SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to receive MAC SYNC frame within time-out period
SYNC Timing Scnchronization failure - Failed to acquire FEC framing
SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing

That's a fancy way for the cable modem to say that it can't talk to the cable company. I think it's scary that I know what those mean even though I've never actually worked with cable modems other than using them. Guess that's what I get for being into both networking and radio stuff. Can anyone else say what QAM/QPSK stands for without looking? Hint - QAM is the cable alternative to the 8VSB format used for terrestrial DTV broadcasting. :)

Work today was decent. Dave and I got to learn a lot of passwords and get diagrams and explanations of how to reboot the server rooms if stuff goes horribly wrong. I hope I don't have to use them. In finishing up things before he left my boss also set up some stuff so I can test the new list server. Now the trick is just to make sure I don't completely collapse Bethel's mail server cluster again. How many thousands of bounces can it handle per minute... :) I have the routing changes necessary to only test on half the cluster now though, so if I kill anything it shouldn't be bad.

I figured out how to disable drag and drop as well as cross-application copy/paste under OS X today. I guess "figured out" sorta implies that I was trying to do so, while in reality it was a side effect of trying to eliminate unnecessary services from my machine - pbs tends to be handy. Although the good news is you can run for many hours without it no problem, and despite the man page saying users shouldn't manually run it if you know where to find it I thing you're qualified to do so (everything seems to work). I finally killed off blued and stopped it from respawning by changing filesystem permissions. If you don't have bluetooth enabled there's no reason to be running it's daemon. Yet Apple seems to have a lot of crap enabled. Also disabled automount, cups, nfs, crashreporter, and some other junk. The stupid iChat helper is on the list to kill occationally. I don't use or want iChat. And then there's AppleSpell. I don't find a spell checker handy enough to have it running all the time in the background. It looks like X11 is the program starting it too, which makes no sense. Spell check in a terminal window?!? Oh well, I think the best part of OS X is chmod -x. :)

OK, enough geeky ranting. I just want a UI that doesn't add random delays to stuff.