journaling: enabled

I’m trying out a different LiveJournal client. Normally I use iJournal, but this is Phoenix. I’m not sure that it provides anything not in iJournal that I find useful.
There’s an awesome sunset tonight. It’s been cloudy this evening but it’s clearing in the far west so there are all sorts of pretty colours on the bottom of the clouds … purples … reds … oranges. It’s awesome. I’m glad it’s not raining. We had enough rain last week to last me for a few more days yet. I heard on the news they’re still getting more rain south of here. Probably not too bad if you have webbed feet and feathers, but for those of us that don’t, it’s a bummer.
I started painting my homemade tv stand last night. I’m painting it all black. I got 1-2/3rds coats on so far, and it looks like I need at least two more. It should be nice when it’s done… will match the TV and other components. I think I might move my server downstairs into the west closet so it can take advantage of the central air. I don’t have air upstairs where it’s currently located, but that’s one of the things I’d like to fix this year… putting ductwork and whatnot in to provide heating/cooling upstairs by something other than the stairway. If anybody knows of a good general contractor (in Western, WI or perhaps the Twin Cities area) that could do this I’m open to suggestions.
Tonight has been pretty uneventful. I got my cable/broadband bill today and I’m rather po’d at my ISP. They’re charging me $15/mo. for a static IP address. When I asked for one, they said it would be $5/mo. This is doubly irritating because in the 3 yrs I’ve had their broadband without the “static IP” service, my IP address has changed exactly once. Grr. I think I might investigate DSL from CenturyTel … anybody have experience with them?
Liz is “out on the town” with a friend tonight that she hasn’t seen in a while. I hope she’s having fun. I honestly don’t know what I’ve been up to tonight. I am playing around with re-compressing the Dance Theatre video for DVD … trying to get the highest quality possible while still fitting on one disc. My first pass at it left 700MB free on the disc, which seems a waste to me. It’s about 83 minutes worth of video… takes about an hour and a half to compress using 2-pass VBR encoding.
This week has been crazy at work. I’ve been dealing with new students who can’t remember the answers to their security passphrase (for our web-based account management tool). I’ve had to reset about 2 dozen so far this week. This is principally due to new students registering for classes. While it doesn’t take long, it’s still a little interruption in my train of thought. It was doubly frustrating on Mon and Tues because I couldn’t really be out of the office for long as the other two support staff who can reset the answers were out on vacation. I’ve also had to start dealing with the paperwork that goes along with new computer orders again. This is one of my least favourite tasks, as it involves a lot of work with a database that has some serious issues. Hmm… I guess that’s what I had been considering working on tonight … investigating redoing it. It’s currently a FileMaker Pro database. It would be nice if it were SQL-based. It would make it harder to customize reports and add fields though. I guess that’s something to discuss with other staff members.
I did finally manage to update the www.netmug.org homepage with a message from our group president. Suffice it to say that online user groups are difficult to maintain.
As far as what I’ve been doing lately … not a whole lot outside of work. Liz and I went to Iowa last weekend to visit her grandparents. Her grandfather is in poor health and we haven’t seen them since last summer. It’s a real bummer. As of this past spring, I no longer have any living grandparents. My grandmothers I miss. As far as my grandfathers go, one of them passed away when I was really young and the other … is a long story.
This weekend Liz and I are going to see Les Miserables. I’m really looking forward to it. I wish I had gotten to see Rent while it was in the area earlier this spring but the timing sucked. The weekend after this coming one we’re going to NTPA tractor pulls in Tomah. The weekend after that we’re spending down in Madison, WI to see “Rhythm and Booms” Other entertainment events include myself and my next younger brother going to see Metallica in mid-August and Liz and I seeing Norah Jones in September.
Anyway, probably enough for tonight … ttfn

We’re going to see Phil Collins in Milwaukee (Bradley Center) on Sept 7th. Should be fun. Taking the day off to drive down there and go to the concert … driving back that night/next morning to be back up here by 8am. I think it will be worth it tho. We’re also going to see Norah Jones in the Cities on Sept 11th. Also should be great fun. I still haven’t decided whether I want to go see Metallica again in August.