Feeling fairly patriotic now that today is the last day of a three day weekend including Independence Day. Feeling jazzed about getting back down to business tomorrow.

The Zephyr Side Of The Moon

Thursday, 3 July, was the night Sons Of Nothing returned to the Salt Lake area with a spectacular performance at the legendary Zephyr Club in downtown Salt Lake City.

(Incidentally, the Zephyr's website sucks, I'm sorry to say.)

And once again, I was there to do the on-screen visualizations and video.

Like at Suede six nights before, the band started out with a set of original tunes and then played two hours of Pink Floyd tunes. The original set was mind-blowing. They did amazing job playing those songs. Randy — the de facto band videographer — told me he thought that was the best original set he'd ever seen them play. I told him I agreed and that I thought it was probably to make up for Tim breaking a string during “Stolen” at the Suede show.

After playing a lot of Pink Floyd, the band played an encore of Brain Damage and Eclipse from Dark Side Of The Moon. The audience (and the manager of the Zephyr) wasn't satisfied and wanted more, more, more. Thus, they cranked out “Fearless”, “Cymbaline”, “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun” and a double or triple-length version of “Astronomy Domine”.

All in all it was great and it sounds like both clubs are talking to the band about booking upcoming dates.

In the busy-ness

About six months ago, I pulled out all the Iodynamics sales tax filings for the previous couple of years to see how we'd been doing compared to previous years. Sure, there was a steady increase in our sales revenues each year (a good thing), but the third quarter of each year was always a big disappointment compared to Q1 and Q2. It just seemed like Summer and Fall were a bad time to be in the business Iodynamics is in.

Not this year.

Whether it's because Mike and I are working our butts off to keep the business flowing in or because things are different this year in the industry, Iodynamics is looking to do a better Q3 than Q2 or Q1 and it's great. We've been setting revenue goals for the last couple months and meeting each one and that makes me very proud to be involved with this corporation.

This last week has been stressful for the Iodynamics partners, though. We've been working on some marketing materials for one of our clients that is going to a trade show in about a week. The whole project was done on short notice, so we knew it was going to be a tight schedule, but to complicate things, Mike had a weeklong vacation to the northwest planned next week, Dave had a family campout planned (at the last minute) for the July 4 weekend, and Chadd had some holiday plans that affected his availability as well.

It looks like we're still going to be able to deliver everything on time, but I can tell the overall stress level this last week got much higher than normal as people are trying to get their obligations fulfilled before they head out. I wasn't as involved with this particular project as I usually am because it was something that didn't involve any programming. (for a change)

I guess it's a good sign when you're stressed because you've got too much work as opposed to being stress because you don't have enough.

Baby coming through!

We're about six to seven weeks out from welcoming our son into the world. We don't have a specific name decided upon yet. I suspect we'll do what we've done in the past and wait until the day of the birth to come to a final decision. It helps to assign a name to a face, I guess.

Christine, Maya, Lucy, and I took a short tour of the Alta View Hospital Women's Center on Saturday so we'll know where we're going and what to expect when the time comes to head up there.

DVDs coming through

I finally got a DVD burner!

Okay, let me say that again...

I finally got a DVD burner!

And it feels good to finally be able to author my own DVDs. Tapes are so... 20^th century. I'm excited about being able to record commentary audio and do subtitles and all that jazz. I'm excited about learning all about the DVD format and authoring DVD menus and multimedia. If nothing else, it's something to put on my résumé I guess.

I haven't recorded any DVDs yet. At roughly $1.60 a piece (and that was for a cheap spindle of generic 1X discs), I wasn't about to burn anything “just for fun” yet.

So, right now, as I type this, one of my other computers is encoding Jay and Jennie's wedding video to DVD MPEG streams so I try making that into a DVD.

It'd be really cool if I could do the DVD authoring in Linux.

Maybe I just need to bite the bullet and get a Mac if I'm going to be serious about video editing and DVD authoring. *shrugs*

Recent thought theme

Now, a slight shift of gears to a move intimate, personal level. One thing I've been thinking about lately is the courage and bravery required to do the “right things” in life.

I think it's easy — even popular — to take the easy road through life.

I'm not really going anywhere specific here, just putting some ideas down so I don't have to ponder them so much.

I guess the reason I've been thinking about this lately is because I have these issues about religion and being religious. I've always kind of thought my issues were about “the people” and the cultures surrounding the LDS faith here in Utah. As I've pondered this recently, I've started to wonder if that's all bullshit (pardon my portuguese) and if the excuse that I have beef with the people is just my leaning on a convenient, cowardly crutch.

I mean, if I believe something is the right thing to do, I shouldn't let the supposedly petty behavior of others get in my way. I should just do it.

Anyway, that's really all I have to say about that at this time. Maybe I'll come up with more later.