I broke email. I broke one server yesterday, we discovered it today, and then in fixing it I overloaded and thus broke two more email servers. I did good. :) That was a weird one though, glad that's over. Otherwise mainly small crazy stuff. People still seem to be missing files all over the place a lot more often than normal. And then they ask me to restore stuff and don't know which folder it was actually in 5 levels up. After work I finally went with my Dad and we started getting the whole cell phone deal fixed. We were working with the rep and had all 6 phones we were messing with out on the counter and one of the other reps looks over and is like "What are you guys doing?" Basically we ended up porting 2 numbers from Sprint and got 4 phones free so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. Although because of the name thing with porting we have to go in as soon as that finishes and move 5 of the phones from 3 different accounts onto one account. My phone is the Nokia 3589i, which we found out (after picking it and it being one of the cheaper phones in the bunch) that it is getting the reputation for the best phone overall with Verizon for service quality. Anyways being a Nokia I quickly hopped into programming mode and had some fun. Apparently phones when porting get a temporary phone code internally which is interesting. I also found this IP address and port which arin has assigned to Bell Atlantic (which is the former name of Verizon for those not paying attention). Might have to investigate that one a bit further. As for the GetItNow feature, it pretty much sucks. Everything in there they want money for. There is a weather thing which could be cool, but it's much better if I write a perl script to listen on an email address and bounce me back any data I want - cheaper, faster, and easier to use. Oh well. The browser thing appears to be broken (something about security - wouldn't be surprised if it's the SSL cert thing), although don't know that I'd use that much. Now I just need to get everything out of the old phone and into the new...

Decent day for a Monday. The flood of pages stopped sometime in the morning shortly after I turned on paging again for the person who could actually fix it. Definitely need a scheduler to turn them back on when people come back from vacation. After work Dave and I went to get some R2 at Willow Gate II and ended up seeing Brad and another Jeremy (Berg) arriving as we were leaving. I think half the people I know eat there on a regular basis. Anyways, the point of that whole trip was we were heading over to National Camera to get hands-on experience with the Digital Rebel. From a should wait to buy perspective that was a very bad move. That is a sweet camera and as I still can't find any big valid complains about it, we'll see what tomorrow may bring. After that Dave and I watched Blue Crush, which is much better movie than you'd first expect. The rest of the night involved more Rebel discussion boards and reviews, and a little chatting with Jeff about who this danielle person may be and how she stumbled on certain sites as she seems to be a regular visitor to a few blogs. Well, enough reviews for the night for me.

Started off the day going to Salem with Dave and Nick. JoeBuck showed up there but apparently was in a hurry afterwards so didn't really get to talk to him. After that did nothing for a bit, and then decided to make myself a pizza and watched the U2 go Home concert. Ended up getting distracted and chatted with brooke for a while while she got frustrated by the crazy keys on the keyboards over in Sweden. For those who didn't happen to be online at the time she says hi. Anyways, got back to watching the concert. That's probably the best live recordings as far as audio I've heard for a long time. They have a 2ch PCM (which is getting ripped and transcoded to ogg as we speak for portable and office listening), as well as 5.1 DD and DTS tracks (of course I was listening to the better one there :). That's just an awesome concert, and they have a couple bonus tracks too. In case you're wondering, this concert is basically a 20 year anniversary one for the band at the same place as the one back in 1981 and almost to the day. After that did a little more camera research. Then was Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Decent movie, although I didn't like it as much as the others. Looks like others generally agree with me there too. After that watched Alias which was interesting. After that there was a commercial which wasn't too spectacular except one of the layers in the soundtrack was the music for the Bloodhound Gang's Nothing but Mammals - it caught my ear as something I was definitely not expecting to heard on primetime network TV, even with the lyrics gone. Finished off the evening with a lot more camera research. Yea, that's not a good trend, although I did find some pointers on getting the camera for relatively cheap through BestBuy. Well, gotta love encoding on a decently fast machine. It took longer to rip the stream and pull the audio out than it's taking to encode to ogg which isn't known for it's niceness to the CPU. Well, better get some sleep since tomorrow is back to work.

Friday work wasn't too interesting. Mainly just routine stuff, although it feels like I talked to people more about stuff that's going to happen rather than actually doing stuff. I guess that's probably better than guessing and having to change it later. Somewhere along the line the BSSD printing project somehow was just sorta set aside and got rediscovered when it became time to add machines to it. And then replacing stolen computers when the previous ones were just sorta tweaked over time... After work though had a bunch of people over for movie night. We took forever to get started since brooke distracted JoeBuck and he was supposed to get the movie. Thousands of miles away but still causing trouble... We also were trying to figure out pizza and had someone ditch out (although that was for good reason). First movie on the list was A Mighty Wind which is pretty funny, but you have to be expecting it. After that a couple people left and we pulled out the laserdisc of The Empire Strikes Back at Dave's urging. Of course Paul decided to fall asleep and try and keep his record of never having watched a full Star Wars movie. I think it's time to kick him out of the computer geek club or something. Saturday slept in a bit, but not enough. Checked email and stuff and did nothing for a bit. Apparently some idiot(s) decided to make a makeshift bomb and put it in a reshall. Actually the description sorta sounds like they may have been trying to do something else and didn't realised it'd blow if they capped it, but like I said idiots. Hopefully this won't turn into something like last year. Continued the series I've been doing and watched Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. After that went shopping to use my BestBuy money from Christmas. Picked up a few DVDs and another case to store some in since I've gone past the current wallets I have. I decided to abandon the idea of buying the 40 DVD wallets and adding extra pages since they're pricy and I've already filled 2 in the past year. I bought a case without the DVD cover inserts but that holds 128 as is for half the price of just the 40 DVD one. Hopefully that'll hold me for a bit. Unfortunately on my way out I noticed a live U2 DVD, so that got added to the stack of stuff to buy too. Hard to not justify U2 though. I had hoped to poke around a bit with the Digital Rebel since I've sorta been considering buying one, but unfortunately they didn't have any out and I was sorta rushed for time. From there picked up my sister and brought her back to my parents' house for some game at the high school. I swapped out my DVD burner from my dad's machine and put a DVD-ROM drive in for now. Finally got that thing back. Somewhere along the line we got talking about cameras and spent a long time looking at the Canon EF lenses. They have one that I really like (EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM) but at around $500 probably wouldn't get that very soon, especially after buying the Rebel. I wasn't really even considering buying the camera until late spring or early summer, but it looks like I may end up going on a vacation in March so I hope the price drops a bit in the next month or so (hoping for below $900 with the EF-S lens). Time to start really looking at the reviews and specs. While I was home my mom finished sewing up a bunch of material I'm gonna use as a curtain across the screen wall downstairs, so maybe I'll hang that up tomorrow. That'll hopefully block out the remaining light from the window and also cut the light in general at the front of the room during movies. I also grabbed a Verizon phone so I can evaluate the coverage throughout my house better. I'm thinking of switching my phone over soon, maybe another task for tomorrow. After I got home I watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Now I'm writing this, defending my lack of posts on Fridays, and thinking I should probably go to bed soon, but will probably read tech manuals some...

Today went better - thankfully no big exciting events like yesterday. Seems to be crazy server time though. While the temp in the one server room isn't 85+ like yesterday, something is up. One server rebooted early this morning. No good reason, but it's running Windows so probably a disk cache full or something. In poking on a different one for performance reasons I discovered something slowing it way down so hopefully that one will be better. Then there's this websense thing - it restarts 8 times a day and still manages to crash between those times sometimes. Oh well, at least it's a service where being up most of the time meets the purpose. Now one of the core web servers is down and looks like it probably needs a power-cycle so that gets to go to the first one in tomorrow. And email load went high enough the servers stopped accepting for a bit - that's always fun. Speaking of email it looks like I get to play with sendmail and spamassassin this weekend. My hosting provider noticed the config I have wasn't scaling well with the numbers of emails going through the system lately (it wasn't designed to as the number of messages wasn't expected) - oops. In other news Andy Nelson initiated a C1 run today which was great, and also managed to get signed into enough classes to get around not being admitted due to lack of space. I'd say that's a rather decent accomplishment for a single day. Anyways, if you don't already have plans for Friday night here's an option. If you can't log into that and are interested email me for details, but basically movie night 7pm my place.

Well today was interesting. Was on the way to grab Nick and head out to Great China for lunch, and a couple people down in 10's office noticed that pages weren't loading. On the way out of the lab noticed that something was definitely wrong, figured probalby a switch. Get up to Nick's office and am greeted by "<the core router> is down". I started to say it looked like more than that, and we both realized we were definitely not gonna be going to lunch for a while. Turns out one of the breakers that powers most of 2 racks of core switches and servers tripped, taking out a couple switches from the main mesh that feeds all the VLANs, as well as the core router between those VLANs, the VLAN server, DHCP, DNS, monitoring, etc. The switches for the most part came up OK, but DHCP/DNS required a bit of poking. And then the router - it's still sorta in development and nothing is set to come up on boot. Of course Nick isn't the one who works on that and that person happened to be out at lunch, so... An hour or so later we actually ended up leaving for lunch, which was very nice and relaxing at that point. Other fun things of the day involved building a hack around that nice mailman bug, and more general miscellaneous stuff. I got the basis of renaming student accounts on the windows side functional, which is nice since students get married and tend to want their logins changed relatively often and the process is usually manual and sorta time consuming. The evening was hanging out a bit at the Help Desk bugging Joe and Austin. Then went home and watched Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (second one in the series for those who haven't figured it out yet). Pretty decent movie in my opinion. Can tell it was made back in the early 80s though. In other news it appears inanimate objects have figured out how to post blog entries yet again. Judging from the fact that this one isn't blank I have a feeling there may be more to this one than the last time an inanimate object posted to some blog.

Today was interesting. Got that kernel up and running. Tried typescripting for documentation, decided after realizing that the terminal was still listed as intelligent that wasn't a good idea. Luckily that process is nice and simple so it was easy to document otherwise. No new problems with Avalon during the work day at least, but it looks like I have stuff to look at tomorrow. And then there was that Apple thing. After sitting through it for like an hour and a half we turned it off and left for lunch when the whole mini thing price was announced. Boo for Apple. In the afternoon played with mailman a bit. Discovered a nasty bug in 2.1.4 where it drops messages. If the list address isn't in the to field and the only address there, it drops it even if recipient filtering isn't on. It passes through far enough that it puts it in the archives but then never even logs the message got to it otherwise. Tomorrow I get to try and figure out if that happened with 2.1.2 as well. If it does the fix may involve adding another procmail recipe until they fix it rather than going back before that. After work sat around a bit and then watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture. While not the greatest movie by today's standards, I hadn't seen it in a *long* time so was sorta interesting.

First normal day of work this year (pretty much the normal amount of people around) went well. This morning discovered that all the home directories under one letter never got the permissions reset so people couldn't access them. I fixed that but then figured out that the permissions were broken on the parent directory so they still couldn't see them, but all should be fixed now. Of course I learned about the second problem by being told a different letter was broken and trying to figure out why everything looked right and I could get to it fine but they couldn't. Oh well, such is life. Lunch was Eddington's with the crew which is always good. It would have been in-n-out, but we decided that lunch would probably be too long after the drive. The afternoon was more miscellaneous stuff. Tracking down permissions, changing other permissions, people wondering why stuff doesn't work (Exchange is a pain sometimes BTW), and setting up accounts. Installed a new version of mailman on the new list server, which was amazingly painless. Works better than most expensive software. Tomorrow is upgrade the kernel and recompile RAID drivers day. After work went over to brooke's place for dinner with the usual gang since she's leaving for 23 days in Europe tomorrow. After that went out to the car and it was cold enough that the mp3 player refused to start. Hard drives don't like cold. At least CD players generally fare better and I had the 28 Days Later Soundtrack along. I got my big box full of STP, wall jacks, wall plates, patch panels, splitters, and various other stuff. Maybe this weekend will be cabling time. While walking out to grab the mail noticed what looked like a CO2 cartridge on the driveway. Picked it up and turns out it's a coax negative trap for 65-78. Not sure why that was on the driveway, but it looks like it's been there for a day or two since it was partially buried in snow but it wasn't there Friday. Not sure why it'd be there since I haven't had any cable work done recently at all. Maybe I should turn on a TV and check what channels I get and see if anything changed. I wouldn't expect comcast to carry those traps normally though since there are 3 Basic 1 channels and no higher channels in that range. Wait, now that I look at their site none of those are in the Basic 1 listing anymore though. So maybe I have fewer channels. Oh well, cable modem still works which is all I care about (the cable is just because it's cheaper than paying the non-cable premium).

Started off the day sleeping in a bit and going to the 11:15 service at Salem with Dave and 10ley. After that we went to lunch at Champps and Dave and I both ate way too much. This caused the afternoon to involve basically sitting around and doing nothing. In the evening the family came over and brought Old Chicago pizza. I managed to eat some, but now think I can make it through tomorrow without eating anything if I wanted. Oh well, gotta make up for slacking off and not eating much through the holiday season I guess. Ended up loaning my brother my digital camera and a set of 2000mAh Ni-Mh batteries for his trip around the world, so hopefully that'll come back in full working order. Got the laserdisc player mounted and stuff today, which was good. Turns out it wasn't broken, just didn't like everything piled on top of it. Also realised when I attached a copper cable between the cable box and the rest of my system (I just had it hooked up to an audio run across the house with an isolation transformer) that the cable provides a nice ground differential and a 60hz buzz coming through the sub quite nicely. Didn't have a splitter handy so I'll have to dig one out of the box later and hopefully just grounding the cable to the rack will fix it. For now since i don't care about the video this is where toslink actually becomes sorta useful and there's a reason to use it over coax. Been sitting on my laptop downstairs just listening to music for a couple hours. 3 albums later I realise that I should have been in bed long ago. Sometimes I wish I my laptop battery didn't still have another 5 hours left so it'd yell at me or something. Anyways after listening to the 28 Days Later Soundtrack last night I decided that I definitely have to just sit and listen to music more often. It's just relaxing and entertaining. Tonights selections included the 10 Things I Hate About You Soundtrack, the American Wedding Soundtrack, and Rob Dougan's Furious Angels album.

Friday was pretty good. Lunch with the usual crowd at Taco Bell. Work was weird since it felt like Monday and Friday and every other day at the same time, but was workable since lots of people were there but it wasn't busy but there were things to do so it wasn't boring either. After work went to Houlihan's with the family and ate way too much food. I had a BLT that was basically lengthwise slices from the loaf of bread, plus a stack of bacon in the middle about an inch and a half thick. After that hung out with them for a bit and played Life which I hadn't played in a long time. Saturday slept in and then got up and watched Deep Impact. While the story was an interesting concept I didn't think it was all that well written. The video was pretty pixelated (didn't help that it wasn't even anamorphic to start with), and the soundtrack mix was pretty bad. As a redeeming factor it was sorta funny to see Elijah Wood going through a wooded areas on a motorcycle after getting used to him in the LotR series. After that I was reading slashdot and discovered this rather interesting online site for music. Not sure what the legal status in the US is, but they are legit in Russia and it's basically just importing, so... It and another equivalent service in Spain have been going for quite a while though without problems. They have a lot of stuff which you just can't buy anywhere anymore too. Speaking of music I got a couple CDs in the mail today which was nice. Gotta go listen to them soon and rip after I get a fast ripping drive installed again. One of them has some really interesting stuff, like a bit of a storyboard about the story of the movie. One of the good things about actually getting CDs (besides the fact that usually the compressed stuff sucks). As for mail, I think everyone must have said to deliver catalogs right after the first or something. I got a pile of stuff for "<the previous owner> or Current Resident" which I unfortunately can't just stick back in the box with this other bundle of stuff from yesterday that should have been forwarded. As for that, it's the 4th time so I think I need to give the post office another call and ask why they can't seem to get that straight consistently. After that watched American History X which is a good movie. It's a good reminder of just how crazy and messed up some people can be. Well, off to go listen to music.