Dominica is officially done with her scheduled job and is now going to work on a day-by-day basis (dato-a-dato) until she is no longer able to work because of the baby.  Our expectation is that she is going to manage two more days in the office, Monday and Tuesday, before she won’t be able to drive in any more.  She is off Wednesday through Friday because of her bereavement days so by the time that she would be driving back down to Totowa another five days will have passed and that is a lot of time this late in the pregnancy.  We are into the “baby any day” zone at this point.

I managed to get back to Peekskill at 9:23 on the first off-peak train from Manhattan.  It took a while to fight by way through Grand Central Terminal as thousands of halloweenies were descending upon the city as I was heading out.  It was early enough that the family was able to wait for me to get back to Peekskill before eating dinner.  They picked me up at the Peekskill train station (which, by the way, our GPS unit does not list as even existing!) and we drove out to the New City Diner for dinner.  It is very handy that such a versatile restaurant is so near to our home.

After dinner we got back and it was pretty late so we pretty much just went straight to bed.  We are all really exhausted from this week.  Dad and aunt Sharon completed all of the painting that needed to be done in the nursery, master bedroom and the master bathroom which involved even pulling the medicine cabinet off of the wall to get the paint deep into the corner between it and the main mirror.  It was a huge amount of work.  Unfortuantely I have only been at home in Peekskill late at night and there are very few lights in the house so far and thus it has been so dark that I can barely tell what colour anything is.

Dominica and I slept in this morning until almost nine.  We are really exhausted after a very long and busy two weeks.  Now we need to do a little catch up on that so that we can remain functional.  There is a whole lot of “busy” coming up on us very quickly.

We had thought about doing breakfast with dad and aunt Sharon this morning but there was so little time before we all had to leave that we decided against it.  So we just visited for a little while before Dominica and I had to get ready to go to her ultrasound appointment which was at ten thirty.  We have an “emergency” ultrasound today because there was some fear that the baby was oblique and not completely head-down so today we are getting confirmation on the baby’s position.  If the baby is oblique it will raise the chances of having a Caesarean section dramatically.

Dominica and I had to leave for the hospital at a quarter after ten.  Dad and aunt Sharon were just loading up the car to head out themselves.  Just as we were leaving Dominica discovered that her referral paperwork was missing from the car so we searched the car and house in a panic and then decided that our best bet was to run downtown and get new papers issued from the clinic.

It was a bit of a panic but the clinic got us copies of the paperwork and we were up to the hospital by a quarter till eleven.  Late but they took us anyway.

The ultrasound went well.  The baby is actually head-down and not oblique so we are still in the clear for avoiding a Caesarean section.  Little baby Miller is currently estimated to be seven pounds three ounces although there is some growing left to be done and an ultrasound-based weight measurement has a very wide margin of error.

After the ultrasound we got a quick tour of the birthing department at the hospital.  It is very nice and I think that we both feel better after having had a chance to see the facilities.  They are very small and it is a very personal facility.  They are only really designed to handle about five new babies at a time which means that they only receive one or two per day, I think.  When we are there Dominica will have a private room and the new baby will be able to stay in the room with her as long as nothing goes wrong.  I am able to stay there twenty-four per day as well.  Visiting hours for the rest of you are from noon until eight in the evening.

After the tour we went down to the Beach Shopping Center near to the hospital and checked out the Stop and Shop which is our local supermarket.  This is our very first time buying groceries or any type of commodity supply while in Peekskill.  We really liked the market.  It is a lot like a well-lit Wegmans.  We aren’t sure but it may be open twenty-four hours per day as well.  We will figure that out.  It is very close to the house.

We picked up a copy of Hudson Valley Magazine today.  We are Hudson Valleyers now; time to get to know the lay of the land.  It was the “best of” issue with all of the best restaurants and stuff from around the region which runs from Yonkers to Albany.  It is a very large part of the state with a lot of really interesting communities.  We are also on the lookout for Westchester Magazine.  We’ve been looking for it but have no idea who might sell it.  No one appears to be selling it anywhere.

After shopping we came home and worked on cleaning and unpacking for a little while.  Then I made lunch which was vegetarian BLTs with thick sliced Stop and Shop Bakery sesame bread, Roma tomatoes, Boston Bibb lettuce and mayo with Morningstar Vegetarian Bacon.  They were really delicious.  We also got a Stop and Shop Bakery lemon crunch half-pie for dessert.

I got the Playstation 3 hooked up today.  It is sitting on our wire-frame printer stand and hooked to the television which is sitting on the floor leaning against the wall.  Not the best setup but we wanted to be able to use the system.  Immediately Dominica discovered why I have been talking about getting a larger screen very soon.  The current screen is absolutely miniscule in our large living room.  We have to move the furniture closer just to be able to see it.  We are used to it being in our bedroom where it was right at the foot of our bed.  It wasn’t large there but it was adequate.  In the living room though, it looks awkwardly small in addition to being hard to see.

I got the PS3 running and played a little bit of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which I have been looking forward to playing for about three years now, it seems.  Jeremy had Elder Scrolls III on the PC back when I still lived in Geneseo and I bought it for my own PC when I was living in North Brunswick by myself in early 2006.  I liked Elder Scrolls III and was looking forward to the updated and larger sequel but just never had the time or the platform on which to play it.  It is a really neat, sandbox style traditional RPG with some action and amazing graphics and sound.  According to many sources that I have read the PS3 version of the game is the very best one to play as it came out later and had more time to be perfected before being released.

Oreo was sleeping innocently by the back door (glass sliding doors) this afternoon when the neighbour’s cat, Bella, jumped on over to our deck and came right up to Oreo at the glass and scared the crap out of him.  Oreo ran into the kitchen to get Dominica to come help him and then ran back to the window and attempted to attack Bella through the glass!  The two of them, I was told, were really going at it both being extra brave with the solid glass between them.  It was quite entertaining.  I was upstairs and was not aware that this was going on.  Very funny.

Because of the Oreo/Bella display we got a chance to visit with the neighbours a little.  They were pretty shocked to find their cat launching herself over onto our deck!  I don’t think that they were as surprised as Oreo.  He is not a cat loving dog.  He is terrified of cats.  He was on high alert for a long time and exhausted himself doing house patrols for the rest of the afternoon making sure that no other rogue cats were invading his domain.

After we were tired of doing things around the house, which didn’t take long after our long week, we decided to just go out and do some exploring and shopping and to pick up, if possible, something on BluRay to watch on our new BluRay player.  Dominica has Heroes Season Two but I have not completed the first season yet so we can’t watch that together until I do.   I have a few episodes left to go but each one is an hour and they are on the AppleTV so there will be no watching that until the AppleTV is hooked up.

We went exploring looking for Cortlandt Center which dad had found on a map and thought must be close to us, but we were not sure where it was.  It turns out that Cortlandt Center is right around the corner.  We just head over to Main Street and head east for a very short distance and there are a ton of shops that we will use all of the time including a good-sized Walmart, Best Buy, Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Dunkit Donuts, Applebee’s and much more.

We shopped at Walmart and picked up some basic house supplies and Shrek the Third on BluRay.  It was inexpensive and we assumed that a CG Dreamworks movie from the Shrek franchise would at least show off the BD capabilities and be mildly entertaining.  Neither of us had seen this latest Shrek movie (and in actuality we were not really clear on its existance – we are dramatically out of the mainstream media world at this point.)

We decided to get dinner out since we were someplace new rather than going home to eat even though there is food in the fridge.  We will have that tomorrow.  We tried out the Piazza Roma that is in the Cortlandt Center plaza.  It was very good.  I had coconut crusted sea bass over mangoes which was excellent.  Min had the pasta trevi and really liked that as well.  The service was a bit slow but there was a roast (not the pig kind, the jabbing kind) going on that had quite a crowd and we think that that was what was affecting the staff.  We will definitely be trying them again down the road.

We got back home and discovered, at ten thirty at night, that Walmart had not removed their security packaging from the BluRay that we had bought.  It is not the kind of thing that you can just remove and if you do it sets of a piercing alarm which you cannot turn off.  I know this because I know someone who had this exact thing happen to them with CAT5 cables and ended up with two alarms going off for hours and they had to bury the stupid things in a dumpster to get them to not be overpoweringly loud.  So I was not about to set off one of those in our new home with the windows open!

I drove back to Walmart as quickly as I could.  Luckily they didn’t close until eleven tonight and I got back there at a quarter till.  I got right in to customer service but ended up having to wait there for over twenty minutes while the electronics department flatly refused to help them at all.  In fact, the customer service manager also refused to respond when needed for other customers and the store manager never reacted at all.  Twenty minutes I stood there waiting for Walmart to give me a product for which they had happily taken my money just two hours earlier.  I couldn’t believe that little they were willing to help me.  The poor customer service kids were stuck there without any way to get anything done.

Not one single person who arrived after me even got into customer service.  There was a line the entire time and all of those people ended up just leaving without getting any resolutions to their problems at all.  Unbelievable.  I only got service because I wasn’t willing to leave and had already purchased the product.  I was there after the store closed.  Completely ridiculous.

I got back home and we watched Shrek the Third which was mildly entertaining, as we had guessed.  Not a great movie and definitely just playing off of the franchise but a decent film and definitely one that looked great on the BD player.  We are very glad that we now have BD capability.  It has solved a lot of problems.  Our Netflix queue should begin sending us BD films later this week too, which will be nice.

It was a pretty late night but we were energized just being in our new home.  There is very visible progress on the unpacking as well.  The office is still not set up and we are just doing without today.  That is a project for tomorrow as there is much that I need to do down in the office anyway.  It cannot be delayed any further.

We will be home tomorrow.  No plans to go anywhere at all.  Unpacking, homework, etc.

Much of the market issues have been caused by confusion for buyers being unable to identify high end video media formats one from another. This is not the fault of BD and HD-DVD, however, as even many (or possibly most) news outlets have been referring to both formats as forms of DVDs which they most certainly are not. An HD-DVD or a BluRay Disc are no more DVD than a CD is or a Laserdisc is. These are five discrete and independent formats that share little in common other than their size and the fact that they are plastic based media carriers. But few consumers have the ability to clearly discern a DVD from a CD (both can be audio, data or video carriers in common usage) even after both formats have widely run their courses and are about to be retired. So expecting them to grasp modern formats is sadly asking too much.

For those who did any research into the formats it was clear that BluRay had a huge advantage and no format that isn’t supported by the high end market ever survives. Videophiles are often the earliest adopters of any new format and they are willing to do research and generally understand the reasons for choosing formats. To this market, as well as the computer data market, HD-DVD was a senseless format aimed at using a confusing nomenclature to grab uneducated market share quickly. But the uneducated consumer market is not heavy in the early adopter space and that mistake sealed the fate of HD-DVD.

More importantly, however, I believe is that BluRay will not be a highly successful format simply because the era of physical media is waning and there is little need for it today. For a short time it will pick up steam and surpass DVD but with its slow start caused by market confusion it did not get the foothold that it needed while network deliver mechanism were still nascent and now it will face a very difficult and ultimately impossibly battle with “instant satisfaction” network based deliver systems.

At the moment BluRay must face competition from AppleTV, Amazon UnBox, Netflix and on-demand cable and satellite services in addition to ad-hoc Internet based delivery systems. But BluRay has a minor upfront advantage in that its massive storage capacity is extremely difficult to compete with over these network delivery systems. But this capacity is only an advantage when the content will be viewed on high end devices and only when the original content exists in a quality high enough to warrant the extra storage space. (This is another reason why HD-DVD could not survive, its meager storage capacity would be eclipsed much sooner by content delivery networks.) At the moment only 1080p cinematic content is really of high enough value to be worth the extra effort of using BluRay. But as network speeds increase, network based content availability increases and as network based systems continue to refine and redefine compression algorithms the static BluRay format will fall farther and farther behind.

Today is President’s Day and I have the day off from the office. I spent the last two days relaxing and today I have to take my final exam in my Project Management class. Oreo is home with me but Dominica had to go to work today. But her friend Katie as the day off and is going in to have lunch with Dominica and the crew at her office.

I slept in a little this morning but not too long. I was up around nine in the morning. It was nice to get to really relax though. I am ready to face the day. The plan is to feed and walk Oreo early this morning and to go right on to my exam so that I can get that out of the way. It is always a concern that Oreo will interrupt me during the exam since the exam is timed and is three hours long.

I ended up not being able to work on my exam this morning due to a “Trojan horse” emergency in Ithaca that ended up taking my entire day. The malware ended up being one that could not be identified by any software that I was able to get my hands on including Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, Kaspersky or Panda. I eventually learned that the malware was utilizing Window’s explorer.exe and that if I shut that process down that it appeared that the system was functioning correctly otherwise. That was no little trick though since the Trojan had used Group Policy Objects to lock out the Task Manager. What a day.

This would not have been so bad had I not had one disaster after another on my own network. By the end of the day my Netgear FVG318 finally just started to die. It has been having problems for quite some time and over the past week or so the wireless has completely died. It no longer has a functioning interface to the wireless settings nor is there any wireless coming from the unit at all. Today it decided to completely restart itself and reset itself to system defaults but later added other custom settings back in. And by the afternoon it started going through a slow death requiring me to restart it by physically unplugging and plugging it back in once an hour. It would start off fine but slowly degrade over the course of the house from stable to instable to just plain off.

So I spent at least ten hours today dealing with that virus and/or my own network. It was awful. The work was hard and extremely stressful. And it took every possibly free second of my day. It was all that I could do to get Oreo fed and walked. He ended up spending the entire day in bed leaving me to my work.

Dominica picked up dinner from On the Border near her office so that I could just eat and get back to work. The food was good – beer battered fish tacos. We really liked it and will be adding that to our food rotation.

I think that I forgot to mention previously that we have decided to get Oreo a doggy potty that will go in the apartment. Our lifestyle is just so difficult for him even though we work very hard to accommodate his needs. He needs a place to go in the apartment and there are a lot of times when we need him to be able to do so. So Dominica ordered that over the weekend and we are hoping to have it by the end of the week. It is a 38″x20″ artificial turf unit that we are going to put next to the book shelf behind the recliner in the living room. It is made of black plexiglass. We really hope that he will learn to use it. It will make us all much happier.

I finally managed to start my final exam at about eight thirty in the evening. Nothing like waiting until the last minute. It is a three hour exam and must be completed by midnight. In a pinch I was going to take my laptop down to the lounge to work but that would have been dreadfully uncomfortable considering the amount of writing that needed to be done.

I wrapped up around eleven thirty and was thoroughly exhausted but unable to sleep. Dominica spent the evening watching the DVDs of Christie that dad had lent to us. I had wanted to watch it too but simply do not have enough time to watch everything that Dominica watches and we just have to pick and choose quite a bit. The more that we have that she can watch without me, the better.

Since I couldn’t go right to sleep and since Dominica wasn’t really sleepy either we decided to start watching the new, direct to DVD cartoon, Dragons of Autumn Twilight based on the amazing novel by Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman that kicked off the Dragonlance series of novels in the 1980s. In recent years there has been a young reader adaptation of the book series as well with this first chapter being made available as two novels “A Rumor of Dragons” and “Night of the Dragons“.

We watched about half of the movie which, unfortunately but expectedly, did not deliver at all on the incredible depth of the original novel. “Dragons of Autumn Twilight” is one of the truly great, ground-breading novels in the fantasy genre with deep character development and along, involved storyline. The character interactions are great and the world is lush and realistic. It was this novel that first drew me into fantasy literature when I was between the ages of ten and twelve in the 1980s. The book was original published in 1984 and I have the original trilogy in their original first edition printing.

The Dungeons and Dragons game is on for tomorrow.  This is our secondary group with just four players in which I actually get to play instead of Dungeon Mastering.  Tomorrow night will be the first time that we actually get a chance to play instead of just setting up the characters.