“a rocket…man.” –shatner

friday night i had to work for maintenance, so i went into work after lunch. some people were having kind of weird problems with ftp and ssh. it sounded like a firewall or network issue, but eventually we determined dns was exhibiting some odd behaviour. i was trying to figure out what was going on for a few hours, then they contacted a brilliant guy they use as a contractor and he figured it out in about 15 minutes. granted, he got to get the information it had taken me/us a few hours to collect, but i hate it when i work diligently on something but can’t figure it out — and then someone else solves it quickly. one of the main things i’m taking away from the experience is to use dig when you’re trying to diagnose/troubleshoot dns issues. for whatever reason, i stuck to analyzing log files and using nslookup. i stayed for the downtime, although i did pretty much none of the stuff i’d planned because my brain and nerves were shot.
saturday i spent most of the day with the potts family. first i went around for an hour or two with sue and the kids, helping them take care of errands for the afternoon and evening event. which was the art crawl. jack had put the bohemian photography studio in it, so he was showing his work, along with a few other artists, and some bands were playing. i was there for basically the whole art crawl timeframe. one of the artists, whom i had met once before (but never seen his work), does really cool mixed media stuff. jack said he thought i’d like it, and he was right. it’s very detailed art work, along with collage and print, plus objects and texture (etched glass, lighting, shadow boxes, metalwork, etc.). really cool looking stuff. (it reminded me of some of dave mckean’s stuff.) i got to see a whole lot of people coming and going, plus a number of people came by and hung out that go to kaleo and/or know jack in other ways. after 7 hours of that, i was pretty ready to go home and decompress for awhile.
sunday morning i got up and decided i wanted to go to a movie. there were two movies out i was pretty interested in seeing, but the new coen brothers movie sounded a bit dark and violent, so i decided i’d see the other. i decided for sure once i saw it was a limited engagement playing only at river oaks. it was starting in 15 minutes, so i just got dressed and put on a cap and took off. the movie in question is before the devil knows you’re dead. it has philip seymour hoffman, ethan hawke, albert finney, marisa tomei, etc. i had, for some reason, been under the impression it was a black comedy. i was very, very wrong. it started off exciting enough, seeing marisa tomei mostly and completely naked for a few minutes. but the movie is basically a non-linear telling of people making bad decisions over and over and destroying their lives and the lives of those around them. it centers around a botched robbery, but the characters already have issues (some more than others) and they just spiral into a nosedive straight down the pit. i had bought some hot tea before the movie, but i completely forgot about it until the credits were rolling. so the movie was good — as in it was gripping and absorbing, and the acting was good — but i walked out feeling like i’d just been beat up by the offensive line of a football team. which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — it’s just not exactly what you want to experience while still groggy from getting up. i won’t say it’s as emotionally traumatic as requiem for a dream, but it knocked me around. perhaps no country for old men would have been a better choice for an early movie after all (i’ll see it soon, probably).
after the movie i drove over to ikea and ate a late lunch, then had a meeting with jack and sue and emily. they’re trying to get some stuff worked out with the business and such, and i am trying to help in some way. while there, i looked around at coffee tables and candle-related items and other such things. but i ended up only buying a bed for my cat, lenin. hopefully she will like it and start using it, instead of leaving hair all over my bedspread and sheets.
from there i met jack at his office, then we went over to the warehouse live. i assisted jack in shooting mewithoutYou. i had to take my wallet chain off, and they were wanding at the door, so i had to hide all of my contraband. but we went in and jack set me up with a camera on a tripod and i took a bunch of pictures. i think some of mine even ended up looking pretty good. after that, we went back to jack’s office and i helped him do some stuff with his powermac g5 and leopard.
monday i made a pretty major purchase. it’s going to be complicating my thanksgiving weekend plans. i’ll be providing more information about that within a few days, i’m sure. if you listened to the radio show this evening, you’ve already heard me talk about it.
monday evening i attempted to install leopard on a new hard drive i had put into my powermac g5. the install never really started because the erase hung, so i gave up after a few hours and put the old hard drive back in. i’ll try again sometime later. tuesday evening i installed red hat enterprise linux 5.1 on four servers. they no longer appear to have the minimal install option (unless i missed it), which was nice in rhel 4. i was also confused by the fact that using the text install made me need 4 disks after i narrowed the install options, while using the gui install made me only need 2 disks with the same options checked. i opted to use the gui install.