One of my high school classmates is apparently ashamed to be an American tonight. I’m assuming this is because the election isn’t going the way she’d like. Regardless of how it’s going, I have to say that I’m proud to be an American tonight. The American people are exercising their right to vote, regardless of how much research they’ve done on the candidates, regardless of how well-informed they are, regardless of who they believe in… they believe in their freedom to vote. I for one don’t think *any* American should *ever* be ashamed of exercising the freedoms that so many men and women have sacrificed to give us. A big thank you to my brother-in-law and others who proudly serve our country and make nights like tonight possible.
At the risk of offending someone (sorry) … some of you may be interested in the web comic Jesus Christ – In the Name of the Gun. I linked to the “cover” to avoid spoiling the storyline too much, but to summarize, Jesus becomes po’d at how we’re behaving down here and decides to come down and do something about it.
A friend of mine asked me last night how Liz and I knew we wanted kids. I know my wife has always wanted kids and prayed that she’d be able to. Of course, she wanted to be an elementary school teacher too, so she really loved kids. Myself, I don’t know that I knew I wanted kids so much as I knew I didn’t not want kids (yeah, how’s that for a confusing sentence full of negatives). I think that up until I met flutterbyefred, I was more concerned with the precursor step of actually meeting someone who was willing to go out with me. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but the birth of my daughter changed me in ways I cannot describe and wouldn’t have predicted. I’m considerably more protective of children, particularly babies. I used to be more pro-choice than I am now (not to say I’m exactly of the “pro-life” stance now, but more in that direction than before). When I read about the death of a young child, I cry inside. When it happens to a friend, I’m heart-broken (r.i.p. Sam).
On a totally different note, I’ll be very happy when the elections are over, regardless of the outcome. I’m quite tired of campaign ads. Especially for the Senate race in Minnesota. I feel sorry for the poor souls get to make a choice in that election, as I don’t feel I’d want to vote for either of the two major party candidates. I watched the presidential debate last night. I think it’s the first one I’ve ever watched. One particular question jumped out at me… the one regarding whether the running mate is qualified. Mr. McCain attacked Mr. Biden’s foreign policy stance … particularly on his suggestion that Iraq be divided into 3 separate countries. I think if Mr. McCain took a look at the history of that area, the track record for what it takes to keep regions of disparate beliefs like that together, and examine what’s really going on there, he might find the idea more plausible. It just might be that the only reason Iraq stayed together as a nation was because it had a ruthless leader.
Well, I haven’t quite made 3 posts within a week, but certainly I’m doing better than I had been. Work has been pretty good this week. I’ve starting working on a pair of projects, one small and one larger. Both are upgrades to web apps that I’m responsible for. My new job is going to involve a significant amount of project management and coordination. I am looking forward to the challenge, as I’ve not done a lot of that in the past.
I really need to “get out” one of these days. I haven’t had a geek outing since early August when Joe and I went to see the Star Wars exhibit at the SMM. I’m not sure what I want to do tho, but I think it needs to involve technology. Ideally it wouldn’t involve spending a lot of money, as I don’t have a lot to spend on toys and I need to come up with some ideas for Christmas anyway. Speaking of purchasing technology, our home theater receiver (Kenwood VR-407) flaked out. 
We found a deal on a Denon AVR-588 to replace it, but I would have preferred not to spend $$. The new one should meet our needs for some time to come, as it handles HDMI as well as our current video connections. It also has dual s-video outputs, which will be nice for movie nights whenever we do one again (w/projector).
I’m also trying to think of a direction to go with our church website. I was trying to design it with some CMS features. It works okay, but I’d like something better. The problem I’ve had with CMS packages I’ve found is that the calendar integration often wasn’t great. Right now I’m thinking I might go the route of creating a Google calendar account to use with the site. One big plus of doing that which I can think of is that the church administrative assistant (secretary?) should be able to update it via Outlook if we set things up right. I’ll have to play around a bit with Outlook (*gag*) and see how well that works.
I went to my first college football game this past weekend (which is a little pitiful since I work at one). Met up with a friend from my Prucha Hall days before the game and we touched base again after the UWRF Falcon victory! It was nice to see her again and I hope we can visit again sometime in the not-too-distant future. Ten years is too long. 
I should really get to bed now. I tend to be pretty wiped at work the next day if I stay up much past 10 o’clock. How sad is that?
I had assumed, perhaps naively, that I was part of the target audience for the new Knight Rider tv series, being as I had enjoyed watching that show as a kid. After tonight, I’ve decided that clearly I’m not. I like science-fiction, action, spy movies and fantasy. I realize that some things require “suspension of belief” to watch and enjoy. However, this version of Knight Rider appears to require that you not only suspend belief, but that you take it and beat it to a pulp with a 2×4. I made it 1/2 way through the pilot they showed last spring. Tonight I made it 1/2 way through the first episode of season 1. It was like an overdone spy movie (and I like Bond films).
Haven’t posted in a while. Not surprising … life in general has been kinda full. I am now working on a different team at work … “application management.” It’s basically focusing on what I’ve spent most of my time doing over the past year anyway, but with less distractions. I get a new working job title along with it … “application system administrator.” And a new manager… not that I didn’t like my old one, but my new one is awesome too.
We’ve done some painting in the house in the past week with a lot of help from friends. It’s nice to finally have some color … I am looking forward to having our bedroom painted too. This weekend Liz is going down to visit her parents and I’m staying up here. Right now I’m thinking I’ll do some tidying up in the garage to prep for cold weather. In other news, our home theatre receiver is flaking out. The S-video output isn’t working reliably. I’m suspicious of the audio as well, because I’m having difficulty getting it to play the right audio when watching DVDs (e.g. just the ‘.1’ in 5.1 sound).
Well, off to bed for me. Will try to post more often …. really!
Okay … I really need to get better at this. I’ve been spending a lot of my “spare” time on Facebook getting in touch with classmates. I had a nice chat with one of them tonight that I haven’t seen in 10 years, which made me very happy.
Yesterday I took my Dad to Family Night at Lambeau Field. We had to wait through a rain delay, but it was awesome. They finished off with one of the best (if not *the* best) fireworks experiences I’ve ever had. One thing that is bugging me is a part of the music mix for the fireworks show. It was a remix of “Your Love” (originally by The Outfield) done with a female vocalist… I would like to identify the vocalist. Anybody? Youtube video is here and the particular music starts around 3:20.
been a while since I’ve done one of these:
beldurnik! … welcome to the 30-something age bracket!
So I had a 3 hour power outage here at home. Thankfully apcupsd did its job and shut down my server when the batteries ran out of juice (1 hr 6 minutes of runtime … w00t!). Power came back on just after I crawled into bed so I decided to get things up and running again since I had the time. I was very thankful I didn’t have any serious boot errors, but unfortunately some side-effects of an upgrade to openssl a week or so still remained … a couple of packages core-dumped when starting up; namely apache and that which handles authentication for email. Apache I could live with being down for a day or so but people like reading their email for some reason (myself included). Rebuild the authentication packages and that is back in business. Currently rebuilding apache to see if that will start up.
