Apparently I've been busy or something. In the past week or so I've finished Alias Season 3, watched The Faculty, done a lot of coding and documentation review, ordered some servers, had a birthday, been dragged into too many meetings, set up software distribution plans, ordered more servers, fixed stupid appletalk stuff that broke, attempted to track down other broken stuff, planned more infrastructure, worked around comcast breaking their DNS, set up mailing lists, evaluated another semi-federated distributed authentication system, attempted to implement some dynamic windows lockdown systems, investigated quota systems, patched utilities from Windows Server 2003 into Windows 2000 Server, attempted to convince people that greylisting is not the cause of all lost email, speculated at site bandwidth requirements for very loosely defined groups of people, investigated Windows policy application, attempted to work around weird network glitches, investigated disk IO problems, lost a bunch of data, drank way too much Mountain Dew, and tried to forget about work when I get home. Yea, other than the first two, that data stuff and that one other thing, that's been work for the past couple weeks. Actually that seems like not enough explanation now that I look at it. Going home has involved sitting around doing nothing and reading random stuff to try and relax. It's been made easier by horrible network latency to work, but harder by the phone beeping with random pages. Right now I'm sitting on the couch at home, every couple minutes resisting the natural urge every couple minutes to move so the lights will turn back on. Mainly that's because the lights here don't turn on if I move (well, unless I walk over to the switch), so it's pointless. I think that means I either need to move more at work so the lights stay on there, or I need to tweak the motion detector timing. I'm thinking it's probably approaching time to find something to do and take a week off. Of course at work I sorta work time off around 3 people. One of those took a bit over two weeks coming back Monday (but sick the last two days). Another is gone this week. The third is gone next week. Maybe I should claim the week after before it's gone? :) If only I wasn't in the middle of so much I could actually take vacation without having to find something to continously occupy my time and distract me.

So today I walked by as someone was unpacking a new toy. This toy was a nice new fast multi-CPU Sun box. I asked the question "what OS are you going to run on that?" with the two obvious choices the only thing in my mind. He looked at me and somewhat hesitantly said "actually, it'll probably be Windows 2000". What has this world come to? I guess I should have realized. It seems lately we've been buying Sun stuff to run linux on, and other gear to run Solaris on. It just never really hit me before...

It was a long week. I did a lot of coding, but I'm making a lot of progress on the IncidentBase. I've converted almost all if not all the lists of Incidents to a new format which allows dynamic resorting and per-user context for stuff like visibility. I think the two places in which it will be found most useful are the creation when pulling all the Incidents for the user (which also now only shows 6 months unless selected) and query (which needs a separate overhaul, but I won't get started on that yet). I finished off the week by dropping in a new My Incidents system which replaces the old switchboard viewing other users' preferences with individual customizable views. The column sorts here are also sticky, and they (with the sticky column sort) can be exported as static links which can be sent to people. I'm really liking the consistent look and functions across everything, although I think I'm temporarily confusing people in how to use all the CSS tags properly across them and differentiate between them (hint, I classed everything extensively, and either classes or IDs should do it in most cases).

Toward the end of the week I felt like I was in a time warp thing. I would go and do a bunch of reworking across half the system, and look back at the clock and it'd only be 20 minutes later. I've also been a lot less tired. I'm thinking it may a combination of it's a lot more efficient to do some of this stuff now, and the fact I've apparently been getting enough sleep (can't fall asleep at night, and wake up earlier than I want to in the morning). Oh well, I guess I won't complain too much.

I decided for fun to pull the stats for IncidentBase. So far this month we've pulled some around 2.8GB from it (compared to like 800MB for www.bethel.edu if I'm reading it right). I'm curious how much that'll go up as now with mod_gzip it's snappier and I can afford to send more detailed data in some cases. Plus working towards dynamic views and interactive stuff... The fun part of the stats was browsers. IE on XP was the number one IE browser. It came in at a significant 4th with like 1/3 of the number 2 browser. #1 was Moz on Windows, and #2 was Safari on OS X. #3 was another Safari version, and numbers 5-7 I think were other Mozillas. Guess that shows what the IT group prefers. :)

Today I decided to be ambitious and go through email. After making a handful of Incidents and looking at some other stuff (hey, I was getting under 100ms latency amazingly) I decided that was enough work stuff and started on a fun project. I guess my definition of fun is probably different than that of most people, as I made a virtual magnetboard. You know those little magnets that you cut up and stick to a refridgerator or whiteboard or any other flat surface with sufficient metalic backing and move them to make sentences? Yea, I made one with DHTML and javascript. Then I decided to copy it to a server rather than just being an HTML file on my hard drive, and since I then had a database I decided to make it sticky so I could leave the page and come back and they'd be in the same position. So it makes a call back to the server whenever the mouse is released with the new position. Routinely each user's board goes and checks for updates, so multiple people share the same board too. I also stored which magnets exist in the same place, and reclassed them which combined with a couple mod_rewrite rules means I can easily create an effectively unlimited number of these magnet boards just by saying what words should be on them. Maybe I'll give people the ability to submit a list of words and it'll make a board for them. This could be almost as much fun as the user css. :)

Finished off the day watching Wicker Park. I didn't like it too much during most of the movie, but I did like how they wrapped it up and the ending. They did it in a much better way than most stories with similar styles. I'm sorta curious about the original now.

Friday I was working on projects, as well as a lot of planning stuff. It was a long day, especially since I worked on some stuff rather late. Hopefully that'll be done soon though and people will like it. Raadt made a cool theme for IncidentBase too - you'll have to ask about it sometime.

Saturday was a relaxing day. I slept in until sometime in the afternoon, and then did some cleaning up. I made a couple dongles to go from S-Video and dual RCA to STP RJ-45s. Basically to run video and audio over STP CAT5 to upstairs. Much easier than running a bunch of coax and audio patches up. After that was set I watched a couple movies. First was Napoleon Dynamite, which I thought was pretty boring. The soundtrack had some interesting parts, but it's not something I'd go out and buy. The movie itself was boring, with a lot of dumb humor. I guess to each their own, as some people seem to think it's the best movie ever. Second movie was I, Robot. That movie also got split reviews, but I liked it a lot. I liked a lot of the ideas that Asimov brought up, but never really got into his writing style. Something about how they were written just never hooked me in. This movie seems to have done a good job of adapting many of his ideas into a single coherent story. It sorta has a traditional sentient robot plot line, but that hasn't really been done well with any modern movie. For some reason the good stories just seem to be books. Maybe this movie explains why, given there are 3 rendering companies, 2 pre-vis companies, 1 motion capture studio, and 3x the number of stunt people as actors. That can't be cheap, and robots don't exactly draw a mainstream audience (although the two main characters may have helped the draw on this one). Good mix of just good action and a strong plot, and they didn't go and throw in an unnecessary love story. I'd recommend this one. I also find the shape of the USR building in the movie rather funny. Think cable modem...

Sunday was getting up earlier than normal for church. After that was off to the parents' place for lunch, as my dad's birthday was last week. Their Mac Mini arrived as well, so I went with my sister to pick out a keyboard and mouse she'd like (my dad was supposed to order them online 2 weeks ago, but never did so we ended up spending way too much at Best Buy). Plugged it in and it was good to go. Those things are tiny. Seriously, the box my Axim came in was bigger than the one it came in. After that was home to clean up a bit and get ready for people coming over. Last year people showed up at 1, this year it was more like 5:20, although I'm not gonna complain. It was a decent crowd, and I think everyone had fun. Lots of junk food, and Nick showed up but disappointed everyone by not bringing the promised chili. There were two people doing homework, and 4 people on laptops during the thing. Surprisingly schdav left his at home, which is pretty rare for events at my house. :) The funniest part was the Lincoln Fry auction, which sat at a high number (I think it was $99 trillion) after a quick rise. Basically once it passed $1 mil it started getting out of hand. I have the numbers, maybe I should graph it. It was interesting to see companies using the bidder list/high bid name to advertise. Yea, mostly the type you'd expect to see getting links on web sites in that way... There was one very funny one with the picture of the combined Janet Jackson and Paul McCartney... The Internet is a great thing. Everything I looked for online I was able to grab quickly, including videos from the pregame stuff. I'm not sure that the TV people would be that happy about it, but if they don't release it, what do they really expect? The big exception being laughing at godaddy for their site dying for a couple minutes after their commercial. Everyone else I looked into seemed to be using stuff like akadns and akamai, and even yahoo auctions was having noticable performance problems. It's cool that they got it back up quickly though, and seemed to keep it in house at least somewhat. The longer version of their commercial (shot down by Fox) is a lot better than the one that ended up getting aired. It better conveys the message which was basically some of the crazy inconsistencies about what's getting aired and what isn't lately. Also the company CEO has a blog on which he has some interesting arguments and reasoning. Halftime was good, even though we had to educate some people who had never heard of Hey Jude (and shortly after when some commercial had a U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday which they couldn't identify either). There is that whole thing about him being the clean guy after last year and noticing the selection of people on stage. Austin had a great comment on that, and while I don't remember his exact wording some other people expressed the same ideas pretty much perfectly. It is something to think about. As Dave said, he's an old man now so it's OK. Menards takes the cake for the cheapest looking, least interesting, and most annoying commercial. Yea, it's just like their other ones, except it played during the superbowl. It looks like some guy with a camcorder made it.

I stumbled on this interesting article. The PDF is linked, but the text is more readable on their page. I especially like point #3. The part about "what constitutes spam is in the eye of the beholder" is very true, and I hear about it weekly and sometimes daily. It's amazing how many people fail to realize that and just make people want to completely ignore everything from them. Gone are the days where you can hit people with commercials that the vast majority of people see - the whole system is moving towards targeted and "grassroots" or "community-driven" (yea, I know, lack of better terms) marketing. Those who get people pissed at them early on will have an interesting time in the future. The other points in the article are definitely valid as well. A good summary could be to let the consumer make an intelligent choice rather than try to force feed them stuff. A good product or service will sell itself. Consumers are becoming more intelligent and picky, especially with the availability of information on the Internet. The days of being able to sell crap with marketing spin are going away.

Second movie of the day was Cellular. It was better than I was expecting, partially because of the bad reviews it got. It actually had a better plot than a lot of action movies, and was something different for a change. And how can a movie possibly go wrong featuring and having a soundtrack by G. Love and Special Sauce? I think the best part of the DVD is one of the extras called "Celling Out". Basically it's a brief overview of phones, basically how cell phones came about and how they've changed. A large part of it is how phones originally started to tie people to their desks, and how cell phones have changed that, but the tradeoff is you can't get away anymore. It's rather interesting to hear the guys who were involved in designing the phones and systems rant about how much of a pain they've become.

Third movie of the day was The Village. The best way to watch this DVD is to put the disc in, wait until the Hitchiker's Guide trailer finishes, and then eject it. Yea, I didn't like the movie much at all. I will admit I knew the ending going into it, but it just didn't seem interesting. It was pretty obvious what was going on since they did a poor job of covering it up. I guess I don't really like any of Shyamalan's stuff. Signs was OK but the ending really sucked and wrecked the story. I never bothered actually finishing The Sixth Sense (although I've started it at least 3 times, I always get bored within the first half hour or so - and given some of the movies I've sat through that should say something). He does seem to put a lot of thought into stuff and make the films well, but the stories just seem to suck. Maybe he should consider directing stories from other people?

Other things in the day include some guy making UML diagrams of The O.C. and posting them on slashdot. The predictable responses (basically what everyone but schdav says about it) ensued. One person remarked that it almost looked fully connected. Somewhat of a great disturbance? And then Crucial now has RAM with bling available. Ground effects and everything. Sounds like something those nuts who put windows in their cases would use.

Last week finished off being sorta busy. Wednesday was Alias, which I don't remember much about, other than it was a bit of a disappointment. Next week we don't get one either, because there's something that all the channels decide they have to show rather than just letting one cover it. Thursday was working. I think I was there until around 11. Ross surprised me by stopping by at like 8 because he was working too. Joe also stopped by twice while grabbing his dinner. Friday was Gusday, which was interesting. I think it went quite well, although from my perspective it could have been a bit more technical. One of the ones I went to was really boring, and was more of a teaching thing than a tech one. Oh well, was interesting to chat with some of the other schools and hear about their problems.

After work on Friday Dave and I went over to Nick's place and we recabled his house and set up his TV. He got a new DVD player too, but apparently it has issues so it's going back. Joe and brooke stopped by too, but we sent them away because they wanted to watch a movie and we still had to set up the TV. Saturday I slept in a lot, but then we ended up having a movie night. It was good to have people over again. First movie was A River Runs Through It, which was good but slow. Second movie was Grosse Pointe Blank, which is a funny one. Austin apparently thought it was boring and fell asleep though. Betsy was asking about the big football game and nobody had heard anything about a party so now there's one next weekend. If you haven't heard about it you probably should ask someone so you get in on the news about fun stuff like that and movies.

Today started with church at Salem. Flabre and schdav showed up too. It was rather uneventful other than the lady in front of us stealing the outline/verses sheet from me inadventently. Neither her or her kids seemed to be paying attention very well, and she pulled it off my knee with her elbow without noticing (I was sitting behind her, so I had to be careful not to get hit). After that was putting up the thing about the Superbowl, and then watching Resident Evil: Apocalypse. The commentary with the actors is funny - they start going off about Vaios in the movies but they're Mac people and then they talk about the Airport Extreme... They're rather interesting people. Now I have a couple more movies to watch, so I should probably get to that.

"Awake Ye Heathens!" Sorry, just listening to OSAS and I like that quote. The way it's said reminds me of Gandalf a bit. Anyways, came across an article that schdav would like. The author shares our views of running, which seems to be a minority view. I like the comment on joggers contributing to the heat death of the universe by increasing local entropy unnecessarily. I apparently am low on music balance too, since I can't order stuff right now. I should probably get more of that. Too many movie soundtracks recently I guess.

First movie of the day was The Transporter. That's just a funny movie to laugh at or when you just need a good action flic. Pure action, extremely simplistic and unbelievable plot. Just like an action flick should be. :) I liked the soundtrack on it too. It's not the stuff you'd just listen to, but more environmental. Second movie was Spider-Man 2. I liked it, except about halfway through I started thinking "wait, isn't this supposed to be in New York? New York doesn't have an El." Yea, other than that a decent movie. I liked most of its soundtrack too. I'm starting to think that based on my recent movies I may have stumbled across soundtrack recommendations rather than movie recommendations. Oh well, I listen to music a whole lot more than I watch movies.

Actually yesterday I was complaining about iTunes and its horrible latency at switching songs and how my Karma does it better. Mr. Boyum managed to find that someone wrote a native OS X output plugin for xmms, so now I'm switched back to that. One more ugly brushed metal app out of the way... Yea, my biggest complaint about OS X (and Windows) apps is resource allocation. Too often there is stuff going on in the background which for some reason takes precidence over the UI. I think that the command line is partially why I'm able to live with it - I can get a couple lines of commands out while waiting for the system to respond and show the keystrokes while it's off doing something or has to wait. That's another thing that bugs me, is the UI tries to be intelligent. If I type a bunch of stuff but the application is locked (or it can't reach that app over the network), those commands are to that window. I should be able to switch to another window or application and have all the previous keystrokes and mouse clicks go through. I'm realisizing the key reason I like X so much is it's asynchronous. It's necessary due to the client/server architecture, where the server has to queue the commands to the specific client until it responds. I've learned over the years to take maximum advantage of that fact by typing where a box will exist, or clicking where the button will be in a few seconds. Due to the way it is handled you can think ahead of the system and know it'll do what you want rather than having to watch and see. I also realized that X11 under OS X apparently has clickthrough on window selection, so I'm starting to seriously reconsider going all X again. I can live without Aqua (the title bars are too big anyways). Should be interesting to see if I can get motivated to actually dig up X versions for darwinppc or recompile all the apps for it.

Friday it felt like I got a lot of stuff done. Of course I had a huge amount left at the end of the day too. Oh well, such is life I guess. Hopefully I can soon get stuff in place so I can do the rest in more manageable pieces. It snowed a lot on Friday. When I was going to bed it sounded like sorta like a hailstorm with it hitting the side of the house too. Saturday I was woken up by my brother wanting to know stuff about the snowblower since it wouldn't run right. Apparently it didn't work out since when I woke up and actually got up, the whole thing had been shoveled. First movie of the day was Code 46. It was interesting, but I wasn't too impressed either. I think my favorite part was how they did the titles and then added the multilingual part on top of that. Second movie was Timeline. This one was more interesting, but still lacking a bit. I have a feeling it's like the rest of Michael Crichton books, where the book is a lot better than the movie. I think this is another one that I managed not to read the book for. He tends to give a lot of detail that you which you figure out later. In the movie they take those parts and make the discovery of the relation to prior details way too obvious. Oh well, I think it's worth watching at least once. Anyways, while watching trailers, I saw one for this. I realized that Jena Malone is building a rather odd reputation of the characters she plays in movies. In looking at the news I also found how to shovel snow. And in reading blogs stumbled across a funny church sign. And after seeing parts of the football season this year as my brother watches it, I'd have to agree with this argument. The fact that they can pay for that much advertising is crazy too - apparently they're making plenty of profit. Prescription drugs are one of those things that don't seem right to advertise. Those who need it should be told by their doctor (if a doctor doesn't know about treatment options or where to get that info, get a new doctor), and doctors are already bribed enough by the pharmaceutical companies about new drugs. Such is life where they can get people to demand overpriced and probably unnecessary treatments, the doctors will prescribe to get the patient to stop bugging them, and the insurance company is stuck paying for them. OK, I should go find something better to do...

Today was nice and relaxing - Holidays are good. I woke up to my phone ringing because the server room was calling to complain about the power being out. Apparently there was a power outage, and the generators kicked in. I never heard about another one, so it must have transitioned off OK (or still running on them). Anyways, after bugging people about them having to work and me sitting around doing nothing for a while, I caught up on news and then went to watch movies.

First movie of the day was Underworld. That movie has one of the most awesome non-DTS soundtracks I've heard. Usually it seems people just don't pay attention to the regular mix, and the DTS is so much better. I sometimes think it's so the DD mix sounds better on cheap speakers, so in this case it could be that this isn't a super mainstream movie. I don't remember if the normal cut had quite the same quality either. I like the extra footage in some areas, but at least one could have been left out. More explanations for stuff, longer fight sequence at the end... Very good movie. Second movie was The Butterfly Effect. I watched the Director's cut, as that's the one I like better. Some of you may remember I watched this last fall and all the guys liked the Director's cut and the girls liked the Theatrical cut. The reasoning was mainly because of the last scene and the possibility of them getting back together. So I'm watching the deleted scenes and the extra two endings that has which are similar to the theatrical release. One of those actually has them getting back together. So if you really liked that way and wanted to see that happen, you should watch the alternates. And I have some dust in my projector apparently. It's not noticable sometimes, but other times is really noticable (especially after you notice it). I think I'll have to figure out how to get that apart and take a look at it.

Pretty normal Sunday, although I'm glad I don't work tomorrow. Extra sleeping in is always good. Started with church at Salem. The shuttle showed up today in a reasonable amount of time, which was nice. The last couple weeks they've seemed a bit flaky (like they don't come for 10+ minutes so drive or walk over to the main lot to minimize lateness for the service). After that my brother and a friend watched the game. Apparently the Vikings lost. They went upstairs around the end of the game I think. After a while I went up to see if they were done watching and I could switch to something else - they were gone. I asked later and apparently he thought I was watching so he didn't turn it off. Not sure how that idea crossed his mind. Anyways, started off the movie sequence with Below which was decent. Not the best I've seen, but I've seen a lot worse too. I think the premise is a bit overdone, but they started to take it in an interesting direction but nothing really became of it. The filming style was interesting, but they didn't seem to make good use of it. After that switched to a bit of comedy and watched Mr. Deeds. There were some funny parts, some overdone parts, and overall I'd say it's pretty decent. Don't watch it expecting to think a lot though. After that and a bit of chatting with friends, I switched back to the how-many-characters-can-we-kill-off genre and watched Pitch Black. I think it probably has become my second favorite Vin Diesel movie, first probably being Boiler Room since it makes you think a bit. Anyways, I haven't tracked the games or anything, but I think the storyline is interesting. They built out the character pretty well I think. The movie doesn't seem to fall to a lot of the shortcuts a lot of movies of this type seem to have. And that wraps up my Sunday.

Saturdays are good. I think it was cold outside, but I didn't go out there. Movies for the day were Lost in Translation and The Italian Job. Both are good movies.