I just uploaded pictures from Friday for anyone who's interested.
I took some pictures this weekend up on the north shore between Duluth and Tettegouche State Park. Nothing too spectacular, but I figured I'd post them.
So I was driving on Monday night and noted this Kansas plate which I thought was slightly humorous. Not quite as good as too rude though. Sorry for the crap quality - it was night and I only had my cell phone camera in the car.
Sometimes I just have better things to do than update. Like nothing. Sometime shortly after the last update things blew up at work. Then as soon as or shortly before one thing would be fixed something else would break. I don't really remember the order or anything anymore - the whole few weeks turned into a blur, with pretty much solid work and not much sleep. Things have pretty much recovered now, although there's still plenty to do, but at least I get to leave on time. At least most of the time. Tonight I get to take stuff down at 10pm, so I just stayed the whole time, spent a bit cleaning the office, upgraded one of our fileservers by 800GB (hot swap is so nice - it means I can get out of here sooner), and am gonna be upgrading the RAID card firmware and applying patches on an Exchange server in a bit. Such is life. I think I need to start planning some time to do something else though.
In case you haven't figured them out or been sent links already, I went to a couple weddings and have pictures up online. First is Betsy & Pete, second is Ross & Lindsey. There's also pictures from Ross' bachelor party up on the pics page. Other weekends included my brother's white coat ceremony for med school, and then one of trying to relax. This weekend I may see about wiring my house in anticipation of filling the attic with insulation due to the gas price thing predicted for the winter and insulation being on sale. I think I'll go 2xCAT-5, 2xRG-6QS, and 1xSCAT-5 to each plate, mostly one per room except for some big ones. I think that should cover things pretty well.
Movies have been somewhat lacking although there's been some good ones. Raadt and I have been taking advantage of the free redbox movies on Mondays in October to get some. I also have all the netflix, and Firefly courtesy of the JoeBuck. That's a sweet show. Much better than the 24 I had been watching. Other movies were The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which was good, Hotel Rwanda which was also good, and Brazil which I thought sucked.
Today the aforementioned webmaster noticed the /. article on the MySpace XSS worm, leading to a discussion on it since he's just been working with AJAX interfaces and stuff. After the discussion about how they deserved it for pretty much ignoring stuff that everyone knew about, we started thinking about whether other places had vulnerabilities. Due to schdav's recent activity the one that immediately came to mind was facebook. We poked a bit but it seems they've actually locked it down quite decently (upon further review it appears they had vulnerabilities but didn't ignore them). There are some interesting things you can do related to certain actions such as collecting friends, but it's a more interactive process and not an exponential worm like samy's. Still should be an interesting experiment. Enough fun for the day though - back to work...
This weekend was my brother's graduation, along with that of quite a few of my friends. So I was there, and took some pics of graduation and some of the Baccalaureate. Some of you know of other pics I have up. If you don't ask brooke or Betsy. :)
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.
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.
I got a comment about my pictures not being easy to find since they're all over right now. So for now I put links to them all in one place. Hopefully in the somewhat near future I'll consolidate them all into a better system.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
