Friday was Christmas Eve and the associated party with my mom's side of the family. That went well, although I'm not as much a people person as most of them. I sat around and took pictures. Saturday was Christmas Day and the associated party with my dad's side of the family. It was at my parents' place so I had Internet access too. I took more pictures, as I borrowed my dad's lens for the day. Unfortunately it was a little long for sitting in the same room as people, but it worked. After they all left it was Family Christmas. It went well, I got some cool stuff, and ended eating too much and not getting near enough sleep. I went home after we finished presents at like 2am Sunday morning (yea, my family stays up late). Then there was church and back to the parents' for lunch. Sat around there all day, and some other relatives came over to hang out. Went home some time on Monday morning, and stopped by work to fix some stuff which broke on Friday morning. I brought home another stack of laserdiscs to watch.

Over the weekend I managed to acquire a Dwin LD-2 (not as a present). For those who don't know, that's a nice line doubler. Basically put Composite or S-Video in and get RGBS out. I hooked that up between my receiver and projector and threw in a laserdisc. It looked awesome, other than some hum bars which look like possibly a ground loop somewhere. Now I remember why laserdiscs can be nicer than DVDs - it's just my projector's color separation and transcoding system sucks... I ended up watching two sides of Star Trek: Generations while tweaking the thing. The biggest thing I was annoyed by was the black level or lack thereof (I'd previously seen this quality on CRT projectors). I went to bed and slept for around a dozen hours. While laying in bed on Monday afternoon I realized that my projector had threads on the lens but I had never done anything with them. So I checked and the size is the same as my camera. So on went the .6ND filter, and the blacks are a lot better now. After finishing up the 3rd side of Generations, threw in a trailer disc and compared DVDs through the component output in progressive mode and the s-video out through the doubler. As the doubler basically puts out the same as the player in that mode (480p), it was a reasonable comparison to try. One would think that after combining the colors into one signal and then pulling it apart the quality would be crap. Keep in mind though that this thing is not consumer level, and the transcoder in the projector (convert from component to RGB for the panels) is likely pretty cheap. They were actually very comparible, with the color output from the doubler blowing away the component. It makes the DVD player's stock output look flat. Now if I could only get rid of those hum bars... And figure out what to do with anamorphic discs. Unfortunately the projector won't do 16x9 on a VGA input...

Anyways, also watched Fahrenheit 9/11. It was decent technically, but should be laughed at as a documentary. In the interviews it's obvious he's leading people along, he leads people confronting him to say stuff in the way he want so he can twist it, and he does stupid stuff. It's funny how he portraying people who are ignoring the guy with the camera who's trying to ask them question as if they're personally saying they're against his policies. He's just as much a prick to everyone as in his previous big hit about Columbine.

After that sat around for a while and talked to AT&T support about my Ogo. Apparently it needed a complete reset. That caused it to lose all data, but luckily I have a dedicated POP3 account for it so it was able to just pull most of it back in. Sounds like a design flaw to me. Now that I'm able to get GPRS connectivity again I tried signing on to AIM as I was chatting with the guy. Yea, they're admitting that they have major issues with the portals and it's affecting everyone. Fun stuff. Between that and their coverage, I'm thinking it's still on the track for this thing to go back before the end of the trial period. Maybe it'll be more mature in a year or so. Anyways, my brother came home and we watched X2, which is still a good movie. Oh yea, I'm up for movie nights this week, just let me know if you're interested.

Merry Christmas!

Yea, I know. You're all gonna kill me for this one (especially if you're using an LCD monitor), so I'll keep it short. I'm probably off partying somewhere, so you should be too.

Did I mention that browser DOM models suck? Mozilla treats everything as an element all the time, which makes sense. Safari does as a list of nodes, but only if you don't have any paragraph tags in there and you reference it as a list. IE is better than Safari sometimes and worse in others. I need to go read the spec to be sure what they're supposed to be doing, but the Moz way definitely makes the most sense to me (and follows the pure XML models I've used).

It's been busy but boring. Work stuff has been routine get stuff ready for the break/outages/announced changes, not much fun playing with new toys stuff. On Monday Ogo #1 went back to the store. It was sorta funny since it couldn't authenticate to the network at all when I brought it back. Apparently there were major problems with their network that day though. Today Ogo #2 is freaking out (can't properly authenticate and use the network). Given similarities to other outages they've had, I wonder if they increase in roaming traffic is overloading the HLR systems. Oh well, all I know is they can't seem to keep everything up reasonably. One day it's the air interface, the next the portal, and they don't have good coverage where I'd like to use it anytime. Non-work stuff hasn't been much. The VoIP phone worked great at home, but I brought it back to my office. It's sitting here again for a while seeing as there's not much use for it at the office, and we'll see if it keeps working as students get back at the end of Break. Tuesday was Paul's birthday party, which was good. That whole crowd doesn't get together as often since everyone has crazy schedules lately. This morning one of the database servers at work blew up. I fixed a couple other things that depended on it (mainly just getting the online giving back up), and I think I'm gonna leave it until Sunday. It's Christmas, quit trying to work... :) Plus it'd mean going in, and I'm not even supposed to be able to get into the buildings... I'll leave you with a great quote that came across nanog-l this morning.

The true artform of the craft, is to realize that the maintenance, and day to day operations of complex computer systems -isn't- a battle against logic and math, like we were originally taught....

But, in sooth, is a battle against human error, in all its myriad of forms.

-Richard Irving

Wednesday stuff happened. Don't remember much of what anymore, probably just routine stuff, and making sure people knew about that night. After work was fun though, with a bunch of people coming over for RotK. Nick's chili was a big hit and ended up gone before intermission. The movie was also great, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Although I will say the conversation regarding the perceived relationships between characters went downhill towards the end of the movie.

Thursday was the ITS Christmas Party (for staff) with it's associated white elephant party. The swans ended up duplicated on standard letter-sized paper and included in many gifts, and the VP ended up unknowingly claiming "the real swans". It was a lot of fun, and the food was good too. Got more planning for the Christmas shutdown done, but nothing else too interesting. After work decided to poke around a bit with iTunes and rendezvous. I started tunneling 224.0.0.251 mdns traffic from Bethel to my house. It's coming across OK, but my iTunes has latched onto zeroconf addresses and not my public one, so it's not seeing the shares properly. Maybe I'll poke with that later. I don't really listen to anything other than my own music at work even, so not sure why I'm bothering. More of a "how hard is this" than anything. NoBong (a former roommate who stumbled on this site) also emailed me, and it was good to hear from him.

Friday was another skipping work day, so I slept in. Woke up sometime after 11, and looked at the ogo to see if anything interesting had happened. I started getting IMs right away, and also had a bunch of emails from my router complaining about the suspicious traffic (a whole ton of multicast mdns traffic being tunneled over from Bethel - I should probably turn that off). Apparently the thing's IDS isn't designed to handle multicast properly. I guess I can't complain too much for $20. After quite a while I realized I should probably actually get out of bed and get ready for the day. While getting ready and debating what to do for the day the shiny new phone in my office (which I found out about while chatting) came to mind. Yep, I'm a geek. A few minutes later the boss called asking some questions about the holiday outage, so I decided three reasons was good enough (the third being I was hungry and sick of pizza with not much else in the house) and headed for the car. Within 5 minutes of sitting down at my desk I had managed to lock the thing out of the system. After acquiring the appropriate passcodes to get the thing back into the phone system, I also got the appropriate DHCP server options and information about the firmware it downloads on boot. After scanning through the phone's menu and noting the options, I was ready. After a small meeting about the outages thing and chatting with some friends, the phone became unplugged from the network and UPS and managed to follow me home (hey, it was on my desk for "testing" :). Luckily the firmware loads into flash so I didn't actually need to set up TFTP and DHCP options. Without the settings though I did need to point it back at the call server. It actually connected quickly (after timing out trying to get TFTP since the firewall blocks that). Incoming audio didn't work, but that was a quick NAT change on my end to let it reach the phone. After a few test calls I have to say that it's amazingly stable even over the net. It was around 40ms jitter, which wasn't noticable. Of course I'm getting 50ms latency to work right now - I'll have to try this some other time when students are around and it jumps to the hundreds. I was able to sustain long calls without problems too. The speakerphone on this thing is amazing too - it sounds great on the local end, and apparently doesn't sound like a speakerphone on the remote end either. No luck getting a softphone working yet, as it's H.323 rather than SIP (and the only decent H.323 client I've found for OS X apparently doesn't like some of the messages the server sends). I'm gonna have to ask Telecomm about that one. It'd be cool if our gateway supported SIP too. OK, that's enough for now, I'm supposed to get up before noon tomorrow... :(

Today was pretty good. Got stuff done, but another one of those feel like nothing got done days. I did walk someone through downloading and installing Mozilla over the phone though. It's not bad if the person isn't afraid of the computer. I also got to hear a pizza guy telling a faculty member about PhD syndrome, although not quite in those words (something along the lines of "professors can be so damn stupid, except in..."). I was just trying not to laugh at the humor in him saying this outright to a prof he didn't know. :) I guess if he's not expecting to see the prof again, may as well state it outright. After work there was the ITS Student Christmas party. Movie was Elf, which was good. I actually hadn't seen it before, which apparently was unusual. I have pictures which I should probably gather together and post sometime. I should really figure out how I want to post pictures rather than not doing it because I don't want 100 different places on my site. After the party, I went out and bought RotK for tomorrow night. 250 minutes of fun - you should be there. brooke even decided she'll probably be there, although is claiming to be bringing a pillow and blanket. I'm not sure that counts as trying to watch the movie. 10, the crossed out word is sad, but points to more story needed...

Today went well. I started off the day by driving over to the Comcast office and dropping off the HD box and canceling all the video service. They're gonna send someone to trap the video on Wednesday supposedly. After Dave's ordeal who knows what'll happen though. As long as my cable modem doesn't die I probably won't know (I haven't had a TV connected to the cable for months). After that JoeBuck™ and I went to Chipotle for lunch. Burritos are good. I then went and restocked the dew in the office, as well as acquired some canned food items for the department Christmas party. Bringing those things is a great idea and all, but for those of us who don't normally keep that type of stuff around... It becomes like the Chipotle free burrito day. Maybe that's why I remembered it. I stopped by and bugged the coworkers a bit. The Ogo AIM portals also freaked out for most of the afternoon, and Cingular kept duplicating SMS messages too. We'll see how long this thing sticks around. The rest of the day was spent sitting around, as well as fighting Bethel's horrible latency to try and eliminate some pages. Which didn't work apparently as my phone is beeping and vibrating right now... Actually they're not Dave's servers this time - it's the network being broken again. The server is "OK" now (defined as Packet loss = 0%, RTA = 2088.30 ms). Anyways, some interesting links were acquired. Want to know what happens when you give a writer a camera? It's actually rather funny, especially if you know anything about what the normal photo guys go through. Then there's the case where someone leaves a voicemail telling someone "God hates you and he wants to kill your children," along with a work phone number, and the predictable results. Then there's Roseville being a big shopping area. I'm pretty indifferent on that one, other than I don't mind the fact that there's a lot of different restaurants in close proximity to work.

Today was a day of sitting around. Got back to church and my brother was watching the Vikings (I remembered to connect the DTV tuner before I left), so sat around a bit. After that was reading and listening for a while. Eventually did a little cleanup around the house, and ended up deciding to bring down and hook up the rear surrounds to bring it to 7.1. Went to calibrate them and discovered my sub had become disconnected. Not really sure how long that's been that way, as I generally am listening to music and the sub isn't used much (most of the bass goes to the front speakers). Got that all hooked up and ran the level checks, crossover sweeps, and rattle checks. Yea, they have tests that are specifically designed to test if there's stuff that rattles too much in the room. :) I did discover the upper frequency limits of my speakers though. That or my ears and the SPL meter both drop off in the same place (just under 20kHz). Apparently it's running slightly above reference too, oh well. After that did more reading and ended up starting to read some BGP course that's under the Creative Commons license. It's pretty interesting so far. I figured I'd learn a lot, but somehow I've apparently managed to pick up most of how eBGP works just from other discussions. iBGP seems like it could be finicky though, and is definitely designed for a centrally managed system (doesn't scale well and requires some manual config). OK, too much geeky stuff. JoeBuck™ came over and we watched Two Towers. Overall a good movie, even though I've seen the original 2-3 times and the extended 2-3 times. It's my favorite of the first two I think, but we'll see what happens when I get RotK. JoeBuck™ and I are both more excited about RotK now. They added almost an hour! Should be fun times on Wednesday.

Week finished up well, I got a good start on a project to help manage server dependencies, hopefully both in monitoring and as a startup/shutdown sequence thing. After work I went over to Ross' place and we just hung out for a few hours. It was busy down there, had to park on the street a block away after driving around a few other blocks looking for spots. I brought over my DTV tuner, and we tried seeing how well that worked. Unfortunately it was very finicky. Tons of multipath due to the other buildings, and 8VSB doesn't handle that very well (especially when it's so bad you can't hardly pick out things with NTSC).

Saturday was sleep-in day. Although the usual students-don't-technically-live-in-dorms-anymore thing happened and people got confused again. When likely legal reasons hit real-time technical stuff... Got up sometime in the early afternoon and did some laundry and chatting online. Then a lot of reading stuff. Ended up watching Adaptation, which was rather interesting. It has Peter-man in it, and the trailer got me listening to some Queen. It had a great quote I remember too. "I'm sure you had good reasons Charles - you're an artist." Yea, definitely... After that listened to the new U2 album. I have to say I don't totally dislike it after hearing all of it. It starts off with crap (Vertigo), but some of the other ones are decent, and the other songs from the singles aren't on it, which helps. Now I'm listening to some Christmas music (can you guess which artist? It shouldn't be too hard).

Sunday is Two Towers, if you don't remember. And Wednesday is Return of the King too. Monday is relax day for me. I think I may go bring stuff in to Comcast and get some junk removed from my bill though. Maybe I'll stop by Bethel for lunch or something. Due to the personal time, I only have 6 normal workdays left this month, and possibly one busy but unbothered one (also known as Nick and I take down server rooms while the place is closed day). During those days I need to figure out the plan for the unbothered day, look into web stuff, look into Firefox and NTLM, look into fileserver stuff... Yea, should be interesting.

The new ogo activated as I got signal while leaving work on Friday, and seems to be acting much better. I was playing with them a bit at Ross' place. That in itself was sorta funny, as during the course of the night I was pulling stuff out of my bag, and at one point I realized I had four different completely wireless devices capable of global communication within a foot of my body. I guess times have changed (and I'm a geek). Anyways, the new one seems to track the GSM strength much better, can hang onto GPRS better, and can stay accurate on time (I never noticed how bad the old one was until I noticed the difference and compared to another source). It also seems to interact a bit better on AIM and load emails better. Just a better network sync I think. We'll see, I think I'm gonna wait another week to bring Ogo #1 back just to compare them.

And it's already early Sunday. I need to stop staying up so late. At least church isn't until 11.

Um, can't anyone be responsible for themselves these days?

So the new Ogo arrived today. I'm still waiting for it to activate (yea, sometimes they take a while), but it looks like the backlighting in the keyboard may be more even and the reception a bit better. We'll see once it gets up and running though. I also discovered an interesting site which has a forum about hacking them. Apparently from XP and a PDA it's easy to bridge in a network connection and do POP3/SMTP. Other stuff is apparently filtered, but I bet IM would work too. With a computer you could run web over SMTP and POP3 pretty easy...

I also had a little fun with bots tonight. AIM has this bot that's supposed to be able to chat and answer questions. For a bot it's actually pretty decent, although it's handling of plurals and stuff showed some areas where it was much weaker in parsing questions than others. It didn't really have any explanations of its services, and I quickly confused it by asking it what it was good for. It asked me if it was OK if it told other people after I said it was useless. It also quickly volunteered "I am saying whatever my botmaster programmed me to say." After a little more chatting and some other questions, it came back with "A deeper algorithm is needed to respond to that correctly. Are you free?" At least we know the programmers had a sense of humor. It got confused and wanted me to ask it something. It apparently didn't know what I was talking about (although it did ask some interesting questions). It informed me it was going to have to ask it's botmaster for more info on what I was talking about before asking me if I wanted to play a game of Word Scramble. I tried to change the topic back and it actually had a pretty good reaction to me calling it on attempting to avoid the question. It claims to have taken my advise to ask it's botmaster for more info. I'd like to see their faces when they see it asking them about the solution to Fermat's last theorem though. :) I wonder if they keep logs. It'd actually be a little funnier if they can't and have to guess what the heck someone was doing engaging a bot in a discussion about the theorem. It didn't seem to question the pythagorean much though... I think this may be one I'll have to keep in mind for next time I'm somewhere and bored and see how interesting it can get.