Well, today went reasonably well. Started off the day at Salem with Dave and JoeBuck. Then went and decided to start moving things from the laptop to a different drive since the laptop still made some weird noises when I booted it up. I turned off swap to minimize traffic on the drive, and went from around 24GB used to around 3.8GB (3.3GB in my home directory and most of that is active use (email) or tons of small (although some big music and multi hundred MB video files) stuff that I don't want to archive multiple times so will just get thrown in a tarball with everything else. Of course throughout that whole process the drive was making funny sounds, but now seems to be fine with it. Of course that doesn't mean I'm gonna trust it... This afternoon I watched Star Trek: Generations which has to be one of the worst DVD transfers I've seen in a long time. Another scope but not anamorphic, and they had major issues with the soundtrack. Like the center channel being badly distorted on a quiet scene and then they do a cut to a much louder scene and it's fine. Pretty much has to be in an early stage so I'm amazed they missed it in the final mixing. I seem to remember the laserdisc being better, so maybe I'll have to pull that out sometime. Anyways, tomorrow I have to be at Dave's place at 7am for the roadtrip, which doesn't sound fun at all, but such is life. Should be a good time later.

Friday started off slow but I started getting plans for getting the paging system setup. Lunch was Eddington's which is always good, at least for the people who will actually take advantage of the bottomless bowl. I managed to somehow eat for just over $5, which I'm a little confused about. Somehow I managed a dollar off and a free drink, but I'm not gonna complain there. During the afternoon /var filled up on the server which handles a bunch of internal ITS stuff, but apparently wasn't monitored. Managed to corrupt 5 database tables, but luckily they were all either transient or non-critical data, and it seemed to rebuild all the data anyways. After work went over to Ross' place and hung out for a bit. He's on the 26th floor in the middle of St Paul so I got some good pictures, a few of which I picked out and posted last night. In the morning I was awakened by my phone ringing at 6:50. Upon seeing it was from Bethel my first thought is "great, what could be bad enough that they're calling me now" and given my mostly incoherent state let it go to VM. Turns out it was the alarm in one of the server rooms going off which security would pretty much have to deal with anyways, so I set my phone to silent until 9am knowing they wouldn't ack and it'd call a few more times, and went back to sleep. Sometime around 10am I woke up and couldn't really get back to sleep but layed in bed until around 1. In the mean time dealt with non-work (thankfully) phone calls and stuff. Upon actually getting up I found my laptop's hard drive was making an abnormal amount of noise, but nothing it hadn't done for short times before. Sometime in the afternoon I watched Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I think that is one of my favorite of the original series at least. After that my laptop's hard drive was making lots of noise that sounded vaguely similar to something like metal scraping against metal. Not my favorite thing to have happening to the drive in my laptop. I finished up final arrangements for the night at Mike J's and by that time writes were very slow and almost not occuring, so figured I'd shut it down and hopefully it'd recover enough to pull the data off later. Turns out it never shut down properly, sorta freezing at some weird mangled screen, so I just shut it off. Went and dealt with the aformentioned alarm incident, and while I was there printed directions and a couple of the pictures from Friday night (2-4). They look very nice, but the color laser puts a little bit of a line pattern in them. For the evening a bunch of us went over to Mike J's place to party a bit since he was dogsitting and his wife was out of town. Ended up playing Risk which was described by JoeBuck already. Afterwards I ended up playing with a bowling demo game on the phone as well as sending text messages. Eventually ordered a 60GB hard drive to replace the 30GB one which was making noise, since I won't trust it much even if it does come back at this point. Then there was SNL, which had probably one of the funniest things about Chicken of the Sea and stuff like that. Combined with the previous comment of "Chicken and Tuna are people!", that whole spin was probably the best SNL thing I've seen in quite a while. Throughout the night the dogs were a bit excited and crazy at times, so got a few good pictures. Maybe I'll post them tomorrow or something. As for the computer, after I got home I booted it up and it seems to be working and made noises for a few seconds after booting which went away. Of course if you've ever dealt with computers in a techy way, you know at this point that drive is considered dangerous and not to be trusted with any important data. So I think I'm gonna post this and shut it down for the night.

Decent day for a Monday. The flood of pages stopped sometime in the morning shortly after I turned on paging again for the person who could actually fix it. Definitely need a scheduler to turn them back on when people come back from vacation. After work Dave and I went to get some R2 at Willow Gate II and ended up seeing Brad and another Jeremy (Berg) arriving as we were leaving. I think half the people I know eat there on a regular basis. Anyways, the point of that whole trip was we were heading over to National Camera to get hands-on experience with the Digital Rebel. From a should wait to buy perspective that was a very bad move. That is a sweet camera and as I still can't find any big valid complains about it, we'll see what tomorrow may bring. After that Dave and I watched Blue Crush, which is much better movie than you'd first expect. The rest of the night involved more Rebel discussion boards and reviews, and a little chatting with Jeff about who this danielle person may be and how she stumbled on certain sites as she seems to be a regular visitor to a few blogs. Well, enough reviews for the night for me.

Started off the day going to Salem with Dave and Nick. JoeBuck showed up there but apparently was in a hurry afterwards so didn't really get to talk to him. After that did nothing for a bit, and then decided to make myself a pizza and watched the U2 go Home concert. Ended up getting distracted and chatted with brooke for a while while she got frustrated by the crazy keys on the keyboards over in Sweden. For those who didn't happen to be online at the time she says hi. Anyways, got back to watching the concert. That's probably the best live recordings as far as audio I've heard for a long time. They have a 2ch PCM (which is getting ripped and transcoded to ogg as we speak for portable and office listening), as well as 5.1 DD and DTS tracks (of course I was listening to the better one there :). That's just an awesome concert, and they have a couple bonus tracks too. In case you're wondering, this concert is basically a 20 year anniversary one for the band at the same place as the one back in 1981 and almost to the day. After that did a little more camera research. Then was Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Decent movie, although I didn't like it as much as the others. Looks like others generally agree with me there too. After that watched Alias which was interesting. After that there was a commercial which wasn't too spectacular except one of the layers in the soundtrack was the music for the Bloodhound Gang's Nothing but Mammals - it caught my ear as something I was definitely not expecting to heard on primetime network TV, even with the lyrics gone. Finished off the evening with a lot more camera research. Yea, that's not a good trend, although I did find some pointers on getting the camera for relatively cheap through BestBuy. Well, gotta love encoding on a decently fast machine. It took longer to rip the stream and pull the audio out than it's taking to encode to ogg which isn't known for it's niceness to the CPU. Well, better get some sleep since tomorrow is back to work.

Friday work wasn't too interesting. Mainly just routine stuff, although it feels like I talked to people more about stuff that's going to happen rather than actually doing stuff. I guess that's probably better than guessing and having to change it later. Somewhere along the line the BSSD printing project somehow was just sorta set aside and got rediscovered when it became time to add machines to it. And then replacing stolen computers when the previous ones were just sorta tweaked over time... After work though had a bunch of people over for movie night. We took forever to get started since brooke distracted JoeBuck and he was supposed to get the movie. Thousands of miles away but still causing trouble... We also were trying to figure out pizza and had someone ditch out (although that was for good reason). First movie on the list was A Mighty Wind which is pretty funny, but you have to be expecting it. After that a couple people left and we pulled out the laserdisc of The Empire Strikes Back at Dave's urging. Of course Paul decided to fall asleep and try and keep his record of never having watched a full Star Wars movie. I think it's time to kick him out of the computer geek club or something. Saturday slept in a bit, but not enough. Checked email and stuff and did nothing for a bit. Apparently some idiot(s) decided to make a makeshift bomb and put it in a reshall. Actually the description sorta sounds like they may have been trying to do something else and didn't realised it'd blow if they capped it, but like I said idiots. Hopefully this won't turn into something like last year. Continued the series I've been doing and watched Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. After that went shopping to use my BestBuy money from Christmas. Picked up a few DVDs and another case to store some in since I've gone past the current wallets I have. I decided to abandon the idea of buying the 40 DVD wallets and adding extra pages since they're pricy and I've already filled 2 in the past year. I bought a case without the DVD cover inserts but that holds 128 as is for half the price of just the 40 DVD one. Hopefully that'll hold me for a bit. Unfortunately on my way out I noticed a live U2 DVD, so that got added to the stack of stuff to buy too. Hard to not justify U2 though. I had hoped to poke around a bit with the Digital Rebel since I've sorta been considering buying one, but unfortunately they didn't have any out and I was sorta rushed for time. From there picked up my sister and brought her back to my parents' house for some game at the high school. I swapped out my DVD burner from my dad's machine and put a DVD-ROM drive in for now. Finally got that thing back. Somewhere along the line we got talking about cameras and spent a long time looking at the Canon EF lenses. They have one that I really like (EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM) but at around $500 probably wouldn't get that very soon, especially after buying the Rebel. I wasn't really even considering buying the camera until late spring or early summer, but it looks like I may end up going on a vacation in March so I hope the price drops a bit in the next month or so (hoping for below $900 with the EF-S lens). Time to start really looking at the reviews and specs. While I was home my mom finished sewing up a bunch of material I'm gonna use as a curtain across the screen wall downstairs, so maybe I'll hang that up tomorrow. That'll hopefully block out the remaining light from the window and also cut the light in general at the front of the room during movies. I also grabbed a Verizon phone so I can evaluate the coverage throughout my house better. I'm thinking of switching my phone over soon, maybe another task for tomorrow. After I got home I watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Now I'm writing this, defending my lack of posts on Fridays, and thinking I should probably go to bed soon, but will probably read tech manuals some...

Well today was interesting. Was on the way to grab Nick and head out to Great China for lunch, and a couple people down in 10's office noticed that pages weren't loading. On the way out of the lab noticed that something was definitely wrong, figured probalby a switch. Get up to Nick's office and am greeted by "<the core router> is down". I started to say it looked like more than that, and we both realized we were definitely not gonna be going to lunch for a while. Turns out one of the breakers that powers most of 2 racks of core switches and servers tripped, taking out a couple switches from the main mesh that feeds all the VLANs, as well as the core router between those VLANs, the VLAN server, DHCP, DNS, monitoring, etc. The switches for the most part came up OK, but DHCP/DNS required a bit of poking. And then the router - it's still sorta in development and nothing is set to come up on boot. Of course Nick isn't the one who works on that and that person happened to be out at lunch, so... An hour or so later we actually ended up leaving for lunch, which was very nice and relaxing at that point. Other fun things of the day involved building a hack around that nice mailman bug, and more general miscellaneous stuff. I got the basis of renaming student accounts on the windows side functional, which is nice since students get married and tend to want their logins changed relatively often and the process is usually manual and sorta time consuming. The evening was hanging out a bit at the Help Desk bugging Joe and Austin. Then went home and watched Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (second one in the series for those who haven't figured it out yet). Pretty decent movie in my opinion. Can tell it was made back in the early 80s though. In other news it appears inanimate objects have figured out how to post blog entries yet again. Judging from the fact that this one isn't blank I have a feeling there may be more to this one than the last time an inanimate object posted to some blog.

Today was interesting. Got that kernel up and running. Tried typescripting for documentation, decided after realizing that the terminal was still listed as intelligent that wasn't a good idea. Luckily that process is nice and simple so it was easy to document otherwise. No new problems with Avalon during the work day at least, but it looks like I have stuff to look at tomorrow. And then there was that Apple thing. After sitting through it for like an hour and a half we turned it off and left for lunch when the whole mini thing price was announced. Boo for Apple. In the afternoon played with mailman a bit. Discovered a nasty bug in 2.1.4 where it drops messages. If the list address isn't in the to field and the only address there, it drops it even if recipient filtering isn't on. It passes through far enough that it puts it in the archives but then never even logs the message got to it otherwise. Tomorrow I get to try and figure out if that happened with 2.1.2 as well. If it does the fix may involve adding another procmail recipe until they fix it rather than going back before that. After work sat around a bit and then watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture. While not the greatest movie by today's standards, I hadn't seen it in a *long* time so was sorta interesting.

Friday was pretty good. Lunch with the usual crowd at Taco Bell. Work was weird since it felt like Monday and Friday and every other day at the same time, but was workable since lots of people were there but it wasn't busy but there were things to do so it wasn't boring either. After work went to Houlihan's with the family and ate way too much food. I had a BLT that was basically lengthwise slices from the loaf of bread, plus a stack of bacon in the middle about an inch and a half thick. After that hung out with them for a bit and played Life which I hadn't played in a long time. Saturday slept in and then got up and watched Deep Impact. While the story was an interesting concept I didn't think it was all that well written. The video was pretty pixelated (didn't help that it wasn't even anamorphic to start with), and the soundtrack mix was pretty bad. As a redeeming factor it was sorta funny to see Elijah Wood going through a wooded areas on a motorcycle after getting used to him in the LotR series. After that I was reading slashdot and discovered this rather interesting online site for music. Not sure what the legal status in the US is, but they are legit in Russia and it's basically just importing, so... It and another equivalent service in Spain have been going for quite a while though without problems. They have a lot of stuff which you just can't buy anywhere anymore too. Speaking of music I got a couple CDs in the mail today which was nice. Gotta go listen to them soon and rip after I get a fast ripping drive installed again. One of them has some really interesting stuff, like a bit of a storyboard about the story of the movie. One of the good things about actually getting CDs (besides the fact that usually the compressed stuff sucks). As for mail, I think everyone must have said to deliver catalogs right after the first or something. I got a pile of stuff for "<the previous owner> or Current Resident" which I unfortunately can't just stick back in the box with this other bundle of stuff from yesterday that should have been forwarded. As for that, it's the 4th time so I think I need to give the post office another call and ask why they can't seem to get that straight consistently. After that watched American History X which is a good movie. It's a good reminder of just how crazy and messed up some people can be. Well, off to go listen to music.

Started off the day by removing the rack from it's current mountings, bringing the wood inside and installing it (after making some final cuts with the circular saw), and remounting the rack. It fits better than it looked like it was going to, and seems very sturdy. Now it's just a question of whether I need to do any patching to the drywall before the trim can go in, or if it'll cover it all. Keep in mind that this was all just a rough cut by hand with a sawzall, but it's looking pretty close for the most part. I looked into the hole for conduit, but I'm gonna try a slightly different approach and by the time I was this far the plans for the evening were already in place so it was time to clean up. Got the place cleaned reasonably well and then helped brooke get her photo uploading working right. Soon after Dave came over and we finished the cleanup project and watched TV for a bit. There was a sorta interesting show on live tv bloopers, but not much really good. Around 8 Joe, brooke, Betsy, and Trav came over for a bit of a new year party. Betsy even drove all the way back from the middle of nowhere (aka Nebraska) to join us. We played Monopoly (Disney edition so it was interesting to try and keep track of stuff) and it basically ended up being guys vs girls, and they ended up beating us. We ended up watching Brad Pitt get hit by a van (from Meet Joe Black) on repeat for a while, and finally switched that to Animatrix. Shortly before midnight we switched over and watched the ball drop to start off 2004, while commenting how in the 10 minutes we watched I'm pretty sure there were more commercials than content. Quickly after that we switched back and watched the rest of Animatrix and then called it a night. All this was unfortunately interrupted a few times by the receiver shutting itself off, I think for temperature reasons. I haven't had issues before, but I guess it's a good thing I'm gonna be putting it in a rack with some forced airflow around it - it tends to get pretty hot. I'm tired now though, and have marked all my spam from the printmaster read (I had 226 new emails after an hour or so away from the computer - sorta unusual for a holiday) so I'm done.

Started off the day with a run to go get the wood for around my rack cut. That went pretty smooth without any real problems. Then I went to get stain for it, and ended up getting some stuff that's both the stain and the polyurethane in one so there aren't multiple steps. The only problem is it's very sticky and I started thinking the water based stuff might have been better. After the first coat and attempted cleanup, I ended up going grocery shopping and picked up this stuff called goop which managed to somehow clean it off. It didn't get rid of the nice strong chlorine smell on my hands from the other fun chemicals I tried, but that should wear off soon. After the second coat that goop stuff even cleaned up the brush nicely, which I think is pretty amazing. We'll see if the brush is nicer the next time around with the trim whenever I do that (it got a little gummy between the first and second ones). Between coats there Joe, brooke, Trav, and Dave came over and we watched Taxi Driver. Yea, that movie's just weird, and I'm still not sure what the whole point of the story was, but oh well. Then we sat around and watched Leno and Conan and then everyone left. Hopefully despite being in the garage the stain will dry sufficiently overnight that I can break out the power tools and install it and reinstall the rack tomorrow.