Funny link of the day - Rock, Paper, Saddam. And those of you at Bethel should get a laugh out of this. I also had a cool pirate keyboard picture, but I'm too lazy to go get the link right now. Ask brooke if you want to see it.

Yea, the guy died, but this is just crazy. Pretty much demonstrates why I only bother with reading news through RSS or a few online sources anymore. At least there I can easily ignore it, when with all the others you're stuck hearing them go on about it for hours... I guess when they have nothing better to cover, they latch on to whatever they can.

"Awake Ye Heathens!" Sorry, just listening to OSAS and I like that quote. The way it's said reminds me of Gandalf a bit. Anyways, came across an article that schdav would like. The author shares our views of running, which seems to be a minority view. I like the comment on joggers contributing to the heat death of the universe by increasing local entropy unnecessarily. I apparently am low on music balance too, since I can't order stuff right now. I should probably get more of that. Too many movie soundtracks recently I guess.

First movie of the day was The Transporter. That's just a funny movie to laugh at or when you just need a good action flic. Pure action, extremely simplistic and unbelievable plot. Just like an action flick should be. :) I liked the soundtrack on it too. It's not the stuff you'd just listen to, but more environmental. Second movie was Spider-Man 2. I liked it, except about halfway through I started thinking "wait, isn't this supposed to be in New York? New York doesn't have an El." Yea, other than that a decent movie. I liked most of its soundtrack too. I'm starting to think that based on my recent movies I may have stumbled across soundtrack recommendations rather than movie recommendations. Oh well, I listen to music a whole lot more than I watch movies.

Actually yesterday I was complaining about iTunes and its horrible latency at switching songs and how my Karma does it better. Mr. Boyum managed to find that someone wrote a native OS X output plugin for xmms, so now I'm switched back to that. One more ugly brushed metal app out of the way... Yea, my biggest complaint about OS X (and Windows) apps is resource allocation. Too often there is stuff going on in the background which for some reason takes precidence over the UI. I think that the command line is partially why I'm able to live with it - I can get a couple lines of commands out while waiting for the system to respond and show the keystrokes while it's off doing something or has to wait. That's another thing that bugs me, is the UI tries to be intelligent. If I type a bunch of stuff but the application is locked (or it can't reach that app over the network), those commands are to that window. I should be able to switch to another window or application and have all the previous keystrokes and mouse clicks go through. I'm realisizing the key reason I like X so much is it's asynchronous. It's necessary due to the client/server architecture, where the server has to queue the commands to the specific client until it responds. I've learned over the years to take maximum advantage of that fact by typing where a box will exist, or clicking where the button will be in a few seconds. Due to the way it is handled you can think ahead of the system and know it'll do what you want rather than having to watch and see. I also realized that X11 under OS X apparently has clickthrough on window selection, so I'm starting to seriously reconsider going all X again. I can live without Aqua (the title bars are too big anyways). Should be interesting to see if I can get motivated to actually dig up X versions for darwinppc or recompile all the apps for it.

Friday it felt like I got a lot of stuff done. Of course I had a huge amount left at the end of the day too. Oh well, such is life I guess. Hopefully I can soon get stuff in place so I can do the rest in more manageable pieces. It snowed a lot on Friday. When I was going to bed it sounded like sorta like a hailstorm with it hitting the side of the house too. Saturday I was woken up by my brother wanting to know stuff about the snowblower since it wouldn't run right. Apparently it didn't work out since when I woke up and actually got up, the whole thing had been shoveled. First movie of the day was Code 46. It was interesting, but I wasn't too impressed either. I think my favorite part was how they did the titles and then added the multilingual part on top of that. Second movie was Timeline. This one was more interesting, but still lacking a bit. I have a feeling it's like the rest of Michael Crichton books, where the book is a lot better than the movie. I think this is another one that I managed not to read the book for. He tends to give a lot of detail that you which you figure out later. In the movie they take those parts and make the discovery of the relation to prior details way too obvious. Oh well, I think it's worth watching at least once. Anyways, while watching trailers, I saw one for this. I realized that Jena Malone is building a rather odd reputation of the characters she plays in movies. In looking at the news I also found how to shovel snow. And in reading blogs stumbled across a funny church sign. And after seeing parts of the football season this year as my brother watches it, I'd have to agree with this argument. The fact that they can pay for that much advertising is crazy too - apparently they're making plenty of profit. Prescription drugs are one of those things that don't seem right to advertise. Those who need it should be told by their doctor (if a doctor doesn't know about treatment options or where to get that info, get a new doctor), and doctors are already bribed enough by the pharmaceutical companies about new drugs. Such is life where they can get people to demand overpriced and probably unnecessary treatments, the doctors will prescribe to get the patient to stop bugging them, and the insurance company is stuck paying for them. OK, I should go find something better to do...

Alias going downhill? It sure seems that way. I was skeptical from the start with the intro they've been playing this year, but then there was this week's episode ("Ice"). Weiss' comment to Marshall pretty much summed up that scene, and then there was the scene in the hospital as Syndey is walking away... I like the history of the show, the other parts, and the directions it could go. I just really don't want it to continue going the direction it appears to be.

Apparently Columbia House doesn't know how to manage their systems. They've been wanting me to do one of the 5 movies for $0.49 each and we'll cancel and start your membership over. I figure what the heck, I want some movies anyways. That was in December sometime. Today I get another offer of the same thing (which I have no account currently listed as "good standing", just a closed and new member). I also get a letter from them triggered by the closing of the one account about how I can reopen it and they'll give me the trial offer. I just laugh and wonder how much they're gonna spend sending me these things over the next year. After I canceled the one they started sending new offers to my old address too (which they got the change right once, apparently it duplicated and now both are in there).

Last night apparently all the ideas people had been giving me about our Incident tracking system at work got sorted out by my brain and I ended up writing a long list of stuff to implement. Unfortunately it happened while I was trying to fall asleep, so I was tired (thus the sending myself the long list so I could try to ignore and deal with it later). I got a lot of stuff done today, hopefully stuff will move relatively quickly. It should allow us to streamline a lot of current stuff and add other things easier as well. Should be interesting.

A quote I saw today: "It's the cigarette that smokes, you're just the sucker."

"This is the last time you will ever have to feel alone on our nation's roadways." Sorry if you were actually paying attention to that thing. I didn't know anything about it until I was pointed at the web site this evening. Who knows what that means though. OnStar? XM? Probably not something worth getting a new car for though...

It was a good day back. It was schdav's birthday today, so we wished him all a happy one. We got free breakfast too, which is always nice (if I remember it or check my voicemail within a few days of it). Got stuff done at work, but another one of those feels like nothing got done days. Lots of little stuff I guess. Not much else interesting, just figured I'd post the above.

Today was nice and relaxing - Holidays are good. I woke up to my phone ringing because the server room was calling to complain about the power being out. Apparently there was a power outage, and the generators kicked in. I never heard about another one, so it must have transitioned off OK (or still running on them). Anyways, after bugging people about them having to work and me sitting around doing nothing for a while, I caught up on news and then went to watch movies.

First movie of the day was Underworld. That movie has one of the most awesome non-DTS soundtracks I've heard. Usually it seems people just don't pay attention to the regular mix, and the DTS is so much better. I sometimes think it's so the DD mix sounds better on cheap speakers, so in this case it could be that this isn't a super mainstream movie. I don't remember if the normal cut had quite the same quality either. I like the extra footage in some areas, but at least one could have been left out. More explanations for stuff, longer fight sequence at the end... Very good movie. Second movie was The Butterfly Effect. I watched the Director's cut, as that's the one I like better. Some of you may remember I watched this last fall and all the guys liked the Director's cut and the girls liked the Theatrical cut. The reasoning was mainly because of the last scene and the possibility of them getting back together. So I'm watching the deleted scenes and the extra two endings that has which are similar to the theatrical release. One of those actually has them getting back together. So if you really liked that way and wanted to see that happen, you should watch the alternates. And I have some dust in my projector apparently. It's not noticable sometimes, but other times is really noticable (especially after you notice it). I think I'll have to figure out how to get that apart and take a look at it.

Pretty normal Sunday, although I'm glad I don't work tomorrow. Extra sleeping in is always good. Started with church at Salem. The shuttle showed up today in a reasonable amount of time, which was nice. The last couple weeks they've seemed a bit flaky (like they don't come for 10+ minutes so drive or walk over to the main lot to minimize lateness for the service). After that my brother and a friend watched the game. Apparently the Vikings lost. They went upstairs around the end of the game I think. After a while I went up to see if they were done watching and I could switch to something else - they were gone. I asked later and apparently he thought I was watching so he didn't turn it off. Not sure how that idea crossed his mind. Anyways, started off the movie sequence with Below which was decent. Not the best I've seen, but I've seen a lot worse too. I think the premise is a bit overdone, but they started to take it in an interesting direction but nothing really became of it. The filming style was interesting, but they didn't seem to make good use of it. After that switched to a bit of comedy and watched Mr. Deeds. There were some funny parts, some overdone parts, and overall I'd say it's pretty decent. Don't watch it expecting to think a lot though. After that and a bit of chatting with friends, I switched back to the how-many-characters-can-we-kill-off genre and watched Pitch Black. I think it probably has become my second favorite Vin Diesel movie, first probably being Boiler Room since it makes you think a bit. Anyways, I haven't tracked the games or anything, but I think the storyline is interesting. They built out the character pretty well I think. The movie doesn't seem to fall to a lot of the shortcuts a lot of movies of this type seem to have. And that wraps up my Sunday.

Saturdays are good. I think it was cold outside, but I didn't go out there. Movies for the day were Lost in Translation and The Italian Job. Both are good movies.

Got some big stuff out of the way on Friday, which was nice. Network stayed up too, which I'm happy about. I got a new switch in my office too, which will hopefully be nice. It means I can test stuff easier at least. So you know that email I mentioned a couple days ago? Today I got another one, which was much better. The link was even plaintext. I'm amazed - maybe they do have someone who knows what they're doing there. :) So today apparently Internap's Fisher Plaza facility in Seattle lost power. Apparently it's not the first time either. Word is they may have been doing construction on one floor. Oops. In other outage news, Verizon just had a second major cable cut occurance in a week. Apparently each time has been multiple cables in diverse locations too. Sounds like someone's upset with them for some reason. And speaking of people being upset with other people, sometimes there are good reasons. You'd think they'd do some basic sanity checking... Tonight went well. Nick and I went to go look at TVs, but he didn't buy anything. He'll probably update his site though... After that went home, and my brother came home and had a friend over and we watched Windtalkers. Good movie. Now I'm gonna go try to get on a decent sleep schedule for the weekend.