Sheep Guarding Llama

Today begins my first real holiday week at a regular job. I am only in the office for three days this week. But there is plenty of driving (and all in the BMW which makes my leg hurt) to make up for it this week. We will be putting only nearly a thousand miles between Thursday and Sunday.

This morning I had to do some work from Newark before I could drive into the office. On my way I had to stop back at the dealership. Last night both headlights on the PR5 went out AGAIN so I had to take the car in for its headlights for the third time since Friday! I ended up spending over two hours getting the car fixed today. I was in a hurry after that so I hit Taco Bell and grabbed a very quick lunch and rushed into the office.

Dad and I were talking today about the old Coleco Vision that my parents got for me for Christmas in 1982. It was the same year that dad got our first VCR. Also for that Christmas I got Legos like I always did as well as the Star Wars miniatures TIE and X-Wing fighters that had a button on the back that when you pressed it would cause the spaceships to “go limp” and fall apart and then would come back together simply by releasing the button.

I found an awesome video on YouTube of “How to Beat Video Games” featuring the ColecoVision classic Cosmic Avenger which was probably my favourite childhood video game. Many an hour I spent playing that game and some serious scores I did score in my day. Dad found the “How to Beat Video Games” video for Zaxxon as well. Isn’t the Internet fun?

I decided that I needed to have a Coleco Vision page on SGL dedicated to my old video game system so I took the time to create one today. You can see a complete list of the games that I had on the system and more. Good stuff. Boy does just thinking about that old Coleco Vision bring back the memories!

The day flew by today. I suspect much of this can be attributed to the fact that I was so busy and had so much that I needed to do today. I had plenty of phone calls that needed to be made but I got a lot of stuff taken care of that needed to be dealt with today. I had to deal with my Motorola Q which was stolen. I shut the service off last night and dealt with the errant accounts this afternoon. Tonight I need to file the police report and tomorrow I need to file the insurance claim. Boy the little things will really keep you busy, won’t they?

I remain, to this day, the only person that I have ever really known to have had the Coleco Vision. One kid that I rode the school bus with when I was very young said that he had one but we weren’t really friends and I never saw it. I don’t even remember his name now. Maybe it was Kevin. Kevin someone or other that lived near Linwood, NY and owned a Coleco Vision. Kevin (I hope that that is your name), if you are reading this, let me know.

I was in the office until after six this evening. I can safely stay late now, I hope, because my headlights are now working again! What a relief.

This week is expected to be extremely slow as there is just about nothing going on at the office. Someone remarked today that it feels like everyone is all ready on vacation. Lots of people are actually out on vacation too. This is a popular week to be taking off. Dominica and I are both working three days down here and then she has two full days off and I have one day off and one work from Utica day.

Oreo is going to stay home tomorrow. Dominica needs extra time to get her hair done after work and doesn’t have enough time to pick Oreo up. He also, we think, needs some extra time to just sleep and taking his middle day off this week will make this week an ideal sleep “catch up” time for him. He has been doing much better when left home alone since we have been in Newark so we are hoping that he will enjoy his day off.

We got up this morning and decided that the Nintendo Wii was so cheap that we would just get one. But we decided to go online and check to make sure that Nintendo was actually making the device, low end as it is, able to connect to modern monitors. Nintendo’s range of websites themselves have been down for several days with no way to get any information from them. But searching around online provided far more disclosure on the machine itself than Nintendo was willing to give anyway and the answer is absolutely not. Nintendo is so ridiculous and out of touch that the Wii doesn’t even have the capability nor does Nintendo make or intend to make any type of adapter that allows it to connect even to VGA let alone digital monitors. Buying a component to VGA adapter is expensive like close to $100 plus you have to buy the component adapter from Nintendo as well. Suddenly it turns out that the Nintendo Wii is pretty expensive. About the same price as the XBox 360 almost once you try to get it to connect to anything modern.

We decided that we really need a television of some sort for our bedroom. So we decided to just get one today. We decided just to get something inexpensive and a little small that we can mount on the wall above our closets. We looked at a number of options and there is nothing that we could find that can handle 1080p so we figured that we will have to settle with a 720p display. We did further research today and discovered that the Sony PS3 is not nearly as powerful as they have been claiming and is having a terrible time handling 1080p rendering and will be limited due to practicality to 720p so since we intend to use the PS3 as the main source for the monitor having it be only a 720p (aka HDTV) isn’t really a limitation. Originally Sony was claiming that the PS3 would have dual 1080p outputs but once the units were being tested they discovered just how wussy the hardware was and it definitly is not on par with modern computers. Dominica and I saw a PS3 in action last night and while it was impressive for a console it was not impressive at all compared even to some very inexpensive and not too recent computers. In fact, now that the PS3 is is only outputting 720p it is still failing to produce output for computers monitors made in the last six or so years. Even playing Quake II on a Pentium II 350 on Windows 98 back in 2000 with nothing but a VooDoo 3 video card did okay on a 1280×1024 display!

We also decided that even though the Nintendo Wii is incredibly unimpressive that we were going to try one anyway just because it was original and cheap. But when we went to the store we discovered, much to our surprise, that the Wii was actually widely sold out and unavailable! We have no idea what is driving so many people to want to get the Wii.

We ended up just getting the Westinghouse 32″ 720p monitor. It is big enough for our bedroom but small enough to still fit. One of the benefits of the monitor is that it has a variety of inputs so that it can even take input from the low end Nintendo Wii if we still decide to get one when Nintendo finally gets that back onto the market.

We also had to run out and grab a cheap DVD player because we had nothing to hook to the monitor except for the computers. One of the best bits is that we are now able use both computers while watching something. We watched the original Disney That Darn Cat with Haley Mills and then Just Friends.

My goal for the day was to drive around the city of Newark and to get some video footage to work with to put together a short video about the city. I have not done any real video editing before and I want to try it out. So we started the day out by taking Oreo out for a walk in Military Park and getting some breakfast at the hot dog truck that parks on the park – he sells egg and cheese sandwiches for breakfast. We had the BMW brought around and put the top down so that we could enjoy one of the last semi-warm days of the season before our chances are all gone.

Dominica drove around Newark while I did some video taping from the passenger seat. We tried driving into the Ironbound but we discovered that that area of the city is so busy on Saturdays that there is no way to drive through it at all. The traffic was totally insane! It was lunch time on a weekend and it was total gridlock and mayhem. We had no idea that it got like that during the weekends down there. On weekday evenings it is very quiet and easy to get around. It would never have occurred to me that the weekends could be like this.

After putting in an hour or two of driving around with Oreo bundled up in the back seat we decided to have the car parked and to walk up to the NJPAC Light Rail station and to take a ride on the Newark Trolley that has just recently been put into service. The Light Rail / Trolley is a major part of the city’s attempts at downtown revitalization and we wanted to take a test ride on it to see how it was. We were very impressed. It is inexpensive and travels over a pretty useful piece of downtown. The cars are very clean and nice and the whole experience is very comfortable and easy. I do wish that they had some information at the stops to let you know the expected arrival time of the trolley though. On the weekends it can be half an hour before it comes by and if you are like us and the only people at the station and there is no one around you can convince yourself that the trolley doesn’t even run on weekends and never see it go by.

Once we returned to our home station we walked by NJPAC and around the north side of Military Park. We stopped at the NJPAC Cafe which is actually in Military Park and had PB&J sandwiches, some muffins and coffee since it was into the afternoon and we had had nothing but egg and cheese breakfast sandwiches so far today. The NJPAC Cafe serves as a shelter for people entering and exiting the parking garage that is located under Military Park. It was nice to be able to just sit comfortably in the park right in the middle of downtown. The views from there are pretty good. It would be a good place to start an on-foot exploration of downtown. It would give a tourist a great opportunity to orient oneself before setting off into the city. The selection is awfully thin there with just a few pre-made sandwiches, scones and muffins but everything was good. The muffins were especially good. And the view was nice.

We hung around the apartment for a few hours and then walked over to Food for Life for some dinner. I tried their “Wrap it Up” for the first time today and have finally found another item there that I might like as much as their infamous BLT! I am very happy.

After dinner we drove up to Clifton to do some shopping. I needed some video editing supplies and we were hoping to be able to get some shoes. We need new shoes for going to the gym. Both of us are having issues with our feet hurting. We discovered that the sports store there was so busy that we really couldn’t even consider going there. There was just no way. So we just went to Target where we managed to do some early Christmas shopping and got ourselves the video game “Children of Mana” for the Nintendo DS. That is one of the top games for that platform that we have been waiting for. “Final Fantasy III” is the next really big game that we want. Target did not have what I needed at all though so we ran over to Staples too. At Staples I managed to get the IEEE 1394 cable that I needed to be able to transfer videos off of the video camera onto the desktop (the cable I had before would only work with my laptop.) I also got an SD card reader so that I can easily move pictures from my Nikon camera to the computer. Dominica found some pink headphones that she liked and so we both picked up new headphones (mine are not pink) since I have been trying to find a pair that won’t fall out of my ears all of the time while I am working out.

We got back and we played with some of our new toys for about an hour. I got a video transfer started and we headed down to the gym for our daily work out. I am still on a roll without having missed a single day yet since the gym opened. Today was my ninth day in a row.

After working out we just relaxed in the apartment. I worked on the SGL Daily and on the video that we took today. I started trying out the Pinnacle Studio 10 that dad uses but I quickly discovered that it was one of the worst, most amateur pieces of software that I have had to deal with in a long time. Nothing in that package worked at all. It took me quite some time just to get it to not crash the first moment that I clicked anywhere in the application. Totally pathetic. No wonder they hide their trial download so well. They dare not let anyone attempt to use it! But I found a solution. I immediately downloaded Ulead’s video studio to see how that would work. I won’t say that I am amazingly impressed but at least it worked and I was able to start working with the video right away. Not exactly knocking my socks off but for being $30 less expensive the Ulead is taking a major lead over Pinnacle who made me very unhappy by placing very misleading pricing on their site. (They list their prices as “with mail in rebate” but very carefully hide the fact that the rebate is only available to upgrade customers, not to new customers. So the actual price of the products is not clearly listed anywhere except for places with a strikethrough through is as in: $99 $69 “with mail in rebate*”)

Dominica stayed up for a little while playing video games and then was off to bed. Tomorrow she is going to be doing a lot of homework so she needs her rest tonight. Oreo has done little but sleep all day. We are worried that he is falling farther and farther behind on sleep and just isn’t getting enough opportunity to rest up between bouts at doggie daycare where he can’t help himself and has to play hard all day long.

Weight Loss: -2.0 🙁

Here is a bit of trivia for you. Just like the United States is full of old laws that everyone has forgotten and are rarely enforced (but wind up keeping almost every citizen in a state of potential arrest and imprisonment for laws that could never be fully researched) – it is a mortal sin for Roman Catholics to enter a movie theatre anywhere in the archdiocese of Philadelphia! This ruling was put into affect in 1934 and is still official unlike many other rules that are now gone such as fish on Fridays. Given the fact that the ruling for “movie theatre” in 1934 would include most home theatres today it means that it is a mortal sin for Catholics to even go home in many cases! (This means that it is a mortal sin to watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, even though it is a Catholic film, in almost all of Pennsylvania since almost all the state is within the archdioses including Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Scranton.)

I discovered a quirky animated/comic bear names Bueno that you should check out.

Dominica found this great article about a mischievous bonobo at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa. This ape must have a personality like Oreo’s.

No word this morning as to how the Sony PS3 sales went. We know that lots of people were waiting in lines last night but no one is reporting that all of the units are sold out so we are thinking that there are still many still available yet today. New shipments are supposed to be arriving daily as well. So I am thinking that I might try to find one today if Dominica doesn’t manage to come up with one.

I had to get up and get out the door right after Dominica this morning so that I could get the PR5 into the shop. It is the headlights as always. What a pain that is. But the car is due for an oil change so the timing isn’t all that bad. Headlights, oil change and they are going to look into the sound that we are getting from the shifter. The car has 85,000 miles on it these days so it is due for some maintenance items. I caught the shuttle from Crystal Auto Mall up to Warren for work. It is really handy working in an area where you can get a shuttle to and from the dealership. I have never been able to take advantage of a service like that before.

No luck on the PS3. The NYC area has too high of incomes for the price tag to have been a deterrent like it will be in most of the country. But I tried calling back to Geneseo and the only place selling them in Livingston County, the Walmart right beside our house, sold out last night. They are a twenty-four hour store so they would have had people going there all night even if they hadn’t sold out immediately.

I found out today that the telephone comment line that we have maintained for the SGL Podcast is no longer working. Eric on Long Island discovered this today when he tried to leave a comment. Apparently that is now a modem or fax line! (Do people really use that stuff anymore?) So I will investigate this over the weekend and see if I can get this sorted out. In the mean time everyone should just record MP3’s or Ogg Vorbis files on their computers or portable digital devices and email them to me and I will put in audio comments that way.

I have decided that I need some video editing software so that I can actually do some editing of my videos. Currently I am limited to the almost worthless QuickTime Pro (which crashes constantly as well as does almost nothing) or Windows Movie Maker which is far better but still extremely limited. So I am thinking that I am going to download Pinnacle Studio tonight for the thirty day free trial. It isn’t too expensive and dad swear by it. They are up to version 10.6 now. I am looking for something that will do decent editing, let me add in titles and stuff, overdub and, most importantly, output to a variety of formats including WMV, MOV (QuickTime) and DivX/Xvid. Pinnacle Studio should do all of that so I will give it a shot.

Some of the guys at work wanted to go out for lunch today and they grabbed me as I was heading down to the cafeteria and we all went out to Houlihan’s for lunch. I have never been there before but the food was really good and I will be going back there sometime. I especially liked their stuffed mushrooms and fish tacos. It was a nice change of pace to get to go out with everyone for lunch.

Crystal Mazda’s shuttle picked me up at three thirty to take me back to get my car. Fortunately the repairs were quite inexpensive and were done by the time that the shuttle was done running so my day was very simple and easy. I rode down and picked up my car and drove back to work. I parked in the garage and as I parked I noticed that the other headlight was out! I called Crystal and they had me go right back down there so that they could fix it right away. I grabbed everything that I needed from work so that I wouldn’t have to come back again and I headed down to Crystal Mazda on Route 22 in Dunellen, NJ.

The car only took fifteen or twenty minutes to get repaired. It was just a loose wire and took very little time. I took off and did okay for attempting to beat rush hour traffic. There was a bit but it wasn’t too heavy. I got home way before Dominica did and got a little chance to just talk to dad on the phone.

Dominica got home at her usual time and I met her outside and we headed right out for West Orange so that we could get some huge burritos from the Desert Moon Cafe and then some dessert from Cold Stone Creamery. That was delicious. I have finally learned that even though when I get ice cream anywhere else I need to get something huge to satisfy me that I can get the smallest size at Cold Stone and I am very happy. So even though their ice cream is probably very full of cream compared to normal ice cream I need so much less of it that I am pretty sure that it is better for me to get it there. We are thinking of starting to by our regular “tubs” of ice cream there. We didn’t realize before tonight that they sold them just like in a grocery store.

We checked the AMC movie theatre while we were there to see if we could make it to see Casino Royale – the new James Bond film. It didn’t fit our schedule tonight but we are thinking about going to see it tomorrow. We have heard great things about it and are really interested to see the new Bond and to see the series start over again. For those out of the James Bond loop – Casino Royale is the first Bond film to be remade and is chronologically the very first Bond movie in the series. The James Bond character originated from the book “Casino Royale”. Most Bond afficionatos do not consider the original Casino Royale movie to be canon with the other Bond films and it was definitely in a completely different flavour and was one of the films used as much of the basis for the Austin Powers movies.

We came home and watched Haley Mills in Summer Magic which neither of us have ever seen. It wasn’t very good and there is a reason that Disney never really talks about it. But it was okay. After the movie it was time to hit the gym! This is eight days in a row for me. We just did a short half hour workout tonight. I am counting tonight as my “night off” for my body to relax but I didn’t want to totally take the night off or the routine would be lost and that is the beginning of the end.

I downloaded the trial version of Pinnacle Studio tonight so that I can play with that this weekend. I also got the video camera out and ran down the battery so that I can get it charging. Dominica and I are hoping to do a video tour of Newark tomorrow and we want the battery to be ready to go. This is one of our rare weekends with nothing scheduled at all and we are really looking forward to it. Now hopefully I will discover that I have all of the cables that I need to be able to do video transfers or else we will need to make an emergency shopping trip for that as well.

For die hard video game console fans, don’t forget that the Nintendo Wii is releasing on Sunday.