Well, the car is back up and running fine. Today was a rather routine day at work, with lots of little stuff. I found and fixed a bug in the account creation script since the big changeover, and had to go fix all the accounts created in the last 9 days. :( Finished moving stuff around and finally decommissioned the 5 36GB 10k RPM Ultra160 drives from the old student file server and gave them to be used in their new role. Sorta a weird feeling just walking through the halls with two drive cages full of drives with all the important data of most students in the school... A ton of us went to Taco Bell for lunch, and had a rather interesting conversation there. It was cool because there were a lot of guys that are all friends and haven't all been together at once for quite a while. Meghan finally decided what she wants to call her website with a little help from Dave, so we'll see how that goes - she's gonna try to do it all by just typing in the HTML. After work today a bunch of people came over and we watched Die Another day - that movie has a *really* loud mix. Of course the movie choice was much to Dave's objection, as he wanted to watch Cat Ballou. We even had that DVD in, but we watched the trailer and pretty much everyone said to take it back out and pick another one... Overall a good time though - we need to do movie nights more often.

Second day of the week started off better. Went to Great China for lunch, and then went to Red Ginger for dinner with a bunch of people, so got more than my fill of chinese food for the day. On the way out to dinner I discovered that one of the tires on my car was introduced to a screw, so that was a bit of a hastle, especially since it's not a full-size spare and my commute is 90% freeways with a 65 speed limit. I'm actually sitting waiting for that to get patched right now... Betsy finally set up her web page, and went all-out. I was expecting something simple just so she'd start learning scripting and stuff, and she ends up with that. She was even motivated enough to learn SSIs and stuff... Last night I redid the support on my screen at home with some tensioning lines to get rid of the wrinkles since I folded over the bottom a bit more when I rearranged, and the excess wasn't supported and made interesting stress patterns on the screen. Unfortunately it's a bit small right now for a full-size 4x3 projection, but 16x9 works great, and I can zoom 4x3 if I watch something in that format. I watched X-Men last night since I wanted something with a bit of action, and that's a pretty decent flick. A couple of my sister's friends were over and had to come down and see what was making all the racket, which was sorta funny. Tonight I'm having a bunch of friends over for a movie, so that should be fun - as long as we decide to watch something with a decent aspect ratio... I guess I gotta clean up the junk in my room from this weekend then though... :(

Well, overslept a bit for work, and ended up getting in at about 10:30. Of course I spent a significant portion of the day catching up on email, as my mailbox had grown by around 6000 messages consisting of 70MB... :( Thankfully a lot of them I could just glance over and delete. We had quite a crew for Wendy's today for lunch, and all jammed into vedmic's ride for the trip. Later in the day I finally upgraded my desktop machine from Redhat 7.1 by installing Redhat 9. I did away with metacity and installed it with sawfish. I also did a debian-style install with selecting effectively nothing on the install. The first thing I did was install apt once it was up though, and then selectively pull packages. That way I got exactly what I need and nothing else (well, except for the fact that a lot of redhat packages have weird dependencies, but I wasn't gonna deal with that). Seems to be working fine now, but we'll see how it goes tomorrow. When I got home I had to deal with my dad's email freaking out and losing the last couple months. Apparently there was a corrupt message in there and it was messing up the mail file for his Inbox. :( I showed him how to burn CDs though now...

Vacation went well. Arrived back in town earlier this evening, and since I did rather little in the way of packing (I had 2 bags not including the DVD cases - one my computer bag, and the other half clothes,half tech stuff/reading material) I didn't have much to unpack. I'll get around to posting pictures later - on the trip back I was too busy listinging to TMBG and Eminem, and even got the rest of Blown Away finished - that's actually a pretty decent movie... When I got home I watched Men in Black II, which I thought would be good on the effects even if I knew the plot was bad. I'd have to say that although I haven't seen the first one in quite a while and don't remember the details, I seem to remember it being better. Oh well... Off to work tomorrow, so I should probably get some sleep since I can't really sleep in until noon. :( Looks like movie night maybe Wednesday this week, which is cool I guess...

It's a good feeling to be unable to do anything productive even if you want to for some reason. The most productive thing I did today was probably copy more music over to my MP3 player, and fix a little glitch with it's FAT partition that was created in the process from a low battery. A little more variety - today I listened to 50 Cent, Bad Religion, Bass Mekanik, DJ Shadow, Kool and the Gang, NOFX, Otis Redding, Public Enemy, and Stereolab. My dad, an uncle and I watched The Terminator off DVD as well, which was pretty good. Die Another Day was skipping for some reason though, so didn't get to watch that. Fireworks were good again too. I was tired most of the day though so just sat around in lawn chairs listening to music. Tomorrow it's time to head home though, so gotta get up early in the morning... :(

It's hard to beat a night with no bugs, laying back in a chair on the side of a lake, headphones on listening to SR-71, with fireworks everywhere you can see including directly above, and hot ash coming down... OK, so maybe the hot ash wasn't that great, but otherwise it's good. The night started off clear, and just got smokier as time went on. I wish I had a better camera as mine won't take exposures much longer than a second, and I can't set the time delay and sequence shooting at the same time to do digital addition. It does stay light out until around 11 though... Anyways, hours later and the fireworks are still going strong... I think the no bugs (at least ones that want to bite) is the best part about being here though. The trip up wasn't so bad either. I watched Active Stealth on the way up, along with listening to lots of music, some sleeping, and reading magazines. Since I've been up here I've taken lots of pictures (pretty much filled up the camera twice, and it takes around 300 or 150 depending on the mode (I was going between). Even got to sleep in a decent amount today, which was good since I was so tired I started Blown Away last night but couldn't finish it. I've been out just cruising in the pontoon and speedboat a few times, just enjoying the weather, listening to music, and taking pictures. Even visited Canada twice today... My headphones do a pretty good job of blocking out the ambient sound if I want, which is nice when the family is talking - just sit in the front of the boat looking forward, and throw them on for a nice and peaceful ride. I guess I should probably go to bed now though since everyone else already has and they'll probably want me up tomorrow. I'll have to put together the pictures on the way back so I can get them up sooner...

Vacation is mostly relaxing. I just got done watching Stigmata - interesting story. It's also good in that it's not all action and stuff blowing up, but makes you think and makes you feel like you're there. Throughout the movie there are drops dripping, and they are in every different direction. There's the thunder too - basically makes you feel like you're in the middle of a storm. I wish more movies were done that well. Anyways, leave for a 10hr each way road trip in a couple hours, which is partially why I'm up so late. I hooked up an 8" TV in the van and ran the patch cables to the video in and to the stereo, and am grabbing the DVD player too, so we're gonna be watching movies. I'd still rather sleep I think, especially since I probably won't get to pick the movies (if you've seen my collection, you'll know that only a few of them could really be considered family flicks). Anyways, this trip means no email until Sunday, unless I decide to dial up with a modem. I put enough filters server side to get my inbox down to 200-300 messages a day (it's dropping somewhere around 800+), so pulling over a modem is probably possible... Still wouldn't be pretty, so I'll probably just let them sit and outgoing mail spool up - gotta love a local install of sendmail. Yea, that means I may post updates, and the times will be listed right, but they won't appear until Sunday night... Did I mention I like doing absolutely nothing?

I'm glad that whole Avalon thing is over. Today was my first day of vacation, and it went well. I woke up at 7am and kicked off the last bit of the Avalon stuff, and I was done with that... Of course I woke up like 2 other times during the day, but even then just sorta laid there and waited until I fell back asleep. When I did finally get up I read slashdot and chatted with friends on IM. Then went over to Dave's place for a bonfire and just hanging out with Jeff and Joe. In other words a lot more like what vacation should be. Tomorrow I have to pack and get the DVD player ready to go for in the van, but should be good otherwise. Probably do a movie marathon or something too...

Yea, I haven't posted - I've been at work since 7pm yesterday watching this server that's not been cooperating. The backup server started flaking out (maybe due to NIS+, we're not sure yet - it works fine for routine stuff, but selecting a few million files at once apparently isn't good for it), and the video card is apparently bad and won't go beyond basic text mode, and now we're just manually moving the data over to it. For you geeks wanting a picture here are one and two. Not the greatest I know, but I didn't feel like spending a lot more time with that machine...

Upgrades never seem to go right. Apparently the backup software is very touchy, so you can't select large numbers of files while a restore is happening as 2-3 seconds of not being able to reach the server causes the connection to crash. You can start the restore with what's selected at that point, but the problem is what is selected. Then the server locked up hard requiring a trip to hit the power switch... So most of the day was sitting and checking in on that. I did rearrange my room a bit, and now the seating for movies is a bit less packed. I took some pics - maybe tomorrow I'll download/post them while waiting for the thing some more. I gotta check on this server thing occationally :( - hopefully within a few hours the files will be selected and I can start the actual restores...