December 1, 2006

Winter is just around the corner and it is almost seventy degrees here in northern New Jersey. Wow.

Everyone likes to say I was wrong about Sony being able to sell out the PS3 with the 400,000 units that they were set to release on launch day. Obviously there was a huge rush and supplies were gone in no time. BUT we have recently learned that far less than half that number were actually manufactured and released. Of course they sold out! There were hardly any of them out there.

Microsoft officially launched Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 yesterday. Everyone has been saying that it wouldn’t be able to get them out this year but they are out now. So Vista will most likely be available on the shelves quite soon.

Work was expected to be insanely busy today but most of the day actually ended up being pretty slow with a lot of work happening after hours so I was stuck in the office until well after eight in the evening which I had been planning on so it was no big deal. I am looking forward to this weekend. It will be far less hectic than our average weekend and it is, I believe, our final weekend with a lot of plans until after Christmas and New Years which is a full month away. The holiday season is always the busiest season of the year followed, of course, by the summer wedding season.

I had been hoping to be able to go up to Rochester this weekend for the Relyea’s annual Thanksgiving / Holiday party but I just can’t make it this year. Way too much going on and we have to deal with the BMW’s accident this weekend.

I was stuck at work so late that Dominica ate leftovers on her own tonight. I stopped at Food for Life on the way home and grabbed a quick dinner. That is the only place that I have eaten today. Dominica also went to the gym while I was still at work.

I got home and the evening was pretty much shot. It was very late and Dominica was just wrapping up her homework for the evening. We hung out for about half an hour before she went in to the bedroom to play some video games and to snuggle with Oreo and I did about half an hour of work with the video editors to figure out which one is going to work for me. The final verdict appears to be Ulead Studio 10. After playing with all three major contenders (I decided not to try out Nero’s video editor which is the only other low cost editor that I am aware of) Ulead appears to be the only editing studio that meets my basic requirements. Adobe Premier Elements is just a toy and doesn’t do what I need in the least. Pinnacle probably supports most of the functions that I want and definitely has a much better title creation utility than Ulead but simply doesn’t work at all on my computer (Windows XP Pro SP2 fully patched.) Pinnacle is on version 10.5 and the 10 series is a totally new engine underneath from their earlier packages and apparently it doesn’t work and is super buggy. So that rules them out. Ulead products doesn’t seem very polished but it works and it is the only package that appears to do the basics so it is the only actual option. Fortunately for me Ulead is also the least expensive of the different packages at under $70! So good deal.

It is so warm on this the first night of December that we are sleeping with the windows open even in the midst of the “storm of the season”.

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