For those asking me about pics, here's one (needs straightening, but works) to tide you over until i get the others up. Hopefully I'll have time to put them together in the next couple days and upload when I get back.

Monday went well. Started the day off by going to Seaworld. Spent most of the day there, pretty much saw everything there. After that headed over to the Mission Beach/Belmont Park area and ended up taking some pictures there. Finished off the day with 189 pictures, and headed back to the hotel. I was tired enough that I basically just went to bed.

Tuesday started off nice, since I got a lot of sleep. We drove through Old Town, and through a bit of the residential stuff around there. Looks like mainly a shopping place. Then went downtown to take the Ferry over to Coronado for the day. We wandered around by the ferry landing and got some Coldstone, and hopped on the bus for Hotel Del Coronado. That place is really nice, although I guess for the price they apparently charge it makes sense. We wandered through the parts you can go without being a registered guest (which is a lot since it's a tourist place), and then headed out on the beach. The beach in front of the hotel is very large, and has nice sand. I took pictures while my family played frisbee and walked on the beach. The day was sorta cloudy and cool (I'm not complaining about that one), but still fun. We wandered around more of the hotel, and too more pictures. Then since we apparently missed the bus back we walked across the island back to the ferry area. It was around dinner time so one of my sisters got KFC while the rest of us stopped at a gyros shop. Then more pictures and back on the ferry to San Diego. Tried taking more photos on the way back to the hotel, but we'll see how those come out (underexposed, while traveling down I-5). Now to check other email and stuff...

Sitting in San Diego, CA right now, relaxing in the hotel - 2 days down 7 to go. Only have 260 pictures so far - I'll get around to posting them eventually. :)

Don't remember what happened Thursday, but Friday was long. After I got home Thursday I think I just washed some clothes and sat around. On Friday all the students were leaving and apparently the faculty and staff weren't calling for help either so no little things. Then the no big things since I was trying to get those in consistent state and everything finished up so other people could cover them for a week. That night was packing and stuff. Ended up going to bed shortly before 1 thinking I'd be done, but no, at around 1 my phone rings and I end up on the phone for over a half hour. Then at around 1:45 (right as I'm almost back to sleep) it rings again and i'm on the phone for another 20 minutes...

Anyways, back to vacation. Been good so far. Saturday morning started with getting up at around 5:30 (with only a couple hours of sleep) to get ready and take care of final packing and shutting everything off around the house. Given my water heater leaks I shut off the water and water heater to save water and heating bills. Then might as well cut the heat way back too... Anyways, we were supposed to be picked up between 6:30 and 7 by the family on the way to the airport, but ended up waiting until closer to 7:30. Given our flight left at 9:11, that's cutting it a bit close. Checking our bags took a while, as the guy kept leaving to check on stuff, and apparently he had to wait to talk to the people who could actually do things. Anyways, once I got to the beginning of the line it took like a minute to get my stuff checked, which was nice. Then there was security. It took me, the guy with a bag full of odd shaped metal objects, about 30 seconds to get through (no laptop booting - that was nice). Unfortunately some people in my family were suffering a bit from lack of sleep, and neglected to think about what security involved, and left things like gum wrappers in the bottom pockets of cargo pants. Yes, a metal gum wrapper will set those things off. As will keys, belt buckles, etc... It's also a good idea to pick up your stuff afterwards. Anyways, after waiting for that to finish up, went to the gate and got there with perfect timing and were able to board almost right away. I got to sit next to the window, and took advantage of that for a couple dozen pictures of stuff like the rockies and Grand Canyon, but unfortunately mine was rather scratched so most have a soft look to them and some have funky polarization and diffraction issues (shows as wacky color shifts). In San Diego it went pretty smooth, my dad and I went to get the van we rented, and rode with this guy who had an interesting driving style. We got back to the place and the guy commented he got us back there quick - "it usually takes him longer to find people." Guess that explained the driving... Went back to pick up the rest of the family at the airport, who had been waiting around an hour at that point. We couldn't actually check in to the hotel that early, so spent some time walking downtown and grabbed some lunch. Then we went on a Harbor Tour which took a couple hours but went north as far as Point Loma and south down into the south part of the bay. The tour guide was a bit odd, but I got a lot of pictures. Due to the military presence in the area lots of military ships and stuff, including a cool newer high-speed one that the tour people don't know too much about. After that we were all tired since we hadn't had much sleep to start with combined with the time zone so we went back to the hotel.

Sunday woke up and headed off to the Los Angeles area, specifically Garden Grove to church at the Crystal Cathedral. Lots of interesting pics outside there - they have a lot of statues and stuff. The whole place is pretty impressive. They had a high school choir visiting from Ohio which was pretty good. There was also a choir from Holland which ended up singing (without any preparation), and seemed pretty good too (no mics on them, so they were trying to sing loud). The service was pretty good, although definitely a production performance due to the televised nature. They sorta go for more application and explaining rather than any depth, and it's a bit odd having the stage manager walking all over during it, but oh well. After that we went to lunch at a nearby mall with a family friend who we met for church. After lunch we headed over to Huntington Beach. They have a pretty good size beach which we walked along for a couple hours, again resulting it a lot of pictures. It's also paintball tournament time so there were teams people from all over and courts set up on the beach and stuff. I don't think people realized that even though there's a fence, if you stand next to it you will get splatered with paint... Walked back to the van along the beach again, this time at a quick walk pace so only took us like 30 minutes, and proceeded to drive down the coastline, down around Dana Point, around the Edison south plant, and Point Loma. This took until it was dark, when we proceeded to drive around San Diego including downtown a bit more, followed by Del Taco and the hotel again.

As mentioned, pretty good so far, except as you may have noticed by the fact updates are delayed. Verizon's latest update messed up my phone's data link somehow - it doesn't want to talk AT to my computer right now. Oh well, I'll probably link up through other means within a couple days to sync up these updates and email. Speaking of phones though, Their EV-DO network out here seems to have problems. The system can keep track of a phone fine for voice calls, but then seems to looks track of it for data purposes until the instant a voice connection establishes when text messages dump through. LA is better, but apparently the ability to send emails from the phone depends on which cell you are connected to (and the ones it's broken on work fine for SMS). Not to mention battery standby life goes down noticably, probably due to the two networks in SD thing... I think it's time for me to relax now though... Ross, Arizona is only half the week, but yes, it should be warmer than MN (SD sure is). And brooke, you're confused a bit - I came from the best state in the continental US to visit a couple around the southern west coast. :)

OK, so I'm a geek. Today I decided that mozilla's newsreader sucks, so I wrote learned enough about NNTP and my own script with the help of Net::NNTP to download all the articles out of newsgroups, and grab updates whenever it's run. Then I wrote a few web pages which are effectively a newsreader. I can browse groups, view threads, kill a thread, mark a thread read, kill all threads from a person, and more as i hit more things. Not the most elegent UI, but it's nice and fast (assumnig I don't have my disk IO pegged for other reasons), and once I got everything parsing properly I haven't had any problems. This setup should be more efficient while on a slow conneciton too. Today I got 3 boxes of stuff, which was nice. Box one was my lens filters and stuff for my camera. Box two was a neoprene case for my computer - fits nicely. Box three was a 256MB CF card (a spare for if I fill up my 512MB before I can get back to the computer to download them all). Hopefully that'll tide me over for a while.

Sunday was a nice day for doing nothing. Woke up and went to church, followed by going home and sitting around. My sister stopped by for food and just studied the whole day here, which was cool. I spent most of the time listening to music and reading tech stuff. Ended up doing a bit of grocery shopping since I was low on some stuff, which went pretty decent. Monday was a mix of stuff. Seems like most people had "a case of the Mondays" which wasn't fun weird that almost everyone felt the same way. I think part of it is being a school and all the students around being stressed out due to a lot of things due or tests right before break. Ended up doing miscellaneous stuff involving virus detection, DAV, and other stuff. It was a C1 day though, which always helps, especially on Mondays. After work headed to my parents' place to grab some stuff, and hung out there most of the night. I think I have a backpack i can use for the trip, which is nice. I also now have a nice case for my tripod and will soon have ones for my laptop's power cable and my karma and headphones thanks to my mom. Now I just have to pack... Tuesday was interesting Avalon had a bit more trouble, which turning off Mac stuff fixed, which lead to more DAV research. Sometimes I think Microsoft keeps breaking AFP more and more with each update. Then Ross and I got to figure out why a couple machines which now have spybot were running on login. Turns out it looks like a problem with a previous install, so now that's fixed on the machines we noticed it on. Also managed to find tons of spyware or attempted spyware installs, so another security lockdown policy goes into the boot process. The nice thing about having them all assigned that way is no matter how many times they're reimaged/replaced the same thing that will get them the appropriate background image will apply all the needed policies to them. After work was another sit around and do nothing night. I like those, although they seem to never last long enough to actually be relaxing. Maybe next week.

Thursday involved miscellaneous stuff again, and ordering an SSL cert. The company decided to mess with the O and OU elements of the cert, which has rather annoyed us. There was also an interesting discussion on resnet-l about what different schools are doing regarding email quotas and limits. The evening was spent at Ross' place again, setting up outside. He needs a new camera though, as this one seems to have trouble from about 6am-6pm because of too much light. And at night it can't seem to get decent pictures either... Fun project though, and we have ideas for what may be a good camera to get (we'll see in another week). Friday was interesting, another day of just enough stuff coming up to not get started on projects. Ross and I spent some time getting spybot installing, updating, and running automatically on the lab machines. This is nice for both of us since I'll get fewer profile reset requests and he'll have to reimage fewer machines. It goes nice and slow, but most of the work is done on shutdown and the machines shouldn't ever be rebooted during the day (they do it automatically at night) so it should be good. I also got more WebDAV stuff set up, this time with a different server (hopefully we can push those production soon). My new headphones somehow showed up (UPS ground in 2 days!?!), which was a nice touch. They're much smaller than my old ones, and sound better too. The biggest benefit is I can't hear someone talking right next to me, so they'll be good for both work and on my vacation. Anyways, while Ross and I were working on spybot testing after the lab closed he was almost falling asleep, but somehow managed to stay awake into the evening. This was good as it was movie night. The movie ended up being School of Rock, which was very funny. Had a decent number of people show up, more than I was expecting, but that's always fun. After they left though I was definitely ready for bed. Saturday slept in a lot, followed by getting up and doing nothing. Spent most of the day listening to music (with earphones). Those things are so nice. The only drawback so far seems to be that they're sorta disorienting after listening for a while since they press on the inside of the ear canal and change slightly how you hear the reflections of ambient noise. Ended up ordering the CF card finally, as well as a sleeve for my laptop so I can put it in a backpack without needing a special one for vacation. In the evening went out to Macaroni Grill with the family. Good time, although way too much food in a single day again. Apparently I was the only one who decided it might be a good idea to look at where it was before leaving, so was able to drive right to it even having never been there and only having been in the mall once before. I say if the resources are there why don't people use them? Was a good time though.

Nothing too interesting about Wednesday. Got poking with SSL on IIS again. They seriously make it harder than it needs to be. Tonight was Green Mill with the lab decorating crew. That combined with Subway for lunch and chips and salsa at the standup meeting today means my stomach is rather upset with me right now. Oh well. After that grabbed my stuff from my office and headed down to Ross' place. While sitting there in the car I decided to test Verizon's data network, and booted up the laptop and started chatting on IM. One person got a little concerned about me chatting on IM while going 65 down the freeway, concerned I may have been driving. No, I'm definitely not that crazy... It was sad I was getting lower latency than he does at home though. :( BTW, didn't have any problems. Rock solid connection, if slow modem speed (but that's normal). Hung out at Ross' basically doing nothing. On the way home it was interesting. It was all nice and clear weather, and then it sorta started snowing. A little gusty, but nothing bad. Then it got thicker. And thicker. Pretty soon we could barely see a car 40ft in front of us, and maybe 2-3 streetlights ahead and that's it. Plus it was windy and big vehicles getting pushed around on the road a bit... By the time we got back to Bethel it was basically done, but the roads were coated with a nice slick coating. Slid around on the way home, but nothing too dangerous. I sorta like driving in snow, it'd be nicer if I wasn't so tired and just wanting to get home and to bed.

Today was sorta frustrating - days poking at exchange are never good. Pretty relaxing after work though, just sitting around listening to music and reading. My tripod came today, and is very light. It seems solid when extended too, so that's nice. I'm debating a movie night on Friday night. Looks like it'll probably happen, but who knows. Let me know if you're interested and if you have any suggestions (although the first suggestion looks likely so far).

Well, week didn't start off too well. A server started rebooting right as I started to get settled into the day, and it turns out we suspected heat. So I ended up finding out the AC in the server room was broken, and they're gonna try and fix it tomorrow morning. But in the meantime while trying to sort out other problems caused by the first machine, and attempting to figure out why the first machine kept dying, it seems the first machine's motherboard got fried, so I stole a machine from the Help Desk and have that in there now. Of course it had to be a server which had tons of tiny roles everywhere... After work Dave came over and we watched Lost in Translation. Good movie. Soundtrack was great, and the camera work was interesting, although a bit off at times.

Wow, it's been a while. Last week went pretty decent. More talk of email viruses and ways to avoid them. There was a big outage which I heard a lot about, but thankfuly didn't really have any effect on me. Thursday morning was a bit busy. I spent the entire morning responding to emails, until I finally took a break for lunch. Lunch was Village Wok, which was really good. Thankfully the afternoon slowed down a bit and I got to do other things, although I did manage to create a bit of an upset by reminding everyone of a policy we had. That night we had a little incident with the email server which I discovered when an email hit my cell phone on my way home. Sometimes typos can be really bad. I managed to figure out that it was still happening about an hour later (effects were sorta rippling through slowly), and shut down the appropriate servers to clean out the queues. Thankfully it stayed sorta isolated so all the services that people see were unaffected. Friday started off by seeing snow everywhere. I took some pictures at home, as well as on the way into work. Nothing too exciting, but maybe I'll post some of them anyways. Work was miscellaneous stuff, followed by discovery that verizon decided to drop the msg.myvzw.com domain without telling anyone who was using it. Luckily vtext.com does the same thing, and we were able to just transition over. Weird though - I wonder if it'll come back. Friday night I took down all the Windows servers for maintenance. Went pretty well, think I squashed all the problems we had been seeing, at least for now. We'll see if any come back and deal with them then. Hopefully the loads will be more stable without AFP and they won't get confused again. Saturday I slept in a lot (like until afternoon) which was great since I had been so tired. I got up and did nothing for a while, followed by going over to Nick's place and calibrating his audio stuff. Got it all set up with reference level now, and it was great for demo stuff. The timing was important there because he was having a bunch of people over for food followed by Runaway Jury. Good movie, suspense was rather well done. After that most of the people went to play broomball, but Dave and I ditched and headed over to Ross' place to hang out with other people. After quite a bit of going through the options we watched Fletch. Chevy Chase movies have this unique humor to them which I think is great (as does everyone else who was there). After the movie was just chatting, as well as some people wrestling while the rest of us laughed and Dave dug himself deeper and deeper holes with his comments. Was a late night, but good. Sunday was Salem again, followed by just sitting around relaxing some more. Read more on photo stuff, followed by more. Talked to my dad for quite a while about what filters we had and which sizes, and which would be handy for both of us, and eventually selected a few. Also got a couple step up and step down rings since we're to three lens sizes now. Found my dad an overstock on a cross screen which fits his digital for $4, which was a nice find. All the filters I got won't come in handy right away, but hopefully will. I decided against color correction filters when I realized that since I'm shooting digitally and have manual white balance correction I can do that much cheaper with inverted color samples. Now I just need to stop by a paint store and put together a palette of appropriate samples. :) Hopefully the cheap Ultra II CF card I want will come back in stock within a couple days so I can order that without much markup for fast shipping. Other things of note, I'm still really liking the headset I bought a couple weeks back. I've used it a few hours this weekend, and it's great since even after an hour or so on the phone it still isn't uncomfortable, which is more than I can say about holding any phone. Now there's just the annoying heat problem of a phone in the pocket to deal with...