As is becoming common, Oreo got me up this morning with a desperate need for a walk. Today it wasn’t a short trip just outside the door either but one requiring my coat and shoes. At least it forces me to wake up and to get moving first thing in the morning.
The good news this morning is that the house keys have been located. They are not here so they need to be shipped to us but at least we aren’t having the mailbox locks replaced now which would be yet another big pain and who knows how long it would take. I am very glad that we decided to give it just one more day before asking the post office to replace the lock.
We did some more work with the TVersity system this morning. I have it running off of my desktop in the basement and after a little testing it is still not working very much but we did, somehow, get two episodes of one show to work but we are not sure why or how. Other episodes do not work and tons of other material does not work. It is very baffling. This really should be a fairly simple exercise but is turning out to be rather complex.
There is a lot of snow coming down in Peekskill this morning. Big soft flakes falling pretty quickly. Not a storm by any stretch. It is a calm day with very little wind.
Dominica left for her doctor’s appointment at twenty until two leaving me home with Liesl and Oreo. Oreo has been very sick the last two days and is steadily getting worse. His symptoms are very flu-like although I am guessing that it might be the new canned food that he has had to eat for the past two days because we ran out of his home-made stew and have not been able to get to the store to get the necessary ingredients to make more of it for him yet. We will be running to the store and getting ingredients so that we can make his food tomorrow.
Dominica’s appointment went well and everything is looking good. She did some very quick shopping at the CVS and then ran home arriving around four. This was probably the longest stretch in which I was in charge of Liesl all on my own and I had a sick Boston terrier to care for as well. Everyone was still alive at the end so it must have been a success.
I did a bunch of testing with TVersity today and we have discovered that we have two problems. The first is that almost everything that we have converted to h.264 thus far was done with an old codec that had some problem which means that the PS3 cannot play the output files (even though the AppleTV and VLC have no problems at all.) So we are stuck reconverting a massive amount of material. We also figured out that there is some issue with network speed or caching on the PS3 or something because the videos that do work only barely work as they stop and stutter constantly. Considering that we have a completely GigE network and the PS3 is alone on an 802.11n wireless connection it is hard to imagine that network speed could possibly be the issue. At least we figured out the compression problem and have a solution for it even if it is a really crappy one.
I spent a great deal of the evening taking Oreo out for one walk after another. He is definitely not feeling well and his trips outside are becoming more and more frequent even though it is very cold.
Tonight we finished watching the third season of Dr. Who. What a great season. I think that this was the best one so far. Since we watch Dr. Who via Netflix we are one season behind. Those in the UK have already seen season four (2008) but we just got season three (2007.)
I’ve been trying to play Final Fantasy III while we watch shows at night. I am at a stage of the game where a lot of grinding is necessary and I am able to do that without really paying any attention to it. So I managed to make some really good progress tonight on that.