January 8, 2009: Oreo Not Feeling Well

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.

January 7, 2009: Liesl’s First News Appearance

It isn’t much of an appearance but a photo of Liesl was used in a NowPublic article about a website about Cute Things Falling Asleep which has become so popular as to be mentioned on CNN (although one must argue that CNN is not popular enough to be mentioned on Cute Things Falling Asleep while SGL’s standards are lower and both were mentioned here.)

Oreo woke me up at seven this morning needing an emergency trip outside.  Nothing like waking up and immediately having to run outside in your pajamas in bare feet to take the dog out to pee while all of the neighbours are getting onto the road to head to the train station.

Work was fairly busy today.  Nothing unexpected.

It is all ice and rain here in Peekskill today.  Oreo is not happy.  Taking him for a walk involves a treacherous slide down to the driveway.  The grass is so laden with ice that it is difficult to walk anywhere safely and it hurts our little boy’s feet.  We are very glad that we do not have to drive anywhere today.

I put in a lot of time working on getting stuff converted to h.264 today and to getting things working with the AppleTV.  As far as I can tell, though, the AppleTV and/or iTunes is completely overwhelmed by the volume of content that I am attempting to pump through it (which is not that much, in reality) and it simply cannot handle it as the menus on the AppleTV just will not update to display the new content.  It is very depressing.  So much work has gone into this solution just to find out now that the system fails silently without any errors, warnings, notices or anything.  Another great Apple product – missing interface components and no means of repairing the problem that we cannot even identify.

So, since Apple can’t make iTunes function properly or reliably, we are looking into other solutions.  The first thing to try is a UPnP AV Mediaserver solution such as TVersity which will make the h.264 collection visible to the PS3, XBOX360 and any other device that supports the protocol.  We are going to get this to work one way or another.

I got TVersity installed today and the PS3 is able to see our media without any problem but when I go to actually play something it fails.  We aren’t sure what the problem is but I do not have time to look into it today.  I am hoping that the issue is not with the media but just with the speed at which we are currently able to deliver data to the PS3 (the SAN device that I use is insanely slow so that could be the problem – it is designed for large, cheap near-line storage and not for high-speed access.)

I got to play a tiny bit of Oblivion and Final Fantasy III today but very little.  Dominica did not get to play anything at all.  She has been working her way through Blue Dragon which is a very large game, three DVDs, for the XBOX 360.

This evening we continued watching the third season of Dr. Who via Netflix.  Tomorrow Dominica has a doctor’s appointment at two as a follow up to her surgery just to see how everything is going.  Hopefully the weather will be good for her to drive.  It would be very impractical for me to drive her down to the appointment since it would mean packing up Liesl and Oreo twice and doing twice as much driving and pulling me away from work in the middle of the afternoon for an hour or more.  It would be so much, in fact, that we would never get out of the car but would just drive around or sit somewhere while she was at the appointment and wait for her to finish since getting them both in and out of the car would take so long.

We finally ordered our new LCD television for the living room today.  We got a Samsung 52″ LCD.  Nothing fancy, pretty much the bottom of the line but it will work fine for our purposes.  It will be much, much bigger than our current 32″ Westinghouse and should be brighter, have better constrast and has twice the resolution (1080p rather than 720p.)  We expect it to really make the living room a lot more comfortable for us.  For example, because of the low contrast, small size and low resolution I find myself standing directly in front of the current television to be able to see small items on the ground in Fable.  Hopefully with the new screen I will be able to stay in my chair.  We are hoping that it will be delivered next week.  We were able to pay for the entire television, including tax, from our refund money from Eleven80 and still be able to put over $100 into our investments from the refund money (refund of our initial deposit that we made when we signed the contract in August or September of 2006.)

The old, 32″ LCD then is going to move up to our bedroom for the time being where it is going to be mounted onto the wall opposite the bed so that we can watch stuff from bed just like we used to be able to do when we lived at Eleven80.  We got used to having that setup very quickly and now we really miss it.  It will really be great for Dominica who is stuck rocking Liesl a lot up in the bedroom but has nothing to do but to stare at the wall.  Eventually we plan to get a nice, large LCD for our bedroom too and then the 32″ will move into the nursery as a guest television (we constantly have guests staying in the nursery) and then eventually to be Liesl’s own television once she is a little older and watching stuff.

January 6, 2009: Really Long Day of Work

When you have a new baby in the house, every morning is a challenge to get out of bed.  Even when we manage to get to sleep at a reasonable time the night’s sleep does not seem to be very relaxing.  I can only imagine how bad it is for Dominica.  She gets so much less sleep than I do.  I am getting about five to six hours of sleep each night, I think.  Although I do have to get up in the morning and she stays in bed quite some time after I get up.  As much as two or three hours some days.

I was working at eight thirty this morning.  Oreo came down to the basement with me but after just twenty minutes or so he decided that he was not interested in the cold basement and snuck up to the living room to stake his claim on the recliner while Dominica and Liesl were still asleep.

Today work finally picked back up to a normal pace and I was pretty much busy all day.  I worked all morning and then, at twelve thirty, I switched to being in the living room and kept watch via my BlackBerry Curve and watched Liesl for two hours while Dominica went to the grocery store.  Luckily I get a really slow lunchtime period or else that would not be possible at all.  I did work during that window but the requests were light and intermittant.

When Dominica got back from the grocery store she managed to catch the mail carrier and got all of our mail from the mail box.  That was extremely important as we do not have the key right now.  That was more than a week’s worth of mail that she brought in today.  Almost all junk mail but still.  There was some important stuff in there and one package of really inexpensive HDMI cables that I had delivered from Amazon.

Liesl was very hungry by the time that Dominica got back and I needed to get back down to the basement so that I could get back to work.  So I handed Liesl off to Dominica and went back to the dungeon.  I attempted to play a little Fable over my lunch time but only barely got to play one small section of the game and failed in my quest and had to start over anyway so it was all a waste.

For the first time since we moved from Newark I have our 1TB SAN system back online and running today.  Now we have access to our large collection of converted movies and such via iTunes and the AppleTV that we have been doing without thus far.  The SAN is in the network closet along with all of the other networking gear which is far nicer than having it sitting on my desk which is where it has been most of the time.

I remembered to take out the cardboard for recycling this afternoon.  Tomorrow morning is the cardboard pickup that only comes once per month and we had a dining room full of stacked boxes that needed to be taken out.  We look forward to cardboard pickup around here as if it were Christmas.  We constantly amass so much cardboard that only having a pickup once per month is rather problematic.  We definitely miss having the recycling room right down the hall with nightly pickup like we had at Eleven80.  We got spoiled.  Now we are trying to figure out where in the house we can stage that much cardboard each month.

Dominica made dinner on the early side and we ate around six.  That is amazingly early for us.  Normally we are struggling to eat around ten at night!

I did some basement cleaning tonight while Dominica watched movies on Netflix.  We are slowly taking back that space and getting it nice.  It is the one area of the house where we really have a hope of keeping up with any mess and having it stay neat.  If we fall behind down here then the war against the mess will certainly be lost.

I ended up working very late tonight.  It was eight thirty when I finally wrapped up at the office.  Quite a long day but not unexpected for early January.  Exhausting though.  Once it is eight thirty at night it is hard to decide what to do to enjoy the rest of the day before it is time to go to bed.  Almost anything you do is likely to either be stressful, exhausting or make you feel like you just threw the time away.

I did manage to kick off some additional h.264 Handbrake conversions.  We do not have very much left around the house to convert but what little is here I am tracking down and moving to the AppleTV.  I pointed the iTunes that is feeding the AppleTV to the SAN for the first time today.  This will be our first test to see how well this works.  The SAN is extremely slow compared to other disk access methods that we currently have available in the house so there is a lot of potential for failure but I think that it will probably work for now.  It is really just a temporary solution until we get the long term server-based storage solution sorted out.  That will take a sizable investment and is not something that I really want to do right this moment if it can be helped at all although as we run out of storage more and more quickly it is becoming a rapidly approaching necessity.

The third season of Dr. Who is now available on Netflix OnDemand so Dominica and I watched a few episodes of that while Liesl slept.  Liesl did not wake up for her evening bottle until around one or one thirty in the morning!  Normally we try to give her that bottle around ten.

Before going to bed tonight I noticed that the freezing rain has begun to come down.  Everything is coated in ice but not badly like often happens back home.  Ice storms seem to be a very regular occurrance back where dad lives.  They must get them every year now.  I don’t remember it being like that when I was a kid.  Oreo was not happy about having to walk out onto the ice.

Oblivion: First Impressions

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one of those games that is so large that it is difficult to review or even to begin to cover in any meaningful way.  I am playing ES4 Oblivion Game of the Year Edition (GOTY) on the PS3.  The GOTY includes the original Oblivion game, the Shivering Isles expansion pack (which became a standalone game on many of the consoles) and the Knights of the Nine downloadable content pack which is practically a game in its own right.

First, let me attempt to define Oblivion is terms that most gamers can understand.  In today’s video game marketplace the concepts of adventure, RPG, jRPG (Japanese RPG – interactive fiction with RPG elements) and first person shooters (FPS) are beginning to merge in many instances and Oblivion is one of these examples.  Oblivion is an action traditional RPG.  It is action (i.e. real time and not turn based) but is a true RPG unlike Diablo or Dungeon Siege which are action games with some RPG elements added.  Oblivion’s goal is its role playing whereas Dungeon Siege’s goal is its action.  In Oblivion most of the action can simply be avoided if the player so wishes.  It is a traditional RPG in that the player maker character decisions and significantly affects gameplay.  The game is not linear and interactive fiction like a jRPG (a la Final Fantasy.)  Oblivion is obviously a rendered, three-dimensional game that would appear, in many ways, like a first person shooter but with RPG goals rather than action goals.  And, of course, there are some amount of puzzles built into the game bringing in adventure characteristics.  It is redundant to mention but Oblivion is a sandbox game (like Grand Theft Auto III) in that you can freely move around and go wherever you like.  This is a key tenent of the RPG genre but one that people not used to true RPGs are often surprised by.  In many ways the newer members of the GTA series are closer to RPG and Adventure games than to any other genre.  It takes a lot to define a game these days.

The original Oblivion game is often said to be one to two hundred hours of gameplay.  Being an open-ended RPG there is no good means of determining exactly what constitutes being “done” with the game so measurements vary dramatically.  Completing the core storyline can be done quickly while numerous sidequests, not all available to all players based on in-game decisions, make up the bulk of the storyline portion of the game, and then there is the exploring that needs to be done!  The Shivering Isles expansion adds, what is said to be, another thirty hours of main quests not including side quests and exploration time which is mount to a total, likely, of fifty or more hours.  The Knights of the Nine expansion is said, according to Guide2Games, to add at least another six hours of content again.  In total, I am guessing that I have around two hundred and fifty or more hours of gaming to which to look forward in the world of Oblivion.

Oblivion first released in 2006 so it is hardly a new game, but even now in early 2009 Oblivion still stands as the finest example of traditional role playing games on the market.  The graphics are amazing, the game is immense, the voice acting is suppurb and the score is just amazing.

I put in about twenty hours at this point and have seen a lot of the game including a good chunk of the main storyline, several side quests and lots of world exploration.  The main storyline grabs you right as the game begins and thrusts you right into the action.  It does not take too long before you are given the flexibility to set off on your own to explore the world as you would like which may include racing along to fulfill the main quest as quickly as possible or ignoring it completely.  Oblivion is full of options.

Oblivion, like the other Elder Scrolls titles, is an action RPG and is not a console RPG (aka a Japanese RPG.)  The gameplay is very non-linear and events happen as you interact with the world around you.  Your own style of gameplay will alter the gaming experience is many ways and everyone’s game is very unique.

If you have played Morrowind, Oblivion’s predecessor, one of the first things that you will notice is that the world is smaller and very densley populated with creatures, ruins, cities, dungeons, etc.  It is so densley populated that it feels very, very awkward.  When the Oblivion gates start opening you might notice them popping up several hundred yards away from each other!  While Oblivion is very large it does not have the expansive space feel that you would expect from a game of this type and makes you feel more confined than Morrowind did.  The close proximity of people and places makes it feel much more realistic as you stumble from one “major ruins” to another every few seconds.  Everything is so close that people in the major cities should be able to hear people talking in “long lost ruins” as well as the worshipers at the secret woodland altars.

One of the great things about Oblivion is that everything is voice acted.  Every character that you meet talks to you.  This benefit is tempered by a lack of recorded dialoge and a paucity of voice actors.  It is very obvious very early on in the game that even main characters are often voiced by the same few voice actors which takes away from the game and the range of recorded dialogues is very limited.  You will tire of speaking with the locals very quickly except for those involved in the main quests.

I am disappointed in the world “integrity” within the game.  By this I mean that events or character interactions in one place don’t always seem consistent.  For example, there is a woman in a chapel that I rescued from the horde of evil things attacking her.  Her dialogue with me did not change from the time that I first discovered her and she didn’t know who I was through the time that I rescued her until the time that she went to the camp away from town for safety after I had defeated the evil creatures destroying her town.  The game would have been a lot more interesting if her character was made aware of the fact that we knew each other and that I had saved her, that she had changed locations or that I would be asking different questions of her.  Characters seem to react to basic “world” level stimulous rather than to direct character interactions such as is seen in the Fable series.

Overall the initial impression of Oblivion is that it is gorgeous, sounds great, is expansive and exciting.  Oblivion is consistently rated as one of the top RPGs of all time and an instant classic.  It has held its ground for two years, at this point, as the definitive RPG for the PC over the last three years and of the PS3 and XBOX 360 consoles.  Impressive to say the least.  I am excited to delve into the story, explore the sidequests, take in the grand vistas and see what all this game and its expansion sets have to offer.

January 5, 2009: Back to Normal Work

Today is the first day back to “normal work” after the financial industry freeze has lifted.  So I was up at eight thirty and down to the basement to work.  Oreo came down with me as he always does in the morning.  Today he found his inflatable ball in the middle of the room and played for a good twenty minutes.  He was very excited.

Work ended up being much slower today that I had assumed that it would be.  It was not bad at all.

I spoke to the management at Eleven80 today and our deposit for the apartment is on its way back to us (with over two years of interest from the savings account that it was in during that time.)  We are getting back all of the deposit, not just some of it.  So we have enough to be able to buy the new 52″ Samsung LCD that we want for the living room and will still have some money left over to put into the bank.  That is awesome.  We were thinking that they were going to charge us a minimum of two hundred or so for carpet cleaning or something.  Although we did have the whole place professionally cleaned after we had moved everything out of it.

At eleven thirty Dominica and I took Liesl to her doctor’s appointment.  Just a checkup to make sure that this are going as they should.  Liesl weighed in at 9lbs. 6oz. today which puts her at the perfect weight for her age (five and a half weeks) so everything is looking good.  We got to meet another doctor in her pediatric practice today.  We really like this doctor.  It was really easy to deal with him.

We got home and I played some Oblivion during the lunch break.  I was on my BlackBerry checking emails and working when things came up but very little did.

I have been playing enough Oblivion now that I am starting to get back into the game.  What a huge game that is.  I have heard that it takes roughly two hundred hours to complete the main game itself and possibly another one to two hundred hours for the Shivering Isles part of the game and a nice additional chunk for the Knights of the Nine portion.  I really want to play through the game but four to five hundred hours of gameplay is a daunting task.

The afternoon was quite slow.  A mixture or work and relaxing.  Dominica and Liesl ended up taking a very long nap on the recliner from mid-afternoon until the middle of the evening.  We didn’t end up being able to have dinner until after ten at night because we didn’t remember to thaw the frozen tofu that we needed for our PB-BBQ Tofu and Hokkian noodles.

Tonight was watched Prince Caspian on BluRay which I have been dying to see for a long time.  C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia were my childhood books which my mother read to me and recorded while reading onto cassette and that I then listened to over and over again all throughout my younger years.  There are no books that I know better or are more passionate about.

Overall I thought that the movie was really good.  It was more true to the book that I had thought that it was going to be.  This particular title is a bit more challenging to make, I think, than some of the others like TLTW&TW and Voyage which are more adventure oriented.  This one was more political in nature and had more interpersonal interactions.  In general I was quite pleased with the film and am very much looking forward to the next installment – Voyage of the Dawn Treader which is the most “adventure” oriented of the series.

What I really hope happens is that the entire series gets created and not just some of the titles.  A few of them are going to be very challening such as The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle which are so different from the others that I am wondering what they will do for them.  Leaving them out would be horrible though.  Right now they are doing such a good job with the more popularly known titles that it would be a shame to not do the whole series justice.  It is very common for people doing anything with the series to simply ignore the three lesser known or understood works and to focus only on the more action oriented titles (and sometimes that involves skipping The Silver Chair too even though it is the most Lord of the Rings feeling of any of the books.)

Still no mailbox keys.  I think that we are making the decision to have the lock replaced in the morning.