Nothing too exciting, thus the lack of posts. Lots of just has to be done stuff. I started an account audit for Windows accounts to clean up for the summer. We have way too many people with duplicate accounts, and then there's the whole really leanient on student accounts so we have like 2700 that aren't current students (I just cleaned those up last year too - I didn't realize our turnover was that high). We'll see how that goes this week though when I actually dive in and start doing things with the accounts. Friday night brooke invited a bunch of people over to her place for dinner and then a movie. She made some good soup, despite her claims of not being able to cook (granted it was just opening cans and stirring, but...). Not too many people showed up - besides the 4 obvious it was just Dan and I. After that I went to BestBuy with brooke and Joe to get Joe's graduation present sorted out. He ended up returning the gamecube and got an Xbox instead. Also ended up getting a couple games, an extra controller, and the dvd remote. After unpacking it and starting to play it promptly overheated though. brooke and I spent time alternating between playing the game and trying to figure out why it kept overheating even after cooling down while Joe checked out of his place. Eventually Travis came over and we found the fan making noise attempting to spin. So the thing went back in the box to go back to the store the next morning. Hopefully he got a new one that works now. Saturday was relax day. Slept in a bunch, sat around the house, and watched The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I'd have to say the reviews were a bit off on that one. Yea it wasn't the greatest movie ever, but it was actually pretty decent. It's not a movie to be expecting a plot, but more of just a fun pulling together of a bunch of classic book heros to conquer the evil guys. Standard fun no-thinking action flick. I'd have to recommend it. Sunday was Salem, followed by going home and sitting around some more. Still raining of course. I like rain a bit, but I think the biggest thing is the big storm aspect. I just keep looking outside hopeful for lightning and thunder that shakes everything and stuff blowing everywhere for high winds, and all I see is rain hitting and bouncing off the ground and a world of highly saturated color. So it became time to listen to music downstairs some more. I need to get a more comfortable chair down there. It's always good though, sometimes music just needs to be cranked up a bit. Eventually started watching Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, which was recommended to me at some point. It's a good thing I don't remember where, since that thing was boring as heck. Didn't take long to reach over and grab the computer and start surfing the net more. I let it play through, but didn't pay much attention to the last hour and a half. Doesn't help that it was 160 some minutes long. The guy seems a bit odd. Oh well, at least I didn't suffer through it all. Then there was the season finale of Alias, which seemed to try to cover too much and jump around more than normal. Sorta makes sense to try and tie up loose ends for the summer, but they seemed to do less of that than opening up a bunch of new things and then finishing quick and going to something new. Oh well, we'll see what next fall brings. Tomorrow is back to work, and hopefully only deleting the accounts on my list...

The bonfire was good. A lot of people didn't show up, but we had a big fire so they were the ones missing out. Sunday was Salem as usual, followed by just reading online. There was some interesting stuff on slashdot today. I think my favorite quote of the day in reference to impossible things is "but moores laws and fry's electronics has certainly changed that." Finished off the day by watching The Untouchables. Good movie, although not my favorite type of movie. It's stormy outside now though, and lots of thunder and stuff. That's always fun.

Yea, it's been a while, but asking about it doesn't get new posts up more often. :) I just haven't had too much to write about, and have been doing other things I guess. I don't remember what happened Wednesday at work, so it must have been pretty routine. Lunch was sorta a surprise trip to Chipotle. We were going to Noodles, and then that changed as we were in the parking lot driving out. Austin had mentioned to me that it was raining outside, but a few minutes earlier I had looked outside and saw people just standing around on the phone, which didn't seem like a likely combination. The trip to lunch turned up why though - it was alternating between no rain and pouring down so hard you couldn't see 50ft in front of you. Always interesting, but you have to time your trips between enclosed areas properly to stay dry. The whole weather thing also caused the air in one of our server rooms to be rather humid. Turns out they never set the new AC unit to control humidity, and the old one was mainly case fan exhaust so was showing an artificially low number. Spent some time tweaking that, and it seems to be keeping the room better overall temperature wise too. You'd think the HVAC people would do it right when they set it up, especially after they spent like a week figuring out how to stabilize the temperature variances. That night Ben and Josie came over to see my place and spend the night. They were passing through on their way to Rochester to look for a place there, and since they hadn't ever seen my place it made a great excuse to stay. Ben and I watched Matrix Revolutions which is an OK movie. The soundtrack is a little messed up (weird distortions on fades on the surrounds especially - sounds like bad compression artifacts), but it could be the disc is just scratched as it's Netflix. Thursday was another one of those uneventful days, although with some more HVAC checking (everything always looked good though). Friday we had someone from the HVAC crew turn off the older air conditioner since they thought it wasn't needed. Nevermind that we need all 8 tons to keep the room in the range it should be within. Friday was spent looking at Active Directory stuff, as well as Avalon. We had some problems with Word XP still, and think it may be a bug exposed due to Application Data being redirected. No other app has problems, which is annoying, since it points to Word but what are we gonna do. I vote for OpenOffice everywhere, but... I managed to get a policy set up so Application Data would go back in the roaming part of the profile. Hopefully that'll make things more stable, but now I'll probably have to deal with people complaining about how long it takes them to log in/out again... It was also a night to stay late working on Avalon. I spent some time planning a new layout for our entire AD structure, which can hopefully be implimented at least partially sometime this summer. Then I demoted Avalon as a domain controller since I have two other ones running right now due to some other things that came up. Hopefully that'll help the load out a lot. The history of the domains unfortunately has involved a lot of combining file servers with domain controllers (typical small environment stuff), but we've definitely grown to the point where that's a bad idea. That and the merging of two distinct computing communities and another goofy split meant most of the AD redesign. Of course a CS prof had an assignment due at midnight (two hours after the outage started), and a bunch of people decided to work on it at the last minute. I think they survided though - I was done before midnight and none of them were around anymore. Of course I ran into the fact that the account management stuff all broke because of the change, so had to get that up and running. Should be now though, and I haven't heard any complaints so I'm caling it good. Saturday morning was sleep in time, which was nice. I had been really tired for a good chunk of the week. I need to not stay up as late. Tonight is a bonfire, which should be fun. If you don't know about it you haven't been talking to the right people this week.

On Thursday the OS X server seemed stable and everything on it was fine, so served out all the shares and hoped for the best. Avalon had been stable for the most part, but I had heard a few complaints about "freezing" so best to get it out of the way before problems happened. Apparently something was up with mac authentication through MacAdmin so taking off Avalon from the list caused students to be unable to log in. My staff account could log in fine, but not my student one. I got a temporary fix in place which allowed logins but took a bit longer that evening, and Mike and I sorted it out in the morning. Not sure why the other AFP auth wasn't working, but it seems the combination of OS 9, and OS X server, and macadmin still needs plaintext password (the old AFP server always required them too, so oh well). Totally shut off AFP and AppleTalk on Avalon which should help the load over the next couple weeks. I think Thursday wins for the week with 1022 Incidents modified. I didn't look on Friday, but the Help Desk seemed somewhat more relaxed, so... Friday was Arby's for lunch, and we even dragged jherter out with us. Always a good time, if slightly on the more expensive side. Avalon seemed pretty stable all day, and the disks didn't show much IO wait which is a good sign. After work hung out around Bethel a bit and fixed an app that had been broken on my site for quite a while. My cousin called and will be coming through the cities this next week and hasn't seen my place yet, so they're gonna stay here for a night. That should be fun, as I haven't seen them since Christmas. Then I tried to talk brooke into leaving the mass voicemail about people being put in "The Dungeon" VLAN for misbehaving computers using TextEdit and the BadNews voice. She didn't go for it for some reason (although the sample "you have been burninated" message sounded pretty funny)... Then Dave and I headed down to Station-4 (their website currently sucks) for a Moxie Bliss concert. A bit too loud, although mixed better than a lot I've been to. Can't complain for free though. We left shortly after they finished since we hadn't heard of the others and even after calling and bugging him Ross wasn't gonna show up. Excessive caffeine was already necessary anyways, so it was time to call that a night. Saturday was sleep in a lot day, which is always nice. Read up on the tech stuff a bit and fixed some speed issues in my newsreader (mainly involving indexing and cleaning out around 60k old articles). Then realized it was definitely time to go grocery shopping since the fridge was starting to get empty. Got back and found out the SSL wildcard cert for work had expired - oops. Apparently problems with getting the right name on them didn't get worked out in time. Oh well, at least I'm not responsible for buying the certs (except one which has the correct name and has been in place for a while without any hastle for probably a month now). The SSL cert people sure seem to do a pretty poor job for how much they charge though. Finished off the evening by watching Brotherhood of the Wolf. That genre line on IMDB really is about right (it's listed under 6). Basically think Sleepy Hollow meets The Matrix. They made extensive use of time distortion on the visuals (both speeding up and freezeframe), usually to good effect. One scene made me think of the Burly Brawl in Reloaded quite a bit down to even the coat, which is funny considering it came out two years earlier... I grabbed it through Netflix on a recommendation so didn't catch language thing at first. The only talking by the people where you can see their faces in the first fifteen minutes or so is a couple sentences, so suddenly I realized that it was actually doing the dubbed version by default. I don't get that - who in their right mind defaults to a dubbed track? A quick drop to the menu resulted in finding there was a french track and english subtitles (which seem to have some thought put into them), which was much better. Good movie, but the french origin definitely shows. The good outweighs the bad though and I'd recommend it.

Sunday was good. The morning was my sister's confirmation. Went a little long, but was good. That was followed by lunch at Olive Garden and the unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks. I normally don't eat too much on Sundays, so only ended up eating two bowls of Zuppa Toscana, but it was good (especially since my second bowl was a fresh batch). I don't think it quite compares to Emily's Chicken Potato Chowder (not as creamy), but it's good. For the afternoon I watched Shrek, which is a very funny movie. The nice touch was the lens flare for a wide open aperature of all things. Think about that one for a second... Sorta like the new M&Ms commercial (which also looks animated). The soundtrack is good too, gotta love when they pull out Joan Jett songs in a kids movie. After the movie was music time again. After the Sunday night TV I decided it would be a good idea to turn off the projector, but was too lazy to go turn on the lights. I realized I actually like it better that way. Those who have been at my place know how I have the entire front wall of the room a black cloth surface and that I can effectively shut off almost all outside light. So yea, if I look up from my computer screen there's *nothing*. It's the kind of dark your eyes just kind of focus off way into the distance trying to find something. Yet the only thing is a couple LEDs on the light switch off to the side. It actually makes the listening experience better in my opinion, as the walls just disappear. Especially with some processing so the sound comes from all around it sounds like being in an extremely large room or just open space. I've heard lots of recommendations about how listening in the dark can be much better but never bothered for no good reason (it's not the walking in the dark part - I walk around doing things without bothering to turn the lights on all the time). Too bad I just discover this when it's gonna start being light outside for longer. At least nobody complains if I crank the music in the middle of the night...

Friday was as Fridays have been recently, at least as far as work was concerned. I need to start planning something fun for Fridays to get rid of that. Did end up taking the fixed BethelAuth module that Andy had cleaned up after we discovered and fixed a rather major bug in it and converted it to the other format and posted them up on the docs site. Then had to track down everyone who uses auth and tell them. It wasn't a security bug or anything, which was good. I had been meaning to do that for quite a while lately, since there were a lot of little upgrades he had added over the last couple years. After work was the 2004 ITS Student Worker BBQ which also was Tenley's going away party. It was good, although seemed a little quieter/slower than last year - oh well. After that Dave and I went over to my place and watched Kill Bill: Vol. 1. I have to say that's one of the best movies I've seen in a while, and I'm pretty sure Dave agreed. We were trying to think of a theater good enough to go see Vol. 2 in. The soundtrack for the movie was very well done, with extreme attention to detail (should have expected that though). I'm not sure why I didn't have that much interest in the film when it first came out, I blame the reviews saying it was just full of violence and stuff (true, but that's not anywhere close to the main purpose of it). Anyways Saturday slept in a decent amount, sat around reading tech stuff, and then watched Reservoir Dogs. Good movie, not sure which I like better yet (leaning towards Kill Bill due to the more complex plot). After that decided it was listening to music time. Some (most?) songs sound great with Logic 7, but I found 2-3 tonight that get some really odd effects. Sound like modern pop as defined by the radio. On the other hand, hearing about your favorite radio city sounded amazingly well defined in the surrounds. Every time I'm down there listening I realize I should do it more often - some music just doesn't sound that great with headphones, you need the effect of feeling the music. Maroon 5's Harder to Breathe was one I really noticed tonight. I've never been too big of a fan when listening on headphones or even upstairs at home. Get it on the good system though... I may have to pull out the rest of the album.

Lately updating this has seemed like just another annoying thing to do. I think I finally figured out why - it requires thinking. Lately at work I've been trying to push away from more of the tedious stuff and to planning. This requires thinking, but then I get distracted on some other thing that comes up, so I have all these different threads going on at once. By the end of the day I don't want to do anything. I go home, sit and just read tech stuff, and do nothing else until bed. I think tomorrow I may try and not read any tech stuff and just listen to music. It's been a while since I listened to the whole Go Home concert... Tuesday otherwise went pretty well. Spent some time with the Macs and AD again. We got them binding properly. Seems a big annoyance with the current version is they have to be bound by a user account in the domain to which they are binding. Even though we have permissions assigned to normal tech accounts for the Windows side, we'll have to use something else for the Macs (probably end up being a binding-only account). We found some interesting DNS stuff, but then that stuff got shot down, so we still have poking to do as to why some stuff has worked and others have not worked. Between Tuesday and Wednesday though I think we're pretty much set for some sort of solution this summer. Also spent some time talking to Quan about how we need to migrate people properly because of the way the Mac deals with resource forks through AFP versus SMB and WebDAV. Probably gonna end up with some sort of document. Lunch on Wednesday was Olive Garden for the Soup and Salad deal. The waiter was very quick on getting us more of both before we needed them, and even left us the cheese grater (and swapped it out twice when we ran out of cheese - yea we used a lot). That was a good lunch. Eddington's is tomorrow with the Chicken Potato Chowder - hard to go wrong with Zuppa one day and that the next. After work on Wednesday went home and watched Ice Age. While the story isn't that great, it does hold the interest just enough and the animation is good.

Pretty normal weekend. Slept in really late on Saturday. Almost got up at noon, but then apparently fell back asleep before managing to get all the way out of bed and slept for another hour. Pretty much sat around and did nothing all day, except a bit of tech reading. Then decided I was glad I didn't choose AT&T Wireless again. As if their network wasn't bad enough already, apparently the entire thing pretty much collapsed on itself for a decent chunk of Saturday. Turns out an OC-192 in Texas went down, and apparently it handled a good chunk of their GPRS traffic. Not sure why that took out everything else exactly, but probably something to do with load and the domino effect (especially since stuff was sporadic). From what it sounds like how phones interacted with the network during this GSM sound like a pretty crappy interface method, although I'm sure the system had reasons. Why the heck should rebooting a phone be needed to reconnect? And why doesn't AT&T use the features of GSM that are sorta like the PRLs in other systems? Oh well... Sunday slept in later than I should have, but still made it to Salem basically on time. Ended up being sorta warm in there, but it was a relatively short service too, which was nice. After that sat around reading the aftermath of yesterday's problems as mentioned above. Then watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. That movie has it's funny parts, but I still seriously think it's overrated. I've never gotten how people can sit there going through sound clips forever. They're maybe funny on their own as an occational thing, but putting a bunch together just gets annoying... By the time the movie was over I was definitely more interested in what was going on outside. I promptly grabbed my camera and ventured into the world of water, hard flying objects (hail and big raindrops driven by high speed wind), and bright flashes of light. Unfortunately it was one big overcast sky with nothing too interesting, but I may have gotten some other interesting ones. I just set everything up to dry out a bit when I got back inside, so I'll have to go retrieve the pics later. After that turned on the local TV to discover that everything was focusing on the weather. SD too, so you'd think that they could have put the network feeds on HD on a subchannel, but whatever. They moved Alias back to 11 something and then only put it in SD, which was a bit of a disappointment. I sat and listened to music on my big system for a while, which I don't do near often enough. The furniture in my office upstairs and the resulting speaker layout just doesn't lend itself well to a good music listening environment. It's nice to just listen to music in a relaxed environment too. If it weren't for having to go to work tomorrow, I'd probably listen to music a lot longer here.

Web hosting stuff still down. I submitted a trouble ticket, asking why they were bouncing email and when it would be back up, and they talked about hardware and software problems and it was being worked on but no estimate. They ended the email with "Because we are aware of this issue, you do not need to submit a ticket." That was rather nice of them I thought - add that to the list of reasons... Anyways, today was Church with my family, at least sorta. I showed up to church on time, and by the time church started they still weren't there so other people ended up sitting by me. They ended up being like 5 rows back by the time they got there. After church shut down the mail server for a bit again. Seeing as the backend still isn't up, I'm doing a sort of manual greylisting to cut spam. Bring it up and leave it up for long enough for legit mail to queue through, but leave it shut down rejecting mail enough that spammers don't end up getting mail through if they don't use a real mail server queue (especially overnight and stuff when they like to send). Hopefully the server will actually be up sometime soon - it'd be nice for mail to go through like normal. Anyways, around lunch time we headed up to have Easter with my dad's side of the family. That was good food, although too much of it. Then hid some plastic eggs for the younger kids to find, and a lot of sitting around. Got back home and did my taxes. The M1W form seems to be the laziest thing for the state... There aren't that many different types of W2 forms... Anyways, that only took a few minutes (I still don't see why people complain so much - for individuals it takes under a half hour for the vast majority of people). Finished off the night by watching Cyborg 2. Not that great of a movie. The DVD looked like it was filmed on video, but also looked like transfer off a decently worn film. The story was sorta interesting, but the acting and writing wasn't all that great either.

So I'm actually writing this from the web update rather than just sending my website an email. It's been a long time since I last did that. The reason is because my crazy webhost (for qux.net and the mail, not for a lot of the other sites I host) has been down all day, which was annoying but I could deal with it since my mail server was just spooling stuff. Then they turned on the SMTP listener again, but managed to get it to give a 550 error (user unknown) for every valid address. Of course they still haven't actually fixed it, and I submitted a trouble ticket with no response. So the frontend mail spool is off right now, and if you send mail to my qux.net address I won't get it for a while. I should fix it so it silently spools in a bit here so I don't have to deal with people wondering about it. I gotta drop that host soon - they were good at first, but now sorta suck. Always slow, they've done this (although not as bad) a few times, and their billing system is pretty crappy. So yea, stay away from communitech and their many resellers. Anyways, today went well. I woke up rather sore for some unknown reason. I didn't think I had slept curled up or anything, but must have since even standing up straight was annoying. Managed to stretch out sorta slowly. Sat around for a bit, and then went to see The Passion of the Christ with my family. Second time I've seen it, and I still think it's a good movie. The theater we saw it in looked pretty good at first and concessions weren't too pricy (at least candy, pop was expensive), but the seats were pretty uncomfortable. Managed to get a collection of voicemails during the movie, so spent the next 20 minutes on the phone responding to those. Then hung out with the family a bit. They wanted me to stay even longer, but I was sorta tired and wanted to go home. Ended up watching Waterworld when I got home. Not a great movie, but it doesn't suck as bad as the general opinion seems to be. It seems to try and push the fact that it's in the future even though it's in the past a bit too much. Anyways, I'm tired, and I got some sendmail poking to do..