Got the test results today - I passed with a 94. Not a bad deal considering that I spent less than 4 hours studying, although I did manage to mess up my sleep schedule for a couple days. Now I just gotta fill out another application and write the state a check... Later this afternoon I ended up helping take down some dead trees behind our yard since one had fallen into our yard. Most of the other ones would also naturally fall into our yard so the taking them down involved rope, leverage, and a chainsaw. Then we got to see how well we could throw large branches over a hedge... A bit more tiring than what I had planned for the day. Then I watched American Psycho 2. Weird movie, although I think I'd consider it better than the first one (even though they aren't even the same type of movie and probably shouldn't have been connected by name). In the first one the guy just kills people for no real reason. In the second one there are actual reasons behind them, different type of movie completely. Straight to video but pretty decent quality compared to a lot of them. Pretty decent but you sorta have to like movies of the type.

Since the dual PIII wasn't working so well it went to visit the pile of b0rken machines today. The controller and drives were installed in a new machine I built today - dual Athlon MP 2600+ with 2GB RAM. Insanely fast, and it hasn't rebooted on me unintentionally once. :) Probably overkill a bit, but oh well. Now on Monday I just have to recompile the 3ware drivers for it. After work was a movie night in the lab with Anger Management. OK movie, some funny parts. I'd say it's better than last night's pick, but not all that great either. Lunch today was C1, probably the best I've had in a long time. Spicy, very hot temperature wise, and nice and fresh too. Probably end up going there sooner rather than later again.

Well, that didn't go quite as expected. Ended up instead going to pick up some shelves from some business since they were gonna get rid of them. Not sure what the whole story was, but I yanked the thing out of the wall and helped carry it to the trailer. On the way there we stopped at Ax-Man and browsed a bit. Sorta funny since in the van we were listening to Evanescence Fallen, and in the store they had that CD playing too. Then I came home and I sorta spaced out for an hour. Then I did that for probably another hour after a nap too. Or maybe a little longer... I found out more house stuff, but I won't go into that here. The nap was good, I'm not sure whether it helped or hurt me though. Since I hadn't really eaten all day though I work up rather hungry. Found out Dave got his new speakers and they are apparently setup for biwiring so that was interesting to figure out over IM. Apparently they sound a lot better than the old ones - I guess I'm not surprised at that though and I doubt he is either. Finished off the day watching American Beauty. If you haven't seen it, don't bother. Wasn't too interesting, and I probably would have normally almost fallen asleep. I only managed to stay awake since my body thought waking up after two hours of sleep must mean some very important reason and dealt with it accordingly. :( Twice in one day means I'm a little messed up right now too... Hopefully I can fall asleep now and get back on a normal schedule. And the quote of the day by CowboyNeal of /. fame. "There might not be anything fishy going on at all, but that's no reason to stop making perfectly good conspiracy theories."

My internal clock is way too messed up right now. I did troubleshooting on the machine that was rebooting. Swapped out the power supply, video card, and even reduced the RAM clock speed to test and nothing seems to work. Looks like we got a bunch of bad motherboards. :( The auth server was being a bit slow at work so I decided to a little cleanup. Dumped one of the logging tables and it came out to over 640MB. Luckily I was able to compress that to around 45MB, but still a ton of data. Then I decided to delete everything before the first of August this year. That seemed to be going OK since nothing needs realtime access to that table, except that a couple hours later all the possible database threads were tied up waiting to drop stuff in there since it was still deleting. Aborted the delete and let them go, and ended up doing it in month chunks rather than all at once. Ended up removing 4.6 million rows, which sped things up a bit just because it wasn't chewing up RAM trying to manage the huge table. Of course then the table apparently hadn't stablized before I upgraded MySQL, so it corrupted. I noticed 2 hours later, but of course inserts on a corrupted table don't work so well so I was only able to recover from before the upgrade. Oh well, at least there were still those 600,000 remaining rows. Looks like I have to put together a couple more kiosk machines for temporary use. Luckily the system is extensible enough I basically just have to give them static IPs and allow the site. The system is nice once it's finished. :) Last night after I came home I started studying for a test this morning. Didn't start until then since I didn't have any materials to study from. Finished up around 1, and the test was at 7am this morning so I had to be on the way by shortly after 6. :( I was done with the test by about 9 (we were given until noon) so hopefully that's a good sign. Guess I'll find out in a couple weeks... Since I had to stick around and wait for my dad to finish I went to Bethel and chatted with people for a while. Dave had 6 people in his office for a while even... Then it was time to grab some ice cream for a snack and head home. Probably to take a nap now...

Apparently students have been logging onto the instructor stations in classrooms to do assignments, and then abandoning them resulting in an upset prof for the next class since the machine is locked. So after digging around with W2K resource kit, adding a script on one of the domain controllers running as a domain admin, and a proxy script on a real web server managing what people are allowed to do, most of the work to allow any of the Help Desk workers to log off locked machines in public areas is done. Now I just need to figure out a way to track idle time and if a machine is idle and a user is logged in, execute the script automatically. That one should be more interesting... Since yesterday I decided on the name for the new list server - Jue - I also tried to set that up today. I say tried since apparently we have another machine that likes to reboot randomly. It won't even make it through the install all the way... :( Changing BIOS settings doesn't seem to help, so tomorrow is hardware troubleshooting day. The voltages on most of the lines were slightly high, but probably within spec - within 1/20 of a volt or so. They were consistent where most machines seem to have some high some low and shift a slight bit, so it's possible that's it. Probably the easiest thing other than RAM to swap out too. Hopefully it's not something like the motherboard or CPUs though. :( At least it wasn't tons of little projects today...

Got to sleep in a bit later than normal today. That's pretty rare. In the afternoon I watched Enemy at the Gates which was pretty good. Then I did a bit of web stuff and coding including URL submission for yafiygi. I figured might as well make it easy... Some chatting with friends, and then broke out the large silver discs and watched Heat. A good movie, but too long for it's own good. The soundtrack includes a couple Moby songs which is cool. I didn't like that album as much as Play though... It also has as Top O' The Morning To Ya by House of Pain - that song always cracks me up when I hear it in a movie. Also caught up a bit on W32.Swen, which just looks like a general pain all around. Although it looks like they came up with another easy removal tool for it. I almost hope these things start really damaging systems to the point of needing to be reinstalled. It might actually get people to start patching. Like when we scan resnet and netsend everyone who isn't patched for the RPC thing with instructions to go to windowsupdate and apply patches, and people just call wondering about seeing this error that pops up many times a day that they never have actually bothered to read... Oh well, hopefully stuff doesn't start going crazy tomorrow again.

Thursday the screensaver issue came up. Seems some people don't like entering their password more than once a day or so. Seeing as I probably type in a password for something a hundred times a day, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy, but we'll see what happens. Figured out some roaming profile as well as guest printing problems. I spent the last couple hours of the day finally getting around to resetting a bunch of handheld computers, which was a nice break. Friday was a pretty normal day. For lunch a bunch of us went to Eddington's since brooke managed to not have class over lunch. Got some people who don't go to lunch often out, which was cool (still not sure why the guy who lives in Chicago was there - I mean, Eddington's is good, but...). Finished up more stuff that had been waiting for a while, and even got the hardware side of a new server put together and the RAID configured. After work I added an virtualhost to yafiygi.com for the domainname sitefinder.verisign.com (I bet most of you see where this is going). Then I set up a DNS server which just does the usual lookups (I was nice and used the local servers as forwarders) but with that zone defined and pointing to the server hosting http://yafiygi.com/. Now if I (or anyone else using that server) hit a non-existant domain while this whole wildcard redirecting to sitefinder thing is still going on a random web site comes up instead. :) After that a bunch of us (many of the same people who went to lunch) met and went to The Cheesecake Factory followed by hanging out and watching TV at brooke's place. Since the wait for food was over an hour, we wandered around the mall and visited the Apple store for a while. We spent time looking at the new powerbooks, and Dave and I had a little fun with a couple of the salespeople. We started complaining about the one button mouse and about needing a third button, and when we started talking about linux PPC and one of them says "Oh, geeks" and they sorta wandered off. I think they sent another sales guy over though because he was pretty geeky and we ended up having an interesting conversation about scalable user interfaces and resolution independence (them being an Apple thing according to him, ignoring the fact that some unix stuff is already going that way too). Ended up leaving schdav.org up on some of the computers too... While we were at dinner spending way too much money and getting way too much food, Paul had an interesting encounter with on old friend. You'll have to ask him about it sometime. :) After all that I just wanted to sleep, but ended up talking a bit since my parents were leaving for a few days and after that ended up making a little frontend with frames for my random redirector at yafiygi.com and also weeding out some bad links (I only spent an hour or so on it before we went out). Saturday was sleep day though. Didn't really do any real work other than answer a couple quick questions about Appletalk. Read some more stuff on AVS Forum... Finally started catching up on Netflix though. Watched Mallrats which is a funny movie. Filmed right here in the Twin Cities for the most part, although the credits say "on location in Canada". I guess to us Paul lives in Canadia, to them we do... Then watched the JoeBuck favorite The Boondock Saints. I think I liked that one better, but I'm not sure how much of it was that the soundtrack was clean and not bugging my ears. I liked the music choices for both of them, and the storyline for Boondock Saints is really interesting. And now here I am trying to remember what I did for the past couple days. Makes me think too hard - 3 days back is too far to remember. :)

Sorta backwards, but... Got the list of instructor stations a little while ago. Turns out a bunch of them had actually been moved to different rooms. That sorta explains the troubles tracking them down to fix them. I also watched Super Troopers. That's a pretty funny movie. Nothing too crazy today, just more of the usual otherwise. Blackboard died again, and took more restarting multiple times to get it to reset. It's sorta annoying when you can't dive into the source and figure out what's causing it anymore. :( I guess they must have gotten sick of us reporting bugs and including a patch along with the report or something. :) The slowness with the library web site is back now too. Probably one of the sites sending insane sized documents again. There's no reason a single httpd process should end up needing 384MB of RAM... Lovgat is annoying since the existing CDs we distributed don't fix it, but students are thinking they are and saying they cleaned it up (nevermind it doesn't say it didn't fix anything). As soon as they get back on the network, back off they go... Then there's the people thinking running windows update last week means they applied all critical updates. Little do they realize that part of the joy of running windows is applying patches almost weekly, and checking for them at least once a week if not more often. Oh yea, speaking of that new RPC thing, it's nice that there is exploit code all over the web now. Should be interesting in a few days...

OK, so maybe the random junk hasn't let up yet. Two days of doing everything but what was planned. Today there was that fun little SSH thing, and then that stunt that verisign has pulled having fun with the email servers. Jeff was at Bethel so we all went to Arby's for lunch, which was fun. That was a last minute change from C1, so today we all ended up going to C1 for lunch. I guess we started off the week pretty decent in that regard. House stuff is interesting, and we'll leave it at that for now. Last night I ended up helping brooke with her CS2 assignment. They're learning emacs and java in that class now - what are they trying to do, scare away all the people halfway interested in CS? Oh well, another person who is hooked on X forwarding for working on remote machines. :) Today I found out that the OS 9 macs like to sort home directories in random order when viewing on the file servers. At least that's a better explanation than stuff doesn't show up on macs but it does on PCs. I was starting to wonder even more about Microsoft's AFP implementation... Then I got the distributed profile stuff sorta worked out for students. Apparently even though it wanted to apply through groups earlier this summer, now it doesn't so I have to move them into different OUs. Oh well, no big deal I guess. I'm sure there's a way to automate it. The implementing screensavers is probably gonna be pushed back a bit until we announce it in the newsletter. We really want to do it, but given the couple complaints for the few people we've done already we probably need to make sure they know rather than kill the Help Desk. After work tonight I met the family at Davanni's where they were finishing up dinner to talk for a bit. There's an estate sale tomorrow at one of the houses we looked at this past weekend and it looks like there could be some good deals there on camera stuff. Had to go look up the contact info for that one again. Hopefully stuff will settle down this week soon though. I'm starting to miss my don't-worry-about-anything-in-the-evenings that I had for the past few months... :(

I really like days like today when it's just time to relax. I started off the day not feeling too rushed but slightly confused since the rest of the family was rushed. Turns out I need to start paying attention to when they change the service times in the fall. Oh well, they were 10 minutes early, I was 10 minutes late - it was peaceful around the house for about 20 minutes though. After that was a nice meal, and then watched The Fugitive. Sorta a classic movie there. The DVD sorta bugged me since the first chapter is a little background on the history and the "special edition" but with skipping restricted (scanning still works though). Then I read stuff and chatted with friends for a few hours and then Finding Forrester. Not my usual type of movie, but Sean Connery is normally pretty decent. Had a good story though, definitely better than Signs for sure. Now it's time to end the weekend nicely, and hopefully not end up needing to try hard to stay awake tomorrow.