journaling: enabled

Well, in 11 days I’ll be in a new house (and without Internet access for a weekend). We still haven’t come up with much assistance for moving but hopefully we’ll be able to pry some people out of the woodwork. We’ve rented a storage unit here in town to transfer stuff to so hopefully there won’t be much to actually move out of the current place on moving day.

Work has been okay of late. Busy and a bit stressful … I haven’t been getting as much done as I would like. Email has been causing headaches for us with various issues (authentication daemon dying, quotas going haywire, etc.). We’re also in the midst of working on wireless to get that “up” by the end of the semester.

My ISP is re-organizing their network tomorrow, so I get a new static IP address. Hopefully they don’t do anything rash like start blocking incoming services. Then I’d have to start hunting for a new ISP I think.

Nothing big planned for the rest of the week, other than moving relating stuff. Need to buzz up to my parents sometime and get a trailer to move some of the larger items with (e.g. washer, dryer). Hopefully we can find some help this weekend so we can get them out to storage this weekend rather than waiting until 1-2 days before.

Tonight Liz and I went to Olive Garden in Eau Claire to celebrate 3 yrs together (those at the wedding may remember ceremony time of 4:17). We decided we like that one better than the ones in Maplewood and Oakdale. Much less busy than Maplewood and more open than Oakdale. Got to see the construction going on along I-94 that we skipped this weekend (saw signs for “90 minute delay ahead” and decided a detour down to Hwy 10 was in order). I guess that particular road work is certainly due.

Anyway, bedtime for this rabbit. zzzzzz.

Well, I haven’t posted much lately. Life has been busy. Work is slowly returning to something resembling normal after the month-long email crisis. The current hot project is wireless access, which is supposed to be available in a few weeks. There are a fair number of lab projects to do this summer, including a major upgrade of one of our Mac labs (complicated by the fact that we’re switching from PowerPC Macs to Intel Macs). I gave blood on Thursday! Voluntarily that is.

On the home front, we’re moving on April 28th! I have pics of the new house up in our photo gallery … some are from this past week when we got in to take measurements. Figuring out the finances has been quite a challenge. We need to purchase a fridge and a stove for the new place and since we’re going to be there a while, we’re getting nice ones. Complicating matters is the fact that the clutch on my truck decided to stop working earlier this week. Thankfully, rather than the clutch itself failing, it appears that it was just the “slave cylinder” for it (which looks to be about a $30 part) … but it’s still going to be a fair amount for labor.

Last weekend was the end of Dance Theatre stuff for the year, with our final concert on Saturday night. After the concert, rather than going to the cast part, Liz and I went out with Liz and Corey (ex-gf and her bf) to eat in Hudson. That was fun. We should get over to their neck of the woods one of these days.

This weekend I’m working on the DVD for this year’s Dance Theatre concert. I should have actually started it earlier this week, particularly since the adjustments to the video image (adjusting gamma) are taking a bit of time for the computer to render. We’re heading up to my parents place later this morning to spend some time visiting, but I think we’ll come home late this afternoon rather than staying up for dinner.

This coming week shouldn’t be too exciting. There’s the Dance Theatre banquet on Wednesday (hence a deadline for getting the DVD completed), so that should be fun. Not sure how much posting I’m going to get done in the next few weeks because there is a fair amount of packing to get done of course. We’re getting a storage unit in town so we can move most of the stuff out before moving day. We’ll be closing from noon to 2ish and then we can move in! Yay!

SOLD!

… email outage! Yeah, the IMAP server at work had a nasty failure on Tuesday morning and we’ve been without email since. It’s been interesting trying to get work done with one of our primary means of communication shut down. Current estimate is a partial return to service on Thursday morning. Some of our staff are going to be having some very long days. I’m glad I didn’t try transferring to the network services team.

Hopefully I’m going to sleep better tonight. The past two nights I’ve woken up rather early (i.e. 4:30am). I think I might try benadryl tonight rather than sudafed (I’ve been having issues with stuffed sinuses at night recently too).

Not sure what plans are for the weekend. I might give a holler out to beldurnik to see what he’s up to. Another possibility is going to visit my cousin in Eau Claire. We’ll see what happens I guess.

Some days I wish there was a flashing red light outside the men’s room that lit up when some guy did his business (especially at a urinal) and didn’t wash his hands afterword. This is particularly disturbing in a computer lab facility.

Ever been greeted by something very wrong bright and early in the morning? I checked my email this morning when I got up … no new messages. First thought … oh sh*t … what broke? Checked the mail logs and they were full of errors. Joy. Re-build postfix (after reminding myself what version of berkeley db to compile against). That fixes errors. Thunderbird tells me I have 3 new emails. Oh sh*t … they’re empty! Log into firewall and block incoming smtp for the time being. Check the processes that should be running and discover that SpamAssassin was broken. Determined that I really should have followed the post-install instructions for upgrading perl last night. D’oh. Run post-install scripts while pondering who the hell hard-codes a perl version into their scripts. Restart SpamAssassin and test. Re-enable incoming smtp and test. Send out outage message about the problem (yay, at least mailman still works).

Lizzy made me do it! Okay, not really. She kindly requested that I update my journal so here I am babbling on and on about not much of anything. Okay, I guess I do have a rant to make. It seems that some people are really fond of Chalk & Wire. I can understand that it makes creating ePortfolios nice and easy. At least it makes creating “nice looking” portfolios easy. Unfortunately, they create these online and then they want to put them on CD. So, some people went out and bought an application to download the portfolios on a PC. Of course, they want this installed “as soon as possible”. Unfortunately, asap doesn’t mean much when we have a large number of other “asap” tasks already in the works. So, me being a nice guy and all, I came up with a free solution for the Macs that uses the wget command-line utility. I even spent some time to create a nice-looking GUI for it that even shows progress! I suspect this will be easier to use than (insert Windows app name here).
Well, that’s all for now. Maybe I’ll post more this weekend.

Well, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted. Since I last posted, we’ve put our house on the market. We’ve also searched for and found a new house and even managed to get an offer accepted on it. Now all we need to do is find someone to buy our current place. It’s been frustrating because we’ve had 4 people look at it so far with no bites. From the sounds of it, the house is priced right but we just haven’t found the right buyer yet.
In other news, I managed to get my server updated to FreeBSD 6.0 from 5.3 without casualties. I had a bit of a scare when after the reboot it didn’t want to accept incoming mail, but I figured out that the greylist daemon needed rebuilding to re-link with a mysql library. Hopefully this will alleviate some of the sluggishness I’ve been experiencing with samba. As far as video projects go, I finally got the 2000 and 2001 UW-RF Dance Theatre concerts onto DVD now (were on VHS). I need to dig up more program info for the 1999 concert before I can do much with that one. I’ve started archiving my A-Team episodes from MythTV off onto DVD.
Liz and I went to Bona Casa for an early Valentine’s dinner. We’ll do an actual cozy movie on Tuesday.

“We will never forget them nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.’ “

What have I been up to for the past week? Well, last weekend was spent up at my parents for Christmas on “my side” of the family. Yes, married now so I get to do the multi-Christmas. Not too bad though. I received some tops, including a new suede shirt and some Packers gear (go Pack!). While I was up there, I upgraded apache from version 2.0.55 to 2.2. That was fun, especially since I accidently wiped out my httpd.conf. This caused a couple of problems, notably it broke my virtual hosts. I figured this out and managed to get PHP re-installed. I also finally got mod_proxy working again (for accessing my mythtv web interface).
Monday, we drove up to Thunder Bay, Ontario to visit our friend Danni and spend a week relaxing. That was enjoyable. We went to see “The Family Stone”, which was more enjoyable than I expected and had a satisfactory ending. We even did some sledding, which I haven’t done in several years. I got a sore bum from that (still a bit sore). We came back on Friday to some kitties that were happy to see us.
Yesterday was pretty slow. While Liz was having fun with church youth game & movie night, I monkeyed around with my router and loaded dd-wrt on it. After some tweaking I have it mostly working the way I want it. The notable feature I gained over the Alchemy firmware I was running before is that port forwarding is more flexible. Instead of being limited to forwarding port x on public interface to port x on machine z, I can forward port x on public interface to port y on machine z. I also caught up on some of the TV that had been recorded over the past two weeks, including the pilot episode of “A-Team”. I forgot how much fun that show is (lots of bullets, nobody gets killed). I am planning on archiving the A-Team episodes off onto DVD once I’m done doing the 3 Dance Theatre concerts that I have on VHS (1999-2001).
Tomorrow it’s back to the old grindstone. Work will be occupied with coordination of new computer installs and computer lab fixes. The computer lab stuff needs to be completed within the next two weeks so hopefully that doesn’t stress me too badly.