Well, my day was going OK, and then it both got worse and better at the same time. I was told I should share out my music on iTunes 4. No big deal, just boot up the OS X box and give people a bit more variety... Of course, my normal machines are all linux, for which no client exists. Can you see where this is going? So yea, I reverse-engineered DAAP and created a command-line client. Of course my goal isn't to download everyone's music, just to stream it, so it's not worth much to me at this point (no, I'm not giving it out either - I don't want to be responsible for killing the whole concept of iTunes sharing - Apple being one of many entities whom would be rather pissed about that). Next up are a DAAP server and a streaming proxy for xmms. The biggest problem is I have to work at 9 tomorrow morning. I have a feeling tomorrow will involve a lot of Dew...

I'll be glad when classes are done. Monday there was a physics lab exam, which wasn't hard, but wasn't as easy as the last one either - I may have missed some points on it. I finished off the day by watching Minority Report. That's an OK movie, but not the best. Nothing specific bugs me, but I just understand why a lot of people don't like it. Today went OK, although I seemed to be running around everywhere for random little things. I forgot until Dave reminded me that tonight was some community appreciation thing which meant free food. That was a nice surprise, although I don't normally really eat dinner, so I guess it didn't matter too much to me. Oh well. As I've been horribly tired the last couple days, I figure it's time to catch up and go to bed now. Quite a few hours earlier than normal I guess...

Well, despite the fact that I was dead tired and have compensated with way too much dew, the day went well. I went and hung out in a fabric warehouse for about an hour, and came back with some nice stuff. I bought a piece of material that looks like it's the same stuff real screens are made from. I also bought some very black material for around the edges and for masking. The black from the projector on it doesn't look like there's anything on it, so it'll just be the picture once I finish making it. And it's hard to beat the price too - 75" screen with aspect ratio masks for $22.38 plus a few bucks worth of wood to hook it all together. Much better than buying one... I actually tacked the screen material up to see how it looks and to enjoy it even before I put it all together. All I can say is wow. It has enough gain to almost but not quite eliminate the lines between pixels on the projector. The colors are also very bright, but don't bleed at all. Basically both DVD and Laserdisc look pretty much like pictures. So for pure eye candy I watched X-Men, along with trailers for it, Spiderman, xXx, and Stewart Little. The only problem with DVD now is the color artifacts from the horrible color bandwidth compression on DVD MPEG-2... Then I watched Patriot Games on laserdisc. As if I wasn't hooked on movies enough already...

Well, the Exchange stuff finished OK. It successfully defragmented, which means a completely rebuilt database which does seem quite a bit faster (although the old one said it was fine, and there's nobody on the system so it's hard to say yet). After that came up, I went to see X2 with Jeff and some other people. That was a pretty good movie. Since I was in the area I also stopped at Bethel and did reading for homework. Interesting, but not techie enough for my tastes... Rounded out the day by watching Clerks. Funny, but as with all Kevin Smith movies you had better not be easily offended. My dad wanted a 120GB HD and asked me to order one, so since I was ordering I added in another drive, mb, CPU, RAM and stuff for that PVR box I've been meaning to get to... So I guess that sets what I'm doing next weekend. Although it sounds like I get to yell at the credit card company again tomorrow... When they take their customer system down for "weekly maintenance", it's not a good idea to just reject all charges...

Today ended pretty good... Had a bunch of people over, and watched Airplane and Dogma. Both rather different movies - gotta wonder where some people come up with their ideas. Some interesting pics from it too... Too bad Paul just got a new manager's sign last week. We took down the exchange server as planned, although maintenance due to "undefined error" is not something I normally like to see from a database maintenance utility. I'm moving 26GB of stuff to a different drive temporarily, which should help the situation, but is gonna make a decent dent in the backup tape usage... Hopefully that'll let the consistency checker actually finish this time - apparently 32GB isn't enough for it. I get to stay up a bit to make sure the files move and restart eseutil too...only 69 minutes left on the move... :(

Some days just drag by... Even playing chess didn't add much excitement (although losing couldn't have helped). The fact I had a test that I think I did OK on but know I missed some stuff doesn't help either. Oh well, tomorrow is movie night. But tomorrow is also Curt's last day, and starting time on some maintenance for the exchange server... At least it's not all bad...

Well, the day was going good... Lets just say I was reminded again of why I hate Exchange and most Microsoft products in general... Anyways, since Curt is leaving today was my day to learn about everything related to the print servers. That wasn't too bad, but I'm sure there's something key that we've missed somewhere. I really should have done some work on a project today, but instead I hung out at the Help Desk talking to people and listening to people complain about how slow the printers are after they sent a couple print jobs well over 130MB through the system, and realised several hours later that since I had been there through 3 different shifts it was probably time to go find something productive to do. Oops. Oh well, homework is overrated anyways...

I love getting physics tests back. 100%... :) Then we got to play with radioactive samples and geiger counters in lab, which was fun too. Our group managed to get 2 counters and 2 samples, plus I measured background radiation before the lab started, so we finished ahead of any other group by quite a bit. Strongbad email is pretty good today. Some of the easter eggs are especially funny. AI homework was a pain, but that's it for homework this semester finally. In Networking Brent showed how easy it is to spoof email by sending himself email from me. We thought it would be a good pop quiz to send the class email from him, but I never actually did that. He suggested believing it could be grounds for failure. I mean, he just told them never trust where an email comes from... :)

So I wake up and I have pages about the library's web site and FTP server being down. No big deal, since usually that just means it's slow and will die in a day or so if I don't restart IIS, but sometimes it just comes back (it's some ASP they have somewhere but it doesn't happen enough to be worth tracking down). After church I start looking into it more and it turns out that IIS is totally shut off, and VNC is just closing sockets right away. I manage to restart VNC remotely and then get in, and it looks semi-normal except that IIS is off. It does seem a bit sluggish though, but I attribute it to the fact it's been up way too long (it had been logged in since Feb 7). Hit reboot, and wonder why 20 minutes later I still can't get an ARP response. Uh oh. :( Turns out one of the drives went flaky and decided rather than just die like a normal bad drive it wanted to spew enough junk on the SCSI bus that the controller got enough errors to flag all the drives as bad. And I don't care what kind of RAID you run - if the controller thinks every drive is bad, it's not gonna work right... So since this WebBIOS thing apparently doesn't work if you can't load the OS (not sure how that's supposed to work for recovery), I manage to find out that it needs a DOS utility, and am able to flag the remaining two drives as good again. Oh, did I mention that because it was so screwy I had to start unplugging one drive at a time and power up the machine to see which one disconnected would actually let me scan the rest of the bus? Yea... It's up and running now, but I'm not happy with the whole situation. Looks like we're replacing that RAID controller (American Megatrends MegaRAID) with a better one sometime (probably Adaptec 2100S). The whole thing reminds me of what happened with Avalon last summer... Oh yea, I did manage to get homework done too, and surprised flabre with a checkmate just when he though he was about to get me... I forgot how much fun chess can be sometimes (especially when it's your homework assignment)...

Fun day. Didn't get up until noon, then went to my grandma's and disconnected a modem I had put there temporarily. I also hooked up a new VCR (old one broke), redid some TV cable, and just chatted for a while. Then I went over to Dave's place for a bonfire, barbeque, and movies. Amélie is an odd movie... Topped off the night by setting up a mailing list for my sister's FCA group. I also decided I'm probably gonna build a machine for MythTV, although I might not add the TV tuning right away (just do playback). Short day I guess. And I really smell like smoke, and need to get out of these clothes... :(