I'll be glad when classes are done. Monday there was a physics lab exam, which wasn't hard, but wasn't as easy as the last one either - I may have missed some points on it. I finished off the day by watching Minority Report. That's an OK movie, but not the best. Nothing specific bugs me, but I just understand why a lot of people don't like it. Today went OK, although I seemed to be running around everywhere for random little things. I forgot until Dave reminded me that tonight was some community appreciation thing which meant free food. That was a nice surprise, although I don't normally really eat dinner, so I guess it didn't matter too much to me. Oh well. As I've been horribly tired the last couple days, I figure it's time to catch up and go to bed now. Quite a few hours earlier than normal I guess...

Well, despite the fact that I was dead tired and have compensated with way too much dew, the day went well. I went and hung out in a fabric warehouse for about an hour, and came back with some nice stuff. I bought a piece of material that looks like it's the same stuff real screens are made from. I also bought some very black material for around the edges and for masking. The black from the projector on it doesn't look like there's anything on it, so it'll just be the picture once I finish making it. And it's hard to beat the price too - 75" screen with aspect ratio masks for $22.38 plus a few bucks worth of wood to hook it all together. Much better than buying one... I actually tacked the screen material up to see how it looks and to enjoy it even before I put it all together. All I can say is wow. It has enough gain to almost but not quite eliminate the lines between pixels on the projector. The colors are also very bright, but don't bleed at all. Basically both DVD and Laserdisc look pretty much like pictures. So for pure eye candy I watched X-Men, along with trailers for it, Spiderman, xXx, and Stewart Little. The only problem with DVD now is the color artifacts from the horrible color bandwidth compression on DVD MPEG-2... Then I watched Patriot Games on laserdisc. As if I wasn't hooked on movies enough already...

Well, the Exchange stuff finished OK. It successfully defragmented, which means a completely rebuilt database which does seem quite a bit faster (although the old one said it was fine, and there's nobody on the system so it's hard to say yet). After that came up, I went to see X2 with Jeff and some other people. That was a pretty good movie. Since I was in the area I also stopped at Bethel and did reading for homework. Interesting, but not techie enough for my tastes... Rounded out the day by watching Clerks. Funny, but as with all Kevin Smith movies you had better not be easily offended. My dad wanted a 120GB HD and asked me to order one, so since I was ordering I added in another drive, mb, CPU, RAM and stuff for that PVR box I've been meaning to get to... So I guess that sets what I'm doing next weekend. Although it sounds like I get to yell at the credit card company again tomorrow... When they take their customer system down for "weekly maintenance", it's not a good idea to just reject all charges...

Today ended pretty good... Had a bunch of people over, and watched Airplane and Dogma. Both rather different movies - gotta wonder where some people come up with their ideas. Some interesting pics from it too... Too bad Paul just got a new manager's sign last week. We took down the exchange server as planned, although maintenance due to "undefined error" is not something I normally like to see from a database maintenance utility. I'm moving 26GB of stuff to a different drive temporarily, which should help the situation, but is gonna make a decent dent in the backup tape usage... Hopefully that'll let the consistency checker actually finish this time - apparently 32GB isn't enough for it. I get to stay up a bit to make sure the files move and restart eseutil too...only 69 minutes left on the move... :(

Fun day. Didn't get up until noon, then went to my grandma's and disconnected a modem I had put there temporarily. I also hooked up a new VCR (old one broke), redid some TV cable, and just chatted for a while. Then I went over to Dave's place for a bonfire, barbeque, and movies. Amélie is an odd movie... Topped off the night by setting up a mailing list for my sister's FCA group. I also decided I'm probably gonna build a machine for MythTV, although I might not add the TV tuning right away (just do playback). Short day I guess. And I really smell like smoke, and need to get out of these clothes... :(

Two busy days... Although Tuesday was cool because it was C1 for lunch, blood drive in afternoon, and then Dave and I went to Fuddruckers and watched Empire. Of course today I made up for no homework yesterday by spending 5+ hours working with Joe on sorta AI (we got distracted a bit). Oh well... Tuesday one of our coworkers announced he was leaving to go work at Target, so that was a bit depressing since we'll all miss him. Big lunch party on his last day, so if you know Curt and don't know about it, let me know (or you could always join the lunch list). The server team gets to be busy the next 2 weeks trying to learn enough to cover for him until we get someone else. Hopefully that process will be quick though. Oh, and it's getting close enough to the release of Matrix: Reloaded that we're getting a group together for that too...

Somehow I think I manged to get back on a normal sleep schedule rather easy. I was still really tired and had to resort to caffeine as the day went on though... Had some family over for a nice big lunch and just to hang out and talk as well. I uploaded all the pics of ITS Student Workers I cropped yesterday and repointed the database at the replacements, so we'll see how that goes tomorrow... Just got done watching Face/Off, which was much better than I remember it being. Due to the style of movie (a lot of action) you need to watch it on a nice system, which may be part of it since I think before it was probably just on a tv somewhere - oh well. Basically for the whole 3rd side (laserdisc) the room doesn't stop shaking and stuff flying around behind you - gotta love John Woo films... :)

Weekends are great for sitting around doing nothing, and 3 day weekends are great for messing up your sleep schedule. Waking up at 3 (yes, in the afternoon) the day before you have to get up at 8 can't be good... And that was solid sleep - not laying in bed because I didn't want to get up. Anyways, my siblings and I watched Blue Crush, which was pretty decent. Spent a while digging through and cropping photos too. A bunch of ITS student workers are gonna hate me Monday when they look at the list of student workers... :)

Joe and I spent way too much time on AI homework, which has been nothing but a headache. We have a good method for solving it which while it works decently, is something that doesn't program into MARE well... Oh well. I spent most of the day doing nothing, and watched The Matrix, so it wasn't all a loss. If you're looking to invest money right now, here's an analysis of how some investments and their returns...

The end of the week is finally here... The day was sorta weird I guess. This morning I was busy, but now I can't remember what I did... I think that means it's really time for the weekend... Then there was Chipotle, a quiz in AI, and learning about Top Spin. Then discovering we need to haul out the drill again to mount bluepill in the racks, so that has to wait... The library kiosks now have printing too, and the SSL certificates on webmail won't expire on Saturday anymore (that was fun as it involved playing with an IIS3 server for a bit)... At least I had some variety though. After work Dave and Nick had 10 and Jeff and I over and we had steaks on the grill and watched a really weird movie and sat around watching TV. Fun stuff, but we were all tired and definitely ready for the weekend... Oh yea, Mike J says I'm supposed to mention The Charm of the Bead. I think he said something about google...