Today started off way too early since the goal was to get an early start on wallpaper removal. Didn't get much of a start there, and then it was off to get C1 for lunch. After C1 I got some groceries, and then it was time for dealing with way too much glue creating a big mess. It's not so bad when sheets come off, but the pealing off little pieces is annoying. Either way there's still a ton of glue that needs to be washed off afterwards though. We just finished off washing most of the glue off when the rest of the family showed up and we went to Fuddruckers for dinner. Then it was home depot to get painting stuff for tomorrow/this weekend, and the finally time to relax a bit. As for why it was only washing most of the glue, tomorrow I'm gonna sand everything since the walls are a little rough anyways (we're not sure what the previous scheme was in the room, but think it was some sort of mix of paint and wallpaper). The sanding should remove anything that's left of the glue in the process of trying to make the wall smooth enough to be paintable. We'll see how that goes...

Started today off with a trip to Home Depot for some hardboard, bolts, and screws. Then picked up some speaker brackets at Radio Shack to match the pieces already on the back of the speakers. Stopped and borrowed some cool cordless power tools (a circular saw and drill) from my dad and traded the van for my car again. I managed to get my projector mounted nicely to the ceiling, and with the bolts I was able to level it off perfectly by just adjusting the nuts on the 4 corners - much easier and more accurate than trying to adjust velcro. The mount is now very stable as well, you can push on it pretty hard and it won't even move. About the time I finished that it was time to meet Dave for Matrix Revolutions. I think it's better than the second one, but still left too many things open. They did better at interactions, but still need to work on that a bit. After the movie Dave came over and we mounted a 2x4 to the ceiling and more vertically from that to the floor. Also mounted a speaker bracket for the center channel, and the screen to the vertical supports. I'm definitely gonna need a bigger screen (and it centered a bit better), but that works for now if the projector is zoomed in all the way. Since it was now useable, we watched a documentary on Wesley Willis. If you've never heard of him, you should look into his music. It's rather unique. He has a rather interesting history as well. Anyways, tomorrow is wallpaper day, so I have to get up at a decent time. :(

Today was less annoying than yesterday. Woke up just in time to head over to Dave's to eat fast food. After that I pretty much sat around and did nothing for a few hours. Poked around on eBay a bit though. Today was election day so went through that stuff again. Then I went and grabbed more furniture and some other miscellaneous stuff and brought those back. I also grabbed some 2x4s I had still in the garage from my previous screen-building project, so hopefully will get going on a new screen/wall-building project. On the way back home Dave called and asked if I wanted to see his new laptop he got for free from Dell with a WUXGA screen. Of course being a good geek I told him to come over. Him and brooke showed up a bit later and Dave and I looked at the computer while brooke tried to find Law & Order on TV. During this process a few MAC addresses were added to the router's filter table so more friends can abuse the internet connection. And that definitely happened as Dave updated well over 100 packages on his laptop. Oh well, I guess that's what it's there for. :) I suppose I should probably change my SSID to something other than BC Wireless eventually, but that'd mean breaking out the config tools and stuff so it'll probably stay that way for now. After they left I started planning more of my AV/theater project, and ended up looking for OTA HDTV receivers (the only piece I don't have is the actual receiver and an antenna for it - the rest of the system will handle HDTV). Unfortunately even the low end models are rather pricy. Of course eBay looks somewhat promising... :) Tomorrow is Matrix, and maybe I'll even get some stuff set up here.

Today I got up intending to get some stuff moved over and unload while waiting for the comcast installer to arrive. Of course then I heard that lunch was Eddington's, so got a quick load together and headed over for that. Still got back a bit after 1, which was still plenty of time for the surprisingly early 1:45 arrival of the comcast tech. The cable was already set up at the pole, so he only had to crimp a couple connectors on the coax and plug in the cable modem. The fun part came afterwards. After installing Win2k Server on an old hard drive and trying to install the software, I found out that they apparently don't consider that Windows 2000. A bit of a pain, but I managed to then acquire a W2K Pro CD. After that installed, I sorta got that working. It got past the first OS check, but then the frontend would just hang after complaining about the OS (with big X and then sitting there and only allowing a cancel). I managed to install the Service Agent again and it actually sorta worked with Pro, but their web pages kept coming up as not available or buttons not working on them (the program is an IE wrapper). After a few reboots and restarting the program (luckily it picked up basically where it left off after asking for basic login info), I managed to get it all activated. So I finally have internet access at home. The new $20 dlink router is pretty cool. Lots of features I didn't really expect I'd use. Got my nice access point up and running too even (with MAC address filtering at a higher network level). Then Dave came over and we went and got my bed and a bunch of other stuff. Some geek related, some not. I have a microwave now, and I can actually sleep at my new home. That'll be interesting. Hopefully I'll remember what's going on when I wake up. :) Got some dishes too, so those are being washed. Dave and I also strategized placement of the projector and stuff, so that should be fun once I get that hooked up.

Sunday, normally starts off great and then gets disappointing at the end when you realize that the next day is Monday. Today started off good with church, which was followed by breakfast/lunch at Baker's Square since a relative from a few states away was in town. After that I went shopping with my mom and sisters, and bought more stuff. I got this really nice vacuum with a dust container (yes, no bags to change) that's really easy to empty since the bottom just releases. HEPA filter and all the usual stuff, but very good at picking up everything too. I filled up the thing with pretty much stuff other vacuums hadn't been picking up. A cool part is the hose detaches for using on other things which isn't all that out of the ordinary, but you can attach a smaller version of the rotating brush and use it for stairs or furniture without having to try and manipulate the whole vacuum. Also bought glasses and silverware and towels and other stuff like that. I brought most of that stuff, a bunch of chairs, and more av stuff over in another load to the house too. Starting to be sorta livable. Of course disconnecting and reconnecting stuff took most of the time. Turns out i have a stack over 40" tall without any air spacing so am thinking of rack mounting it all since it'd be easier than building a proper enclosure and still having it be usable. That will be interesting to see how it turns out. Also bought some GFCIs on ebay and bid on some more of the cool dimmers. Tomorrow cable is installed at the house, so I have to get up at a somewhat decent time so I can get a van load together and get over there before install time. I suppose I should probably install windows on one of these other hard drives too so I can configure it. Poor computer...At least it won't have to run it very long...

Last night I moved some stuff (mainly tools and basic things like hand towels and soap) over to my new place, and then went over to Dave's place. Ended up watching The Lion King, which Dave and Paul know way too well. I think brooke knows it pretty well too, but as usual she fell asleep pretty early into it. Saturday I got up at a semi-decent time (even in the morning), and used some coupons I was given to buy some dew and pizzas, and then grabbed enough equipment to listen to music decently and headed over to the house. brooke and Betsy came over and we went shopping for cleaning supplies and other necessities. We got back and they went to work cleaning and Dave came over and we started installing the cool dimmers I got for dirt cheap on ebay. After I took the first switch off of the wall we realized that the old switches were the usual screw terminal style, while the dimmers had pigtails. Of course I hadn't grabbed any wire nuts before I left so we headed off to Home Depot. We also got some 150watt halogen bulbs to replace the old 80watt ones, which helped the room brightness a lot. Dave flipped one switch which was upside down over and only managed to shock himself once (I think). brooke wanted to help with one of the dimmers so I let her do that, but we turned off the breaker for that... I also replaced all the exterior locks so now have a working lock on the back garage door and have one key for everything (I had 2 keys for the working locks, and one non-working). The entire family stopped by during this process, and most of them managed to end up with keys. Dave left for a while, but then came back and we got pizza, and Paul came over to visit too. It was like a normal ITS get together, but with a lot more candy and a lack of furniture. Then everyone went home, and it was time to close up the place. I realized that one of the doors didn't latch properly, but a quick swap of the strike plate fixed that one. We'll deal with that one for real later. Now off to get some rest for more moving tomorrow.

Wednesday was sorta interesting. C1 for lunch, and it was the best I've had for quite a while. It was very hot both in temperature in spice. For work I got the BSSD domain up and running, and had another VLAN and subnet set up as a separate site for testing replication and losing the links between them. Seems to work pretty well. I also got Mathematica back on my laptop. I thought I'd never want to use again, but when you have to do anything more than simple calculations (like say wireless data path loss calculations) it comes in handy. I figure might as well since I am covered under work's license and don't have to pay anything... :) After work I sat around and did nothing, and eventually played a bit with my discussion board project. Thursday finished testing the BSSD stuff, and otherwise generally prepared for being gone for over a week. Copied and modified the account management scripts from the other student domain, which was actually a lot less hastle than I figured it would be. Ended up transplanting one of the servers from a tower to a rackmount case, although it's still sitting in my office and not the server rooms. I ended up doing a bit of poking to find out ways to get a bit more space in the server rooms, but we're gonna have to figure out other ideas at some point. A bit weird trying to make sure I got everything (I did end up logging in this morning, but only to turn off paging since I got a couple and realized I forgot), but nice to be done for a while. Called comcast and finally got a two work orders in and one canceled all ending up in what will hopefully be the installation of a cable modem Monday. Gotta love when the first rep schedules stuff and then the second rep has to cancel it to add the rest. While waiting on hold for it to be canceled though, I got to listen to the important spiel about how federal privacy laws prevent them from releasing information about the account holder so you have to explicitly list anyone else who should have access to your account. I found that rather funny concidering my previous couple calls to them. At least they were nice and didn't complain about the fact that I wanted pretty much every possible privacy flag set and didn't want to give them my SSN. :) The evening involved heading to Northwestern Book Store in Har-mar for a Moxie Bliss concert. Talked to Junk for a bit, and we commented on how schdav said he'd be there but ditched it. It was a good concert though, although they were only opening for another band so didn't have much time. I also got an email about a link from my site causing a mini-slashdot effect. Apparently I have some click-happy readers or something. :) After the concert I stopped back at Bethel to pick up my stuff before heading home, and saw a few cs nerds in the happy lab getting ready to head to Rochester on a road trip (one of the guys lives there). This morning was interesting. Got up and went to go and do a final walkthrough of the house. She left it very clean and in good condition, with no junk still laying around. Then it was downtown for the closing. Lots of papers to sign there, although not as bad as lots of people say. Still signing and initialing every page on multiple copies of a 15 page document along with a bunch of other ones too... The Privacy policies are always interesting too. Like they won't share your data with anyone else except where allowed by law. For marketing purposes of course, and they even say that but in the wordiest and most indirect way possible. Oh well. So the house in mine now, and the task of moving in begins. I think most of that will happen over the weekend rather than today. I haven't eaten yet today though, so I am rather hungry and think I'll go find some food here first...

Windows is a pain. Just in case you didn't already know that for some reason... I rebuilt the BSSD domain as part of the forest today, since it wasn't worth the hastle of trying to get the inter-domain trusts going. Windows Server 2003 has inter-forest transitive trusts, but who knows what else. For 2000 I think I can create an effectively independent domain by carefully picking which services go where (and the automatic splits by sites helps too). While I was poking I set up shortcut transitive trusts to make the forest fully meshed which should effectively remove all reliability problems there (theoretically all but two domain controllers can be down and they'll still trust each other properly rather than needing to go through the roots). That they're transitive also helps since it provides paths for other domains too. Of course active directory is rather dependent on dynamic dns updates, especially for domain controllers. Of course servers never use DHCP, right? So why in the world would you put the DNS updater in the DHCP Client which would otherwise be completely disabled but needs to be running for just that? Oh well... I think everything's working, so hopefully tomorrow I can set up a test site and try cutting it off from the rest and see if it still works properly. Anyways, after I got home I did nothing except read a bit of tech news for a bit, and then played with dynamic DNS. Took about 2 minutes to set up bind and delegate a dynamic zone under one of my domains, and another couple minutes to have a perl script to update them. Now dyn.hackish.net is a dynamic zone. I should probably set up some sort of security (probably challenge/response) on that at some point, but it's open for now. I debated working on the bit bucket test a bit more, but never got to it. Maybe another night. Oh yea, and I discovered machines attempting to log into the administrator account every few seconds for a few hours last night. It's a lab machine in a group of others that's been acting funny, so we'll see what happens with that...

Started off the day by deciding to not bother with the LDAP domain at all since we're getting the AD domain up so soon anyways. Then after a bunch of routine stuff managed to get out for lunch with Raadt (the new webmaster). Finished up a bit early so figured I'd get my utilities straightened out. Xcel was nice to deal with, they're pretty good about the fact that they don't need an SSN to establish service. Comcast on the other hand not only has some really weird policies but is a company you want to have as little personal information about you as possible. The crazy policy as mentioned before is they have to physically disconnect service before you can schedule replacement service. As for the personal information, I was given the name of the current resident just in passing without even being asked, and offered and given the phone number without having to ask either. Both without needing to identify myself in any way other than "I'm buying this house". All in direct violation of their privacy policy (yes, I looked) unless I can somehow be considered a "potential business transition partner" and had some sort of obligation of confidentiality (I'm pretty sure the "this call may be recorded" doesn't help that any). Very comforting to know, huh? :( I'll have to talk with them a bit when I set up service I think... Later on in the afternoon I set up another windows domain/forest and set up trusts with our current domains. That all works great for the most part, but there seems to be some sort of problem with the domains seeing each other fine one second and then saying it doesn't exist the next. Since they share a DNS server that has the complete data I'm not sure what's up yet, but hopefully it'll stabilize with replication and start working normally. It'd be nice to have the ability to add to groups normally and not only one way randomly. Most of the evening was spent reading slashdot (what else is a geek to do). Apparently lots of bloggers have problems with spam. I guess that's one advantage of a totally custom system (although who knows if more and more people start using it).

This weekend was supposed to be sorta used for packing, but that didn't happen. Saturday got up sometime in the afternoon and effectively did nothing. No movies even, just mainly reading between online tech stuff and magazine tech stuff. Of course just kicking back and listening to music too. Oh yea, JoeBuck got his new blog up and running. His should be interesting since part of the whole point of it is to document his experiences on the other side of the world. Sunday I got up and went to church and stuff, followed by lunch at Houlihan's. Then off for shopping at Sam's Club where I bought more Dew and a giant bag of Runts. The Dew was planned but the Runts were a impulse buy while waiting for people to finish in the bathroom. Oh well, it was cheaper than the bulk rate online, lets just hope it makes it to my office or something rather than the alternatives. After that it was a lot of sitting around again doing not much. Started researching cell phone plans. The whole family isn't really tied down much by contracts right now, and we have 5-6 phones to get going, so WLNP coming into effect in November could give a bit of bargaining power. At this point it sorta looks like maybe a combination of Verizon and Sprint. I looked at ATT for a bit, but find it puzzling they're actually moving from TDMA to GSM, and besides that calling it "next generation" when it's just a more constricting form of TDMA - just as everyone else is moving to 3G or at least some form of CDMA... They have the best if you roam a lot with onerate, but otherwise I'm not so sure - neither tech is that great IMHO. Anyways, looks like pretty big fires in the San Diego area with the sky being orange and now sorta black. Some pictures of how bad it is: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. #4 is a skyline picture that shows the darkened sky really well. In a few days maybe this site will be available again with more. If you're curious there's more info available including burn maps and evacuation areas. Eventually watched a little bit of Air Force One while mainly surfing the web. Now I'm listening to music again, currently U2. I want some of their stuff to be released on either DVD-A or SACD in the near future, but I guess I'll have to live with CD for now. Now off to go do more tech reading before bed. I guess I get to pack some during the week this week. It's a good thing I'm not actually trying to get out of a place in one day or anything...