Saturday started off getting up somewhat early and driving to Minnetonka. Watched my cousin's wheelchair basketball game. If you've never seen one, you should. We were chatting a bit with a kid whose team was from Michigan and was hoping for a challenge with the next game since the previous game they beat the other team by a rather large margin. After that was family birthdays, followed by visiting the parents' place for a bit. Finished off the night by watching Jackie Brown. It's a QT movie, what else is there to say? Sunday was church, followed by lunch and just random reading. Watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, also known as crazy swordfighters who can fly. Between that and the story, I can't say I like the movie. At least it's only two hours. That was followed by Six-String Samurai. Interesting, more of a comedy in that you laugh at the movie, but still good entertainment. If it didn't have all the Wizard of Oz elements in it I may not have connected them - the connection is there but weird. "Follow the yellow brick road, homie" Plus you get to hear about the wind shear from a pink golf ball...
The week finished off well. Thursday was Eddingtons which is really good even though it's a little expensive. It also was lots of U2 day, which was nice. OS X is far from being able to be classified as a real-time OS though. That's the biggest thing that bugs me about it, although I'm guessing most people don't notice it. I'm used to be able to push my machine at 100% with CPU and disk IO pegged, but no app being able to take out the system. Music doesn't skip, I click to a different app and other than possibly having to swap it in if I'm really pushing the machine, it's instant. Focus changes instantly rather than waiting for apps... Yea, it's designed for lighter load, but it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to implement that type of design. I think the biggest catch may be that part of the smooth integrated GUI is being overly reliant on checking the state of other things obsessively so they can't get out of sync though. :( Anyways, the days involved lots of group policies. Ross and I got a lot of things clarified, and I think we're going the direction of making some stuff work better. In other news I discovered a completely unpatched (no Service Packs even) NT4 server. Amazingly it has like 5 months uptime too. Hopefully it'll last another 2 or so until it can be phased out (and hopefully that won't turn into 12). Friday afternoon turned into meetings, which went better than expected, even if they went a bit long. It could have been a lot worse. For fun stuff, did you know that going to church is a threat to your health?
"Get down off your holy cloud / God will not deal with the proud"
Those lines always catch my attention when I hear them, probably because it summarizes the whole song (and the one that's based on it) so well. For those of you who don't know where that is from, it's from U2's Always (which became Beautiful Day). Basically the songs both talk about slowing down and thinking about what's important for a bit, rather than getting caught up in the world and putting excessive importance in our own image or things that don't really matter. I think that's something that's probably good to think about often, which is why I think certain people should see movies like Saved. Of course that's more of a comedy and this is more introspective. OK, enough of that - it makes me want to pull out the 5 channel DTS version of Beautiful Day, and if I did that I'd probably end up listening to the whole concert. I think I know what's playing in the office tomorrow.
Not too much new. Coded up some mod_perl stuff to address comment spam on MT blogs and threw that into place after a certain person got annoyed with 15 new spams in one night. They're obviously not paying attention since stuff was getting held anyways, so we'll see what happens with the new rules. The cool part is mod_perl makes it really easy to do lots of funky stuff and it works at a level above the site so nobody needs to make any direct changes. First movie of the day was Pulp Fiction, which was a good flick. That movie just has the same feel as Kill Bill, even though the stories different. It'd be interesting watching them both together or close together to better compare those. Second movie was Swimming Pool. Reminds me a lot of Lost in Translation. Like same concept, but with a bit less constraint. It pushes the ends out a bit farther in time in both directions, and gives more backstory on the characters (although that's arguable) with a little less "in the moment" type stuff. Hard to describe without spoilers. I'd say it's a good flick, but be very careful who I'd recommend it to.
Friday was just miscellaneous stuff. More IB cleanup and improvements too. At lunch we went to Wendy's and then went by that new place just north of 694 to see that it'd be a Red Robin. That should be cool when it's finished. After work was a bonfire at Nick's. The bonfire was followed by Dirty Work. Both were a fun time, so if you missed them your loss. After I got home did a little test recording. I remember why I don't listen to the radio anymore - it's both overcompressed and overmodulated these days, making it sound like crap compared to other things. Oh well, at least it makes it easy to never clip a digital recording while getting it up close to 0db. Saturday morning was get up somewhat early (11am) to ensure the computer recorded the sampler properly. Got that going and headed of to the Bethel football game. Got a few pics up from that one. Afterwards went off to dinner with the family. That was followed by running a batch convert on the pictures, copying over the 2GB audio file from earlier to the laptop (over wireless, took a while), and chopping it up. BTW, if you use OS X Audacity is an awesome editor. It'll open incomplete files (like partway through the copy), and you can copy and paste large amounts of data (like 60MB songs) into new files with effectively no delay. It makes it really easy to confirm cut points by playing the audio too. Got all the pics uploaded and stuff now, so I think it's time for bed though. What I've listened to of the sampler is good, despite the quality sounding like modern commercial radio.
Mad at your computer? It can't take any more percussive maintenance? Here you go.
I'll admit I'm not so great at higher math. Not to say that I'm horrible or anything, but my math GPA in college was 2.57. Linear Algebra is one of the ones I got a C in - it just never really stuck. So I happen to take a look at my web site stats, and notice an insane amount of traffic to an old linear algebra study guide I have. Yea, go looking for a linear algebra study guide on yahoo or MSN and guess who's number 1? I'm also getting traffic for stuff I couldn't answer off the top of my head either. Some examples for you:
Wow, parking was really bad at Bethel on Monday. I think it was Campus Visit weekend again, since everyone seemed to be talking about perspective students. I'm still not sure why studying perspective is so popular, what department it actually falls under (Art? Philosophy? BITS?), or why the heck they're visiting Bethel if they're looking for a good program that deals with perspective. The day was also refered to as a "computer snow day" since the ERP system was down. I don't know about that, since I seemed to have plenty to do telling people it wasn't my system that was broken and fixing the stuff that it broke. That was the excitement for the day though. I did some testing for other stuff though, to basically send people nastygrams.
Tuesday I observed and commented on a large discussion, and sorta disproved a possible solution. Made IB changes and clarified things, and corrected other mistakes. Also found out when I get to go fight a half-dozen people in a meeting. I do have allies and likely allies, but unfortunately they won't really be at the meeting. Wednesday I discussed more backend architecture changes, fixed a sync script that the network caused to mess up AD, cleaned up old account junk I noticed in fixing what the script did, and other miscellaneous stuff. I've been seeing a bunch of problems that have easy fixes it's just people haven't been even making a halfway decent attempt at troubleshooting ("user can't log in to x" doesn't help much). They're relatively simple ones and I know the solution immediately after looking at their account, but they could have also been fixed on the first call with the user by 2 minutes of going through a troubleshooting guide. Oh well, such is life.
Well, I didn't mention it on Thursday, but I ended up ditching Nick a bit early to go help out JoeBuck. He came out of the bank after leaving his car under brooke's watch to find it wouldn't start. I ended up not going to help him because he didn't actually have jumper cables so Mr. Boyum showed up with some to bail him out.
Friday was some more of the same, but not as much (the network stuff that is, not brooke breaking things - at least not that I've heard about yet). It turned into a bunch of random stuff, and I don't remember many details. I do remember moving patch cables around, and talking to people, and people asking me questions every time I sat down to do something. Oh well, those days happen. Did get a few minor IB changes to the look of the UserInfo area done, and sent someone to tell people no. I don't remember the exact quote that was said upon the messenger's return, but a close summary was "there's something about telling someone they're screwed and it calming them down".
Saturday I was woken up to a pounding on my bedroom door. It was around 8:50am and my brother was annoyed by the UPSes beeping. Turns out the power was out. I couldn't really shut them up, but the power came on shortly after 9 and I went back to bed. Now that I look back that was the night I was woken up at 2am when my lights turned on too. My brother said the dining room one was on too. Other lights have done that other nights this past week. My closest guess so far is that there's something really funky with the power and some sort of surge is resetting the switches. I ended up sleeping until early afternoon, which was nice for a change. Sat around for a while online, and then my family came over with pizza after the game. Can't argue with that. After that I left for Dave's sister's place to watch a movie with him and flabre since they were out of town. On the way I noticed that the lights on the south side of 694 on Silver Lake Rd were flashing red (well, noticing was good since I went through the intersection, but it's not the point of mentioning it). After alternating phone calls of giving directions (to other places) and getting directions a few times, I arrived. We watched Mallrats followed by Dogma. Kevin Smith movies are great because you can always catch things in them each time you see them. They may seem odd and superficial at first, but he puts an amazing amount of work into each one. After the movies went to Dave's house with my DTV tuner to prove he wasn't on crack and ended up not proving said hypothesis. Oh well. Watched a bit of L&O and then headed home. Upon approaching Silver Lake Road I notice something isn't quite right about the lights. As I get closer I realize the lights on the south side of 694 are flashing randomly. Like a few quick burst and take a break. Nothing's consistent, not even the lights that normally work together in a given direction. The lights on the north side of 694 are now flashing red. I think the power outage seriously fried some stuff. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with (my siblings borrowed it for a concert) or I would have grabbed a video.
Sunday morning was church at Salem. I grabbed the camera this time for the trip but someone had discovered the lights having a fun time and they were off with stop signs up instead. Oh well. After church sat around for a bit, and ended up watching This Is Spinal Tap. I think that's seriously overrated. Then again, the whole Christopher Guest mockumentary things never interested me much. Trying too hard to be funny or something and basically overdoing it. That was followed by more sitting around and some grocery shopping. Finished up the evening by watching Full Metal Jacket. I'd argue it's one of the best films about war I've seen. Whether you like Kubrick or not, it's hard to argue his films aren't well made. The level of detail in his movies and how many different ways he pulls to make you think about stuff. Basically he does in Drama what Kevin Smith does in comedy. Yes, I did really say that - think about it for a second though.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
