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.