Sheep Guarding Llama

I felt much better this morning and so did Oreo. His limp was all but gone and he seemed to be in high spirits although with the temperature dropping he is burying himself deeper and deeper in the bed trying to stay warm.

I managed to swing over to Food for Life and grabbed a breakfast club before driving into the office. Tonight Dominica, Susan and I are going to see A Christmas Carol at NJPAC so I am hoping to be able to go home on the early side. The show starts at half past seven and might run pretty long.

I managed to get tons more Flickr images labeled today. This project is coming along exceedingly well. Work was exceptionally slow. The end of the year is supposed to be really busy so I think that everything gets held off until the last possible second and right now we are in the calm before the storm. Starting tomorrow I am going to be working late all week and I will be working on Saturday as well from Maryland.

I had been hoping to be able to leave work really early tonight but I got stuck a little later than I had wanted to be and didn’t get a chance to leave until around half past five. That still wasn’t too bad and I got home the same time that Dominica did. We had just enough time to run in, drop off Oreo, run to Subway for a quick dinner and walk over to NJPAC to meet Susan. Susan is treating us tonight to “A Christmas Carol” at Prudential Hall at NJPAC.

The show was awesome. I am not the biggest fan of “A Christmas Carol” but this was by far the best job that I have seen anyone do with it and I was very impressed. The venue was pretty awesome too. I am looking forward to having an opportunity to take advantage of more shows at NJPAC.

Susan wasn’t feeling well and ended up having to leave during intermission which sucks. Originally I had been thinking that I might not be able to make the show or that I might have to run out at intermission but fortunately I was able to stay and enjoy the show. I am really glad that I made it. It was a lot of fun. The show was really well done and the cast was amazing. It turns out that Dominica had never seen “A Christmas Carol” done as a play / musical before (a play with Christmas carols thrown in) so it was really neat for her to see it.

We got home and discovered that the smoke detector had been going off all night (the occasional beep of it notifying you that the battery is dead.) This, of course, terrified poor Oreo who had no way to escape the piercing scream of the smoke detector and he was shaking and scared when we got home and had had a couple of accidents. Luckily building maintenance was able to get the smoke detector fixed right away (we can’t do it ourselves since we don’t have a ladder in our little apartment) and everything is okay now. But poor Oreo 🙁

The word of the day is sore. Everything is sore today. All of the stair climbing yesterday really did a number on me. Nothing damaging. Just muscle soreness but whoa.

I was on the late side heading into the office and grabbed some Subway on my way in for lunch.

I managed to get mad amounts of Flickr images titles and captioned today. I am really on a roll with that. I am really happy with the progress that I have been able to make. I hope to have them all done in a week or so. Once they are all labeled they will be a lot more useful for everyone. And it will make adding new images much easier.

Work was pretty slow today. The calm before the storm, I think.

After work I had to run out to Union, New Jersey to get fitted for my dinner jacket and trousers from Men’s Warehouse. I have to be back on Thursday night to pick them up. Just barely in time for the party. They probably came in last week but the store forgot that they needed to call me when they arrived and the sales person that I was working at is at a different store so no one was assigned to deal with it, I guess. So now everything is a panic even though we started off with plenty of time.

As soon as I got home, which was right behind Dominica, we took Oreo up to the apartment and noticed that he was limping pretty bad. He has had a lot of issues in the past so we were really worried about it. We are hoping that it is just his knee being stiff.

We ran over to Subway (again today) and grabbed a quick dinner. Then we just hung out in the apartment and Dominica worked on her class work before we went to bed.

Today is Susan’s moving day. Susan was up early as Zach was able to get the truck packed early last night and left Baltimore around half past six this morning and was making good time on his way to Newark.

Dominica and I slept in a little longer but got up at a reasonable time considering it is the weekend and headed over to Harrison a little while after Zach called to let Susan know that he was all ready there at the apartment.

It was probably around ten by the time Dominica and I got over to Harrison to help out with Susan’s move. Zach had driven a large, maybe twenty-three foot, box truck up from Baltimore. I hate driving big trucks. I am so glad that I didn’t have to drive that thing.

When Dominica and I arrived Ryan Cloud had just gotten there via the PATH train and they were just getting started with the move. It was pretty much perfect timing. The hardest part of the move was that the apartment is located several flights of stairs above street level and everything that went in had to be carried up a lot of stairs around many corners. Boy did we get sore quickly.

We got seventy-five percent of the truck emptied when Zach’s friend Brian arrived from Manhattan and helped out with the last bit. It is a good thing that he made it because I was wearing out quickly. There were a number of large furniture items in the very back of the truck so he still had plenty of work to do even though the truck was mostly empty. All in all the move went pretty quickly and about as smoothly as possible.

After the move the four of us guys drove out to Broadway in North Newark to drop off the U-Haul truck. Then we headed back to Harrison and stopped by an Italian place just up the street and picked up a late lunch for everyone. The pizza from there was really excellent.

We got back to the apartment and while we were out the girls had started unpacking and the cable guy from Comcast had all ready come and had the cable service hooked up and working. Perfect timing all around.

After eating Dominica and I returned home and spent the afternoon relaxing at the apartment and hanging out with Oreo. Dominica had a lot of class work that she had to work on so she spent the majority of the evening working on that. I have Pinnacle’s Studio 10 a fresh run with a completely new install and I managed to get it to work this time so it looks like I am going to be able to go with Pinnacle instead of Ulead for my video editing. The price is close enough that that isn’t a factor. Really the biggest factor is that dad uses Pinnacle and it would be really helpful if we were able to help each other with it instead of each using different packages. I am not totally convinced that I like Pinnacle better than Ulead. It is more polished from the interface standpoint and would appear to have more options but I like a lot of the simplicity and “it just works” from Ulead too.

The weather was supposed to be very cold today but it is bright and sunny and feels quite warm. Cool enough to wear a fleece outside but only barely. Oreo got right up and out of bed and went to lay in the sun and even after having the house windows open all night he still got too warm laying in the sun.

Last night I started experimenting with uploaded SGL Vlog videos to YouTube so that people can watch them directly from the site. The quality is greatly diminished when viewing them that way but it is quick and easy and the quality is only so good anyway. I have two uploaded so far, the first two from being in New Jersey in March of this year, and I will be working on the rest hopefully today. I uploaded some that didn’t work so I will have to work on those to see if I can get them fixed. I really like how easy YouTube makes it to embed flash videos onto your own webpage. That is very well done. The videos from YouTube are 320×240 (the same as iPod video or Creative Zen Vision M video) and are pretty highly compressed. So if you really want to see what is in the videos just download the originals from OurMedia to get the less compressed versions. My older videos are all 320×240 natively but the newer ones are mostly 640×480 if you get them from OurMedia which is four times the resolution of the old ones. So the conversion to YouTube will be pretty dramatic.

Today was pretty much a wasted day. Just about nothing happened all day yet I feel like I was just never able to get to anything. I took Oreo for a walk in the park this morning and then Dominica and I went over to Food for Life for a very late lunch (yes, that is three meals in a row over there for me.) After lunch we came home and Min spent the afternoon working on her Java homework assignments. There was also a lot of laundry to be done today because Oreo had an accident the other night in addition to our regular laundry load. I did several loads yesterday to in an attempt to keep us caught up.

Recently we have discovered a new wine that we really like in the bargain category: Yellow Tail’s Shiraz / Grenache blend. It is very robust and drinkable. Perfect for early evening or a casual movie. Australia is definitely my second favourite wine region after the Finger Lakes.

We have come to realize that we have significant digital storage needs around here and today we decided that we just cannot put off getting more storage any longer and I ordered a 500GB (that is a half terabyte) hard drive. Not the largest on the market but quite large. We are going to add that to Dominica’s computer as soon as it arrives. She has been working off of an 80GB drive and it is totally full and we have no space to play with. I have a 250GB on my desktop and we have been moving as much over as possible but there isn’t any room to spare. Now that we are going to be storing tons of video content for the Creative Visions we will need a lot of storage to be able to handle it.

Dominica went down on the early side before dinner and hit the gym. That is two days in a row that she has gone down there without me. She is really taking this seriously.

I talked to Art today and they have finally gotten their assignment information for their move to Papua New Guinea next year. They now know that they are going to be living on the main island in the eastern highlands. The town nearest to them is Goroka which is not a big place at all. The good news is that their weather is going to be quite nice all year round and there is a Quality Inn in town.

Today I figured out how to download YouTube flv videos and convert them to Xvid so that we can watch them on the Creative Zen Vision M. I tracked down the original Numa video called Maiyahi where animated cats since the famous O-zone song. Tonight we discovered an amazine “LegO-Zone” remake of the original video in outstanding quality.

For dinner we decided to just do the easiest possible thing and order in some pizza. We are loving Domino’s new 555 deal (five medium regular pizzas for $5 each.) And so we have been taking advantage of that recently.

Susan rolled in a little after we had eaten dinner. Tonight is her last night with us. She is moving into her new apartment in Harrison tomorrow morning.

Winter is just around the corner and it is almost seventy degrees here in northern New Jersey. Wow.

Everyone likes to say I was wrong about Sony being able to sell out the PS3 with the 400,000 units that they were set to release on launch day. Obviously there was a huge rush and supplies were gone in no time. BUT we have recently learned that far less than half that number were actually manufactured and released. Of course they sold out! There were hardly any of them out there.

Microsoft officially launched Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 yesterday. Everyone has been saying that it wouldn’t be able to get them out this year but they are out now. So Vista will most likely be available on the shelves quite soon.

Work was expected to be insanely busy today but most of the day actually ended up being pretty slow with a lot of work happening after hours so I was stuck in the office until well after eight in the evening which I had been planning on so it was no big deal. I am looking forward to this weekend. It will be far less hectic than our average weekend and it is, I believe, our final weekend with a lot of plans until after Christmas and New Years which is a full month away. The holiday season is always the busiest season of the year followed, of course, by the summer wedding season.

I had been hoping to be able to go up to Rochester this weekend for the Relyea’s annual Thanksgiving / Holiday party but I just can’t make it this year. Way too much going on and we have to deal with the BMW’s accident this weekend.

I was stuck at work so late that Dominica ate leftovers on her own tonight. I stopped at Food for Life on the way home and grabbed a quick dinner. That is the only place that I have eaten today. Dominica also went to the gym while I was still at work.

I got home and the evening was pretty much shot. It was very late and Dominica was just wrapping up her homework for the evening. We hung out for about half an hour before she went in to the bedroom to play some video games and to snuggle with Oreo and I did about half an hour of work with the video editors to figure out which one is going to work for me. The final verdict appears to be Ulead Studio 10. After playing with all three major contenders (I decided not to try out Nero’s video editor which is the only other low cost editor that I am aware of) Ulead appears to be the only editing studio that meets my basic requirements. Adobe Premier Elements is just a toy and doesn’t do what I need in the least. Pinnacle probably supports most of the functions that I want and definitely has a much better title creation utility than Ulead but simply doesn’t work at all on my computer (Windows XP Pro SP2 fully patched.) Pinnacle is on version 10.5 and the 10 series is a totally new engine underneath from their earlier packages and apparently it doesn’t work and is super buggy. So that rules them out. Ulead products doesn’t seem very polished but it works and it is the only package that appears to do the basics so it is the only actual option. Fortunately for me Ulead is also the least expensive of the different packages at under $70! So good deal.

It is so warm on this the first night of December that we are sleeping with the windows open even in the midst of the “storm of the season”.