January 2005 Archives

Monday morning begins a new era in the life of Mr. and Mrs. Doran Barton.

Christine starts her job at my former stomping ground Sorenson Media tomorrow as a quality assurance engineer. She’ll be working full time there from now on.

Our neighbor Lindsy will be watching the kids in the mornings and on Monday afternoons. On Tuesday and Friday afternoons, my mom will do it. On Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, I’ll be assuming my role as dad.

This means we both need to get up early in the morning to get ready to go to our respective jobs/contract sites, get the kids ready for school and/or Lindsy’s house, and get breakfast.

It should be interesting.

Christine and I are both feeling some degree of nervousness about it. Christine asked me today if I was sure we were doing the right thing. I told her I didn’t think we’re doing the wrong thing. I mean, the right thing would be for me to be the sole breadwinner for the family and Christine to stay home and be a mom. However, we’re both sick of being in so much debt and not having money for much more than to pay bills (if even that).

Our primary goal is to get those debts paid down. Then, once that is done, we’ve got a growing list of other things that need to be done like finishing our basement, replacing our Mazda Protege with more of a family vehicle, fencing in our backyard, landscaping the backyard, and buying some new clothes.

Along the way, we are going to put some money away and save up for a vacation this summer.

Well, it’s midnight already and I’ve got to be up in seven hours. Ole domestic me must go to bed now.

January 2005 is going to go down in history as a time of many changes.

Big boost for Iodynamics

Earlier in January, I was able to get a couple of job interviews. One was for a programmer/architect position for a company looking to overhaul the web application they used in their business of customer satisfaction surveys. The other was a system administration job for a web application service provider.

I was more interested in the programmer position because it seemed less stressful and it was only 10 minutes away from my house. The interview with that company went spectacularly and I was sure I was going to be offered a position. The next week, they called me in for a second interview. This interview was with the owner of the company. She was very nervous about hiring me because of Iodynamics. She said as the owner of a company herself, she could go work as a consultant somewhere, but if the demands of her own company grew, her priority would be there and not the consulting job.

That afternoon after the second interview, I received a "thanks, but no thanks." letter from that company via e-mail. In fact, they had attached a Microsoft Word document to the e-mail. That made it so much easier to accept the rejection.

The other company — the ASP — called me in for a second interview. I wasn’t crazy about working there because I had heard some negative stuff about the company, but I didn’t have anything else going on and nothing to lose.

My second interview went well, but again, they were also concerned about my ties to Iodynamics. My interviewer asked me if I could give them a verbal two-year committment. I told him I wasn’t comfortable giving him more than one year. He expressed concern about that.

Then, he asked me how I would feel about them outsourcing their system administration needs to Iodynamics.

Wow.

Well, to make a longer story shorter, that’s exactly what has happened. As we explored the possibility more, it seemed the right thing to do, for all people involved.

Our contract started this Monday. I’ve been going onsite and becoming familiar with their systems and doing minor tasks as needed. It’s going well.

And then...

I’m starting a personal contract project for another company next week doing some programming.

Will it end?

Finally...

After Guru Labs didn’t renew my contract, Christine decided she should look for work too. This week, she got a good offer from my old stomping ground, Sorenson Media and accepted it. She’ll be starting on Monday.

Just posted pictures from the Steamboat Springs show. You can get those here.

It’s Sunday afternoon and we are en route back to our respective hometowns in Utah after Saturday night’s performance in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

Our experience at Club Levelz in Steamboat Springs was very interesting.

Up until Saturday, Thom was half-joking that if we arrived in Steamboat Springs and nobody knew who we were or that we were playing there, he wouldn’t be completely surprised. He had been unable to get anyone from the club, the newspaper, or the local radio stations to return his calls. Our technical contact had not corresponded with Tim either. We had no idea what we were going into or whether or not the venue (or anyone else) had promoted the show at all. In retrospect, the venue also had no idea who they were going to be dealing with.

We had accommodations at a Super 8 motel. We only had the address and not the name, so I did a search online when we were in Vail and determined it was the Super 8. The Super 8 was “okay.” It was a mighty step down from the Holiday Inn in Vail. For one thing, there was no high-speed Internet access.

On Saturday at 6 p.m. we went up to Club Levelz to do our load-in and met Chad — the manager of the club along with Erik — our sound and lighting engineer for the evening.

Levelz is on the third floor of a building in a trendy resort area populated by bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and ski and snowboard stores. Chad told us it would be easiest if we loaded our gear into the club through the back door. The weather was considerably colder than it was in Vail and the ground and walkways were icy and slick. To make matters worse, none of the lights along the stairs or walkways on the rear side of the building worked so we had to load all our gear into the building in the dark while working to keep our footing on the patches of ice.

The inside of the club was as cold (or colder?) than outside. I don’t know if there was no heat and they were just planning on the crowd and the band to warm the room up or if they just took forever to heat the room.

The room was a good sized room, but was, in a word, filthy. I felt like I couldn’t touch anything in the room that wasn’t covered in a sticky film. The wood dance floor was worn, dirty, and looked as if it hadn’t been maintained in years.

The stage at Levelz is a good sized stage. The only bad thing about it is a pillar that goes up to the point of the roof at the front of the stage about two thirds the way across. There were two other pillars in the audience area that also went up to the point of the roof.

The lighting at Levelz was very exciting. They have multiple colored PAR cans on a truss beam across the back of the stage and in front of the stage. In addition, there are five intelligent scanners mounted on the rear truss with the PAR cans. The lighting console was several magnitudes better than what I had used at the Sandbar in Vail and certainly better than most we’ve used anywhere.

The screen situation was a difficult one. We rented a six by eight fastfold screen from a local hotel but because of the rear lighting truss being only about 8-10 feet above the stage floor and the drum riser going in the middle of the stage, we couldn’t hang the projection screen directly above and behind the band. We considered both sides of the stage and ended up putting the screen on an angle on stage right with the projector on the front-of-house stage-right speaker stack.

I was very frustrated as we tried to figure out how we were going to handle the screen and projector situation. This was compounded by the cold room, everyone else’s moods (bad, bad, bad), the less than stellar aesthetics of the venue, my low blood-sugar and growing hunger, and the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the venue staff. Plus, the ticket price for the show was five dollars (The Sandbar charged ten) and we weren’t getting paid a “good” guarantee for the show, presumably because it was our first time in Steamboat Springs and at Levelz. That gave me (and everyone else, I guess) less incentive to try to excel at my job. I think everyone in the band was feeling similarly.

Then the pizza came. The venue supplied us with food from the pizza restaurant downstairs. The pizza was okay (any pizza is “okay” it seems, but was a far cry from any food we had eaten in Vail.

After getting the screen situation solved and eating some food, I realized I didn’t have the microphone that I used to trigger the music visualizations on the screen. I asked around to see if anyone had an inexpensive consumer microphone and everyone looked at me as if I was asking them if they had an apple pie in their pocket I could eat.

After soundcheck, Thom and I drove down to the Wal*Mart in town — the only place open, I was assured, that might have a microphone. I found a cheap Labtec computer microphone there for eight or nine dollars and we grabbed some Oreos and headed back up to the club.

At ten o’ clock, Chad started asking us if we were ready to start. Thom, Juli, Matt, and I were there and ready to go. We were the non-drinking members of the entourage and the drinkers were not back from heading back to the hotel. Fortunately, they arrived within five to ten minutes and I started up the intro music track. There was about 40 or 50 people there when we started Shine On You Crazy Diamond to go into our first set — the complete Wish You Were Here album.

The crowd responded and boy did they respond. They were dancing, hooting, screaming, and clapping. Some of them were coming up to the stage and giving band members high-fives repeatedly throughout the show. Some were obviously hardcore Pink Floyd fans. Most were in their 20s and 30s but there were some first-generation Pink Floyd fans in the audience singing along with the songs too.

After a couple of songs, one of the guys handling security near me got my attention and asked me, “How long have these guys been playing together?” I told him it had been about four years. He expressed his amazement and said they were playing so well, he thought they’d been doing this for a lot longer.

Erik, our light and sound engineer, assured me he knew a good deal of Pink Floyd songs, so I let him run lights. I was reluctant to do this because of how well I was able to handle the lights in Vail but I was so exasperated with the situation leading up to the show I didn’t really care anymore.

Erik turned out to be more than just “familiar” with the music of Pink Floyd — he was as big a fan as any of us. His lighting was better than anything I could have done juggling audio effects and projected visuals concurrently with lights. Erik’s lights were, by far, the best light show we’ve ever had. The only thing missing was fog (we ran out of fog juice in Vail).

After finishing the WYWH album, the band took a short break and I played a Daffy Duck cartoon on the screen and then our website promo. The band came back onstage and started the second set with Run Like Hell. There were close to 200 people in the audience by that point.

The music for the night was nearly spotless. Thom said he about wept during Us And Them because the vocal harmonies on the chorus were so sweet.

When the show was over (after an additional encore of Fearless slapped on at the last minute, the audience and venue employees mingled with the band congratulating them on a great performance. Chad, the club manager, promised us we’d be invited back soon and that he’d double the ticket price. He told us he’d take care of getting us a screen to use the next time. He had two more pizzas ordered up for the band after the show and told us to stop at the restaurant on the first floor in the morning for breakfast on his tab.

Chad commented that he rarely sticks around to watch a show, but he stuck around in the back of the room and watched the entire show.

The second batch of pizza was very good compared to the pizza we had earlier.

Erik came down from the sound and lighting booth and told just about everybody in the band that he had a great time and that everyone did a spectacular job. That’s when he told us what a big fan he was and admitted he was skeptical of the band when we arrived.

Erik said he was able to just set the sound on the mixing board and leave it while he ran lights. He said this attested to the band’s ability maintain their own consistent sound and levels on-stage.

All the venue employees helped haul the gear down the flights of stairs to the truck. It seemed like each of them couldn’t say enough good things about the band and wanted shake everyone’s hand.

This morning, we went to breakfast at the restaurant downstairs from Levelz. When we walked in, Bridget, the waitress, asked us, “Are you... Sons Of Nothing?” and then showed us to our table.

This was a kind of landmark for me. I mean, it’s not uncommon for the band to be called “the band“ or “the Pink Floyd band” but Bridget referred to us by name... and she didn’t have to look at a cheat sheet, cue card or anything.

We all had a delicious breakfast and we tipped Bridget twenty dollars, gave her a t-shirt and some stickers and got out of town.

Right now, it’s looking very likely we’ll be heading back to Colorado sometime in April.

Friday night’s show was awesome. The Sandbar was packed with excited, enthusiastic people. The club committed to at least one date in April to have SoN come back. By then, I’m sure the band will have a bunch of new tunes to play from the new album.

I was a little dissatisfied with how the lighting came out at Thursday’s show. For one thing, the lighting console was set up to do some funky things. One thing I didn’t like was that several of the dimmer channels controlled more than one color of lights.

So, I was determined to fix that before Friday’s show. I tried figuring out how to program the light board and couldn’t really figure it out. I did, however, manage to make it unusable.

It was about 9:00 at that time and the band was set to go on stage at 10. I went into the club manager’s office and googled for a manual of some kind for the console. I found one, but it was really small- like 6 pages.

I tried a couple of procedures in the manual to assign channels but they didn’t work. Finally, I found the procedure to reset the console bck to factory defaults. That solved everything.

Doing this, however, taught me how to program chase sequences into the console. Because of that, I was able to do some awesome lighting at Friday’s show. It rocked.

Earlier on Friday, the whole band went west to Avon, CO to do a taped interview with KZYR 97.7 radio. I took some pictures at the studio and they can be seen on the SoN site.

I’m in Vail, Colorado with the band tonight. We just finished the first of two shows at The Sandbar in Vail. On Saturday, we play at Levelz in Steamboat Springs.

I’m way too tired to go into any detail about the show right now... but it was a great show. A lot of people came out and it was a Thursday show! Friday’s show will probably be packed. We’ll have to see.

I took a fall while setting up the projector and the lights before the show. I was coming down a ladder near the front of the stage when I passed in front of the projector and the light blinded me and I got disoriented for a second. It was just long enough for me to lose my balance and I started to fall off the ladder. I reached up and tried to grab onto something above me that could save me from falling. All I could get my hands onto was a power cord for one of the lights. It held briefly and I started to regain my balance, but then the cord came unplugged and started to fall again. I tried to catch myself by landing on my feet on the stage, but I landed on one of Tim’s guitar pedals which made me fall to one side — toward the stage monitor. I reached for the top edge of the wedge-shaped stage monitor to try to steady myself, but it tipped backwards. By this point, my body was somewhat twisted and I ended up falling sideways onto the monitor as it tipped back. I heard some girls scream from the bar tables. Then, my body rolled off the tipped-over stage monitor and I fell off the stage (about 2 feet off the ground) and landed with my back on the floor.

It was a surprisingly soft landing. I mean, it hurt, but it wasn’t as much of a physical shock as I expected. I jumped right back up and was fine.

Several people commented on the visual of the fall. Some said the whole thing took place in slow motion. That’s how it was for me too. Thom said it was “spectacular” to witness.

Alright, I need to go soak my poor body before going to bed.

Just wanted to point out I have added some new pictures for the graphics on the site... These are from November and December of 2004.

This is an addendum to the story I posted yesterday.

Today, we installed the toilet back in our master bathroom now that the tile is all done. However, there was one adventure left in this home improvement task.

Christine helped me move the toilet. I lifted it up and she used a plastic bag to remove the old wax ring from the bottom of the toilet bowl. Then I proceeded to move it to its home base...

As I moved the toilet from the shower stall where it was sitting on a piece of cardboard, I knocked it into one of the metal toilet paper roll brackets on the side of the vanity. The bracket broke off and fell. Where did it fall? The worst place possible, of course: Right down into the drain pipe in the floor for the toilet.

We could see the bracket at the bottom where there is an elbow in the ABS pipe so I grabbed a fiberglass pole I use to fish wire with and tried to fish it out. It looked hopeful, but eventually, it fell down further to a spot where I couldn’t see it.

Christine had to leave for an appointment, so we stopped right there determined to do something later.

Because Christine was gone, I had the responsibility of picking Maya up from school in the afternoon. While sitting in the car waiting for the bell to ring, I came up with a new idea for getting the bracket out of the pipe: a magnet. I could disassemble an old hard drive and use the super-powerful magnet inside to lure the bracket and lift it out of the drain pipe.

When I got home, I tried using a couple refrigerator magnets on the braket that was still attached. No dice. The brackets didn’t have any iron in them. A magnet wasn’t going to work.

The next step was going down into the basement and removing the cleanout plug for that drainpipe, flushing water down the drain, and catching the bracket as it went down. I volunteered Christine for the job (because her hands are smaller than mine (luckily, for me). I told her I would try to find some rubber or latex gloves she could wear.

Then I thought of another idea: a small strainer. We could put a small strainer into the cleanout and it would catch the bracket. We didn’t have any small strainers, but I knew where we could probably get one for cheap: the dollar store.

I went to the dollar store and got not one, but four plastic strainers of varying sizes for a buck. The smallest one fit perfectly in the cleanout.

Christine was eating some dinner, so I asked Maya to help. I showed her how to hold a bucket to catch any water that might splash out of the cleanout and told her I would go upstairs, knock on the floor, and then flush the toilet (which I had re-attached to the floor and water supply).

I went up, knocked a few times on the new tile, and flushed. Then I went down and, sure enough, there was the bracket, in the strainer- along with a piece of the old wax ring off the bottom of the toilet that Christine had been unable to completely remove earlier.

And that, my friends, is how we saved the toilet paper roll bracket from the ocean... or whatever.

Well, Jennie posted a new entry in her jennalog after about 12 days. I figured I better hurry and say some stuff before it’s been 12 days for me!

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks at our house with me not going to work at Guru Labs. Christine’s been freaking out from time to time thinking we’re going to spend 2005 living in poverty like we did during parts of 2003 and 2004. But, in the end, we’ve communicated — much better than before — and we’re on the same page now.

Iodynamics is doing much better now than it was in 2003. It’s good positive growth, but it’s still somewhat slow. But, based on the growth curves, it should be capable of paying me and Mike decent salaries sometime this year. Just not in January. Not yet.

So, Christine and I have both been looking for work. We both have interviews this week too. We’ll have to see what happens.

We could get away with one of us working a part-time job right now. That would probably bring in enough money we could pay the bills and everything... but we’ve got some debt that’s piled up over the last couple of years that we need to pay down. And we need a new vehicle soon. So, the plan is to get some work — even if it’s temporary — to take care of that.

New Years

Christine and I debated about what we were going to do for New Years Eve. When we lived in Cache Valley, it was tradition to go to Chadd’s party. We went to a neighbor’s party last year and that was okay... but we wanted to do something different this year. We talked about going to Hollywood Connection in West Valley. We also considered going to a movie. Christine wanted to invite some people over to our house.

In the end, we just hung out at home, had pizza and shrimp, played some poker using the poker game set I gave Christine for Christmas, and watched LOTR: The Two Towers.

Eli and Lucy couldn’t last, but Maya stayed up until just after midnight. We watched the TV coverage of Times Square and also KUTV’s coverage of festivities in Salt Lake City. One of our neighbors set off some (illegal) fireworks and we watched them out our north windows.

So, it was fun.

Laptop Gone to Mill Pitas

Last week, I spent some time in Logan working on some servers at a client’s office. While I was there, I was using my laptop, and a couple motherboard manuals (real thin things) fell off a shelf and hit my laptop keyboard just right so that a small plastic lever clip thing under the space bar cracked and broke. The space bar still worked, but it required extra effort at times. It was flakey if you used the right side of it (where the broken clip/lever was) instead of the middle or the left side. So, I e-mailed Hewlett Packard support and asked them if they could send a new clip/lever thing.

HP support replied and said the clip/lever thingie isn’t available as a separate product; I’d have to replace the keyboard. They recommended I send it in for repair. I asked if they could send the keyboard to me so I could make the repair. They said the keyboard wasn’t available as a orderable item or something... which was wrong because I found it in their part finder utility on their website with a price tag of $90.00.

Well, to make the story short, my laptop is in Milpitas (how do you say that, anyway?!), California for repair. FedEx came Monday to pick it up and HP e-mailed me today saying they got it. Now we wait and see how long it takes one of their monkeys to replace the keyboard and stick it back in the mail.

I wonder if they’re going to complain about all the sunflower seed shells they find.

I’ll Tile til I’m tiled

With a little more extra time on my hands, I decided to try to get some progress made on some home improvement projects. I decided to tile our master bathroom and finish painting it. We had a professional who is a friend of the family do the tile in our kitchen. He told me what to order to get enough materials to tile the kitchen, both bathrooms, and the laundry room. My brother did the tile in our main bathroom and I was hoping I could watch and learn as he did it, but my brother doesn’t often have the patience to teach someone how to do stuff. If you try to help or observe, he’ll finally just say something like, “Just go get a burger or something. Go walk your dog.” I think he actually did the tile in that bathroom when I wasn’t home.

This time, however, I wasn’t going to just have him do stuff... I wanted to do it myself. It’s kind of an uphill battle, though. When you ask Tom for help, he usually just tries to do it all himself because he figures you’re an idiot and couldn’t possibly do anyting as well as he can; Why bother trying?

I read some sites online about how to lay tile, but all the sites and all the howto books I’ve read all recommend using a cement board (wonderboard) as a base for your tile. Our professional didn’t have me get that. He had me buy wire mesh and white thinset mortar. Apparently, the mesh and mortar is a staple of custom tile jobs.

So, I asked Tom to come out and show me how to do that. Of course, he did everything, but I paid close attention. He was going to come back in a couple days to cut and lay the tile on top of that, but I beat him to it. I borrowed my father-in-law’s tile saw and got all the tile layed down.

Tom came out tonight and grouted the tile. I mopped it up afterwards. We’ll put the toilet back on tomorrow morning and have two bathrooms again. Wahoo!

Scriptural reflection

People who know me know I’m somewhat passively religious. I realize I should be more actively spiritual- especially now that I’m a family man, but it’s difficult to remember to study my scriptures, pray, ponder, etc. when it’s not something I was trained to do early in life.

But, I got my scriptures loaded up on my Handspring Prism recently and this morning I read the first couple of chapters of The Book Of Mosiah which I recall was one of my favorite parts of The Book of Mormon.

It really struck a chord as I read it.

In the first couple of chapters, King Benjamin is getting old and is getting ready to turn over the throne to his son Mosiah. As a final act as the king, he speaks to the people and gives them counsel.

He tells them about serving their fellow men and says, “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.” (Mosiah 2:17)

And then King Benjamin talks about people who fall away from spirituality and how their lives will not be as enriched as those who keep God’s commandments and teachings.

This really made me think about the rabid secular movement underway today. So many people feel no importance for God or that there is any relevance in spirituality.

Even among traditionally christian nations, secularists are taking up more and more of the population. Only a very small percentage of people in the UK go to church anymore. One reason so much of Europe is reported to hold negative feelings toward the U.S. is because there is widespread belief that the U.S. is deluded by its christian fervor.

Is the U.S. the last great christian nation?