Friday was busy as usual, although it's starting to fade off. It's still jumping around doing tons of different things, but towards the end of the day I started getting gaps in there while waiting where it was either just wait or start a big project, which was a welcome relief. Lunch was Eddington's, which is always a fun one. The ResNet scanning was still going well, with the number of patched computers rising at a pretty decent rate, and the only message back from someone saying they were patching right then. After work I went over to Dave's place for a movie night. The movie of choice managed to be Breakfast Club. I think we laughed at it more than watched it though. Betsy brought a working Nintendo (Dave's had been disassembled since it wasn't working well, and that didn't help much), so there was a bit of a Dr. Mario tournament even though Dave and brooke were pretty much the only ones any decent at it. Saturday I slept a lot, and then went and looked at some more houses. Then I watched Signs. It started off pretty decent, but the ending sucked. I mean, their skin eats away like that when water spills on it? They wouldn't survive very well with even our atmosphere or brushing against things. It was done pretty well technically, so I was sorta disappointed. Oh well, that's why it's NetFlix and not one I bought.

Today was interesting, although I was way too tired. Got up and managed to stay awake through church though. After church was shopping as my brother needed to buy food for 200 people for some party thing. I found a new source for dew in bulk though, and they even come on the pepsi bottle racks. I thought people looked at me odd carrying in 4 six packs to by office, but carrying a bunch of six packs on the pallete stacking trays gets different ones. After that I decided to watch Con Air. It's a lot better than I sorta remember it. Lots of stuff blowing up, decent plot. Has Nicolas Cage and John Cusack which is an interesting combo, as well as some other bigger names. After that I went to go look at houses again. We'll see how that ends up. Then went over to my sister's dorm and fixed her microwave since it apparently was dropped. That was easier than I had guessed, since I was basically told "go fix her microwave, here are the security torx bits you'll need" so sorta feared the worst. Got to see her place though, which was good since I'd never been over there before. Ended off the night looking through stuff from the previously mentioned house looking. Finally time for bed though. I'll be glad when stuff stops being quite so busy...

Friday was interesting. Spent the morning dealing with roaming profile issues. Apparently something with the XP image (at least on the laptops) has some weird issuse if they get their profile from that and try to go to a W2K machine. Or if their profile was created under NT4 and they now go to XP. I think it's time to start dumping out a template profile in their home directory when the account is created. I think part of the issue may also be due to caching/inconsistencies when the network is unavailable. I think we're getting ethernet hubs or switches to replace all the physical switches between the permanant machine and laptop cable on the instructor stations, which should solve some of the problems. In the meantime I've disabled offline files and all caching of credentials for previous logins - if the switch is in the wrong position it won't allow a login. Sometimes the whole way the windows profiles and settings works annoys me. It's nearly impossible to not copy large amounts of data around and none of the settings that really would help work without loosing stuff since user data and application data is so integrated (well, without user education that's followed and can have real penalties in data loss if not followed - try that one in an academic environment). Oh well. Got a "break" with the usual rush of random stuff for the afternoon. I'll be glad when the rush dies down and stuff is back to normal. It seems like all the good ideas for changes always come up during this time too, but are forgotten by the time there is time to do them. Or if they were tracked with Incidents it's "this thing where we talked about all the details in person". I have to say email can be much better than talking to people for most things work related - probably why most of our team's conversations beyond greetings and what's for lunch are on email (although the lunch mailing list is a funny twist on that). Anyways, after work a bunch of people came over for Two Towers. That's a good movie, although there seemed to be a couple glitches in encoding. It was annoyingly hot in the room though, which could have caused some of that I guess. The biggest thing was something I noticed in the theater too though - film needs something better than 24fps. For anything that's motion and especially stuff like LotR, 48fps would be really nice - pans with large amounts of change look jerky on 35mm (it seems to become really easy to see every frame), and with MPEG compression more fun stuff is added... Anyways, after the movie I flip over to email to discover that I have a few dozen emails from some spammer who went through Bethel's email list again. It looked like it was quick and over, but then I got some more (it's times like these I realise too many different addresses end up getting back to me) so it was quick track it down enough to blacklist the sender on all of the publicly visible mail servers. While I was up to modifying access files I also finally decided to reject messages from this one IP who still wants to send me 30+ sobig messages a day. I figure at 100K each it's better to reject them on the frontend... Saturday was sleepin time although it was a little sticky. I basically sat around most of the day, and eventually watched Ransom. Good flick, although it looks like it was shot on grainy film too (similar to minority report in a way, but much more brightly lit). Not quite what I was planning for the day, but oh well...

Yesterday was a nice relaxing day for a while. Woke up sometime in the afternoon but didn't really get up for a long time. Then I quick scanned through the MTV Video Music Awards. I was mainly looking for Evanescence since Betsy had asked me to record it, and I'm a fan of them too. I watched that intro segment that everyone has been talking about. I don't really see the appeal of any of it. Some people just don't act normal if it'll attract attention... Anyways, Evanescence only presented, no performances. :( What really upset me was they lost two different awards, one to Linkin' Park, and the other to 50 Cent. While I occationally listen to 50 Cent, I don't think he is anywhere close to Evanescence, and Linkin' Park is just crap... Then I ended up watching The Pianist which was a decent movie, but rather long. It seemed to just drag on an on... I didn't end up watching any more because by then it was time to fill out way too many forms. Tuesday was the first day of school, and some classes were enjoyed, others were hated. I'm just glad I'm done with them... :) First day with new students at the Help Desk, and they definitely aren't used to stuff yet. Lots of routine stuff, people needing access to things, etc... We had a meeting to figure out why people keep needing to go back into the black hole when we take them out. We pretty much agreed that it was extremely unlikely that spyware was generating the average of 120 pings/sec that infected machines were hitting, so they get to sit in the black hole until they figure out how to get it off. Also decided on a schedule to start registration for all machines on campus in stages by building. Should be interesting when it startks kicking in. I got Nimda modified to find existing Incidents for users who have been BlackHoled and then cleaned and update them rather than create a new one if they need to go back in. It keeps the history a bit better, and means that people are a little more careful about whether the user is likely to actually be clean. Finally left a little late, and discovered another DVD-A arrived. I spent the weekend enjoying the Eagles Hotel California disc, so was looking forward to it. The disc is Missy Elliot's Miss E...so addictive. While not my favorite musical style, it does show the format very well - very clean. I'm gonna have to watch the volume levels for the sake of my hearing (because it's so clean it's hard to get a good sense of volume - it can be loud enough to hear on the other side of the house through walls and floors, but still not sound that loud in the room). Now they just need to release more stuff in the format.

Saturday didn't feel like a Saturday. It's just not normal to wake up and go to work at 9am on a Saturday morning... Although there were two boxes of Krispy Kremes at the end of the hall which Dave and I put to good use (we stopped before a half dozen, each...). I discovered that apparently Dell Poweredge machines when they go to sleep and don't have a console hooked up, don't like to wake up if you plug the console back in. And because of the weekend it was doubtful that the company's tech support would be available if something went wrong when we power cycled their database server, so that's what Tuesday is for - they can figure out what to do then. I did a bunch of little things, and ended up starting to put together the new email list server. No software yet, just hardware. Lunch was Chipotle, which is always good. Joel Calhoun stopped by for the end of the day, and I hadn't seen him in a long time so Dave and I chatted with him a bit. After work a bunch of us went over to Betsy's place, apparently to watch brooke and Betsy play Nintendo, and try to get them to eat the remaining Krispy Kremes. Watching Nintendo isn't too entertaining, and although I somehow managed to end up with a controller in my hands for a while and it was better than watching, that bubbles game (don't have a clue what it was called) just doesn't do much for me. After that I went to Noodles with Dave, Joel Calhoun, and brooke. That was good, although I don't think any of us were that hungry. Then we all went over to brooke's place and a ton of people joined us to watch Grosse Pointe Blank as long as one could stay awake. Missing Saturday sleep-in time is a bad thing... Of course then I had to get up for church in the morning, which I managed to stay awake through, partially because I remembered caffeinated mints. Then lunch with the family at J.Cousineau's, even though I was still not hungry because of Saturday. I think I chatted with people for a while, but was tired and don't remember a lot. I did end up upgrading my mythtv install to 0.11 to fix some bugs, and the hardware encoder was a little goofy putting vertical blue and yellow stripes in the picture, so had to shut down and power cycle the box. Works great now though. Watched Die Hard 2 which is another great movie in the Die Hard series. It even had DTS which sorta puzzled me, since DTS wasn't invented yet when the movie first came out... After the movie I found out that Jeff and Dave were looking for me as they were both bored. After chatting for a while about what to do it was finally decided that they'd come over and bring Nate with, and we'd all watch The Transporter. Upon commenting within the first minute that the composer must have liked bass, I was informed that he is a bass player. So yea, the music had as much bass as the explosions, which isn't bad I guess, just unusual. Overall it's a pretty good movie, lots of action, decent plot, although a few continuity issues. Then chatting, and eventually watching the previews of the extended version of Two Towers and the preview of Return of the King. Too much fun on too much caffeine... And I'm in a linking mood, as you've probably noticed if you made it this far. The scary part is I'm too tired to actually look anything up (other than the specific movies and like 2 clicks into the dell site since I started with good intentions), so those are basically the links off the top of my head (yea, I'm way too much of a geek - I did type most in to make sure they hadn't changed though).

Busy day as usual. Started off the day with a nice discussion about filtering to the list server. The announcement lists got a nice pile of bounce messages, all of which the list server of course holds. When I set up the new server we're gonna try to filter them before they get to mailman. If you are curious as to just how much mail this Sobig.F thing is generating, feel free to take a look at a screenshot of what came in to the MAILER-DAEMON on the backup smtp servers (the stuff going through the primary doesn't even make it to the client side on this box). And that wasn't even the biggest folder... :) Today was also movin day for most students. The Help Desk was swamped with people wanting to know what to do with the viruses on their machines so we'd let them back on the network. brooke complained about it as usual, and seemed to be happy to get out of their as soon as she could. And that was with 5 people working instead of the usual 2. And then there's just the putting people in the blackhole. I think Nick spent almost the entire day dragging around icons in VLAN Manager, and left running out saying "I have to be gone before my email says I have another new message" After work I hung out at the Help Desk a bit, which by then was quite a bit quieter. Paul seemed to be barely awake and not quite thinking straight, which was sorta entertaining. And Betsy said the MTV Music Awards have Evanescence, so that's in the process of recording right now (it was too late to catch the first run - gotta love the repeats every other hour). After work I discovered that my Two Towers DVD arrived, so watched the special features stuff. Lots of cool stuff - turns out there were 16 TV spots. Unfortunately you can tell they were mastered for TV and not DVD. Probably gonna have a movie night next week to watch it. After that I watched 2010. That's a good movie, and it doesn't seem like it was made way back in 1984. Even though I haven't seen 2001 for a few years, I now get a lot of the story in the first one I didn't understand before (he sorta assumed you'd read the books). It all makes sense now. I amazingly stayed awake without caffeine (and am even awake enough to notice that the IMDB URL format changed since yesterday), although who knows how much that is due to the soundtrack, and how much to the insane amount of water I drank. Oh well, enough for tonight. Tomorrow is another long day of work (as is Saturday :( ).

Today was busy. Start off the day with printing down. While trying to figure that out, it looks like the core router is down even though it really isn't, and then a crossover switch on a fiber converter fails and takes out the Internet connection. All this while we're not sure what's actually going on, and are going through a large list of machines nimda (one of the servers which watches the firewall/router very closely) has identified as behaving like they have viruses, just in case their traffic is causing some of it. For lunch Ross, Dave and I were able to relax at Dave's place and eat Wendy's. My sister on the other hand apparently met most of the department and spent lunch talking about me. I heard about it from at least 3 people at work, and everyone at home, and still don't know all that went on. Oh well. The afternoon wasn't much better. The Nick and I moved a few printers to a different place on the network so we could get some printing back up, and about the time we finished the regular stuff came back up (unrelated to us moving them). We wanted to eventually move them anyways, so it wasn't all in vain. Of course during the afternoon nimda kept finding more and more machines to yank, and we tried to catch up on all the stuff we would have been doing otherwise... Every year for TA training they end it all with pizza and a movie, so at 6pm I went to join the party. We watched Best in Show, which was very funny, but probably not appropriate for the setting, especially at Bethel. After that went and found the system had identified more machines with viruses. At that point I figure leave them on the network for a while since they can't get out, and we'll hopefully get all the currently vulnerable machines infected and therefore off the network before the next round of new machines tomorrow. Sorta cruel, but effective. I feel sorry for Network Services with all this. At least it's automatically creating Incidents so they can just be sent to the Help Desk with all the information in a consistent state (including the user if we know it). I decided to go home relatively early and watch Die Hard since I've had it from Netflix for a few days. That's a fun movie, with impressive effects (especially for 1988) and really good sound (even DTS). I had totally forgotten than Alan Rickman plays Hans Gruber - he has the perfect style for a terrorist. Anyways, the rest of the week doesn't look any less busy, and I work Saturday, so time for sleep for me.

Well, Sunday I watched Catch Me If You Can with my mom and brother, and one of my sisters and dad each stayed for about half the movie (different halves). That's a good movie. Then I decided to actually get a full night of sleep. Although I'm so used to so little sleep I sorta started half waking up and looking at the clock thinking I was late or something. Work was crazy, with people thinking that virus filtering on the email server wasn't working, and then the network dragging to a crawl combined with lots of people needing to be blackholed, "fixed" computers needing to be blackholed again, and printing not working until Dave and I both poked at it and basically gave up, printed a test page, and then everything started working again. Gotta love mysteries. Then tryed to get some real work done, but got out of there by about 8pm, and went home to do nothing, but got stuck doing other stuff. Eventually watched Sniper 2 which is low budget but still good movie. Hopefully tomorrow will be less crazy.

Friday was long. Work in morning, trying to catch up with stuff. Noodles and Company for lunch. Somehow Dave managed to talk Betsy into coming even though she just got her wisdom teeth out thursday, so it was funny to see her try and eat. Then more work, and dinner at BK with the Nick. Most of what I got done involved recommissioning the machine called nimda (guess what that did before) to scan firewall logs and watch ICMP traffic and decide which machines to yank from the network. I also worked with Joe to teach him a scripting language called AutoIT, which we used to heavily modify a template CD for blaster fixes to include service packs, the patches, fix scripts, and our virus scan, all with autorun and just asking the user. Hopefully that'll make it easier to get student machines patched. Also did other stuff, but that was a while ago and the nimda thing just sticks out. Saturday I got up to go look at houses. Looked at some for reference on the area, and one looks interesting right now. We'll see what happens there. Stopped in at Bethel afterwards and was informed by Betsy and brooke that there was a party at Dave's, so ended up sticking around. The Help Desk training video is almost done, although not without Betsy putting a lot of time into it and somehow managing to convince half the other student workers to work all weekend with her. The party at Dave's was fun. Watched Orange County and Better Of Dead. Then everyone was tired so went home. I ended up looking at house stuff until late, and then had to get up this morning for Church. Been sitting around since, looking at more house stuff, and messed with the projector mount a bit too. The way I was gonna try doesn't work too well without a more sturdy base and better clips, so I'll probably leave it for now. Especially if everything's gonna need to be redone within a couple months anyways... I think I'm gonna go and watch a couple movies and try to get to bed early. I need to relax more...

Interesting day today. Started off the morning figuring out how to handle testing accounts for blackboard since we can't duplicate the login scripts anymore. The new method is actually much more elegant anyways - if a user is authorized to use testing accounts when they log in it gives a list of accounts to choose rather than dropping directly into the site. That way they don't share the test account either. :) KFC for lunch. Then there were a bunch of little things - everyone discovers all the things that aren't right before the beginning of school. There was a nice break for Ice Cream and chatting with coworkers. I finished off the day getting the machine ready to run analysis on firewall logs and email viruses and drop people in the blackhole. Which was a very good thing, considering that for some reason I started getting random pages around 8pm with random problems reaching things. Didn't see anything I could do about it and figuring it was related I went off to watch Galaxy Quest. The movie is OK I guess. Sorta funny, mostly in the how corny it is. Oh, those network problems... Turns out a few machines in resnet and a couple on campus got W32/Nachia and were effectively ping-flooding the world. So tomorrow maybe we'll get to put Nimda (the analysis machine) to work. Wasn't quite planning on implementing so soon, but the network guys can only stay awake yanking machines off the network manually for so long...