Back to work again. Didn't get as much list stuff done as I wanted, mainly because I couldn't find the scripts I can probably basically copy to finish up what we want to do. I did a little more load testing though and figured out some combinations may be possible. We may have to test on a few live mailings that aren't time-critical. Otherwise the day was broken up by just random stuff. Unfortunately more than I'd like I'm hitting the places where I need to ask people about things, having done most of the changes that can be pulled off without problems or working with other people. The problems from that are that everyone else is busy now that I need to ask them, and stuff needs to be explained, so stuff takes longer.

Sometime within an hour or so of when I was gonna go home Nick and Doug came to visit. Nick and I ended up going up to North Village to troubleshoot problems reaching servers, while Doug poked from the core end and changed stuff for us. Unfortunately we discovered bad stuff, in the form of packet size limitations and limits hit due to 802.1q VLAN tags and changing MTU sizes. Then there were 802.1q trunking issues. I hadn't installed much in the way of packet analysis software on my machine, so we had fun reading TCP dump output. And then trying to figure out AP associations. We then wandered around and I could at least get an IP outside every building. I also could see almost every if not every access point from outside the buildings too (and a building or so away). Most with pretty good signal strength. I'm gonna start blaming people bringing in 2.4Ghz phones on the connection problems people have I think.

It was a pretty relaxing day. Although it's starting to get humid again, which isn't fun. I'll probably turn on the air conditioning and that means should clean the cottonwood off the condenser soon. Maybe it's time to acquire a hose.

Started off the day with Salem, which was good. Then Dave and I realised neither of us had much to do, so we went and looked at the wiring he spent all day working on with Ross on Saturday. It looks good guys. Then was home to see that Bethel's network connection was down. Oh well, not much I can do. Sat around for a bit just reading stuff.

After a few hours Dave and I went to go see The Bourne Supremacy, which I thought was a good movie. It was an interesting balance between explaining and allowing the viewer to figure it out, but I thought it made for a more interesting movie. The shakiness didn't really bother me. It was a little overdone and I can see how a couple certain scenes could annoy people, but the cool part was you were effectively watching the scenes from a bunch of perspectives at once. The odd focusing annoyed me a bit more - it's unusual to see the side of the face in focus but not the eyes. In some places it did fit, but others seemed out of place. What actually annoyed me the most about it was the copy serial dots. They're noticable enough in a normal movie, but when the movie is cut down to fractions of seconds and you're trying to track that, they're a lot more noticable. If they would have stuck with yellow instead of red it wouldn't be near as bad...

Now Bethel's network connection is up again, so I'm responding to emails. I hope I can finish up these projects soon, and then it's a while of keeping strict hours. Sometimes it's annoying having to test stuff while people aren't around (I suppose I could test during the day, but I don't think I'd be friends with the Help Desk people for long).

The week is finally over. I'm quite happy about that. Not only were both Brent and Mike gone all week, but it's the time for students to start using our resources again and for faculty to come back and start complaining about things. And of course everything has to be done "now". Monday night started off with a movie night. brooke did a decent job of picking a movie, that movie being Dead Poets Society, even though it's not quite good enough for the number of times I've seen it. It was a good time though. Unfortunately most of the other nights of the week were just relaxing to keep my sanity.

The big project for the week was to get lists stuff up and running. The problem with that is that is mainly coding at this point, which means it doesn't work well when I'm covering for things. I installed Windows XP and some management tools on my powerbook, so I shouldn't have to VNC into the servers near as much anymore. SP2 breaks mmc if exchange stuff is installed though, which is a bad thing. We managed to chew through a ton of backup tapes too, and one of the tape drives really messed itself up and took a good amount of time to fix. I managed to forget about a lot of other tape swaps now that I think about it too. And you don't want to know what our restore window is now - just don't delete stuff accidentally. :)

There's also this whole Windows architecture thing to finish before school. So I rebuilt an old server up as our new Apps server. I figured out which Mac apps only run in classic mode and archived those, and the native OS X ones are in the process of being migrated. Stupid macs and slashes in file names, and stupid windows for not allowing slashes in file names. Neither is a good idea to encourage I say. I also started tweaking the domains, and disabling lm announcements on servers to which users shouldn't be directly browsing (they shouldn't be using browsing at all, but...). I think I may be able to completely control what shows up in the lists anyways, but we'll see on that. Also experimented with turning off netbios on some windows stuff. Apparently macs still use smb over netbios rather than smb though to connect (even though they say smb). They've only been doing it for a couple years, I don't see why they went for the old technology. Half my file servers aren't accessible from half the places on the network either. It's not my fault though, and I can't do anything about it, so I don't worry about it. People don't like when my reaction though - "Yea, they can't get to that. It'll probably be like that for a few days. Have them try again next week." Overall that part is good though. We could start school without any big problems right away I think. Other than apparently someone followed some really old instructions and mathematica 5 doesn't work in some places. 2 years was more than enough time to transition that one...

The lists stuff. I didn't do more course testing or anything, but I think that's stable. I still need to do automated membership for courses. I did write and install a new module after I got home last night that does sending location verification. Basically a message has to come from on campus (including webmail) or be sent with authenticated smtp or the list servers will bounce the message for most lists. It also bounces mail flagged as spam. Those two should make a lot of list managers happy. The management tools for list moderators are greatly improved as well. For when users send a message to a list in multiple ways (such as to multiple addresses) it also detects and bounces all but the first one with a note about watching the recipients when replying to all. There are other cool things in there too, but they're my secrets. The wonders of procmail and perl and what can be achieved. I still need to get automatically populated lists up and running. I think I may try and do that Monday. I think that means Monday is get-stuff-done day, which means I may not check Incidents at all. If you work for the Help Desk sorry, they'll have to wait until the next day. It probably isn't a big deal. Like that "had to be done within 2 days" restore a month ago that they just noticed the restore wasn't what they needed.

Saturday was more work stuff. I went in and actually got some stuff done (thus the plan for continuing it on Monday, but I can't break stuff then). I changed the lab logon notice to prevent people clicking close right away. It does go away, and you can put stuff over it. Hopefully people will actually take note of it now. Most of my other stuff hasn't broken anything yet, so things are still working. I need to get an old machine and test some last stuff though. Apparently we need to keep Windows 95 and 98 machines working like they're part of the domain for a bit longer. :( We'll see if I get motivated to actually do stuff on Sunday. Maybe I should do a couple smaller movie nights this week just to force me to to take a break after last week.

Weekend started off slow. Got to sleep in a bit on Saturday which was nice. Then ended up dragging in a bunch of bricks from the garage. I now have tiered seating with the back row being raised up a little over 7 inches from where it was. Then my mom came over and picked up more bricks for some shelves she was making. I also updated my DVD page so if you know where that is you can see some ideas for the next movie night. Finished off the day with my brother and I watching Twelve Monkeys. Seemed a bit more interesting this time around, but something still seems to be missing from it. Oh well. I also listened to music a lot. That's starting to be a trend.

Sunday started off with church as Salem as usual. After that ordered CDs, specifically Fishtank No. 9 and OSAS and some others. Probably shouldn't have done that, but I like the music that I have, and even though I couldn't find some of it anywhere (mp3.com tracks), they are 128kbps and I was getting annoyed by them. After that went home and picked up some checks, as well as fixed some computers. I'm now on check #1201, and I've had that account since sometime in the mid 90s. Given that I've only been using checks while getting stuff electronic again, I wonder how many years I'll still have my original check order for. And if the bank will ever say anything about the address not matching (I never use checks in person so them not matching my ID doesn't matter). Anyways got home and after more music watched Drunken Master. It's funny since the Cantonese soundtrack randomly switches between English and Cantonese. And whoever did the foley doubled the humor of the movie. Every swing is roughly accompanied by what sounds like someone swinging their hand in front of a microphone. Classic Jackie Chan style. Then I decided to do a basic bit of cleaning up before people come over since there was crap everywhere. Told my brother to do his dishes too. They were starting to smell... And now to go prepare for another day at work tomorrow...

• Apparently MN is a geeky state. 57.5% of rural MN uses the net and 27% has broadband.
• If if you can't manage to figure out an excuse on your own, I think you'd be too confused by the message to use the escape-a-date message.
• And in another PR move, they want to ban spam on phones. Too bad most spam doesn't come from the US...
• XP SP2. "The idea is that if users have to actively give permission for programs to interact with their computers, there is less chance they will be hit by a virus or inadvertently allow malicious software that can monitor computer activities." Um, what? Given that half the recent onces have involved saving and opening a password protected zip file after disabling the virus scanner which is stopping them, I doubt clicking OK will do much good. Hopefully it'll prevent some of the further effects though.
• Again with the thing, MS is pushing automatic updates. And they provide phone support for people, not listed but likely 866-PC-SAFETY like before. And remember that's 866, as most users who need it would probably follow the instructions at 800-. The combination may be a good way to help get some computer problems away though.
• Look at the third paragraph here. And then never complain when someone outside Microsoft adds the $ in place of the s. Also that link could be handy. People put undue trust in big companies - use it to your advantage. They also have one on spyware.
• And not again... One person who was notified works in an unrelated area on the campus and is aware of the applicable laws (the ones cited in the letter) - which only require disclosure if the data is not encrypted. Oops.

OK, enough for now...

Well, Bethel is still there, but it's only been one day. We'll see what happens when I actually get digging into the email system. Today was mainly just Windows stuff. Tomorrow looks like more spam filtering rules for people, possibly considering a mailbox rename, and repointing an alias. I may also try stress testing the email servers and making myself an advisor and teach a class or two (at least according to the server team's systems).

I also tried to figure out how some stuff always seems to break. There are certain common factors, which is starting to get sorta annoying. Ross and I were talking about it today and it was funny since he had to go but our conversation finished with "well we can finish ranting about this tomorrow". Dave's probably wondering how things can break with simple proximity. Sorta the opposite of the computer working when the tech gets close. Hopefully those problems will just stop happening or something though.

Paul came to visit today, or at least to pick up his computer. He brought "thing 1 and thing 2" with him. It was good seeing all of them as I haven't seen them near often enough this summer. Paul tried to leech Internet access, while one of the things asked me questions (he never told me which was which). Anyways there may be a party next week if the other thing ever sends out an email.

I decided to switch my keyboard back to Dvorak tonight. Not really sure why, but I did. I guess I just like it better. I got sick of qwerty again or something. I read there can be some goofy stuff because Apple did keyboard layouts in a somewhat braindead way and didn't fix it with OS X. We'll see what happens.

SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to receive MAC SYNC frame within time-out period
SYNC Timing Scnchronization failure - Failed to acquire FEC framing
SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing

That's a fancy way for the cable modem to say that it can't talk to the cable company. I think it's scary that I know what those mean even though I've never actually worked with cable modems other than using them. Guess that's what I get for being into both networking and radio stuff. Can anyone else say what QAM/QPSK stands for without looking? Hint - QAM is the cable alternative to the 8VSB format used for terrestrial DTV broadcasting. :)

Work today was decent. Dave and I got to learn a lot of passwords and get diagrams and explanations of how to reboot the server rooms if stuff goes horribly wrong. I hope I don't have to use them. In finishing up things before he left my boss also set up some stuff so I can test the new list server. Now the trick is just to make sure I don't completely collapse Bethel's mail server cluster again. How many thousands of bounces can it handle per minute... :) I have the routing changes necessary to only test on half the cluster now though, so if I kill anything it shouldn't be bad.

I figured out how to disable drag and drop as well as cross-application copy/paste under OS X today. I guess "figured out" sorta implies that I was trying to do so, while in reality it was a side effect of trying to eliminate unnecessary services from my machine - pbs tends to be handy. Although the good news is you can run for many hours without it no problem, and despite the man page saying users shouldn't manually run it if you know where to find it I thing you're qualified to do so (everything seems to work). I finally killed off blued and stopped it from respawning by changing filesystem permissions. If you don't have bluetooth enabled there's no reason to be running it's daemon. Yet Apple seems to have a lot of crap enabled. Also disabled automount, cups, nfs, crashreporter, and some other junk. The stupid iChat helper is on the list to kill occationally. I don't use or want iChat. And then there's AppleSpell. I don't find a spell checker handy enough to have it running all the time in the background. It looks like X11 is the program starting it too, which makes no sense. Spell check in a terminal window?!? Oh well, I think the best part of OS X is chmod -x. :)

OK, enough geeky ranting. I just want a UI that doesn't add random delays to stuff.

And the skips are gone. A while back I applied a firmware update to my Karma. It was a minor bugfix one, mainly detecting more types of corrupted audio files and allowing them to be partially played or flagged so they are disabled in playlists until corrected. This was all fine until I tried playing some tracks which are encoded in 320kbps vorbis. About halfway through the song it'd start skipping occationally and stuff. Only happened on those and most other portable players which can even play 320kbps don't do it well, so no big deal. I went and told it to rebuild the song database tonight and after pausing my song for about 2 minutes all is fixed. This firmware version also makes it so the ethernet works better and it just pauses during the transfer rather than actually stopping playback too, which is cool. According to the docs they fixed some unicode locality stuff and support UTF-8/16 and Kanji so maybe I can upload tracks with non-ascii names now. Can't argue with a player you can sync over ethernet and they release free upgrades to it every month or two. :)

Sunday went OK. I got home from church and couldn't get my email. Turns out the IMAP server crashed again. Brent's replacing that as soon as he gets back from vacation - hopefully it won't happen again until after he gets back. That meant a run in to Bethel, but luckily it was an easy problem to fix. I had tell a former student to stop writing bad code and loading down the shell server and do it right, but he seemed to take it well. If you have procmail available, a perl script which goes and shuffles things around through IMAP is just painful to yourself. After rebooting more bethelwulf nodes to stop the emails from them, left and headed to family birthdays. It had been months so there were a lot of birthdays. Was a decent time. I ended up loading up the back of my car and bringing home more toys, this time speakers. Stopped by my parents place to grab the amps to go with said speakers and for some reason the family was playing with a sphygmomanometer and decided to check my bloodpressure for fun (guess that's what I get for having so many medical people in the family). Of course the timing was just after I had just restacked a pile of amps downstairs and lugged two 7301s up the stairs. And they wondered why my systolic was a little high... Now I just need to buy or build a crossover and I can try and not blow out the windows in the house or burn up the wiring. They'd be great for the outdoor movie night idea, but nobody seems to like the idea of helping me move them. Something about the speakers being heavier than the amps or some crazy thing. May have to try it once though.

Monday was a Monday. Started sorting things out at work, working on more automation and stuff. Blah. After work I'm relaxing at home and the server room calls me to complain about its temperature. I tell it to stop calling people and ignore it for a while. Still bad so go in and check on it. Turns out Bethel had a power outages I thought was minor but the air conditioner didn't like them much. It was hot and humid, so I turned on the old unit and tried to get it to not drip all over the hallway. It sorta works so I leave. On my way out security is escorting an Xcel truck through campus. I saw said Xcel truck leaving when I got to work this morning - turns out there was more than one outage and apparently not minor. I know a lawnmower and a 220 line were involved in an incident on campus in the same general timeframe, but I think that's actually completely separate and happened this morning (unless they were mowing after 10pm, in which case no wonder they hit it).

Tuesday was routine as well. Dave forgot his DVDs, so we went to Wendy's instead. I also rebuilt one Windows server, and automated more stuff. We got free corn in the afternoon, and while not as good as past years it was still free. Finished off the day by making a list of IPs/hostnames and what I think they do. Tomorrow is the boss's last day before a week and a half of vacation, and Dave and I get to try and pick up the slack. We get to learn about everything he's done so far this summer tomorrow. Should be an interesting day...

I think Mozilla can get really confused on downloads. I never noticed that on linux, but then I don't download big files that often. I think that started happening at about the 2GB mark, which makes sense if they're using 32bit numbers. They should probably fix that as more people get broadband or use local networks these days. I should have known it wouldn't display right when it had no clue of the file length or estimated time when it started.

Thursday night Dave and I watched The Bourne Identity (the new mangled 2002 version). He didn't remember much of what was in it and afterwards we determined that was because he hadn't seen the whole thing. That movie has a well mixed soundtrack, and good environmental effects. Plus it has a DTS soundtrack to actually take advantage of it. Nothing quite like gunshots and explosions at reference levels. Well, other than the real thing that is.

Friday was System Administrators Appreciation day. Seemed like any other day to me, although I was mainly doing little cleanup tasks. Did some group cleanup in Active Directory. I still have a ton more to do there before school starts. Like building all the departmental areas on our main file server. I did request a lot of database access permissions though, and Dave got them all set up. I completed two automated data sync projects, with architecture in place for another once some other stuff is in place. This will also allow me to start getting the list server stuff together too (finally).

Saturday was relaxing. I saw this article over at slashdot which was interesting. I've always thought something like that would be cool to do (basically like movie night, but outside). Not as an invite-the-public type thing, but just with a bunch of friends some weekend or something. The bugs in MN make it a bit of a pain to pick a location though. Anyone have any good ideas?

And crap - that download died. Seems when the number reached 0 (about 4GB), Mozilla crapped out. And wget -c doesn't like continuing at that stage, so I may be downloading again. :( While I was writing this I was poking around on my computer a bit, looking to find the big space consumers. I think the winner is iDVD. 1.09GB for a single App (that I'll maybe use once or twice)? What the heck?!? After a backup to DVD I think that one is going through the rip out most themes inside it process.

Somehow this topic came up with The Nick and I during lunch. Phones are these intrusive devices that ring or make other obnoxious noises at what is becoming more and more intrusive times and frequencies. Yes, cell phones have that quality (with most non-geeks), but landline phones fit there too. Lets say there you are in the middle of a conversation with someone, and the person's phone rings. There are basically two types of reactions for them.

• Answer the phone. Often doesn't matter who it is, or what it's about. The phone is ringing, so must be answered.
• Ignore the phone. You are in the middle of a conversation, the phone is like someone else walking up and wanting to talk to you.

Granted there are always exceptions. One being that you are working, your job is to answer the phone, and the conversation is not work related. In most other situations, why the heck do people answer the phone? In my opinion that's effectively like saying the person on the phone, whose identity may or may not be known, is more important than the person to whom you are talking in person. Same thing with call waiting. This is one of the primary reasons behind voicemail - the person can leave a message and you can get back to them as soon as your current conversation is done.

Similar with businesses. How often have you been in a store where a customer is getting help from someone when the phone rings, and the person immediately answers the phone and makes the customer wait. Since when did that become acceptable? If another customer walked up and asked for assistance would you expect the first customer to wait then?

You may have noticed I mentioned non-geeks specifically earlier in relation to cell phones, and there seems to be some sort of distinction here. It seems that the more geeky people tend to have their phone on silent/vibrate or a quiet normal ring, and if it rings while others are around silence it and ignore within a ring or two. The less geeky people on the other hand tend to have loud and non-standard ring, leave the phone places where they are not but others are, and let it either ring the entire time until it goes to voicemail or interrupt the in-person conversation to take the call.

Before someone comes back with a comment about phone tag, there's a reason that you can record your voice rather than just punch in your number (although that's often an option). You're supposed to say what you want (note that doesn't mean a 10 minute message rambling). I get calls all the time from people about some form of technology not working. Most of them end up with the caller leaving a 30 second voicemail saying why they called. Then I leave them a 30 second reply saying what to do to fix it. Then I get a reply of "Thanks, that worked". Ever wonder why voicemail systems have an answer option? Yep, that's it. I've noticed it's younger people rather than older who have a hard time figuring out that whole concept. They sit there and try to figure out how to ask the question once they finally get a hold of the person they have been trying to reach. Have we as a society become so ADD-like that we can't figure out what we want without prompting from someone else. While those who work at a Help Desk will probably say no and say it's because they don't understand, people don't just do it with tech stuff.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm firmly in the in-person is more important than the caller group. I have people talking to me in my office stop mid sentence and say "aren't you gonna answer that" and then have their jaw practically hit the floor when I say "no, you were talking -- that'd be interrupting you." I consider it common courtesy not to interrupt someone. Enough of my thoughts for now though. What do you think about this subject?