And the skips are gone. A while back I applied a firmware update to my Karma. It was a minor bugfix one, mainly detecting more types of corrupted audio files and allowing them to be partially played or flagged so they are disabled in playlists until corrected. This was all fine until I tried playing some tracks which are encoded in 320kbps vorbis. About halfway through the song it'd start skipping occationally and stuff. Only happened on those and most other portable players which can even play 320kbps don't do it well, so no big deal. I went and told it to rebuild the song database tonight and after pausing my song for about 2 minutes all is fixed. This firmware version also makes it so the ethernet works better and it just pauses during the transfer rather than actually stopping playback too, which is cool. According to the docs they fixed some unicode locality stuff and support UTF-8/16 and Kanji so maybe I can upload tracks with non-ascii names now. Can't argue with a player you can sync over ethernet and they release free upgrades to it every month or two. :)

Sunday went OK. I got home from church and couldn't get my email. Turns out the IMAP server crashed again. Brent's replacing that as soon as he gets back from vacation - hopefully it won't happen again until after he gets back. That meant a run in to Bethel, but luckily it was an easy problem to fix. I had tell a former student to stop writing bad code and loading down the shell server and do it right, but he seemed to take it well. If you have procmail available, a perl script which goes and shuffles things around through IMAP is just painful to yourself. After rebooting more bethelwulf nodes to stop the emails from them, left and headed to family birthdays. It had been months so there were a lot of birthdays. Was a decent time. I ended up loading up the back of my car and bringing home more toys, this time speakers. Stopped by my parents place to grab the amps to go with said speakers and for some reason the family was playing with a sphygmomanometer and decided to check my bloodpressure for fun (guess that's what I get for having so many medical people in the family). Of course the timing was just after I had just restacked a pile of amps downstairs and lugged two 7301s up the stairs. And they wondered why my systolic was a little high... Now I just need to buy or build a crossover and I can try and not blow out the windows in the house or burn up the wiring. They'd be great for the outdoor movie night idea, but nobody seems to like the idea of helping me move them. Something about the speakers being heavier than the amps or some crazy thing. May have to try it once though.

Monday was a Monday. Started sorting things out at work, working on more automation and stuff. Blah. After work I'm relaxing at home and the server room calls me to complain about its temperature. I tell it to stop calling people and ignore it for a while. Still bad so go in and check on it. Turns out Bethel had a power outages I thought was minor but the air conditioner didn't like them much. It was hot and humid, so I turned on the old unit and tried to get it to not drip all over the hallway. It sorta works so I leave. On my way out security is escorting an Xcel truck through campus. I saw said Xcel truck leaving when I got to work this morning - turns out there was more than one outage and apparently not minor. I know a lawnmower and a 220 line were involved in an incident on campus in the same general timeframe, but I think that's actually completely separate and happened this morning (unless they were mowing after 10pm, in which case no wonder they hit it).

Tuesday was routine as well. Dave forgot his DVDs, so we went to Wendy's instead. I also rebuilt one Windows server, and automated more stuff. We got free corn in the afternoon, and while not as good as past years it was still free. Finished off the day by making a list of IPs/hostnames and what I think they do. Tomorrow is the boss's last day before a week and a half of vacation, and Dave and I get to try and pick up the slack. We get to learn about everything he's done so far this summer tomorrow. Should be an interesting day...