Usually people worry about losing their luggage, not finding new and exciting things in it it. In other news, people have different reasons for getting broadband, and that's just the ones that admit it...

Lots of planning at work, and dealing with stuff. Like people deleting their email folders on the server when they go to publish their web pages... The new ogo should also show up tomorrow. That should be fun.

If you work for ITS you can find details here. If not and you're interested in Return of the King Extended next Wednesday (Dec 15) at my place, let me know and I'll get you the details.

For those of you who want to try out the ogo over the holiday season, and want a good price, for the next couple days (I think maybe until Wednesday) you can get it for $50 after an instant rebate. Seeing as they're still going for well over that on ebay, seems like a pretty risk-free trial. And seeing as they're currently saying they'll ship sometime between now and Saturday, that means that you don't have to send it back until January. Need something to do while visiting relatives? :)

It was a long week. A few outages, starting to look suspiciously network related. Rumor has it that Enterasys may have an idea of some possible cause, so hopefully we'll get somewhere on that. Today I went in and hit the reset switch on a box to get it up and running again... Other than that I eliminated the last of the old mailing list servers last week. It's nice to have everything standardized now. Some account merges, patches, updates to policies, the usual... Did come up with some good ideas about how to handle some stuff though.

Friday night was LotR:FotR EE, which was good. Ross and Pete and Betsy showed up, and Dave showed up after his printing fixes. Hopefully those printing fixes mean that Ross won't have to fix more SP2 stuff.

Saturday I slept in until some time in the afternoon, which was really nice. Then I went over to my parents' house and went up on the roof to pull and pry the chimney. That didn't go so well, but helped with a bit of other stuff, and we recapped it too. The ogo didn't work very well over there either. I've pretty much decided that it's going back now, as Cingular just can't keep a decent signal around here on GSM (and it's horrible with GPRS), and the ogo doesn't handle losing the signal well either. Oh well, maybe they'll improve it in a few months or something.

Sunday was church, followed by coming home to my brother watching the game. I left partway through that to go and reboot the database server, and then to run the sawzall to my parents' place. Then it was movie time. First was THX 1138, which was good. "Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy." After what he's done to Star Wars, makes you wonder if he's sane... After that watched The Italian Job. I sorta like the ending better than the newer remake, but I like parts of the new one better. For those who think the new one is completely unrealistic, that's intentional - both versions have it. Think suspension of disbelief.

Monday was bad. First, it was a Monday. Lunch was good though, Ross and I went to C1. For some reason the rest of the day just seemed long. Then I went home. At 10:20 or so, the server room called me complaining the power was out. I also got calls from other people asking about it. A few minutes later the server room called again, this time complaining about both the power and the temperature. About 10:50 I called and it had hit 89 degrees in the room, and the power had been out for 30 minutes, so it was time to go in and start shutting stuff down. I met my boss and a network services guy there, and the fun started. 3 of us jammed in a room that has so much stuff it's a pain for one person to move around in, it's dark, there's only the server and switch LEDs and a trouble lamp for light, and it's over 90 degrees, and we're all moving around shutting down and turning off different machines while we get even hotter air blowing at us out the backs of them. And then just as we get everything down, the power kicks back in. So we spent the next hour and a half getting everything back up and fixing some glitches and figuring out what can wait until morning, and then home, which was listed in the previous entry.

Tuesday was better. It was Futurama day, since the Simpsons didn't show up. Still good though. Some goofy issues from the night before, some other things. Little random things pop up... Oh well. After work was good, got dinner with the family at Olive Garden, which is hard to argue with. I'm still debating on the Ogo thing. It's a handy little gadget. The whole doesn't work at work is rather annoying though. They need to put GSM on 850 around here... We'll see, still a few weeks to go...

I normally don't post pictures to the front page, but anybody want a pet mouse?

Some of you probably know the story about the mouse and oreos. Maybe I'll post pictures sometime. This little guy has been living in my house for a few months, living off a stash of oreos he hauled up the stairs one night (discovered by me finding oreo crumbs all over the stairs). I've seen him a few times, but he evaded traps. He's a fat little guy, so he's obviously been well nourished by those oreos. He finally got caught by the biggest trap of them all though. I'm still not quite sure how he got up in there - he must have really been climbing on stuff. So I'll ask again - does anyone want a pet mouse (apparently acrobatic even)? I wonder if Bethel could use another. We've had them visiting the lab before, although those are usually white. I guess if nobody claims him he'll probably end up outside. I don't think he'd last too long out there though, even if he is acrobatic.

Don't think about all those things you fear
Just be glad to be here.

That's FC/Kahuna's Hayling, which is actually sung by Hafdis Huld. There's an interesting music video at the end of Confidence with her, along with one from Zero 7 (Destiny). Zero 7's site sorta reminds me of the Ogo documentation... Anyways, there's also another (just as weird) video of Hayling done by Lynn Fox up on her site. I sorta like the musical style though - I may have to look into more of FC/Kahuna's stuff. Apparently they're supposed to be like Zero 7. They also were the people that started the Big Kahuna Burger club (yes, they got the name from there) in 1995, which inspired Fat Boy Slim. Their whole bio is actually pretty interesting.

Saturday I upgraded SA on my personal server to the latest version. That combined with a few custom rules has dropped the amount of spam I see to almost nothing, which makes me happy. It'd be nice if spammers just went away, but unfortunately I don't see that happening until idiots stop buying stuff from them. Sunday started off with church. Amazingly even though I got lots of sleep and actually wasn't that tired when I got up, sitting down and not moving for an hour really made me tired. The rest of the day sat around catching up on /. and newsgroups some more. Then watched Confidence. Good movie I thought, fits in with the others like it. As you probably noticed already, the soundtrack was more interesting though. BTW, if anyone knows what the 1 minute long clip on the end credits is (after Clocks), I'm wondering. It's not any of the credited songs as far as I can tell. My guess is something for the movie by Beck, but apparently it's not in the official soundtrack, so...

Year after year this always amazes me. How can people completely forget how to drive in the winter over the summer? One day of snowing and it turning wet, another day of it sorta sticking but basically just wet on roadways, and we get that. If the car rolls when you hit the ice, it means you were going too fast on the road. I can't see how people think some country highway is safe to go normal speeds on during or shortly after snowfall... That and the fact most people don't seem to know what to do when they hit ice...

Well, unfortunately I have to work in about 8 hours. So much for the nice long weekend. I guess all good things have to come to an end. I just hope that we don't get roped into too much computer fixing that we shouldn't be doing tomorrow.

It was a good Saturday. Didn't have to get up for anything, so just slept until I woke up. Then proceeded to just read for a bit, followed by getting up and going and reading a bit more, along with coding. Watched Paycheck which I think isn't as bad as the reviews say. Yea it's a little overdone, but that's pretty common these days. I'd say it's actually pretty decent. After that coded some more and managed to get an RSS thing going. Basically it's a reader but it just runs as a cron job and when it sees a new entry emails the title, url, and contents at that URL to me. In my case to my ogo for easy reading wherever I may be. I tested it with all the blogs I frequent, and it seems to be parsing things decently. We'll see who manages to break it somehow in the near future.

So I somehow managed to get sucked into the mass commericalism and left the house today. On Wednesday a certain someone asked me for my opinion on a little gadget for IM and email. That turned into reading reviews and forums and... The thing is only IM/email/text, but given I can and have scripted stuff to do dynamic stuff from my phone (and others have for Ogo too), plus the plans the developers have for the bluetooth and stuff and that it's unlimited usage... So today I went out to the Cingular Blue store and bought one. So far it's been good. It actually took me longer to read throught the terms of service than for it to activate. I did manage to lock up the SIM and need to get the PUK code from customer care within the first half hour, but other than that no problems (and even that only took 5 minutes and one question from the rep). It's very responsive and even downloaded my mailbox pretty quick. I think I need t! o work on spam filtering a bit though - for the fact it'll be alerting me, not the deleting whick was actually really easy and quick. Anyways, I'll probably write more on the usability once I get more dynamic queries set up on my side. I'm still not sure if I'll keep it or not - I have 30 days to decide that. Anyways, if you know me and chat with me on IM you may want to add jmooneymobile to your list, as that's what I'll be using. Well, despite this thing being easy to type on, I think I'm gonna go back to the computer for a while.

The weeks has been going well. A lot of it consisted of changing stuff and helping to stabilize stuff through the servers for Ross. He ended up getting a ton of high priority stuff with little things breaking. Hopefully the changes will prevent people from breaking stuff, as well as keep things better maintained and prevent some other problems too, and help them speed up some other stuff long term too. Also did a little reliability testing on 802.11g. It did well over a decent distance. If only most home APs would automatically select channels I think people would be a lot happier with the technology. Wednesday was bad. After getting a server back up and running enough to last through the day, I'm just happy I'm not working today. And stuff worked out well enough that we don't have a ton to do on it other than watch someone rebuild it on Monday. How can one not be thankful for that?

Turkey day went well, but ate way too much food. That's sorta to be expected given the tradition though. I took some pictures, but nothing too exciting so we'll see if I get motivated enough to post them. Then there was a lot of games and stuff that I wasn't too interested in, so I just sat around. Sometimes that's nice though. As for the rest of the weekend, it should be nice to just relax, and try not to think about work. I have three movies from Netflix (well, 2 and I should check the mailbox), which won't last as well as a normal weekend. I think I may have a few other movies around though. If you're up for a movie or two let me know. We'll see what else I find to break and rebuild this weekend...