Today was Monday. Went pretty normal as Mondays go. Sat and watched the server room while they did more installing of the new AC unit. Hopefully that'll be up and running without any hitches in the next week or so. New virus means blocking even .zip files through email at Bethel - guess people might actually learn that a word document is a waste when a plain text copy works fine. Otherwise pretty much routine. Lunch at Wendy's made it a bit better. It was snowing a lot in the morning, so driving into work was fun and driving to lunch was OK. By evening it had pretty much all been packed down though. :( My biggest concern was coming home to a few feet of snow at the end of my driveway and having to find somewhere to park and walk home and shovel. Luckily they didn't bother plowing the road so there was only around 6 inches at the end so i could still drive in. Pulled out the snowblower, put on the headphones, and had fun for a bit shooting snow around. Seeing as I was in jeans an a tshirt when the snow hit me it melted pretty much instantly so I was a bit wet when done, but that's part of the fun. I got a bunch of Netflix movies today so watched Star Trek: Nemesis. I like parts of that movie a lot, but other parts aren't so great. It's definitely one of the best transfers and audio mixes, but that's at least partially because it's the newest. I'm not sure whether it gets my vote as the best one or not, but it's definitely up there. After that chatted with my dad about phone stuff for a while. Still getting some of the stuff sorted out with the phones on his plan, including updating the PRL on them since they had such a major change in service plans so they're confused. I'm sorta puzzled by my phone's battery gauge though. I used my phone for probably an hour or so today, and it's listed as half strength. It should be around 2/3, which is sorta evidenced by the fact that it tends to sit at half for a while then drop quick (I have maybe an hour of talk time when it drops below half, and it sticks on half for probably around an hour). I'd prefer a more linear movement, but I guess as long as I know what's happening. At least it's li-ion so I don't have to worry too much and can just charge it up every night. Probably means that if trends continue I'm never gonna get the full 2 weeks standby but only because I use it too much. Sorta funny since I'm usually the one people point to as avoiding using the phone whenever possible.

Woke up for Salem in the morning. I was tired and couldn't focus well though. Kept drifting off into a sorta-sleep state which wasn't a good thing. After church I cut some more boards, took down the screen, and mounted black fabric over the front wall. The fabric is some relatively light stuff (and semi-transparent if light is behind it which against a wall isn't an issue) but has a similar surface to velvet so it looks like nothing. Overscan hits the fabric and just disappears. Now I just need to get some black edging around the screen itself and do something about the ceiling. After all that was together I watched The Score which is a pretty good movie. Reminds me sorta of Oceans Eleven and The Italian Job mixed.

Spent Saturday morning as it should be spent, sleeping. Got up sometime in the afternoon and did nothing for a while. Then there was a little grocery shopping, followed by cleaning up the place a bit for movie night. I spent some time moving the second half of the alphabet of DVDs into the new cd wallet, and splitting the other half into the old wallets and adding all the new movies. I should count and update the web list soon. Jeff helped open and stick movies in, so thanks for that. Then the rest of a rather big crew showed up and we watched Office Space which is a cult classic. Gotta remember to loan that to my mom since she wants to see it. After that one a bunch of people left (apparently being tired and ignoring the tradition of 2 movies in one night especially when the first ends around 9), and the remaining crew watched Sleepy Hollow. Good flick. Then everyone else left and I watched Star Trek: Insurrection. The second to the last, and probably my least favorite of the TNG movie series. I do have to say the beginning is a lot better than I remember it, but the end isn't all that great. 3 movies in one night is pushing it, but fun sometimes (although if I hadn't seen all of them before I think it would have been hard to keep track of them). Anyways, in a week and some number of hours I'm having a bit of Superbowl party, so if you know me feel free to ask me for more details there. Apparently CBS has some interesting things planned. Most of the cameras are HD, with eyevision being probably the biggest exception(s) (that link has a complete list of which cameras and resolution - some people take this way too seriously), they have a crazy sized local production place, and some new technology (like they finally got the first down working in hd - this is like the 2nd or 3rd game) with some HD commercials. Should be an interesting marketing campaign, and I hear there might be a football game too. :)

Work was OK. Dealt with a machine spamming, and another one is infected with the new Bagle worm. Crazy windows machines... Ended up staying a little late doing some profile reset stuff, but at least they're done with. Ross also started a great thread on the its-discuss list about one of the pictures from yesterday. After work headed over to Ross' place and hung out with him and Brad for a bit. Watched Grumpy Old Men which is a pretty funny movie. Tried a little debugging of his wireless issue while using some random neighbor's access point. It's amazing how many different access points are usable from his place.

Today's been way too long, but was fun. I got up sometime around 6:30 to get ready and head over to Dave's by 7. Shortly after that we piled into the car and hopped on 35W north. We made pretty good time after that and ended up in Duluth sometime a little before 10am. The current temp was -16F, so I put on a windbreaker much to the delight of Ross and Dave (I don't think they've seen me with a jacket for years). Then we went shopping since Ross wanted to, and he bought a Nalgene bottle while Dave and I just looked. He knew about a little coffee shop up there, so that was our next stop. We played a game of Chess followed by a game of Scrabble, followed by a few minutes of thinking of shopping and then back to the car for some sightseeing. We went out to Park Point and went out on the lake a little bit from the beach. It's sorta weird seeing sand mixed with snow on the beach. Looks more like a big pile of stuff to put on the roads. :) Anyways, got some good pics, unfortunately forgot I had the camera set to small mode so the pictures are only around 1.5megapixel, which thankfully isn't that bad. We proceeded to drive up the mountain and take some more pictures, followed by stopping at First United Methodist Church and taking more pictures. In case you haven't figured it out, the trip quickly turned into a photo trip more than anything, as I had my new Canon Digital Rebel, Dave had his film camera loaded with black and white film, and Ross had his new Canon A80 along. We got a lot of pictures, and I have mine posted here. Of course I'm still learning about my camera which is why there's quite a few pictures with duplicates at different settings - just trying out and seeing how the auto interacts with the full range of what it is willing to pick for the image. Anyways, after taking pictures at the church we decided it was time for lunch so headed off to Grandma's for lunch. While getting reasonably stuffed we decided that a trip up to Two Harbors and Gooseberry Falls would make a good afternoon, so started off there. Stopped a few times along the way to take pictures, which mainly turned out good. After arriving at Gooseberry we walked down to the falls which was pretty much deserted. There were a couple other people looking around, but the cold weather sorta kills tourist season. Of course this meant good pictures without near as many people around, but unfortunately a lot of paths had already been trampled. The falls being frozen also meant that it was a lot easier to get around to places to take pictures, provided the fact that it's a river and you have to watch the ice because of currents is taken into consideration. Got some good shots without slipping too much. Although I need to invest in a couple filters and a tripod if I'm gonna do a lot more photography like that. Unfortunately carrying more stuff means it's harder to pull yourself along with your elbows on the snow (yea, maybe I'm crazy, but that route was a lot shorter than climing over the and walking around the big rocks, and workable since the river was frozen). It's sorta interesting to see how the river changes when it freezes and how much of what is normally dry ground is covered with ice (including parts of the paths). Gooseberry pretty much marked the end of the trip so we called it a day and headed back south to the cities. Afterwards we were all very tired and Ross went home while Dave and I watched The Time Machine. That movie isn't really that great, although could have probably been done a lot better. Some of the effects were pretty bad, not to mention the continuity issues and plot holes. Anyways, pictures are all uploaded and I'm tired, so maybe I'll update more tomorrow.