I spent six hours last night compressing the first thirty episodes of the SGL Podcast in the hopes of being able to fit them onto a DVD for a backup. No luck. They are so huge that they don’t fit. That is the original files, the Audacity files. The are gigantic. So I have given up on attempting to store the original files and am just going to make do with having some high quality MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files that I can work from it I ever need to. So I began converting everything to those formats and am making an online copy of them at the Internet Archive so everyone is welcome to get super high quality copies of them there. I am starting with the oldest shows because those are the ones that had to be dropped from podOmatic when my account filled up. That is too bad that they have to made to delete your old stuff but the service is free and storage is expensive. Espeically when most of that old stuff will never be heard ever again.
Dad found his VHS copy of “The King’s Special Christmas” which is a short puppet video that we have from when I was younger. It is a hilarious Christian video that almost no one knows. In fact, I did a Google search on the title and there wasn’t a single hit. I couldn’t believe it. So I mentioned here first I guess and in a few weeks you will be able to do a search for it and find SGL. I am having dad convert the aging VHS to a digital format so that we won’t lose the video. I want to track down the company that actually holds the copyright on that but I have no idea who they are since the name of the video doesn’t even appear online. It is a really funny video. Everyone should check it out.
UPS came by this morning and dropped off my new book “How-To Hydroponics Fourth Edition” by Keith Roberto that I have been waiting for for several weeks. This is the book that I had ordered from Amazon but they forgot to ship. This is the one that I had actually placed the order for. The other books were just filler.
Dad’s old friend Mohawk who worked at Kodak with him came by to visit him today. They haven’t seen each other in fourteen years! Just popped in and surprised him.
Dad was hungry for lunch and probably for a fish fry so he came over to pick me up to go over to the Omega at 1:00. He had breakfast there just a few hours ago. Same waitress. It is becoming a joke how often we are there.
You know that you are getting old when you no longer even expect to have plans on a Friday night. I can’t remember the last time that we actually had regular plans on a Friday night. Now Saturdays are a completely different story. Sort of.
Dominica and I are very sad because Mr. Humphries is sick. He is quite old. Not exceptionally old for a hamster but we had felt that he had been doing so well that he was probably going to make it for quite a while but now it is looking like we might lose him any day. He is very weak and definitely losing weight. It is very hard to tell whem a hamster is sick. He does so many weird things all of the time and so often acts sick and is actually just tired that we never know for sure what is going on. But I have had suspicions for weeks that he seemed to be aging rapidly and not feeling up to his old self. We were hoping to have him for at least another year if not two. He is such a wonderful hamster. A bit of a character and very high maintenance but so incredibly sweet and wonderful. We are so blessed to have gotten him. He really loved us and just liked to spend time with us. We have had him since before we were married. He is the first pet that Dominica and I have had together. I have him some treats and some lettuce. I wanted to make sure that he was eating and that at least he was eating things that he liked. We will just have to wait and see what happens.
Those who miss Anne’s updates that we used to have you can find out more on her blog which you can get via RSS or just check out the web version.
I have spent a bit of time the last two days uploading audio files to the Internet Archive. My account at podOmatic is completely full and cannot hold any more podcast audio. Which is, obviously, a problem. So I have been converting everything that I can into higher quality versions in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats and uploading them. So the first six episodes of the SGL Podcast are all ready no longer available on the podOmatic page but they are available from the Internet Archive. Now you just download them one at a time instead of getting them through an RSS feed. I am going to have to figure out how I want to deal with that in the future. But most archived content isn’t done through a feed anyway. So that seems to work decently well the way that it is for the time being. You can get to my Internet Archive stuff by clicking on the Our Media button to the right.
Here is some exciting news: We have health insurance again! Whoo-hoo. It is amazing how exciting that can be but when you have been going for half a year without any you really begin to wish that you had some.
I took a couple of quick pictures tonight because we have more or less devoid of new pictures on the Flicrcast for weeks now and I know that everyone wants something new to see.
Mr. Humphries is definitely declining. He has not opened his eyes all day. At 10:00 tonight he came out to get a drink of water and just fell right over. He hasn’t slept in days either as far as I can tell. He lays there like he is sleeping but doesn’t actually ever stop figiting. I really expect that we will lose him in the next 48 hours. I turned up the temperature in the house in the hope of making it more comfortable for him. But I doubt that he will notice at this point. I gave him some more Romaine lettuce. He ate all that I had given him before. He seems to really appreciate that so I will keep giving him as much as he wants to eat.
It is so windy tonight that they lost power up at Dominica’s office and they don’t have any backup systems so they just let them go home. So Dominica was able to leave work twenty minutes early tonight. That was a pleasant surprise.
So here is something funny: If you go onto Flickr and do a search on the tag Scott you end up getting nothing but pictures of or by me! How cool is that.
I did some cleaning and organizing in the office. That is what you have to do when you have a client coming down and working at your house. I have a client that is going to be working here at the house with me for about three hours tomorrow morning and I suppose that I need to have the office clean before he comes. I also took the opportunity to do some bill paying while I was sitting at the desk going through papers in the office. Best to get that stuff out of the way when you are thinking about it.
It took Dominica an hour to get home tonight. That is almost twice as long as it normally takes her. The wind is really awful. That is one thing that I really just can’t stand about Upstate New York is the unbelievable amount of wind that never stops. For several months of the year the wind just blows and blows. Even when the temperatures are nice, which is rare enough, it makes the outdoors relatively unusable because of how windy it always is. Our tiki torches on the deck are practically useless all year round.
When Min got home she spent some time with Mr. Humphries. He let her pet him for a little bit. He is not improving any. It is not happy day here.
I discovered tonight that I had accidentally let my car’s registration expire. Oops. I hate dealing with that kind of stuff. Luckily New York allows you to do your registration online now so I was able to get it taken care of really quickly. Pheww.
Before going to bed we watched a few episodes of The Family Guy but we were both pretty tired and headed for bed before 1:00. I have to be up pretty early in the morning to get everything ready so I want to be able to get some sleep. Hopefully we will still have a hamster in the morning. If anyone needs me tomorrow I am going to be pretty busy so try the cell.