So far everything is going well. It's been pretty fun. Saturday was a wedding in Iowa. It wasn't that bad, as the service was about 30 minutes, and then the reception was like 6.5 hours. They blew out the sound and lights twice (actually took out power strips, not breakers), and the first time everyone just started singing. It was a little scary how well some people knew the songs, so that was interesting to see. It was a bit over 100 there, with heat indexes around 115. So we stayed inside a lot. Then was off west on Sunday for lots of camping.

BTW, gas is dirt cheap in Iowa, premium is cheaper than regular in Nebraska (apparently nobody wants ethanol, so it's significantly cheaper), and the regular is only 85 octane in Wyoming but everything's a bit pricy.

In Nebraska we drove through to Ogallala and camped right on the edge of Lake Ogallala. It was pretty nice there. The next day we drove to see some friends in Wyoming who we hadn't seen for about 10 years. It was nice to see them again, and we ended up spending most of the day there. By the time we got on the road and ate dinner and decided to find a place to stay it was like 10pm, so we stayed at this hole in Rawlins. BTW, in Wyoming the cheap hotels are like $150/night since people are traveling and the other options are hundreds of miles away. If you're already expecting and packed for semi-rustic camping though, you can get away with cheaper places though. Wouldn't want to use them for much more than a roof over the head though.

After that we've been camping in the Grant Tetons area, the first couple nights in a KOA just outside of Jackson, tonight in the park, and the next few in Yellowstone. Those are a bit nicer. Fun things include a chuckwagon style meal and show, whitewater rafting, finding all the good places to eat from the locals (much better than paying the $30/plate for average food), and driving around the parks taking pictures of wildlife and scenery. I've only gone through a few GB so far, but think I have some good shots. I'll have to go through them and post them somewher when I get back.

The computer situation on the trip is sorta funny. Since a large portion of the trip involved I-35 in MN (which we all have seen plenty), Iowa, and Nebraska, we've had a LAN in the car with cellular Internet Access. It was pretty much in solid use until the western edge of Nebraska, and a couple times a day in Wyoming so everyone can check email. It's actually working pretty well, and much to my surprise after tracking down the source of the slow connection for a while it does support streaming audio decently. That 20s latency (not a typo) is killer though... They're useful for looking things up, and google maps comes in very handy while traveling when you haven't bothered to plan ahead and are just going with whatever seems interesting to do for the day. It's also handy for offloading a few memory cards per day. Although we forgot media and had to pick up a 30 pack of DVD-Rs to store pictures. Hopefully that'll last the trip. Two guys with DSLRs shooting RAW eats through stuff at an amazing rate...

I think that's enough for now. I haven't gotten any frantic phone calls so I can only assume Pete hasn't burned my house down or anything and stuff is OK in the cities. Although I do see Bethel has been having the all too common network issues again. Anyways, I better double check all my food and toiletries are in bear-resistant containers and get some sleep.

I need to post stuff more often. It gets long and boring this way. I'll compensate by keeping this one short. Movies since the last post include 21 Grams, Sum of All Fears, Runaway Jury, Traffic and Bad Boys. They're all good in one way or another. Work's been busy. I think I need to go into project mode and stop doing small stuff and just get a bunch of stuff out of the way. There's too much in the planning stages right now or needing feedback from others. Apparently everyone else is in the same boat since they don't respond to emails about what they need for power in the server rooms. Even after I send out a followup asking if everyone's keeping them in their offices since nobody needs power in the server rooms. Anyways, due to comments and requests I'll probably be having a movie night sometime soon. I'll send something out to the list when I have a better idea. For those complaining about there not being one, you should really offer suggestions for a movie though. In other news I bought a new toy which I like so far. I was taking pictures in the normal lighting of my office today (no flash), which was fun but my coworkers didn't like it too much. I'm too lazy to post any pictures though. There's only a couple good ones since I think I took a grand total of 5 of them due to actually doing work most of the time while I'm there... Anyways, tomorrow is free photo editing class. We'll see how that goes.

Work as usual. Just tedious, although I think we're making good progress towards automating identifying bustificated lab machines, which should help everyone out a bit. And should be much better than having some poor student go around and attempt to log in to every one...

I got a New Camera today. Yea, it's not top of the line, but it also was dirt cheap (like $100 cheap). That's a good solid camera though. The goal was something I can actually leave in my bag rather and have with me rather than having to make a special point of carrying my camera or miss stuff because I don't have it. It's small enough I can slip it in my pocket and it's not that noticable either. I also managed to install the software and properly tag both my cameras with my name and stuff (which also gets embedded in all the pictures they take), which is a good thing.

I finally finished testing the domain stuff. Looks like we need to roll out more Domain Controllers to properly handle stuff. Oh well, I guess you do what's necessary. At least I don't have a domain controller and 4 desktop windows systems running on my powerbook anymore. Hmm. I think there's a total lunar eclipse coming up Wednesday night. I'll have to try and remember that or see if I can dig up info about it. Missed the one in the spring, and the next one is 2007...

Big highlight of the workweek was probably a new system in the IncidentBase where it should automatically handle a large portion of the need to track whether users need to be called back a second time or the Incidents closed - both are now handled automatically. Hopefully that'll go well. Other than that not much interesting. Finished up some stuff and started working on stuff that had been sitting around for a while. Friday was break for students, but we had to work. Sorta annoying since there's nobody around so it feels like it should be a vacation day but it's not...

Saturday I didn't get to sleep in since the plan was to leave my parents' place at around 9am to head up to St. John's for the football game. Was a good trip, and took a lot of pics. Ended up using a 70-200mm 2.8L lens with a 2x teleconverter on my Rebel for the game. That was nice since it meant I had an effective lens length over over 650mm and could sit up above the stands and get good shots of guys on the field. :) At one point some security guy even came up to us and asked if we had media passes. Which is sorta funny when you realize St. John's doesn't really have them. And that we were out on the way to the parking lot to do some tailgaiting after being in the stadium already. Unfortunately Bethel lost horribly, which was bad since Bethel thought they had a good chance and the St. Johns team had been sorta freaked out about the game all week. After the game took some other pics over one of the lakes with the chapel and the trees on the way out. Then some more scenic stuff too at Lake Maria state park. Now my arm is a bit sore from carrying that thing around all day though. :(

Another week complete. Nothing too exciting during the week. Got advisor mailing lists up and running, and some other miscellaneous stuff. Sesame Beef, but they apparently didn't give Wing all that great of meat this time. On Friday stuff crashed, people didn't tell people, and Nick and I figured it out when tracking down other problems. Then more stuff died, we blocked stuff, and it worked. Then the router paniced loosing the block rules, and I hacked root and added them back, along with a startup script in case it crashed again. Did get monitoring up though and since then nimda has created a couple dozen Incidents for machines which are misbehaving. 1.4GB of blocked SYN traffic so far - wow. Nick and I finished off the night by going to Taco Bell and ended up eating outside because the inside was closed. Oh well, it was a nice night.

Saturday I got up early to attempt to make it to the Bethel football game. Go out to my car and it just clicks when I turn the key. After a bit of troubleshooting and poking with meters and vaporizing metal, determined that it wasn't a dead battery, but actually the battery was broken. Luckily figured that out just in time before Betsy and Pete came over to give it a jump (thanks for being willing to help out), saving them the trip. The thing was apparently leaking acid (there was a puddle of probably .75 liters of acid in the battery tray only visible once the battery was out), and it had caused the post to corrode and come off the battery. At first it only looked like it had broken, thus the attempts to bridge it and the vaporized metal (ah, the fun chemistry of lead acid). Ended up with a trip to buy a new battery (under $40), going through a few boxes of baking soda do neutralize the acid, and a jump to get it over to my parents place where we cleaned it out, got the old battery post properly removed from the cables, and washed and siphoned out the tray, and it's back up and running. More excitement than I wanted for the day. Only got one acid burn from it and it's pretty small.

Mixed in with all that were two sports games. The first was Bethel's at Hamline. Even saw Mr. Boyum there, and got a picture of him avoiding looking at the camera. My dad got his 20d Friday so I got my camera back and got to use his 28-70mm USM IS lens that came with it (he was using a 70-200 USM IS 2.8L). Nice lens, and very fast focus. Probably should get a little closer than the stands with it though. Another photographer there loaned him a 1.4x teleconverter for the day, so his photos should be interesting. After that went to my youngest sister's soccer game, and ended up swapping lenses and using the L for a bit. That one's even nicer, although having a lens that weights 3x as much as the camera and is worth 2x as much feels a little odd. Probably can't justify buying it, but they can be rented in the cities for about $25/day (a weekend is a "day"), so may have to do that occationally.

Finished off Saturday (well, other than the car thing) by Betsy, Pete, brooke, Joe, and Travis coming over for movie night. We watched Rushmore which is a decent movie, although seems a bit rushed. Probably could have stretched it out to 2 hours and not had it been too boring. Sunday was church at Salem, which I was tired for. I must not have slept well since I was both tired and sore. Oh well. Closed up some stuff for work (stuff from Friday night), and just sorta relaxed for the afternoon. Watched Underworld, which was pretty decent. Think the Matrix movies without the disappointment of what happened to the story, mixed with something like The Crow. Lots of shooting and chasing/acrobatics, along with a scarily realistic soundtrack. You know how most movies sorta have lots of vibration when shots happen? This one you feel the shots. And there are lots of PoV shots when one person gets attacked by another - and you feel those impacts too. Fun movie.