I was really exhausted when I got up early this morning. Almost no sleep last night. I don’t even know when I am going to have a chance to do some catchup on my sleep either. Not today and not this weekend. I’ve got a lot of work to do before I get any chances to sleep.
I got right to work. No chance for dad and I to go out to breakfast this morning. Originally, when I had first planned to come out to dad’s place today, I was not aware that I was going to be working the early shift
I worked hard all morning and then around one I was able to sneak away and dad and I drove over to Geneseo to get lunch at the Omega Grill. We both got the special of the day which was coconut shrimp.
It was warm out but there was a little cloud cover. Oreo has been so nervous this week that we decided to take him along and to eat quickly. It was fine. A little warm but he didn’t even bother moving out of his snuggly car seat so he couldn’t have been very warm for very long.
After lunch it was straight back to work until almost seven in the evening. At a quarter after six, my aunt Sharon and uncle Leo came up from Leicester. Once I was done with work the four of us drove out to Pavilion to get a Friday night fish fry at BW’s at the Davis’ golf course on Perry Road. I have never eaten there before and after my elementary school classmate, Larry Brown, from Pavilion Baptist School worked there for years as the manager I managed to finally get out there just several weeks after he left to go elsewhere. The food was really good and we all quite enjoyed it. I suspect that there will be many more BW’s fish fries in our future.
After dinner, Sharon and Leo went home and I did a little more work. Then dad and I decided to watch a movie. He has an AppleTV and rents movies on it because it is so quick and easy to do so. Really a nice system for individual movie rentals (Netflix is far better for heavy movie renters, AppleTV is great for more casual renters.) We spent about an hour trying to figure out what to watch and then, when we finally decided on something, we went to rent it and got a warning that we would be unable to view the rental because our system did not support HDCP which is a consumer rights removal system that the movie industry has pushed through to remove fair use rights from its customers. How this is legal I have no idea.
To make a long story not quite as long as it might have been, here is what happened. It turns out that Apple just pushed out a new firmware update to the AppleTV that caused it to start enforcing HDCP. That is why dad never saw this before. It also turns out that his HDCP monitor has a bad connector – the only connector that accepts 1080p video – and was causing the failure, but a second connector that only takes up to 1080i worked. It took about half an hour just to switch the connectors in, what we though was, a futile attempt to test the second connector. Both connectors were listed in the manual as accepting HDCP. So our very first ever experience with this crippling technology (that’s its actually purpose – to cripple your content) was for it to completely fail and to almost make several very expensive purchases worthless through a very minor and unexplained glitch.
We had tried to start watching the movie at nine thirty but it was after ten thirty when we finally got the AppleTV working again (easy interface, ha, who is Apple kidding – an hour just to figure out the DRM software!!) We opened up dad’s bottle of Talisker scotch and both had some and watched Inkheart with Brendan Fraser. It was a light, childrens’ action adventure film with a big budget. Fun and easy to enjoy.
It was way too late by the time that the movie was over. Way past midnight. It was around one in the morning by the time that Oreo and I finally managed to get into bed. Tomorrow morning I don’t have to be up quite as early but I still need to be up by around seven or so so that I can finish up all of the work that I need to do before eleven when I have to be on the road to drive up to Rochester to go to SpiceCorps Upstate New York’s first even meeting. Tony was supposed to car pool with me tomorrow but he cancelled this evening so I do not need to drive out to Avon before the meeting which is saving me at least half an hour.