I like days off - they're relaxing. I got up late morning, and debated with the lunch mailing list about where lunch was today - ended up being Subway. After lunch I wandered around, and spent a few hours hanging out between the PC Setup room, the Happy Lab, and the Help Desk. Then went home and spent more time pretty much doing nothing. I discovered when I made the iso for Dogma I dropped the mpeg2 files on there instead of the dvd fs structure. Of course it didn't complain about missing the TOC file either, I just noticed that the DVD didn't work right. Got that straightened out now, and watched that. It's sorta funny to see the edits in some places - like Jay and Silent Bob wanted desperatly to jump Bethany - right... I also discovered last night's recording was 7.2GB - files that big can be a slight bit of a pain when you have to remultiplex and split them out. There's too many crap music videos anyways, but I have a disc decently full of them now (or will in the morning)... I also discovered that my install of transcode now properly recognises xvid input files, so I can convert xvid format into DVD now too... I'm playing with that, but the mpeg encoder is going really slow - not sure what's causing that yet. Hopefully I got the flags right though and I'll have the right bitrate output and a usable mpeg2 file which I can just set the chapter breaks and burn. It looks like it'll be running for a few days - I like how I can just set the priority and let it go in the background without worrying about it at all. And I guess I'm bored and now writing about pointless stuff... Much Ado About Mousing...or Nutting...or who knows...

The day wasn't much different from yesterday, except there was a big watermelon feast in the afternoon. I ended up talking to people I hadn't talked to in a while at that. After work I spent more time on my IMAP server. I got a bit bored with it and decided to do something else after a while after implementing 4 commands or so. The async stuff with expunging is sorta annoying - the backend makes that a lot easier in my case though. When I decided I was sick of it enough to want to do something else it strangely enough coincided with when I got to the SEARCH command. Have you ever read through what the search command does? Guess how many special keywords and types of searches there are... Yea, so I watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Strangely appropriate since I'm not working tomorrow (although I'm not trying to avoid my boss or anything - I'm actually gonna show up there to go to lunch with friends anyways, but...). Then I got to video editing. A couple shows didn't get recorded right, and I realised I still had some 480x480 recordings saved - those are now gone to make way for higher resolution and also higher bitrate recordings. I recompiled the driver again to push the bitrate up higher yet. I'm apparently recording a 5 hour show right now (music videos I think - I'm not sure), so we'll have to wait until tomorrow to actually switch to the new module. Oh well, gotta get to bed if I want to get up for lunch tomorrow...

Nothing too interesting today. Talked for a bit with the guy running the video stuff at church as we sat up by there today. I brought the projector and piles of cables back downstairs today and hooked that up, and then watched a few hours of junk that had been on TV recently. Multitasked and did video editing at the same time (usually a mix between clipping out music videos and other clips out of whatever I was actually watching at the time too). The one box was remultiplexing video, playing full-motion video, and serving two different clips for editing. The laptop was pulling those two clips in and doing editing on them both, along with playing the finished clips to verify. I managed to lock up sawfish once (sshed in and killed it so I didn't loose what I was doing, but still rather annoying). I've never been able to get that kind of performance out of OS X (way too much latency), or have the machine keep working under Windows (I worked a bunch with XP Pro this weekend, and it had weird lags and stability problems where a program could almost lock the system). OS X looks pretty good and I wouldn't mind switching to it. I could probably eventually even get past the one button thing (I like middle clicking a lot though), but the latency and general system response especially when doing even light multitasking is practically unusable (whenever I topped 3-4 programs actually trying to use the system at once). Oh well. For "testing the system" after reassembly (more because I just wanted something high quality and interesting) I watched Fight Club. That's a really odd movie - so good at brainwashing others he gets himself and doesn't even know it...

Pretty usual day at work, basically a bunch of smaller things, but I guess it kept me occupied. Lunch was Eddington's which is always good. Went home, and started reading RFC3501. Yes, that's the RFC for IMAP. I'm now most of the way through the Authenticated state commands and maybe will get to the rest tomorrow. After this part is complete I'll start working on the rest. The backend design is similar to exchange in the single-instance message store, except with a different purpose. In this setup the server will have something very similar to Ximian Evolution's vfolders which are virtual folders based on different attributes of the message, and can be set up in the same way as any other filters. Except if the server supports them I can use any client (Evolution is really nice, but it's nice to be able to use other ones - like pine is really nice in many cases). The other cool thing is Evolution's filtering isn't really top notch, and neither are most other clients (Outlook on exchange does decent, as does procmail, but they're both server side). As I designed the system and therefore have direct access to the data rather than dealing through IMAP or some other system, the vfolders and filters can both be implemented by the maildrop and neither are limited to preset rules - lots of regular expressions... I like regular expressions... :) Anyways, at about 1am I decided to take a break, cooled off the DVD player to operating temperature, and dropped in Die Another Day. I hadn't seen it before, and have to say it's a pretty decent movie. Some effects were pretty bad, while others were quite decent. The audio mix is very nice in places, such as during the swordfight the blades slicing through the air as well as hitting each other and other objects make smooth transitions around behind you. As the blade swings right over the camera and the sound moves from front left and moving behind you around to front right at a volume lound enough to feel it... Yea, I like those kind of movies... To top the day off my package of 200 DVD-Rs arrived today, so I get to start working on stuff for the long car trip known as vacation... I just wish I didn't have to get up early tomorrow - it's my sister's grad party, so there's getting ready and then tons of people coming over. I have a feeling I'll be consuming lots of coffee and dew...

So, they type of video editing I want to do is actually easier under linux than Windows. I'm rather happy about that. I found this cool program called GOPchop which basically allows you to visually edit an MPEG2 file. You can use a slider for big jumps, and when you get close use next and previous buttons to jump between GOPs (generally the I-frames). Then you just specify whether it's a start or stop point, and once they're all in the list of clips export and you have an edited video. I took an hour long recording of music videos from TV, and had a specific video pulled out and saved in about 2 minutes. Combined with the fact that authoring DVDs is extremely easy too, I just need my burner supported under linux now. At least I just have to select the .iso and choose burn and that's it... Now to just get all these other recordings edited and burned to DVD... Tonight I watched the rest of Speed 2 since the DVD was incomplete last time. I'd have to say that movie is OK but not all that great. Speaking of recording DVDs though, I found a decent blank which seems to be compatible with every drive I've put it in. Now to just make a bulk order...

Long, but actually rather relaxing day. Got up barely in time to make it to church, and then afterwards the family went to Applebee's for Father's Day lunch. After that my dad and I played with my projector and mounting options to the ceiling upstairs in the living room for next weekend. There ends the useful stuff. I spent most of the afternoon/evening watching tons of recorded from TV stuff, including many shows of Star Trek: TNG, The Simpsons, a Knight Rider, and skimming through a few movies that didn't look interesting enough that I even remember what they were anymore. Then for some reason pulled out The Net and watched that. Pretty decent movie I guess. VCD (yes, it's legit - you can buy them legally from Malaysia, or at least you could a couple years ago as they were the equivalent of VHS there) definitely isn't DVD, but still blows away VHS and compares to TV. Especially if it's real one that's the full quality, and you don't kill it by non running component video... Now I think it's time to go to bed before I find out if NIS+ is gonna stay up tonight... Tomorrow it's time to see about the temperature of the server. Apparently it starts flaking out somewhere about 80F (it's an old machine that's been meant to be replaced for a few years now), and the server room's been getting close to that lately (we're trying to figure out why the AC can't keep up - it's set for 68F and seems to be running continuously, but we're told it's working right). Might need to take the cover off and try to get more airflow around it...

So NIS+ took a nosedive again... Only this time it took NFS with it. Which took any other server which was trying to do stuff over NFS down with it. And some of those servers didn't want to let me in, so I had to be a little more persuasive with them... I'm sleeping in tomorrow, so I hope everything is working right now, or we'll find out tomorrow afternoon - two nights in a row is enough without adding in another morning too. Otherwise the day went pretty well. Chipotle for lunch, enough different things throughout the day, and then went over to Jeff's to watch Tears of the Sun - it's an OK movie. So the day was going well, just unfortunately ended rather poorly. And to top it off I'm very tired. Oh well, there's always tomorrow...

Well, I thought today was going pretty well... Great China for lunch, Dave and left early and went to go see the $3.75 showing of The Italian Job. Then I get home and drop in a DVD of Speed 2 I recorded off TV. Turns out either the burner machine hit the 2GB file limit or I didn't actually have a full recording, since it cut off near the end... So I wander back over to the computer to discover that Bethel's NIS+ server crashed again (taking down pretty much every unix service). And the guy that knows how it works is two states away and his cell phone is off... And I'm sorta the backup person, but since we're getting rid of NIS+ very soon and I'm just starting as the backup person, I wasn't gonna even bother to learn it/get trained on it... I guess I got a crash course taught by myself since everything's up now (I think). Email servers are struggling under the load a bit (the load spiked at over 200 on one - you can't expect to effectively shut off email to a college for 2+ hours and not have a huge flood when you turn it back on), and I had to manually give MIMEDefang a kick in the butt on one of them. Of course that machine was the one that's normally stable, and I had been given a warning that the other one may give me minor hastles since it has possible hardware issues, so I wanted to get the "good" box back on it's feet rather than depend on the redundant box. Not exactly the way I expected to spend my night... Oh well, Jeff is back from Canada so we're going to lunch tomorrow, which will force a bit of a break no matter what the fallout from the nscd bomb ends up being...

The graduation went OK, and I didn't have to video too much of it. We had to do pictures once we got home though, and I don't think my dad liked the fact that I took like 100 pictures in a few minutes so he had to download them all to the computer before going to hit the graduation parties. I skipped those even though I was invited to a few, since I didn't really know the people (although apparently they invited me specifically - seemed a little odd). Instead I redid some of the coax in my room to eliminate one run of coax down the hall and instead use some of the stuff I fished through the ceiling/walls a few weeks back. I managed to make the raw non-computer video look decent on the projector too - I think there might have been a very slightly loose connection somewhere in there. I watched the second half or so of the MTV Movie Awards, and while they were sorta funny, I have to agree with Gollum's "MTV Sucks" quote. I also jumped through the first half (I love digital video and jumping through an hour and a half of video in a way you can see what you're doing in about 2 minutes) and watched Yoda's speech which was funny but didn't have quite the um, impact as Gollum's. Then my brother and I broke out the Courage Under Fire laserdisc as somehow neither of us had actually seen that movie before. Good story, good effects. They did some odd cuts though - it was weird for him to be in the middle of an interview that's quiet and stuff, and you feel the impact of the helicopter rotors and gunfire right before they cut to the war footage as a memory since they cut the sound before the video. Kept you in suspense until the end though - I guess I'd have to recommend it.

The day went better than expected, and I didn't even end up breaking out the music. They kept us active and kept people with a good sense of humor running the stuff, so we didn't get bored. The Chipotle run was good - I've never seen the place so packed. I think Quizno's next door finally got sick of the line going out the door and across the entire front of their store and beyond, because by the time we left the line was going the other way. It's definitely the longest line I've ever seen at that location - from talking to one of the employees it sounds like it's the biggest they've seen too. I guess free Burritos for cheap will cause that type of effect. For the evening just relaxed and watched Swordfish. Oh yea, and introduced some coworkers to IMDB... Gotta love days that are sorta half vacation with nothing serious to do, but plenty of stuff to do.