Today I spent some time working on the kiosk machines. It turns out there's some sort of problem with initrd on the SCSI machines and the kernel doesn't seem to want to mount the root filesystem, but complains about it after the fact and before it remounts. Of course it doesn't have any logs at that point, so debugging isn't really practical... :( Lunch was Chipotle - this week finished on a good trend there. Most of the network issues seem to be resolved, although there was one slowness issue we addressed, but we're not sure of the real cause (it was like a saturated link, but it wasn't and the settings were fine). Oh well. Desktop team apparently spent the whole day fixing blaster again. I'm so glad we patched our servers when it first came out... We did get a bit farther on the planning for automatically yanking machines from the network, and I even got that machine started. It was a weird day - I think everyone just wanted the week to be done. I ended up getting 3 boxes today. 2 were full of CDs, and one way oversized box which could have had probably 12 DVDs but had 4 in it. So I spent most of the night listening to music. No response from Epson yet on the projector issue. I did watch 8 Mile though. Good movie, but the language was worse than Analyze This (what do you expect from a story about inner city kids rapping though). The whole room just sorta shook for the whole movie though. Maybe I'll get around to the Axcess stuff this weekend. I'd like to start poking with the projector control a bit and see how that goes... Tomorrow Ross is apparently organizing some huge dinner thing though, so I don't know how much I'll actually get done - we'll see.

Work has been interesting. I started off the week thinking it'd go well, but haven't left really close to on time once this week. Oh well. Toady I was very glad I'm not on the desktop team anymore. They had to deal with the fallout of blaster, and I was not jealous. I am now responsible for some interesting little handheld computers the nursing department uses for data collection. They have a unique user interface that takes the analogy to the real world to the extreme. I also discovered that apparently the default Redhat 9 kernel from an IDE install apparently has no support for SCSI at all. That means more work on the SCSI kiosks, but oh well. With apt it shouldn't be too bad once I figure out what's up - just turn off the firewall, install, and reboot. One fun thing we're thinking of doing now is automatic watching of the firewall logs for virus-like activity, as well as linking into MIME::Defang on the email servers. Basically if a machine sends a virus by email or probes other machines like it has a virus (a la blaster) it will instantly be removed from the network and an Incident created (notifying the Help Desk and the user via email). We're also probably gonna do a quick overview probe when a machine tries to register for resnet and put it in the blackhole rather than on the network if it has an easily detectable virus on it. Hopefully that'll make things a bit smoother for the students who otherwise wouldn't have gotten infected. After I got home I just listened to music which I haven't done for too long. Jaci Velasquez Unspoken for those curious. Then I pulled out music videos and started playing with the projector. Having two DVD players is really nice sometimes... Anyways, with the whole progressive thing, my old method of using inputs for aspect ratios isn't really practical anymore, and it wasn't that great before anyways (levels weren't right). I pulled out the comm manual again and am able to switch ratios by sending the remote keystroke sequence to navigate to the option and change it. The projector takes it as fast as I send it and executes in about a half second, which is sorta annoying since the menu pops up during that time but is acceptable. The problem is I can't query the current ratio, and I can't switch to a specific one, only switch them. That means I have to track state for every input, and hope none of them get out of sync. I sent an email to Epson technical support asking if they have an updated manual/undocumented command, or at least a way to prevent the menu wrap which causes me to not be able to select a specific one. They say within 2 business days, so we'll see how that goes. And I need to start getting to bed on time so I can get up on time...

It's hot in here - this room gets really bad unless the AC is running, which means I need to figure out a better way to get air moving through here. The car took a little longer than expected, but it's done for a while. It's got a little more performance, which I guess is probably to be expected with new plugs and replacing most of the fluids. I get to work and eat lunch at my desk, and then go to a meeting where there's rootbeer floats. Guess I timed that nicely. Got some progress done at work, and didn't work too late. After work I researched speakers a bit more. Still sorta looking at the Infinity Entras. Maybe I'll go listen to some over lunch within the next couple weeks. I could just order some and if I don't like them use the 30 day return, but I'd like to get a better deal elsewhere and not have to deal with it. Later I watched Analyze This. It's a funny movie, but not anywhere close to clean. Think uncensored gangsters yelling at each other most of the movie... Then I signed up for Netflix again. I was in it a few years back, but didn't end up watching enough movies. Now I spend more than I was paying every months buying movies, so hopefully this will help me cut back. I spent about 15 minutes, and rated 116 movies and have 19 in my queue. It was way too easy to rate a ton of movies off the top of my head - I guess that means I watch enough of them.

So it was time to get some work done on the car, and I'm sitting at the dealer, so I finally put together some of the pics I have on my computer from the last month or so. As soon as I get an internet connection I'll have posted North Dakota (4th of July weekend), July 9th movie night and Ben & Josie's wedding (last weekend). For the wedding pics they're low res since there's a lot and they'll probably get hit a lot, but let me know if you want a full res copy of any of them. Anyways, yesterday everyone seemed to work a bit late. I moved some of the windows server IPs around, which was interesting. Went smooth, but we'll see how the file server moves go... After work I finished up watching Sneakers. Yea, the end of the movie isn't any better than the first half. My box of cables came so I also hooked up the rest of the connections. Before I just had the 3 video and the fiber for audio, now I have the 6 channel, s-video, analog stereo, etc... I also discovered some cool THX trailers I didn't realise were on the demo disc I have. TEX is cool... I also got serial cables, so went and grabbed the old windows laptop to load up Axcess and play with the AMX stuff, but apparently the power supply was misplaced and of course the battery is dead. Oh well, some other time. Hopefully the car will be done shortly here. Of course then I have to go to work...

First day back to work after vacation, so of course I spent way too much time on email. It seems no matter how short of a time I'm gone I get a ton of messages. The email server of course was complaining again - I think my box grew around 60MB while I was gone (even with the automatic cleanup). A few hours to go through and that's with lots of filtering. :( Other than that I tried to track down an issue the library kiosks are apparently having with printing, but everything looks fine from my end. There seems to be some weird issue with network connectivity though which is inconsistent. It seems like it started before the big switch this past weekend. Hopefully it'll either go away or be easy to track down in the next few days. I ended up resetting all permissions on home directories on Usonia2 with a script since we had so many problems. Even though the box is slower and there is more raw data, the files are bigger so it was thankfully much faster than avalon. Shouldn't really have to do either though, but oh well. After going home I decided to watch Sneakers, but only got an hour into it because I was tired and a bit annoyed by the bad transfer. I need to watch some of the classics more often though - if I hadn't just watched Sum of all Fears this past weekend, I wouldn't have caught that there is actually a rather funny obscure reference to a character from Sneakers in that movie (the name is unique). Anyways, the DVD transfer is bad in the darker scenes. The bitrate is low for some reason (around 3Mbps), and even the bright water has very bad color banding - I even tried multiple DVD players. You can make it go away by messing with the settings (to around the average TV brightness/contrast settings), but then you lose the details in normal scenes too. I think this is one I may have to dig out the laserdisc to finish. :( Maybe I'll try reencoding at a higher bitrate just to see what happens...

Hmm, it appears that last night's post went missing. It's not in my sent item either, so it wasn't just the mail getting lost - oh well. I watched the rest of the T2 Extreme disc, and was thoroughly impressed. Then I watched Sum of all Fears - also a very good movie, with a pretty decent transfer. Today there was church, and then relaxing and cleaning up the place a bit. I've been getting a lot of stuff through eBay lately, so collected a bunch of packing material and threw it out. Also cleaned up other general stuff, and sorted through mail. I probably should do that more often. While I was at it I ended up finally fulfilling my Columbia House membership requirement since they were complaining that the time was almost up. BTW, if anyone is wondering, I definitely don't recommend their music club. If you just want Top 40 or the really popular stuff go for it, but if you have any diverse tastes good luck (including stuff like Evanescence and even most movie soundtracks). Their DVD club is pretty cool though. I preordered Two Towers for about what I'd pay retail, and got some other movies cheap. I haven't been able to find a good answer online (other than a rather suspicious regionless and slim-case packaged DVD that seemed questionable), but I'm really hoping it has the dts soundtrack. The FOTR extended one did, but I'm not sure if this one will. I'd really like a single-disc version in dts rather than Dolby Digital (can you tell I prefer one over the other just slightly? :). Tonight I watched Bad Boys. It's rather corny, but still funny. It's fun to catch all the crazy references to different movies. Other than the obvious "Bad Boys" song that's in all the trailers to the new ones, they have stuff ranging from Driving Miss Daisy to the original Charlie's Angels (and no, not the original that came out 5 years later - the real original). While that usually is a sign of a movie grasping for things, somehow they managed to make it pretty good. If you can get around the language that is. Back to work tomorrow, so should probably get ready for that.

So I'm evaluating the Pioneer DV-563A DVD player to decide whether to keep it or not. Wednesday night when I was tired I looked at the time so I could jump back, and hit stop and powered off the player. Today I turned the player off, and the resume screen came up again. I thought that was a cool feature, but no big deal. But I have this trailer DVD to poke around with, so pop out the disc and play the other one. When I'm done I pop in the T2 disc again, and find that the resume screen comes back up. Doubting it I hit play, and sure enough it's right at where I left it 3 days ago. Resuming through power cycles is a cool feature, resuming through disc changes is awesome! OK, time to go discover more things...

Wednesday night I decided to watch T2 Extreme. That DVD combined with the progressive scan and the projector made it look like watching a first run film with a 48fps shutter. I think it's time to pull out more eyecandy DVDs to test it out. Thursday morning I got up and moved the excercise stuff. There were two ~7ft tall large metal pillars with pulleys, cables, and weights in them. And they're built very well too. One had 1 200lbs weight stack and probably weighed around 300lbs, and the other had 2 200lbs weight stacks and probably weighed a bit over 500lbs. There were 4 of us carrying these up stairs and up a ramp into a truck, which provided a bit of a workout. Especially since the ambient air temp was 92 degrees. :( Unloading down the ramp and across a level surface was much easier... I think I got my workout for the week there. After that my brother and I rushed up to St. Cloud for the wedding rehersal. That was in the 80s and we got to stand in the sun. Wasn't too encouraging since the wedding was the next day and the weather was supposed to be similar, but we would have to wear our tuxes and couldn't really be carrying around beverages. The dinner was good, and due to the morning activities it was really easy to fall asleep. The next morning we got up to set up all the stuff again. Then we had to go shower and get dressed for pictures. We had gotten up early enough it wasn't too rushed though. Pictures of course took hours, but we could sit in the shade most of the time (and shade gives better pictures anyways). By the time the wedding came around there was shade over the guys side which was very nice. :) Wedding went well, although the humidity caused some problems with the sound equipment. Then there was the dinner which was nice and the dance. I'm not a dancing person, so got lots of pictures. Next time I think I need to bring up more than 2 sets of batteries though, because since it was really low light and a high rate of picturetaking, I only got around 230 shots before they were both dead. Got some good ones in there though. It's always funny to watch drunk people try and dance (or it could be argued that they're better at it, but...). The bride's family is very outgoing and expressive so they had some funny planned dances and interesting things to say. I'll have to post the pictures sometime soon. Today's my day to finally relax after this past week though, so probably not today. Gotta finish playing with the new dvd player. I have this DVD ISO with DD, dts, and THX trailers on it - we'll have to burn that and see how that looks...

The lack of posts after the last sentence of my last post should pretty much explain what I've been doing the last 2 days. The whole NetWorker backup stuff is pretty bad, is slow, and likes to crash/freeze whenever there's a glitch talking to the server (usually caused by one end chewing CPU to the point the machine is effectively unusable). Currently we have resorted to maping a drive to the administrative share on Usonia2 from Avalon, and running the restore client doing a directed recover on Avalon. It shouldn't be so hard to restore from backups... So Mike and I have been watching it pretty much around the clock since Monday morning to get it moving again when it inevitably stops. Today felt like it was Friday for the 5th day in a row - not in the good "it's almost the weekend" way either, but the "do I get to go home yet" way. :( Even though I have had to wake up enough that I have been constantly tired, I have gotten to have a bit of fun. Monday night Dave and Ross and I went over to some of Ross' friends place to watch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. A little different than my usual movie experience as there were 5 of us around a 9" TV, but was still good. The beginning of the movie was pretty funny, but then it ended like a typical chick-flick... Yesterday my new DVD player arrived, so had to play with that. Even though my projector doesn't have flicker since it's not a CRT, progressive scan for film sources is still really nice. Plus that player is very fast at seeking so skips and stuff are effectively instant. I had to test it out and watched lots of trailers (and saw just how bad the MPEG encoding on some is), and then watched Crimson Tide. It's a good movie - I'll have to watch it again some time when I can do more than just stay awake and actually enjoy it more. Hopefully the cables I ordered will arrive soon too. Right now I have the player sitting on my bed with the RCA bundle and the fiber running across the room to the equipment rack. Since it has DVD-A and SACD support I'm gonna end up with around 11 cables coming off the back of it, and that's without any control and if I skip the composite video (probably will since I don't have anything that takes that input anyways). After work today I got recruited to go pick up a trailer for hauling trees and brush since my dad was gone and nobody else was apparently able to drive with a trailer. Tonight should be much better, as I get to relax. I do have to get up early to move heavy exercise equipment around, but can hopefully get to bed early. No, the server isn't done yet, but since I'm on vacation the rest of the week (cousin gets married Friday, and the rehersal is tomorrow evening), I'm thankfully off babysitting duty as of 6pm today. I'm tired of typing now - I'm making too many mistakes... Now to figure out which movie to watch...

Church, and then family birthdays. That was a good time, found out I apparently have more readers than I thought... After that was work. We went to swap out the cable on Usonia2, and the new cable was really bad (wouldn't see any of the drives). We did a low-level format of the bad drive, and swapped out the controller, and everything seems to have rebuilt OK. We finished up Avalon, and left it restoring a few home directories, rebuilding the Mac indexes, and resetting all the home directory permissions. Then I went home, watched the last few minutes of Changing Lanes since my brother was watching it, and then watched Stigmata. I still think it's a bit freaky, but it's interesting and you notice more things each time you watch it. After the movies it's time to check on the servers again. Avalon is doing fine, which I think is a record of some sort. I have no problems believing it'll be done by morning. Usonia2 is another story. The verify is 90% done, and the controller is freaking out about SCSI ID 0 (the old bad drive was ID 4). It's also complaining about NTFS being corrupt and I can't get to over half the data on the drive. It says to run chkdsk, so I try and it exits with errors within 2 seconds. I try chkdsk with a forceful dismount, and same thing. Try unmounting the drive, same thing. Mount it under a different drive letter, same thing. Luckily last night's backup got all the way through the Usonia2 stuff, so worst case we'll loose a day of data... Rebooted it and it's pingable but otherwise unreachable, which is sorta a good sign since it probably means it's attempting to fix the problems with the drive. Not much I can do now since it's unreachable and probably dead anyways... Hopefully it'll be up by morning, otherwise we get to figure out what to do, and none of the options are likely to be very good choices. I guess I better get some sleep - it's gonna be a long day tomorrow. :(