I never realised the lightsabers in Episode II had so much bass. You feel them more than most of the explosions. It makes the scene with the "overgrown mosquito on crack" even better... I also discovered again why null pointers in kernel modules are a bad thing. It's sorta hard to unload and load modules after one of them segfaults on load - oops. At least now I have the nvidia audio drivers loaded and hardcoded to 48k since it kept using 44.1k, so the pvr sounds decent most of the time...

It looks like daapd has been released (thanks to Paul Boyum for finding that one). That's cool, although I want a DAAP 2.0 client too. Maybe I'll get around to it next week sometime. Looks like Todd Larason has more notes on DAAP up on his website, although they appear to all be for DAAP 1.0. Spent way too much time reading about DVDs, MPEG, and recording. I think I may start archiving movies to DVD, which could be fun. In preparation I bumped the bitrate up a bit and changed the resolution to 720x480 rather than 480x480. MythTV is saving directly as .mpg files even though they're named .nuv, so there's not much work to copy out to DVD with the new resolution (audio is already 48k). We'll see how that goes. I just need a better supported sound card now for stuff not worth burning... Another day with way too much time spent watching recorded TV. I hadn't watched The Red Green Show in quite a few years, and forgot how funny it is. Also, music video programs on MTV and VH1 are decent when you can just quickly skip through them to see if they managed to throw in a good video or two and just trash it if not. And even though The Italian Job is being promoted so much you'd think it was sure to be crap, Ebert and Roeper seem to be in agreement that it's a good flick. Now the question is will I actually get off my butt and go see it, or will I just wait and get the DVD in a few months... I need to get back on a regular schedule - rumor has it I may have to go up front in church tomorrow because of something with college graduates. That can't be good...

Can never complain when you get to sleep for half the day. Although getting up to go sit outside in cloudy/rainy weather is sorta annoying (track meet). Afterwards watched Wild Things, which was recorded from TV a day or two ago. The TV version drops the most annoying scenes, which makes it a watchable movie. Still sorta weird though. I still need to figure out where some really annoying ghosting is coming from and fix it though...

Pretty average day at work. For lunch apparently 3 of our student workers decided they only want to go to lunch once a week. Oh well, we still have some people, and other people even stop in sometimes... I ended up going to HR to pick up all the paperwork for health insurance. The stack is like 2" thick - I haven't looked through it yet, but hopefully most of that is just documentation on what is covered and stuff like that. I got to leave early today because I already worked all my hours this week, which means no work Friday too. Before I left I played with iTunes a bit though. There's a new header, Client-DAAP-Validation, which appears to be a 32 character hex string. I'm guessing MD5, but what it is of is anyone's guess - it's not anything super obvious, but it does change with every request. Fun stuff... After work Jeff and Nate came over and we watched Bourne Identity. Apparently people were trying to guess the movie from the sound, and one person who was visiting and sitting in the living room upstairs thought she had to run outside and close her car windows because she heard the "thunder" and thought it was going to rain. Oops... Then I watched like 4 hours worth of TV shows. I love digital video recorders...

I'm tired. Staying up to 2am when you are already dead tired and can hardly stay awake and have to get up early is a bad idea... Last night I watched Ocean's Eleven and could hardly stay awake for the ending. Today was rather uneventful at work, although we went to Chipotle for lunch which was good. Then there was the senior banquet which wasn't all that great, and the senior show which was rather funny. Then standing around for a long time as apparently I have relatives in my class I didn't know about and the parents got talking... Oh well, gotta get up tomorrow for graduation, but at least that's in the afternoon. Can still sleep in...

I'm done for good! With school that is. Today was my last final, which was probably the shortest and easiest from that prof. Now I just have graduation on Saturday, along with a few other miscellaneous things, but no more classes. After the final I helped Mike J learn SQL, and then helped a rather paniced goocas figure out why her web site blew up when she tried to publish. In some ways Dreamweaver seems a bit braindead... Then a bunch of us went to Willow Gate for spicy C1, which was good. Still more cleanup for the account issue, and other miscellaneous things at work. After work I had people over for a party, and we had half a bonfire and watched Die Hard: With A Vengeance on laserdisc. Apparently that was a big deal for some people as they had never seen an actual movie on laserdisc. The bonfire was sorta cool, but only when it involved gasoline... Anyways I managed to get lots of interesting pics of people, and since there were 2 other cameras there, I'm sure there'll be even more. Now if only I didn't have a meeting at 9am... :(

From last night there are pics and more pics. Jeff needs a bigger memory stick for his camera though... :) I love Saturdays - nothing to do but just sit around. Slightly annoying there's still finals next week, and next Saturday I actually have to go do something, but after that Saturdays should be even more enjoyable... I actually did go do something today. I needed a way to switch component/HD RGB video signals, and realised since most stuff has HD-15 connectors anyways, I can probably use this old KVM which I got for free from work a few years back when the mouse ports stopped working. The only problem was I didn't have a power supply for it. So off to RadioShack and I discovered they have a cool adaptor that's the same as a wall wart, but the thing is miniaturized and practically the size of a standard plug. 1300mA too, so no problem powering the KVM. Of course now I realised that I need a F/F HD-15 connector to finish hooking it up, and I'll still need to override the keyboard sense (probably easy) and get it switching by computer/IR control (slightly harder), but oh well - that should be fun. Topped off the day by watching Spider-Man (yes, the dash is part of the official title). Seems like other people had some rather unpleasant Computer Systems project to work on though. Makes me glad our Networking project was already due - one can't do anything once it's turned in except worry, and worrying about things one can't do anything about is totally pointless, thus the excellent day not caring about anything. Now if only I could do something about the humidity in here... :(

So, I thought I disliked Microsoft yesterday. Their implementation of AFP shares just sucks. Basically if there are problems, you have to rebuild the indexes, which normally takes a couple hours. For some reason this time they've been taking most of the day, and some shares are online only because I staggered them so it's working in stages rather than all at once. I also had to reinstall File Services for Macintosh to even get this far. Time to start looking into Samba and Netatalk some more I guess. Other than that finally finished up the book for AI. Interesting, but I started getting bored with it at the end. I'm either in the mood or not in the mood for reading. I mean I read both Two Towers and Return of the King over a weekend last fall, but tonight was annoyed with less than 80 pages. I guess extremes work. We're finally getting a good grasp on networking and it shouldn't be too bad to finish. That'll probably be mainly Thursday's project since tomorrow is Matrix Reloaded and the associated parties. Other than the fact I have a meeting at 9am, it should be a good day...

So I woke up, was so tired and half asleep so I could hardly walk straight, and had to navigate through a crowd of people I didn't know on my way up to the shower. Yea, they were still here at 10:15 this morning, and the house appears to still be in one piece. I was only woken up once, and that was my dad looking for the fart machine in my room. He neglected to notice the full giant glass of water next to my bed, so kicked it over - that's just about dry now... Anyways, we were all tired so didn't do anything until dinner for Mother's Day, except for relatives kept showing up. There wasn't any big thing going on, just different people stopping by all day, which sorta kept the weird party atmosphere alive for most of the day. We went and picked up Olive Garden for dinner since we didn't want to bother with a crowded restaurant (would you want to either if you had just had about 40 high schoolers in your house for an extended period of time?). This afternoon I was just laying on the couch playing with my dad's digital camera and took a whole ton of pictures. I decided that they need to have more consumer-level digital cameras with manual focus - it's too easy to completely confuse auto-focus if you want to do any type of effect. It didn't help that I didn't really want to learn the settings for manually setting the light level on that camera, and I was lazy so would have liked more zoom (it's 10x optical, which works pretty well for most things). I did get one picture which makes a decent background after a bit of touchup (Orig). I did all the work and my local copy are in lossless compression, which looks a bit better (it's not posted here for space reasons, if you want it just ask). It's still based off the original jpg though. I only took about a dozen shots of that one, so I wish I would have been shooting in tiff mode so it wouldn't have all the artifacts. Oh well, maybe if I don't get bored with that background and the weather is right again sometime. Movies of the day were Frequency, which is pretty good, and Redline (not in IMDB), which is pretty bad. The story sounded sorta interesting sci-fi, but by the end of the movie I still hadn't really figured out the point to the plot, and was wondering how they managed to keep it rated R... Anyways, finally getting around to checking the email and IMs for the day. I hardly touched the computer today if you sent me messages and wondered why I hadn't responded. It looks like Dave put up a bunch of pics. Well, the caffeine isn't having much effect anymore, and I have to get up in the morning...

Since mythtv really wanted a capture card, today I went out and bought a PVR-250 and spent a good chunk of the rest of the night getting it working. Turns out the windows drivers contain a firmware image, and burried in the documentation is instructions on how to extract them. It was bad enough I only discovered the problem when I got to the point of reading through the source code to figure out what was going on and what these two random files it wanted to open actually did. Anyways, that sorta works now, although I have a few bugs to work out still. I also helped my dad install a second drive and a video card in his machine. Then watched The Ring - that's just a weird movie. Tonight should be interesting, as there's a bit of a party which has been going strong for about 3 hours now that spans both upstairs and just outside my room (yea, there are a lot of people). People are still ariving, and it will be going all night, or at least until they fall asleep... I can hear them over my music too. Oh well, probably better than what some kids are doing for an after-prom party. I just hope I'll be able to stay awake tomorrow.