I guess I made up for my slacking on movies a bit. Saturday after I finally got up and decided to do something other than just read about electronics stuff I edited some video and watched TV. Ended up cleaning up a couple dozen GB on my pvr box which is cool. Saturday night I watched The Recruit. Hasn't changed since last time I watched it - I still think that's a good movie. Then I stayed up way too late reading more geek stuff. Ended up ordering some tactile transducers, so that should be fun when those come. As if the place doesn't rattle enough already... Sunday I woke up later than I should have, and barely got ready in time. After church it was basically sit around the house day, mainly reading geek material again (lately been mostly home theater forums). Ended up spending some time on the Columbia House site, and discovered everything's "on sale" and free shipping with at least 3 DVDs. Turns out they had a lot of interesting stuff for $9.99, so ended up getting 10 of them. Oops - gotta work on that impulse buy thing. Then I watched The Fellowship of the Ring, which is much better than I remember it. Probably because I watched it on a smaller setup before. That movie is mixed hot and with lots of bass - I think I found new resonances to fix in this room. After that I won an auction for an AXB-IRS4 - about time. I've already paid and the seller confirmed my shipping address and said she'd ship it either tomorrow or Tuesday. That should be fun when that comes. Sorta related is last Friday my box with robotics control cable and geardrive motors arrived. I've thought of a few more ideas for mounting the projector since the original, but we'll see what happens there. For a good chunk of the rest of the night I tried to avoid online shopping sites, since my track record for the weekend wasn't that great. Talked to a few friends online, some whom I rarely talk to. I finally decided to watch The Animatrix. It's surprisingly good quality of animation (although admittedly I don't really watch anime), although they paid attention to some odd details at points while skipping others. I watched the main clips, maybe I'll watch the rest tomorrow night. I'd say it was a good weekend - not exactly looking forward to going to work in the morning...

Sometimes I make myself too tired, but I guess it's usually worth it. That's what Saturday is for anyways though - sleep day, right? The last few days have just been weird at work. Lots of not to exciting stuff, but busy with way too much of it. It's the kind of thing where you feel like you haven't done anything because you haven't gotten anything big done, but realise it only if you think about it for a second. Sorta depressing since it's sorta a "I made no progress" feeling. After work Thursday night though I went home and finished building the frame for my screen. Then I went through a few hundred staples attaching the fabric to the frame. After mounting I realised how bad it needs the rest since what the frame is attached to is crooked, but I knew that and that's why the pile of wood is in the garage... Of course once it was finished I couldn't just let it sit even though I was tired and it was already 11:30, so had to watch a movie. Ended up watching AntiTrust which is one of those movies that isn't that great and yet is good at the same time. Picking was hard since I knew it'd be hard to stay awake so didn't want something I cared much about, or that I had to pay attention to, but wanted good quality technically and at least reasonable plot. Friday was more of the same at work, but with a little more worrying about the Avalon issue. I got to patch a lot of Windows machines, which was of course the usual level of great fun... After work I helped Meghan resize her XP NTFS partition and install linux. The whole NTFS partition thing was interesting but not that bad. I guess this is linux bootcamp week or something (although both of them have been bugging me about it for a couple weeks). After that and more finishing up the Windows patching, it was time to head over to Dave's place for a bonfire. People ditched early but Dave, Betsy and I just talked for a few hours. Then at like 12:30 JoeBuck and Nick came back and hung out for a while too. Gotta love sitting around a bonfire poking at it and burning random things... I realise I've been slacking in the movie department lately. I still have a bunch of those new ones to watch and evaluate. Maybe if I decide to wake up tomorrow I'll get some of those done...

Wow, lots of time with no posts. Friday and the weekend went well. Friday was a typical day at work, with no big problems for once (at least not big enough that I remember them offhand). After work I went to see X2 with Dave, Brie, Ryan, JoeBuck, and Travis at the cheapseats. The sound sucked, the film was scratched and missing frames in places, the projector was jittery around reel changes, the image overscanned (or whatever the film equivalent for that term is) about 3ft on one side, and there was a big blotch of white shiny spots on the screen, but it was fun anyways and only $2 too. Afterwards we went over to Dave's place for a bonfire. Dave, Brie, Ryan and I talked for a long time, and then Brie and Ryan ditched and Dave and I talked for another long time. That conversation was lots of geeky/techie stuff... Then Saturday I taught myself Qt and was playing around with graphics overlaid with text, and pulling data out of a database to determine what to display on screen and stuff. It was fun, although I discovered the annoying way that none of the GUI parts are thread-safe at all. Luckily they provide a nice mutex I could use to get around that. It doesn't really make sense to not be able to manipulate graphics independently if you're not writing to the screen, and those should have no reason to try to talk to X, but oh well... I also spent way too much time on avsforum and ebay, and that continued for most of the day Sunday as well. I now remember why trying to buy things on ebay on the weekend is a bad idea. No new toys yet, but watching a few auctions that close later... Tonight one of my cousins who I normally see relatively often but hadn't seen all year called since he was driving and gonna be going through the cities in couple hours and figured he could stop. Went to Davanni's and caught up a lot - that's always great fun. Although since I also went to Chipotle for lunch, I feel like I've eaten enough for a few days now... I almost got motivated enough to go get lumber for my screen, so maybe tomorrow. Seems I mention that I may go around here and everyone wants some sort of board for this or that. Maybe I can get my sister to come along and help carry stuff as a condition for picking it up. Too much time on avsforum has be thinking though, which is scary... Like how cool would it be to have a 18x24ft screen in the backyard and watch some movies on it? :) Might have a movie night later this week (the indoor kind), but that depends on whether Paul gets his mind off the powerbook and schedules it. :) Seems he has told at least one person though, and interest is building...

Well, the car is back up and running fine. Today was a rather routine day at work, with lots of little stuff. I found and fixed a bug in the account creation script since the big changeover, and had to go fix all the accounts created in the last 9 days. :( Finished moving stuff around and finally decommissioned the 5 36GB 10k RPM Ultra160 drives from the old student file server and gave them to be used in their new role. Sorta a weird feeling just walking through the halls with two drive cages full of drives with all the important data of most students in the school... A ton of us went to Taco Bell for lunch, and had a rather interesting conversation there. It was cool because there were a lot of guys that are all friends and haven't all been together at once for quite a while. Meghan finally decided what she wants to call her website with a little help from Dave, so we'll see how that goes - she's gonna try to do it all by just typing in the HTML. After work today a bunch of people came over and we watched Die Another day - that movie has a *really* loud mix. Of course the movie choice was much to Dave's objection, as he wanted to watch Cat Ballou. We even had that DVD in, but we watched the trailer and pretty much everyone said to take it back out and pick another one... Overall a good time though - we need to do movie nights more often.

Second day of the week started off better. Went to Great China for lunch, and then went to Red Ginger for dinner with a bunch of people, so got more than my fill of chinese food for the day. On the way out to dinner I discovered that one of the tires on my car was introduced to a screw, so that was a bit of a hastle, especially since it's not a full-size spare and my commute is 90% freeways with a 65 speed limit. I'm actually sitting waiting for that to get patched right now... Betsy finally set up her web page, and went all-out. I was expecting something simple just so she'd start learning scripting and stuff, and she ends up with that. She was even motivated enough to learn SSIs and stuff... Last night I redid the support on my screen at home with some tensioning lines to get rid of the wrinkles since I folded over the bottom a bit more when I rearranged, and the excess wasn't supported and made interesting stress patterns on the screen. Unfortunately it's a bit small right now for a full-size 4x3 projection, but 16x9 works great, and I can zoom 4x3 if I watch something in that format. I watched X-Men last night since I wanted something with a bit of action, and that's a pretty decent flick. A couple of my sister's friends were over and had to come down and see what was making all the racket, which was sorta funny. Tonight I'm having a bunch of friends over for a movie, so that should be fun - as long as we decide to watch something with a decent aspect ratio... I guess I gotta clean up the junk in my room from this weekend then though... :(

Vacation went well. Arrived back in town earlier this evening, and since I did rather little in the way of packing (I had 2 bags not including the DVD cases - one my computer bag, and the other half clothes,half tech stuff/reading material) I didn't have much to unpack. I'll get around to posting pictures later - on the trip back I was too busy listinging to TMBG and Eminem, and even got the rest of Blown Away finished - that's actually a pretty decent movie... When I got home I watched Men in Black II, which I thought would be good on the effects even if I knew the plot was bad. I'd have to say that although I haven't seen the first one in quite a while and don't remember the details, I seem to remember it being better. Oh well... Off to work tomorrow, so I should probably get some sleep since I can't really sleep in until noon. :( Looks like movie night maybe Wednesday this week, which is cool I guess...

It's a good feeling to be unable to do anything productive even if you want to for some reason. The most productive thing I did today was probably copy more music over to my MP3 player, and fix a little glitch with it's FAT partition that was created in the process from a low battery. A little more variety - today I listened to 50 Cent, Bad Religion, Bass Mekanik, DJ Shadow, Kool and the Gang, NOFX, Otis Redding, Public Enemy, and Stereolab. My dad, an uncle and I watched The Terminator off DVD as well, which was pretty good. Die Another Day was skipping for some reason though, so didn't get to watch that. Fireworks were good again too. I was tired most of the day though so just sat around in lawn chairs listening to music. Tomorrow it's time to head home though, so gotta get up early in the morning... :(

It's hard to beat a night with no bugs, laying back in a chair on the side of a lake, headphones on listening to SR-71, with fireworks everywhere you can see including directly above, and hot ash coming down... OK, so maybe the hot ash wasn't that great, but otherwise it's good. The night started off clear, and just got smokier as time went on. I wish I had a better camera as mine won't take exposures much longer than a second, and I can't set the time delay and sequence shooting at the same time to do digital addition. It does stay light out until around 11 though... Anyways, hours later and the fireworks are still going strong... I think the no bugs (at least ones that want to bite) is the best part about being here though. The trip up wasn't so bad either. I watched Active Stealth on the way up, along with listening to lots of music, some sleeping, and reading magazines. Since I've been up here I've taken lots of pictures (pretty much filled up the camera twice, and it takes around 300 or 150 depending on the mode (I was going between). Even got to sleep in a decent amount today, which was good since I was so tired I started Blown Away last night but couldn't finish it. I've been out just cruising in the pontoon and speedboat a few times, just enjoying the weather, listening to music, and taking pictures. Even visited Canada twice today... My headphones do a pretty good job of blocking out the ambient sound if I want, which is nice when the family is talking - just sit in the front of the boat looking forward, and throw them on for a nice and peaceful ride. I guess I should probably go to bed now though since everyone else already has and they'll probably want me up tomorrow. I'll have to put together the pictures on the way back so I can get them up sooner...

Vacation is mostly relaxing. I just got done watching Stigmata - interesting story. It's also good in that it's not all action and stuff blowing up, but makes you think and makes you feel like you're there. Throughout the movie there are drops dripping, and they are in every different direction. There's the thunder too - basically makes you feel like you're in the middle of a storm. I wish more movies were done that well. Anyways, leave for a 10hr each way road trip in a couple hours, which is partially why I'm up so late. I hooked up an 8" TV in the van and ran the patch cables to the video in and to the stereo, and am grabbing the DVD player too, so we're gonna be watching movies. I'd still rather sleep I think, especially since I probably won't get to pick the movies (if you've seen my collection, you'll know that only a few of them could really be considered family flicks). Anyways, this trip means no email until Sunday, unless I decide to dial up with a modem. I put enough filters server side to get my inbox down to 200-300 messages a day (it's dropping somewhere around 800+), so pulling over a modem is probably possible... Still wouldn't be pretty, so I'll probably just let them sit and outgoing mail spool up - gotta love a local install of sendmail. Yea, that means I may post updates, and the times will be listed right, but they won't appear until Sunday night... Did I mention I like doing absolutely nothing?

So right from the beginning today starts with things not quite working right. Of course that's piled on top of I didn't work yesterday, so have way too much email to check and way too many Incidents waiting to be done. Then there was discussion about security, persistent sessions, and the proper way to implement user preferences. To top it all off the core router flipped for about 20 minutes, and I also got to migrate a directory structure from Maildir to Exchange... I did manage to sort through the pile of computers in my office to figure out which ones work. Turns out only one of the P90s was really dead, but there's another 16MB of RAM making machines not POST. Got that taken out and they're fine now. Too bad they're all P75s and P90s though. :( I didn't get much done in the way of prep for this weekend, so hopefully tomorrow I can just sit down and write scripts. Since this weekend is gonna be work, I decided tonight was a no-thinking night. I was gonna watch Animatrix, but decided against it. My copy of Dolby Labs' "We've Got the Whole World Listening" arrived so I watched all the Dolby Digital trailers, as well as behind the scenes on them and demos of stuff like dolby headphone. That was pretty cool. Then I sat down and started watching T2 Extreme. Apparently my DVD player is running too hot though right now, and it didn't like the second layer. I threw two fans blowing through the stack around it, but it's gonna be a while so I'll probably just finish up this weekend sometime. I'm not sure what I think of the whole multi segment thing, especially since they looked the same so far - I'll have to look into that. The quality is definitely very good. It was like film but without the flicker, at least until the MPEG2 decoder started getting a bit too hot... Maybe one of these days it'll force me to build a better equipment rack. Power amplifiers need to either go on top or in a different area - way too much heat...