Somehow I managed not to watch any movies over the weekend until today. Not sure how I pulled that one off. I actually don't remember much of what I did Saturday, other than I went to my parents' house for some food. And it was snowing and we followed a bunch of snowplows home (they were going rather slow on 694). Sunday was church followed by some shopping. I picked up weatherstriping and furnace filters and stuff and resealed the doors, and also put just enough foam in the frames of some others to keep the bass from making them resonate and rattle. After discovering Walmart doesn't have it locally anymore I also ordered a new toy online. Hopefully that will arrive this week. They shipped UPS ground though, so it'll probably sit in a warehouse for like a week. Although amazingly they're predicting Thursday. After a ton of research on Sunday I also ordered another new toy. We'll see about that one when it arrives though. Hopefully it won't take too long. Something about that resolution on that size screen makes me happy.

On Monday I called to RMA the Ogo. While the guy was trying to get the system to stop giving him errors and send the RMA labels we talked about why I was sending it back. Based on his responses to my comments about the GSM/GRPS coverage vs their TDMA stuff it sounds like it's not exactly a rare response. Actually everyone I've dealt with at Cingular seems to not question anything beyond "coverage sucks", and both reps I've talked to about the 850 vs 1900 sound like they'd like it to happen too. I guess if it helps them have fewer cancellations... I can tell students are back at Bethel, as latency sucks. VoIP phone is weird talking to myself but works fine even on two trips through the Internet link talking to someone else. It's much harder to notice since the echo cancelation is good and it pretty much makes you not hear your own voice coming back at all. Although I'm guessing it could be noticable now. I just tested and the one way latency was almost a second. :) Anyways, first movie of the evening was Collateral. It was a good movie, but not the best I've seen. I didn't think the soundtrack was all that great either. Second movie of the night was Resident Evil. I thought it was a really good movie. I think I've maybe seen parts of it before, but not sure where. I do know the beginning reminded me a lot of Cyborg 2. I guess I wouldn't be surprised if the original game and that had some of the same sources. Although that movie wasn't near as much like a video game as Resident Evil. It's actually sorta funny some of the things looking back at the movie and how they happened and things were designed and filmed.

I'm still a bit annoyed that Alias is moved to Wednesdays. Having TV shows during the week sucks in my opinion. It's too bad I don't have an HD card for my myth box (which I need to get going again). Oh well, I guess I'll deal with it. Tomorrow is back to work. Should be interesting - hopefully nothing major will happen.

Over the weekend I managed to acquire a Dwin LD-2 (not as a present). For those who don't know, that's a nice line doubler. Basically put Composite or S-Video in and get RGBS out. I hooked that up between my receiver and projector and threw in a laserdisc. It looked awesome, other than some hum bars which look like possibly a ground loop somewhere. Now I remember why laserdiscs can be nicer than DVDs - it's just my projector's color separation and transcoding system sucks... I ended up watching two sides of Star Trek: Generations while tweaking the thing. The biggest thing I was annoyed by was the black level or lack thereof (I'd previously seen this quality on CRT projectors). I went to bed and slept for around a dozen hours. While laying in bed on Monday afternoon I realized that my projector had threads on the lens but I had never done anything with them. So I checked and the size is the same as my camera. So on went the .6ND filter, and the blacks are a lot better now. After finishing up the 3rd side of Generations, threw in a trailer disc and compared DVDs through the component output in progressive mode and the s-video out through the doubler. As the doubler basically puts out the same as the player in that mode (480p), it was a reasonable comparison to try. One would think that after combining the colors into one signal and then pulling it apart the quality would be crap. Keep in mind though that this thing is not consumer level, and the transcoder in the projector (convert from component to RGB for the panels) is likely pretty cheap. They were actually very comparible, with the color output from the doubler blowing away the component. It makes the DVD player's stock output look flat. Now if I could only get rid of those hum bars... And figure out what to do with anamorphic discs. Unfortunately the projector won't do 16x9 on a VGA input...

Anyways, also watched Fahrenheit 9/11. It was decent technically, but should be laughed at as a documentary. In the interviews it's obvious he's leading people along, he leads people confronting him to say stuff in the way he want so he can twist it, and he does stupid stuff. It's funny how he portraying people who are ignoring the guy with the camera who's trying to ask them question as if they're personally saying they're against his policies. He's just as much a prick to everyone as in his previous big hit about Columbine.

After that sat around for a while and talked to AT&T support about my Ogo. Apparently it needed a complete reset. That caused it to lose all data, but luckily I have a dedicated POP3 account for it so it was able to just pull most of it back in. Sounds like a design flaw to me. Now that I'm able to get GPRS connectivity again I tried signing on to AIM as I was chatting with the guy. Yea, they're admitting that they have major issues with the portals and it's affecting everyone. Fun stuff. Between that and their coverage, I'm thinking it's still on the track for this thing to go back before the end of the trial period. Maybe it'll be more mature in a year or so. Anyways, my brother came home and we watched X2, which is still a good movie. Oh yea, I'm up for movie nights this week, just let me know if you're interested.

It's been busy but boring. Work stuff has been routine get stuff ready for the break/outages/announced changes, not much fun playing with new toys stuff. On Monday Ogo #1 went back to the store. It was sorta funny since it couldn't authenticate to the network at all when I brought it back. Apparently there were major problems with their network that day though. Today Ogo #2 is freaking out (can't properly authenticate and use the network). Given similarities to other outages they've had, I wonder if they increase in roaming traffic is overloading the HLR systems. Oh well, all I know is they can't seem to keep everything up reasonably. One day it's the air interface, the next the portal, and they don't have good coverage where I'd like to use it anytime. Non-work stuff hasn't been much. The VoIP phone worked great at home, but I brought it back to my office. It's sitting here again for a while seeing as there's not much use for it at the office, and we'll see if it keeps working as students get back at the end of Break. Tuesday was Paul's birthday party, which was good. That whole crowd doesn't get together as often since everyone has crazy schedules lately. This morning one of the database servers at work blew up. I fixed a couple other things that depended on it (mainly just getting the online giving back up), and I think I'm gonna leave it until Sunday. It's Christmas, quit trying to work... :) Plus it'd mean going in, and I'm not even supposed to be able to get into the buildings... I'll leave you with a great quote that came across nanog-l this morning.

The true artform of the craft, is to realize that the maintenance, and day to day operations of complex computer systems -isn't- a battle against logic and math, like we were originally taught....

But, in sooth, is a battle against human error, in all its myriad of forms.

-Richard Irving

Wednesday stuff happened. Don't remember much of what anymore, probably just routine stuff, and making sure people knew about that night. After work was fun though, with a bunch of people coming over for RotK. Nick's chili was a big hit and ended up gone before intermission. The movie was also great, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Although I will say the conversation regarding the perceived relationships between characters went downhill towards the end of the movie.

Thursday was the ITS Christmas Party (for staff) with it's associated white elephant party. The swans ended up duplicated on standard letter-sized paper and included in many gifts, and the VP ended up unknowingly claiming "the real swans". It was a lot of fun, and the food was good too. Got more planning for the Christmas shutdown done, but nothing else too interesting. After work decided to poke around a bit with iTunes and rendezvous. I started tunneling 224.0.0.251 mdns traffic from Bethel to my house. It's coming across OK, but my iTunes has latched onto zeroconf addresses and not my public one, so it's not seeing the shares properly. Maybe I'll poke with that later. I don't really listen to anything other than my own music at work even, so not sure why I'm bothering. More of a "how hard is this" than anything. NoBong (a former roommate who stumbled on this site) also emailed me, and it was good to hear from him.

Friday was another skipping work day, so I slept in. Woke up sometime after 11, and looked at the ogo to see if anything interesting had happened. I started getting IMs right away, and also had a bunch of emails from my router complaining about the suspicious traffic (a whole ton of multicast mdns traffic being tunneled over from Bethel - I should probably turn that off). Apparently the thing's IDS isn't designed to handle multicast properly. I guess I can't complain too much for $20. After quite a while I realized I should probably actually get out of bed and get ready for the day. While getting ready and debating what to do for the day the shiny new phone in my office (which I found out about while chatting) came to mind. Yep, I'm a geek. A few minutes later the boss called asking some questions about the holiday outage, so I decided three reasons was good enough (the third being I was hungry and sick of pizza with not much else in the house) and headed for the car. Within 5 minutes of sitting down at my desk I had managed to lock the thing out of the system. After acquiring the appropriate passcodes to get the thing back into the phone system, I also got the appropriate DHCP server options and information about the firmware it downloads on boot. After scanning through the phone's menu and noting the options, I was ready. After a small meeting about the outages thing and chatting with some friends, the phone became unplugged from the network and UPS and managed to follow me home (hey, it was on my desk for "testing" :). Luckily the firmware loads into flash so I didn't actually need to set up TFTP and DHCP options. Without the settings though I did need to point it back at the call server. It actually connected quickly (after timing out trying to get TFTP since the firewall blocks that). Incoming audio didn't work, but that was a quick NAT change on my end to let it reach the phone. After a few test calls I have to say that it's amazingly stable even over the net. It was around 40ms jitter, which wasn't noticable. Of course I'm getting 50ms latency to work right now - I'll have to try this some other time when students are around and it jumps to the hundreds. I was able to sustain long calls without problems too. The speakerphone on this thing is amazing too - it sounds great on the local end, and apparently doesn't sound like a speakerphone on the remote end either. No luck getting a softphone working yet, as it's H.323 rather than SIP (and the only decent H.323 client I've found for OS X apparently doesn't like some of the messages the server sends). I'm gonna have to ask Telecomm about that one. It'd be cool if our gateway supported SIP too. OK, that's enough for now, I'm supposed to get up before noon tomorrow... :(

Today went well. I started off the day by driving over to the Comcast office and dropping off the HD box and canceling all the video service. They're gonna send someone to trap the video on Wednesday supposedly. After Dave's ordeal who knows what'll happen though. As long as my cable modem doesn't die I probably won't know (I haven't had a TV connected to the cable for months). After that JoeBuck™ and I went to Chipotle for lunch. Burritos are good. I then went and restocked the dew in the office, as well as acquired some canned food items for the department Christmas party. Bringing those things is a great idea and all, but for those of us who don't normally keep that type of stuff around... It becomes like the Chipotle free burrito day. Maybe that's why I remembered it. I stopped by and bugged the coworkers a bit. The Ogo AIM portals also freaked out for most of the afternoon, and Cingular kept duplicating SMS messages too. We'll see how long this thing sticks around. The rest of the day was spent sitting around, as well as fighting Bethel's horrible latency to try and eliminate some pages. Which didn't work apparently as my phone is beeping and vibrating right now... Actually they're not Dave's servers this time - it's the network being broken again. The server is "OK" now (defined as Packet loss = 0%, RTA = 2088.30 ms). Anyways, some interesting links were acquired. Want to know what happens when you give a writer a camera? It's actually rather funny, especially if you know anything about what the normal photo guys go through. Then there's the case where someone leaves a voicemail telling someone "God hates you and he wants to kill your children," along with a work phone number, and the predictable results. Then there's Roseville being a big shopping area. I'm pretty indifferent on that one, other than I don't mind the fact that there's a lot of different restaurants in close proximity to work.