Today was busy. Start off the day with printing down. While trying to figure that out, it looks like the core router is down even though it really isn't, and then a crossover switch on a fiber converter fails and takes out the Internet connection. All this while we're not sure what's actually going on, and are going through a large list of machines nimda (one of the servers which watches the firewall/router very closely) has identified as behaving like they have viruses, just in case their traffic is causing some of it. For lunch Ross, Dave and I were able to relax at Dave's place and eat Wendy's. My sister on the other hand apparently met most of the department and spent lunch talking about me. I heard about it from at least 3 people at work, and everyone at home, and still don't know all that went on. Oh well. The afternoon wasn't much better. The Nick and I moved a few printers to a different place on the network so we could get some printing back up, and about the time we finished the regular stuff came back up (unrelated to us moving them). We wanted to eventually move them anyways, so it wasn't all in vain. Of course during the afternoon nimda kept finding more and more machines to yank, and we tried to catch up on all the stuff we would have been doing otherwise... Every year for TA training they end it all with pizza and a movie, so at 6pm I went to join the party. We watched Best in Show, which was very funny, but probably not appropriate for the setting, especially at Bethel. After that went and found the system had identified more machines with viruses. At that point I figure leave them on the network for a while since they can't get out, and we'll hopefully get all the currently vulnerable machines infected and therefore off the network before the next round of new machines tomorrow. Sorta cruel, but effective. I feel sorry for Network Services with all this. At least it's automatically creating Incidents so they can just be sent to the Help Desk with all the information in a consistent state (including the user if we know it). I decided to go home relatively early and watch Die Hard since I've had it from Netflix for a few days. That's a fun movie, with impressive effects (especially for 1988) and really good sound (even DTS). I had totally forgotten than Alan Rickman plays Hans Gruber - he has the perfect style for a terrorist. Anyways, the rest of the week doesn't look any less busy, and I work Saturday, so time for sleep for me.

The trend continues with another busy day... Tracked down and fixed the cause of most of the slowness on the network. Hopefuly that'll stick long term too. Was able to get out of there at like 8:50, mainly because there was a bonfire at 9 hosted by JoeBuck at his former residence for all the new students. I got some decent pictures, although nothing great.

Well, Sunday I watched Catch Me If You Can with my mom and brother, and one of my sisters and dad each stayed for about half the movie (different halves). That's a good movie. Then I decided to actually get a full night of sleep. Although I'm so used to so little sleep I sorta started half waking up and looking at the clock thinking I was late or something. Work was crazy, with people thinking that virus filtering on the email server wasn't working, and then the network dragging to a crawl combined with lots of people needing to be blackholed, "fixed" computers needing to be blackholed again, and printing not working until Dave and I both poked at it and basically gave up, printed a test page, and then everything started working again. Gotta love mysteries. Then tryed to get some real work done, but got out of there by about 8pm, and went home to do nothing, but got stuck doing other stuff. Eventually watched Sniper 2 which is low budget but still good movie. Hopefully tomorrow will be less crazy.

Friday was long. Work in morning, trying to catch up with stuff. Noodles and Company for lunch. Somehow Dave managed to talk Betsy into coming even though she just got her wisdom teeth out thursday, so it was funny to see her try and eat. Then more work, and dinner at BK with the Nick. Most of what I got done involved recommissioning the machine called nimda (guess what that did before) to scan firewall logs and watch ICMP traffic and decide which machines to yank from the network. I also worked with Joe to teach him a scripting language called AutoIT, which we used to heavily modify a template CD for blaster fixes to include service packs, the patches, fix scripts, and our virus scan, all with autorun and just asking the user. Hopefully that'll make it easier to get student machines patched. Also did other stuff, but that was a while ago and the nimda thing just sticks out. Saturday I got up to go look at houses. Looked at some for reference on the area, and one looks interesting right now. We'll see what happens there. Stopped in at Bethel afterwards and was informed by Betsy and brooke that there was a party at Dave's, so ended up sticking around. The Help Desk training video is almost done, although not without Betsy putting a lot of time into it and somehow managing to convince half the other student workers to work all weekend with her. The party at Dave's was fun. Watched Orange County and Better Of Dead. Then everyone was tired so went home. I ended up looking at house stuff until late, and then had to get up this morning for Church. Been sitting around since, looking at more house stuff, and messed with the projector mount a bit too. The way I was gonna try doesn't work too well without a more sturdy base and better clips, so I'll probably leave it for now. Especially if everything's gonna need to be redone within a couple months anyways... I think I'm gonna go and watch a couple movies and try to get to bed early. I need to relax more...

Interesting day today. Started off the morning figuring out how to handle testing accounts for blackboard since we can't duplicate the login scripts anymore. The new method is actually much more elegant anyways - if a user is authorized to use testing accounts when they log in it gives a list of accounts to choose rather than dropping directly into the site. That way they don't share the test account either. :) KFC for lunch. Then there were a bunch of little things - everyone discovers all the things that aren't right before the beginning of school. There was a nice break for Ice Cream and chatting with coworkers. I finished off the day getting the machine ready to run analysis on firewall logs and email viruses and drop people in the blackhole. Which was a very good thing, considering that for some reason I started getting random pages around 8pm with random problems reaching things. Didn't see anything I could do about it and figuring it was related I went off to watch Galaxy Quest. The movie is OK I guess. Sorta funny, mostly in the how corny it is. Oh, those network problems... Turns out a few machines in resnet and a couple on campus got W32/Nachia and were effectively ping-flooding the world. So tomorrow maybe we'll get to put Nimda (the analysis machine) to work. Wasn't quite planning on implementing so soon, but the network guys can only stay awake yanking machines off the network manually for so long...

Work was a bit busy today. Started off discussing people having way too much stuff on the servers, as well as future plans for servers. Then there were moving machines around, updating stuff on the servers, tracking down some odd random annoyances, piles of small requests, and more automating updates to stuff. It turns out our call tracking system started sending out survey requests to students submitting voicemail updates - oops. Had to take care of that, but there's gonna be some random surveys. I'm not sure how one can be dissatisfied with Help Desk courteousness when submitting a voicemail update online and no human interaction happened. Oh well... I also started a successful install of the box which is gonna watch the firewall rejects and the viruses going through the mail server and deal with them appropriately. Should be interesting once we get that up. After work I watched an animated flick called Daredevil vs Spiderman. No, it's not based off either of the two movies - it's based off the original comics. It was actually pretty decent, and gave a lot more detail in the backstory. It's good quality too, being a 2003 Disney release. Given that Netflix mailed it to me last night, and it should go back in the mail tomorrow morning at around 7am, they're gonna start hating me... I wonder if I can get on my 3rd generation of rentals by the time my free 10 day trial is done... :) Oh well, I'll probably feel the effects of this next month if their trend is anything like what I've heard.

Pretty usual day, nothing really too out of the ordinary. Sobig.F was interesting. I had around 150 alert messages by 11am just from stuff going through the secondary mx servers (main servers too loaded?) before my boss got sick of them and turned them off. A quick look at the mail logs and it looks like we had around 7600 messages, which isn't too terrible if you look at the big perspective, but since it's summer and students aren't sending much yet it was like a sixth of our email today... We're better off than some though - apparently Notre Dame had 60k filtered and that's double their previous record for a month. After work I sorta just hung around chatting with people, and ended up poking with the screensaver issue some more. Apparently windows doesn't like just dropping the screensaver stuff in the registry until you log out and back in, so that's staying out of the login script... We'll have to go with group policies there. Then I tried to catch up with email lists - way too much junk, although some interesting stuff. No movie tonight - I went through too much caffeine...

Work went pretty normal. There still seems to be some goofiness with latency around the network though. That on top of another slow page on one of my webapps pushed me to fix that, which I guess was good. C1 for lunch today, which is always good. Lots of little catchup stuff at work, and finally got around to rebooting a couple servers which had VNC lock up on them. One of them we were having some "quota issues" on, and I tracked it down to the drive being almost full. 2 days without the console on the server and they manage to fill it without bringing any one user over quota. I think the users are conspiring against us. :) I managed to find a gig and a half to delete, and didn't resort to doing mass sweeps of home directories to delete stuff they shouldn't have anyways, which is good. I guess this is a good reason to push for actually implementing reasonable quotas for staff... Anyways, after work I went to Cold Stone with my family since my sister moves to Bethel tomorrow. I think she's managed to set a record for a girl packing the least amount of stuff necessary though. I guess that's a good thing. :) Also updated her computer to avoid the fate of blaster... I got the September issue of SGHT today too, which is about DVD recording. Interesting stuff - I'll have to read through it more when I don't need caffeine to keep my eyes open...

Today went well. I wasn't too tired despite (or maybe caused by) staying up so late. Church was good. I was a little surprised but happy when some people went up and played a U2 song. After that I did general browsing and then watched The Bourne Identity. It's 3 hours long, but had an intermission halfway through so wasn't too bad. Not quite as fast paced as the 2002 version, but I think it is much more true to the original story (I say that having not read the book, but based on what a friend did not want to say about the story after seeing the newer remake). It's like a whole different story than the new one, but with a few shared elements like names. Then I did more browsing, more research on AMX stuff. I still haven't found that power supply yet. Maybe I'll have to pull out a desktop and put Windows on it one of these days. :( After that, I watched Spy Game. Going into it I thought it'd be decent, but now I think it's great. Think along the lines of The Recruit, but the guy's not a traitor, and it takes place years after training, although they jump around a bit. Good effects, lots of explosions. Pushes the low end quite a bit (transducers got a workout), and still manages to push the highs. Another reminder of why I'm sorta looking at new speakers. :( Gotta work tomorrow though...

Today was fun. I got plenty of sleep, waking up sometime in early afternoon. Then I watched the original Ocean's Eleven. Las Vegas is definitely a different place these days. And the 2001 remake is very different in story too - the endings aren't even the same... After the movie, it was dinner time. Ross instigated a gathering at Old Spaghetti Factory of a bunch of people, mainly former Bethel people. Then he invited people over to my house for a movie (yes, he asked me first). Him, Tiff, and Brad came over and we watched Minority Report. Good movie, and none of them had ever been over before so that was fun too. Had to watch a couple THX trailers too... Of course since that went until 1:30, it's gonna be difficult getting up for church in the morning. :( Oh well, 'twas fun - at least I don't have to drive home too.