Well, Friday was spent largely getting ready for the night. I also got some policies done so now Word should actually show up on all the lab machines without us getting requests to reset profiles and stuff because of it. While I was in there I also started experimenting with wallpaper. I set a few places up to test before doing the part that's really needed. The backup of Avalon issue was a little interesting and took longer than we would have liked. Killed a bit of time by going to Old Chicago with Dave for dinner. It was a bit busy, but he went and got Christmas shopping done while we waited so that was cool. After that killed more time by rolling out that test to all the rest of the labs. IMHO they look a lot nicer than the default sorta blue color, but we'll see what people say. During this time we also finished all the other work we were planning to do. That went off without any problems except for the two machines which needed keyboards to boot, but we just had to tell those to continue when we physically went up later. I'm guessing we'll hear about some things that were pointing directly at the old IPs after school starts back up though. Eventually the backups finished so we brought up and swapped in the new hardware. That went relatively smoothly, other than the SCSI cable wasn't connected all the way at first. The renaming and adding to the domain went reasonably well, although I ended up rebooting both the other domain controllers just to force replication and connection updates and get them to figure out that the old domain controller with the same name really was gone. Then became the process of selecting everything to restore. The selection was a bit slow, but not bad considering there were 4,066,797 files and over 81GB. Of course after selection finishing up at 4am the client wouldn't properly talk to the server so we had to reselect. Anyways to make a long story short mid-Saturday stuff was in process and everything selected although restoring a bit slow. As of now 2 drives are done and it's just the home directories going. Of course those are the ones with tons of tiny files, but... Saturday evening went over to the house of some family friends where another family joined us too. Haven't hung out with them for a couple years, so that was a good time. I'm tired now though. :(

I managed to get up on time. Really didn't want to though. My internal clock is so messed up it felt like both a Monday and a Friday today - that's messed up. Today was the ITS Christmas party with the usual white elephant gifts. I ended up with a rather interesting gift that is now hanging up in my office. Maybe I'll get a picture of it up here soon. It's definitely a use for AOL CDs that I hadn't thought of. Did a lot of miscellaneous things today, including getting ready for tomorrow night. Should be interesting, since it looks like the backup had issues. Of course I can't get into the server and the email provided absolutely no information. Finished off the evening by watching Caddyshack II. It's a pretty funny movie, better in some ways than the first, but not as good in a lot of ways too. Oh well, it was worth watching. Tomorrow is C1, which I've been wanting for like a week now. About time...

Tuesday went well. Slept in a decent amount because of the expected staying up halfway through the night. Then I finally went and bought a new mattress and boxspring. It was about time since the old one was pretty much falling apart (big holes in the side of the boxspring, edges all ripped, etc). I think that thing must be almost as old as me. Anyway, somehow I managed to get delivery on Wednesday, which was cool. Then headed to Home Depot to register my input on the color of paint going in my brother's room in my house (he didn't like the blue for some reason). Of course I also had to get everything out of that room. Then ended up going to Dave's to watch Tommy Boy with him as well as Brie and Ryan. When that finished up it was around 9:30 so time to head over to to Bethel since we were leaving for the movie at 10. Everyone showed up relatively on time and we gave the student workers who were working a hard time for not going to the movie. We ended up getting to the theater at around 10:30 and they let us right in, which was rather surprising. Another cool part was they had Code Red slushies - more caffeine to enhance the movie experience. The movie was 11:59, and actually started relatively on time. They had trailers and stuff of course, but the number of them was surprisingly low, not that I'm complaining. The movie itself was good, although I'm still not sure of the ending. They skipped a part of the book that in my opinion is a major part of the whole point of the book. Of course they said that they'd be doing that since the beginning, but I figured that meant they would end the story right before it. Nope, they had to just jump over it and do other stuff, making it seem like that never happened! Anyways the movie and ride home were rather uneventful, other than I was wide awake and everyone else seemed sorta tired. Of course one person in the group was already sick and two more were sick today, so hopefully that trend doesn't continue. Ended up going to bed around 4:45, which I didn't think was too bad. Until my phone rings at 8:30am. The delivery people are at my front door wanting to deliver the bed stuff. And the guy told me to call after 8:30 to find out when they'd be delivering it... At least that was only like 10 minutes so I promptly climbed back into bed and slept until something like 1pm. By that time my mom and brother were going on the painting and the house started smelling a bit - oh well. Spent a lot of the rest of the day relaxing, although I ended up returning a lot of voicemails too. I'm not the biggest fan of the phone so sometimes end up getting a bit behind there. My new drivers license arrived today, which sorta surprised me. At the place they told me they were running behind and the temporary thing only lasted for 30 days so I'd probably have to go back and get it stamped. Of course then a week later it arrives in the mail. Oh well. Talked to JoeBuck as he was heading off to go and catch his plane. That means he's gonna be back here soon, which is cool. C1 on Friday! Went shopping and put together everything for the bed which means I have a place to sleep tonight, which is good. Finished off the evening by watching X2 with my brother. He hadn't seen it before, so that was cool. That movie has a pretty good soundtrack - lots of explosions and good environmental sound if a bit exaggerated sometimes. Now I wonder if I can get up in the morning...

Sunday started off well with another trip to Salem Baptist. Of course Dave had to go look at houses again afterwards... My brother came over to watch the game and bring over some stuff though, and ended up helping to clean up the place. It didn't take too long, although we managed to clog up the vacuum enough that it overheated and cut off twice. Unfortunately a thorough cleaning involves a 24hr drying period, so just a cooldown happened in the middle. When I emptied it and washed everything it definitely had collected a lot of dust though. Assembled my DVD/CD rack and started filling it. Looks like I need at least one more, if not two. Or I need to resort to more dvd wallets... Anyways, after a little shopping settled in for the extended version of Fellowship of the Ring. Dave and Jeff came over and joined in the fun, which was good. I discovered that I need to deal with some doors and their rattling in the frames though. Monday went pretty well. Some building servers, lots of patching, some planning for updates, and some adding additional IP addresses. I'm still not sure about this weekend. Hopefully it'll go smoother than it seems like it will. It was also full day #2 with the Karma at work, and works great, no glitches. I think I last charged the thing Saturday or something, and it's still well over half left... Anyways, tonight was v2 of the trilogy, with the extended edition of Two Towers. Jeff came over and eventually Dave came and joined in right before the big battle sequence. Very enjoyable time, and ready to watch the third one in the theater. I've decided against reading the book tomorrow though, mainly because I want to sleep half the day. I've been dead tired the past couple nights, and going to bed relatively early. And since this movie doesn't start until midnight... Anyways, off to start that sleeping in process.

Friday was sorta slow. Put together the drive cabinet for the Avalon replacement which took a good chunk of time, so that helped a bit. Also poked around with HTML applications (the IE things) some more. It's pretty cool how easily some stuff can be done, but sorta scary too. The security implications of how it's started are sorta scary. At least it looks on the surface like execution from inside IE still prompts the user. Friday evening I started doing codec comparisons between mp3, ogg vorbis, and flac. Flac by far wins, and there are distinct differences between mp3 and vorbis. I'm used to the mp3 artifacts a bit so they sound more normal to me, but I think long term I'd like the vorbis better. And the fact that q6 vorbis is around 192kbps and compares with 256abr vbr lame encoded mp3s is nice too. I tried varying the bitrate a bit and have to say that q4 sounds a lot like 128kbps mp3s, which reminded me how much I hate those things in headphones. They just destroy the music... Saturday I was planning on getting up by 9 since that was the beginning of the install window for Comcast. Of course the doorbell rings at 8:50, so I had to get up quick and go let the guy in. Install went smooth, although those things take forever to download the software they run. The installer said it bugs him since they could easily let them all sit for a bit in the warehouse and not have to do that. I had all the cables needed to hook it up, but he gave me a 12ft cable with component video and 2 audio RCAs too since they normally use that. Not a bad dela there. The guy knew what he was doing and was cool to talk to for the most part. Other than he plugged the digital audio into the wrong plug (we fixed it by switching to optical right away, but I discovered it later). Since I only have the lowest basic service I currently just get the OTA broadcast channels in HD. Of course all the rest of the analog channels look pretty decent since the tuner is nice. The box is a Motorola DCT5100, which is pretty cool. Looking through the diagnostics menus and stuff that thing can handle lots of stuff. It has an integrated docsis cable modem, but it's only used for it to talk to the cable co. Unfortunately it's IP is listed as 0.0.0.0 in there. The box itself supports Firewire and ethernet (although neither is installed), as well as usb (which is installed). It also has some pvr options and support for hard drives. Too bad this box is leased from that perspective, but that's probably a good thing since I doubt it would be cheap. It has DVI output so maybe I'll play with that eventually. A bonus to this whole thing is I get all the digital music channels too just for having the box. Haven't looked to see if anything is good, but we'll have to see there. Digital music feed, with digital output...hmm... I wonder if the song data is available by text or if it's only video. Screen scraping and OCR would be possible but probably too much work. Anyways, after the install more sleep was necessary. The next task was to put in this thermostat that's been sitting on my counter for the past week. It's the old programmable one from my parents house that was replaced by a newer model. That went pretty smooth other than the fact that the old one was screwed into the drywall with tiny screws and was more held on by paint so it's a little loose, and the fact the new one has two totally separate electrical systems I had to jumper. It seems to not be reading ambient temperature right (it was reading like 8 degrees warmer than true - interesting when I have the house set at 64 normally), but hopefully that'll be fixed soon. After that went shopping and got some rugs. Now hopefully my entryways will stay somewhat clean, and I won't be tracking mud everywhere either. Also picked up some cheap dvds for the price of renting since I was at Walmart. There are occational good ones, but I have to say there's a reason most of the ones that are still in the bin are there. From there went to the parents' house and picked up my server machine and some other miscellaneous stuff. After that to home and watching extra features. I got Two Towers Extended, T3 and X2. Nothing spectacular on the last two. Finished off the day by watching Caddyshack, so I got that going for me, which is nice. Funny movie, although sorta odd in parts, and short. Successfully avoided another day of cleaning, although gonna have to do that tomorrow before people get here. :(

Today was interesting. The MP3 player arrived, which was really cool. Lunch was Eddington's again. I still really like the Chicken Potato Chowder. For work stuff it was a bit of a mix. Planned a little bit for the upgrade in a bit over a week. Not looking forward to that at all except for the fact it'll be out of the way. Of course we need a few more parts to finish it off too. We were able to get set up around that though. Also figured out why we couldn't talk to one of our servers in San Diego. It helps if the tech hooking it up knows which switches are on which physical networks. Also played a bit with HTML Applications to get around security policies in IE (yea, I know. It's for a very specific use). It's sorta weird because the place has gotten quieter with finals starting so the staff are relaxed, but the students are more stressed out than ever. After work I was poking around figuring I'd keep doing stuff and wait until the batch transfer I had going finished when some people wanted to stop and see the fun stuff I'd done to my house. Ended up going home and they thought it was a lot bigger which was cool. The giant antenna in the living room turned into an HD demo, and the new speakers prompted an audio demo. After they left more people came over, and I gave them back their computer in exchange for a snowblower. It's a little noisy and the hand-start is broken, but it has electric start and otherwise seems to work fine. Hard to beat the price though. They left and then it was time to start copying music again. Of course since the Karma uses the same database as the other Rio products and a custom FS I had to get the ID3 tags updated. Again the annoying thing where people get lazy typing things into CDDB gets really annoying really fast came up. I thought it was fast copying over 802.11b to the thing, but then I pulled out another ethernet cable and have it running at 100Mbps now. Syncing goes pretty quick when you do that. :) This little java application is nice since I can use it on any machine and select tons of files and it'll copy them as it can (including handling disconnecting the player for a while and then connecting it and picking up again). The fact that it's java and multi-platform is awesome. I have 10.47GB transfered or queued to transfer at this point, which is pretty good. Should be finished copying for now. I think I'll leave the rest for a bit, and maybe this weekend look into the process of re-ripping and doing a dual conversion into FLAC and Vorbis. It'd be nice to fit more onto the player (my old one is only 6GB, but even 20GB seems limiting for mp3 storage). Hopefully I'll be able to pick out CDs I haven't listened to in a while and not have to start dropping things I want to listen to again. :( Anyways, work comes way too soon...

Tuesday was interesting. I got to work in under 10 minutes, although it sounds like other people had it a bit rough. I got to have fun on the roads too, since nobody had plowed yet. Lunch was at Culvers which is always fun. Work involved fixing little things, as well as planning the replacement of Avalon (the student file server). It just has to last another 9 days... Then there were policy discussions. Those are always fun when faculty are involved. My team pretty much always agrees on stuff, it's getting it through that is an issue. Going home was more fun since stuff still hadn't been plowed. I think I spent most of the night reading forums on that mp3 player though (yea, I ordered it). Wednesday I tried to sleep in, but woke up on my own around 9. I guess I'm too used to not sleeping in during the week. Managed to get a little more sleep and not get up for a couple more hours though. Then did some general cleanup and went to go buy RotK tickets. Had to do a little shoveling first though since they got around to plowing and there was no way I could get through the mound at the end of the driveway. Cleared an 8x8 square of of snow about a foot thick which got it back past the plow stuff to the regular stuff my car could go through no problem. Anyways, got the tickets through the student association so got a discount there which was cool. Then was geting my address updated at the DMV, which involved waiting for more than twice as long as the actual process took. Apparently they now just do a duplicate card thing so no hastle of going through the picture and vision test and other stuff. Plus it's only $8 rather than $18.50 or whatever the normal price is. After that I grabbed a pair of the Entra Ones and a receiver and headed off to the ITS Student Christmas party. Watched the new How the Grinch Stole Christmas movie. It was funny how many movies they refered to. I especially liked the extended part ripping on Episode 1. Now I'm tired though, and have to do a few things before sleep. :(

Today started off pretty routine, nothing too exciting. After lunch I was just settling down into things when literally 2 seconds after the boss leaves one of the servers goes down. Of course while poking with that one I find another one is really slow. I think I get the first one fixed and find out the second one was unresponsive and eventually rebooted itself for unknown reasons (Windows machines are great about logging that kind of stuff). Then discussions on screen saver policy and more general cleanup stuff. After work was a trip down to Eagan to help out with Operation Christmas Child. Found out about that one last night. Ended up spending 3 hours inspecting boxes, taking out stuff that wasn't allowed, and adding filler stuff to make all the boxes full. I think the oddest thing I took out was a glass vial of perfume. We normally toss them in buckets that are sorted through later and either put back in (they get more lenient as time goes on) or go elsewhere where they won't get the extreme heat/cold/shock treatment. That one ended up taped to the inside top edge of the bucket so I didn't end up smelling it the rest of the night... After that I looked at slashdot which was a bad idea since now I'm looking at this cool portable mp3/ogg/flac player. Maybe I can sell my old one though...

Got up and went to Salem Baptist again this morning. Dave apparently got roped into plans right afterwards again this week, so we had to give him crap about that. He did go look at houses though. Anyways afterwards I sat around for a bit, and then decided to get motivated and took out the other wall in the basement. This one was messier since I had to make a lot more cuts in the drywall to work around some electrical in the wall. Now I have a good look at what's there though since it's just sorta hanging in free space so I can plan moving it. After cleaning up with the shop vac and letting the box fan/furnace filter combination catch the fine dust from that, I pulled out my regular vaccuum and did more cleanup. That thing's great because it not only cleans up the floor but all the furniture, and gets almost all the dust without spitting any back out. Of course all this turned me into a dustball so I had to clean up. :( Then I washed down the leather chairs and wiped the dust off the speakers too. They had accumulated a nice layer on top. Since I had sorta destroyed the old surround speaker locations I had to remount them. Of course now they have much better mounting points anyways though. Remounting and changing the layout of the room of ocurse means recalibrating so out came the SPL meter and calibration DVD. Got all that set up and then decided to do a little test with a CD. Started it playing and turned up the volume while tracking it with the SPL meter. I stopped when I was sustaining an average of 108db SPL. I could have still gone farther on the gain (especially given I was working off a relatively quiet track), and there was no audible distortion (for what that's worth), although for the sake of my ears I decided that was plenty. Maybe I'll have to bring in some hearing protection and try a real test sometime. Anyways later I ended up going shopping and bought a few CDs, a hammer, and groceries. I'm listening to the CDs now, pretty good on some, although the audio quality on one is pretty bad (it's a mix and it sounds like they have a few spots with bad bitstreams). I also got magazines today. Apparently for some reason the address change didn't take so they were sitting at my parents' house. Weird.

Friday was interesting. I think there were like 7 people in our department who actually showed up, and 5 were on 2nd floor. There was this thing for Network and User Services where a bunch of schools get together. Don't know much about it other than a lot of people don't think to highly of it. Anyways, got stuff done but it was a pretty slow day otherwise. I think the biggest thing I did was get stats for faculty home directory usage together. Friday night I watched The Others. OK movie, but the ending sorta sucks and I think make the whole movie seems so boring once you've seen it. Saturday I slept in until around noon, and then for some reason decided to get motivated and pulled out the sawzall and took out one of the walls. Only took out one due to the fact that it was pretty much impossible to breathe down there (the filter on the fan after letting it run for a while is gray with drywall dust instead of blue) combined with I neglected to realize that the blade would be hot after cutting through metal and went to straighten it with my hand. I ended up finishing that computer (wiping and reinstalling Windows), which went pretty smooth. ME likes a lot of reboots though. I also managed to get my cell phone switched over into my name. A whole predicament there involved almost canceling and having to get new numbers. Apparently I'm approved for 10 cell lines though, which is just weird - nobody should ever need that many. Hopefully in a week or so I can invoke WLNP and transfer both lines to different accounts on a different provider though. After that was movie night with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl hosted by Nick. A bunch of people were there and it was a good time even though we didn't really get his surround sound working until afterwards (for some reason his dvd player was downconverting Dolby Digital to two channel but passing DTS through normal). Of course these get togethers end up with fun stuff and tonight we got a great quote from Tenley - "I bitch because I can." After that a few of us hung out and talked for a while. Nobodys's car got messed up either. Anyways the sawzall battery is dead and now charging, so I'm off to bed.