It was a long week. A few outages, starting to look suspiciously network related. Rumor has it that Enterasys may have an idea of some possible cause, so hopefully we'll get somewhere on that. Today I went in and hit the reset switch on a box to get it up and running again... Other than that I eliminated the last of the old mailing list servers last week. It's nice to have everything standardized now. Some account merges, patches, updates to policies, the usual... Did come up with some good ideas about how to handle some stuff though.

Friday night was LotR:FotR EE, which was good. Ross and Pete and Betsy showed up, and Dave showed up after his printing fixes. Hopefully those printing fixes mean that Ross won't have to fix more SP2 stuff.

Saturday I slept in until some time in the afternoon, which was really nice. Then I went over to my parents' house and went up on the roof to pull and pry the chimney. That didn't go so well, but helped with a bit of other stuff, and we recapped it too. The ogo didn't work very well over there either. I've pretty much decided that it's going back now, as Cingular just can't keep a decent signal around here on GSM (and it's horrible with GPRS), and the ogo doesn't handle losing the signal well either. Oh well, maybe they'll improve it in a few months or something.

Sunday was church, followed by coming home to my brother watching the game. I left partway through that to go and reboot the database server, and then to run the sawzall to my parents' place. Then it was movie time. First was THX 1138, which was good. "Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy." After what he's done to Star Wars, makes you wonder if he's sane... After that watched The Italian Job. I sorta like the ending better than the newer remake, but I like parts of the new one better. For those who think the new one is completely unrealistic, that's intentional - both versions have it. Think suspension of disbelief.

Don't think about all those things you fear
Just be glad to be here.

That's FC/Kahuna's Hayling, which is actually sung by Hafdis Huld. There's an interesting music video at the end of Confidence with her, along with one from Zero 7 (Destiny). Zero 7's site sorta reminds me of the Ogo documentation... Anyways, there's also another (just as weird) video of Hayling done by Lynn Fox up on her site. I sorta like the musical style though - I may have to look into more of FC/Kahuna's stuff. Apparently they're supposed to be like Zero 7. They also were the people that started the Big Kahuna Burger club (yes, they got the name from there) in 1995, which inspired Fat Boy Slim. Their whole bio is actually pretty interesting.

Saturday I upgraded SA on my personal server to the latest version. That combined with a few custom rules has dropped the amount of spam I see to almost nothing, which makes me happy. It'd be nice if spammers just went away, but unfortunately I don't see that happening until idiots stop buying stuff from them. Sunday started off with church. Amazingly even though I got lots of sleep and actually wasn't that tired when I got up, sitting down and not moving for an hour really made me tired. The rest of the day sat around catching up on /. and newsgroups some more. Then watched Confidence. Good movie I thought, fits in with the others like it. As you probably noticed already, the soundtrack was more interesting though. BTW, if anyone knows what the 1 minute long clip on the end credits is (after Clocks), I'm wondering. It's not any of the credited songs as far as I can tell. My guess is something for the movie by Beck, but apparently it's not in the official soundtrack, so...

Year after year this always amazes me. How can people completely forget how to drive in the winter over the summer? One day of snowing and it turning wet, another day of it sorta sticking but basically just wet on roadways, and we get that. If the car rolls when you hit the ice, it means you were going too fast on the road. I can't see how people think some country highway is safe to go normal speeds on during or shortly after snowfall... That and the fact most people don't seem to know what to do when they hit ice...

Well, unfortunately I have to work in about 8 hours. So much for the nice long weekend. I guess all good things have to come to an end. I just hope that we don't get roped into too much computer fixing that we shouldn't be doing tomorrow.

It was a good Saturday. Didn't have to get up for anything, so just slept until I woke up. Then proceeded to just read for a bit, followed by getting up and going and reading a bit more, along with coding. Watched Paycheck which I think isn't as bad as the reviews say. Yea it's a little overdone, but that's pretty common these days. I'd say it's actually pretty decent. After that coded some more and managed to get an RSS thing going. Basically it's a reader but it just runs as a cron job and when it sees a new entry emails the title, url, and contents at that URL to me. In my case to my ogo for easy reading wherever I may be. I tested it with all the blogs I frequent, and it seems to be parsing things decently. We'll see who manages to break it somehow in the near future.

Saturday started off getting up somewhat early and driving to Minnetonka. Watched my cousin's wheelchair basketball game. If you've never seen one, you should. We were chatting a bit with a kid whose team was from Michigan and was hoping for a challenge with the next game since the previous game they beat the other team by a rather large margin. After that was family birthdays, followed by visiting the parents' place for a bit. Finished off the night by watching Jackie Brown. It's a QT movie, what else is there to say? Sunday was church, followed by lunch and just random reading. Watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, also known as crazy swordfighters who can fly. Between that and the story, I can't say I like the movie. At least it's only two hours. That was followed by Six-String Samurai. Interesting, more of a comedy in that you laugh at the movie, but still good entertainment. If it didn't have all the Wizard of Oz elements in it I may not have connected them - the connection is there but weird. "Follow the yellow brick road, homie" Plus you get to hear about the wind shear from a pink golf ball...

Not too much new. Coded up some mod_perl stuff to address comment spam on MT blogs and threw that into place after a certain person got annoyed with 15 new spams in one night. They're obviously not paying attention since stuff was getting held anyways, so we'll see what happens with the new rules. The cool part is mod_perl makes it really easy to do lots of funky stuff and it works at a level above the site so nobody needs to make any direct changes. First movie of the day was Pulp Fiction, which was a good flick. That movie just has the same feel as Kill Bill, even though the stories different. It'd be interesting watching them both together or close together to better compare those. Second movie was Swimming Pool. Reminds me a lot of Lost in Translation. Like same concept, but with a bit less constraint. It pushes the ends out a bit farther in time in both directions, and gives more backstory on the characters (although that's arguable) with a little less "in the moment" type stuff. Hard to describe without spoilers. I'd say it's a good flick, but be very careful who I'd recommend it to.

Friday was just miscellaneous stuff. More IB cleanup and improvements too. At lunch we went to Wendy's and then went by that new place just north of 694 to see that it'd be a Red Robin. That should be cool when it's finished. After work was a bonfire at Nick's. The bonfire was followed by Dirty Work. Both were a fun time, so if you missed them your loss. After I got home did a little test recording. I remember why I don't listen to the radio anymore - it's both overcompressed and overmodulated these days, making it sound like crap compared to other things. Oh well, at least it makes it easy to never clip a digital recording while getting it up close to 0db. Saturday morning was get up somewhat early (11am) to ensure the computer recorded the sampler properly. Got that going and headed of to the Bethel football game. Got a few pics up from that one. Afterwards went off to dinner with the family. That was followed by running a batch convert on the pictures, copying over the 2GB audio file from earlier to the laptop (over wireless, took a while), and chopping it up. BTW, if you use OS X Audacity is an awesome editor. It'll open incomplete files (like partway through the copy), and you can copy and paste large amounts of data (like 60MB songs) into new files with effectively no delay. It makes it really easy to confirm cut points by playing the audio too. Got all the pics uploaded and stuff now, so I think it's time for bed though. What I've listened to of the sampler is good, despite the quality sounding like modern commercial radio.

Well, I didn't mention it on Thursday, but I ended up ditching Nick a bit early to go help out JoeBuck. He came out of the bank after leaving his car under brooke's watch to find it wouldn't start. I ended up not going to help him because he didn't actually have jumper cables so Mr. Boyum showed up with some to bail him out.

Friday was some more of the same, but not as much (the network stuff that is, not brooke breaking things - at least not that I've heard about yet). It turned into a bunch of random stuff, and I don't remember many details. I do remember moving patch cables around, and talking to people, and people asking me questions every time I sat down to do something. Oh well, those days happen. Did get a few minor IB changes to the look of the UserInfo area done, and sent someone to tell people no. I don't remember the exact quote that was said upon the messenger's return, but a close summary was "there's something about telling someone they're screwed and it calming them down".

Saturday I was woken up to a pounding on my bedroom door. It was around 8:50am and my brother was annoyed by the UPSes beeping. Turns out the power was out. I couldn't really shut them up, but the power came on shortly after 9 and I went back to bed. Now that I look back that was the night I was woken up at 2am when my lights turned on too. My brother said the dining room one was on too. Other lights have done that other nights this past week. My closest guess so far is that there's something really funky with the power and some sort of surge is resetting the switches. I ended up sleeping until early afternoon, which was nice for a change. Sat around for a while online, and then my family came over with pizza after the game. Can't argue with that. After that I left for Dave's sister's place to watch a movie with him and flabre since they were out of town. On the way I noticed that the lights on the south side of 694 on Silver Lake Rd were flashing red (well, noticing was good since I went through the intersection, but it's not the point of mentioning it). After alternating phone calls of giving directions (to other places) and getting directions a few times, I arrived. We watched Mallrats followed by Dogma. Kevin Smith movies are great because you can always catch things in them each time you see them. They may seem odd and superficial at first, but he puts an amazing amount of work into each one. After the movies went to Dave's house with my DTV tuner to prove he wasn't on crack and ended up not proving said hypothesis. Oh well. Watched a bit of L&O and then headed home. Upon approaching Silver Lake Road I notice something isn't quite right about the lights. As I get closer I realize the lights on the south side of 694 are flashing randomly. Like a few quick burst and take a break. Nothing's consistent, not even the lights that normally work together in a given direction. The lights on the north side of 694 are now flashing red. I think the power outage seriously fried some stuff. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with (my siblings borrowed it for a concert) or I would have grabbed a video.

Sunday morning was church at Salem. I grabbed the camera this time for the trip but someone had discovered the lights having a fun time and they were off with stop signs up instead. Oh well. After church sat around for a bit, and ended up watching This Is Spinal Tap. I think that's seriously overrated. Then again, the whole Christopher Guest mockumentary things never interested me much. Trying too hard to be funny or something and basically overdoing it. That was followed by more sitting around and some grocery shopping. Finished up the evening by watching Full Metal Jacket. I'd argue it's one of the best films about war I've seen. Whether you like Kubrick or not, it's hard to argue his films aren't well made. The level of detail in his movies and how many different ways he pulls to make you think about stuff. Basically he does in Drama what Kevin Smith does in comedy. Yes, I did really say that - think about it for a second though.

The fun part about weekends is just sitting around. Saturday I ended up taking pictures at the game again. Got some good ones since the players ran down the sidelines a few times and at one point actually ended up coming out of bounds and stopping about 4 feet in front of me. Luckily the lens I had zoomed out a reasonable amount for that. Sunday was church followed by a run to Chipotle to get my receipt good for one free burrito on Tuesday. That should be good... Listened to the CD that came with the latest Wired. It's one of those that's best loud. It's creative commons licenses and they all allow non-commercial sharing so if you don't have a copy and want one (and know me), let me know. Watched Foolproof, which was an interesting movie. Not pushed to as fast of a pace as some, but had some good twists. In other news, I bought my house a year ago today. True fact, although I didn't really think much about it other than my mom mentioned it to me. I think I need to call my insurance guy to ask if they want the money for insurance too. That reminded me that I got the description of the insurance and changes and amount but never anything saying where to send money or when they wanted it. I'm pretty sure they want something though...

Sometimes I feel like as soon as I start to get things off my list of things to do, people just come up with more things to ask for. But whatever I guess, they'll get done as time permits.

Saturday was getting up too early and going to the Bethel Football game at Concordia. I wasn't driving though, so I got to just relax in the car. Got breakfast and dinner for free too. Didn't get many good pictures, although maybe I'll look into cropping and posting some of them. On the way back the team and everyone stopped at some parents' house for deserts and stuff which was fun. Then I put in my headphones so I couldn't hear anyone else and slept for most of the rest of the way home. I still think it's odd I wake up every time we get to the exit coming back down 94. Doesn't happen on any other exit, but it seems to happen about there every time. Pretty much just enough time before getting to my parents' house to get everything ready to just get out car (at least for me, everyone else seems to spend 10 minutes getting out). At least I got a decent amount of sleep.

Sunday was Salem as usual, although the service was a bit different than usual. And I was really tired. Odd how that happens when you get a lot more sleep than usual. Got home and my brother wanted to watch the Vikings so that was on for a bit. They had something funky going on with the audio today though. It'd jump to what seemed like a different feed and the audio would repeat like a second or so but souding like it came from different microphones. Really odd. After that sat around for a bit and eventually watched Saved!. It's a sorta funny movie, but I think most of the good parts were in the trailer (what else is new these days). They seemed to do a pretty decent job of reflecting reality, but watching the deleted scenes and bloopers explains a lot about why things happened the way they did. It also seems they did a bit of rewriting between takes. The most annoying technical thing was probably what looked like an issue with the telecine - the objects in the frame would move a bit relative to the entire frame. It almost seemed to be an issue with audio vibration messing up frame alignment in places causing it to be pushed to one side or the other every other frame. It seems odd they'd have it playing where it could have an effect, maybe just only noticed it more there (which would make sense given how the soundtrack had more bass in long slow shots than in quicker shots with more motion). Anyways, worth seeing at least once. After that watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That's a good movie, although there were things they probably could have left out or find better things to put in where they needed to break up the memories. It was almost like they were trying to push the fact there were issues with the process, but they don't really go that way and then show how well it's worked otherwise. It did seem like they did a bit too much tying up at the end and flashing back to the beginning. Like the knocking on the car window thing. That's what annoys me about most movies that have jumps like this one. But whatever, still a good one to see.

OK, those of you who haven't seen Shaolin Soccer are missing a really funny movie. You should have come to movie night. Now you'll have to rent it or buy it.

Quote of the day - "Adobe Photoshop: When you want the truth, really bad." Unfortunately I didn't see the original skit, does anyone have a copy of it though? It sounds really funny.