Somehow it has become July, the second half of 2010. I can’t believe that we have been living in Texas for over half of a year already. That seems absolutely unbelievable.
Dad went out for breakfast with is breakfast crew this morning. I got up and got right to work. Being in New York and getting up based on my Texan schedule means that I am up very, very early in the morning and online long before anyone else.
Around lunch time today my migraine from yesterday returned. No fun. It is not quite as bad as it was yesterday but still pretty annoying. Today, however, I figured out what was causing it. It is the DVD drive in the old HP laptop that I have been using in dad’s office. When the DVD drive is spinning, which it is constantly doing as I am doing DVD archiving, it makes an almost inaudible, high-pitched whine that is causing my head to swim.
So I packed up the old laptop and moved it out to the kitchen counter and went and got Dominica’s decently new laptop and brought it into the office instead. My head immediately began to improve and there was no doubt where the problem was coming from. I can’t believe that I have been putting up with that other machine all of this time not realizing that it was making me not feel well.
This evening, once work calmed down, we drove over to Denny’s in Geneseo for dinner. Liesl put on her usual performance being the center of attention for the restaurant. Everyone has to watch her while she eats and, when we left, she had to say “bye bye” to each and every table that we walked past. She has still not had any of the traditional toddler shyness set in and we are pretty confident that it never will. She is our little social butterfly.
Liesl has been doing tons and tons of development this week while we have been in New York. Much of it is, of course, me seeing new things that she picked up from all of her time with Dominica’s family but since coming out to dad’s farm she has been playing with tons of new toys and reading all new books and hanging out with her grandpa all of the time and she has surely learned lots of new words and concepts. Every day she demands that she go “outside” many times for walks. Her favourite things including going out to see the big “rocks” that dad has out in the yard (for his Boulder Golf Course) and to walk about the tiny, Liesl-sized sidewalk that is the remains of the old, in-ground swimming pool that dad filled in with dirt a few years ago.
I heard a rumor that Apple is finally planning to release the AppleTV 2. It is about time. The original AppleTV is getting quite venerable and there are some really critical features missing – most notably, 1080p support. I am very hopeful that the new version will also include support for DLNA so that we can stream movies to it off of the network like we do to all of our other devices. I have not heard that that is going to be supported which is really too bad. That is a major lack of functionality that puts the AppleTV into a category of being far less useful than our existing PS3 and other solutions. If the rumored price on the new units turns out to be true – just $99 – the AppleTV is just a few, basic features away from being a total win if Apple doesn’t screw it up somehow. The AppleTV 2 is to be based on the iTouch and the iPhone rather than on the Mac computer which makes way more sense. So, in theory, from a manufacturing standpoint, the new machines will be far less costly to make and should be much more energy efficient for end users to operate which is a win all around. We are looking forward to learning more about them.