Liesl slept though the entire night last night! She went to bed with Dominica at eleven when she had her bottle. She didn’t wake up until after seven this morning. What a blessing. We are now getting real sleep again.
I got pictures from yesterday edited and uploaded to Flickr this morning. The Liesl Flickr set is now up to 111 images, and I haven’t even had a chance to start using the new 50mm lens yet that arrived yesterday.
My morning was completely crazy. I worked until one thirty in the afternoon without any break at all. Major problems at the office keeping us all on our toes. Not a fun day. Not interesting work just cleaning up after things have broken. The worst kind of work.
This afternoon was Liesl’s checkup at the doctor’s office. My morning was so crazy that I didn’t get to shower or eat or walk Oreo before we had to go. We took him with us and he had a quick walk on the way to the car but that was all.
Liesl’s doctor’s appointment went well. She is up to eight pounds now which is very good. All of her signs are very healthy. Her umbilical cord fell off this morning so he got to inspect that as well.
After we got home, Dominica made me some lunch while I got back to work and then she started playing the original Fable on the XBOX. She had started Fable 2 the other day but then realized that we had the original game as well so she went back and is going to play them in order.
It is a dark and dreary day here today. We are into the darkest few weeks of the year plus it is very overcast and has been raining all day. So there has been practically no natural light at all. One of the problems of having a baby just as we head towards winter is that there is so little light with which to take pictures.
Pinnacle Studio Plus 12 arrived today. I wanted to update to the latest version now that I will be taking videos of Liesl on a regular basis. I already have one video that I attempted to post to Flickr just to discover that Apple’s faulty QuickTime wasn’t able to play the audio on the file but that once it got to Flickr it had audio of people talking in the background that I have to fix.
I got the first video posted. Pinnacle has not really improved at all in this latest version. I am very disappointed. It was cheap and will work for me for now just fine but down the road, when I get a high def camcorder for recording Liesl, Pinnacle completely falls apart. In Pinnacle’s extreme wisdom they have decided to completely block the use of 1080p output (even though practically everyone shoots in this for home use these days and needs it for viewing on their televisions) as well as h.264 compression (the only practical compression solution for anything online) so that you are limited to old, bulky compression algorithms at artificially low resolutions maxing out at 1080i (but who has a monitor that handles interlacing without having to convert to progressive – and even progressive is a misnomer since LCD displays it all at once!)
I’ve heard a rumor that Adobe Premier Elements doesn’t have these artificual cripplings so I will be able to use that to make my “basic home movies” that even Pinnacle can’t handle properly 🙁 (Just to open videos taken with my over-a-year-old Kodak digicam required me to upgrade again to Pinnacle 12.1 and to apply an h.264 license!)
For now by highest definition camera is my Kodak Digicam which is only 720p which Pinnacle can handle. I have to output to somewhat bloated MPEG-4 files and just work with those or else output to super low-compression MPEG-2 and use a third party conversion utility to transfer into h.264 files that can be handled by AppleTV or for other online download purposes. The worst part is that in the Pinnacle forums everyone defends Pinnacle Studio’s shortcomings by claiming that no one can use this stuff online – as if AppleTV and FrontRow on Apple products, iTunes, and the like’s default settings (which are pathetically low IMHO) don’t even represent real users!
Not to mention shows like Mariposa which has been available in 1080p for years now and is doing well. Part of the problem is that everyone assumes a tiny slice of possible usage scenarios and thinks that everyone else wants to do the same thing. They point out in the forums that services like Vimeo don’t go to such a high resolution and ergo those resolutions don’t matter. But Vimeo is a single, free, Flash-player service. What about RSS based background downloaders and Torrent users? There are a lot of us out here ready to consume 10-100x the bandwidth that videos are currently be offered in but no one is providing any content.
I took Oreo on a very long walk this evening. We went up the hill and all the way out to the main entrance of the complex and back along with a short side trip too. He was very excited and very hungry by the time that we returned home.
The Ralstons are planning on coming down to Peekskill the weekend after New Year’s. We haven’t seen them in months. They are planning to stay two or three days. This is their chance to see Liesl. Ramona is coming next weekend to visit Liesl (that is the the weekend after this weekend coming up in a few days.) Liesl has a lot of people looking to come visit her.
I am working on getting the first Liesl video cross-posted to Vimeo but am having some problems getting their uploader to accept the file. I know that the file is good because it worked fine on Flickr. I tried YouTube but they are down for maintenance at the moment.
Dominica, Liesl and I all went out to the Stop and Shop tonight for some serious grocery shopping as we are out of everything at the house. This is Dominica and Liesl’s first trip anywhere other than the doctor’s office. Liesl did really well barely making a sound the entire time that we were shopping – which is good because it is totally unfair to force a crying baby onto people in public unnecessarily.
We got a ton of food and supplies. We should not need to go back to the grocery store for some time now. At least a week, I hope. We had to go today because Oreo is just about out of food and needs something to eat tomorrow.
For dinner we picked up a ready to bake pizza from Stop and Shop and cooked that ourselves. We put on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and watched that before going to bed. No video games for me today. Dominica did get to put in a few hours on Fable.