Week finished up well, I got a good start on a project to help manage server dependencies, hopefully both in monitoring and as a startup/shutdown sequence thing. After work I went over to Ross' place and we just hung out for a few hours. It was busy down there, had to park on the street a block away after driving around a few other blocks looking for spots. I brought over my DTV tuner, and we tried seeing how well that worked. Unfortunately it was very finicky. Tons of multipath due to the other buildings, and 8VSB doesn't handle that very well (especially when it's so bad you can't hardly pick out things with NTSC).

Saturday was sleep-in day. Although the usual students-don't-technically-live-in-dorms-anymore thing happened and people got confused again. When likely legal reasons hit real-time technical stuff... Got up sometime in the early afternoon and did some laundry and chatting online. Then a lot of reading stuff. Ended up watching Adaptation, which was rather interesting. It has Peter-man in it, and the trailer got me listening to some Queen. It had a great quote I remember too. "I'm sure you had good reasons Charles - you're an artist." Yea, definitely... After that listened to the new U2 album. I have to say I don't totally dislike it after hearing all of it. It starts off with crap (Vertigo), but some of the other ones are decent, and the other songs from the singles aren't on it, which helps. Now I'm listening to some Christmas music (can you guess which artist? It shouldn't be too hard).

Sunday is Two Towers, if you don't remember. And Wednesday is Return of the King too. Monday is relax day for me. I think I may go bring stuff in to Comcast and get some junk removed from my bill though. Maybe I'll stop by Bethel for lunch or something. Due to the personal time, I only have 6 normal workdays left this month, and possibly one busy but unbothered one (also known as Nick and I take down server rooms while the place is closed day). During those days I need to figure out the plan for the unbothered day, look into web stuff, look into Firefox and NTLM, look into fileserver stuff... Yea, should be interesting.

The new ogo activated as I got signal while leaving work on Friday, and seems to be acting much better. I was playing with them a bit at Ross' place. That in itself was sorta funny, as during the course of the night I was pulling stuff out of my bag, and at one point I realized I had four different completely wireless devices capable of global communication within a foot of my body. I guess times have changed (and I'm a geek). Anyways, the new one seems to track the GSM strength much better, can hang onto GPRS better, and can stay accurate on time (I never noticed how bad the old one was until I noticed the difference and compared to another source). It also seems to interact a bit better on AIM and load emails better. Just a better network sync I think. We'll see, I think I'm gonna wait another week to bring Ogo #1 back just to compare them.

And it's already early Sunday. I need to stop staying up so late. At least church isn't until 11.

So the new Ogo arrived today. I'm still waiting for it to activate (yea, sometimes they take a while), but it looks like the backlighting in the keyboard may be more even and the reception a bit better. We'll see once it gets up and running though. I also discovered an interesting site which has a forum about hacking them. Apparently from XP and a PDA it's easy to bridge in a network connection and do POP3/SMTP. Other stuff is apparently filtered, but I bet IM would work too. With a computer you could run web over SMTP and POP3 pretty easy...

I also had a little fun with bots tonight. AIM has this bot that's supposed to be able to chat and answer questions. For a bot it's actually pretty decent, although it's handling of plurals and stuff showed some areas where it was much weaker in parsing questions than others. It didn't really have any explanations of its services, and I quickly confused it by asking it what it was good for. It asked me if it was OK if it told other people after I said it was useless. It also quickly volunteered "I am saying whatever my botmaster programmed me to say." After a little more chatting and some other questions, it came back with "A deeper algorithm is needed to respond to that correctly. Are you free?" At least we know the programmers had a sense of humor. It got confused and wanted me to ask it something. It apparently didn't know what I was talking about (although it did ask some interesting questions). It informed me it was going to have to ask it's botmaster for more info on what I was talking about before asking me if I wanted to play a game of Word Scramble. I tried to change the topic back and it actually had a pretty good reaction to me calling it on attempting to avoid the question. It claims to have taken my advise to ask it's botmaster for more info. I'd like to see their faces when they see it asking them about the solution to Fermat's last theorem though. :) I wonder if they keep logs. It'd actually be a little funnier if they can't and have to guess what the heck someone was doing engaging a bot in a discussion about the theorem. It didn't seem to question the pythagorean much though... I think this may be one I'll have to keep in mind for next time I'm somewhere and bored and see how interesting it can get.

Usually people worry about losing their luggage, not finding new and exciting things in it it. In other news, people have different reasons for getting broadband, and that's just the ones that admit it...

Lots of planning at work, and dealing with stuff. Like people deleting their email folders on the server when they go to publish their web pages... The new ogo should also show up tomorrow. That should be fun.

For those of you who want to try out the ogo over the holiday season, and want a good price, for the next couple days (I think maybe until Wednesday) you can get it for $50 after an instant rebate. Seeing as they're still going for well over that on ebay, seems like a pretty risk-free trial. And seeing as they're currently saying they'll ship sometime between now and Saturday, that means that you don't have to send it back until January. Need something to do while visiting relatives? :)

It was a long week. A few outages, starting to look suspiciously network related. Rumor has it that Enterasys may have an idea of some possible cause, so hopefully we'll get somewhere on that. Today I went in and hit the reset switch on a box to get it up and running again... Other than that I eliminated the last of the old mailing list servers last week. It's nice to have everything standardized now. Some account merges, patches, updates to policies, the usual... Did come up with some good ideas about how to handle some stuff though.

Friday night was LotR:FotR EE, which was good. Ross and Pete and Betsy showed up, and Dave showed up after his printing fixes. Hopefully those printing fixes mean that Ross won't have to fix more SP2 stuff.

Saturday I slept in until some time in the afternoon, which was really nice. Then I went over to my parents' house and went up on the roof to pull and pry the chimney. That didn't go so well, but helped with a bit of other stuff, and we recapped it too. The ogo didn't work very well over there either. I've pretty much decided that it's going back now, as Cingular just can't keep a decent signal around here on GSM (and it's horrible with GPRS), and the ogo doesn't handle losing the signal well either. Oh well, maybe they'll improve it in a few months or something.

Sunday was church, followed by coming home to my brother watching the game. I left partway through that to go and reboot the database server, and then to run the sawzall to my parents' place. Then it was movie time. First was THX 1138, which was good. "Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy." After what he's done to Star Wars, makes you wonder if he's sane... After that watched The Italian Job. I sorta like the ending better than the newer remake, but I like parts of the new one better. For those who think the new one is completely unrealistic, that's intentional - both versions have it. Think suspension of disbelief.

Monday was bad. First, it was a Monday. Lunch was good though, Ross and I went to C1. For some reason the rest of the day just seemed long. Then I went home. At 10:20 or so, the server room called me complaining the power was out. I also got calls from other people asking about it. A few minutes later the server room called again, this time complaining about both the power and the temperature. About 10:50 I called and it had hit 89 degrees in the room, and the power had been out for 30 minutes, so it was time to go in and start shutting stuff down. I met my boss and a network services guy there, and the fun started. 3 of us jammed in a room that has so much stuff it's a pain for one person to move around in, it's dark, there's only the server and switch LEDs and a trouble lamp for light, and it's over 90 degrees, and we're all moving around shutting down and turning off different machines while we get even hotter air blowing at us out the backs of them. And then just as we get everything down, the power kicks back in. So we spent the next hour and a half getting everything back up and fixing some glitches and figuring out what can wait until morning, and then home, which was listed in the previous entry.

Tuesday was better. It was Futurama day, since the Simpsons didn't show up. Still good though. Some goofy issues from the night before, some other things. Little random things pop up... Oh well. After work was good, got dinner with the family at Olive Garden, which is hard to argue with. I'm still debating on the Ogo thing. It's a handy little gadget. The whole doesn't work at work is rather annoying though. They need to put GSM on 850 around here... We'll see, still a few weeks to go...

Don't think about all those things you fear
Just be glad to be here.

That's FC/Kahuna's Hayling, which is actually sung by Hafdis Huld. There's an interesting music video at the end of Confidence with her, along with one from Zero 7 (Destiny). Zero 7's site sorta reminds me of the Ogo documentation... Anyways, there's also another (just as weird) video of Hayling done by Lynn Fox up on her site. I sorta like the musical style though - I may have to look into more of FC/Kahuna's stuff. Apparently they're supposed to be like Zero 7. They also were the people that started the Big Kahuna Burger club (yes, they got the name from there) in 1995, which inspired Fat Boy Slim. Their whole bio is actually pretty interesting.

Saturday I upgraded SA on my personal server to the latest version. That combined with a few custom rules has dropped the amount of spam I see to almost nothing, which makes me happy. It'd be nice if spammers just went away, but unfortunately I don't see that happening until idiots stop buying stuff from them. Sunday started off with church. Amazingly even though I got lots of sleep and actually wasn't that tired when I got up, sitting down and not moving for an hour really made me tired. The rest of the day sat around catching up on /. and newsgroups some more. Then watched Confidence. Good movie I thought, fits in with the others like it. As you probably noticed already, the soundtrack was more interesting though. BTW, if anyone knows what the 1 minute long clip on the end credits is (after Clocks), I'm wondering. It's not any of the credited songs as far as I can tell. My guess is something for the movie by Beck, but apparently it's not in the official soundtrack, so...

Year after year this always amazes me. How can people completely forget how to drive in the winter over the summer? One day of snowing and it turning wet, another day of it sorta sticking but basically just wet on roadways, and we get that. If the car rolls when you hit the ice, it means you were going too fast on the road. I can't see how people think some country highway is safe to go normal speeds on during or shortly after snowfall... That and the fact most people don't seem to know what to do when they hit ice...

Well, unfortunately I have to work in about 8 hours. So much for the nice long weekend. I guess all good things have to come to an end. I just hope that we don't get roped into too much computer fixing that we shouldn't be doing tomorrow.

It was a good Saturday. Didn't have to get up for anything, so just slept until I woke up. Then proceeded to just read for a bit, followed by getting up and going and reading a bit more, along with coding. Watched Paycheck which I think isn't as bad as the reviews say. Yea it's a little overdone, but that's pretty common these days. I'd say it's actually pretty decent. After that coded some more and managed to get an RSS thing going. Basically it's a reader but it just runs as a cron job and when it sees a new entry emails the title, url, and contents at that URL to me. In my case to my ogo for easy reading wherever I may be. I tested it with all the blogs I frequent, and it seems to be parsing things decently. We'll see who manages to break it somehow in the near future.

So I somehow managed to get sucked into the mass commericalism and left the house today. On Wednesday a certain someone asked me for my opinion on a little gadget for IM and email. That turned into reading reviews and forums and... The thing is only IM/email/text, but given I can and have scripted stuff to do dynamic stuff from my phone (and others have for Ogo too), plus the plans the developers have for the bluetooth and stuff and that it's unlimited usage... So today I went out to the Cingular Blue store and bought one. So far it's been good. It actually took me longer to read throught the terms of service than for it to activate. I did manage to lock up the SIM and need to get the PUK code from customer care within the first half hour, but other than that no problems (and even that only took 5 minutes and one question from the rep). It's very responsive and even downloaded my mailbox pretty quick. I think I need t! o work on spam filtering a bit though - for the fact it'll be alerting me, not the deleting whick was actually really easy and quick. Anyways, I'll probably write more on the usability once I get more dynamic queries set up on my side. I'm still not sure if I'll keep it or not - I have 30 days to decide that. Anyways, if you know me and chat with me on IM you may want to add jmooneymobile to your list, as that's what I'll be using. Well, despite this thing being easy to type on, I think I'm gonna go back to the computer for a while.