In case anyone hasn't heard already, Austin is now famous (sorta).

Free movie of the week is Assault on Precinct 13, which was pretty decent but nothing special. It was one of the free things today, the other being using a little aluminum foil to get a free burrito at Chipotle. So a very good day there, although the cross-dressing nun was a little disconcerting (mostly because the giveaways besides the face looking familiar were pretty much just the voice and his hands).

Oh yea, if you haven't acquired your free movie rental code (good until November 14) due to not having an appropriate throwaway address to give the redbox and want one, let me know. That's another free thing. Netflix is also apparently unloading copies of Sin City for $6, which is a good deal but also not the same as free. Still worth considering though. And tomorrow is Firefly Theater. Should be good times.

Movies for the weekend were O, which was good. Second was Bourne Supremacy, which is definitely more upbeat. I've seen it a couple times before, but it seemed a bit different. I think it may have been the fact that things which made it interesting such as the shaky camera movement are things I didn't even notice anymore. It's also one of those that I managed to remember way too much of - it's more fun if the details are relearned. Oh well. Third movie was The Rainmaker, which while the court scenes were a little odd, was a good overall story. I wish certain things were covered a bit more such as the difference in motive between Rudy and Deck, but maybe that was just dropped to make the movie better. Still a good movie though.

I sorta caught up on sleep this weekend, which was nice. The extra hour helped a bit there. I'm still annoyed with having to manually reset clocks though. I think about a third of my clocks need to be reset, and because they mostly are off and it doesn't bother me since I just compensate without thinking, I think it may be a while until they get fixed. The only one I've changed so far is the thermostat so things stay comfortable.

Also made some site updates today. I went and did some cleanup, removed some lingering layout tables (not sure why they were still in there and not removed before - they didn't really do anything), and updated the css to handle those changes. Also built a sitemap generator for google and integrated it into the system. Now if any updates (posts or comments) are posted, within an hour the sitemap will automatically regenerate and google will be notified. We'll see if that brings a bit more search consistency. I did find that it wasn't possible to index everything through non-restricted links as well, so the missing sections should now be indexed again too.

Work has been going reasonably well. Nothing's been blowing up, which is nice. However now it's what big things to start in what order, and making sure all the little interruptions are out of the way first. I need to take a few days off sometime. I do have one planned this week, but it's for class and not for relaxing, so I'm not sure that counts.

Anyways, last weekend Joe Buck and I went to see Serenity, which is an awesome movie. You should go see it if you haven't. For those who haven't seen Firefly and are in the area and pay attention to the lunch mailing list, L&O Theater will be Firefly Theater for a while. Hopefully we'll all fit. Other movies of the weekend were Texas Chainsaw Massacre which was horrible, Sideways which was decent but nothing special, and The Machinist which was weird. Free movie of the week was Unleashed, which was really really good.

Last weekend I also bought a bunch of insulation accessories and started poking around in my attic. It didn't go near as well as I had hoped, but maybe I'll get around to finishing that up sometime in the near future. Stupid low-pitched hip roof...

This week went decently well, with someone deciding that The O.C. would be good lunch material over L&O so there was a revolt and a watching of an episode of Upright Citizens Brigade. This is actually what inspired the whole Firefly thing BTW. We also decided to check out the new buffet at China Tiger, which was good and had lots of food. Also went to Chipotle, which is one of those places where I think I see people I know every time I go. Saw 3 people and ended up eating with Joe and brooke, which was cool. That's enough mundane details for now though. You should try China Tiger's buffet if you like Chinese food though.

Free movie of the week was Crash, which was definitely a good one-time watch. It brings up interesting points in an interesting way. It's not designed to entertain, thus the not being one to watch over and over. Other events of Monday involved taking apart the sub to figure out why it hasn't been working for the past several weeks. After taking out the 12 large screws holding the amp to the back of the box, I discover that it's also solidly glued on. I guess it makes sense, but a bit of a pain. So off to the other side and take out the ring of screws around the driver. Luckily I could reach in through there to the amp board, and found a fuse for each rail of the power supply that blew. After work on Tuesday I picked up replacements but of course forgot to check fast/slow, so got fast-blow to be safe. Turns out the originals look like slow-blow, and I blew two more during a buzz and rattle test before I had it set back down to sane levels. It did give me a good set point for the compressor so I'm unlikely to blow any more fuses, which is good. I also found one of my equalizers apparently is bad, which I'm suspecting may have been one of the causes (it was actually shorting out the signal on the entire sub/LFE chain). I need to track that down now and be sure it didn't do more damage, since the transducers don't seem to be acting quite right either but it wasn't noticable with the sub gone. Anyways, it's so nice to have it back, and since I had it out I moved it out of the corner which should help stuff too. There's so much with subtle low bass these days that you wonder how it didn't seem horribly wrong with it missing.

Anyways, I seem to have gotten half the office either annoyed at or wondering about the "smarter you are..." part of the Petals game. Such fun. :) I seem to also be shocking pictures with an old pic I pulled out, which is sorta funny. A coworker is also convinced that facebook is of the devil and/or no good can come of it, which only means that everyone is tormenting him about getting on it now. He doesn't seem to believe that I had nothing to do with that either for some reason. Question for you guys, should I start confirming the random friend requests I'm getting from random people who I don't know who look at my profile? I'm torn between laughing a them trying to figure out how it happened, and not wanting to deal with them complaining to me about it. Opinions? OK, enough of the semi-sadistic side - it's time for sleep.

Sometimes I just have better things to do than update. Like nothing. Sometime shortly after the last update things blew up at work. Then as soon as or shortly before one thing would be fixed something else would break. I don't really remember the order or anything anymore - the whole few weeks turned into a blur, with pretty much solid work and not much sleep. Things have pretty much recovered now, although there's still plenty to do, but at least I get to leave on time. At least most of the time. Tonight I get to take stuff down at 10pm, so I just stayed the whole time, spent a bit cleaning the office, upgraded one of our fileservers by 800GB (hot swap is so nice - it means I can get out of here sooner), and am gonna be upgrading the RAID card firmware and applying patches on an Exchange server in a bit. Such is life. I think I need to start planning some time to do something else though.

In case you haven't figured them out or been sent links already, I went to a couple weddings and have pictures up online. First is Betsy & Pete, second is Ross & Lindsey. There's also pictures from Ross' bachelor party up on the pics page. Other weekends included my brother's white coat ceremony for med school, and then one of trying to relax. This weekend I may see about wiring my house in anticipation of filling the attic with insulation due to the gas price thing predicted for the winter and insulation being on sale. I think I'll go 2xCAT-5, 2xRG-6QS, and 1xSCAT-5 to each plate, mostly one per room except for some big ones. I think that should cover things pretty well.

Movies have been somewhat lacking although there's been some good ones. Raadt and I have been taking advantage of the free redbox movies on Mondays in October to get some. I also have all the netflix, and Firefly courtesy of the JoeBuck. That's a sweet show. Much better than the 24 I had been watching. Other movies were The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which was good, Hotel Rwanda which was also good, and Brazil which I thought sucked.

Today the aforementioned webmaster noticed the /. article on the MySpace XSS worm, leading to a discussion on it since he's just been working with AJAX interfaces and stuff. After the discussion about how they deserved it for pretty much ignoring stuff that everyone knew about, we started thinking about whether other places had vulnerabilities. Due to schdav's recent activity the one that immediately came to mind was facebook. We poked a bit but it seems they've actually locked it down quite decently (upon further review it appears they had vulnerabilities but didn't ignore them). There are some interesting things you can do related to certain actions such as collecting friends, but it's a more interactive process and not an exponential worm like samy's. Still should be an interesting experiment. Enough fun for the day though - back to work...

So it's been a while. Last weekend I don't remember anything too out of the ordinary. I did watch Constantine, which was decent but nothing too special. Also watched After the Sunset, which I liked a lot.

Last week at work was nice in that even though it was the beginning of school, nothing blew up too much. Some surprise network upgrades to deal with some other issues (Word under Windows sucks when talking to a server). It's still up and running though and that's more to prevent things from getting any worse. I did end up doing a bit of extra work moving some servers onto a different network core, which will hopefully allow the transition to go better. It should be interesting to see what ends up happening over the next few weeks - hopefully only good things.

Saturday I got to catch up on sleep a bit. Also read a bit of a nice book I got on Active Directory. I'm still debating whether to read it straight through or use it as a reference. It's like 1500 pages so I may just read parts and then look up stuff as needed. I'll have to see on that though. I also watched Demolition Man. It's an interesting movie, definitely mid-90s rather than modern in effects. It's sorta scary how close some of the stuff in it sounds to the way society is going now though.

Sunday I went to church with the family at BBC, and then we went to the state fair. I hadn't been in years, and I'd definitely say it's gone down hill since I was younger. It's much less of people showing off their stuff, and almost entirely selling stuff now. I went to the all you can drink milk stand, which last time I went to was only a quarter. Now it costs a dollar, but at least they've upgraded to 12 oz cups. I still felt I had to get my money's worth, but only drank 4 cups. My brother beat me by a cup, but that last cup was hard. It definitely gets noticeable when you have to stand in line for a minute between cups rather than just downing them repeatedly. One of the more interesting things I thought was the KKMS booth, where the one guy would openly debate people on the street as to their beliefs. The pineapple malt at the dairy building was also very good. Other than that nothing too interesting. The free stuff people give away has definitely gone down in quality and volume. Now it seems to mostly be brochures and stuff. The whole fair experience was sorta funny too. I didn't have anything specific I wanted to see, I actually only found out we were going late Saturday night (and my brother found out on Sunday morning when he got my message). So the family basically just wondered in general directions, making several loops around the fair area. Nobody really bothered to stick that close together either. Everyone had such different interests that we'd walk into a building and nobody would pay attention to where anybody went - just go find something interesting, and eventually within a few buildings everyone would be somewhat close together again. Overall I'd say the fair was an OK experience, but nothing too special this year.

Monday was family birthdays, so it was up to the St. Cloud area. It was a fun time, as those seem to be happening less and less often as time goes on. I think we celebrated June through October this time. Those things used to be monthly... As they're dairy farmers and we hadn't seen the latest equipment (they had a fire a year or two ago that meant rebuilding pretty much everything), it was off to the barns and milking parlor. Everything is extremely automated now, to the point that the cows all walk in and line themselves up (with the help of metal guides), there's the cleaning and the equipment goes on, and when the milk stops the vacuum shuts down, the equipment falls, and is pulled back up out of the way. When the row is done, hit a button and the gates open and they walk out, and the process repeats. Still gotta watch out though - manure falling 5 feet to concrete still splatters quite a ways.

So the X5L mentioned previously arrived last week. So far I like it a lot. I had to do some renaming initially as I copied stuff over, but I had to do an equivalent with the old thing anyways since ogg doesn't have track numbers but the metadata did. Anyways, I have a decent amount of stuff transfered over, and the rest has to wait until I boot up other machines (I didn't have much on the powerbook since I always had that with). Anyways, for starters the sound quality is awesome. The response curve is better than the old one, which I thought was better than a lot of other things. With a well encoded file it actually starts sounding rather similar to the original. The noise floor is awesome too. I initially didn't here it, but then I realized the background noise from the room through my earphones was just louder. There's nothing from the screen or drive though, just a very quiet hiss and a pop with the power switch. The UI takes a few seconds to get used to (a coworker said it made sense after about 30 seconds), and seems workable. The screen is bright and crisp, and easily readable from a decent distance or any angle. It doesn't take thinking and it's instant to turn the backlight on or off without affecting other things, which is nice. My only complaint is in audio mode it only updates a few times a second so the audio level graphs are kinda pointless. The thing feels slightly heavy for its size (but still reasonable), but I think that's probably due to the battery. I can pretty much unplug it in the morning when I go to work, use it all day (drive to work, work, drive home, evening at home), and not bother turning it off at all (like when I leave the office or go to lunch), and still have it barely drop off the top of the battery gauge. That is such a nice feature that way too many things lack. Stupid battery technology... Anyways, I have nothing but good things to say about it, so if you're in the market for a digital audio player, you should at least consider it.

As for the week at work, it was busy. I got power distribution for a rack moved to new circuits in one server room, and in the other one added 2 (sorta 3) new circuits. Should allow us to get everything up and running before school starts. Stuff also sorta blew up, but luckily none of it was my fault and I can't really do anything but sit back and wait for it to be fixed. I almost got another new server up, but I'm waiting for it to be able to reach stuff so it can be used. I think I finally got all the new student stuff figured out, and the system assigned permissions this morning. I still sent the list of changes it made to the student supervisors for verification in the morning since I don't know if they got me everything. I also got permissions for student workers for the rest of the school tied to contracts, which should hopefully save time for everyone (they say the access when requesting the job, don't have to think about having it added/revoked since everything's tied to contract dates and signing/termination). It'll be interesting to see how well that works after what's happened though - apparently they couldn't get contracts printed and signed in May, but had to wait until August to request them, so people may have a couple days waiting to get access after getting back and signing them. Such is life I guess, and maybe can be resolved next year.

The weekend was good, with sitting around and relaxing. First movie was Elektra which was better than expected (I had low expectations going in). Other than the intro when I put in the DVD that is. I have something funny if people want to see it. Anyways, the plot wasn't all that great, but it had fighting and martial arts and some interesting effects. Second movie was Wild Things 2. It was one of those where when I heard of it I was wondering how they could possibly do a sequel, so I had to see it. It's basically the same plot as the first one. Yes, same plot, although some of the characters have different relationship roles and some minor details are different. So yea, not such a great movie, unless you want to laugh at the movie. Third movie was Swimfan, which was better than expected. The plot was interesting, although nothing special. The soundtrack was interesting and well done technically, and they used some really interesting editing techniques. Like rather than draw out the scenes to simulate the normal emotion like most movies, there's multiple angles cut together with overlap sorta like a replay. That description actually doesn't do it justice, and it works way better than it'd seem at first. It's sorta combines a this is important with the character replaying what happened in their head to sorta make you look at it from their perspective. Yea, I'll stop before I totally mangle it. You should see if you haven't though.

It was a good weekend, although I'm glad I could mostly ignore work for it. On Saturday I watched Back to the Future Part III, and on Sunday it was The Firm. Both are good movies. Other than that it was sitting around and wishing that it either wasn't the weekend or newegg was open on weekends. Or that the thing had died on Thursday morning rather than Friday... Such is life I guess. I'm sure tomorrow I'll be busy enough after what's been happening this weekend that I won't think of it too much.

So, you think he can get more cowbell now? Walken 2008

So it's been a while. It's been crazy at work with getting ready for some time away, combined with the usual summer schedule and trying to sort out some other stuff. I'm at the point where a lot of stuff is either almost done, or to go back for revision two. And everyone else is so busy that it'll probably be a while before I know. Hopefully by the time I get back people will have had time to respond. I'm just trying to make sure everything's ready and set for easy maintenance so nothing gets held up.

My brother came back yesterday and cut the grass today. It looks really weird, since it's like 6" shorter. He said something about having to go over it twice, I'm not sure he liked me leaving it for a month. The neighbors still haven't cut theirs yet though, so not like anyone can complain there.

Last weekend I watched Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II. Both classic movies, can't really complain about them. Also watched The Conversation, which was interesting as well. A few ways the story could be taken, and it's a bit slow, but good overall. That's it for now.

Going back to work was OK. It's work and busy, but it's interesting too. Still feels like nothing is getting done, although I'm starting to get to the point on some things where I know a lot of prerequisites are out of the way, so that helps. I managed to get my schedule all messed up so by Friday I was really tired and just wanted to sleep all weekend, but that's sorta to be expected I guess.

Thursday night I got around to upgrading the firmware on my Axim. Apparently I hadn't been paying attention, and it was three versions out of date. The process went relatively smoothly, other than due to the way VirtualPC works with USB it wouldn't run the firmware update (basically OSX reads the device IDs on connection, and passes to the appropriate VPC instance if it goes there, a very quick process. However when the PocketPC resets and sees the "glitch" in communication, it considers the link unstable and won't do an upgrade. I've been upgrading and rebuilding enough machines to have an office that's turned into a server storage/junkyard though (seriously, my couch has stuff stacked, there's stuff on the chair, and most of the rack is full, and now there's a pile of new machines too), so it became a quick process. It was good to get the thing wiped clean, and the interface does seem a little more stable (although I can still push the thing to the point of lagging a lot relatively easily).

Saturday I watched Alien³. I don't really like it as much as the first couple, but not really sure why. I think it may be because it's somewhat more character development based, and I like the sci-fi side of the series.

Sunday was Blade: Trinity. I actually sorta liked it. The soundtrack was the best of the bunch, but we'll see how well it sticks. A lot of people were disappointed with this one, claiming it wrecked the series and wasn't as good and stuff. I can definitely see where that comes from, as the movie makes fun of the whole genre. If you are a big fan of the story behind the vampire comics and movies, you won't like the movie. The history/backstory stuff seemed broken up, but I think it would have been worse if it was all jammed together. They could have probably dropped a lot of it though - it's an action movie, it's to be watched for stuff blowing up, not for the plot. :)