No Fur-Low

Hooray, according to an e-mail we received today, we won't be getting furloughed:

BUDGET UPDATE: On Friday, Mar. 1, Gov. Tom Vilsack signed into law Senate File 2304. This bill makes a number of final adjustments to the FY 2002 state budget. Initially, the bill required that furloughs be used by state agencies, including the Board of Regents institutions, to achieve cost savings. During the legislative process, this requirement was removed. State agencies now have the power to choose the cost-saving measures they will employ. The University of Northern Iowa will not use furloughs. The UNI cabinet is working to determine how the university will make adjustments to cope with the loss of an additional $1.5 million in state appropriations. Care will be taken not to disturb classes already in progress, and other functions vital to the university's "Students First" mission.

Bledded Wiss

I got back from Omaha last night, after being in the wedding of my friend Adam Turnbull and his wife Lori Hokomoto.  I was the "Second Best Man", behind Adam's brother Andy, but ahead of my friend Jeremy who was either the "Third Best Man" or "Worst Man", depending on your point of view. Okay, maybe we were just groomsmen, but Second Best Man sounds more important...

The wedding went off okay, despite the rings being left in a suitcase, and arriving with no time to spare.  The attendance was a bit smaller than I'd expected, though I think most of that can be blamed on the blizzard that came through the night before.

I had a phone interview this morning for a job administering the network in the Residence Halls here at UNI.  I think I'm an ideal candidate for it, since I have a strong background in Residence Life, having been a Resident Assistant for several years back at ISU.  I'd never had someone put me on the spot in an interview before, but one of the system administrators asked me "What are the five components of the ActiveDirectory Single-Master model?" and frankly, I had no clue, and told him so.  I e-mailed him later and asked for the answer, and he told me that he really didn't expect the interviewees to know and recite them, but he wanted to see what our reaction would be.  Well, I was honest, I guess.  If you want to know what they are, here you go.

The other question involved troubleshooting a sluggish network port, and that one I answered immediately, as it's something I've dealt with here before.  They seemed a bit surprised by that, so maybe I wasn't supposed to know the answer to that question either.  The phone interview is to determine who the "short list" of candidates will be, and I'll hopefully know by next week if I'm on that list or not.

Fur-Lowed

Well, it looks like I'm going to be furloughed.  One half-day every two weeks, with a corresponding cut in pay.  Our governor finally caved to the Republicans in the state legislature, and the University is going to have its budget cut once again.

It sucks that my pay is going to be cut by about $100/month, and it's going to really suck to be a student here in the next two years.  Tutition for next year went up 19%, and the article says that double-digit increases are likely for next year as well.

Anyone want to hire a Pee-Cee guy who dabbles in Mac and Linux, and can write a weblog?   I didn't think so...

My new digital camera came today.  I think I'm in love.  This camera is just amazing, and since I know it can produce great shots, I'll have only myself to blame for my crappy ones.

The thing I love about digital cameras is the instant feedback.  Whenever I've tinkered with my Canon AE-1 35mm camera, I've found that about 10% of my photos turn out well, another 25% are passable, another 10% are amateurish, and the rest are out of focus, underexposed, or poorly developed.

With a digital camera, I can look at the image instantly, on either the camera or my laptop, and do some trial and error to produce the picture I'm looking for, not to mention the savings in only getting the shots you want on paper, and not having to buy film.  With my 256MB Compact Flash card, my camera can hold 167 shots at the highest quality (3.3 Megapixels).  Even I can't shoot that many pictures in a day.

SpamAssassin, Qmail, and Razor

I've been working on building a linux-based mail server over the last month or so.  I started off with sendmail and some realtime blackhole lists, then I added SpamAssassin, and today I topped it off with Vipul's Razor.

One of the other sysadmins on campus (a total Linux guru) offered to replace my sendmail with qmail, which he says is superior, though no one can really explain why to me in less than two paragraphs.  After a couple hours of re-compiling and tweaking, sendmail has been replaced, but my realtime blackhole lists are gone!

I can add them back in with qmail, but to do so, I'll have to compile a tcpwrapper to wrap around the qmail smtp service.  It makes my head hurt just thinking about it...

On the plus side, the spam-filtering is great!  I invoke SpamAssassin and Razor via my .procmailrc file, and divert all the junk into folders to be reviewed and deleted at my leisure.  Razor seems to do a better job of detecting the true spam, but Assassin catches a lot of other assorted junkmail and moves it out of my inbox.

You might be thinking "I just push the delete button, and it works for me".  Well, that's nice, but try reading your e-mail on your "Visor" over a 14.4K cell-phone link, and you'll appreciate having fewer junk messages to download.

Black Hawk Down

I saw Black Hawk Down this weekend.  It isn't one of those movies you can wait to see on video, it demands the true Theatre experience to really hit you with the full impact of the movie.

And what an impact it was.  This is the first movie that could actually cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a person.  Yes, the movie was gory, and normally that doesn't bother me.  But the level of realism attained in this movie was what really drove it home, it wasn't cheesy cartoon-like violence, those wounds seemed real, and the knowledge that the movie is based on actual events makes it seem real to the viewer.

I was literally horrified, it's a terrifying experience to watch the planned raid by the American soldiers go so disasterously wrong.  This isn't a cheesy patriotic film, it's not about moral superiority, or great leadership.  It's a illustration of Murphy's Law, and it's worth $6.50 and 2.5 hours of your time.

I don't pretend to be a serious movie critic, however, so I'll link to my favorite critic, Roger Ebert, and his review of the film.