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Eric and I went to Mammoth last weekend and it was amazing. I arrived around 8:30am after a 4.5 hour drive from my house, not fun. Immediately after arriving it started snowing and did not stop much the entire weekend. After getting situated we all decided to go boarding. Being short on money, we opted for the $30 beginner ticket. This ticket is meant for use on one lift for beginners, of course we did not do this because the staff did not check our lift tickets when getting on lifts that take us to the top. Anyways it was snowing non-stop the entire time we were out Friday. Katie, my girlfriend, and I did not have facemasks for the first couple runs and wound up freezing our entire face’s. We got smart and put of the $16 for one which lead to a much better snowboarding experience.

On Saturday all the girls wanted to stay in and watch the entire first season of Grey’s Anatomy while all the guys went off to the mountain. We bought full lift tickets today so we could explore the entire mountain without any problems. Turns out that the top of the mountain was closed due to high winds and avalanche warnings. This was not a problem though since we could still go everywhere else. It has snowed over 18 inches that night so there was powder everywhere! Riding in this much powder was a little tough, however it did not matter how hard you fell because it was so soft.

Sunday everyone went with the beginner lift ticket again. It was a lot more crowded this day that any other for some reason. I am sure it is due to the holiday weekend. Again the snow was all powder which lead to another great day of boarding.

Check out all my random pictures here: Mammoth 2006

Well I am back! Sorry for the lack of updates, I have been overwhelmed with school and plain laziness lately. Anyways, I will attempt to post more often from now on.

Over winter break I setup a new firewall using Shorewall. I am pretty impressed with how easy it was to setup and secure. My firewall now has my wireless network separated from my wired network, a DHCP server for the internal networks, a DNS proxy, and Squid setup as a transparent proxy. Pretty impressive considering this is my first firewall setup. In the future I would like to lock down my wireless network even further by using an OpenVPN bridge to encrypt local wireless traffic on top of the current WEP encryption. That might be a little overkill, however it should be a good learning experience.

My brother bought a video iPod and harassed me to figure out how to get movies onto it. After I gave in and a little research I found a program called HandBrake that most people seem to be using. It works best on OSX even though there are Linux, and Windows versions available. The Linux version is command line only, so there is no fancy GUI for those of you that can’t work without one. I downloaded the Linux version, compiled it, and gave it a go. I tested H.264 and MPEG-4 encoding and received the best iPod compatibility and encoding speeds with MPEG-4. I would like to say that the H.264 video had better video quality with a smaller file size.

I attended SCALE 4x last weekend with Eric Gaumer and it was great! I got to meet a bunch of great people such as Aaron Seigo, Ted Haeger, Jono Bacon, and the famous DVD Jon! Eric and I spent most of the day with Ted and Jono discussing various topics such as LugRadio Live 2006 and why Novell needs to embrace deb packages instead of RPM’s. FYI, we were introduced to Jono last year by Jon Masters after revealing that we were huge fans of LugRadio. Anyways, we attended the three talks on desktop linux. Aaron Seigo about KDE4, Ted Haeger on NLD10, and Jono Bacon on the future of the linux desktop. All three talks were great and well presented, however I would have to say Ted’s presentation on XGL was the most interesting to me. I was really amazed at XGL and look forward to checking it out in the future. I also enjoyed the “Bacon and Eggs” picture import during Ted’s presentation. Eric took some pictures that I will post once he sends them to me.

Anyways, Eric and I will be going to Mammoth this weekend. Expect some pictures from that trip as well.