Hmm... So the changes to iTunes 4.0.1 are non guessable. It looks like I need to find two machines and watch the traffic between them rather than just guessing against one server. Oh well. Windows is also a pain, especially when apparently there is something wrong with an NTFS partition but it doesn't have any details about what it may be - chkdsk just either segfaults or takes forever... Oh well, Willowgate made up for it at least somewhat. Dan said he'd give us "melt the car seat" hot C1 in response to Nick's request about how spicy we wanted it.

First day back to work was pretty good. Went to Chipotle for lunch, which is always good. Discovered that Apple updated iTunes and restricted the sharing a bit, which is sorta a pain, but we'll see what happens. Discovered I recorded 15GB of video today, so cut back on the bitrate a bit. Now the sound card rate is showing a bit though (it doesn't like 48k audio, at least under linux). Gonna have to get that one solved... Watched pointless TV and chatted with a coworker for a long time. Pretty boring but fun day at the same time. Sometimes less is more...

So much done, but nothing to show for it. Except maybe a lot more hours on the projector. Well, and the PVR works a bit better, I have about 8GB of content on it, and deleted half of what it's recorded so far. I've decided that even with time shifting, half of what's on TV is junk. I did get one unexpected cool thing, but unfortunately it's missing a bit - all but the last 30 seconds or so (guessing on that one) of Evanescence's Bring Me to Life video... Wish I would have gotten the whole thing there. I guess that's why it's nice that it's effectively free to capture music video programs for hours at night and can skip through an hour of junk in under 5 minutes to determine if there's anything good. Gotta love digital video...

Well, the pvr thing is all working now. The system is integrated with XMLTV for program guides, and has some nice OSD stuff for what's on as well as channel (including station logo), time, etc. The quality looks pretty good too (once I pulled a clean cable feed into the room - gonna have to track that one down). Pics are here and here. Judging by how many things I selected I'm gonna be watching a lot of TV in the near future, but I guess that's why it's there. The driver for the hardware MPEG2 encoder was hardcoded at 16Mbps, so I modified that and recompiled it to give a more reasonable 6.5Mbps. It looked good at 16, but that kind of hard drive space is definitely not cheap (and since DVD maxes at 9.6 and my source here is cabletv...). We'll see how the overnight captures went when it's time to watch them tomorrow. There's something on about the Matrix on in a bit which I will watch tomorrow. Gotta love the time shifting without the hastle or wearing out of tapes too... :)

Well, it's finally over. Graduation was yesterday, which was the usual graduation stuff, nothing too interesting (can you tell I'm not big on official cerimonies and stuff?). At least enough administrators and students have a sense of humor that we got quotes from people like Morpheus (yes, from The Matrix) and remarks about how many years certain people had been at Bethel. After a bunch of pictures the family had dinner at Claddagh Irish Pub where we ate way too much. Sleep for not near long enough, and then baccalaureate this morning (thankfully with more humor) followed by lunch at O'Gara's. Of course eating as much food in 2 meals as I normally eat in a week doesn't help the fact that I was already tired. I think it's time to pull out the soldering iron and take some stuff apart so I have some activity today. Maybe get the PVR going too...

I'm tired. Staying up to 2am when you are already dead tired and can hardly stay awake and have to get up early is a bad idea... Last night I watched Ocean's Eleven and could hardly stay awake for the ending. Today was rather uneventful at work, although we went to Chipotle for lunch which was good. Then there was the senior banquet which wasn't all that great, and the senior show which was rather funny. Then standing around for a long time as apparently I have relatives in my class I didn't know about and the parents got talking... Oh well, gotta get up tomorrow for graduation, but at least that's in the afternoon. Can still sleep in...

Not to unusual of a day at work, other than this meeting this morning that didn't seem to really get anything accomplished other than yes, stuff isn't perfect and we should probably see about doing something. Then a bunch of us decided to go to lunch, and brooke somehow even convinced her roommate to come with. All around lunch (not during it though), Dave was having way too much fun with his digital camera, and has lots of pictures to show for it. After work I decided for some reason to work on my DAAP Proxy again. It was just getting too big for all the data to fit in IPC memory (it was chewing upwards of 20MB), so I moved it to an SQL backend. This also had the benefit that I can hardcode the servers in there and have it better automate the connections, as well as doing song consolidation. That's probably my favorite feature of all. Basically I give it a list of servers to pull from, and at any time there's a master playlist, with one of each unique song (sorted alphabetically). These are of course just numeric keys back into the guts of the proxy, which then knows which servers contain that song, sorts them by the least used/fastest, and finds the first one which is currently active to stream from. The more people with the same song, the more resiliant the system gets... I also totally separated the session initiation and streaming, so if the session isn't currently active, it instantly transitions to the next song. I also rewrote the actual media code using sockets rather than LWP, so the songs start streaming even faster than iTunes streams them. In other words, I had way too much fun, and something of which I'll definitely make use. I'm even streaming from work back to home and haven't had it skip yet, but doubt I'll do that too often. Hopefully I can get up on time tomorrow...

I'm done for good! With school that is. Today was my last final, which was probably the shortest and easiest from that prof. Now I just have graduation on Saturday, along with a few other miscellaneous things, but no more classes. After the final I helped Mike J learn SQL, and then helped a rather paniced goocas figure out why her web site blew up when she tried to publish. In some ways Dreamweaver seems a bit braindead... Then a bunch of us went to Willow Gate for spicy C1, which was good. Still more cleanup for the account issue, and other miscellaneous things at work. After work I had people over for a party, and we had half a bonfire and watched Die Hard: With A Vengeance on laserdisc. Apparently that was a big deal for some people as they had never seen an actual movie on laserdisc. The bonfire was sorta cool, but only when it involved gasoline... Anyways I managed to get lots of interesting pics of people, and since there were 2 other cameras there, I'm sure there'll be even more. Now if only I didn't have a meeting at 9am... :(

Carrying a 64oz Dew mug into finals can get some interesting reactions. Just wandering around taking drinks out of it gets weird looks too. Although it gets tiring carrying around 4 pounds of liquid, not to mention the mug itself probably weighs a pound... Oh well, finals went well, and the day was good because there wasn't much to do. I worked for a couple hours, spent about 45 minutes in one final and 35 minutes in another, spent 30 minutes on a project presentation, and just chatted with people the rest of the day. Lots of wandering aimlessly through the halls until I found people I knew. The DC was open late for free pizza and drinks, so I went and filled the Dew mug up and got pizza. Then went back for breakfast at 10pm too. I even got some studying in, although I was rather distracted among listening to lots of music on iTunes, downloading music from emusic, and calculating possible grades in AI. Oh well, get to sleep in a bit tomorrow, which is good. Not gonna get near enough sleep tomorrow night since I'm having a bit of a party...

A day that starts off with finding out that you can go back to bed for an hour even though you didn't wake up early can't be too bad... Although the prospect of finals tomorrow of course led to procrastination. I'm not really worried about them either, it's just the natural avoid studying instinct. The process started by vaccuuming the car out - it really needed it anyways. Then since last night I noticed one of the subs in my room wasn't working right, I broke out patch cables and connectors to start tracing back the problem and eventually broke out the ohm meter to confirm that the splitter from the back of the compressor to the patches to the subs had an intermittent ground on one side. I'm guessing that may be the cause or caused by that weird ground loop I had a while back, and it's just been getting worse since. Oh well, threw a replacement splitter in there and that one can visit the land of junk mail and pizza boxen. Since everything was working again it was time to pull the big chair into the middle of the room and just listen to music for a while. Then cleaning and vaccuuming since I'm having a party on Tuesday, and more music listening. I did eventually get some studying in, but not without a lot of chatting in the meantime too. Tomorrow night I get to study for my last test. At least then I get free pizza and dew in Bethel's dining center. Hmm...free dew...maybe I need to break out the big dew mug...