September 28, 2007: Hello City

Listening To: The Puppini Sisters – Betcha Bottom Dollar

Today is my first official day of being based off of Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. My office is officially mine at nine this morning. But since it is Friday and unlike the normal working population this is my critical, busy day and not my slack off and leave work early day I can’t even consider going into the office until someone there has verified that my workstation is set up and ready to go and that someone is there and definitely able to let me into the building because I do not believe that I have badge access yet to the building. On Wall Street, unlike in Warren, you need a badge to move about internally in the building. For example, to use the rest room you have to leave the area that you are in and without a working badge would be unable to return.

Dominica has recently gotten hooked on the infamous webtoon Questionable Content. Good stuff.

The Puppini Sisters singing “Wuthering Heights” might be the best 1940s styled female trio vocal tune ever. W00t!

I made myself a simple lunch – whole wheat bread with organic pure peanut peanut butter and gooseberry preserves. What a hipster I am.

Today during her lunch break Dominica ran out to Best Buy and did some shopping. She grabbed an LCD wall mount so that we can relocate our 32″ Westinghouse 720P LCD that has been in the living room up until now into the bedroom where it is going to be mounted above the main closets so that we can watch it from bed. And she also picked up the 40GB AppleTV that we are going to hook to the LCD to use as our television source. We are very excited to try it out. The AppleTV will work over the wireless in our apartment to get RSS feeds from the iTunes on Dominica’s desktop.

My work day was rather long which was mostly my own fault because I didn’t wait to kick it off until late like I usually do on Fridays but instead started working nice and early.  Since there is no escaping early on Fridays I was left working a long day.  Meh.

Min got home around seven and we tore into the AppleTV so that we could check it out.  So, first impression: the unit itself is gorgeous and there is nothing to it.  It is a tiny, attractive “half height Mac Mini wanna-be” which is very cool.  It is almost exactly a half height Mac Mini.  It has a power cord and a tiny remote.  That’s it.  Just add HDMI cable and plug in.

Our AppleTV failed immediately.  It had all kinds of issues with blue lines appearing on the display almost constantly, occassional screens full of red and blue garbage and about half the time the image went out completely leaving us with nothing but an “invalid signal” message on the monitor.  Great.  We tried everything including different cables, placement, configurations, settings, etc.  Nothing worked.  But turning the HDMI Brightness down to low blew away the image completely.  So that didn’t work.  I guess we have to take it back tomorrow.  What a pain.  Just like the Wii.

I at least took the time to get iTunes set up so that I could start getting material ready for the AppleTV if and when we get it working tomorrow.  That was a chore in and of itself as the iTunes installer wouldn’t function for the longest time and once it was working getting through its amateur interface was a job in itself.  But I think that I have it figured out now and can actually get it to be useful if we get the AppleTV working.

Min bought Knocked Up the other day and she really, really wanted to watch that tonight so once the AppleTV wasn’t working we put that in.  She really only got it because it was a Katherine Heigl movie (KH RULZ!)  But the movie turned out to be a total disappoitment.  Bad characters.  Bad acting.  Horrible storyline.  It was just sad.  I stopped watching it after about half an hour.  It wasn’t worth sitting through.  Bleh.

We were off to bed a little before midnight.  More AppleTV goodness tomorrow.

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