Pretty usual week, thus the lack of posts. Friday night ended up rebuilding my powerbook since the partitioning tools from Apple suck. There's no good reason to not allow changing partitions on a system drive (I could see the system partition maybe, but not others). It seems to be running better for the most part. This time I actually went through custom and chose not to install the stuff I never used anyways (and discovered used way too much space). That includes iCal, iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, GarageBand and the like. Unfortunately they still include too much crap. Like Address Book, Chess, iChat, Internet Connect, Mail, and Stickies. They already have a custom install, why make us still have to delete a bunch of crap afterwords? At least it still sorta resembles it's unix roots and I was able to drop in my home directory and have it work. Why it can't be on it's own partition you never have to touch when reinstalling without worrying about the partitioning issue if you want to move space around though...

Saturday was a busy day. Woke up in the morning to some pages from idiots who decided our blocking them from the mail servers meant they should try again in the middle of the night from a different machine (this one doesn't look quite as cracked). It was rather nice of them to include paging the sysadmins as part of the spam run though... Then there was a Soccer game followed by Football. It was cold and the lens didn't like the cold much. I had to help it focusing occationally, and still ended up with an unfortunate number of not-quite-focused shots. After the football game ended up taking some pics up at seminary since I was there and there was a good view with the colors and the lake. Took a look at the inter-building cable runs too since I hadn't been up there since they went in - interesting. After that was off to my parents' place for dinner since it was my mom's birthday. Pizza, followed by Radio. Good movie, good story.

Sunday was Salem and listening to Politics in church. That was interesting. Then some sitting around the house. Finished off the day by watching 3 movies. Started with Red Dragon. It's definitely an interesting story, seemed stronger and doesn't seem as held back as the other two. Second was The Shining. Seems like a failure compared to Kubrick's other films. I heard bad things about it, but tried to think it couldn't be so bad. So the movie starts off with the shadow of the helicopter they're shooting from visible in the shot - and doesn't get any better. Oh well, I guess they can't all be perfect. I ended up realigning my projector a bit during this one. Finished off the night with Conspiracy Theory. I liked that movie. It's one of those ones where there's action and they reverse the plot a ton of times. Some people like those, some don't. And now I need to get up early again tomorrow, so that's it.

Sunday went well. First movie was Reindeer Games, which was actually pretty good despite Ben Affleck. Then there was Equilibrium. Definitely better than I was expecting. Think the plot line of Nineteen Eighty-Four, mixed with The Matrix with more fighting style and less special effect, and taking down the man in the end.

Monday ended up getting up entirely too early to return the lens and teleconverters from Saturday. Luckily I can pretty easily avoid 35W for most of the troublesome parts, so it only took like 10 minutes to get to Minneapolis even at 8am. Then there was work, which was sorta just miscellaneous stuff again. It's another one of the just busy enough to be wondering which thing to do, but not so busy that you actually get time to worry. Working on stuff that makes me wait for it doesn't help the problem either. Oh well, hopefully I'll start getting stuff sorted and started enough where I don't have to worry. Unfortunately it looks like I may have another server which is flaking out... :( I did manage to lock up my powerbook completely today too. To the point where I had to hold the power button. Crazy thing is starting to be slow again. Stuff is way too integrated and it has too many internal dependencies. It's one way to maintain a basic "user friendly" interface, but it kills predictibility and therefore productivity in the process. Allow events which aren't dependent on relative timing to happen even while waiting for other things to go. Oh well, enough ranting for now.

Another week complete. Nothing too exciting during the week. Got advisor mailing lists up and running, and some other miscellaneous stuff. Sesame Beef, but they apparently didn't give Wing all that great of meat this time. On Friday stuff crashed, people didn't tell people, and Nick and I figured it out when tracking down other problems. Then more stuff died, we blocked stuff, and it worked. Then the router paniced loosing the block rules, and I hacked root and added them back, along with a startup script in case it crashed again. Did get monitoring up though and since then nimda has created a couple dozen Incidents for machines which are misbehaving. 1.4GB of blocked SYN traffic so far - wow. Nick and I finished off the night by going to Taco Bell and ended up eating outside because the inside was closed. Oh well, it was a nice night.

Saturday I got up early to attempt to make it to the Bethel football game. Go out to my car and it just clicks when I turn the key. After a bit of troubleshooting and poking with meters and vaporizing metal, determined that it wasn't a dead battery, but actually the battery was broken. Luckily figured that out just in time before Betsy and Pete came over to give it a jump (thanks for being willing to help out), saving them the trip. The thing was apparently leaking acid (there was a puddle of probably .75 liters of acid in the battery tray only visible once the battery was out), and it had caused the post to corrode and come off the battery. At first it only looked like it had broken, thus the attempts to bridge it and the vaporized metal (ah, the fun chemistry of lead acid). Ended up with a trip to buy a new battery (under $40), going through a few boxes of baking soda do neutralize the acid, and a jump to get it over to my parents place where we cleaned it out, got the old battery post properly removed from the cables, and washed and siphoned out the tray, and it's back up and running. More excitement than I wanted for the day. Only got one acid burn from it and it's pretty small.

Mixed in with all that were two sports games. The first was Bethel's at Hamline. Even saw Mr. Boyum there, and got a picture of him avoiding looking at the camera. My dad got his 20d Friday so I got my camera back and got to use his 28-70mm USM IS lens that came with it (he was using a 70-200 USM IS 2.8L). Nice lens, and very fast focus. Probably should get a little closer than the stands with it though. Another photographer there loaned him a 1.4x teleconverter for the day, so his photos should be interesting. After that went to my youngest sister's soccer game, and ended up swapping lenses and using the L for a bit. That one's even nicer, although having a lens that weights 3x as much as the camera and is worth 2x as much feels a little odd. Probably can't justify buying it, but they can be rented in the cities for about $25/day (a weekend is a "day"), so may have to do that occationally.

Finished off Saturday (well, other than the car thing) by Betsy, Pete, brooke, Joe, and Travis coming over for movie night. We watched Rushmore which is a decent movie, although seems a bit rushed. Probably could have stretched it out to 2 hours and not had it been too boring. Sunday was church at Salem, which I was tired for. I must not have slept well since I was both tired and sore. Oh well. Closed up some stuff for work (stuff from Friday night), and just sorta relaxed for the afternoon. Watched Underworld, which was pretty decent. Think the Matrix movies without the disappointment of what happened to the story, mixed with something like The Crow. Lots of shooting and chasing/acrobatics, along with a scarily realistic soundtrack. You know how most movies sorta have lots of vibration when shots happen? This one you feel the shots. And there are lots of PoV shots when one person gets attacked by another - and you feel those impacts too. Fun movie.

Short week, but nothing too eventful. Tuesday was L&O day with pizza. Wednesday was Nick buying a car, and Dave skipped out since he was sick so I gave him a lift up there. Got a free lunch at Noodles out of the deal though. Thursday and Friday the boss was sick. Luckily Dave wasn't though, as that would have really been no fun. Had a meeting with some ITS people and HR to sort through some organizational stuff and how it should be stored and handled for some processes. Effectively was a crash course in how the whole system is set up and stuff for me, which was interesting. Hopefully once it's sorted out it'll be easier for everyone. Friday was lunch at Chipotle, which is much to rare of an occurance.

There was more of the what's lately become usual talking with people too. Friday night I started looking over some stuff and thinking about it. Saturday I ended up writing a bunch of documentation and sorted out some other things. A handful of knowledgebase articles and an email were the result. Hopefully that will solidify some policies and push other people to write more and also help this whole situation a bit.

Besides the above there was lots of sitting and just listening to music to relax. I need a better music listening chair though. Maybe I need to rearrange some stuff from upstairs. Saturday went out to dinner with the family after the soccer and football stuff they went to. That's becoming a trend on Saturdays, but I'm not arguing. My dad is continuing to take a ton of pictures with my camera - really liking it in combination with some lenses he's been renting. Hopefully his will come in soon so I can have mine back.

Sunday started off with Salem. The parking lot was amazingly empty, even though for some reason I was thinking church started 15 minutes later than it did so was late. Actually that's how it started after I woke up. Last night was the power outage fun at Bethel. Luckily I didn't have to go in, but Brent (and I think Doug) were there shutting down things. All my stuff in my office stayed up, as the outage was only a bit over an hour. A few fewer problems to deal with. When I got up I only had to start SMTP on the exchange server as that apparently didn't get started before the outage (it was down for an unrelated reason). After church was just sitting around relaxing for most of the day. Starting in late evening was movie marathon. First movie was Poolhall Junkies. I really liked that one. The soundtrack especially seemed better done than most. Next was Spawn. That's an odd movie, but decent. Finished off with The Professional, which is another good movie. And that concludes the weekend, or at least the interesting part.

Last week was interesting. We could sometimes reach our servers, and sometimes couldn't. I think as of today they have it pretty well fixed, but I'm sure something will come up with the number of changes that had to be made. Like all the pages I've been getting for the past 20 minutes probably mean something, especially since it was so quiet for the past day. I'm just glad that I can basically ignore it since my systems themselves stay up and I can't do anything about their connectivity.

I did get a lot of other stuff done though, like a bunch of mailing lists moved to the new server. With most of them people aren't even noticing the move, which is nice. Also lots more miscellaneous stuff, like reprogramming an alarm, talking to lots of people about stuff again, and generally dealing with the day to day stuff. I like Dave's response to what he does (as the same applies to both of us) - sit in an office and type all day. It sure is a lot simpler to explain.

Friday after work brought my sister over to get a bike and also went shopping at Sam's club. I picked up a few weeks worth of Dew, so shouldn't be running out for a bit. Saturday was sleep in and then try and ignore pages. Stuff broke again. I hear Doug worked most of the weekend, hopefully he gets a break now. Ross called me to invite me to a barbeque/bonfire, but I didn't feel like doing much of anything other than sitting around - I was still tired from the week. I did finish up Alias Season 2 though. Now I just have to watch Season 3 and I'll be caught up. I suppose I should get myth working again before Season 4 starts. I now have the box in the same closet as the HD tuner, so should be able to get better quality captures.

Sunday was church followed by sitting around the house all day. Basically trying to stay awake. I watched Identity, which was an interesting idea, but badly done. They start setting it up one way and it's really obvious it's gonna end with a reversal and yea... Can't really recommend based on the plot. If you're watching on a good system though, the sound is good, as well as the video cuts. While not having a great surround field, it has a lot of punch on the "surprises". That was followed by bringing in 4.5 gallons of Dew into the office so I don't have to carry it in later and mailing back the movie so I can get more sooner. Hmm. Mountain Dew Ice Cream. That actually sounds good.

Monday was sleep in day. Although it seems everyone forgot, at least at first. It was nice though. Stuff broke, and they fixed it, and I got to ignore it. Except when I couldn't get my email, that was sorta annoying. The mailing list server unsubscribed a ton of people today from one list I moved over. They had been bouncing ever since the migration. Apparently the old server just threw away the bounces and never bothered actually disabling or unsubscribing people. Hopefully this way we'll have less junk flying around the mail system long-term. Finally completely removed and reinstalled fink on my powerbook, so now I can install stuff. Got gimp up and running so I can edit pictures again. I have to say that it doesn't perform as well on large images as my linux box did. Then again, I normally seem to have problems with memory management on this box. There was a responsiveness glitch though. When changing layers and stuff and it had to swap things in from disk it'd take forever and the X11 interface doesn't seem to handle async very well. I wonder if it's based off older X code. Unfortunately that happened quite a bit. It warned me though that the image file was too big when I created it - I probably just need to tweak the settings a bit. It doesn't like when you get more than 11 million pixels or so in the image. Finished off the evening by watching Count of Monte Cristo, which was OK, followed by Rising Sun. It's been a bit over 10 years since I read the book (back in my reading every Michael Chichton book I could get my hands on phase), but I have to say when they say "based on the book" in this case it's pretty loose. They kept the general plot, but seem to have dropped half the investigation. Oh well, after seeing what they did to Jurassic Park, Congo, and Sphere, and especially Lost World, shouldn't be too surprised... I wonder what's in store for tomorrow.

My guess is that car was stolen, given that it was in neutral, the button on the gear shift was broken, the doors were unlocked, and it had an open ignition. Security was putting a boot on it as I left, but it was gone the next morning too. Cops probably came and got it. The dent in my car was gone by the next morning when I went to work, so at least I don't have to deal with it.

I think this is the calmest school startup we've had since I've been at Bethel. Seriously, none of my stuff has really broken. The biggest issue we've seen is some switches flaking out, and Doug and Brent and I fixed that at least in the short term with not much work (we just effectively rebooted the network). Things started looping and confusing each other since buffers filled up and things started looping. That's fixed now though, at least on the network. There's still the maximum packet size at north village, but that's just helping them get their exercise since they have to either know what they're doing or go to the main campus. Other than that, I managed to eliminate one email list server so far - only two more to go. I also wrote a bounce handler to deal with bouncing emails for a lot of things, so none of the bounces for lists get to me now. The Help Desk probably will notice that they're not getting bounces for Incidents anymore soon too.

Last night was movie night with Butterfly Effect. Way too many of you didn't show up. Claim bad scheduling or whatever, but I didn't pick the day. And Doug even showed up. It was definitely a good movie. It was guys against girls on which ending was better (we watched both). Doug and Ross and I liked the director's cut, while Meghan and Steph and Lindsey liked the theatrical version. I wonder if that's trend holds (Hint: notice the "Add Comment" link below)? The movie was definitely different than what I was expecting. It's not a scary movie at all, but it is designed to shock and surprise you (like everything flashes and you feel an impact shock). It's an interesting one to think about the ideas involved in it.

Today was interesting. Lunch involved going Ross and I going to my place to eat leftover pizza from movie night watch Mr. Rogers. There need to be more shows like that on TV. Then before I leave work today Curt Koehn stops by and we chat for quite a while. He says hi to all you Bethel people I work with since I'll probably forget to tell you in person. Then I finish off the night by fixing email lists as someone is trying to use them, followed by watching Episode 1 of Season 2 of Alias. I'd say it's a good day.

Thursday was interesting. We set up "Where's George", a webcam for the Bethel community to see the location of George. This was possible due to his standing outside greeting the freshmen and their parents as they moved in. It was pretty funny, although we did end up with a no-more-webcams-without-permission decree... Oh well, we were allowed to keep it up for the day, and it was fun while it lasted. Lunch was interesting, as a bunch of us just needed to get off campus, and had a fun time trying to get back on. We ended up eating lunch while sitting in the car listening to tunes in a long line of cars...

Work for the Thursday and Friday ended up mostly being list stuff. Setting up lots of lists, evaluating selection criteria for others, and migrating things to the new server. I managed to get most of the ones off one of the servers, and should hopefully be able to decommission that this next week after I hear back on some things. Saturday I was on call for the afternoon, and since I had to wake up and be available anyways, I figured I should put the time to use and did more lists stuff. There is definitely a more noticable latency doing X forwarding to Bethel now than during the summer though.

Saturday night a bunch of people came over and we watched Kill Bill: Vol. 1 followed by Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Good movies, although I had some issues with part of the ending on Vol. 2. I also discovered my walls have an interesting reasonance I'm gonna have to deal with. Sunday was Salem which was crowded due to a bunch of freshmen from Bethel being there for a service project. After that did a little grocery shopping so I can eat food at home for a while again. Then started watching The Man Who Wasn't There. That's an interesting movie. Billy Bob is an interesting actor. Don't see many black and white movies from this century either. Then the family went out to dinner for my brother's birthday at Green Mill, which was good. Then I finished the previously mentioned movie, and now am just sitting around. Realizing tomorrow is back to work. And hopefully not having to deal with a lot of stuff...

Saturday was decent. I didn't feel much better, but it was Meghan's going away party so I was outside a decent part of the day, which might have helped. After the party I fixed my dad's computer a bit, and that was it. Sunday was church at Salem, and I took a nap. I don't remember much else.

Monday was the first day of the fun known as training and welcome week. Basically since then I've been busy with work stuff constantly. Tuesday I started off the day with making some progress on the list server. I finished off the day doing a mass migration of email lists to the new server and rushing to get temp LDAP entries in place so we could go live since another system was broken. A bit over 4000 email lists in a day, that works. We'll find bugs in production I guess - so far all the new server restrictions seem to be working as planned though. Then Wednesday I finished up a script to add, modify, and delete LDAP aliases automatically, which should save hastle. That was also new student pizza and movie night which was fun with Ice Age. Although a bunch of us sat on our computers during it. And Mike Vedders leaves too many programs up and running while playing movies on the projector... That was followed by setting up my sister's computer (Macs have some cool features to help fix PCs), and meeting all her roommates and getting attacked by Austin in the process. 4 people at the movie ended up in her room, it was sorta weird.

Then I got this email forwarded to me. It was spam. No big deal, it's happened before, someone gets a list of Bethel people, the email servers don't like them anymore. The pattern in this one looks really odd though. Start poking a bit more, and see a distinct thing meaning the list came from one of two places. Look on one and someone obviously trying to get around the filters to harvest addresses. A marketing company, different from the spamming company. The emails are coming in at a rate slow enough that it's obvious they're trying to avoid detection. What a pain. Harvest from web (over 2 days, also likely to lessen chance of detection), demunge, and sell. At least the emails admitted they're an advertisement. How low can you go though - even targeted to the organization name...

It was a pretty relaxing day. Although it's starting to get humid again, which isn't fun. I'll probably turn on the air conditioning and that means should clean the cottonwood off the condenser soon. Maybe it's time to acquire a hose.

Started off the day with Salem, which was good. Then Dave and I realised neither of us had much to do, so we went and looked at the wiring he spent all day working on with Ross on Saturday. It looks good guys. Then was home to see that Bethel's network connection was down. Oh well, not much I can do. Sat around for a bit just reading stuff.

After a few hours Dave and I went to go see The Bourne Supremacy, which I thought was a good movie. It was an interesting balance between explaining and allowing the viewer to figure it out, but I thought it made for a more interesting movie. The shakiness didn't really bother me. It was a little overdone and I can see how a couple certain scenes could annoy people, but the cool part was you were effectively watching the scenes from a bunch of perspectives at once. The odd focusing annoyed me a bit more - it's unusual to see the side of the face in focus but not the eyes. In some places it did fit, but others seemed out of place. What actually annoyed me the most about it was the copy serial dots. They're noticable enough in a normal movie, but when the movie is cut down to fractions of seconds and you're trying to track that, they're a lot more noticable. If they would have stuck with yellow instead of red it wouldn't be near as bad...

Now Bethel's network connection is up again, so I'm responding to emails. I hope I can finish up these projects soon, and then it's a while of keeping strict hours. Sometimes it's annoying having to test stuff while people aren't around (I suppose I could test during the day, but I don't think I'd be friends with the Help Desk people for long).

The week is finally over. I'm quite happy about that. Not only were both Brent and Mike gone all week, but it's the time for students to start using our resources again and for faculty to come back and start complaining about things. And of course everything has to be done "now". Monday night started off with a movie night. brooke did a decent job of picking a movie, that movie being Dead Poets Society, even though it's not quite good enough for the number of times I've seen it. It was a good time though. Unfortunately most of the other nights of the week were just relaxing to keep my sanity.

The big project for the week was to get lists stuff up and running. The problem with that is that is mainly coding at this point, which means it doesn't work well when I'm covering for things. I installed Windows XP and some management tools on my powerbook, so I shouldn't have to VNC into the servers near as much anymore. SP2 breaks mmc if exchange stuff is installed though, which is a bad thing. We managed to chew through a ton of backup tapes too, and one of the tape drives really messed itself up and took a good amount of time to fix. I managed to forget about a lot of other tape swaps now that I think about it too. And you don't want to know what our restore window is now - just don't delete stuff accidentally. :)

There's also this whole Windows architecture thing to finish before school. So I rebuilt an old server up as our new Apps server. I figured out which Mac apps only run in classic mode and archived those, and the native OS X ones are in the process of being migrated. Stupid macs and slashes in file names, and stupid windows for not allowing slashes in file names. Neither is a good idea to encourage I say. I also started tweaking the domains, and disabling lm announcements on servers to which users shouldn't be directly browsing (they shouldn't be using browsing at all, but...). I think I may be able to completely control what shows up in the lists anyways, but we'll see on that. Also experimented with turning off netbios on some windows stuff. Apparently macs still use smb over netbios rather than smb though to connect (even though they say smb). They've only been doing it for a couple years, I don't see why they went for the old technology. Half my file servers aren't accessible from half the places on the network either. It's not my fault though, and I can't do anything about it, so I don't worry about it. People don't like when my reaction though - "Yea, they can't get to that. It'll probably be like that for a few days. Have them try again next week." Overall that part is good though. We could start school without any big problems right away I think. Other than apparently someone followed some really old instructions and mathematica 5 doesn't work in some places. 2 years was more than enough time to transition that one...

The lists stuff. I didn't do more course testing or anything, but I think that's stable. I still need to do automated membership for courses. I did write and install a new module after I got home last night that does sending location verification. Basically a message has to come from on campus (including webmail) or be sent with authenticated smtp or the list servers will bounce the message for most lists. It also bounces mail flagged as spam. Those two should make a lot of list managers happy. The management tools for list moderators are greatly improved as well. For when users send a message to a list in multiple ways (such as to multiple addresses) it also detects and bounces all but the first one with a note about watching the recipients when replying to all. There are other cool things in there too, but they're my secrets. The wonders of procmail and perl and what can be achieved. I still need to get automatically populated lists up and running. I think I may try and do that Monday. I think that means Monday is get-stuff-done day, which means I may not check Incidents at all. If you work for the Help Desk sorry, they'll have to wait until the next day. It probably isn't a big deal. Like that "had to be done within 2 days" restore a month ago that they just noticed the restore wasn't what they needed.

Saturday was more work stuff. I went in and actually got some stuff done (thus the plan for continuing it on Monday, but I can't break stuff then). I changed the lab logon notice to prevent people clicking close right away. It does go away, and you can put stuff over it. Hopefully people will actually take note of it now. Most of my other stuff hasn't broken anything yet, so things are still working. I need to get an old machine and test some last stuff though. Apparently we need to keep Windows 95 and 98 machines working like they're part of the domain for a bit longer. :( We'll see if I get motivated to actually do stuff on Sunday. Maybe I should do a couple smaller movie nights this week just to force me to to take a break after last week.