Friday was interesting. Spent the morning dealing with roaming profile issues. Apparently something with the XP image (at least on the laptops) has some weird issuse if they get their profile from that and try to go to a W2K machine. Or if their profile was created under NT4 and they now go to XP. I think it's time to start dumping out a template profile in their home directory when the account is created. I think part of the issue may also be due to caching/inconsistencies when the network is unavailable. I think we're getting ethernet hubs or switches to replace all the physical switches between the permanant machine and laptop cable on the instructor stations, which should solve some of the problems. In the meantime I've disabled offline files and all caching of credentials for previous logins - if the switch is in the wrong position it won't allow a login. Sometimes the whole way the windows profiles and settings works annoys me. It's nearly impossible to not copy large amounts of data around and none of the settings that really would help work without loosing stuff since user data and application data is so integrated (well, without user education that's followed and can have real penalties in data loss if not followed - try that one in an academic environment). Oh well. Got a "break" with the usual rush of random stuff for the afternoon. I'll be glad when the rush dies down and stuff is back to normal. It seems like all the good ideas for changes always come up during this time too, but are forgotten by the time there is time to do them. Or if they were tracked with Incidents it's "this thing where we talked about all the details in person". I have to say email can be much better than talking to people for most things work related - probably why most of our team's conversations beyond greetings and what's for lunch are on email (although the lunch mailing list is a funny twist on that). Anyways, after work a bunch of people came over for Two Towers. That's a good movie, although there seemed to be a couple glitches in encoding. It was annoyingly hot in the room though, which could have caused some of that I guess. The biggest thing was something I noticed in the theater too though - film needs something better than 24fps. For anything that's motion and especially stuff like LotR, 48fps would be really nice - pans with large amounts of change look jerky on 35mm (it seems to become really easy to see every frame), and with MPEG compression more fun stuff is added... Anyways, after the movie I flip over to email to discover that I have a few dozen emails from some spammer who went through Bethel's email list again. It looked like it was quick and over, but then I got some more (it's times like these I realise too many different addresses end up getting back to me) so it was quick track it down enough to blacklist the sender on all of the publicly visible mail servers. While I was up to modifying access files I also finally decided to reject messages from this one IP who still wants to send me 30+ sobig messages a day. I figure at 100K each it's better to reject them on the frontend... Saturday was sleepin time although it was a little sticky. I basically sat around most of the day, and eventually watched Ransom. Good flick, although it looks like it was shot on grainy film too (similar to minority report in a way, but much more brightly lit). Not quite what I was planning for the day, but oh well...