March 25, 2008: AppleTV is Hooked Back Up

March seems to have blown by in a blur. Somehow we have arrived at the end of the month already.

This week I am really on the early morning shift unlike last week when I just thought that I must be. Oops. So the plan was to sleep until the very last second this morning and then start working. But twenty minutes before I was going to get up Oreo got out of bed and had a little emergency. He needed me to walk him, and not just his short walk around the building but his long walk around the block. He had a bit of a tummy ache. So I got him home and fed him his breakfast. But no sooner had he eaten than he needed to go for another emergency walk. It is going to be a long morning for me, I can tell.

One of my jobs today was getting the AppleTV hooked back up in our bedroom now that we have wireless working in the apartment again. I did some cleaning on the top of our bedroom bookshelf and found a good spot for the AppleTV, hooked it up and got it updated to the latest 2.0 software package. Then I worked to get a few h.264 videos that I have been testing transferred over to see how they would work on it. The first few videos worked extremely well. Handbrake successfully took 1.2GB MPEG2 files and turned them into 330MB h.264 files for the AppleTV that look better than normal SDTV. We are going to be very happy using the AppleTV for watching our own collection. And Dominica is going to be very excited to be able to watch YouTube from bed again.

One channel that we discovered that we really like on YouTube is Howcast. You can watch them on their own site or through HowCast YouTube.

It was a fairly busy day. I wasn’t hurting for things to do. I tried to do some cleaning in the apartment when the opportunity arose but there wasn’t much chance for that. All I really managed to do was to clean up some shelves that have been inaccessible while we were storing all of the stuff that we just shipped to dad’s house this past weekend. The shelves were pretty prominent in the living room and were driving me crazy so I am much happier having gotten them mostly cleaned up. It looks much better now.

I did manage to do two loads of dishes and made a big dent on the recently acquired mess in the kitchen. And I got the cardboard trash out that has piled up over the last few days and I took out the old office chair and switched over to my new one. The new chair is tiny compared to the old one and is more attractive as well.  Just by switching to it we have tons more space in our tiny office spot.  Now it is much easier for Dominica and I to work at the same time since before our chairs were always touching.

Dominica was really hankering for a vegetable stir-fry which, for some odd psychosomatic reason always gives me a headache so she ate that and I just ran over to Food for Life to grab some dinner for myself.

We discovered the ultimate “meal bar” food today: Fiber One Chewy Bars by General Mills.  Dominica bought the oats & caramel flavour the other day and I had my first one today.  Wow are they ever good and loaded with fiber too!

I did about an hour of homework tonight and Dominica did as well.  We have so much to do that there isn’t much chance to avoid it.

Leave a comment