February 4, 2006: John Stephens Hanging for the Day

John Stephens and I decided to get up just shortly after Dominica had left for work. Currently our only futon is in the living room so John didn’t have much chance of sleeping through Dominica getting ready for work. Just another reason why we would like to be able to have a “guest bedroom” kind of space available down in the basement so that people staying at our house could have a little privacy. And a little darkness. Our living room is a very hard room to keep dark during the daytime because there are windows on both ends of the open space as well as a skylight right in the middle of the room. It is difficult to cover up all of that light.

After getting up and showering and checking out some cool website like Ask A Ninja and Super Secret Dance Society and, of course, Rocketboom, we decided to grab some lunch and so returned to the Omega Grill to get some food.

Here is a question: Why did someone post a video of Mike Dancing at a Basketball Game? This stuff is weird people. Weird. And boring. Actually, more boring than weird. I just can’t believe that I come across this stuff.

After lunch we came back to the house and hung out in the living room while I completed the work on the computer that needed to be installed and shipped today. It took a few hours to get everything in place. Just as we were starting to get ready to go Andy called down to see what we were up to. So we decided to all get together to get some dinner. It was around 4:30 by the time that John and I managed to get out of Geneseo. We drove up to the FedEx on Scottsville Road but they are not open on the weekends so then we had to drive down to the FedEx Kinkos on Jefferson and get the shipping done from there. It is really handy that they are open twenty-four seven. A place that does shipping is not the kind of place that you want to have closing.

We got the packages shipped out and then went up to Brighton to pick up Andy so that we would all be in the same car. Oreo came along for the ride too. We decided to go to Applebee’s so we drove up to Webster and checked the place out. It was a forty-five minute wait and the line was out the door so we decided that someplace else would be a lot better. I looked while we were there and the Fizoli’s where Josh used to work that shared a parking lot with Wegmans and Applebee’s in Webster is gone and it looks like the old building was turned into a bank. It is probably for the best. Whoever thought that Italian fast food was a good idea wasn’t someone who liked eating. The food there was not good and even just mentioning it to someone tends to make them think that it was a bad idea. Fast spaghetti? Ewww. It is hard enough to come up with good spaghetti at a real Italian restaurant.

So we decided to just save money and to go down to Jay’s Diner for dinner instead. It is more casual there anyway and a lot easier to talk and hang out since it is not completely packed and loud. I like eating in relative quiet so that I can actually talk to people. If I didn’t like to talk to people I would just eat by myself. We had a good time at dinner and then we all went over to Borders to do a little book shopping while we were out. John and I both found some stuff that we wanted. I found a couple books on Asterisk and VOIP as well as a book on learning Ruby which I have been interested in checking out.

We took Andy home and then drove back down to Geneseo. Dominica managed to beat us home by seconds. She was still standing in the garage when we pulled in. Dominica was hungry so she drove over to Walmart and did some shopping and picked up a pizza for dinner.

I had some work that I wanted to do and Dominica wanted to get caught up on Firefly so she and John went down to the theatre while I worked up stairs for about three hours. I was working on trying to learn how to compress and encode video taken from my DV recorder. I would really like to be able to get my videos in Xvid format (an open source implementation of the MPEG-4 format) but I haven’t come up with an easy way to do that on Windows yet. If my laptop was Linux this would be a lot easier. But it isn’t so I have to figure something out. I have converted the videos into Windows Media files and I am able to get pretty good quality out of file sizes of 150MB and 300MB for a one hour recording. So I think that that is pretty good. But since I can’t use Windows Media files at the school and don’t feel like dealing with a proprietary format anyway I want to get Xvid working.

After they had watched the two episodes that I had all ready seen I went down and joined them for two additional episodes of Firefly. John was sleeping on the couch in the basement for most of the time. He had fallen asleep for about half an hour in the car on the way up to Henrietta earlier. He worked an early shift yesterday and needed to catch up on some sleep.

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