I was poking on my myth box today - I "fixed" some stuff. Unfortunately I didn't discover this until I checked my email, and by that time it had already sent every email in the queue. So for the last few hours my email client has been downloading 20+ messages every couple minutes, and I still have 5 months to go (that's just on the one series, I hope there's not another). 1616 down, who knows how many to go... On the topic of email, last night I got an interesting spam. It started off with "If you've received this message - then your email address has been screened circulating on junk-email and spam related mailing lists." Thanks, but I've definitely figured that out a long time ago... As for today, the morning started off with a trip to Salem as usual. Then was DVD time a bit. Ended up watching up through Episode 15 of Alias, as well as the one that was on today. For those not counting, that's 4 DVDs so far. I like this approach much better than watching it regularly. It's like a long movie, but with a 2 minute review every 50 minutes or so. OK, a very, very long movie. Also ended up getting a call since apparently last night's backup caused a few tables under the mysql service to freeze up after filling the root partition. Sorta odd since nothing it can see is writable there (everything's on other partitions), but whatever. Got that all figured out, which let people do their jobs. People wanted to get back on the network or something it looked like. Complainers... :) Not much else, have the myth box CPU pegged all day and night encoding. 2 pass VBR on video is a good way to peg a CPU for a long time... Tomorrow is Monday. Hopefully I'll find something fun to do.

Friday was sorta interesting. After some poking and fixing a subnet masking mistake (.240 is /20, not .224), Ross and I got the firewalling of DHCP computers from other DHCP computers working on our test group. Assuming nothing goes wrong with that we'll roll it out wider in the near future. Lunch was C1, which is always good. Also got BSSD up and running, it was that pesky kerberos thing again. Going up to 2k with a UDP packet when most of your customers use ethernet and there's a chance the connection will have to pass through a stateful firewall is just crazy. Limiting the UDP packets to 1400 bytes of data effectively solves the problem though. If you don't know why go look a the basic specs of an ethernet packet again. :) Nothing else too exciting though. The OS X stuff is still hitting the same problem. Maybe will have to create a test DNS server to force some differences and see how that gets handled. After work waited a bit and then headed down to Ross' place. From there went over to Club 3 Degrees to see Junk's band Moxie Bliss. It was good, although we only stuck around for his band and then left. All of us were tired, so that was pretty much it for the day. Saturday slept in, read tech stuff for a while, then watched the first 5 episodes of Alias. Good story, but they've definitely improved the vocal recording quality since the first season (that or they just managed to mangle some of the voices on the center channel on the DVD mix while leaving the effects perfectly clear). After that was off to the parents place for pizza and finding stuff to do on the computer while everyone else watch various sports events on TV.

Lately updating this has seemed like just another annoying thing to do. I think I finally figured out why - it requires thinking. Lately at work I've been trying to push away from more of the tedious stuff and to planning. This requires thinking, but then I get distracted on some other thing that comes up, so I have all these different threads going on at once. By the end of the day I don't want to do anything. I go home, sit and just read tech stuff, and do nothing else until bed. I think tomorrow I may try and not read any tech stuff and just listen to music. It's been a while since I listened to the whole Go Home concert... Tuesday otherwise went pretty well. Spent some time with the Macs and AD again. We got them binding properly. Seems a big annoyance with the current version is they have to be bound by a user account in the domain to which they are binding. Even though we have permissions assigned to normal tech accounts for the Windows side, we'll have to use something else for the Macs (probably end up being a binding-only account). We found some interesting DNS stuff, but then that stuff got shot down, so we still have poking to do as to why some stuff has worked and others have not worked. Between Tuesday and Wednesday though I think we're pretty much set for some sort of solution this summer. Also spent some time talking to Quan about how we need to migrate people properly because of the way the Mac deals with resource forks through AFP versus SMB and WebDAV. Probably gonna end up with some sort of document. Lunch on Wednesday was Olive Garden for the Soup and Salad deal. The waiter was very quick on getting us more of both before we needed them, and even left us the cheese grater (and swapped it out twice when we ran out of cheese - yea we used a lot). That was a good lunch. Eddington's is tomorrow with the Chicken Potato Chowder - hard to go wrong with Zuppa one day and that the next. After work on Wednesday went home and watched Ice Age. While the story isn't that great, it does hold the interest just enough and the animation is good.

Monday is a Monday, and not much that can be done about that. Everything stayed up over the weekend with no problems after all the rebooting, which was nice. Read over documents and stuff, some related to MS Security stuff. Lunch was Culvers, which had been way too long. After work sat around a lot. Did end up downloading my pictures from Sunday's storm. Nothing really great, but did end up with this one of which a higher res version is my background. The new SA implementation on my email is definitely nice. It's catching a good chunk of my spam now. I'll have to keep in mind that I should update that more often. It's like a 2 minute procedure, so...

Pretty normal weekend. Slept in really late on Saturday. Almost got up at noon, but then apparently fell back asleep before managing to get all the way out of bed and slept for another hour. Pretty much sat around and did nothing all day, except a bit of tech reading. Then decided I was glad I didn't choose AT&T Wireless again. As if their network wasn't bad enough already, apparently the entire thing pretty much collapsed on itself for a decent chunk of Saturday. Turns out an OC-192 in Texas went down, and apparently it handled a good chunk of their GPRS traffic. Not sure why that took out everything else exactly, but probably something to do with load and the domino effect (especially since stuff was sporadic). From what it sounds like how phones interacted with the network during this GSM sound like a pretty crappy interface method, although I'm sure the system had reasons. Why the heck should rebooting a phone be needed to reconnect? And why doesn't AT&T use the features of GSM that are sorta like the PRLs in other systems? Oh well... Sunday slept in later than I should have, but still made it to Salem basically on time. Ended up being sorta warm in there, but it was a relatively short service too, which was nice. After that sat around reading the aftermath of yesterday's problems as mentioned above. Then watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. That movie has it's funny parts, but I still seriously think it's overrated. I've never gotten how people can sit there going through sound clips forever. They're maybe funny on their own as an occational thing, but putting a bunch together just gets annoying... By the time the movie was over I was definitely more interested in what was going on outside. I promptly grabbed my camera and ventured into the world of water, hard flying objects (hail and big raindrops driven by high speed wind), and bright flashes of light. Unfortunately it was one big overcast sky with nothing too interesting, but I may have gotten some other interesting ones. I just set everything up to dry out a bit when I got back inside, so I'll have to go retrieve the pics later. After that turned on the local TV to discover that everything was focusing on the weather. SD too, so you'd think that they could have put the network feeds on HD on a subchannel, but whatever. They moved Alias back to 11 something and then only put it in SD, which was a bit of a disappointment. I sat and listened to music on my big system for a while, which I don't do near often enough. The furniture in my office upstairs and the resulting speaker layout just doesn't lend itself well to a good music listening environment. It's nice to just listen to music in a relaxed environment too. If it weren't for having to go to work tomorrow, I'd probably listen to music a lot longer here.

Friday is Friday, the last workday of the week. Sometimes that's a very good thing. Miscellaneous stuff, followed by C1 for lunch. Then more miscellaneous stuff. Between Active Directory replication and the great patching system for Windows... Did some relatively major reworking of part of the Incident management system, but was able to use the same scripts for the most part with a couple additions to handle the changes, so it didn't take too long. Now it gives the users fewer options and forces a specific path, but that should be better long term. After work was dinner at Queen of Sheba. It's a bit of a trip from Bethel, but it's good food. The only downside is your hands sorta smell the rest of the day (it's Ethiopian - you eat with your fingers). We got a big special that had pretty much everything in it and everyone shared. I think the Doro Wott was probably my favorite part. After that was helping Dave fix some stuff, and then off to update the Microsoft Monopoly store. There are now mugs up there, but no thongs as Dave threatened to order one. It appears there have been a few orders, which is cool. Then the magic time rolled around, followed by a couple hours of rebooting Windows boxes. Exchange really depends too much on Active Directory (yea it needs it to authenticate and stuff, but the services could still come up in an inactive state and start working or something when the domain controllers come back rather than needing a reboot). Then the crazy keyboard and mouse not working if they weren't in on boot. Windows is too dependent on the BIOS, of which there are many very poor types. The weekend is finally here though.

Thursday went well. Everyone liked the Microsoft Monopoly stuff. There's a curious OS trend that I may talk about at some point in the future. Today was more patching, since our Internet connection worked better. I quickly discovered that even though according to Windows Update all the latest patches can be installed together followed by a single reboot, doing that is likely to result in one to four of them not properly applying. And then there's the MBSA freaking out since someone forgot to tell it that files these things update are really OK and that doesn't mean these older updates aren't applied. Tomorrow night should be interesting since that's when I get to take everything down to patch them and reboot a lot of things a lot of times... Anyways, lunch was Arby's since Dave discovered they had two of the medium sized ("Giant") sandwiches for $4. Arby's is always good. I also spent time today reading about security stuff between waiting for patches. After work I cleaned up a bit at home, and actually finally got together the information necessary to fill out my W-4 for 2004. I managed to get myself the 2003 form, which shouldn't be a big problem as the info is the same, but now I just need to get it to HR. Tomorrow is Friday though, which is always fun.

Tuesday's security conference went really well. I thought it was gonna be boring, but Jesper Johansson was the speaker for the one track and was actually really interesting. He actually knew what he was talking about, and not just in relation to Microsoft products. It's always nice when people are willing to admit product shortcomings or outright design flaws (especially when they have ways to work around them). Product failures as well, such as Windows ME also known as windows me or windows 98 but they managed to break everything, or Wintendo. Anyways, the day was worth it. While we were there Ross came up with a good idea for shirts so I threw together a draft last night. Everyone liked it so tonight I went all out and started editing 10000x3000 pixel multi-layer images (my gimpswap file was up just over 900MB) and ended up with this (that's the scaled down version). As for the shirts, CafePress also has other stuff, and they're the cheapest assuming they either don't notice or their policies are more CYOA, so have fun. If you have any other suggestions of products to place the image on that you're actually interested in buying, let me know. Tuesday night also involved hanging out at Ross' avoiding rush hour traffic, trying to figure out why my email was taking so long to download and realizing that having 5300 messages in the box may have something to do with it. Then Dave wanted to go to Willow Gate, followed by Starbucks with rather interesting conversations. Wednesday was odd. Seems like every time I tried to do something other things got in the way. Sorted through the above mentioned email, which involved lots of virus warnings and notices to yank machines from the network. I need to remember to add my other machine to the exception list so it doesn't complain when I forward viruses to people... Anyways, tried to work on a server in San Diego, and firewall stuff stopped me. Got that working, and started investigating applying patches to our Windows servers due to the patches released Tuesday, but then the internet connection got slow enough the downloads just sorta crawled the rest of the day. Oh well, it feels like I actually got stuff done. Other interesting stuff of note - that house I was looking at last fall is back on the market again. This time they are selling it for sale by owner (they get an extra 3%), and they bumped the price up again. Sometimes I wonder about people...

It's still down. They sent me another email that they're "working on it". That's 3 days so far... As far as work, it started off hearing that I should visit one of the server rooms to investigate a server which was beeping and annoying the people in the next room over. I went up there and yes, one of the raid cards was making quite a racket. I found the source of the noise and covered it with an appropriate amount of scotch tape, and the sound no longer travels very far. I suppose I should reboot and actually take care of that soon. Tomorrow won't be the day though, since I get to spend it at the Microsoft Security Summit at the convention center. Should be interesting, none of us our sure what to expect. We're all hoping it won't be a big marketing thing and we'll actually find useful stuff, but there aren't a lot of details on the page. It's free though, and I got tagged as the person from the servers group to go. Get to be in St Paul at a bit before 8 tomorrow morning, which won't be too much fun. We'll see how it goes though.

Web hosting stuff still down. I submitted a trouble ticket, asking why they were bouncing email and when it would be back up, and they talked about hardware and software problems and it was being worked on but no estimate. They ended the email with "Because we are aware of this issue, you do not need to submit a ticket." That was rather nice of them I thought - add that to the list of reasons... Anyways, today was Church with my family, at least sorta. I showed up to church on time, and by the time church started they still weren't there so other people ended up sitting by me. They ended up being like 5 rows back by the time they got there. After church shut down the mail server for a bit again. Seeing as the backend still isn't up, I'm doing a sort of manual greylisting to cut spam. Bring it up and leave it up for long enough for legit mail to queue through, but leave it shut down rejecting mail enough that spammers don't end up getting mail through if they don't use a real mail server queue (especially overnight and stuff when they like to send). Hopefully the server will actually be up sometime soon - it'd be nice for mail to go through like normal. Anyways, around lunch time we headed up to have Easter with my dad's side of the family. That was good food, although too much of it. Then hid some plastic eggs for the younger kids to find, and a lot of sitting around. Got back home and did my taxes. The M1W form seems to be the laziest thing for the state... There aren't that many different types of W2 forms... Anyways, that only took a few minutes (I still don't see why people complain so much - for individuals it takes under a half hour for the vast majority of people). Finished off the night by watching Cyborg 2. Not that great of a movie. The DVD looked like it was filmed on video, but also looked like transfer off a decently worn film. The story was sorta interesting, but the acting and writing wasn't all that great either.