So I'm actually writing this from the web update rather than just sending my website an email. It's been a long time since I last did that. The reason is because my crazy webhost (for qux.net and the mail, not for a lot of the other sites I host) has been down all day, which was annoying but I could deal with it since my mail server was just spooling stuff. Then they turned on the SMTP listener again, but managed to get it to give a 550 error (user unknown) for every valid address. Of course they still haven't actually fixed it, and I submitted a trouble ticket with no response. So the frontend mail spool is off right now, and if you send mail to my qux.net address I won't get it for a while. I should fix it so it silently spools in a bit here so I don't have to deal with people wondering about it. I gotta drop that host soon - they were good at first, but now sorta suck. Always slow, they've done this (although not as bad) a few times, and their billing system is pretty crappy. So yea, stay away from communitech and their many resellers. Anyways, today went well. I woke up rather sore for some unknown reason. I didn't think I had slept curled up or anything, but must have since even standing up straight was annoying. Managed to stretch out sorta slowly. Sat around for a bit, and then went to see The Passion of the Christ with my family. Second time I've seen it, and I still think it's a good movie. The theater we saw it in looked pretty good at first and concessions weren't too pricy (at least candy, pop was expensive), but the seats were pretty uncomfortable. Managed to get a collection of voicemails during the movie, so spent the next 20 minutes on the phone responding to those. Then hung out with the family a bit. They wanted me to stay even longer, but I was sorta tired and wanted to go home. Ended up watching Waterworld when I got home. Not a great movie, but it doesn't suck as bad as the general opinion seems to be. It seems to try and push the fact that it's in the future even though it's in the past a bit too much. Anyways, I'm tired, and I got some sendmail poking to do..

Thursday went well, mostly miscellaneous stuff. Helped Mike J with the Windows and Active Directory stuff as needed, and he got OS X working right with it. Now it's just changing stuff bit by bit until we figure out why it didn't work in our production environment (I have a feeling it'll end up being something with cross-domain authentication). Lunch was a Chinese buffet with Sheldon and a few coworkers. That went well, although my breath reeked for the rest of the day (to the point people a decent distance from me could smell it), and breath mints and dew didn't help much. Given Dave's experience as well, I'm thinking we'll avoid that place for a while. After work I played with my phone a bit. No luck on the fast connection stuff. I did manage to get it to connect, but my pppd got confused with something and dropped the conection while my phone didn't. This caused problems when it thought I was logged in while I really wasn't. Hopefully I'll get that stable soon. When I went home I sat around and just caught up on tech reading and stuff. Friday was sleeping in until after noon. Then there was restocking the office dew supply, depositing some rebate checks (and finally updating my address with the bank), and getting some necessities at Cub. Watched Bowling for Columbine which is an interesting movie. It brings up a lot of good points, but I also agree with "bob the moo"'s comments on imdb about Moore's style and things he did. After that figured out I was confused about the time all day (stupid SprintPCS), and headed over to Nick's place. There we watched The Breakfast Club, which is good. I always catch more things each time I see that. After that we just hung out and talked until everyone left. Got home and find someone infected with a virus. No big deal until his computer starts having fun with the lists server - apparently he had a lot of list server messages on his machine for the thing to pull addresses from. Got sick of that rather quickly (as I see the amount of time to clean up the held message queues growing) so blacklisted his machine on the two main mail servers. The cool part is now that we have SMTP blocking, those are the only two that can be used from on campus anyways, so the spreading is effectively stopped. Why do people insist on opening password protected zips from people they don't know and then running them?!?

Week has gone decent so far, with tomorrow being the last day (Friday is a holiday), so I'm happy about that. Today I ended up rebuilding a server for the test domain since it was messed up. Seems to be working fine now though, which is good. Lots of other discussions and small stuff, nothing too big. Tuesday was pretty much the same. I think Quan and I have definitely become regular visitors to Taco Tuesday though since we're greeted by name when we walk in. Wednesday went with a bunch of other ITSers to Wendy's which was sorta funny since we jammed 5 people into Nick's sweet ride. After work I've been pretty much doing geek stuff. Tonight I stumbled across the proper init codes for my phone to go into 3G data mode, which is awesome. That led me on another fruitless search to find the proper init codes to get the phone into AT mode. I can use it fine under linux once it's been set in that mode by the windows drivers (by plugging it in for 2 seconds), but haven't been able to find what to send it to get it in the right mode. The problem is that it resets when the phone is restarted. Granted the phone pretty much never needs a restart, but there are situations such as flying where a restart is unfortunately necessary, and I'm not carrying a windows machine for just for that. I poked around in the Forum Nokia developers area for a while, and it seems like a lot of other people have similar problems, but nokia hasn't been any help. Google only turns up a couple responses, and they're just having similar symptoms and haven't even gotten as far as I have. Hopefully I won't end up resorting to a pulling out jumpers and a scope to figure this out... We'll see what tomorrow night brings.

Well, it was Monday. Poked around some more, looked into Windows domains a bit more. Those things are just trouble... Flabre and I went to lunch at Boston Market, and overheard an interesting loud and one-sided conversation from another table. It was sorta funny to listen to actually, plus the food there is always good. Other than that moved some more accounts, and also restored email for someone who managed to delete it. After work sat around a bit, and then watched Basic. I thought it was a really good movie. It seems the people complaining about it don't like the ending, which is sorta the key. It's one of those ones where the plot does a complete 180 5 times in 10 minutes, and you never know exactly what's gonna happen. The movie was also well done, and never slow. The soundtrack was decent through most of it (one weird spot with a song sample), but unfortunately they had to only have a Dolby Digital version and no DTS. DD tends to somewhat kill environmental sounds in the rear, especially stuff like rain when there are loud effects up front (gunfire). Basically the droplets turn into a compressed mush (highs merge between channels, and what's left is the general dynamic with no detail). Oh well, movie's still worth seeing. Very shallow depth of field almost throughout, with some interesting pans. Camera guys had to be staying pretty awake.

Nice restful weekend. Saturday slept in, followed by going and getting the oil changed in my car and picking up some dew for the office. While there Paul and brooke were in 10's office so bugged them for a bit, until Paul decided he wanted a new phone which quickly became more important than any homework they may have wanted to do. I spent the night sitting around reading and stuff. Came across some cool sites like tech info on CDMA. All you could ever want to know about all the cool ways CDMA works is in there. Also ended up reprogramming some of the NAM stuff in my phone so now NAM2 works to force roaming if I ever want to do that. Sunday got up and went to Salem which was pretty good. Then sat around relaxing all afternoon before heading over to my parents place for a sorta party since my sister's birthday was last Friday. It was basically pizza and the game and cake. I pretty much ignored the game, but apparently the gophers lost which isn't a good thing. Get home and just start reading blogs and then Bethel's Internet connection goes down. So for all you people hosted at Bethel I can't read your blogs right now. Oh well, that's what morning is for. Since paging doesn't work when our internet connection is down right now, I was nice and paged network services for you guys too. Hopefully it's not something too serious.

Well, glad the week is over. I've been tired all week, so sleeping in will be nice... Nothing too exciting this week that I've done. The coding I did wednesday night (not the rss stuff) did confuse a lot of people at work. Basically I sent everyone who logged into our main work software to a spoof of our blocked web site page when they first attempted to access it. Dave also changed his site a bit, and I debated scaring and confusing people too, but I didn't. Today was campus beautification, and most of our department went out and wandered around picking up trash for an hour or so. That was sorta cool. Lunch was Chipotle with the ITS crowd, and Obang ended up joining us since he happened to be walking by as one of the cars was leaving Bethel, which was cool. Apparently we were only two under the record for the number of people in the one booth. We had 7, and I'm not sure how they'd manage to jam 9 in there, but if Dave could do it in his car (and include a picnic basket), there must be a way. Other news is 10 finally got a blog. She's been debating it for a while, and my bugging her about needing to get one before she leaves this morning apparently worked. And yea, as she commented about (and now that it's actually been announced), she's ditching us to move halfway across the country - apparently she thinks she's too good for us Minnesota people or something. :) Finished off the day with Movie night. A bunch of people came over, and we watched Tommy Boy followed by Airplane. Nick and I were the only two who ended up staying through all of both movies, but it was fun anyways. Time to start the weekend off right though...

Hmm. The week has been both slow and quick, I guess sorta typical for a week after vacation. Work has lots of little mindless things to do, along with a couple big things I gotta do. After work I've basically been doing nothing. Although due to the upcoming day I did a little bit tonight. Today Dave was bugging me about not having an rss feed for my site, so I spent the two minutes and here you go.

Well, I'm back and glad to be able to sleep in my own bed for a change. Maybe I'll get a decent night's sleep... Nothing too exciting. Got up way too early, hopped in the van, and rode back to San Diego. Just past Yuma a ways into California there were these huge sand dunes (probably a hundred feet or more) with people driving all over them, which was sorta fun to watch (they were throwing sand everywhere). Then we stopped by Taco Bell for lunch, followed by the airport for the plane ride back. San Diego security is a bit tighter than MSP, but wasn't bad either. Everyone has to take off their shoes and send them through separate though, and they were checking a lot of people with wands after going through the other metal detectors. Got back to MSP and some wise guys decided to take the only two flights on one carousel and throw them onto the one next to it with 4 other flights, so luggage took a bit (and it always seems to take longer at MSP than anywhere else anyways). After I got home I got the water turned on and heat back to normal, and started uploading. Yep, the pics are finally up. It's the first major use of my album software there so let me know if something doesn't act right (I caught one thing my beta testers didn't get last week while I was sorting them). That and downloading email took forever. I think I'll have to have my laptop grab it's copy of the work email while I'm there tomorrow rather than from home. Turns out the post office delivered some of my mail last week (looks like random days), so I may have to call them about that one. They can't seem to get anything straight consistently... Now to finish up some laundry and get everything else unpacked.

Hmm, another long one (as if it matters since they'll all post at once). Thursday went well as a day to just relax. Got all the photos up until that point into the photo gallery system. A surprising number of the sunset pictures did come out. There are a lot of them, but the sunset also changed drastically during the time (many different color combinations), and the foreground was always changing, so check that out when I post a link if you want. Really didn't do anything else that day, other than relax and listen to music. It was my day I slept in the most though.

Friday started with a 9:30 run into the desert just for fun. Basically my aunt and uncle live on an airpark on the outskirts of Salome, and it's right next to a bunch of government lands with paths all over managed by the Bureau of Land Management. For fun half the residents will just get together with dune buggys and ATVs (and pickups or jeeps) and head out exploring (and geocaching). The paths were extremely bumpy, made of large rocks and dirt, and frequently crossed washes with 45 or 50 degree slopes down follewed by a right angle at the bottom and an immediate slope back up. The larger washes had very high sides (see the pics for some) and some were wider and had rock bottoms which were also used as paths). You know it's bad when 4 wheelers have to select a different path to stay on more than 2 wheels (or you have to use a foot as a side support to not flip). Came back with white hair and beard (from the dust - there is a picture I'll see if I can get my hands on), so a shower was very nice. I didn't realize that much dust could collect in the sides of one's eyes either...

Saturday was day two of runs into the desert. This one started off a little faster cruising 40+MPH down the highway, but quickly slowed down when we went offroad. The lead buggy picked much bumpier trails this time, and 4 wheel drive on the ATVs was nice (with one person and a running start at least - more than one meant one person got out and pushed on some inclines). We planted a geocache, had lunch, and then some of us headed back while the others headed out for more exploring. On our way back I got to head out in front once we got on a main road which was nice and I just opened it up. 40-50MPH without a windshield is much more fun when you're not driving through a cloud of dust. It's easy to fishtail at those speeds around sharp corners too. :) After a while our family headed offroad a bit more, and I let my dad drive while I road in the buggy a bit (and took pictures of them). After we got back it was shower time again, followed by printing boarding passes for the flight back tomorrow, and then over to a neighbor's hangar (it's an airpark, remember?) for a big potluck dinner. That was good, and the whole group is fun to be around. After that I put together all the pictures from the last couple days (another hundred or so), and have them ready to upload as well. Tomorrow we get up early and drive back to San Diego (5 hr drive) to fly home (a 3.5 hour flight), so will be a full day of travelling.

Wednesday went pretty well. We woke up and got everything cleaned up and out of the hotel. Then it was on the road down to Chula Vista. There we visited the Olympic Training Center. After that we headed back up to Mission Valley to stop by Target before heading out on our all-day road trip, and then stopped at In-N-Out for lunch. Very good burgers, but I think it's a tiny bit overrated. Then it was the trip to Salome, AZ. Long drive, but interesting views along the way. There was a nice sunset, and I got some pictures, but all at 65+ MPH so we'll see how those turned out. Once we arrived in Salome I started importing pictures, and they all finished overnight. There were 709 photos so far, totaling 1.8GB at full resolution. The web versions are only around 80MB total though. I did some organizing into different galleries, but the rest will probably be worked on over the next day or two. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up and get them all posted within a day or two of getting back.