Today's work involved a bit of programming and compiling and installing drivers for a RAID card under linux. That was easy. The other big part was resetting permissions and trying to figure out why people couldn't see or access certain files. There was definitely something up with the drive, but the RAID controller says it's fine and so does chkdisk. Tonight was a reboot as a preventative measure, hopefully that will resolve any issues. I guess we'll see tomorrow. Windows is always fun... In the evening I finished putting together the screen. It's quite heavy compared to the old one, but is big. I'll have to get pictures of that up soon. Digital Video Essentials also arrived today, and is probably the highest quality DVD I've seen in a while. Good test material for the way too big screen. I'll have to get it all calibrated and stuff sometime this week.

Work went OK, although there were enough smaller things I didn't get really started on any bigger things. Oh well. After work I ended up actually deciding to build my screen. I framed it, made crossbraces, and mounted the front panels. Then I decided that rather than just sand the thing, I'd fill in all the gaps first, so I filled in all the holes over the screws as well as giving the seams a decent coat. I'm gonna let it dry and then tomorrow it should be plenty dry for me to sand it smooth and mount the material over the top. This one will definitely be heavier than the last one, but it's bigger and should stand up much better to wear and stay square better. I'll have to post pictures of it once it's done.

Getting up early is never fun. Started off the day by heading over to MGCC. Then a trip to Menards to exchange some fence which turned into a much more complex process then necessary. Even the security guy at the yard thought it was crazy. He had a wireless computer that was supposed to help them have less paperwork, but he still couldn't handle most of the process and the other people couldn't figure out what to do with the paperwork they did have or even where it was. Did a little computer work, and gathered more things to drag to my place, including new material for the screen. Now I just have to build the frame... My brother ended up coming over and watching the football game, which I heard didn't go well. I didn't pay much attention but they did have some decent music between things. Then just sat around a bit. I pulled the windows drive out of the pvr box and got it up and running. Rebuilding the cable index wasn't a very big hastle, although myth still needs to work on long provider name (there are 3 Roseville cable channel layouts and they look identical on screen since the end is chopped off). Finished off the day by watching Freeway. Rather interesting movie, although sorta weird. Reminds me a lot of American Psycho 2, but she's going for justice rather than just what she wants. Talked to JoeBuck a bit, hope his night turns out well...

Not much today. Slept in late which was nice. Got the mail and there was an Xcel bill. That prompted a trip to the attic to evaluate insulation. Definitely need more up there... My dad was over and looked at the furnace a bit, and replaced some of the dryer vent and we also replaced the washer hoses and cleaned off the mineral buildup from connections that were not properly tightened and leaked. Then I ended up watching 48 Hrs which is a semi-interesting although sorta slow movie. It was always a weird mix of happy and sad and probably would have been better if they had picked one and stuck with it - too much like a documentary or something. After that I watched The Big Lebowski. That's a weird movie, although is sorta like Office Space in it's true-to-life style. Lots of bad language, but otherwise pretty funny.

Nothing too interesting for the last couple days, thus the lack of updates. I made the most of my evenings by sitting around and doing absolutely nothing. Work was sorta routine, although the email server was being rather slow sorta randomly. Although that was fixed this morning. Of course after that was fixed the faculty file server started being slow and ended up needing hard resets twice. That turned out to be related to the drive filling up and it not denying the writes but trying to cache them. Maybe this will be enough to get faculty quotas in place, especially since their space usage has practically quadrupled in the last year. After work I went for a little tech shopping and bought a DVD-A and a couple SACDs as well as Finding Nemo. On my way home from that I stopped and got some hot cocoa and cayenne pepper (more on that later). Then the siblings came over and we watched The Recruit. Then we watched a few parts of Finding Nemo, which is an awesome movie on the technical side, and has some good humor too. Then they left and I started listening to SACDs and discovered that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon SACD is one of the best discs I've heard. The surround is mixed better than most movies, and the style of music can actually take advantage of it for more than ambiance without sounding stupid. Now back to the hot cocoa thing. Tenley posted something to ITS Board about hot cocoa being good for you because of anti-oxidants and stuff. This got Joe H and I talking about the history of hot cocoa and peppers today. So after a little searching on google we found some nice recipies that in the simplest form (as in not much different than standard hot cocoa) basically is a quarter teaspoon of cayenne pepper per two cups of cocoa. I mix up a batch and in the words of Crush, "DUDE!" It's gotta be the best tasting thing of cocoa I've ever had. A bit of a bite and a sorta undescribable aftertaste. Very slightly bitter yet sweet at the same time. So yea, you should try it sometime. I also read a rather funny obviously fictional diary on k5 tonight about outsourcing. Not gonna post a link for various reasons, but I think my favorite quote is "I'm sorry, I'm going to have to put you on hold. While I'm shooting the intruder, please re-install the printer driver." Anyways, should probably not screw up my sleeping schedule too much here.

Today was somewhat catch-up day. Just little stuff that needed to be done. Ended up running MS's baseline security scanner on the servers and nothing flagged (none of the server team machines at least other than it complaining it can't talk to linux machines). I started it running on the dhcp pool before I left, so those results should be interesting tomorrow. After work visited the fabric warehouse and found some stuff for the screen border and the screen wall. They were out of the material I use for the screen though (they've been waiting for a couple weeks now - the truck was lost apparently), so I'll have to wait a bit on the bigger screen. Hopefully I won't forget anything like last night and end up needing to tape up plastic sheeting on the walls at 2am...

Today being the first day back, I spent most of the day responding to email. Too much mail. So after work I started a new project. The first part was get the mail servers to send udp packets to me whenever I get mail. That was easy, as was a command line receiver for those packets. Command line is fine and all, but for interactive notifications when you're doing other stuff it doesn't work so well. So since I've played with qt only a bit and gtk never, I decided java would be good and started trying to relearn Swing. It took a few tries, but I managed to hack out a program that instantiates messages in a box which hide themselves after 8 seconds. The box automatically resizes to fit however many visible messages there are, and hides itself totally when there are none. The multi-threading was relatively easy, the inter-object notification was a bit tricky. It's in a usable state and should be interesting to test tomorrow. I have to stop starting such insane geeky projects and trying to finish them the same night...

This morning was a bit of a change of pace since I went to Salem Baptist with Dave and brooke. Then we went over to Dave's for lunch, and ended up hooking up his computer to his stereo with a digital connection rather than analog, which should eliminate the computer noise as well as get rid of the cheap DACs from the chain. Much better. Then we ended up watching some of his 10th grade videos. Didn't know most of the people in there. After that my brother came over to wash clothes and watch the game, and we discovered that the TPR valve on the water heater didn't like the water again. Over the course of clothes washing it got worse and worse, and eventually just didn't hold much water in at all. So I got a new one of those and put it on. Not too hard, but we discovered that the only water shutoff that works completely is the main one. I guess most of those are gonna get replaced at some point... Also picked up more 2x4s and some hardboard so once I get some more screen material I can build a bigger screen. I'll even try and make it actually square this time. :) Also picked up the handy cordless sawzall. Have to determine what's in the walls before I can actually use it, but at least I can do it whenever now. Watched 1984, which was odd. It's sorta slow and long, but it's not designed to be entertaining as much as show a scary possibility for the future. "who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past" "We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. We make his brain perfect before we blow it out. And then...when there is nothing left but sorrow and love of Big Brother...we shall lift you clean out of history...Nothing will remain of you." "But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you."

Today was nice an relaxing. Got up rather late, and just sorta poked around online. After a lack of email for about 5 hours I got concerned and realized that my DNS server had crashed again and for some reason the secondary didn't take up the slack or something. The crash is annoying it appears to be a failure to fork due to artificial memory limitations (it's a virtual machine) cause the parent process to fail. It appears to happen at the 4am logwatch pretty consistently so I now have a cron job to restart bind shortly after that. I also increased a lot of timeout values and added a third authoritative DNS server to the mix. We'll see how that one goes. If this crazy virtual host thing keeps up I may seriously consider getting a dedicated box. I have the sendmail load limits pretty low to keep it limiting itself before getting fork errors, and it's been routinely logging load averages 10+ for short times, and I've had weird latency issues lately. Sorta a pain. :( Anyways, I took down and remounted the screen 3" over so now it lines up with the projector's throw. 4x3 still spills off the top, but I'm not to concerned since most stuff I watch is 16x9 or higher anyways. The screen frame is still not square, but the picture is and the 16x9 area falls totally within the frame. I also mounted the center and surround speakers and rearranged that room a bit so it's usable to watch movies now. Maybe tomorrow I'll go get a bigger piece of screen material and build the wider frame. Right after I finished getting the room together Dave IMed and asked what I was doing tonight, so after he went and worked a bit he came over and we watched Solaris. It's not a bad movie, but not really good either. Really weird, and makes you think but doesn't really bring up specific points but more general ideas. We guess that it probably doesnt' adapt to film well and are guessing the book is much better. Maybe I'll have to read it sometime.

Well, woke up and patched holes in the room, and then went to Culver's for lunch. Then patched the holes again (the scraping leaves the front of deep holes open a bit so you have to get it again once there's a solid backing). Then there was the sanding all the walls. Of course they forgot both the shop vac and box fan (slap a filter on the back and it'll filter a lot fast) yesterday, so the room got rather dusty rather quick. I actually did 3 walls and then opened the windows and put smaller fans blowing the dust outside since it was not pleasant to breathe. Got the last wall finished and then it was time to paint. Primer was a bit of a pain both to apply and clean up, but luckily we only really needed it to be good over the yellow paint and other big marks on the wall since there had been paint before. Then the regular paint, which is a better color than I thought it would be. It's slightly more reddish than a pure grey, but not noticably. I guess it's probably something more people would like though. That paint was a bit easier to clean up, but made a bit of a pain by the TPR valve on my water heater being crazy and not liking the water twice today resulting in cold water. So I either have freezing and hot, or freezing and normal cold water (my cold water is very cold, so the hot is warm enough that you can hold your hand in it and still feel your fingers a minute later, but that's about it). I guess that'll probably get replaced this weekend. At least it's at the top so I probably wouldn't have to drain the whole tank. As for other things today, I ended up buying an HDTV receiver. It's a Samsung SIR-T151 which is about as low as they come, but still not normally cheap. I bid on it yesterday or the day before, and was outbid, but apparently the top bidders fell through or the seller had more since they submitted a personal offer for my original bid through ebay (like any other auction but only comes up if you know the item number and not in searches and buyitnow only). That should be interesting and will maybe get me somewhat interested in TV. It sounds like the primary viewing may be by people wanting to watch games on it though. Oh well, that works. Tomorrow is sleep in day, although I suppose I should finally get the rest of the system hooked up so I can watch my Netflix DVDs I've had for like 2 weeks now...