Weekend started off slow. Got to sleep in a bit on Saturday which was nice. Then ended up dragging in a bunch of bricks from the garage. I now have tiered seating with the back row being raised up a little over 7 inches from where it was. Then my mom came over and picked up more bricks for some shelves she was making. I also updated my DVD page so if you know where that is you can see some ideas for the next movie night. Finished off the day with my brother and I watching Twelve Monkeys. Seemed a bit more interesting this time around, but something still seems to be missing from it. Oh well. I also listened to music a lot. That's starting to be a trend.

Sunday started off with church as Salem as usual. After that ordered CDs, specifically Fishtank No. 9 and OSAS and some others. Probably shouldn't have done that, but I like the music that I have, and even though I couldn't find some of it anywhere (mp3.com tracks), they are 128kbps and I was getting annoyed by them. After that went home and picked up some checks, as well as fixed some computers. I'm now on check #1201, and I've had that account since sometime in the mid 90s. Given that I've only been using checks while getting stuff electronic again, I wonder how many years I'll still have my original check order for. And if the bank will ever say anything about the address not matching (I never use checks in person so them not matching my ID doesn't matter). Anyways got home and after more music watched Drunken Master. It's funny since the Cantonese soundtrack randomly switches between English and Cantonese. And whoever did the foley doubled the humor of the movie. Every swing is roughly accompanied by what sounds like someone swinging their hand in front of a microphone. Classic Jackie Chan style. Then I decided to do a basic bit of cleaning up before people come over since there was crap everywhere. Told my brother to do his dishes too. They were starting to smell... And now to go prepare for another day at work tomorrow...

I think Mozilla can get really confused on downloads. I never noticed that on linux, but then I don't download big files that often. I think that started happening at about the 2GB mark, which makes sense if they're using 32bit numbers. They should probably fix that as more people get broadband or use local networks these days. I should have known it wouldn't display right when it had no clue of the file length or estimated time when it started.

Thursday night Dave and I watched The Bourne Identity (the new mangled 2002 version). He didn't remember much of what was in it and afterwards we determined that was because he hadn't seen the whole thing. That movie has a well mixed soundtrack, and good environmental effects. Plus it has a DTS soundtrack to actually take advantage of it. Nothing quite like gunshots and explosions at reference levels. Well, other than the real thing that is.

Friday was System Administrators Appreciation day. Seemed like any other day to me, although I was mainly doing little cleanup tasks. Did some group cleanup in Active Directory. I still have a ton more to do there before school starts. Like building all the departmental areas on our main file server. I did request a lot of database access permissions though, and Dave got them all set up. I completed two automated data sync projects, with architecture in place for another once some other stuff is in place. This will also allow me to start getting the list server stuff together too (finally).

Saturday was relaxing. I saw this article over at slashdot which was interesting. I've always thought something like that would be cool to do (basically like movie night, but outside). Not as an invite-the-public type thing, but just with a bunch of friends some weekend or something. The bugs in MN make it a bit of a pain to pick a location though. Anyone have any good ideas?

And crap - that download died. Seems when the number reached 0 (about 4GB), Mozilla crapped out. And wget -c doesn't like continuing at that stage, so I may be downloading again. :( While I was writing this I was poking around on my computer a bit, looking to find the big space consumers. I think the winner is iDVD. 1.09GB for a single App (that I'll maybe use once or twice)? What the heck?!? After a backup to DVD I think that one is going through the rip out most themes inside it process.

This weekend was mainly time to relax. After working most of the last two weekends I decided this was my weekend. Hopefully the array with the drive that failed will last until next weekend. If not, that's what backups are for. The doing nothing quickly turned into watching movies.

The Crow was movie #1 on Saturday. It had an awesome soundtrack, and it was good technically. The plot was a little odd being was both slow and busy at the same time, but it sets the mood well. It's about death so it already had that feel to it, but then there's the fun element that the main actor was killed while making the movie to top it off.

Movie #2 for Saturday was The 6th Day. I really like how they did the transitions, with a sort of multi-column rotation/overlay. They used a similar effect of the overlay blur during the movie which was cool too (it could be said it was overused, but it fits well with the story). The plot is interesting, although I could see how some people could call is shallow. It does keep bringing up a few ideas, with a very heavy pushing a point of view (anti-cloning). The end is an interesting twist though. It definitely fits under Thriller due to that winding the plot back and forth that seems to show up in all of them. Plus it's action, and hey, I'm a guy.

Sunday morning was church at Salem. Turns out Bjorn is leaving to get ready to go to med school so won't be the worship leader anymore. He was good and the temp people never seemed to have quite the same leading, but hopefully someone good will step in. This is the first I heard of any med school stuff, and it seems odd since he majored in CS and BTS. I hear he's going to a mormon school though, so maybe he's planning on putting that BTS degree to use converting them all. Anyways, hope the best for him.

The first movie for Sunday was PCU. A funny movie, plus it has everyone wanting to kill David Spade. A good one to just laugh at.

After that finally got around to watching Requiem for a Dream. Reminded me a lot of Trainspotting but without the happy ending. He did a good job of having things appear from the point of view of the people in the story. However it is Darren Aronofsky, who seems to have a style of giving as little information as possible at the time, and you figure out how it ties together later. A good film though.

That left a few hours left on Sunday evening, so I figured since the trend seems to be to redesign websites lately, I decided to get in on it. For the most part the biggest change is the the light grey blocks with black text. Unless you're using Netscape 4 for some crazy reason, in which case you're lucky if you got this far. On the backend I converted almost everything to CSS, and eliminated most tables. There's still a few I need to convert, but I figured I'd get the basics done first. I didn't originally intend to make it look different, but it was so easy while I was in there that I did. If you're using a gecko-based browser or one that supports CSS3 (sorry Safari and IE users) you even get rounded borders and stuff. And before you comment about anti-aliasing, they're not images but CSS, so that's your browser doing that. I only tested in Firefox on OS X (and sorta Safari), but it is valid XHTML. Let me know if something looks broken though and if it's something standards compliant to fix it I may consider it.

Today was another work from the couch day. Although that was preceeded by work from the hard wooden benches since the little kids invaded the couches. Oh well, was still a lot nicer than the office, as it was a reasonable temperature. It got hot out today. I don't like when it hits the 90s in MN, as it's just too humid. A few months ago down south I would go spend all day outside in 90+ degree weather, but unfortunately we get humidity here. I did finally totally eliminate BETHEL_DOM today. Hopefully that'll cause less confusion, and creates a more stable and reliable architecture. I'm just glad our new architecture allows us to create central authorities better, as all the server renames mean people try to impersonate old ones (or name their computers things close like aval0n). Hopefully I can test and eliminate even more broadcast traffic by the time school starts. Other things today included finally cleaning up orphaned home directories after two account creations failed within a couple hours due to unknown home directories already existing. And this is the slow time, with only a few new accounts a day...

After work was movie night. As Dave mentioned we were geeking it up ahead of time, with even Ross joining in on keeping his nose in the laptop. The movie was So I Married an Axe Murderer. Good movie, if you thought you were too good to join us you missed a good time.

After the movie I started poking around with StumbleUpon as mentioned on Dave's site. It's an interesting idea, although it quickly served to point out how many web sites there are that just suck. That toolbar is huge too. Being bugged by the toolbar pushed me to start tweaking my desktop environment a bit. I started tweaking the dock a bit, and figured out how to get it smaller than the GUI will let you. I don't see why they limit the minimum icon size to 16 pixels (I'm used to my entire menu bar being 16 pixels high on a much higher res screen). No luck on changing the hide delay speed, so it'll have to stay visible rather than autohide for my sanity. No luck changing the menu bar or window title bar height either. Any thoughts there? I'd like them about half their default height... I did start setting up keyboard shortcuts, we'll see what that does. Started changing what appears in the finder windows and things. I noticed an interesting tendency to have options dupicated and some not really do what's intended. I also am not sure I like the duplicated roles regarding window management. It's sorta weird to be able to switch windows without quartz-wm running. Also killing the window manager really shouldn't make you log out, but whatever. I did poke around with delays on the backlight sensing to increase the delay (preventing screen activity from fooling it). Also finally got around to going and turning off that crazy backlight. It's a cool novelty thing, but sorta an annoying distraction to be able to see your keyboard when working in a darker environment. Ah whatever, I'm starting to get closer to the fence on whether it's worth trying to tweak OS X or just switch to linux where I can make my desktop responsive...

The weekend was too short and too long at the same time. Too long because I was working most of it, and tired the rest. Too short as I didn't get to fix the second problem listed above. I think things went reasonably well despite a few crashes and replanning half of the things that happened. And those numbers that don't seem to match up... While I spent a night rebuilding my dad's machine, which i think I'm finally done with for a while. I actually had time to watch some movies too. One of those too tired to do anything involving thinking, but sleeping would just mess me up further things.

Dreamcatcher (the 2003/Stephen King version) is a decent flick. It does get a little crazy towards the end, although I hear the book is much better so I may have to read that. Whoever recommended that to me did a decent job. As opposed to Serendipity - whoever recommended that one should be glad it's been long enough that I don't remember who it was. Cinematography was decent, with some interesting effects in places. The plot on the other hand had me pretty bored the whole way through - another one where I was checking how much time was left on the DVD a couple times (and glad it was only 90 minutes). If you like the same kind of movies I like, this is one to avoid.

The last few days have been busy, getting ready for this weekend. Talking to people about getting stuff moved and writing notices, making a few exceptions for people who need to be up, other things we can take down at the same time, etc. Then there's fixing things that broke before or making other policy changes... And tracking down a suddenly broken kiosk machine. Turns out some idiot swapped out the NIC (a PCI 3C905B) with an ISA version of the same card. Seems to work fine for us which is nice, but the old NIC is now useless and probably tracked on the local network. Given the history of most of our computer thefts, the culprit will probably try to register it on resnet or something, although this was someone who had the guts to go into the library with a screwdriver and replacement NIC and swap it out. They even moved the dust cover over to the old slot. They did leave behind the WoL cable, which is sorta funny. Last night was way too late reading work stuff and poking for the weekend. Tonight was a good break with movie night. A decent number of people came over and we watched Fletch. My Dock locked up today. Sorta weird, since that collapsed into Finder and then the Apple Menu. Of course then the WM locked and even Alt+Tab wouldn't work. I managed to open up a terminal window and kill it off, which also killed the window management and made all my minimized windows reappear. I realized this is the second time for that today. Earlier all my minimized windows suddenly restored when the background switched. I though it odd, but maybe it was predicting. This machine has only been booted for 5 days, what the heck is up with it? I also noticed that certain window/ui stuff was having weird lags today too (like a short beachball on opening a dropdown). I wonder how open that WM code is in there - I've been really annoyed that focus-follows-mouse isn't avaiable too, so maybe I'll have to go hacker mode for a while and fix it. Maybe I can start poking while waiting for stuff this weekend. Doing some miscellaneous new domain registration stuff I noticed that gandi now has some interesting antispam stuff available now. Sorta interesting, but obscuring the physical name and location may be a bit far... For fun stuff on one of the mailing lists I'm on there's been a "WTF?" thread for the last day or so which started off as oddest things found under a raised floor but has sort spread into odd computer stories. A short time ago someone posted this story. Enjoy.

Monday was good. Lunch at C1 for the last time in a couple weeks. In a day they close for their yearly two week vacation. The Apple thing was today, but didn't pay much attention to that. They didn't provide much publicity for it. Finished off the day tracking down some crazy exchange stuff. Which reminds me I should restart all that is exchange... Meghan came back and was at Bethel today, so it was good to see her. I think she's glad to be back and seeing everyone again. After work was movie night, with quite a few people over. The movie was The Italian Job, played at reference level. Lots of good stuff in there. Of course the Pink Floyd in the soundtrack meant out came the Dark Side of the Moon SACD at even louder levels for the awesome surround mix from Money, as well as Time, which was then refered to as "alarm clock hell". I agree though, that song would be a good prank to pull on a roommate... Well, Exchange is back up and running now, but still appears to be a bit goofy. I think I may have to queue a reboot up for first thing in the morning (the old fasioned way, it doesn't come up right if it's done automatically)... :(

The powerbook is now in pieces. Or more precisely, he "finished disassembling" it and will proceed to put it back together when the part comes in. The part would be the left blower to keep the insides cool, and the ETA is tomorrow. On Wednesday Ted stopped by and we (although my part was mostly watching) took it apart and tried to track it down. After booting it up, starting a loop to peg the CPU, and then playing three movies in quicktime simultaneously as well as plugging it in, we were able to get the fan to come on and it made a clicking/scratching sound. Taking the top off really makes those things cool better. :) The sound changes when you press on it, so we're thinking that the presure from the top screwed down, combined with resonance from the metal casing and the weird noises from the fan is the source of the annoying clicks/beeps/squeaks that once one notices cannot be ignored. We'll find out in a couple days when I get it back though. Last week was more miscellaneous cleanup stuff. We got to the point where the first step became "is this something on our end or do we send it back", which is good in a way because it means the stuff that's really bustificated is probably fixed, but bad because it means we wore out/confused the Help Desk and they don't know what to send where anymore. I think I need to send along more detailed info ahead of time on the next fixes. Towards the end of the week I also started changing and reconfiguring things. I eliminated one of the domains (although even though it disappeared from the list on DCs, the clients still show it - I'll have to figure out what machine needs a swift kick to the power cable to loose that cache entry), which is good because that's one fewer thing to cause problems/confusion. Friday night I also made it a native 2003 domain, and recreated the entire DNS structure for the forest. No, I didn't do the DNS stuff by hand, I'm not that crazy. Basically I set up a new AD integrated zone which means we have multi-master updates available so stuff is more stable if things are down. I also set up scavenging to clean up old workstation records since those tend to build up way too much. Then it was a matter of moving over DCs one by one and forcing DNS registration, and once the forest was built to a reasonable and almost complete level bump up the old zone serial number and allow rollover into the client DNS system. There are a few oddities/old domain records which are finally gone, which is nice. The scavenging plus building everything possible dynamically from scratch means that I now know there's a reason for everything being there and nothing I didn't specifically specify will end up stuck in there. For those worrying, yes I did test domain logins after I made all the changes. I want a quiet Monday too. :) Saturday was setting up wireless at my grandma's place. That included 802.11b (appropriately locked down), wireless video, and wireless phone. Everything seems to be peacefully coexisting, which is pretty cool as I think the video is 2.4Ghz too. After that was attempting to fix my dad's computer too, and getting Qdoba for the entire family. Most people liked it, which was good. Today was sitting around, poking with my dad's machine more (looks like something with the registry so another rebuild), and a visit to Southdale to see chyron off. I ended up watching Trainspotting which is an interesting movie. Not sure how much I liked it yet, I'll have to let it sink in a bit I think. Since the mall visit today I've been using my linux machine again, and it's just serving to frustrate me as to what I'm missing on the mac. I've decided that much of the OS X UI looks nice but has issues. This machine, despite being in PIII 700Mhz mode and having only 512MB RAM, responds much quicker than the G4 1.5 with 1GB RAM. And It's dealing with 1600x1200 on a lower end video card than than the one driving the 1280x854 screen. I'm having a hard time believing it's the hardware, so that leaves the OS. Darwin/mach is pretty quick, so that leaves Aqua. I had turned off many things (Onyx is a cool but not nearly useful enough tool), but I think I need to figure out how to shut off more animations. People say that the windows open plenty fast on the mac, but when I've been used to the new window being completely drawn by the time my hand is off the mouse button... Plus the dropped keys when typing fast is annoying. I thought I was just really fatfingering stuff, but when another coworker commented about it while I was trying to log into a machine, I figured it out. Mostly happens on passwords, I think a little above the 5 keys/sec point (it'll miss like 1-2 characters over the course of a few seconds). When you know it well enough to type faster, but can't see what's actually making it into the machine... Oh well, enough OS X rants for now. I have around 18 hours in the car (minus whatever I end up driving) coming up in the next week to try and make my computer usable like a real OS. :)

Thursday was Staff Appreciation Day, which was good. Twins game so that part wasn't too entertaining, but just sitting around talking with people and not having to work is always nice. Got to go home early too. Thursday was also National Hunger Awareness day, and as many of you probably know that means a free Chipotle burrito if you bring in two canned food items. So a bunch of Bethel people went there in the early evening. Free Chipotle is hard to beat. Later that evening I went to pick up my sister and bring her down to the Airport to pick up a friend's car. Given that I picked my sister up in Maple Grove and didn't really take the most direct way home, I basically made a big loop around the west/central cities. Only like 70 miles, but sometimes it's just fun to drive in the middle of the night on roads with like no other cars and the tunes cranked. Friday I started doing more account audit type stuff. This is cleaning up the old accounts before we do merging. I'd rather just get them out of there or at least flagged to basically ignore since we may have to do manual tweaks and stuff to the active accounts as glitches come up. Friday night was movie night, which was good. Pizza Hut were being jerks about prices so we ended up getting pizza from two places again. Oh well, such is life. Movie was BIg Fish which is interesting. Godo story, but not sure if I liked it yet. It seemed long even though it was only 2 hours. I think part of that is they jump around a lot. Yea it's to set the mood and understandable, but it doesn't seem to be done in a good way. Oh well. Saturday was sleep in day of course. This was followed by a trip to MG and then out to Rogers for my cousin's grad party. When I got there I found out I had to leave in like 15 minutes to bring my other sister to meet my grandma to go to a game. Unfortunately due to road construction this involved more driving than it should have, which wouldn't be bad except that it took some people longer than it should have to say hi to people so we were running late. After that it started raining very hard. Like can hardly see 50 feet in front of you hard. I intended to go home, although due to the aforementioned road construction that route was closed, and the detour route they had is normally bad and the rain didn't make it any better, so I had to go out of the way a bit to get decent roads. That was cool, other than the rain turning into can only see the guy 30 feet ahead of you because of his taillights. Good thing I know that route pretty well, because I couldn't see the signs over the road even as I drove under them. I like rain better when people drive normal in it rather than driving 10 under the limit and hitting the brakes randomly for no apparent reason too. As for the weather otherwise, it's getting too hot. The hot part isn't that bad, except for the humidity thing. Hopefully I'll get my AC running before this next week. As for other fun stuff, the exchange server was acting up the last couple days again. After getting the stuff copied I kept moving boxes over. Then due to old logs the drive filled up. Moved them over to another machine and was able to free up a couple dozen GB and keep the migration going. After all that finished was able to do an integrity check on the old store which returned no problems (funny since it's been complaining for the last few days), followed by a defrag which just builds new files and copies the data over and moves them over the old ones. Now we have around 50GB free, but it's still complaining there's corruption in that store. Crazy thing, at least there's not much in it anymore.

Wednesday was more tracking down accounts as well as poking with AD. Sorta got the new domain up and running. If you're gonna set up a new domain for all your user accounts, do it right. No, that's not edited other than to blur out the other domains. And no, I don't think they'll let me leave it that way for very long, but because of fun AD stuff I couldn't call it Users... Wednesday night was movie night with Matrix Revolutions, which isn't all that great of a movie. First big movie night of the summer though, so that's cool. Mr. Boyum didn't show up so everyone sorta slashdotted his cell phone with calls and text messages. Apparently he was buying groceries at the time too. Didn't get him to come over though. Thursday was more tracking down accounts and stuff. It's amazing with only a few people how many random accounts we can track down off the top of our heads. Still a bunch left though. I'll be happy when that's done, as once we have all accounts associated with something specific they can be audited automatically. I need to track down all these accounts as well as set up the new domain structure pretty quickly. Hopefully the hardware and software will all be here early enough that it's nothing to worry about, but at least I have plans to get domain stuff together beforehand. I'd like to test a lot of locking down heavily by default policies though before it goes production. Thursday night I spent time trying to figure out what's up with the computer talking to the cell phone. I think it's just windows being crazy. I think I need to look into virtual machine stuff there to do snapshots of the system and make troubleshooting easier. Oh well, we'll see if it's worth it (if I can figure out the data init codes it won't be needed).