Apparently I've been busy or something. In the past week or so I've finished Alias Season 3, watched The Faculty, done a lot of coding and documentation review, ordered some servers, had a birthday, been dragged into too many meetings, set up software distribution plans, ordered more servers, fixed stupid appletalk stuff that broke, attempted to track down other broken stuff, planned more infrastructure, worked around comcast breaking their DNS, set up mailing lists, evaluated another semi-federated distributed authentication system, attempted to implement some dynamic windows lockdown systems, investigated quota systems, patched utilities from Windows Server 2003 into Windows 2000 Server, attempted to convince people that greylisting is not the cause of all lost email, speculated at site bandwidth requirements for very loosely defined groups of people, investigated Windows policy application, attempted to work around weird network glitches, investigated disk IO problems, lost a bunch of data, drank way too much Mountain Dew, and tried to forget about work when I get home. Yea, other than the first two, that data stuff and that one other thing, that's been work for the past couple weeks. Actually that seems like not enough explanation now that I look at it. Going home has involved sitting around doing nothing and reading random stuff to try and relax. It's been made easier by horrible network latency to work, but harder by the phone beeping with random pages. Right now I'm sitting on the couch at home, every couple minutes resisting the natural urge every couple minutes to move so the lights will turn back on. Mainly that's because the lights here don't turn on if I move (well, unless I walk over to the switch), so it's pointless. I think that means I either need to move more at work so the lights stay on there, or I need to tweak the motion detector timing. I'm thinking it's probably approaching time to find something to do and take a week off. Of course at work I sorta work time off around 3 people. One of those took a bit over two weeks coming back Monday (but sick the last two days). Another is gone this week. The third is gone next week. Maybe I should claim the week after before it's gone? :) If only I wasn't in the middle of so much I could actually take vacation without having to find something to continously occupy my time and distract me.

So today I walked by as someone was unpacking a new toy. This toy was a nice new fast multi-CPU Sun box. I asked the question "what OS are you going to run on that?" with the two obvious choices the only thing in my mind. He looked at me and somewhat hesitantly said "actually, it'll probably be Windows 2000". What has this world come to? I guess I should have realized. It seems lately we've been buying Sun stuff to run linux on, and other gear to run Solaris on. It just never really hit me before...

This week started with a bunch of smaller stuff, and finished with a lot of coding. I think I'm close to done on an effectively complete rework of our knowledegebase system, which will hopefully allow CMS integration and make people happy. Once that's done I just need to figure out how to do automatic correlation of articles with Incidents in our tracking system for likely causes. Should be an interesting next week.

Outside work haven't done much that's exciting. Today I finished up the 3rd disc of Alias Season Three. I think it's better the second time around, but it still seems not nearly as well done as the previous two. For fun stuff, my dad just sent me forward with this content. I thought it was funny.

Alias going downhill? It sure seems that way. I was skeptical from the start with the intro they've been playing this year, but then there was this week's episode ("Ice"). Weiss' comment to Marshall pretty much summed up that scene, and then there was the scene in the hospital as Syndey is walking away... I like the history of the show, the other parts, and the directions it could go. I just really don't want it to continue going the direction it appears to be.

Apparently Columbia House doesn't know how to manage their systems. They've been wanting me to do one of the 5 movies for $0.49 each and we'll cancel and start your membership over. I figure what the heck, I want some movies anyways. That was in December sometime. Today I get another offer of the same thing (which I have no account currently listed as "good standing", just a closed and new member). I also get a letter from them triggered by the closing of the one account about how I can reopen it and they'll give me the trial offer. I just laugh and wonder how much they're gonna spend sending me these things over the next year. After I canceled the one they started sending new offers to my old address too (which they got the change right once, apparently it duplicated and now both are in there).

Last night apparently all the ideas people had been giving me about our Incident tracking system at work got sorted out by my brain and I ended up writing a long list of stuff to implement. Unfortunately it happened while I was trying to fall asleep, so I was tired (thus the sending myself the long list so I could try to ignore and deal with it later). I got a lot of stuff done today, hopefully stuff will move relatively quickly. It should allow us to streamline a lot of current stuff and add other things easier as well. Should be interesting.

A quote I saw today: "It's the cigarette that smokes, you're just the sucker."

Alias Season 4 started tonight. If you haven't seen it, stop now and come back when you have. I think it was pretty good, although had issues. I think it's looking like it could be better than last season, although they need to be very careful. It's almost like they're starting over, in a bad way. The music was well picked. World is on Fire sounded really weird in this type of show based on what the theme of the song is (the video makes it really obvious if you haven't seen it), but it somehow fits the story really well. Ending with Cat Stevens really looks like someone had a statement to make too. But anyways... The whole storyline seemed like a lot of the summary of the first two seasons as far as family relationships and feelings go, but with Nadia rather than Sydney. And the last line just made me laugh. I think they managed to set it up to get going again despite the last season, but I the worry is that it'll be too similar and be boring and just go downhill again. We'll have to see.

In other news, based on routing and timestamps, it appears the two new toys are at the same point on the distribution path. They show as separate scheduled delivery dates though. If it was FedEx I wouldn't be concerned and would just expect them to come together. It'll be interesting to see if UPS are pricks as usual and actually separate them out and delay the one or just deliver them together.

Somehow I managed not to watch any movies over the weekend until today. Not sure how I pulled that one off. I actually don't remember much of what I did Saturday, other than I went to my parents' house for some food. And it was snowing and we followed a bunch of snowplows home (they were going rather slow on 694). Sunday was church followed by some shopping. I picked up weatherstriping and furnace filters and stuff and resealed the doors, and also put just enough foam in the frames of some others to keep the bass from making them resonate and rattle. After discovering Walmart doesn't have it locally anymore I also ordered a new toy online. Hopefully that will arrive this week. They shipped UPS ground though, so it'll probably sit in a warehouse for like a week. Although amazingly they're predicting Thursday. After a ton of research on Sunday I also ordered another new toy. We'll see about that one when it arrives though. Hopefully it won't take too long. Something about that resolution on that size screen makes me happy.

On Monday I called to RMA the Ogo. While the guy was trying to get the system to stop giving him errors and send the RMA labels we talked about why I was sending it back. Based on his responses to my comments about the GSM/GRPS coverage vs their TDMA stuff it sounds like it's not exactly a rare response. Actually everyone I've dealt with at Cingular seems to not question anything beyond "coverage sucks", and both reps I've talked to about the 850 vs 1900 sound like they'd like it to happen too. I guess if it helps them have fewer cancellations... I can tell students are back at Bethel, as latency sucks. VoIP phone is weird talking to myself but works fine even on two trips through the Internet link talking to someone else. It's much harder to notice since the echo cancelation is good and it pretty much makes you not hear your own voice coming back at all. Although I'm guessing it could be noticable now. I just tested and the one way latency was almost a second. :) Anyways, first movie of the evening was Collateral. It was a good movie, but not the best I've seen. I didn't think the soundtrack was all that great either. Second movie of the night was Resident Evil. I thought it was a really good movie. I think I've maybe seen parts of it before, but not sure where. I do know the beginning reminded me a lot of Cyborg 2. I guess I wouldn't be surprised if the original game and that had some of the same sources. Although that movie wasn't near as much like a video game as Resident Evil. It's actually sorta funny some of the things looking back at the movie and how they happened and things were designed and filmed.

I'm still a bit annoyed that Alias is moved to Wednesdays. Having TV shows during the week sucks in my opinion. It's too bad I don't have an HD card for my myth box (which I need to get going again). Oh well, I guess I'll deal with it. Tomorrow is back to work. Should be interesting - hopefully nothing major will happen.