Thursday went well, mostly miscellaneous stuff. Helped Mike J with the Windows and Active Directory stuff as needed, and he got OS X working right with it. Now it's just changing stuff bit by bit until we figure out why it didn't work in our production environment (I have a feeling it'll end up being something with cross-domain authentication). Lunch was a Chinese buffet with Sheldon and a few coworkers. That went well, although my breath reeked for the rest of the day (to the point people a decent distance from me could smell it), and breath mints and dew didn't help much. Given Dave's experience as well, I'm thinking we'll avoid that place for a while. After work I played with my phone a bit. No luck on the fast connection stuff. I did manage to get it to connect, but my pppd got confused with something and dropped the conection while my phone didn't. This caused problems when it thought I was logged in while I really wasn't. Hopefully I'll get that stable soon. When I went home I sat around and just caught up on tech reading and stuff. Friday was sleeping in until after noon. Then there was restocking the office dew supply, depositing some rebate checks (and finally updating my address with the bank), and getting some necessities at Cub. Watched Bowling for Columbine which is an interesting movie. It brings up a lot of good points, but I also agree with "bob the moo"'s comments on imdb about Moore's style and things he did. After that figured out I was confused about the time all day (stupid SprintPCS), and headed over to Nick's place. There we watched The Breakfast Club, which is good. I always catch more things each time I see that. After that we just hung out and talked until everyone left. Got home and find someone infected with a virus. No big deal until his computer starts having fun with the lists server - apparently he had a lot of list server messages on his machine for the thing to pull addresses from. Got sick of that rather quickly (as I see the amount of time to clean up the held message queues growing) so blacklisted his machine on the two main mail servers. The cool part is now that we have SMTP blocking, those are the only two that can be used from on campus anyways, so the spreading is effectively stopped. Why do people insist on opening password protected zips from people they don't know and then running them?!?

Well, it was Monday. Poked around some more, looked into Windows domains a bit more. Those things are just trouble... Flabre and I went to lunch at Boston Market, and overheard an interesting loud and one-sided conversation from another table. It was sorta funny to listen to actually, plus the food there is always good. Other than that moved some more accounts, and also restored email for someone who managed to delete it. After work sat around a bit, and then watched Basic. I thought it was a really good movie. It seems the people complaining about it don't like the ending, which is sorta the key. It's one of those ones where the plot does a complete 180 5 times in 10 minutes, and you never know exactly what's gonna happen. The movie was also well done, and never slow. The soundtrack was decent through most of it (one weird spot with a song sample), but unfortunately they had to only have a Dolby Digital version and no DTS. DD tends to somewhat kill environmental sounds in the rear, especially stuff like rain when there are loud effects up front (gunfire). Basically the droplets turn into a compressed mush (highs merge between channels, and what's left is the general dynamic with no detail). Oh well, movie's still worth seeing. Very shallow depth of field almost throughout, with some interesting pans. Camera guys had to be staying pretty awake.

Well, glad the week is over. I've been tired all week, so sleeping in will be nice... Nothing too exciting this week that I've done. The coding I did wednesday night (not the rss stuff) did confuse a lot of people at work. Basically I sent everyone who logged into our main work software to a spoof of our blocked web site page when they first attempted to access it. Dave also changed his site a bit, and I debated scaring and confusing people too, but I didn't. Today was campus beautification, and most of our department went out and wandered around picking up trash for an hour or so. That was sorta cool. Lunch was Chipotle with the ITS crowd, and Obang ended up joining us since he happened to be walking by as one of the cars was leaving Bethel, which was cool. Apparently we were only two under the record for the number of people in the one booth. We had 7, and I'm not sure how they'd manage to jam 9 in there, but if Dave could do it in his car (and include a picnic basket), there must be a way. Other news is 10 finally got a blog. She's been debating it for a while, and my bugging her about needing to get one before she leaves this morning apparently worked. And yea, as she commented about (and now that it's actually been announced), she's ditching us to move halfway across the country - apparently she thinks she's too good for us Minnesota people or something. :) Finished off the day with Movie night. A bunch of people came over, and we watched Tommy Boy followed by Airplane. Nick and I were the only two who ended up staying through all of both movies, but it was fun anyways. Time to start the weekend off right though...

Thursday involved miscellaneous stuff again, and ordering an SSL cert. The company decided to mess with the O and OU elements of the cert, which has rather annoyed us. There was also an interesting discussion on resnet-l about what different schools are doing regarding email quotas and limits. The evening was spent at Ross' place again, setting up outside. He needs a new camera though, as this one seems to have trouble from about 6am-6pm because of too much light. And at night it can't seem to get decent pictures either... Fun project though, and we have ideas for what may be a good camera to get (we'll see in another week). Friday was interesting, another day of just enough stuff coming up to not get started on projects. Ross and I spent some time getting spybot installing, updating, and running automatically on the lab machines. This is nice for both of us since I'll get fewer profile reset requests and he'll have to reimage fewer machines. It goes nice and slow, but most of the work is done on shutdown and the machines shouldn't ever be rebooted during the day (they do it automatically at night) so it should be good. I also got more WebDAV stuff set up, this time with a different server (hopefully we can push those production soon). My new headphones somehow showed up (UPS ground in 2 days!?!), which was a nice touch. They're much smaller than my old ones, and sound better too. The biggest benefit is I can't hear someone talking right next to me, so they'll be good for both work and on my vacation. Anyways, while Ross and I were working on spybot testing after the lab closed he was almost falling asleep, but somehow managed to stay awake into the evening. This was good as it was movie night. The movie ended up being School of Rock, which was very funny. Had a decent number of people show up, more than I was expecting, but that's always fun. After they left though I was definitely ready for bed. Saturday slept in a lot, followed by getting up and doing nothing. Spent most of the day listening to music (with earphones). Those things are so nice. The only drawback so far seems to be that they're sorta disorienting after listening for a while since they press on the inside of the ear canal and change slightly how you hear the reflections of ambient noise. Ended up ordering the CF card finally, as well as a sleeve for my laptop so I can put it in a backpack without needing a special one for vacation. In the evening went out to Macaroni Grill with the family. Good time, although way too much food in a single day again. Apparently I was the only one who decided it might be a good idea to look at where it was before leaving, so was able to drive right to it even having never been there and only having been in the mall once before. I say if the resources are there why don't people use them? Was a good time though.

Well, week didn't start off too well. A server started rebooting right as I started to get settled into the day, and it turns out we suspected heat. So I ended up finding out the AC in the server room was broken, and they're gonna try and fix it tomorrow morning. But in the meantime while trying to sort out other problems caused by the first machine, and attempting to figure out why the first machine kept dying, it seems the first machine's motherboard got fried, so I stole a machine from the Help Desk and have that in there now. Of course it had to be a server which had tons of tiny roles everywhere... After work Dave came over and we watched Lost in Translation. Good movie. Soundtrack was great, and the camera work was interesting, although a bit off at times.

Wow, it's been a while. Last week went pretty decent. More talk of email viruses and ways to avoid them. There was a big outage which I heard a lot about, but thankfuly didn't really have any effect on me. Thursday morning was a bit busy. I spent the entire morning responding to emails, until I finally took a break for lunch. Lunch was Village Wok, which was really good. Thankfully the afternoon slowed down a bit and I got to do other things, although I did manage to create a bit of an upset by reminding everyone of a policy we had. That night we had a little incident with the email server which I discovered when an email hit my cell phone on my way home. Sometimes typos can be really bad. I managed to figure out that it was still happening about an hour later (effects were sorta rippling through slowly), and shut down the appropriate servers to clean out the queues. Thankfully it stayed sorta isolated so all the services that people see were unaffected. Friday started off by seeing snow everywhere. I took some pictures at home, as well as on the way into work. Nothing too exciting, but maybe I'll post some of them anyways. Work was miscellaneous stuff, followed by discovery that verizon decided to drop the msg.myvzw.com domain without telling anyone who was using it. Luckily vtext.com does the same thing, and we were able to just transition over. Weird though - I wonder if it'll come back. Friday night I took down all the Windows servers for maintenance. Went pretty well, think I squashed all the problems we had been seeing, at least for now. We'll see if any come back and deal with them then. Hopefully the loads will be more stable without AFP and they won't get confused again. Saturday I slept in a lot (like until afternoon) which was great since I had been so tired. I got up and did nothing for a while, followed by going over to Nick's place and calibrating his audio stuff. Got it all set up with reference level now, and it was great for demo stuff. The timing was important there because he was having a bunch of people over for food followed by Runaway Jury. Good movie, suspense was rather well done. After that most of the people went to play broomball, but Dave and I ditched and headed over to Ross' place to hang out with other people. After quite a bit of going through the options we watched Fletch. Chevy Chase movies have this unique humor to them which I think is great (as does everyone else who was there). After the movie was just chatting, as well as some people wrestling while the rest of us laughed and Dave dug himself deeper and deeper holes with his comments. Was a late night, but good. Sunday was Salem again, followed by just sitting around relaxing some more. Read more on photo stuff, followed by more. Talked to my dad for quite a while about what filters we had and which sizes, and which would be handy for both of us, and eventually selected a few. Also got a couple step up and step down rings since we're to three lens sizes now. Found my dad an overstock on a cross screen which fits his digital for $4, which was a nice find. All the filters I got won't come in handy right away, but hopefully will. I decided against color correction filters when I realized that since I'm shooting digitally and have manual white balance correction I can do that much cheaper with inverted color samples. Now I just need to stop by a paint store and put together a palette of appropriate samples. :) Hopefully the cheap Ultra II CF card I want will come back in stock within a couple days so I can order that without much markup for fast shipping. Other things of note, I'm still really liking the headset I bought a couple weeks back. I've used it a few hours this weekend, and it's great since even after an hour or so on the phone it still isn't uncomfortable, which is more than I can say about holding any phone. Now there's just the annoying heat problem of a phone in the pocket to deal with...

Sunday went pretty well. Got up and went to Salem, which was sorta interactive so it kept me awake. After that spent some time cleaning the house, since people were coming over. A lot of people in the house, but not as many as superbowl and definitely a different environment with family of all ages. After that read some more geeky stuff online, and banned another IP from the mail server for a few hours. It was sending enough the servers didn't like running through all the virus infected machine checks for all of them since it was probably around 1000 in a few minutes time. My total for Sunday for alerts is 2602, which is fewer than Saturday (which is actually 2930 after I realize I missed some) but still way too high. A few more non-ResNet machines infected too. :( Finished off the night by watching Outbreak. Interesting movie and kept my attention, but nothing stood out as great. After that I had an IM from wiljefv with this game in it. It's more strategy than timing, which is more fun in my opinion. I'm currently at level 30 but stuck and tired, so we'll see how big of a replay factor it has (since there doesn't appear to be a way to save the games).

So Tuesday night, right after I post (well, like 10 seconds before, but I didn't know until a minute or so later), Avalon goes down. Stupid thing... Wednesday involved documentation, moving a server, meeting with people, way too much caffeine, and drafting an announcement. After work I just sorta sat around. I ended up ordering a headset for my phone (cell phones are nice because they're small, but after about a half hour get annoying to hold). Too bad all the wireless ones are really expensive. Could maybe get one used for $50, but when a good new wired one is well under $20... Anyways, didn't do anything special for shipping and it was almost delivered to my house less than 12 hours later (I wasn't there to sign for it), which amazed me. UPS is the only shipping company that never seems to do that... Finished off the night by starting a conversion of Nothing So Strange from MPEG-4/aac (yes, a legit copy) to MPEG-2/ac3 for DVD. Sorta weird since I hadn't seen one in aac before, and transcode doesn't support aac natively. Had to pull the stream out and decode with faad and use them separately. Of course transcode doesn't like the file format for some reason either, so I may have to extract the streams, convert and re-multiplex. I like them easier when they're simple... Thursday work was similar, but not as big of things. Servers acting up a bit, trying to fit things different places, etc. I did finish building a server and brought it up to the server room today. I got sick of the crazy slow elevators and just grabbed it and went up the stairs. People looked at me sorta weird for that one - server in one hand, dew in the other, walking up the stairs like it's perfectly normal. Anyways, after work did nothing for a bit again, and then went to see The Passion of the Christ with some people from Bethel. I have to say that movie is really good. People say it is very violent, and I sorta see their point compared to a lot of mainstream stuff, but it doesn't seem much different than some other movies that came to mind. On the flip side those movies are fiction and while some are also designed to invoke ideas about the wrong in the world, this is actually made as a documentary. In my opinion there it's not possible to really portray the awful truth of what happened without actually showing it, and assuming that is the intent they actually probably cut too much. I do have to admit I am coming from a perspective of not being easily disturbed - I didn't feel any urge to look away at any point, although I realise a lot of people do. The sad truth is this isn't made up - people have been tortured both based on beliefs and just because some people are really messed up (no not making a rip on the director in this instance, but refering to the actions of the main character), and society can't always ignore it and pretend nothing happened. Hopefully this movie will make people really think about a lot of different things. OK, enough ranting before I go from content into the technical side. *%@! red reel serialization dots - and I thought yellow was bad...

Friday... It's never fun when important people say or do things and schedules get swapped around. Spent most of the day migrating people off a server. Actually went incredibly smooth, I'm sure partially since we picked probably the easiest group to do it to. Ended up staying a bit late, and talked to Joe for a long time. Gave me time to finish up everything though, and what could have turned into a couple checks over the weekend was done before I went to bed. Saturday slept in really late. Then sat and just listened to music for a while. I need to figure out a way to create playlists based on quality though. Even 160kbps encodings can sound quite bad when in a mix of higher quality ones. Took a couple pictures, and played with gimp a bit. For the evening went over to Dave's sister's place, where he was dogsitting, and watched Cinema Paradiso and hung out with friends. Good flick, although the quality was a bit odd at times on the technical side (weird film grain issues). Was very wide awake due to all the sleep, but Sunday morning not sure what happened to that. Kept waking up for like an hour earlier than I needed to, but then could hardly stay awake in church. In the afternoon worked on my photo web application some more. I now have the ability to edit captions and descriptions, as well as rearrange images on the admin area (on my laptop). The public interface also has comments now, and I have a way to sync them with a single command too. It makes it a lot easier when you can design the database around replacing parts separately. Ended up with a bit of a headache, not quite sure why. Sorta like lack of caffeine (yea, I know that's bad), but it's not like I hadn't had any in a long enough time for withdrawal. Decided to pick a relatively short movie though, and watched Behind Enemy Lines. The pounding inside my head quickly gave way to the pounding on my chest by the movie. That movie is very well done technically. The picture was awesome, and the sound even better. I especially liked the way they handled sudden panic type events, mimicing the way the human mind tends to work there, and otherwise with perspective and camera shaking. The soundtrack while sounding a bit odd if you're just looking at it or hearing it, but if you're actually immersed in the story is very well chosen. The plot was relatively decent too, but had the usual failings of an action movie in that regard. :( The movie's definitely meant to involve you by making you feel like you're there with both video and sound, so if you haven't seen it on a good system you may want to watch it again. Anyways, I think it's time for me to try and sleep off the headache, and hope that tomorrow's not a mess as a result of Friday's work...

Avalon managed to stay up and running all day today, which was very nice. I also spent some time testing WebDAV stuff. Turns out drop folders and trying to write to read only stuff causes some problems. Both Windows and Mac OS have issues when messing with emulated disk devices which disappear as the driver effectively crashes. Managed to lock up multiple machines multiple times. Also spent some time looking into Shibboleth, which looks really cool. After work went home to discover a notice of attempted delivery for a registered mail package rather than a box with my data cable. Not sure how a package originating outside the US managed to come registered, but now I get to stop by the post office on my way to work tomorrow or wait a couple more days. Guess I get to get up early... While poking around on the net I had my Karma playing on random and it hit The Dolphin Cry. Almost forgot about that song, so out came Distance to Here. I think that's gonna be most of my playlist the next couple days, since I really like the style of it. The style lends itself to acoustic stuff well, but not sure how much I like the acoustic versions of those songs - something about the studio recording style seems to be part of the sound. Watched The American President to finish off the night. Not sure where I got my recommendation, since that's normally not the type of movie I like too much. Other than the DVD transfer being horrible technically, the movie was decent though. I like the fact that this movie came out 4 years before Office Space, the "Yeah, didn't you get the memo?" immediately reminded me of Samir, since it was said in the exact same way in a very similar context. Anyways, to top off the night my brother found this notice in the police report section of the local paper. That's New Brighton for you I guess.