Going back to work was OK. It's work and busy, but it's interesting too. Still feels like nothing is getting done, although I'm starting to get to the point on some things where I know a lot of prerequisites are out of the way, so that helps. I managed to get my schedule all messed up so by Friday I was really tired and just wanted to sleep all weekend, but that's sorta to be expected I guess.

Thursday night I got around to upgrading the firmware on my Axim. Apparently I hadn't been paying attention, and it was three versions out of date. The process went relatively smoothly, other than due to the way VirtualPC works with USB it wouldn't run the firmware update (basically OSX reads the device IDs on connection, and passes to the appropriate VPC instance if it goes there, a very quick process. However when the PocketPC resets and sees the "glitch" in communication, it considers the link unstable and won't do an upgrade. I've been upgrading and rebuilding enough machines to have an office that's turned into a server storage/junkyard though (seriously, my couch has stuff stacked, there's stuff on the chair, and most of the rack is full, and now there's a pile of new machines too), so it became a quick process. It was good to get the thing wiped clean, and the interface does seem a little more stable (although I can still push the thing to the point of lagging a lot relatively easily).

Saturday I watched Alien³. I don't really like it as much as the first couple, but not really sure why. I think it may be because it's somewhat more character development based, and I like the sci-fi side of the series.

Sunday was Blade: Trinity. I actually sorta liked it. The soundtrack was the best of the bunch, but we'll see how well it sticks. A lot of people were disappointed with this one, claiming it wrecked the series and wasn't as good and stuff. I can definitely see where that comes from, as the movie makes fun of the whole genre. If you are a big fan of the story behind the vampire comics and movies, you won't like the movie. The history/backstory stuff seemed broken up, but I think it would have been worse if it was all jammed together. They could have probably dropped a lot of it though - it's an action movie, it's to be watched for stuff blowing up, not for the plot. :)

The long weekend was nice, although there was way too much water up there. You could stand in knee high water on the docks if you wanted (well, except for the wood ones which were moved to land whenever they went underwater), and the boats were only in the water during the day when they could be parked on the lawn as needed. Not helping the situation any resulted in many storms with heavy rain and lots of lighting. They gave flash flood warnings, but I don't think anyone would have been too surprized at any level of flooding. Anyways, it provided lots of opportunity for me to sit outside and watch the rain while listening to music and sometimes taking (and more often attempting) pictures of lighting. Dave will be happy to hear that I did listen to some HA up there, and I'd have to say that's probably better than in the dark. I will admit I like it, but it gets tiring after a couple songs.

Anyways, issue number one with the weekend was I forgot the charger to my karma at home. That's an issue, because although it lasts like 15 hours, the weekend is a lot longer than that. The drive time was easy, because then the computer is usable (while I'm not driving at least), and it can be plugged in. After being unsuccessful in locating a charger by my high-tech text-to-intarweb gateway (aka schdav), and their support people not being able to tell me anymore than "we have to tell you that you can buy them through our web site" (odd, considering he did try to help me after that statement) and the same specs that are on the back of the unit, I came up with another good idea. My Axim has plenty of CPU and battery capacity (and a charger), BetaPlayer plays pretty much anything, and being that I have a digital SLR I have plenty of CF memory available. So I loaded up a decent amount of music on there, plugged in my headphones, and was quickly annoyed that the lowest volume level was quite loud - I think it's designed for normal headphones. Equalizers and preamp settings came to the rescue though, and I had a nice source of music all weekend. I'm actually sorta impressed by the sound quality, and the battery life was nice in that I could listen to music all day without any problem on the standard battery. Someone commented on it and my response was "the nice part about having too many toys is that they can start substituting for each other." And I'll stick to that. :)

Issue number two was with my phone. It wasn't so much that I locked myself out of it (sorta), but that by the end of the weekend I had a pile of voicemails and text messages I couldn't check and had no forseeable ability to check. Anyways, my phone usually stays on for months at a time. The only time I turn it on is if I've been out of service or on analog for most of a day and the battery goes dead, which is pretty much only out in the middle of nowhere. So of course out in the mountains of North Dakota, this is actually the case. As a side note ND is actually relatively solidly covered by VZW otherwise. And yes, the description is worse than Eagle Mountain in MN, but they're enough that there's natural forests and lakes up there. Anyways, I turn the thing back on and it's locked. Except it doesn't like my code, and being there's the months between restarts, I'm sorta iffy and try a few different things. I walk over to a digital area and try a reprogramming, and that doesn't work (probably because the phone was locked). Anyways, after trying off and on, and VZW being confused at the programming menus not letting me run them without it being unlocked (Nokia eliminated the concept of a default override security code and programming loopholes recently since it pretty much defeated the effectiveness of the locks when they were common knowledge), I decided to just switch phones when I got home, and bring it to a store the next day. After 10-15 minutes of letting the computer go at it, the guy told me the code, which turns out to be a truncated version of my previous one, that must have been set by the system during a recent update. I had tried it before, but after too many attempts it locks me out, and I hadn't been persistent enough at resetting and trying. At least I have a phone I can use for things other than incomming calls, calling my work phone, and calling customer service though.

Anyways, the weekend went well otherwise, and I'll hopefully post pictures sometime soon. We'll see how motivated I get on that one though.

It's been a good week. On Friday the 24th the new Chipotle located 1.3 miles away from my house officially opens. However that meant that on Tuesday and Wednesday it was free food days. Of course that meant waiting in line for 30 minutes the first day and over 45 minutes the next, but hey - free burritos and whatever else you want. I think half the people in line both days were Bethel people too. Today they get to sleep in though, as they've all been there every day for 8 days and need rest for the big day tomorrow. Apparently the way to be first in line for the official opening is to fax your order in at like 8am asking for it to be ready at 11. Or at least that's what one of the workers said. On Wednesday I was sitting down eating with Ross and Lindsey, and suddenly one of the workers walks by, looks at me, and says "hey, it's the fix-your-computer guy!". We all sorta were puzzled for a second, until I realized that on Tuesday I had worn this shirt. I hadn't talked to any of the employees that day, but I guess I must just make an impression on people.

Otherwise the week has been sorta boring. Work is busy with too many projects, all of which are going in and out of various states of holds on certain things. It's an interesting balancing game of figuring out something to do while waiting for something else to avoid ending up with yet another in-process project hanging over my head. I say it's better to not start rather than have to keep track of state. I spent the day hiding in the server room, which was actually sorta peaceful. No interruptions, and it's a room with white noise (fans/air through the ducts) so loud that you have to raise your voice to talk to people, but with my earphones in I can't really hear that. Perfect background for just listening to music while waiting for progress bars and doing all the daily requests.

Tuesday night the Comcast guy came out to disconnect the video trap. I sorta felt bad for him, since he was a short guy and the ladder and fence were definitely disproportionally large for him. And the fact that I actually have no intention of ever hooking up a TV to it. The reason for the visit was actually because they offered me a free upgrade to 6Mbps service for a year, along with that video. They came bundled, not separately. I haven't noticed anything different yet. Unless things change drastically, I think it's pretty definite that in a year I'll switch back to 4 or possible 3Mbps service (if I even have Comcast HSI at that point).

I'm rather annoyed at Microsoft tonight. ActiveSync is being flaky and saying my PocketPC is a Guest (allow network pass through) rather than a syncing connection. Apparently this isn't an uncommon problem with it, which doesn't sound like fun. And ActiveSync 3.8 has issues with the installer (as does 3.7). I think I may start looking at sync4j again and possibly do a complete wipe and rebuild once that's working. That's assuming it handles all-day events now. Why don't any of the open calendar solutions handle that properly? vCalendar supports it, which is what stuff seems to use. Apparently iSync breaks it on everything though (on my PocketPC, and also for someone who uses it with a blackberry). It turns them into 00:00-24:00, which is completely broken with timezone changes. Actually IIRC Outlook has this issue too if you're not careful, and it came up in a recent /. article. I'm thinking that I may need to customize a solution to get what I want. I've said it before and I'll say it again - PocketPC is fine for those who know computers and want certain features (like VGA resolution on a 3" screen and it backed by a fast CPU and lots of RAM), but sucks for non-computer people. So yea, basically they're horrible for the people they're targetted towards, and fun toys for the people outside the marketing department's view.

I'm an idiot. I decided it'd be nice to get my Pocket PC synced to my Mac, so start the install/setup process. I end up hard locking up my Pocket PC. I think that's the second time it's done that with heavy bluetooth traffic (the first was when I was setting it up initially). Of course the Mac has issues with bluetooth transfers too. That's definitely not a good thing, as I haven't synced it in a while. I also haven't done an image of it in a while (like since January 20th). That's just stupid of me since it takes like 30 seconds and is a complete image that will restore even faster than the backup and puts everything back into place (even the screen calibration I forgot I fixed until it was back to slightly off). So I've been going over Department Calendars and other Bethel lists and typing stuff in to sync back to it. I think everything's in place now, but if you're expecting me to be somewhere in the near future and I'm not there, that could explain it. I like that excuse actually... "It's not my fault - my Mac deleted it from my Pocket PC" Now to see if I can get it to sync over bluetooth again. I only have like 25MB of data so far, and it still takes forever over that link...

Yea, so the new toys arrived on Thursday, thus the lack of updates. So I've been migrating data, installing stuff, and trying new things. I found this thing plays divx much better than normal computers seem to be able to do (the audio stays in sync all the time). Only got one movie in over the weekend - Invincible. It's pretty decent, although it does have its shortcomings too. This article is sorta interesting, although the info isn't that surprising. That data is pretty well represented already by their customer churn rates. In other news, some people need to not make it so obvious when they're trying for easy money. First claims offense to the show and wants money, then when asked by the media for his side of the story says he can't talk to them unless they pay him. And he's worried about companies making people think most people are driven by money? Yea... I did a bit of image editing to get myself a wallpaper for my Axim, but I'm not quite satisfied. I think I need to pick a non-blurry starting image. Anyways, I just got a low battery notification. Had the thing sitting here playing Alias as a test of the quality (yea, it can keep up on the fights). I should go charge this as well as myself.