Having stayed up so late last night my plan had been to sleep in nice and late this morning so that I would be totally rested so that I could really hit the day running. I do have a cold and need my sleep you know. But alas, Oreo decided to get me up at 8:10 which was only five and a half hours of sleep. Far less than I had been anticipating. But at least it gives me a kick start.
Dominica and Danielle are hanging out today. Danielle came over at 10:30 and picked Min up and they headed up to Henrietta to have lunch and to do some shopping and banking.
I have plenty of work to do this morning so I got right to it. Lots of little miscellaneous things.
Now here is some exciting news for us broadband techno-geek types who refuse to own televisions: AOL Time Warner is opening a free Internet television network! How exciting is that. The company ownes tons of classic television shows and has the rights to use them however they want. I guess they figure that getting a solid audience out of them instead of having them sitting on dusty shelves is a better use of their previous investments. Um, duh. I am excited to see how this plays out. Apparently Yahoo! and Google have been looking at a similar system but neither of them own television content that they are able to draw on to bring the system out as quickly as AOL can. This should prove to be quite interesting. I will most definitely be checking it out. I am also eagerly awaiting regular television style content made by amateurs on the web using syndication technologies like RSS. Sure, I do that with my vlog but it isn’t the same. I want sitcoms and dramas and real production. I want the shows that no one can make for regular television because the audience just isn’t big enough to be able to squeeze it onto prime time but there are enough people who want to watch it to make it feasible for Internet distribution. Imagine if Roswell has come out now and everyone would have been watching it online. It wouldn’t have died from being transfered to a network that no one had access to and everyone would have had solid viewing numbers because the Internet lets us know each and every time someone watches a station. No more complex, inaccurate and cumbersome Nielson ratings. How do those things work anyway? Anyone ever met a person who as been asked to do a Nielson rating? Do they represent our demographic accurately? Somehow I doubt it.
Dad picked me up a little after 11:50 and we went over to the Omega Grill to do a business lunch meeting. After lunch I came home and tried to get back to work. I made some calls and followed up on some things. It was only ten or twenty minutes before Dominica got home. She managed to get me the rockwool that I needed to start the pepper plants that I have been wanting to grow. So I am planning on getting those seeds started today if possible. My insurance company called today and said that my car insurance was way too high and that they had found a better spot to get my insurance through. It will lower my insurance by almost $1,200 a year! I am really happy about that. And no it is not that stupid company with the lizard either.
I talked to the Castile school today and they do have the computer lab ready for me to come in and begin getting the computers ready. That is going to be no small project. There is a lot of Linux installing to do. Some hardware repairs and changes that need to be made and a whole bunch of new wiring that needs to be taken care of. It is going to take me a while to get everything into place and ready. We could easily have just about nothing done until next semester. That is really depressing after all of the work that we did in the spring to get things up and running but we know better what we are doing now and should be able to have a much better system much more quickly. I am anxious to see how the new computer “lab” has turned out. It is still only a temporary space. I guess in some ways anything would be a temporary space. But this one is extremely temporary with only the intention to use it for one to three semesters as I understand it.
I have a new podcast that is available starting today. Everyone should check it out. I think that it is pretty cool. I am starting a project, well continuing the project that I mentioned some time ago, to read the entire Bible and record it. So, to make the project more interesting, I am now podcasting the entire Bible one chapter at a time and hoping to keep up doing one chapter per day. The first chapter of Lamentations is all ready posted and available. You can check out the website at Scott Reads Bible or you can subscribe through your friendly neighbourhood podcatcher like Juice to the Scott Reads the Bible RSS Feed.
Information has finally come out about iPodder’s name switch to Juice. As many people though, it was because of its confusing name. Although I think that everyone assumed that they had done it because the name was confusing and not because Apple and sent them a cease and desist order. Bah hum bug. I wonder what will happen to so many other products that are similar such as iPodderX, iPodder.net and iPodder.org. Well, I all ready noticed that the last of those has been taken down and they switched their web site address but are still no longer online. So I wonder if Apple hasn’t contacted them as well. I think that this is a really bad idea from Apple’s viewpoint because so many people were buying iPod’s because of the name connection to podcasting but if they force everyone to take the word pod out of anything that they do then they are only diminishing their own mindshare. They had a really good thing going on with everyone being so confused and thinking that they had to buy an Apple product just to listen to music on the Internet.
Dominica laid down on the floor with Oreo in the afternoon sunlight streaming into my office and took an afternoon nap. Oreo normally sleeps in the sun so Min just laid down next to him and fell asleep on his doggie pillow.
This is a picture of the cabana that was next to the house where I grew up. A lot of you have heard me talking about the farmhouse that I grew up in from age zero through seven. We moved into the second house over Christmas break from school when I was seven. In this picture the farmhouse is all ready gone and would have been just to the left of the picture. The new house is visible on the right. The cabana was originally attached at the side of the old farmhouse and then the new house was attached at a ninety degree angle to the same concrete slab that the old house was. This picture was taken because the cabana was going to be taken away and I wanted something to remember it by. The cabana was a really weird thing to have when I was growing up because I had never really thought about how weird it was until I was older. But the cabana was a full free standing building that we only ever used for storage but had plumbing and a full working bathroom. What a weird thing to have. Had we not gotten rid of the cabana I probably would have wanted to move into it when I was older. I think that it was strange that we had such a useful building right there attached to our house via the pool’s concrete slab and we never used it for anything other than pool storage. If I had that building today I would easily have a thousand much cooler uses for it.
This entire afternoon ended up being very, very busy. I can’t believe how much time I ended up on the telephone. Dominica thinks that she is coming down with a cold. I have one so that is pretty likely I think. She slept from about 1:00 until a little after 5:30 after having gotten a full night’s sleep last night. And she is feeling a little stuffy. Sounds like a cold to me.
A little searching onling and we found Shop England Online’s Double Devon Cream which is what we fell in love with when we were down in Walt Disney World. Yummy! I am planning on ordering some quite soon. Maybe a case of it.
Dominica did a little house cleaning after she got up but it didn’t take very long before she was really exhausted and needed to relax. She sat in the living room and watched the first season of Aardman Entertainment’s Creature Comforts which is a new television show based on the classic BBC shorts of the same name. She watched most of that while I made her some dinner. She and Oreo sat on the couch and I did the cooking for a chance. I just made sandwiches and simple stuff. Then I did more work in the office and Dominica watched Dragonslayer from 1981.
Tonight Oreo decided it would be fun to spend long hours sneaking around in the darkness at the back of the house. He kept telling us that he needed to go outside and he would go out and stay out until I came looking for him which is not normal. The third time he was out for a really long time and I had to take his favourite bouncy ball out onto the deck and bounce it loudly so that he could hear it before he would come back. Dominica was pretty worried but he came back straight away once he could hear the ball bouncing. Once he was in the house we could smell that he had been rolling in some large animal’s feces. Oh boy was he ever gross. He had chunks of it caked onto him. Ewww. So we had to throw his straight into a bath. He had been needing a bath anyway but we were not exactly planning on giving him one just that second. He is getting visitors tomorrow afternoon so it is good that at least he will not be smelly for them like he has been. That was not fun. I hate when he does that. The lay of the shrub and trees behind our house is just perfect for us to have absolutely no visibility out the back of the house at all. We have only a single 150 watt equivalent flourescent bulb to light up the area but even during the day there is almost nothing that can be seen because the entire open area behind the house is perfectly obscurred by a few choicely positioned shrubberies. What a pain.
Dominica was totally exhausted tonight but I did convince her to do a podcast before she went off to bed. Tonight is our twenty-first podcast. I think that we started off pretty strong but by the end both of us were really tired and were barely able to wrap up the show like we had wanted to. But at least we managed to get another podcast together. Maybe part of the secret is not trying to be so ambitious with the show. Very few podcasts attempt to do as much as we do and it is definitely a strain. It takes me about an hour after having finished a podcast to actually have all of the editing taken care of and everything ready to go. There is a lot more involved in doing a podcast than people realize.