I was up and moving at 6:00 this morning. That is twice in a row now. I hope that this isn’t going to be the start of a trend! I like having time to sleep in with Oreo. He likes to hang out in the morning and just relax. If I get out of bed he will follow me into the office and sleep on his pillow there.
I went to Burger King on my way out of town. I needed some breakfast and knew that I wouldn’t very likely be able to get any lunch.
Nothing exciting going on today in Ithaca. Just fixing a broken desktop.
It ended up taking longer than I thought which I should really be used to by now since it always takes a lot longer than I thought. I managed to get out of Ithaca around 5:15 to head back for Geneseo.
While I was in Ithaca I had to make a stop over to Best Buy and while I was in Best Buy I checked out some of the new portable media toys from Samsung. I am very depressed that they are no longer making the same MP3 player that I have. The one that I have is near perfect. It has a few minor problems but the cost is good and the size is perfect. And the best feature is the forty-two hour run time off of a single AA battery. I don’t like the rechargable units because they get far lower run times and you have to have a charger for them and cannot simply go out and get a battery for them. You can get batteries anywhere making them extra easy to use. I think that there are a lot of people like me who like to use their MP3/Ogg Vorbis players for many things like long walks, car drives, flying, etc. In many of those cases you need to have very long play times or the ability to just change the battery so that you can keep on listening. With a rechargable battery you are often stuck with not enough charge, even if fully charged, to last for the whole time that you might want to use the device! Especially on days when you are doing some serious travelling – liking riding a bus. And on those days you never have any good way to use a charger so you are doubly out of luck with those types of units. But while I was there I did discover that Samsung has a first generation audio/video player out that looks to be very interesting. It is very tiny for what it is and it allows you to play all of the audio files that you are used to except for Ogg Vorbis which is a real shame but it also allows you to play MPEG4 videos! MPEG4 is a very high quality, small file size and popular web video standard. It is very exciting because it means that you can use this tiny and inexpensive unit for both podcasting and videocasting! I am totally wanting one now but I am sure not going to spend any money on one until I have a chance to really try one out and see whether or not it is really able to do anything useful. But it would be really cool to be able to watch my own Vlog on there as well as Rocketboom, Villagegirl and other neat Vlogs. It is a cool idea and a start one way or another. It would be really neat to replace television with something like that.
I got back to Geneseo at 7:30 and met dad and Jeremy over at Denny’s for some dinner. Jeremy has been begging to go to Denny’s for two months now so we finally got to go.
After dinner Jeremy came over and set up his computer in the living room. We tried to get a VPN set up with some of his friends so that we could play Age of Empires 2 but after several hours of trying we finally ended up giving up on it for the night. We worked on that until 11:00 when Min got home from work and grocery shopping. It is not an easy thing to get to work.
Jeremy played video games into the night. Dominica and I recorded the twentieth SGL Podcast last night and, for the first time, we have added music to it. I am excited about Min doing the show with me. I think that it will take some time before we start to get anything super interesting but if we keep at it, and you guys keep listening and sending in comments, that we will manage to figure it out and get a pretty awesome show going. We all ready have a special guest host that is planning on joining us for next weekend’s podcast. That will be neat.
By the time I had finished editing the show and getting it ready to post it was around 2:30 in the morning and I really needed to get to bed. Dominica managed to go to bed a bit before I did. She has to work tomorrow but it is her last shift for the week and she gets the next three days off!