Got some big stuff out of the way on Friday, which was nice. Network stayed up too, which I'm happy about. I got a new switch in my office too, which will hopefully be nice. It means I can test stuff easier at least. So you know that email I mentioned a couple days ago? Today I got another one, which was much better. The link was even plaintext. I'm amazed - maybe they do have someone who knows what they're doing there. :) So today apparently Internap's Fisher Plaza facility in Seattle lost power. Apparently it's not the first time either. Word is they may have been doing construction on one floor. Oops. In other outage news, Verizon just had a second major cable cut occurance in a week. Apparently each time has been multiple cables in diverse locations too. Sounds like someone's upset with them for some reason. And speaking of people being upset with other people, sometimes there are good reasons. You'd think they'd do some basic sanity checking... Tonight went well. Nick and I went to go look at TVs, but he didn't buy anything. He'll probably update his site though... After that went home, and my brother came home and had a friend over and we watched Windtalkers. Good movie. Now I'm gonna go try to get on a decent sleep schedule for the weekend.

Yea, so the new toys arrived on Thursday, thus the lack of updates. So I've been migrating data, installing stuff, and trying new things. I found this thing plays divx much better than normal computers seem to be able to do (the audio stays in sync all the time). Only got one movie in over the weekend - Invincible. It's pretty decent, although it does have its shortcomings too. This article is sorta interesting, although the info isn't that surprising. That data is pretty well represented already by their customer churn rates. In other news, some people need to not make it so obvious when they're trying for easy money. First claims offense to the show and wants money, then when asked by the media for his side of the story says he can't talk to them unless they pay him. And he's worried about companies making people think most people are driven by money? Yea... I did a bit of image editing to get myself a wallpaper for my Axim, but I'm not quite satisfied. I think I need to pick a non-blurry starting image. Anyways, I just got a low battery notification. Had the thing sitting here playing Alias as a test of the quality (yea, it can keep up on the fights). I should go charge this as well as myself.

Somehow I managed not to watch any movies over the weekend until today. Not sure how I pulled that one off. I actually don't remember much of what I did Saturday, other than I went to my parents' house for some food. And it was snowing and we followed a bunch of snowplows home (they were going rather slow on 694). Sunday was church followed by some shopping. I picked up weatherstriping and furnace filters and stuff and resealed the doors, and also put just enough foam in the frames of some others to keep the bass from making them resonate and rattle. After discovering Walmart doesn't have it locally anymore I also ordered a new toy online. Hopefully that will arrive this week. They shipped UPS ground though, so it'll probably sit in a warehouse for like a week. Although amazingly they're predicting Thursday. After a ton of research on Sunday I also ordered another new toy. We'll see about that one when it arrives though. Hopefully it won't take too long. Something about that resolution on that size screen makes me happy.

On Monday I called to RMA the Ogo. While the guy was trying to get the system to stop giving him errors and send the RMA labels we talked about why I was sending it back. Based on his responses to my comments about the GSM/GRPS coverage vs their TDMA stuff it sounds like it's not exactly a rare response. Actually everyone I've dealt with at Cingular seems to not question anything beyond "coverage sucks", and both reps I've talked to about the 850 vs 1900 sound like they'd like it to happen too. I guess if it helps them have fewer cancellations... I can tell students are back at Bethel, as latency sucks. VoIP phone is weird talking to myself but works fine even on two trips through the Internet link talking to someone else. It's much harder to notice since the echo cancelation is good and it pretty much makes you not hear your own voice coming back at all. Although I'm guessing it could be noticable now. I just tested and the one way latency was almost a second. :) Anyways, first movie of the evening was Collateral. It was a good movie, but not the best I've seen. I didn't think the soundtrack was all that great either. Second movie of the night was Resident Evil. I thought it was a really good movie. I think I've maybe seen parts of it before, but not sure where. I do know the beginning reminded me a lot of Cyborg 2. I guess I wouldn't be surprised if the original game and that had some of the same sources. Although that movie wasn't near as much like a video game as Resident Evil. It's actually sorta funny some of the things looking back at the movie and how they happened and things were designed and filmed.

I'm still a bit annoyed that Alias is moved to Wednesdays. Having TV shows during the week sucks in my opinion. It's too bad I don't have an HD card for my myth box (which I need to get going again). Oh well, I guess I'll deal with it. Tomorrow is back to work. Should be interesting - hopefully nothing major will happen.

Not too much interesting today. Usual around the house stuff. Also the usual reading and catching up on stuff. Garden State arrived so I watched that. It was a pretty decent movie. Very well done technically, especially on the music selection and timing. The plot seemed bland though. The first half or so wasn't so bad, but I think the last half was rather boring. It does remind me of a certain other movie it's often compared to, but I think it's better. It certainly gets the plot across without resorting to crazy stuff to do it. I do think it's probably one that people who relate to it like a lot more. I finished that up just in time to send it back in the mail today. Also decided to pay some bills. Xcel apparently managed to not note my payment that they deposited so still want it from me. I'll have to try to figure out if they've figured it out in their system since they printed the statement or if I need to bug them about it. Stuff like that is why automated payments are a bad idea for a lot of things (like anything that can change amounts). After doing more stuff around the house I watched The Client. Good movie, and it even has Homer Simpson in it. It may be slightly far fetched, but was well made.

I'm still debating the ogo. I'm pretty sure it's going back, but I could keep the hardware for $20 if I did it right. I'm pretty sure it's locked up with their servers though, so probably not worth it. I'm sorta looking at other things now. My palm seems to be constantly complaining about low battery, and I guess I can't be too surprised since 3 year old lithium ion batteries from that era don't tend to be very good anymore. I'm sorta considering combining the two and upgrading. I really like PalmOS, but the wifi capable palms are kinda pricey. I'm looking at the PocketPC ones, but even though I'm OK with Windows 2003 on servers for managing Windows machines, I can't stand it as a desktop OS. They could run Linux though, and PalmSource said they're making a PalmOS to overlay on a Linux base... Maybe I'll have to see if I can try linux on one of the iPAQs I have in my office (Erik's post got me thinking about that one). That and see if I can get my hands on a Tungsten C for a week or two to try. Anyone have any good suggestion of hardware on either side? I'm basically looking for decent battery life, wifi, and a decent screen. On the software side a browser, text/open ebook/pdf viewer, contacts, maybe calendar, and a decent password manager. The hardware side is sorta required, on the software if it supports me writing stuff I'd say lacking pretty much anything is fair game.

In other news a bunch of linguists got together (again) and now want to get rid of the word "blog". Although I don't know how much linguists who say they are "uber-serious" should be trusted...

I'm tired. I think part of that has to do with getting done working a 14 hour day, with very little of it sitting. In fact it was mostly standing, with large portions of bending over, squatting, kneeling, and lifting stuff. Tuesday wasn't too exciting. I slept in quite a bit, and read stuff online, followed by watching movies. I watched .com for Murder, which could have been better, but could have been worse. Sorta interesting in how other people probably see online stuff... Then Bethel's Internet provider apparently had issues, which also seemed to take out other schools and the Star Trib. It got resolved pretty quickly, I wonder which one they cared most about. :) I was impressed that my phone resynced within seconds of it coming back up. Pretty good... Then I watched The Bounce Supremacy, which is a good movie. I stayed up later than I should have watching extras.

Wednesday I overslept and woke up at 7. Nick did too though, so we didn't care too much. We both needed breakfast and caffeine to get us going though. We started work a bit before 8. The first server room was sorta annoying, since we had to work around boxes that needed to stay up. Of course this is in the process of repatching all the network stuff and putting in new power strips. The power strips are fancy, and measure volts, amps, va, watts, power factor, kilowatt hours, and power on time, and can alert when there is too much draw. Yea, they're geeky, but they will hopefully help power management so we can keep circuits evenly balanced. We managed to do it all though, and I only had all core services down for maybe 10-15 minutes. It took me around an hour to get blackboard back up and running though (after I discovered it didn't come back cleanly). That place is a ton cleaner though, and now we just need to label some stuff and clean up some serial console lines. We probably pulled out over half the length of patch cables in the room though. We ended up finishing that room at around 2, and since schdav arrived we dragged him along to lunch at Culvers.

We got back from lunch around 3, and moved to the other server room. This one was easier since there was one server in our racks that we needed to keep up as much as possible. So it got its cables moved to the side, and moved directly to the outlets on the wall. We then proceeded to rip out every patch cable and power cable in the room. They all went on the floor, later arranged into piles. It felt like walking on some really weird carpet... Then we pulled out switches, put them in new places, repatched serial lines, moved servers to make better use of space, and mounted new fancy power strips everywhere. That room looks like a new place. Then Nick and I spent a couple hours hooking up power cables, repatching network stuff, and routing lines to be as clean and manageable as possible. We went from a room full of mostly 16ft patch cables to mostly 5 and 7ft cables. Yea, the big ones really weren't needed for most things. Even though I'm sore and tired, I'm glad it's done. It has been needed for a long time. Now to go get some sleep...

Over the weekend I managed to acquire a Dwin LD-2 (not as a present). For those who don't know, that's a nice line doubler. Basically put Composite or S-Video in and get RGBS out. I hooked that up between my receiver and projector and threw in a laserdisc. It looked awesome, other than some hum bars which look like possibly a ground loop somewhere. Now I remember why laserdiscs can be nicer than DVDs - it's just my projector's color separation and transcoding system sucks... I ended up watching two sides of Star Trek: Generations while tweaking the thing. The biggest thing I was annoyed by was the black level or lack thereof (I'd previously seen this quality on CRT projectors). I went to bed and slept for around a dozen hours. While laying in bed on Monday afternoon I realized that my projector had threads on the lens but I had never done anything with them. So I checked and the size is the same as my camera. So on went the .6ND filter, and the blacks are a lot better now. After finishing up the 3rd side of Generations, threw in a trailer disc and compared DVDs through the component output in progressive mode and the s-video out through the doubler. As the doubler basically puts out the same as the player in that mode (480p), it was a reasonable comparison to try. One would think that after combining the colors into one signal and then pulling it apart the quality would be crap. Keep in mind though that this thing is not consumer level, and the transcoder in the projector (convert from component to RGB for the panels) is likely pretty cheap. They were actually very comparible, with the color output from the doubler blowing away the component. It makes the DVD player's stock output look flat. Now if I could only get rid of those hum bars... And figure out what to do with anamorphic discs. Unfortunately the projector won't do 16x9 on a VGA input...

Anyways, also watched Fahrenheit 9/11. It was decent technically, but should be laughed at as a documentary. In the interviews it's obvious he's leading people along, he leads people confronting him to say stuff in the way he want so he can twist it, and he does stupid stuff. It's funny how he portraying people who are ignoring the guy with the camera who's trying to ask them question as if they're personally saying they're against his policies. He's just as much a prick to everyone as in his previous big hit about Columbine.

After that sat around for a while and talked to AT&T support about my Ogo. Apparently it needed a complete reset. That caused it to lose all data, but luckily I have a dedicated POP3 account for it so it was able to just pull most of it back in. Sounds like a design flaw to me. Now that I'm able to get GPRS connectivity again I tried signing on to AIM as I was chatting with the guy. Yea, they're admitting that they have major issues with the portals and it's affecting everyone. Fun stuff. Between that and their coverage, I'm thinking it's still on the track for this thing to go back before the end of the trial period. Maybe it'll be more mature in a year or so. Anyways, my brother came home and we watched X2, which is still a good movie. Oh yea, I'm up for movie nights this week, just let me know if you're interested.

Wednesday stuff happened. Don't remember much of what anymore, probably just routine stuff, and making sure people knew about that night. After work was fun though, with a bunch of people coming over for RotK. Nick's chili was a big hit and ended up gone before intermission. The movie was also great, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Although I will say the conversation regarding the perceived relationships between characters went downhill towards the end of the movie.

Thursday was the ITS Christmas Party (for staff) with it's associated white elephant party. The swans ended up duplicated on standard letter-sized paper and included in many gifts, and the VP ended up unknowingly claiming "the real swans". It was a lot of fun, and the food was good too. Got more planning for the Christmas shutdown done, but nothing else too interesting. After work decided to poke around a bit with iTunes and rendezvous. I started tunneling 224.0.0.251 mdns traffic from Bethel to my house. It's coming across OK, but my iTunes has latched onto zeroconf addresses and not my public one, so it's not seeing the shares properly. Maybe I'll poke with that later. I don't really listen to anything other than my own music at work even, so not sure why I'm bothering. More of a "how hard is this" than anything. NoBong (a former roommate who stumbled on this site) also emailed me, and it was good to hear from him.

Friday was another skipping work day, so I slept in. Woke up sometime after 11, and looked at the ogo to see if anything interesting had happened. I started getting IMs right away, and also had a bunch of emails from my router complaining about the suspicious traffic (a whole ton of multicast mdns traffic being tunneled over from Bethel - I should probably turn that off). Apparently the thing's IDS isn't designed to handle multicast properly. I guess I can't complain too much for $20. After quite a while I realized I should probably actually get out of bed and get ready for the day. While getting ready and debating what to do for the day the shiny new phone in my office (which I found out about while chatting) came to mind. Yep, I'm a geek. A few minutes later the boss called asking some questions about the holiday outage, so I decided three reasons was good enough (the third being I was hungry and sick of pizza with not much else in the house) and headed for the car. Within 5 minutes of sitting down at my desk I had managed to lock the thing out of the system. After acquiring the appropriate passcodes to get the thing back into the phone system, I also got the appropriate DHCP server options and information about the firmware it downloads on boot. After scanning through the phone's menu and noting the options, I was ready. After a small meeting about the outages thing and chatting with some friends, the phone became unplugged from the network and UPS and managed to follow me home (hey, it was on my desk for "testing" :). Luckily the firmware loads into flash so I didn't actually need to set up TFTP and DHCP options. Without the settings though I did need to point it back at the call server. It actually connected quickly (after timing out trying to get TFTP since the firewall blocks that). Incoming audio didn't work, but that was a quick NAT change on my end to let it reach the phone. After a few test calls I have to say that it's amazingly stable even over the net. It was around 40ms jitter, which wasn't noticable. Of course I'm getting 50ms latency to work right now - I'll have to try this some other time when students are around and it jumps to the hundreds. I was able to sustain long calls without problems too. The speakerphone on this thing is amazing too - it sounds great on the local end, and apparently doesn't sound like a speakerphone on the remote end either. No luck getting a softphone working yet, as it's H.323 rather than SIP (and the only decent H.323 client I've found for OS X apparently doesn't like some of the messages the server sends). I'm gonna have to ask Telecomm about that one. It'd be cool if our gateway supported SIP too. OK, that's enough for now, I'm supposed to get up before noon tomorrow... :(

Today was pretty good. Got stuff done, but another one of those feel like nothing got done days. I did walk someone through downloading and installing Mozilla over the phone though. It's not bad if the person isn't afraid of the computer. I also got to hear a pizza guy telling a faculty member about PhD syndrome, although not quite in those words (something along the lines of "professors can be so damn stupid, except in..."). I was just trying not to laugh at the humor in him saying this outright to a prof he didn't know. :) I guess if he's not expecting to see the prof again, may as well state it outright. After work there was the ITS Student Christmas party. Movie was Elf, which was good. I actually hadn't seen it before, which apparently was unusual. I have pictures which I should probably gather together and post sometime. I should really figure out how I want to post pictures rather than not doing it because I don't want 100 different places on my site. After the party, I went out and bought RotK for tomorrow night. 250 minutes of fun - you should be there. brooke even decided she'll probably be there, although is claiming to be bringing a pillow and blanket. I'm not sure that counts as trying to watch the movie. 10, the crossed out word is sad, but points to more story needed...

Today was a day of sitting around. Got back to church and my brother was watching the Vikings (I remembered to connect the DTV tuner before I left), so sat around a bit. After that was reading and listening for a while. Eventually did a little cleanup around the house, and ended up deciding to bring down and hook up the rear surrounds to bring it to 7.1. Went to calibrate them and discovered my sub had become disconnected. Not really sure how long that's been that way, as I generally am listening to music and the sub isn't used much (most of the bass goes to the front speakers). Got that all hooked up and ran the level checks, crossover sweeps, and rattle checks. Yea, they have tests that are specifically designed to test if there's stuff that rattles too much in the room. :) I did discover the upper frequency limits of my speakers though. That or my ears and the SPL meter both drop off in the same place (just under 20kHz). Apparently it's running slightly above reference too, oh well. After that did more reading and ended up starting to read some BGP course that's under the Creative Commons license. It's pretty interesting so far. I figured I'd learn a lot, but somehow I've apparently managed to pick up most of how eBGP works just from other discussions. iBGP seems like it could be finicky though, and is definitely designed for a centrally managed system (doesn't scale well and requires some manual config). OK, too much geeky stuff. JoeBuck™ came over and we watched Two Towers. Overall a good movie, even though I've seen the original 2-3 times and the extended 2-3 times. It's my favorite of the first two I think, but we'll see what happens when I get RotK. JoeBuck™ and I are both more excited about RotK now. They added almost an hour! Should be fun times on Wednesday.

Week finished up well, I got a good start on a project to help manage server dependencies, hopefully both in monitoring and as a startup/shutdown sequence thing. After work I went over to Ross' place and we just hung out for a few hours. It was busy down there, had to park on the street a block away after driving around a few other blocks looking for spots. I brought over my DTV tuner, and we tried seeing how well that worked. Unfortunately it was very finicky. Tons of multipath due to the other buildings, and 8VSB doesn't handle that very well (especially when it's so bad you can't hardly pick out things with NTSC).

Saturday was sleep-in day. Although the usual students-don't-technically-live-in-dorms-anymore thing happened and people got confused again. When likely legal reasons hit real-time technical stuff... Got up sometime in the early afternoon and did some laundry and chatting online. Then a lot of reading stuff. Ended up watching Adaptation, which was rather interesting. It has Peter-man in it, and the trailer got me listening to some Queen. It had a great quote I remember too. "I'm sure you had good reasons Charles - you're an artist." Yea, definitely... After that listened to the new U2 album. I have to say I don't totally dislike it after hearing all of it. It starts off with crap (Vertigo), but some of the other ones are decent, and the other songs from the singles aren't on it, which helps. Now I'm listening to some Christmas music (can you guess which artist? It shouldn't be too hard).

Sunday is Two Towers, if you don't remember. And Wednesday is Return of the King too. Monday is relax day for me. I think I may go bring stuff in to Comcast and get some junk removed from my bill though. Maybe I'll stop by Bethel for lunch or something. Due to the personal time, I only have 6 normal workdays left this month, and possibly one busy but unbothered one (also known as Nick and I take down server rooms while the place is closed day). During those days I need to figure out the plan for the unbothered day, look into web stuff, look into Firefox and NTLM, look into fileserver stuff... Yea, should be interesting.

The new ogo activated as I got signal while leaving work on Friday, and seems to be acting much better. I was playing with them a bit at Ross' place. That in itself was sorta funny, as during the course of the night I was pulling stuff out of my bag, and at one point I realized I had four different completely wireless devices capable of global communication within a foot of my body. I guess times have changed (and I'm a geek). Anyways, the new one seems to track the GSM strength much better, can hang onto GPRS better, and can stay accurate on time (I never noticed how bad the old one was until I noticed the difference and compared to another source). It also seems to interact a bit better on AIM and load emails better. Just a better network sync I think. We'll see, I think I'm gonna wait another week to bring Ogo #1 back just to compare them.

And it's already early Sunday. I need to stop staying up so late. At least church isn't until 11.