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...