This morning was a bit of a change of pace since I went to Salem Baptist with Dave and brooke. Then we went over to Dave's for lunch, and ended up hooking up his computer to his stereo with a digital connection rather than analog, which should eliminate the computer noise as well as get rid of the cheap DACs from the chain. Much better. Then we ended up watching some of his 10th grade videos. Didn't know most of the people in there. After that my brother came over to wash clothes and watch the game, and we discovered that the TPR valve on the water heater didn't like the water again. Over the course of clothes washing it got worse and worse, and eventually just didn't hold much water in at all. So I got a new one of those and put it on. Not too hard, but we discovered that the only water shutoff that works completely is the main one. I guess most of those are gonna get replaced at some point... Also picked up more 2x4s and some hardboard so once I get some more screen material I can build a bigger screen. I'll even try and make it actually square this time. :) Also picked up the handy cordless sawzall. Have to determine what's in the walls before I can actually use it, but at least I can do it whenever now. Watched 1984, which was odd. It's sorta slow and long, but it's not designed to be entertaining as much as show a scary possibility for the future. "who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past" "We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. We make his brain perfect before we blow it out. And then...when there is nothing left but sorrow and love of Big Brother...we shall lift you clean out of history...Nothing will remain of you." "But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you."

Today was nice an relaxing. Got up rather late, and just sorta poked around online. After a lack of email for about 5 hours I got concerned and realized that my DNS server had crashed again and for some reason the secondary didn't take up the slack or something. The crash is annoying it appears to be a failure to fork due to artificial memory limitations (it's a virtual machine) cause the parent process to fail. It appears to happen at the 4am logwatch pretty consistently so I now have a cron job to restart bind shortly after that. I also increased a lot of timeout values and added a third authoritative DNS server to the mix. We'll see how that one goes. If this crazy virtual host thing keeps up I may seriously consider getting a dedicated box. I have the sendmail load limits pretty low to keep it limiting itself before getting fork errors, and it's been routinely logging load averages 10+ for short times, and I've had weird latency issues lately. Sorta a pain. :( Anyways, I took down and remounted the screen 3" over so now it lines up with the projector's throw. 4x3 still spills off the top, but I'm not to concerned since most stuff I watch is 16x9 or higher anyways. The screen frame is still not square, but the picture is and the 16x9 area falls totally within the frame. I also mounted the center and surround speakers and rearranged that room a bit so it's usable to watch movies now. Maybe tomorrow I'll go get a bigger piece of screen material and build the wider frame. Right after I finished getting the room together Dave IMed and asked what I was doing tonight, so after he went and worked a bit he came over and we watched Solaris. It's not a bad movie, but not really good either. Really weird, and makes you think but doesn't really bring up specific points but more general ideas. We guess that it probably doesnt' adapt to film well and are guessing the book is much better. Maybe I'll have to read it sometime.

Started today off with a trip to Home Depot for some hardboard, bolts, and screws. Then picked up some speaker brackets at Radio Shack to match the pieces already on the back of the speakers. Stopped and borrowed some cool cordless power tools (a circular saw and drill) from my dad and traded the van for my car again. I managed to get my projector mounted nicely to the ceiling, and with the bolts I was able to level it off perfectly by just adjusting the nuts on the 4 corners - much easier and more accurate than trying to adjust velcro. The mount is now very stable as well, you can push on it pretty hard and it won't even move. About the time I finished that it was time to meet Dave for Matrix Revolutions. I think it's better than the second one, but still left too many things open. They did better at interactions, but still need to work on that a bit. After the movie Dave came over and we mounted a 2x4 to the ceiling and more vertically from that to the floor. Also mounted a speaker bracket for the center channel, and the screen to the vertical supports. I'm definitely gonna need a bigger screen (and it centered a bit better), but that works for now if the projector is zoomed in all the way. Since it was now useable, we watched a documentary on Wesley Willis. If you've never heard of him, you should look into his music. It's rather unique. He has a rather interesting history as well. Anyways, tomorrow is wallpaper day, so I have to get up at a decent time. :(

Last night I moved some stuff (mainly tools and basic things like hand towels and soap) over to my new place, and then went over to Dave's place. Ended up watching The Lion King, which Dave and Paul know way too well. I think brooke knows it pretty well too, but as usual she fell asleep pretty early into it. Saturday I got up at a semi-decent time (even in the morning), and used some coupons I was given to buy some dew and pizzas, and then grabbed enough equipment to listen to music decently and headed over to the house. brooke and Betsy came over and we went shopping for cleaning supplies and other necessities. We got back and they went to work cleaning and Dave came over and we started installing the cool dimmers I got for dirt cheap on ebay. After I took the first switch off of the wall we realized that the old switches were the usual screw terminal style, while the dimmers had pigtails. Of course I hadn't grabbed any wire nuts before I left so we headed off to Home Depot. We also got some 150watt halogen bulbs to replace the old 80watt ones, which helped the room brightness a lot. Dave flipped one switch which was upside down over and only managed to shock himself once (I think). brooke wanted to help with one of the dimmers so I let her do that, but we turned off the breaker for that... I also replaced all the exterior locks so now have a working lock on the back garage door and have one key for everything (I had 2 keys for the working locks, and one non-working). The entire family stopped by during this process, and most of them managed to end up with keys. Dave left for a while, but then came back and we got pizza, and Paul came over to visit too. It was like a normal ITS get together, but with a lot more candy and a lack of furniture. Then everyone went home, and it was time to close up the place. I realized that one of the doors didn't latch properly, but a quick swap of the strike plate fixed that one. We'll deal with that one for real later. Now off to get some rest for more moving tomorrow.

This weekend was supposed to be sorta used for packing, but that didn't happen. Saturday got up sometime in the afternoon and effectively did nothing. No movies even, just mainly reading between online tech stuff and magazine tech stuff. Of course just kicking back and listening to music too. Oh yea, JoeBuck got his new blog up and running. His should be interesting since part of the whole point of it is to document his experiences on the other side of the world. Sunday I got up and went to church and stuff, followed by lunch at Houlihan's. Then off for shopping at Sam's Club where I bought more Dew and a giant bag of Runts. The Dew was planned but the Runts were a impulse buy while waiting for people to finish in the bathroom. Oh well, it was cheaper than the bulk rate online, lets just hope it makes it to my office or something rather than the alternatives. After that it was a lot of sitting around again doing not much. Started researching cell phone plans. The whole family isn't really tied down much by contracts right now, and we have 5-6 phones to get going, so WLNP coming into effect in November could give a bit of bargaining power. At this point it sorta looks like maybe a combination of Verizon and Sprint. I looked at ATT for a bit, but find it puzzling they're actually moving from TDMA to GSM, and besides that calling it "next generation" when it's just a more constricting form of TDMA - just as everyone else is moving to 3G or at least some form of CDMA... They have the best if you roam a lot with onerate, but otherwise I'm not so sure - neither tech is that great IMHO. Anyways, looks like pretty big fires in the San Diego area with the sky being orange and now sorta black. Some pictures of how bad it is: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. #4 is a skyline picture that shows the darkened sky really well. In a few days maybe this site will be available again with more. If you're curious there's more info available including burn maps and evacuation areas. Eventually watched a little bit of Air Force One while mainly surfing the web. Now I'm listening to music again, currently U2. I want some of their stuff to be released on either DVD-A or SACD in the near future, but I guess I'll have to live with CD for now. Now off to go do more tech reading before bed. I guess I get to pack some during the week this week. It's a good thing I'm not actually trying to get out of a place in one day or anything...

The weekend was nice. Slept until sometime in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday, which was very needed. Watched To Live followed by Soylent Green. Both were interesting movies, if a little weird. Soylent Green got an unplanned intermission due to someone plugging in a hair dryer and tripping a circuit breaker. Imagine a room that's effectively light-tight with normally a decent amount of lights from not only room lights but also VFDs and LEDs. Then imagine that room without power - yea, it's very dark. So after resetting the breaker with enough delay to force a move of the hairdryer to a different bathroom, the ending was uneventful. After that I tried to sleep some more, which was interesting since I hadn't been up all that long so kept waking up and having to fall back asleep. Sunday was church, and not sleeping through Sunday School this week. After that it was attempt to control the Asian Beetles. After a few times vacuuming and cleaning up a dozen each time, I found and cleaned up a bunch in other rooms as well. Then I watched The Legend of Drunken Master. While dubbed to English rather than subtitled, it was still one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. I mean, with quotes like "What does it mean when there's a picture of a skull!" with the the reply being "Good Stuff!!!" and "If you have job, you wear the pants!", how can one go wrong? Then more cleaning up the beetles, involving removing the light fixture to clean up more this time. After cleaning up the ones inside the light (not many), it was good for a while but now I see 3 up there. Talk about annoying little critters...

So today started off a bit late, seeing as I somehow managed to confuse the off switch and the snooze button on my alarm. Willowgate for lunch, which was good of course. I still find it funny when to order you just say "yep" a few times and the whole process is about 15 seconds. When I left for lunch, I had around 120 messages in my Inbox. Not a whole lot, as it was sorta a slow day. I came back from lunch to "[Folder "INBOX" opened with 6,125 messages]". Oops. I managed to have one of the servers send my boss and I a few thousand more emails than expected, to the point evolution was having a bit of a problem dealing with all them (the exchange server gets a bit annoyed and puts weird delays when doing lots of moves). I went in and ended up removing 2100 messages from mail server queue, and 2700 from another, which was a bit nicer waiting until it delivered them all... Overall I'm guestimating I got around 8,000 emails today, which is about 4x the normal amount lately. And in the process learned that mailman's bounce detection doesn't respect the don't notify admins when you repeatedly bounce many thousands of messages into it... After work a bunch of people picked up KFC and came over to eat and watch Matrix Reloaded. Like the first one I liked it better the second time around. They like to hide little things in the movies you just don't pick up the first time. Especially since for movies like that part of the fun of the first time is going crazy with friends and hanging out at a theater for a movie starting at midnight when you're already lacking on sleep. Anyways, that was over early since Dave had to work at 10 and brooke had to make a phone call to the other side of the world. So I settled in for a bit of web browsing, which worked for a while, but then something on the Internet blew up. Paul Boyum and I decided that it's something big since we're both seeing the problem from different networks and it seems to be where the whole metro area connects up to the backbones. That's probably not a good thing... Hopefully after a half-day or so of sleeping it'll be working again. :)

Culvers for lunch since it was Ross' birthday. Then after work a bunch of people all went to the cheap seats to watch Finding Nemo. Very funny movie. After that was hanging out and cake and stuff. So basically party half the day... iTunes for Windows came out today. Preliminary running it under wine didn't result in much luck, but maybe I'll try on my machine with crossover. Anyways, I just got done cleaning since I'm having people over for Matrix Reloaded tomorrow, and am tired.

Apparently I forgot that Matrix Reloaded was released on DVD yesterday, but that meant a nice surprise seeing the DVD when I got home today. Watched the extras disc, which has cool stuff. You can tell in some places where there's rather obvious differences between stuff shot on film and stuff shot on video. Even the MTV Movie Awards spoof (yes, it made the disc) is obvious on composite shots when you watch it on a decent medium. Anyways, today was interesting. Tried to track down some crazy profile problem. The user was able to log in but not load the roaming profile, which was odd since permissions were right, but also the machine hadn't reported in to the logging system in 2 days so I'm starting to think it was rather messed up. Rebooted it for good measure though (make sure all the policies are applied properly), and we'll see what happens tomorrow morning. Lunch was Arby's, which seems to have become more popular. Today was a direct result of Mike J bringing coupons and massively campaigning, but we've gone more than normal otherwise too. Finally filled out some paperwork for the house I should have done like a week ago. Oops...

Watched The War Wagon. I don't normally like westerns, but this one was good. Maybe it was because it didn't just involve gunfights, but actual strategy and blowing stuff up. And they didn't make things obvious right from the beginning like most movies end up doing...