Monday night I saw Dark Water. It was very creepy. It wasn't really a horror film, more a psychopathic story, just that the main character was trapped. It was ok not great, I don't think I would recommend it unless you are in the mood to be creeped out.
Oh and it was probably a bad idea for a date too.
As requested I have added a link to my Home Theater Blog in the links section to the left. I am updating it almost as often as this one.
Well the boot disc based install didn't work, but clean install from within XP did. I now have Vista up and running on a M200. I will play with it more tomorrow. Monday I can install stuff at school and really see how it works.
I finally have a use for my DVD burner. I even opened my 50 pack of DVD+R. The reason is Vista Beta 1. As the world knows it was released last week. I spent Friday downloading the 2.4 GB ISO. It took about 12 hours on and off, it kept retrying and timing out.
I burned a copy today and as I type this I attempting to install it on a Toshiba Protege M200. I tried once already and it just went to a black screen. It is kind of slow since I am using an external USB 1.1 DVD drive. Hopefully I will have better luck this time.
About three weeks ago I installed a new exchange server at school. I migrated all the mailboxes to the new server. Everything seemed to be fine for about two weeks. Then people tried to access Public Folders via the web and I realized I would need to migrate them sooner than later. I decided the best course of action was to just replicate from the old server to the new server.
When I first setup the replication I was getting an error. I found there was a hotfix and I applied it. Then I setup the replicas. This is where the problems started. It created the folders on the new server, but no content got replicated. I called Microsoft and they tried a few things and told me to wait and see. I wasn't able to check it until much later in the day and still nothing. I called Microsoft back about 4 PM.
I sat on the phone with a PSS rep who if he was in the US had not been so for long. He took remote control of the server and just kept running in circles. No progress seemed to be being made. At about the 3 hour point he brought in an actual MS employee (you can tell by their email address) from the connections group. This engineer checked some of the same things. Eventually we found that Intergrated Authentication was disabled on SMTP. This is what caused it all. Apparently replication (and probably other stuff) needs to send authenticated SMTP messages.
At this point I think everything is replicated. I will check it more on Monday and hopefully fully decommision the old server.
Last weekend my parent's came down for the first visit. My dad saw the house during inspection but my mom had only seen pictures. They brought down a La-Z-Boy that they recovered and rebuilt for me. The one I had they took back to do a similar update too. Did you know that all real La-Z-Boy chairs have removable backs? Me either. One the one chair the back had never even been locked into place so just yank and back comes off.
My parent's looked over the progress I have made in the upstairs and in the basement. My mom wasn't impressed by the curtains that were hastily put up to show the house. She took a bunch of measurements of all the windows to help me choose some different ones in the future.
My dad helped me replace the faucet in my kitchen sink. The one I had was quite old, leaked and the spray hose was broken. We got a new fancy one with a built in soap dispenser and has the water control on separate stalk from the water spout. They are quite heavy and hopefully don't rip about the sink.
My dad also helped me talk through the basement work. We went over waterproofing, electrical, walls, flooring and other odds and ends. He gave me some pointers and also was sure that I was nuts overall.
What did my dad like best about his visit? My orange/citrus flavored tooth paste. He had never seen such a thing and was truly amazed.
I added a newer picture over on the left. Yeah me. Some point I will make them randomly switch.
Well today after I came back from moving I again found my DSL in a wacky state. I was getting 95-99% packet loss. I called Speakeasy again to try and troubleshoot, which I have done several times since I moved. I made the mistake of saying there was static on the line so the tech immediately said it was a local phone company (Verizon) problem. I agreed that this was probably true so I had him put the line into safe mode to get it working period.
Then I tried to call Verizon to put in a trouble ticket. I got through to the 800 number but the voicemail system freaked and got stuck in a loop. I hung up and tried again and the 800 number just rang off the hook. I guess my static freaked it out real good.
My DSL was limping along at this point so I just went to Verizon's web page to enter a trouble ticket. In the process of logging the ticket it asked if I had tested at the NID. Which I had a while ago but not recently, so I went outside to check again. First problem was that there is now an ant hill in my NID, have to deal with that later. I brushed off enough to get to test jack. Hooked in the phone and it was crystal clear. Hmm.
Now I have redone the wiring for the phone lines in the house and there is only about a 10 ft run from the NID to the splitter for the house, so this seemed strange. I then checked it with the same phone at the splitter and sure enough the static was there. I thought to test one other thing. I unhooked the DSL modem from the splitter and wallah the static disappeared. Hmm.
In case you don't know DSL works on the same line as normal voice, but just at a very different frequency. You attach filters on each phone or in my case at the whole house splitter. Apparently the filter was bad and was not filtering at all or even worse it was introducing noise of its own. I swapped the filter with a spare (speakeasy sends you like 6). Magically the static disappeared.
I then called Speakeasy back to put my line back into normal mode. I sync'ed at 6.0 MB / 768 KB, which is what I am supposed to be at. Hopefully now it will work more reliably than it has of late.
My day began at about 9 AM when I started mowing the lawn. It was prolonged by my neighbor trying to convice me to bag my grass for trash pickup rather than making a pile of it on side of my lawn.
When I was done about 10:30 I noticed I had a message from Heather that she was on her way. She was being nice enough to help me take the last bits of stud walls to the local dump. After we dropped off the trash at the dump we went to her house for the next trip.
We loaded up her truck with 2 mattress, a box spring, two futons, a set of bed rails and a futon couch frame. We took them over to her friend Kate's boyfriend's apartment. After which we decided to go back and get Heather's love seat and take there as well.
Once we were done with Kate we went to help another person move. We went to Erica's house next. We got a bed, two bookshelves and a dresser from her place and took them to her new apartment to drop them off.
Finally about 4 PM Heather returned to my place to drop me off. Basically about 7 hours straight of manual labor. That is after the 2 hours I spent last night on the 160 2'x2' floor pieces I had to unload. I am little tired.
I got the urge to catch up on my HT Blog tonight. Although I kept going until the point where I was very tired. More to come tomorrow.
I figured there were enough types of posts and enough posts in general that I should put a category list up. This way if someone only wants to read what I think about movies they can. Why you would I cannot answer, but there it is.
I haven't done a weight update in a while so I figured it was due. Last week I lost 4 pounds. I am now within 5 pounds of my low in January of 2003, which I think was my low for about the last 10 years. I think some of the loss has been muscle mass, since I haven't been working out the same of late. More around the house stuff than gym stuff.
If you look at the category you will notice that I am talking computers. This means the invite is not for a party or wedding or the like. It is for something I am very much looking forward too and will hopefully spend a great deal of time with. I haven't had the chance of late to play with similar things. Not since the fun days of 2000-2001 calendar wise. You may be able to guess what I am talking about, or you may not care. However for another year or so I believe I am not allowed to say much more. Yeah!
Well today I had my what I thought was my first root kit on the network. For those that don't know a root kit is a kind of virus that is able to hide itself from most normal detection. The virus can't be seen in Task Manger and the files that ran it can't be seen in Explorer or CMD. Rootkits also do much more than this, but that is some of the main points that allow it to hide.
Today I found what I thought was one of these on a desktop. I was able to find it by using Process Explorer from Sysinternals. There was a difference in the processes listed between Process Explorer and Task Manger. I attempted to look at the file but couldn't since it was invisible to normal file access.
I then tried to run another utility from Sysinternals called RootkitRevealer. It didn't find anything which I thought was odd. However at Mark Russinovich's talk at TechED he mentioned that the rootkit and makers and he are in a constant battle of one upmanship. At this point I swapped the machine out, which was going to happen soon anyway this just forced my hand.
After swapping machines I took the infected one to the tech offices to investigate further. I booted a BartPE disk so that I could get at the files. First I moved the one I knew about and then rebooted. Another file in a different location popped up as this point in its place and did the same thing. Next I went back into BartPE and removed both. After booting back into windows I found all the files also created at the same time and zipped them up. I scanned the files with our Norton and it reported nothing, also tried Ad-Aware and still nothing.
I sent a note to Mark Russinovich since I thought I had found a new variant that he wasn't detecting. He actually wrote me back in about an hour and asked for it. Just in case I sent it to my home account to see if it was going to be flagged as virus. It wasn't on the school server, but was on mine by one engine. It was the Kapersky engine. Which I had disabled at school since it was causing so many problems. I still sent it off to Mark just in case.
According to the results when it got flagged it is the Win32.QooLogic.N virus. The best description I have found is here. Apparently this family of viruses can perform limited root kit like behavior. I imagine it doesn't work well enough to be caught by RootKitRevealer since it only hides itself in very rudimentary ways.
Oh and while this was on the machine, basically any IE process hung and lots of other weird stuff was happening. I am going to reimage the machine just in case, since there is no way to know what all was done to the machine.
As I mentioned I added a new controller card to my server. Before hand it had an Adaptec 2940U2W (which replaced the onboard 39160 which failed and I miss) and a Promise Ultra133TX2. I had the SCSI card as primary boot and the EIDE card as secondary. After I added the High Point RocketRAID 1520 it off course added itself as the primary boot device in the BIOS. I went in and moved up the SCSI to the top and also disabled the EIDE and SATA cards from possible boot. At this point the machine wouldn't boot at all. I tried lots of stuff and then I eventually went back in and set the other cards to later in the boot order. Then it worked again.
It seems the cards need to be in the boot order for their onboard BIOS to load properly. At least with my Supermicro P3TDE6 motherboard. This was an oddity I had never encountered before.
Recently the main data drive in Hoyty.com has been dying a slow and painful death. It has never totally stopped working thankfully. It was having problems with high quantity access. Such as backing up an Exchange database to and from itself. It would time out and the controller card would throw a ton of errors.
I wasn't completely sure if it was drive or controller card and I wasn't in the mood to test it. Mostly becuase it has the only copy of lots of data that is sort of important to me.
What I decided to do was finally practice what I preach. I ordered two new Western Digital 250 GB SATA II hard drives and a High Point RocketRAID 1520 SATA RAID card. I thought about 400 GB drives, but they were older technology and almost twice as much. Also at this point I only have about 90 GB of data on the original 200 GB drive.
The drives aren't the fastest available, but they are a good mix of performance, heat and technology. Also the RAID card isn't the best, but it is SATA, does mirroring and was dirt cheap. I put the drives into a RAID 1 mirror. Then I moved everything from my 200 GB to the new array. Everything seems fine and I will take out the old one and see if I can figure out the problem.
Sometime this weekend the power went out at my school. We know it was 3:05 becuase one of the clocks stopped, however it might have been 3 PM sunday or 3 am Monday. Either way as of now it is still down. Whenever it does come back up I get to go bring everything back online. Lucky me, woo hoo.
Update 9 PM : Still no power. No I get to sleep with my phones since I am effectively on call for whenever the power does come on. Yeah me.
Before we went and got our books Karen and I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We got there only a few minutes before the movie started. The movie was sold out and it was a fairly small theater, which meant seats were sparse. We found a couple on an end with empty seats on either side. Karen asked them to move over and were able to get pretty good seats. The only downside to the seats was that they seemed to be directly below the AC duct which was blasting, I was freezing. Another weird thing was a coupld that came in right before the movie during the trailers. They couldn't find a seat they liked so they just sat down on the stairs next to us.
To the movie. I had some expectations going in due to the fact it was a Tim Burton / Johnny Depp film, also I quickly realized it had Danny Elfman music too. The movie is not a remake of the earlier Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, it was another interpretation of the original book. Since they are based on the same thing there are many scenes that are in both and are similar. As is normal for a Tim Burton film there is a unique look to the film, both brighter and darker than the original film. It was really cool to see visualization using current technology of Willy Wonka's inventions. There was also the storyline of Willy's father which I don't think was in the original film at all.
The only thing I didn't like as much about the film was the Oompa Loompa singing scenes. These scenes were mostly parodies of songs with elaborate choreography. They were cute, however it didn't seemed to mixed properly, which may have been the theaters fault. Often you couldn't hear the lyrics or understand them over the music. The scenes are an important part of the story, but just didn't work as well for me.
Overall I really enjoyed the film and definitely recommend it. Especially if you like other Tim Burton films like Beetlejuice, Big Fish or Sleppy Hollow.
Karen and I had discussed long ago getting together to get our copies of Harry Potter at midnight the day it came out. We finally figured out how and when Thursday. I met her at her place about 8 PM. She grilled some steaks, corn on the cob, potatos and texas toast. After dinner we went to see Charlie and the Chocolat Factory. The movie was over about 11:30 PM. We then walked over to Barnes and Noble. It was a little crazy there. There was one line of people waiting to get tickets to see what place in line they were. Luckily Karen had gone by earlier to get a ticket and we were only number 128. It was difficult to tell what good it did to reserve a copy ahead of time, since those people seemed to be standing in line with all the walk-ins like us. We got our books and were out of the store by about 12:30 AM. I read the first paragraph to Karen in car while we drove back to her house. I will probably read a bit of the book this weekend.
Before going and seeing the movie Wednesday Patrick helped me get some of the last bits out. We took the carpet (drop cloths) out and put it in first then we put some of the fake wood paneling plywood walls on top. Patrick then got in the dumpster and jumped up and down on the pile to squish it. We then took some remaining junk from the basment and the back shed. Now I just need to remember to tell the people to come and pick it up.
The only thing remaining to remove for the basement are some of the stud walls and the tile. They however are not keeping me from running wires to the upstairs. I want to start wiring electrical, data and video for the rest of the house.
Wednesday night I went to see War of the Worlds with Patrick. I haven't seen the original in quite a while so I only remember bits. Patrick said there were scenes that were direct remakes and done well. The movie was very good. It had a great deal of suspense, even one scene with no picture at all and just some environmental sounds. The sound in this film was also amazing, lots of scene enhancing drops and such. Really made you feel like you were in the scene and heightened the suspense. There were a great deal of special effects as well, but they were done well and weren't overpowering. I highly recommend this film.
My dumpster was delivered Friday afternoon. This means that I really have to get going with demolition since I only have it until Monday the 18th. There are pictures of it in my second picture gallery. It is fairly large, although it is filling up quickly. I first put in all the fake wood paneling in, since it was flat and would just lay in the bottom. After that I started ripping down the ceiling in earnest. I just keep filling up the trashcan and then emptying it. Probably about 10 trips or so thus far. I think in the last two days I have done about 160 sq ft of ceiling. Lots of fun let me tell you. I don't know how someone could do this eight hours a day.
I have a separate blog just for my Home Theater, since there may be some people that find it and don't want all the other junk here.
I saw Batman Begins on Sunday 6/26/05 with my friend Patrick. This movie was awesome, I would say it is the best but I still have a soft spot for the first one. It easily matches the first one and even surpases it on levels. Most of my friends I have talked to agreed on the quality of the film.
There were a couple of things that really got me. First, was the use of Ra's Al Gul as the main villain. This character is not known to most since he is not an often used villain. He however was in the Batman cartoons from the WB network that were on a few years ago. It was really cool to see him. Next, was using Scarecrow who also isn't as well known. Both these characters allowed them to establish the new franchise while avoiding comparisons to earlier movies. Third, Bruce Wayne is not made up to be a mad scientist himself. He instead borrows from an inventor at Wayne Industries, I think this makes much more sense than some of the earlier ideas about the character.
The other amazing thing with this movie is its star power. I am not talking about the biggest stars, but rather real actors. The movie had Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and even Rutger Hauer. I also really liked Christian Bale as both Wayne and Batman, not as good as Michael Keaton but close.
I highly recommend this movie, it even lives up to the standards set lately by other comic book movies such as Spider-Man and X-Men.
Almost every morning I see a bunny in my backyard. Last night as I went to take picture of dumpster I saw him sitting in backyard. My current camera has zero zoom capabilities but I took a pic anyway. I see rabbits all over the neighborhood, they all look similar so they may be the same ones and they just roam.
Some people who read this may know that I rarely (like 1% of the time) remember having dreams let alone the content of them. I continue to find this odd. Most people assume I have them and just don't remember, I tend to think I just don't dream. This one however I remember and in great detail. Anyway on to the dream.
It opened up in a training room. One of those rooms that has desks for everyone one and a slight elevation change from front to back. Shortly after it began I realized it was a meeting for employees of Microsoft Consulting Services. I am not sure how I knew this, either the person leading the meeting said this or I read it on a paper on the desk. Also I had the feeling that it was my first day or close to it.
Me being employed by Microsoft I believe would be odd. As some might know I once worked for Microsoft. We parted on somewhat dubious terms, I still like them (as evidenced by my daily work) however the feelings are not returned. This is not to say I don't work well with many Microsoft employees because I do. There are probably less than 10 people in Microsoft who even remember me as an employee and even fewer still who know anything about my departure. I just have a feeling that in some database somewhere I am listed. This listing is in case someday some new MS person is considering hiring me and they do a search and a little pop-up window comes up with my name and the word evil next to it. Maybe I am too full of myself though.
Ok so sorry for the sidetrack, back to the dream. As the dream continues I have a feeling I am in California, I really have no idea why. Maybe I am at the Silicon Valley office of MS, who knows. Then I get the feeling that this is not directly where I went after leaving RPCS. It seems there was some intermediate job that lasted a very short time and then I went to MS.
The next thing I begin thinking about is my house. I am worried where I am going to live and how I am going to sell my house in its current state. I am guessing I didn't finish the basement and that is what I am worried about. I ask the person leading the meeting about this and he says that aren't sure where they want me anyway and to just wait on it.
Next I look at the table and there are some papers concerning rankings and such, I think for reviews. This is a little odd since I just started and so I figure it doesn't apply to me. There is another group of papers with short essay (one paragraph) questions on them. Some are technology related others more general. The people around me are working on them, but I am not really. Then the person leading the meeting says something like 10 minutes left. It is at this point I realize I am supposed to be doing these questions but haven't even started. I frantically begin to write. He quickly says time up and I realize I have almost nothing done. I turn it in feeling very silly for having done so poorly.
It is about this point when the dream ends or I wake up, not sure which. Looking back on it, maybe I was dreaming of an interview process. It was a little weird, but semi plausible. Maybe I am stressed about work or taking on this relatively large remodeling process. Who knows.
GUI is Graphical User Interface for those who don't have their acronym dictionary available. Anyway in most movies featuring computers in some way have these amazing GUI's. Anyone who has used a computer knows these are mostly fanciful creations. One of the ones that always sticks out in my mind is the adaptation of Michael Crichton's Disclosure. In the movie near the end they showed Michael Douglas put on a VR headset and then he could walk around in the files sorted like a library. It also had a helper which would search for you.
If you look at this you can see some quick shots of sample code. It shows drawing the tree and files and folders in a 3D landscape. This an early view of things that will be possible in Longhorn the next version of Windows. Sure it is nothing like in the movies yet but it at least shows that we are heading in the direction that will allow it to be possible.
This doesn't talk to the issue that most of the movie GUI's would be pretty useless in practice I believe. Interesting to see what is happening though.
