So it's been a while. Last weekend I don't remember anything too out of the ordinary. I did watch Constantine, which was decent but nothing too special. Also watched After the Sunset, which I liked a lot.

Last week at work was nice in that even though it was the beginning of school, nothing blew up too much. Some surprise network upgrades to deal with some other issues (Word under Windows sucks when talking to a server). It's still up and running though and that's more to prevent things from getting any worse. I did end up doing a bit of extra work moving some servers onto a different network core, which will hopefully allow the transition to go better. It should be interesting to see what ends up happening over the next few weeks - hopefully only good things.

Saturday I got to catch up on sleep a bit. Also read a bit of a nice book I got on Active Directory. I'm still debating whether to read it straight through or use it as a reference. It's like 1500 pages so I may just read parts and then look up stuff as needed. I'll have to see on that though. I also watched Demolition Man. It's an interesting movie, definitely mid-90s rather than modern in effects. It's sorta scary how close some of the stuff in it sounds to the way society is going now though.

Sunday I went to church with the family at BBC, and then we went to the state fair. I hadn't been in years, and I'd definitely say it's gone down hill since I was younger. It's much less of people showing off their stuff, and almost entirely selling stuff now. I went to the all you can drink milk stand, which last time I went to was only a quarter. Now it costs a dollar, but at least they've upgraded to 12 oz cups. I still felt I had to get my money's worth, but only drank 4 cups. My brother beat me by a cup, but that last cup was hard. It definitely gets noticeable when you have to stand in line for a minute between cups rather than just downing them repeatedly. One of the more interesting things I thought was the KKMS booth, where the one guy would openly debate people on the street as to their beliefs. The pineapple malt at the dairy building was also very good. Other than that nothing too interesting. The free stuff people give away has definitely gone down in quality and volume. Now it seems to mostly be brochures and stuff. The whole fair experience was sorta funny too. I didn't have anything specific I wanted to see, I actually only found out we were going late Saturday night (and my brother found out on Sunday morning when he got my message). So the family basically just wondered in general directions, making several loops around the fair area. Nobody really bothered to stick that close together either. Everyone had such different interests that we'd walk into a building and nobody would pay attention to where anybody went - just go find something interesting, and eventually within a few buildings everyone would be somewhat close together again. Overall I'd say the fair was an OK experience, but nothing too special this year.

Monday was family birthdays, so it was up to the St. Cloud area. It was a fun time, as those seem to be happening less and less often as time goes on. I think we celebrated June through October this time. Those things used to be monthly... As they're dairy farmers and we hadn't seen the latest equipment (they had a fire a year or two ago that meant rebuilding pretty much everything), it was off to the barns and milking parlor. Everything is extremely automated now, to the point that the cows all walk in and line themselves up (with the help of metal guides), there's the cleaning and the equipment goes on, and when the milk stops the vacuum shuts down, the equipment falls, and is pulled back up out of the way. When the row is done, hit a button and the gates open and they walk out, and the process repeats. Still gotta watch out though - manure falling 5 feet to concrete still splatters quite a ways.