Friday started off a bit crazy. Boss was gone Thursday, so woke up Friday to a flood of email catching up on stuff. Fun topic of discussion for the day is the Seminary in San Diego and how to best deal with them from a fileserver/domain standpoint. The options ranged from a single independent domain to 5 virtual machines running on a linux box. Hey, it's an option... :) The sellers for the one house are still crazy, but I think it's for the better. Friday afternoon I went and looked at the other house again, and ended up making an offer on it. Got something worked out the seller would accept, and as of Sunday all the paperwork is signed. So assuming inspection goes well closing is the end of the month. I guess I have to start putting things together and make sure I have everything I need for my own place soon. Luckily going from basically a room to a house shouldn't be too much work for packing. Gotta do stuff like figure out what to do for internet access though... Saturday I sorta caught up on sleep. Watched Phone Booth which while probably not as bad as everyone says, seemed a lot longer than it really is. They didn't keep it interesting enough. Oh well. Maybe today's picks will be more interesting...

Well, dropped in a couple 2 line batch files and a single table in a database and a tiny little cgi and within a few minutes started getting nice logs on every domain machine login/logout/reboot. It's nice to know that policies go into effect that quick, but I'm starting to think maybe I need to watch the load on the domain controllers for that domain. The good part is this new logging provides a much better way to keep track and analyze the data, and doesn't seem to have any noticable impact on the client machines. Power outages are never fun, especially when switches loose their VLAN info and it takes longer for them to reconfigure than for things to reboot and ask DHCP for IPs. Students having to reregister is annoying, but then when you figure out 12 hours later why people are complaining about the printers not working... SCSI vs IDE can be a big difference. If you set up RH9 for IDE it's easier to switch the destination to IDE rather than convert the image. Yea, it's easy enough to switch, but getting it to boot without assistance apparently requires something else since even an initrd with the right modules works long enough to try and remount rw and then says the disk doesn't exist... After work watched There's Something About Mary. Another one of those if you haven't seen it, don't bother... Rather predictable, and while it has funny parts, it doesn't live up to a good followup to Dumb & Dumber.

Got up as usual this morning, which was easier than the last few weeks since I actually got a decent amount of sleep this weekend. Then I even actually went to Sunday School, which was good since I hadn't done that since it started up this fall. After church was driving around time for a bit since my sister left some book at school. My dad was driving and having fun already so I occupied myself with the emergency brake and changing gears when he wasn't paying attention. The brake makes a loud dinging noise along with the light to warn you right before it actually engages when you're moving and you pull it though, which can be both more and less fun... Did nothing for most of the afternoon, just poked around through web logs. Followed some interesting referers. I've decided that Paul Boyum checks his logs way too often though. :) Then I watched The Trial - the older Orson Welles one. While not having the entertainment of modern movies, it is one of those ones you just can't stop watching. A really good reflection on how crazy the world could be even way back when the movie was made and even when the book was written. Just because people are the authorities can you trust them? I guess Orson Welles was probably a good one to make a movie out of the book. I'm sorta curious how the newer remake of it is, but I'm guessing it'd just be a disappointment (plus it appears to be harder to find). Anyways, also got around to updating the about me page on my site, which was way out of date. I did end up buying more movies too, and they arrived yesterday, so maybe I'll have more movie commentaries this week even though I have all 3 of my netflix ones to send back tomorrow...

Got the test results today - I passed with a 94. Not a bad deal considering that I spent less than 4 hours studying, although I did manage to mess up my sleep schedule for a couple days. Now I just gotta fill out another application and write the state a check... Later this afternoon I ended up helping take down some dead trees behind our yard since one had fallen into our yard. Most of the other ones would also naturally fall into our yard so the taking them down involved rope, leverage, and a chainsaw. Then we got to see how well we could throw large branches over a hedge... A bit more tiring than what I had planned for the day. Then I watched American Psycho 2. Weird movie, although I think I'd consider it better than the first one (even though they aren't even the same type of movie and probably shouldn't have been connected by name). In the first one the guy just kills people for no real reason. In the second one there are actual reasons behind them, different type of movie completely. Straight to video but pretty decent quality compared to a lot of them. Pretty decent but you sorta have to like movies of the type.

Since the dual PIII wasn't working so well it went to visit the pile of b0rken machines today. The controller and drives were installed in a new machine I built today - dual Athlon MP 2600+ with 2GB RAM. Insanely fast, and it hasn't rebooted on me unintentionally once. :) Probably overkill a bit, but oh well. Now on Monday I just have to recompile the 3ware drivers for it. After work was a movie night in the lab with Anger Management. OK movie, some funny parts. I'd say it's better than last night's pick, but not all that great either. Lunch today was C1, probably the best I've had in a long time. Spicy, very hot temperature wise, and nice and fresh too. Probably end up going there sooner rather than later again.

Well, that didn't go quite as expected. Ended up instead going to pick up some shelves from some business since they were gonna get rid of them. Not sure what the whole story was, but I yanked the thing out of the wall and helped carry it to the trailer. On the way there we stopped at Ax-Man and browsed a bit. Sorta funny since in the van we were listening to Evanescence Fallen, and in the store they had that CD playing too. Then I came home and I sorta spaced out for an hour. Then I did that for probably another hour after a nap too. Or maybe a little longer... I found out more house stuff, but I won't go into that here. The nap was good, I'm not sure whether it helped or hurt me though. Since I hadn't really eaten all day though I work up rather hungry. Found out Dave got his new speakers and they are apparently setup for biwiring so that was interesting to figure out over IM. Apparently they sound a lot better than the old ones - I guess I'm not surprised at that though and I doubt he is either. Finished off the day watching American Beauty. If you haven't seen it, don't bother. Wasn't too interesting, and I probably would have normally almost fallen asleep. I only managed to stay awake since my body thought waking up after two hours of sleep must mean some very important reason and dealt with it accordingly. :( Twice in one day means I'm a little messed up right now too... Hopefully I can fall asleep now and get back on a normal schedule. And the quote of the day by CowboyNeal of /. fame. "There might not be anything fishy going on at all, but that's no reason to stop making perfectly good conspiracy theories."

Got to sleep in a bit later than normal today. That's pretty rare. In the afternoon I watched Enemy at the Gates which was pretty good. Then I did a bit of web stuff and coding including URL submission for yafiygi. I figured might as well make it easy... Some chatting with friends, and then broke out the large silver discs and watched Heat. A good movie, but too long for it's own good. The soundtrack includes a couple Moby songs which is cool. I didn't like that album as much as Play though... It also has as Top O' The Morning To Ya by House of Pain - that song always cracks me up when I hear it in a movie. Also caught up a bit on W32.Swen, which just looks like a general pain all around. Although it looks like they came up with another easy removal tool for it. I almost hope these things start really damaging systems to the point of needing to be reinstalled. It might actually get people to start patching. Like when we scan resnet and netsend everyone who isn't patched for the RPC thing with instructions to go to windowsupdate and apply patches, and people just call wondering about seeing this error that pops up many times a day that they never have actually bothered to read... Oh well, hopefully stuff doesn't start going crazy tomorrow again.

Thursday the screensaver issue came up. Seems some people don't like entering their password more than once a day or so. Seeing as I probably type in a password for something a hundred times a day, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy, but we'll see what happens. Figured out some roaming profile as well as guest printing problems. I spent the last couple hours of the day finally getting around to resetting a bunch of handheld computers, which was a nice break. Friday was a pretty normal day. For lunch a bunch of us went to Eddington's since brooke managed to not have class over lunch. Got some people who don't go to lunch often out, which was cool (still not sure why the guy who lives in Chicago was there - I mean, Eddington's is good, but...). Finished up more stuff that had been waiting for a while, and even got the hardware side of a new server put together and the RAID configured. After work I added an virtualhost to yafiygi.com for the domainname sitefinder.verisign.com (I bet most of you see where this is going). Then I set up a DNS server which just does the usual lookups (I was nice and used the local servers as forwarders) but with that zone defined and pointing to the server hosting http://yafiygi.com/. Now if I (or anyone else using that server) hit a non-existant domain while this whole wildcard redirecting to sitefinder thing is still going on a random web site comes up instead. :) After that a bunch of us (many of the same people who went to lunch) met and went to The Cheesecake Factory followed by hanging out and watching TV at brooke's place. Since the wait for food was over an hour, we wandered around the mall and visited the Apple store for a while. We spent time looking at the new powerbooks, and Dave and I had a little fun with a couple of the salespeople. We started complaining about the one button mouse and about needing a third button, and when we started talking about linux PPC and one of them says "Oh, geeks" and they sorta wandered off. I think they sent another sales guy over though because he was pretty geeky and we ended up having an interesting conversation about scalable user interfaces and resolution independence (them being an Apple thing according to him, ignoring the fact that some unix stuff is already going that way too). Ended up leaving schdav.org up on some of the computers too... While we were at dinner spending way too much money and getting way too much food, Paul had an interesting encounter with on old friend. You'll have to ask him about it sometime. :) After all that I just wanted to sleep, but ended up talking a bit since my parents were leaving for a few days and after that ended up making a little frontend with frames for my random redirector at yafiygi.com and also weeding out some bad links (I only spent an hour or so on it before we went out). Saturday was sleep day though. Didn't really do any real work other than answer a couple quick questions about Appletalk. Read some more stuff on AVS Forum... Finally started catching up on Netflix though. Watched Mallrats which is a funny movie. Filmed right here in the Twin Cities for the most part, although the credits say "on location in Canada". I guess to us Paul lives in Canadia, to them we do... Then watched the JoeBuck favorite The Boondock Saints. I think I liked that one better, but I'm not sure how much of it was that the soundtrack was clean and not bugging my ears. I liked the music choices for both of them, and the storyline for Boondock Saints is really interesting. And now here I am trying to remember what I did for the past couple days. Makes me think too hard - 3 days back is too far to remember. :)

Sorta backwards, but... Got the list of instructor stations a little while ago. Turns out a bunch of them had actually been moved to different rooms. That sorta explains the troubles tracking them down to fix them. I also watched Super Troopers. That's a pretty funny movie. Nothing too crazy today, just more of the usual otherwise. Blackboard died again, and took more restarting multiple times to get it to reset. It's sorta annoying when you can't dive into the source and figure out what's causing it anymore. :( I guess they must have gotten sick of us reporting bugs and including a patch along with the report or something. :) The slowness with the library web site is back now too. Probably one of the sites sending insane sized documents again. There's no reason a single httpd process should end up needing 384MB of RAM... Lovgat is annoying since the existing CDs we distributed don't fix it, but students are thinking they are and saying they cleaned it up (nevermind it doesn't say it didn't fix anything). As soon as they get back on the network, back off they go... Then there's the people thinking running windows update last week means they applied all critical updates. Little do they realize that part of the joy of running windows is applying patches almost weekly, and checking for them at least once a week if not more often. Oh yea, speaking of that new RPC thing, it's nice that there is exploit code all over the web now. Should be interesting in a few days...

I really like days like today when it's just time to relax. I started off the day not feeling too rushed but slightly confused since the rest of the family was rushed. Turns out I need to start paying attention to when they change the service times in the fall. Oh well, they were 10 minutes early, I was 10 minutes late - it was peaceful around the house for about 20 minutes though. After that was a nice meal, and then watched The Fugitive. Sorta a classic movie there. The DVD sorta bugged me since the first chapter is a little background on the history and the "special edition" but with skipping restricted (scanning still works though). Then I read stuff and chatted with friends for a few hours and then Finding Forrester. Not my usual type of movie, but Sean Connery is normally pretty decent. Had a good story though, definitely better than Signs for sure. Now it's time to end the weekend nicely, and hopefully not end up needing to try hard to stay awake tomorrow.