Today went well. I wasn't too tired despite (or maybe caused by) staying up so late. Church was good. I was a little surprised but happy when some people went up and played a U2 song. After that I did general browsing and then watched The Bourne Identity. It's 3 hours long, but had an intermission halfway through so wasn't too bad. Not quite as fast paced as the 2002 version, but I think it is much more true to the original story (I say that having not read the book, but based on what a friend did not want to say about the story after seeing the newer remake). It's like a whole different story than the new one, but with a few shared elements like names. Then I did more browsing, more research on AMX stuff. I still haven't found that power supply yet. Maybe I'll have to pull out a desktop and put Windows on it one of these days. :( After that, I watched Spy Game. Going into it I thought it'd be decent, but now I think it's great. Think along the lines of The Recruit, but the guy's not a traitor, and it takes place years after training, although they jump around a bit. Good effects, lots of explosions. Pushes the low end quite a bit (transducers got a workout), and still manages to push the highs. Another reminder of why I'm sorta looking at new speakers. :( Gotta work tomorrow though...

Today was fun. I got plenty of sleep, waking up sometime in early afternoon. Then I watched the original Ocean's Eleven. Las Vegas is definitely a different place these days. And the 2001 remake is very different in story too - the endings aren't even the same... After the movie, it was dinner time. Ross instigated a gathering at Old Spaghetti Factory of a bunch of people, mainly former Bethel people. Then he invited people over to my house for a movie (yes, he asked me first). Him, Tiff, and Brad came over and we watched Minority Report. Good movie, and none of them had ever been over before so that was fun too. Had to watch a couple THX trailers too... Of course since that went until 1:30, it's gonna be difficult getting up for church in the morning. :( Oh well, 'twas fun - at least I don't have to drive home too.

Today I spent some time working on the kiosk machines. It turns out there's some sort of problem with initrd on the SCSI machines and the kernel doesn't seem to want to mount the root filesystem, but complains about it after the fact and before it remounts. Of course it doesn't have any logs at that point, so debugging isn't really practical... :( Lunch was Chipotle - this week finished on a good trend there. Most of the network issues seem to be resolved, although there was one slowness issue we addressed, but we're not sure of the real cause (it was like a saturated link, but it wasn't and the settings were fine). Oh well. Desktop team apparently spent the whole day fixing blaster again. I'm so glad we patched our servers when it first came out... We did get a bit farther on the planning for automatically yanking machines from the network, and I even got that machine started. It was a weird day - I think everyone just wanted the week to be done. I ended up getting 3 boxes today. 2 were full of CDs, and one way oversized box which could have had probably 12 DVDs but had 4 in it. So I spent most of the night listening to music. No response from Epson yet on the projector issue. I did watch 8 Mile though. Good movie, but the language was worse than Analyze This (what do you expect from a story about inner city kids rapping though). The whole room just sorta shook for the whole movie though. Maybe I'll get around to the Axcess stuff this weekend. I'd like to start poking with the projector control a bit and see how that goes... Tomorrow Ross is apparently organizing some huge dinner thing though, so I don't know how much I'll actually get done - we'll see.

It's hot in here - this room gets really bad unless the AC is running, which means I need to figure out a better way to get air moving through here. The car took a little longer than expected, but it's done for a while. It's got a little more performance, which I guess is probably to be expected with new plugs and replacing most of the fluids. I get to work and eat lunch at my desk, and then go to a meeting where there's rootbeer floats. Guess I timed that nicely. Got some progress done at work, and didn't work too late. After work I researched speakers a bit more. Still sorta looking at the Infinity Entras. Maybe I'll go listen to some over lunch within the next couple weeks. I could just order some and if I don't like them use the 30 day return, but I'd like to get a better deal elsewhere and not have to deal with it. Later I watched Analyze This. It's a funny movie, but not anywhere close to clean. Think uncensored gangsters yelling at each other most of the movie... Then I signed up for Netflix again. I was in it a few years back, but didn't end up watching enough movies. Now I spend more than I was paying every months buying movies, so hopefully this will help me cut back. I spent about 15 minutes, and rated 116 movies and have 19 in my queue. It was way too easy to rate a ton of movies off the top of my head - I guess that means I watch enough of them.

So it was time to get some work done on the car, and I'm sitting at the dealer, so I finally put together some of the pics I have on my computer from the last month or so. As soon as I get an internet connection I'll have posted North Dakota (4th of July weekend), July 9th movie night and Ben & Josie's wedding (last weekend). For the wedding pics they're low res since there's a lot and they'll probably get hit a lot, but let me know if you want a full res copy of any of them. Anyways, yesterday everyone seemed to work a bit late. I moved some of the windows server IPs around, which was interesting. Went smooth, but we'll see how the file server moves go... After work I finished up watching Sneakers. Yea, the end of the movie isn't any better than the first half. My box of cables came so I also hooked up the rest of the connections. Before I just had the 3 video and the fiber for audio, now I have the 6 channel, s-video, analog stereo, etc... I also discovered some cool THX trailers I didn't realise were on the demo disc I have. TEX is cool... I also got serial cables, so went and grabbed the old windows laptop to load up Axcess and play with the AMX stuff, but apparently the power supply was misplaced and of course the battery is dead. Oh well, some other time. Hopefully the car will be done shortly here. Of course then I have to go to work...

First day back to work after vacation, so of course I spent way too much time on email. It seems no matter how short of a time I'm gone I get a ton of messages. The email server of course was complaining again - I think my box grew around 60MB while I was gone (even with the automatic cleanup). A few hours to go through and that's with lots of filtering. :( Other than that I tried to track down an issue the library kiosks are apparently having with printing, but everything looks fine from my end. There seems to be some weird issue with network connectivity though which is inconsistent. It seems like it started before the big switch this past weekend. Hopefully it'll either go away or be easy to track down in the next few days. I ended up resetting all permissions on home directories on Usonia2 with a script since we had so many problems. Even though the box is slower and there is more raw data, the files are bigger so it was thankfully much faster than avalon. Shouldn't really have to do either though, but oh well. After going home I decided to watch Sneakers, but only got an hour into it because I was tired and a bit annoyed by the bad transfer. I need to watch some of the classics more often though - if I hadn't just watched Sum of all Fears this past weekend, I wouldn't have caught that there is actually a rather funny obscure reference to a character from Sneakers in that movie (the name is unique). Anyways, the DVD transfer is bad in the darker scenes. The bitrate is low for some reason (around 3Mbps), and even the bright water has very bad color banding - I even tried multiple DVD players. You can make it go away by messing with the settings (to around the average TV brightness/contrast settings), but then you lose the details in normal scenes too. I think this is one I may have to dig out the laserdisc to finish. :( Maybe I'll try reencoding at a higher bitrate just to see what happens...

Hmm, it appears that last night's post went missing. It's not in my sent item either, so it wasn't just the mail getting lost - oh well. I watched the rest of the T2 Extreme disc, and was thoroughly impressed. Then I watched Sum of all Fears - also a very good movie, with a pretty decent transfer. Today there was church, and then relaxing and cleaning up the place a bit. I've been getting a lot of stuff through eBay lately, so collected a bunch of packing material and threw it out. Also cleaned up other general stuff, and sorted through mail. I probably should do that more often. While I was at it I ended up finally fulfilling my Columbia House membership requirement since they were complaining that the time was almost up. BTW, if anyone is wondering, I definitely don't recommend their music club. If you just want Top 40 or the really popular stuff go for it, but if you have any diverse tastes good luck (including stuff like Evanescence and even most movie soundtracks). Their DVD club is pretty cool though. I preordered Two Towers for about what I'd pay retail, and got some other movies cheap. I haven't been able to find a good answer online (other than a rather suspicious regionless and slim-case packaged DVD that seemed questionable), but I'm really hoping it has the dts soundtrack. The FOTR extended one did, but I'm not sure if this one will. I'd really like a single-disc version in dts rather than Dolby Digital (can you tell I prefer one over the other just slightly? :). Tonight I watched Bad Boys. It's rather corny, but still funny. It's fun to catch all the crazy references to different movies. Other than the obvious "Bad Boys" song that's in all the trailers to the new ones, they have stuff ranging from Driving Miss Daisy to the original Charlie's Angels (and no, not the original that came out 5 years later - the real original). While that usually is a sign of a movie grasping for things, somehow they managed to make it pretty good. If you can get around the language that is. Back to work tomorrow, so should probably get ready for that.

The lack of posts after the last sentence of my last post should pretty much explain what I've been doing the last 2 days. The whole NetWorker backup stuff is pretty bad, is slow, and likes to crash/freeze whenever there's a glitch talking to the server (usually caused by one end chewing CPU to the point the machine is effectively unusable). Currently we have resorted to maping a drive to the administrative share on Usonia2 from Avalon, and running the restore client doing a directed recover on Avalon. It shouldn't be so hard to restore from backups... So Mike and I have been watching it pretty much around the clock since Monday morning to get it moving again when it inevitably stops. Today felt like it was Friday for the 5th day in a row - not in the good "it's almost the weekend" way either, but the "do I get to go home yet" way. :( Even though I have had to wake up enough that I have been constantly tired, I have gotten to have a bit of fun. Monday night Dave and Ross and I went over to some of Ross' friends place to watch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. A little different than my usual movie experience as there were 5 of us around a 9" TV, but was still good. The beginning of the movie was pretty funny, but then it ended like a typical chick-flick... Yesterday my new DVD player arrived, so had to play with that. Even though my projector doesn't have flicker since it's not a CRT, progressive scan for film sources is still really nice. Plus that player is very fast at seeking so skips and stuff are effectively instant. I had to test it out and watched lots of trailers (and saw just how bad the MPEG encoding on some is), and then watched Crimson Tide. It's a good movie - I'll have to watch it again some time when I can do more than just stay awake and actually enjoy it more. Hopefully the cables I ordered will arrive soon too. Right now I have the player sitting on my bed with the RCA bundle and the fiber running across the room to the equipment rack. Since it has DVD-A and SACD support I'm gonna end up with around 11 cables coming off the back of it, and that's without any control and if I skip the composite video (probably will since I don't have anything that takes that input anyways). After work today I got recruited to go pick up a trailer for hauling trees and brush since my dad was gone and nobody else was apparently able to drive with a trailer. Tonight should be much better, as I get to relax. I do have to get up early to move heavy exercise equipment around, but can hopefully get to bed early. No, the server isn't done yet, but since I'm on vacation the rest of the week (cousin gets married Friday, and the rehersal is tomorrow evening), I'm thankfully off babysitting duty as of 6pm today. I'm tired of typing now - I'm making too many mistakes... Now to figure out which movie to watch...

Church, and then family birthdays. That was a good time, found out I apparently have more readers than I thought... After that was work. We went to swap out the cable on Usonia2, and the new cable was really bad (wouldn't see any of the drives). We did a low-level format of the bad drive, and swapped out the controller, and everything seems to have rebuilt OK. We finished up Avalon, and left it restoring a few home directories, rebuilding the Mac indexes, and resetting all the home directory permissions. Then I went home, watched the last few minutes of Changing Lanes since my brother was watching it, and then watched Stigmata. I still think it's a bit freaky, but it's interesting and you notice more things each time you watch it. After the movies it's time to check on the servers again. Avalon is doing fine, which I think is a record of some sort. I have no problems believing it'll be done by morning. Usonia2 is another story. The verify is 90% done, and the controller is freaking out about SCSI ID 0 (the old bad drive was ID 4). It's also complaining about NTFS being corrupt and I can't get to over half the data on the drive. It says to run chkdsk, so I try and it exits with errors within 2 seconds. I try chkdsk with a forceful dismount, and same thing. Try unmounting the drive, same thing. Mount it under a different drive letter, same thing. Luckily last night's backup got all the way through the Usonia2 stuff, so worst case we'll loose a day of data... Rebooted it and it's pingable but otherwise unreachable, which is sorta a good sign since it probably means it's attempting to fix the problems with the drive. Not much I can do now since it's unreachable and probably dead anyways... Hopefully it'll be up by morning, otherwise we get to figure out what to do, and none of the options are likely to be very good choices. I guess I better get some sleep - it's gonna be a long day tomorrow. :(

Woke up way too early and figured I sorta had to check on the Avalon stuff. Ended up going to sleep again, but waking up every couple hours without trying to check on it, until sometime in the afternoon when I gave up and just got up. Then I decided to watch Daredevil since I had never seen it before. While I can see why some people didn't like it, I didn't think it was too bad. Of course my expectations were along the lines of xXx... The plot wasn't that good, but they did some effects pretty well. The sound was better than most movies as well. There were some bad effects as well, and a few too many shots that were there for reasons which really had nothing to do with the plot, but oh well. Then I went to go find a SCSI cable for a machine at work since it turns out that drive we replaced last night "failed" again. At this point it's a pretty safe bet to say that it didn't actually fail, but hard to say what it might actually be. :( Tomorrow we finish up Avalon and try to figure that one out too. Then Dave had a bonfire. Those are always fun, and it was us, Betsy, and Tenley. Nick even came outside for a while. After hours of poking at the fire, burnination, and melting and eating sugar, it was time for a movie. The film of choice was An Affair to Remember. It was watchable, but definitely not the greatest film ever. You could tell most of the audio had been recorded on very oversaturated analog tape... Now it's finishing up Avalon stuff and going to bed so I can get up early tomorrow. Looks like Avalon is basically done, although there's some goofiness that should be fixed by morning, and there's gonna need to be some serious scripting to reset permissions tomorrow...