Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

How Legal Immigration Works in America As someone with a lot of friends who have gone through or are going through this process I am very aware of this process.  But most Americans don’t know much about how America interfaces to the rest of the world and getting a look at this process is a good practice.

This morning, after getting to bed very late last night after being at the drive in watching the opening night of Eclipse, Dominica had to get up because she, Liesl and dad headed up to Rochester to do some banking and to take Liesl to the Seneca Park Zoo.  This is Liesl second time going to the zoo in two weeks.  I still have not had a chance to go to the zoo with her yet which is very sad.  I had really wanted to have been able to take her to the zoo for the first time.  She really likes going to the zoo.  I am hoping, at least, that I will be able to take her to the Fort Worth Zoo sometime soon, which is supposed to be the best zoo in north Texas.

They were gone all morning giving me some time to be productive at home.  It worked out pretty well.  However, while they were gone, I developed an intense migraine.  One of the worst that I can ever remember having.  It was awful.

I tried to work for as long as I could but by around noon I was completely worthless and could not handle sitting at the computer any longer.  I had tried taking a shower to see if that would help with the pain but it did not.  So I went down to the basement and curled up in bed to take a nap.  Oreo, the ever empathic puppy, knew that I was not feeling well and came down with me, crawled under the covers and snuggled up as close as he could.

The family got home not too long after I laid down for my nap.  I slept for two hours or maybe a little longer.  That helped a lot and I was feeling mostly better by the time that I got back up and returned to work.

Dad got a great deal from his Kodak retiree discount on their new, pocket, solid-state 1080p video camera.  Dominica and I decided that we would get it.  We love taking videos of Liesl but the cameras that we have require too much effort to carry around for casual video taking.  Even our pocket camera from Kodak has to go through such an ordeal to start up and get ready to take a video that you can never catch the little things.  We are hopeful that having a dedicated, pocket video camera will make that much easier.  It was just $110 after tax and shipping so we can hardly go wrong there!  And 1080p HD!  That’s awesome.  That is double the video resolution of our current Kodak pocket camera.  I let Dominica pick the colour so she chose raspberry, although it is unlikely that she will ever use the camera herself.  Our Zi8 video camera is due to arrive on Tuesday.

The DVD archiving process continues full force.  The two laptops are working pretty much around the clock attempting to keep up with the workload.  This is no small project that I have underway.  The progress has really been good.  I’m impressed with how quickly it is going.

This evening dad, Dominica, Liesl and I watching The Tooth Fairy which is dad’s first movie to come via mail from Netflix.  He just signed up yesterday and has not even tried out his on-demand viewing yet.

The Tooth Fairy was pretty cute.  Pretty much what we had expected up front.  Nothing too heavy and nothing ground breaking but a number of good people with some funny bits and some touching bits.  Very much “family movie fodder” but on the better side and quite enjoyable.  Good for the whole family.

For the first time since driving from Texas to New York I am completely caught up with SGL and I am writing down events “as they happen.”  Once I do something like the cross country death march drive I lose two days during the drive and then one day of sleeping in.  The combination means that I am starting out three days behind without any real chance of keeping up on the site.  Then it is all just downhill from there.

I got up around seven this morning (we are on Eastern time for those who haven’t thought about how often we change time zones) and got to work.  My computer at the office was turned off, again, and so working remotely became a huge pain.  I have no idea how a company so large can be so bad at the most basic points of IT infrastructure.  Just doing your job is a continuous challenge.

Liesl got up not too long after I did.  I brought her upstairs and fed her breakfast.  She is loving peaches and bananas.  She does the cutest thing shouting “Nana!  Nana!” when she gets excited about bananas.

This morning proved to be insanely busy.  I barely got a chance to do anything.  It was very exhausting.

For lunch we had plans to meet up with Mary at the Omega in Geneseo.  So over across the valley we drove.  We had a nice, but short lunch.  I was cursed with non-stop email requests coming in while we ate and I barely got any chance to hang out at all.  Definitely “one of those days.”

So we had to leave lunch early to race back to the house so that I could get back to work as soon as possible.  The entire afternoon turned out to be crazy busy.

My cousin Sara came over for the afternoon to visit and hang out with Liesl. Liesl, of course, fell asleep on the ride home and slept for several hours so they did not get very much time to hang out.  Our going out to lunch in the middle of the day has really been wreaking havoc with Liesl’s nap schedule.

Dominica’s plan for this evening is to see Eclipse at the Silver Lake Drive In.  Originally Jeremy was going to go with her but he ended up canceling.

Amanda decided to make it a girls’ night out with Dominica so they went to the drive in around seven and I drove over to Livonia with Liesl to hang out with Eric and the kids.  We grabbed some pizza and beer – Canandaigua Lake Ale – and hung out with the kids.  Liesl had a great time playing with the kids.  She loves having other kids (and toys) with which to play.

It worked out well as Eric and I had a conference call at nine which we were able to just jump on together since we were in the same place.  It was also my chance to check out Eric’s new Snom 300 office phone which I have not even seen yet.  It is very nice.

Once the kids headed off to bed Eric and I popped on Netflix and watched The Fifty World Movies of All Times – a documentary.  It was pretty funny.  It was amazing how many of the movies are ones that I had seen.  Especially Santa Claus Versus the Martians.  John and I watched that one from his horrible sci-fi movie collection many years ago.

Liesl and I headed home.  I put her to bed and did some work for a while finally turning in with Oreo around two.  I was not asleep quite when Dominica made it home from the drive in.  She is going to have a rough day tomorrow.  They had a good time at the movies, though.  The first movie was Letters to Juliet which I had never heard before.  Eclipse opened at midnight so they had to wait to start it until then which is why it ran so late.

Dominica convinced dad today that with all of the movies that he rents on the AppleTV that he could get Netflix, get tons more content, and save money.  The AppleTV is just so expensive to use if you use it on a regular basis.  It is perfect for the occasional need-something-new-right-now stuff but it is not good at all for regular movie rentals and purchases.  The costs is just astronomic.  She figured out that for the cost of about half of what he rents monthly from the AppleTV he could have Netflix.  And that way, even if the Netflix only cut out half of his movie rentals from the AppleTV it would be a break even and anything more would be a win since Netflix is a fixed cost.  And since Netflix has the unlimited on-demand movies and television shows he is likely to get many, many times the value from it since he can sit down and watch anything that they have, anytime, for free.  So he signed up and his first movie, The Tooth Fairy, is do to arrive tomorrow.

Back to work this morning.

For lunch today everyone wanted to do something different so we drove down to Perry to have lunch at the Charcoal Corral with Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo and Jeremy came along as well.  Jeremy is on summer break from SUNY Fredonia and has been at home.  Sara is the only one who did not join us but she is coming down tomorrow afternoon to hang out at dad’s house so that she can see Liesl.

Lunch was good at the Corral.  It was quite busy there.  The “restaurant” section was completely full and we had to sit in the pizza parlour to have a seat at which to eat our lunches even though we were not having pizza.  The pizza business appears to be pretty slow at lunch and picks up for the movie crowd in the evenings.  We also got ice cream while we were there.  They have Perry’s ice cream and they have the banana cream pie that I love so much!  They also have the new midnight orange flavour that Dominica has been wanting to try.  Apparently Perry’s is doing some amazing things with their ice cream line up.

Liesl got a kiddie soft vanilla cone and was in heaven.  She is an ice cream lover like her parents.  She ate pretty much the whole thing – at least the parts that she did not get all over her.

On the drive back home the Ralstons managed to call us.  They both have new mobile phones now so the are reachable again.  So we made plans to get together this evening since Dominica is going to the Silver Lake Drive In tomorrow night to see Eclipse at midnight when it opens.  She tried to get me to go but there is no way I am going to watch that stuff.  Jeremy is going to go with her which is pretty funny because Sara and I won’t watch it.

We worked all afternoon.  I am making amazing progress on the DVD archiving.  I have one laptop running around the clock in dad’s office and one set up on the kitchen counter as well.  So I am constantly running back and forth and going downstairs for another stack of DVDs.  As they get archived they are going straight into boxes for storage.

At six the Ralstons came up.  They have been down the road at their house most of the time getting it ready so that they can move back in.  They are hoping to be moved in in another week or so.  For the moment, until the house is ready, they are living at Art’s mom’s house in Mt. Morris.

Liesl had a great time playing with Art and Danielle.  She really missed them, I can tell.  She was SO little the last time that she got to see them – when they were down at our house staging to leave for the Congo, down in Peekskill.  Liesl would only have been just six months old at the time.

Liesl has really started playing a lot with my 1980 Hot Wheels Sto n Go City set.  I loved that set when I was a kid.   It has pop-up buildings, a scale, a police chase hideout, an automotive lift, hidden garages and more.  It was a ton of fun when I was little and liked to play with cars.  There were two other sets, the Service Center from 1979 that can attach to this set so that a car can travel from the top of the Service Center all the way down through the city.  I’m not sure how well that would actually work in practice but in theory it is pretty cool.  I never had that set even though I wanted it as a kid.  I checked on eBay and they are pretty cheap, maybe ~$25 after shipping.  So maybe I will splurge and get it for Liesl.  I also found the third of the set, the construction area, that attached at the bottom of the city (the Service Center attaches above) and we are talking about maybe buying that on eBay so that Liesl can have it to play with when we are at home in Texas.  Apparently she is really into Hot Wheel and Matchbox cars.

At almost nine we piled into dad’s car and drove over to Geneseo to get dinner at Tim Horton’s.  We got sandwiches, coffee, smoothies and donuts.  A good trip.  Liesl did pretty well considering how late it was.  Her bed time is as early as eight thirty, normally.  We were out well past ten.  By the end she had had enough and was definitely needing to go to bed.

We managed to get a hold of Mary but she was just getting off of work at Walmart as we were climbing into the car to take the Ralstons home and Liesl was not going to put up with being awake much longer so we were not able to get together.  So we made plans to get together for lunch at the Omega tomorrow instead.

We got home and got Liesl to bed.  I worked for a little bit longer and then we went to bed ourselves around midnight.

We found out today that Art and Danielle just bought a car so they are not going to be needing the Mazda for very long.  We had been intending to have bought my plane tickets for me to fly to Washington, DC and then on to Texas tonight so this completely changes our plans.  So the current plan is that I can grab the Mazda just before heading south and I can drive it all the way to Texas.  That means no car rental in DC either.  This will save a lot of effort.  It also means that I can drop it back off for Jen at some point as well so that she can drive it again.

We are quite excited that I am going to be able to take a rather full load of stuff down to Texas now.  Originally we had no spare space whatsoever.  Now we have lots of room.  Now the challenge will be figuring out what we want to take with us and how tightly to pack the car.

This morning we went to the Omega in Geneseo for a late breakfast.  After breakfast we went over to Walmart for a very quick stop just to pick up a few vital supplies and for me to hit the computer and electronic sections to see about finding an external hard drive that I can hook up to the laptop so that I can get some DVD archiving done.

I was very fortunate to find a two terabyte USB hard drive enclosure for around $139 which is very good.  It is just a cheap Western Digital but more than enough for my uses.  That is a very good price and it is a “rollback” currently so it is usually more expensive.  This will let me get started right away.  I am very hopeful that we can get the basement in dad’s house cleaned up, at least, on this long trip even if we can’t get a truck to haul all of our remaining stuff down to Texas.

I had to work for several hours this afternoon and into this evening for the office.  Once I had some free time I got the external hard drive hooked up and started the first DVD archiving to get up and running.  It may not be hard work but it is stuff that really needs to be done for everyone’s sanity and it makes me feel much better to know that real progress is being made on something very tangible.

I am hoping, if all goes well, that about four hundred DVDs can be archived during this trip.  That will represent a massive percentage of dad’s remaining store in the basement.  We have done hundred previously although much work was lost at one point requiring me to start over from the beginning but now we seem to be making some significant progress and my plan is to script a massive compression process that I can allow to just run on its own without any intervention given the volume of work that I will have for it to do all at once and to let the server do it without needing me to set up desktops to do the work.  That should be far, far better than it was before when I had to do everything by hand.

This evening we watched When in Rome on the AppleTV which was quite good.  It had a lot of people that I like in it and was a cute story.  Nothing too ground breaking and, of course, Dominica figured out the entire plot from the very beginning as she always does but it was still cute.

We spent an hour or more just looking through movies available on the AppleTV to see what was out there.  I was very interested to learn that it appears, at least according to some strong rumours, that the next generation AppleTV is about to debut.  Rather than being a direct descendent of the current AppleTV it looks like it is going to be based upon the iPhone and iPad platform and be effectively nothing more than an iPad without any screen with just HDMI output.  This will allow it to be extremely green using almost no power whatsoever and should lower the development cost from Apple’s perspective.  The rumour is that the new AppleTV will be absolutely tiny, use almost no power and output full 1080p instead of the ridiculously limited 720p of the current model.

The new AppleTV is said to have no hard drive, which was a huge mistake, in my opinion, of the current models.  The need to download content to the current unit is a huge pain and the connection to iTunes makes it almost worthless.  Competing systems rely on streaming nearly all content and the current AppleTV has moved in that direction slowly with Internet Radio features and podcast viewing being added since the original version that Dominica and I bought some years ago.

So we will see what all features exist in the new AppleTV when it finally releases, if it ever does, but the old AppleTV was so close to being an amazing idea that I think that Apple will really do itself and its customers a major disservice if they do not continue and upgrade the platform and, hopefully, take it in a new direction not involving local storage.  My primary concern is that they may not support that DLNA standard that all of the competing platforms are using.  If they fail to support DLNA then they will not be able to compete against the PS3 and XBOX 360 and many other devices, in my opinion, that already do this and do it so well.  People have large collections of music and video that they want to be able to listen to and view via their AppleTV that simply cannot do so in any reasonable way with the current system.  The new AppleTV will also need to support a slightly wider array of formats as well.