Spent Saturday morning as it should be spent, sleeping. Got up sometime in the afternoon and did nothing for a while. Then there was a little grocery shopping, followed by cleaning up the place a bit for movie night. I spent some time moving the second half of the alphabet of DVDs into the new cd wallet, and splitting the other half into the old wallets and adding all the new movies. I should count and update the web list soon. Jeff helped open and stick movies in, so thanks for that. Then the rest of a rather big crew showed up and we watched Office Space which is a cult classic. Gotta remember to loan that to my mom since she wants to see it. After that one a bunch of people left (apparently being tired and ignoring the tradition of 2 movies in one night especially when the first ends around 9), and the remaining crew watched Sleepy Hollow. Good flick. Then everyone else left and I watched Star Trek: Insurrection. The second to the last, and probably my least favorite of the TNG movie series. I do have to say the beginning is a lot better than I remember it, but the end isn't all that great. 3 movies in one night is pushing it, but fun sometimes (although if I hadn't seen all of them before I think it would have been hard to keep track of them). Anyways, in a week and some number of hours I'm having a bit of Superbowl party, so if you know me feel free to ask me for more details there. Apparently CBS has some interesting things planned. Most of the cameras are HD, with eyevision being probably the biggest exception(s) (that link has a complete list of which cameras and resolution - some people take this way too seriously), they have a crazy sized local production place, and some new technology (like they finally got the first down working in hd - this is like the 2nd or 3rd game) with some HD commercials. Should be an interesting marketing campaign, and I hear there might be a football game too. :)

Today was interesting. Spent time working with GSS/Kerberos/spnego and integration with apache, active directory, and IE. No luck with the unix side, but with a few tweaks to IE security settings through domain policies I got it working with a windows server. Due to the fact we don't want to use a windows server unless I figure out the apache side this may not actually get implemented. It is sorta cool to be able to go to a windows machine, log in, and visit secure web sites without having to log in again. Lunch was a run to Famous Dave's which was good since I haven't been there in quite a while. After work went for some R2 with Dave, JoeBuck and Meghan. Always gotta love when you can go to a place and the waiter can tell you what you're ordering. After that went over to Meghan's to remove linux from her computer. She's going to the guards for a few months so her computer is going to her brother, who dooesn't have the same appreciation for linux. The whole task was interesting as it started out without having a knoppix CD so had to download it, and then there's the little fact that grub doesn't work well without a linux partition of some sort, and hp included the recovery as a partition on the hard drive rather than cds, so I had to pull a hack with a w2k cd's recovery console (sometimes the big security bugs can be handy). Gotta say the people making ntfsresize are awesome - that's worked twice on that system and both times it was perfect. Especially given what a cobbled-together hack NTFS is in the first place (I've had way to many filesystems corrupt themselves under heavy load), it's a very good piece of software. Now if only someone would make an equivalent to microsoft's fixmbr which would run under linux...

Wednesday the new hard drive for my laptop arrived. Turns out the 60GB only draws .5A while the original 30GB was 1A, so don't have to worry about the power. Maybe I'll even get longer battery life. Spent a good chunk of Wednesday evening installing RH9 on the laptop. Other than a bad 2nd CD which I had to acquire and burn a new disc for during the install (from a VC on the box running the installer - that was interesting). Got it up and running, although the nv drivers for the video card produced lag. Reminded me of using a Windows box. Thursday I got the real Nvidia driver in and now it's much better. Lag went from something a little under a quarter second to effectively unnoticable, so I'm happy again - one doesn't realize how nice response time is until it's suddenly gone. I finally got the resolution fixed for fonts and stuff. It's nice since now it can render text at tiny sizes and still be perfectly readable. The new driver did something else different too since my background looks a lot nicer too (it's one of the shoreline shots from Monday's roadtrip scaled down to 1800x1200). Thursday's lunch was Noodles with a bunch of the usual crew and Jeff since he had a meeting in Anoka. I think it's time to catch up on my sleep a little bit though - last night poking with getting stuff up and running wasn't good with how little sleep I've gotten the past week. :(

Work was OK. Dealt with a machine spamming, and another one is infected with the new Bagle worm. Crazy windows machines... Ended up staying a little late doing some profile reset stuff, but at least they're done with. Ross also started a great thread on the its-discuss list about one of the pictures from yesterday. After work headed over to Ross' place and hung out with him and Brad for a bit. Watched Grumpy Old Men which is a pretty funny movie. Tried a little debugging of his wireless issue while using some random neighbor's access point. It's amazing how many different access points are usable from his place.

Today's been way too long, but was fun. I got up sometime around 6:30 to get ready and head over to Dave's by 7. Shortly after that we piled into the car and hopped on 35W north. We made pretty good time after that and ended up in Duluth sometime a little before 10am. The current temp was -16F, so I put on a windbreaker much to the delight of Ross and Dave (I don't think they've seen me with a jacket for years). Then we went shopping since Ross wanted to, and he bought a Nalgene bottle while Dave and I just looked. He knew about a little coffee shop up there, so that was our next stop. We played a game of Chess followed by a game of Scrabble, followed by a few minutes of thinking of shopping and then back to the car for some sightseeing. We went out to Park Point and went out on the lake a little bit from the beach. It's sorta weird seeing sand mixed with snow on the beach. Looks more like a big pile of stuff to put on the roads. :) Anyways, got some good pics, unfortunately forgot I had the camera set to small mode so the pictures are only around 1.5megapixel, which thankfully isn't that bad. We proceeded to drive up the mountain and take some more pictures, followed by stopping at First United Methodist Church and taking more pictures. In case you haven't figured it out, the trip quickly turned into a photo trip more than anything, as I had my new Canon Digital Rebel, Dave had his film camera loaded with black and white film, and Ross had his new Canon A80 along. We got a lot of pictures, and I have mine posted here. Of course I'm still learning about my camera which is why there's quite a few pictures with duplicates at different settings - just trying out and seeing how the auto interacts with the full range of what it is willing to pick for the image. Anyways, after taking pictures at the church we decided it was time for lunch so headed off to Grandma's for lunch. While getting reasonably stuffed we decided that a trip up to Two Harbors and Gooseberry Falls would make a good afternoon, so started off there. Stopped a few times along the way to take pictures, which mainly turned out good. After arriving at Gooseberry we walked down to the falls which was pretty much deserted. There were a couple other people looking around, but the cold weather sorta kills tourist season. Of course this meant good pictures without near as many people around, but unfortunately a lot of paths had already been trampled. The falls being frozen also meant that it was a lot easier to get around to places to take pictures, provided the fact that it's a river and you have to watch the ice because of currents is taken into consideration. Got some good shots without slipping too much. Although I need to invest in a couple filters and a tripod if I'm gonna do a lot more photography like that. Unfortunately carrying more stuff means it's harder to pull yourself along with your elbows on the snow (yea, maybe I'm crazy, but that route was a lot shorter than climing over the and walking around the big rocks, and workable since the river was frozen). It's sorta interesting to see how the river changes when it freezes and how much of what is normally dry ground is covered with ice (including parts of the paths). Gooseberry pretty much marked the end of the trip so we called it a day and headed back south to the cities. Afterwards we were all very tired and Ross went home while Dave and I watched The Time Machine. That movie isn't really that great, although could have probably been done a lot better. Some of the effects were pretty bad, not to mention the continuity issues and plot holes. Anyways, pictures are all uploaded and I'm tired, so maybe I'll update more tomorrow.

Well, today went reasonably well. Started off the day at Salem with Dave and JoeBuck. Then went and decided to start moving things from the laptop to a different drive since the laptop still made some weird noises when I booted it up. I turned off swap to minimize traffic on the drive, and went from around 24GB used to around 3.8GB (3.3GB in my home directory and most of that is active use (email) or tons of small (although some big music and multi hundred MB video files) stuff that I don't want to archive multiple times so will just get thrown in a tarball with everything else. Of course throughout that whole process the drive was making funny sounds, but now seems to be fine with it. Of course that doesn't mean I'm gonna trust it... This afternoon I watched Star Trek: Generations which has to be one of the worst DVD transfers I've seen in a long time. Another scope but not anamorphic, and they had major issues with the soundtrack. Like the center channel being badly distorted on a quiet scene and then they do a cut to a much louder scene and it's fine. Pretty much has to be in an early stage so I'm amazed they missed it in the final mixing. I seem to remember the laserdisc being better, so maybe I'll have to pull that out sometime. Anyways, tomorrow I have to be at Dave's place at 7am for the roadtrip, which doesn't sound fun at all, but such is life. Should be a good time later.

Friday started off slow but I started getting plans for getting the paging system setup. Lunch was Eddington's which is always good, at least for the people who will actually take advantage of the bottomless bowl. I managed to somehow eat for just over $5, which I'm a little confused about. Somehow I managed a dollar off and a free drink, but I'm not gonna complain there. During the afternoon /var filled up on the server which handles a bunch of internal ITS stuff, but apparently wasn't monitored. Managed to corrupt 5 database tables, but luckily they were all either transient or non-critical data, and it seemed to rebuild all the data anyways. After work went over to Ross' place and hung out for a bit. He's on the 26th floor in the middle of St Paul so I got some good pictures, a few of which I picked out and posted last night. In the morning I was awakened by my phone ringing at 6:50. Upon seeing it was from Bethel my first thought is "great, what could be bad enough that they're calling me now" and given my mostly incoherent state let it go to VM. Turns out it was the alarm in one of the server rooms going off which security would pretty much have to deal with anyways, so I set my phone to silent until 9am knowing they wouldn't ack and it'd call a few more times, and went back to sleep. Sometime around 10am I woke up and couldn't really get back to sleep but layed in bed until around 1. In the mean time dealt with non-work (thankfully) phone calls and stuff. Upon actually getting up I found my laptop's hard drive was making an abnormal amount of noise, but nothing it hadn't done for short times before. Sometime in the afternoon I watched Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I think that is one of my favorite of the original series at least. After that my laptop's hard drive was making lots of noise that sounded vaguely similar to something like metal scraping against metal. Not my favorite thing to have happening to the drive in my laptop. I finished up final arrangements for the night at Mike J's and by that time writes were very slow and almost not occuring, so figured I'd shut it down and hopefully it'd recover enough to pull the data off later. Turns out it never shut down properly, sorta freezing at some weird mangled screen, so I just shut it off. Went and dealt with the aformentioned alarm incident, and while I was there printed directions and a couple of the pictures from Friday night (2-4). They look very nice, but the color laser puts a little bit of a line pattern in them. For the evening a bunch of us went over to Mike J's place to party a bit since he was dogsitting and his wife was out of town. Ended up playing Risk which was described by JoeBuck already. Afterwards I ended up playing with a bowling demo game on the phone as well as sending text messages. Eventually ordered a 60GB hard drive to replace the 30GB one which was making noise, since I won't trust it much even if it does come back at this point. Then there was SNL, which had probably one of the funniest things about Chicken of the Sea and stuff like that. Combined with the previous comment of "Chicken and Tuna are people!", that whole spin was probably the best SNL thing I've seen in quite a while. Throughout the night the dogs were a bit excited and crazy at times, so got a few good pictures. Maybe I'll post them tomorrow or something. As for the computer, after I got home I booted it up and it seems to be working and made noises for a few seconds after booting which went away. Of course if you've ever dealt with computers in a techy way, you know at this point that drive is considered dangerous and not to be trusted with any important data. So I think I'm gonna post this and shut it down for the night.

Had a bit of fun with the camera. Unfortunately no good tripod yet so had to do a bit of makeshift with a little mini one that was half the size of the camera. Here are some night shots.

• Cathedral
• Cathedral
• I-94
• The Capitol
• The Capitol
• Ice Palace (blurry handheld)
• Ice Palace (wide)

You can browse around a bit and find some better ones and some ones that aren't as great.

So the new toy arrived today. Got a second box without a return address which happened to be the CF card and reader which were expected Friday so that was nice. Lots of people wanted to see it and stopped by today, so I have a gallery of photos up from the day. After work I went to National Camera and picked up a case for pretty cheap and got a UV filter so don't have to worry quite as much about the lens. Then went to take some night shots, but unfortunately caffeine, cold, and handheld multi-second shots don't mix well so I only have 3 and they weren't focused properly since I couldn't see through the viewfinder at the angle. Got home and figured out importing and resizing them. 6MP is definitely too high, I run at 1600x1200 and it shows about a quarter of the picture at full size. Luckily under unix it's pretty easy to batch convert and even add names so I have the full size for the web at 1152x768. Yep, that's 3:2 like film and not the traditional 4:3. :) Spent more time in the evening on the phone with my sister troubleshooting printing from XP. That WebClient service has got to be one of the craziest things Microsoft has done in a while. The new phone is still working great, so I'm happy there. Hopefully the other phones and plan for everything but my phone will get worked out soon. Other things with the phone include me writing that weather thing I meantioned last night and it seems to work well. Response time is mainly limited by the email server it's running on (which will hopefully be fixed soon).

Nothing big starting off the day today. Sorta watched my new phone all day. I seem to get service pretty much everywhere except inside one of the server rooms which is underground. I can get it in the hallways outside the room, so I think it may have something to do with one lead wall and a rather solid combinations of multiple layers of metal on all sides. :) I can get service fine in the lab which sorta amazed me. Lunch was with Sheldon who I hadn't talked to much recently so that was fun. He's getting stressed out but should all be worth it since he gets a nice long vacation... After lunch a couple hours later there was a department meeting so that made the afternoon seem really quick too. After work went to the Verizon store with my dad again go get the one number transfered (yes, the port took around 14 hours for my phone and around 20 for my dad's - that's rather quick). Unfortunately that's not actually according to policy and the one guy who was gonna break it (and I think got us better deals on the phones than we should have gotten) wasn't working. So went back to my parents house and talked to Customer Service and got my part of it done, and hopefully they'll get the rest done within another day or two so everyone can start using their phones normally (I think we currently have 3 phones on a plan that's like $9/month for 30 shared minutes, which is sorta funny - effectively some kind of placeholder plan in my opinion). At least my phone's all done and I don't have to worry about it. And for a couple months I have unlimited TXT messaging so I'm having fun with that and stuff like IM and will probably set up and debug some data query type stuff. One thing I sorta forgot to mention. Tuesday over lunch I went to National Camera with the intention of buying the Digital Rebel. Turns out they were out and had a nice long waiting list (28 people IIRC). So I looked and newegg was out, so ended up ordering online from circuitcity.com. That shipped today and should be here tomorrow so I'll be happy when that shows up. Unfortunately my order from newegg with the 512MB CF Ultra2 card isn't scheduled to show until Friday so looks like I'm gonna try and borrow a 128MB one for a bit. I have a feeling I won't get much of anything productive done tomorrow night either...