Miss one day and random coworkers comment to me about it. I think I need to look at my logs sometime and see how many people actually read this thing. Anyways work has been about as normal as possible. The Avalon thing is mainly waiting, but is still there pestering and making sure it's working. Between that and other random stuff that comes up, it's just enough to keep me busy most of the day, leaving just small gaps. Unfortunately those small gaps never are long enough to really dive into a project. I think after this Avalon thing finishes I need to just lock myself away and finish a few big things. After work Wednesday I went to Sam's Club with Joe and Doug, followed by Qdoba on the way back (the big reason I went along. That place is good, and will have to become a more popular destination. Maybe tomorrow's lunch can get people there. After that I started looking into prepaid internet stuff similar to calling cards but for net access. One of my coworkers mentioned them and seeing as I have a vacation coming up I decided it was either that or voice calling card and abuse another source of free net access. Either way it's billed by the minute, which I've used in the past with pretty decent luck, but last time I was on a trip of that type there was no phone line to use. I figured might as well look at cell data plans, but figured they wouldn't be good because of the base cost. Turns out that Verizon will let me get 14.4kbps from my phone for just the cost of minutes, which is unlimited for what I'd plan on using. Plus I can use it almost anywhere in the country. So now I just need to figure out how to get the DKU-5 cable to work under linux or get a QuickMobile cable which unfortunately seems to only come with software that costs $20 more. :( Anyways Thursday night I hung out at Bethel for a bit more, and then went home. Caught up on the tech news a bit, and then started reworking my start page. Nothing too big, mainly move a few links, add a few, and change where some point within sites. Maybe I'll have something solid and upload it this weekend. I have to get up at a semi-reasonable time this Saturday, but hopefully I can use most of the weekend to just relax and ignore everything...

Tuesday was pretty normal, mainly routine stuff. The exception is now the restore seems to want the tapes in a random order and is rerequesting some. Whatever, as long as it sticks to what it has in the drives and doesn't want other tapes... The interesting thing I did today was after work, where I threw together this page. One place for me to go or send people when something about a new alert comes out. Who knows if it'll ever really get used, but it doesn't take many resources on the server.

Today was much too long, or maybe it's just that the amount to do changed enough that I got bored. Maybe it's the not playing in the snow. Anyways, I was tired this morning. Looked outside and saw many inches of snow covering the driveway and steps, which would have been cool if I didn't have to go to work. My brother couldn't get out of the driveway since the minivan doesn't quite have the same running-stuff-over capability as my car, so he had to shovel a bit. Another thing I like about my car is it has pretty decent ground clearance, but also is small enough I can fit in the front row parking spots that nobody else can fit in since half the people can't park. Not complaining there. :) Work went OK. I think I got this big problem sorta resolved, but the question is still why did it happen in the first place. The fix is enabling something we disabled close to a year ago, but the problem has only been happening a month. And only to a select group of people. Oh well, at least we have a solution to make faculty happy. Avalon restore is still going. Apparently word never got out that Ms were up, so told the Help Desk about that. Not sure where that got dropped - it sounds like there was a misunderstanding somewhere along the way so it just sounded like confirmation of what happened before and not news. At this point it's sorta like watching paint dry. I swapped tapes before I left work today, bringing it to the point of not needing any more swaps until after it's done. I think the one drive still needs cleaning though. Now we just have to hope it goes reasonably quick and doesn't crash. For lunch Mike J and Tenley and I ordered Davanni's which was good, and we didn't have to drive anywhere either. After work I came home, and watched The Silence of the Lambs. I hadn't seen it before, but was sorta disappointed since I thought it was supposed to be scary. I was more bored than anything, although it did have some interesting character development and revealing as the movie went on. A lot better than a lot of movies I've seen.

So I didn't notice that the date on yesterday's entry got parsed wrong, so the system sorted it down to the date 0000-00-00 (at the end of my archives). Fixed that now, and double checked that no others like that exist. I'll have to watch in the future more since it's supposed to detect invalid dates and fix them. Woke up this morning and had a bit of extra time before church so went in and swapped tapes on the system. Restore wasn't finished, but looked hopeful for early afternoon. Arrived at church with about a minute to spare before the service started, and found way more people from ITS than normal. Church was a bit interesting since it was more church planning and ideas, and I'm not really a part of the church yet. Sorta scary since a lot of it is almost identical to what my former church was talking about before we closed, but Salem isn't already on a downward slide so hopefully won't go that way. After church the crew went to Subway for lunch. Surprisingly there was a decent line there, but it was good to hang out with everyone again. After that I took JoeBuck and Dave home, and had a bit of fun driving around since the roads were slick. Really easy to fishtail around corners and just drive sideways and stuff. Got home and started the snowblower, which I knew was low on gas, but it promptly reminded me by stopping after a couple times down the driveway. Called and requested a gas can be delivered (great to have family coming over anyways), and went off getting the stuff together for the superbowl party. Downstairs got the Comcast CBS HD feed, and upstairs got the OTA CBS HD feed. Had to run a coax temporarily up the wall to upstairs for the OTA feed (needed the attic antenna - the rabbit ears didn't cut it), but otherwise everything went smooth. They stayed perfectly in sync which was nice, although the in sync also meant the glitches on receiving must have been part of the CBS link or at the station. Lots of people across the country reported the audio glitches, so probably the CBS uplink. Overall the game quality was really good though technically, the playing was boring at first but got better. The halftime show just sucked, and this didn't help at all. Commercials were a bit lacking this year. Nothing too exciting, and the second half seemed to have almost none. A ton of people showed up for my party, so there are some pictures. People kept showing up after we ran out of seats, so had to make use of dining room chairs and pillows, but all was good. I'll have to plan better for next year i guess. As for that restore that I hoped would finish in the early afternoon, it finished just before midnight. Started the next ones now, but one blew up on a bad read and claimed the tape was bad and put the drive in service mode. Luckily I caught it right away and changed it back to online and started it up again. Thankfully the client also just rerequested what was left of the job rather than aborting too. Looks like it's reading OK this time, hopefully it was just a glitch. The drives probably need cleaning bad though... We'll see how that looks tomorrow morning.

Friday. Can we pretend that day didn't exist? Note my "Thursday" entry was posted at about 3am. After I posted that I finished up work and went to bed, to get up at 9. The morning wasn't so bad, other than being horribly tired. Lunch was pizza in market since Junk had a bunch of flex left over. That was good. I think I was on either my second or third bottle of dew by then though. The beginning of the afternoon was decent, swapped more tapes out, the usual. Then something happened to Usonia2. Not sure what actually triggered it, but it was unresponsive, even through RPC. So grab the 4th bottle of dew and out the door and heading to the server room. It was so screwed up that even being off the network for 20 minutes still hadn't made it usable, but it was enough for me to plug the network cable back in and shut down file services for macintosh. Of course that caused the machine to instantly come back to life. Have I mentioned before that Microsof'ts AFP service sucks? I'll be glad to see that go away in hopefully a few short months. Anyways, that brought me a bit past 6 and by then it was Mike's turn to watch Avalon so I headed home, and promptly went to bed sometime before 8pm. That has to be like a record in the past few years. Woke up at like 9 am on Saturday when it was time for me to start watching Avalon again. Seemed to be OK with the tapes it had, so went back to bed for a while. Eventually got up even though I was tired, and cleaned the house a lot. Got the living room all cleaned out. Of course without the boxes the antenna needed a new home, so out came the paddle bits and new holes in the wall and floor. Rerouted the cable line from a wall jack to downstairs in the closet, and ran a coax line from the attic down to the closet as well. The big monster antenna that was in my living room now sits up in the attic, where it gets me better reception anyways. Rerouting that meant redoing the cable bundle across the floor, which was good because now it's secured to the wall on both ends and to the carpet in the middle, so it won't be dragged back and forth anymore. Of course now if I want to connect the cable to the rest of the system in any way, I need to deal with the ground loop issue. My sub can buzz pretty loud if a ground loop gets into the system... So I ran to Home Depot, and grabbed a clamp, a couple terminals the right size for the rack, splices, and a 500ft roll of #14 green copper wire. 500ft is way too much (I need maybe 20ft), but they didn't sell shorter lengths (well, I could have bought a bunch of 8" pieces for more than the spool, but....) and the price wasn't too bad. If anyone needs green wire though, let me know. In hooking stuff up I connected the real ground first, and then the cable line, followed by the antenna. At this point there's a decent buzz from the ground differential over the digital audio line apparently leaking through the audio components on it's way to ground. Bonding the rack in though eliminated it, which is good. That effectively brings the ground levels of everything going into or out of the systems to the same level, hopefully relatively close to actual ground, and through wiring that can handle some differential. Involved in the Home Depot trip was also a trip to do some grocery shopping for tomorrow, which wasn't too bad. I need to start consolidating what I need and making fewer trips though. Finished off the day by watching Final Destination. Weird movie, funny seeing that famous Minnesotan getting decapitated. Well, I've been up for a long time, and tomorrow is a long day. For all you people asking about the Superbowl stuff and then signing off IM, basically my schedule is church, possible run into work for a couple minutes to swap tapes, and then I'll be home. So show up whenever after that (which should be early afternoon), and bring whatever you want. I should be stocked enough with snack stuff, but variety is the spice of life (OK, I definitely need more sleep). If you have any more questions you probably know my phone number, and I'll probably be on IM either on the computer or my cell (or both as usual), so bug me as needed.

So my day was supposed to start with sleeping in. But around 8:30 my phone rings and it's a coworker calling about the exchange server being down. Turns out the thing is still somehow latched to one of the two domain controllers for the domain, and won't fail over. That one domain controller was down since the power switch is in a crazy spot and couldn't be reached during the big shutdown, so it was left for us today. We finally realized what it was after about 10 minutes on the phone, so was able to get a bit more sleep. Got up and went in for lunch at Eddington's with the crow. Had 3 bowls of Emily's Chicken Potato Chowder, which is IMHO the best soup they have. Then I got to start my work day. Went reasonably well. The whole avalon restore process is sorta depressing and casts a dark mood across everything, but thankfully is more just a nagging thing than a constant hastle. We have to be around pretty much all the time and check on it routinely, but don't have to sit there and poke constantly or anything. I managed to clean up a few other things, and got a few that need to wait until the avalon thing finished sorted out and temporily hidden from the to do list. This is the first we've really been able to look into non-avalon problems that weren't critical since it started. Started poking at a this crazy IE error that I think is profile related. Found one possibility (a common machine) but nothing big that I've seen before. We'll see how profile resets work for the users. For dinner went and bought Dew to restock my fridge in my office since I sold out again. That stuff goes quick. Then stopped by home and grabbed my headphones so I could enjoy some music for the evening. It's rather loud in my office with 9 10k RPM SCSI drives in there... Evening went pretty smooth, a couple tape swaps but nothing too big. After work headed over to my parents' house for a bit. My bro was back in the states and brought back my camera with lots of pictures, so was good to see him. Started poking with his cell phone a bit, and discovered it didn't receive calls and attempting to make one resulted in an authentication error. Turns out when the number changed, the verizon person forgot to reprogram it, so it still had the old number and settings (it was on a business account so they canceled it and recreated which was easier). Luckily she had changed the ESN in the system so I was just able to go into the programming on the phone and redo everything, but sorta frustrating as a user shouldn't have to know how to reprogram their phone, especially when they buy it from the store in person. Updated the firmware and PRL and should be set, so hopefully no more messing with phones for a bit. Also loaned my dad my new camera for a day so he can play with it at my sister's BB game and possibly the Ice Palace tomorrow. Should be interesting, hopefully he won't want one too bad. So a few days ago a box from Cisco shows up for me at my parents house, and tonight I got it and opened it. Turns out it's this funky mug with their logo, IBM's and Mainline along with a hockey game in the base, trying to get me to go to a conference on SANs in the area and offering me free tickets to the Wild game that night if I go. I guess companies are bumping up a notch or two in advertising... Then there was going home. Snow is interesting to drive on when it's this cold. It's hard enough that at low speeds it's hard to get a grip, but at higher speeds it just rips apart, so it's actually harder to accelerate from a stop than it is to brake. Weird feeling. Then there's the fact that it's cold enough the torque converter reacts differently and the transmision hesitates before shifting until it warms up for a while. It's like driving a whole different car. Anyways, my internal clock is messed up. 9am will be way too early.

Started off the day with my cable modem being flaky and had to reboot it to get on the net. Stupid thing. As for work, the chkdsk finished, but Windows sucks and would just hang on boot as long as those drives were connected. Tried it on different machines, and worked fine to the point of importing a foreign disk, then kernel panic, memory dump, and no boot with the drives. Then came the last-ditch effort. Burn a Knoppix cd, drop it in the machine, and boot. Hmm. There's an icon on the desktop for each partition, click and there are all the files (well, most of them). Worked without any problems with the RAID controller, the dynamic disc partitioning, and NTFS format devices. Granted there's the little fact that 1/8 the data randomly selected from the array was missing (hey, when 2 drives "fail" in a RAID5 you get as much data as possible), and then with the windows chkdsk one partition was dead, but the home volumes were mainly intact. 30 seconds configuring an apache server to serve out to one other server, and a few minutes configuring a accesshandler for another apache to allow people to access only their files and lots of people are happy they can get to their projects. And why do I like linux so much again? Anyways, while this was going on the new machine came in so picked that up and brought it to Mike and he started building it. I don't know much of the specs since the papers aren't here and I have hardly touched it, but it's a cool box. Too bad we had to put windows on it. Anyways, lunch was C1 with Ross and Junk. Food was ready in like 2 minutes which is always good. After lunch was longer term planning, getting restores sorta planned, and scheduling for the next few days. Between the 3 of us there's gonna be someone there pretty much 24 hours a day. I get 1-10 tomorrow, so get to sleep in a bit, but that's gonna confuse me I think. I got to stay sorta late today and got the first restores going. We're getting the stuff that wasn't recoverable (big chunks at least) up first, and we'll deal with the rest later. It wants 3 different full backups, so the backup server is confused, and this will be an interesting process over the next few days. After work came home and watched The Core. About as good as people were saying... It was an interesting general idea, and they did throw a lot of technology at it and the visual and audio effects were well done, but the story and technical aspects were completely implausible. Hit a problem, make up a random answer that contradicts other things to get around it. Somehow manage to kill off almost all the main characters (don't worry if you haven't seen it, it's not worth worrying about spoilers) in those random answers or just because they're annoying (maybe George Lucas could learn something about what to do with a certain character here). Anyways, not worth watching unless you want completely mindless entertainment.

Today didn't go so well. Suffice it to say Windows and NTFS are not my friends right now. Adaptec is questionable too. I spent a good chunk of the day and evening sitting in a server room, which was noisy and the chair isn't that comfortable. Tomorrow I think I bring my headphones. On the plus side I got automatic Incidents and notifications for blackholing hooked into MIMEDefang on the email servers so I can pretty much completely ignore those messages (a very good thing, since I had 468 new messages between when I left work and got home). Another plus is my 2U vented rack filler panels came today. So I got to get rid of the big box fan at the base of the rack. Mounted a 3u blank panel, then suspended two fans on the inside rail of the rack and a 2u vented panel on the outside, and created support for a filter. Cut fiberglass to fit and then sealed up the bottom with another 3u filler panel. I also rearranged the vent panels a bit so now the cabinet should be slightly positive pressure with filtered air and all the components staying cool. We'll see how that ends up working out and if I need more fans soon. Maybe tomorrow night assuming stuff goes well.

Today was Monday. Went pretty normal as Mondays go. Sat and watched the server room while they did more installing of the new AC unit. Hopefully that'll be up and running without any hitches in the next week or so. New virus means blocking even .zip files through email at Bethel - guess people might actually learn that a word document is a waste when a plain text copy works fine. Otherwise pretty much routine. Lunch at Wendy's made it a bit better. It was snowing a lot in the morning, so driving into work was fun and driving to lunch was OK. By evening it had pretty much all been packed down though. :( My biggest concern was coming home to a few feet of snow at the end of my driveway and having to find somewhere to park and walk home and shovel. Luckily they didn't bother plowing the road so there was only around 6 inches at the end so i could still drive in. Pulled out the snowblower, put on the headphones, and had fun for a bit shooting snow around. Seeing as I was in jeans an a tshirt when the snow hit me it melted pretty much instantly so I was a bit wet when done, but that's part of the fun. I got a bunch of Netflix movies today so watched Star Trek: Nemesis. I like parts of that movie a lot, but other parts aren't so great. It's definitely one of the best transfers and audio mixes, but that's at least partially because it's the newest. I'm not sure whether it gets my vote as the best one or not, but it's definitely up there. After that chatted with my dad about phone stuff for a while. Still getting some of the stuff sorted out with the phones on his plan, including updating the PRL on them since they had such a major change in service plans so they're confused. I'm sorta puzzled by my phone's battery gauge though. I used my phone for probably an hour or so today, and it's listed as half strength. It should be around 2/3, which is sorta evidenced by the fact that it tends to sit at half for a while then drop quick (I have maybe an hour of talk time when it drops below half, and it sticks on half for probably around an hour). I'd prefer a more linear movement, but I guess as long as I know what's happening. At least it's li-ion so I don't have to worry too much and can just charge it up every night. Probably means that if trends continue I'm never gonna get the full 2 weeks standby but only because I use it too much. Sorta funny since I'm usually the one people point to as avoiding using the phone whenever possible.

Woke up for Salem in the morning. I was tired and couldn't focus well though. Kept drifting off into a sorta-sleep state which wasn't a good thing. After church I cut some more boards, took down the screen, and mounted black fabric over the front wall. The fabric is some relatively light stuff (and semi-transparent if light is behind it which against a wall isn't an issue) but has a similar surface to velvet so it looks like nothing. Overscan hits the fabric and just disappears. Now I just need to get some black edging around the screen itself and do something about the ceiling. After all that was together I watched The Score which is a pretty good movie. Reminds me sorta of Oceans Eleven and The Italian Job mixed.