March 10, 2007: Daylight Savings Time Cometh

It was a pleasant walk to the World Trade Center train station last night when I left the office on Greenwich Street. I love Manhattan. You can just walk everywhere and then hop on a train. It doesn’t get much cooler than that. I hate having to use a car to get places. That isn’t any fun. It is too expensive and takes too much work and it breaks down all of the time. Give me public transportation any day.

I took the PATH back to Newark and walked home via the Gateway Center. I had never tried this until tonight. That was really handy. I was able to walk almost the entire way from the train terminal to my front door without ever going outside. This is an entire piece of the city of Newark that I have never seen before and barely even knew existed. It is nice to know that Newark has big, upscale urban areas like this. I was very impressed.

I met Dominica at 1180 and we walked to the Theater Square Grill to get dinner off of their late night menu. We had been hoping to be able to make it there for the regular dinner menu but it was quite late by the time that I was able to get back to Newark.

My birthday present arrived last night but I didn’t get a chance to play with it. Pinnacle Studio 10 Titanium Edition that I bought with the money that dad gave me for my birthday. Now I can do some real video editing. I am anxious to get to try it out but I probably won’t be able to do much of anything with it until after next weekend. Only one week left to go to get everything moved out of the house. What a week this is going to be!

Dominica and I slept in just a little today and we really needed it. I have barely had a chance to get any sleep for several days – ever since we learned of SUN’s Java bug with the new Daylight Savings Time. We got up and went to Food for Life for breakfast. After breakfast we had to drive up to Bloomfield to pick up Dominica’s car from the shop. They called last night to let us know that it was ready for us. We grabbed a car was too since the weather was so awesome today. That was pretty painless but still took way too long and by the time that we were done with breakfast (which was so late as to really be lunch) and the car it was mid-afternoon already. Boy time flies when you only get one day off all week.

Today is my only chance to relax at all so we took advantage of it. I installed Pinnacle Studio 10 which took a few hours between the long installs, constant reboots and crashes (it is not the most stable software.) But I finally got it installed. I also worked on my first ever installation of the WildFire (which just changed its name to OpenFire) Jabber/XMPP Server. One more thing that needs to be done this week. I have more work that needs to be done this week than I can remember having had in a very long time.

We watched quite a bit of the fourth and fifth seasons of Remington Steele while we relaxed. I really needed the downtime. For dinner we just ordered in from Nino’s in Harrison to make things quick and easy.

I hobbled together my first video in Pinnacle but I had to do most of the editing in QuickTime Pro because Pinnacle doesn’t appear to actually support QuickTime MP4 as an input type and since that is what my one camera makes natively there isn’t much that I can do. Apparently QuickTime is a pretty bad format to work in because Apple’s own native QuickTime products like QuickTime Pro are buggy and crash all of the time even now that I updated to the latest version 7.1.5. If Apple’s own QT software can’t handle the format what is the point? And people wonder why I don’t get an iPod! So this first video is pretty roughly edited as Pinnacle can’t do it and QuickTime can’t do it well. I will be using QT less and less as I move forward. Now that I have real editing software I will want to be making higher quality videos. It didn’t matter so much before.

I thought that I would be going to bed at a reasonable time but I wasn’t tired and ended up staying up way too late.  I got paged out just after midnight and had to work until half past one taking care of that issue.  Once it was that late I decided that it would be best if I just stayed up and watched Daylight Savings Time hit us to see how bad it would be.

One fifty nine rolled over to three o’clock in the morning and a number of issues did crop up.  I didn’t want to go to bed until all of my issues were resolved.  I don’t want things waiting for me in the morning if I can help it.  So I ended up staying up until half past four in the morning working.  Not the night that I had hoped for but not totally unplanned for.  I was very tired when I finally got to go to bed.

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