I found out last night that my boss is traveling to Los Angeles today.  So I am covering a little more than I had been planning on this morning.  He is working from there so I am only covering extra while he is traveling, but it is a very busy morning.

I did everything that I could this morning to streamline the system upgrade process.  It is a rather manual process with a lot of steps, a lot of checks and a lot that can go wrong coupled with several reboots which, of course, cause the process to take forever as you wait for the machines to cycle through over and over again.

Dominica spent the morning cleaning after Liesl went down for a nap around a quarter after ten.  She got a ton of cleaning done in the upstairs.  The basement really cannot be helped much, though.

Susan arrived at half past noon.  She had been in the complex for a while but had a really hard time finding our house as the street is mismarked and the three people in the complex to whom she spoke had never heard of our road.  So she just drove around for a while looking for us.

We visited for a little while and she got to meet Liesl who was just waking up from a nice, long nap.  Then the five of us drove out to Grandma’s on Crompond for lunch.  I am still getting the bagel and lox platter almost every time that we go there.  I love it.  And, of course, we all got pie for dessert.  You are not allowed to eat at Grandma’s without getting pie.

Susan left Peekskill shortly after we returned from lunch.  Surprisingly it was around four thirty already by that point.  My how the day flew by!

I watched Liesl and Oreo while dad and Dominica went out to Home Depot to do shopping for the stuff that we need to do the painting tomorrow.  They picked up paint and paint supplies and a new, high-velocity fan to use in the living room.  Our living room gets almost no airflow and it gets very warm in there even when the house is below seventy degrees.  It is a real problem that the few areas of the house that we constantly use – the master bedroom and the living room – are always very, very warm and the parts that we seldom use – bathrooms, the kitchen, etc. – are really cold.  So the air conditioning works really hard just to keep the house livable even when it should not have to do so at all.

This evening we worked on running the CAT6 cabling from the wiring closet, which is located under our stairs, into the living room so that we can hook up our entertainment systems, the Sony PS3 and XBOX 360, directly to Gigabit Ethernet rather than having the PS3 connect over very slow 802.11b wireless and the XBOX be left with no connection at all as it is wired only.  Our original plan was to run this cable through the basement and drill through the floor to run it upstairs but after some research that dad did on the position of the walls we decided that it was far simpler and better, and required no modifications, to snake it directly from the cabling closet through existing holes in the floor and come out at the top of the stairs.  Doing it this way also cuts about eighteen feet of cable length off of the run making it more reliable and less costly as CAT6 cable is definitely not cheap.

Our original plan, back in April, was to run four or five long CAT6 runs up to the living room, but after much thought and discussion we realized how much better it would be to move the Apple AirPort Extreme wireless access point from the basement to the living room giving us better WiFi on the upper levels and out on the deck as well as providing three GigE ports in the living room directly next to the PS3 and XBOX 360.  It gives us one or two fewer physical connections that we would have had with the original plan but it saves money and a lot of effort and provides us with greatly improved wireless coverage.  It also moves more equipment out of the wiring closet which has no ventilation.  Right now the closet door is left open to allow it to cool but that is far from ideal.  Once the wireless is out, which generates more than its fair share of heat, the next big item to leave is the Netgear SC101 SAN device that we plan to have ready for dad to take with him this weekend.  That will leave nothing but the cable modem (bridge), firewall and switch in the wiring closet along with the associated battery unit – none of which generate very much heat at all.  So once we are down to just those we should be able to close the door there making the whole situation far less intrusive.

Running the cable proved to be really easy.  The hard part, that I was really dreading, was finishing the cable by putting the RJ45 ends onto it as we are building our own cables so that we can control the length and run them through the walls.  Dominica has always been good at building cables and got right to work on this.  She managed to get the cable right the first time.  We plugged it in and it just worked!  Awesome.

We moved the Apple AirPort Extreme up to the living room and plugged it in.  We got a GigE connection straight away.  Now the real tests – to see what will happen when we plug in the PS3 and the XBOX 360.

First we tried the PS3.  It connected and got its GigE connection via the wired interface.  We connected to MediaTomb and tried watching some movies.  It was awesome.  Our UPnP connected movies started instantly – none of the wait time that we had when using the wireless.  No buffering needed. Even really high bitrate media started instantly and played perfectly.  Movies looked awesome.  The movie list loaded instantly.  This is going to be awesome.  We will be watching everything this way for sure from now on.  People are going to love this.

We tried watching some PlayOn media from NetFlix and it did appear to work just slightly better than before but still has the same problems that it always did.  We are pretty sure that those problems are actually with the PS3 itself and not with PlayOn or NetFlix but it has been hard to tell.

After verifying that the PS3 would work wonderfully with the new setup we switched to the XBOX 360.  I ran the system updates as the box has not been turned on in quite some time.  We tested the PlayOn connection, which worked instantly, and discovered that almost all of the problems that we have been having with watching things on the PS3 were the PS3 and not the fault of PlayOn or NetFlix.  Suddenly everything just works!  We are very excited.  The unfortunate thing is that our MediaTomb server does not support the proprietary format of the XBOX 360 for streaming so we cannot use it for that yet.  So the PS3 will continue to handle our “in house” media and the XBOX 360 will handle the PlayOn stuff from NetFlix, Hulu, CBS and Amazon VOD.

We watched several episodes of The Wizards of Waverly Place because Dominica and I have had to have been skipping episodes all over the place when they fail to play on the PS3.  Dad went to bed around ten.  Dominica stayed up until just before midnight.  I stayed up later and watched the first episode of Sonny with a Chance which Dominica has seen along with most of the first season watching it without me.  Now that it works on the 360 I can watch it comfortably on the big screen.

I took the time to download the latest expansion pack to Fable II while I was up and using the 360.  Now that is ready for me to play the moment that I have some spare time.  It is a short expansion, I am told.  I am still very excited to get back into the world of Fable II – that is still one of my favourite games ever.

I did some hunting around and discovered that The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition was not available for download to the XBOX 360.  Secret is the original title in the Monkey Island series that released from Lucas Arts in 1990.  It is almost twenty years old this year and Lucas Arts just made a complete remake of the game as a downloadable title for the 360.  What is really cool is that they completely updated the game including new music and voice acting using the same cast that they used for the fourth title in the series, Escape from Monkey Island, which we have for Windows as well as for the PlayStation 2.  Included with the remake is a faithful port of the original as well and by hitting the select button you can switch back and forth between the original and the remake. Very cool idea indeed.  So I downloaded Secret and played a few minutes of it to check it out.  I am quite excited to get to go back and play the original now.  It has been a very long time since I have seen it.

Earlier today while I had some time I also downloaded some titles for the Wii.  There was a big Wii update since the last time that we had it turned on and now you can run games directly from the SD card which is a big improvement and a rather obvious one that I cannot believe that they did not figure out before.  Nintendo has released The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for the Wii retro console which was a really good idea, I think.  I never played the original on the N64 even though I had bought it when it released and was interested in playing it now so was glad to see if on the Wii.  Many serious players claim that Majora’s Mask is the best title, although least appreciated, in the Zelda series so I need to try it out.

I also downloaded Tales of Monkey Island: Episode One which just released for the Wii.  Tales is the fifth installment in the Monkey Island series and the first to release in a very, very long time.  Very exciting indeed.  Tales is also the first completely three dimensional title in the series.  The others were pre-rendered two dimensional with a three dimensional perspective to make it feel 3D.  Tales is an original for the WiiWare platform.  I hope to get to play it very soon.  Dominica will be really excited about this one as well.

Having the living room hard wired to the basement is really going to change the way that we use our house.  This is a major breakthrough for us.  It will affect our television viewing, video game playing, music listening, etc.  This is a change that will impact our lives on a daily basis.  Now what we can see that we want is to get wires run to the upstairs bedrooms.  That, of course, will not be nearly as easy as wiring the living room.  I have no idea how we will manage to pull that off if we even can.  It would be great to get a wire up to our bedroom so that, eventually, we could have a television up there with a PS3 or something to watch the UPnP content on the network.  That would make the media server that much more valuable.

I originally started this article with the intent of installing ps3mediaserver onto my OpenFiler installation but, due to a ridiculous lack of support for dependencies, ps3mediaserver is not a reasonable possibility for this platform.  As it turns out, though, MediaTomb is actually a better, lower resource usage, simpler option that does exactly what I want and does not require careful tuning to force to behave logically.

Installing MediaTomb onto a working OpenFiler system is actually extremely easy as MediaTomb is packaged with all dependencies included in the option binary package for Linux 32bit.  Simply download the i386 static binarys from the MediaTomb Static Binaries Download page.

You can then just unpack the download tarball to the /opt directory using “tar -xzvf” and you have a working system already!  It is actually that simple.  One of the great things about MediaTomb is that it does not attempt to transcode your media files lowering the quality and eating CPU cycles.  It is simply a UPNP / DLNA server.  If you are like me all of your media has been carefully transcoded ahead of time for maximum quality versus storage.  I certainly don’t want low quality, real-time transcoding degrading my video experience.  Many people do but if you are running a full storage server like OpenFiler you probably do not want it busy transcoding media files every time that they are served out.

You can start MediaTomb from the command line simply using the command:

nohup /opt/mediatomb/mediatomb.sh &

And away you go.  In my case I renamed the MediaTomb directory to /opt/mediatomb to make it easier to use.  When you fire it up you will get an on-screen message telling you where the web management interface to the software will be.  You can simply go to the web page to add your media directories to MediaTomb so that it can scan them and make them available via UPNP.

Caveat: I have noticed that MediaTomb tends to crash for me about once every twenty-four hours.  Not a major issue, restarting is quick and easy.  I am still investigating this and hope to have an answer soon but it is not a major issue.

Why not ps3mediaserver?

In order to make ps3mediaserver work you need to manual fulfill a large number of dependencies.  Ps3mediaserver comes as a tarball, not as a system package like RPM, DEB, Conary, etc. and so all dependencies are yours to discover and fulfill.  On Red Hat, Ubuntu or Suse systems these dependencies are often fulfilled by default and can be ignored.  On rPath, however, which is a dedicated appliance, server OS not only are they not filled by default but the necessary packages are not even available for the platform!

You will need to install Java for starters.  This will allow ps3mediaserver to run and serve out audio files.  If this is all you want then you can go down this route.  But once you start ps3mediaserver you will discover that it has no normal administrative interface and is designed to only work with an X GUI.  Of course, no one has X installed by default on rPath Linux – this is a server not a desktop.  This is an extremely silly requirement for ps3mediaserver and really shows that they do not intend this to be used in a serious installation like what we are doing here.  This is a desktop solution like iTunes.  Fine for most people but we are on a different scale here.

So to configure your new ps3mediaserver you will need to install Xterm and get remote X to your server.  If you are working from Windows then you will need an X server like Mocha to handle this.  You can install all of the necessary packages for this using “conary update xterm” but this is just the beginning of your problems.

You can set ps3mediaserver to not transcode but on Linux, without the transcoding libraries installed, it won’t work.  It will attempt to transcode regardless of the settings.  You can verify this by checking the media type from your PS3 or other video player.  For me my pristine, low bandwidth h.264 MP4 files were being displayed as being MPEG2.  This does not happen with ps3mediaserver on Windows with the statically compiled binaries.  Rather inconsiderate for the ps3mediaserver project to compile such for other platforms but to cripple the Linux version without so much as a list of dependencies that we need to fulfill.

You will need ffmpeg and mencode for starters.  Good luck.  Neither are available for the rPath platform and they do not compile using the included compilation environment.  You will, of course, need to install an entire compilation environment just to get started with these.  More software not exactly appropriate on a server.  You can remove it once you are done but then how do you update your system?

The bottom line is that you should avoid ps3mediaserver on the rPath platform and stick with MediaTomb.  The ps3mediaserver project just is not ready for prime time from what I have seen.  They are okay on carefully controlled environments but they are not yet prepared to really run on a “production” media server.  They have some great potential to be sure.  I’ve run their project on Windows and it is very nice.  Over the top complicated but nice.  However getting it to run for the highest possible quality, like MediaTomb does as its only real feature, requires a lot of work and a lot of extra libraries and bloat for a relatively simple system.

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.

• Assassin’s Creed
• Call of Duty 4
• Dragon Age: Origins
• Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition
• Final Fantasy XIII
• Folklore
• GT 5: Prologue

The time changed this morning which was great.  It was well after the new nine when we got up this morning.  Both of us were still really tired.  I have a feeling that that isn’t going to change for a very, very long time.

I started the day playing some Oblivion which I am liking more and more as I get used to it.  It is a really neat game.  I hope that I manage to keep playing it for a while.  Somehow I doubt that I will have much time for it.  Right now I am still at the very beginning of the game and have just set foot through the first Oblivion Gate.

Dominica did a wonderful job getting the kitchen organized today.  There are just two food boxes left.  I got the basement office set up.  Not completely but enough to get us back to basic functionality.  We are back on wireless, Dominica’s laptop is up and running and the telephone is on again so we are able to make and receive telephone calls.  With the wireless up and running the PS3 is now online and updated as well.

Dominica played her new game, Folklore, on the PS3 today.  This is the very first that she has used the system herself at all.  She likes the game, which is good because it is the only one that she has.  I might even try playing it at some point.  She will have a lot more time to play the PS3 soon once she is home all of the time.

We downloaded the playable demo of Eternal Sonata for the PS3.  Wow are those some amazing graphics.  I don’t like the fact that the game is a “linear path” that you take to walk through the game but I really like the graphics, score (it is all Frederick Chopin), battle system and overall feel of the game.  I definitely want to play it.  I would much prefer if it had the open feel of Dragon Quest VIII rather than the “press a button to advance the dialogue” feel like Final Fantasy VII.

I had a pretty busy day working out of the basement.  I had several small items come up at the office that needed my attention and, as it is Sunday, I had to spend a lot of time working on stuff for my class at RIT.  There is no way to avoid that on Sundays.  This is the last Sunday of my class.  The class ends on Friday at midnight.  My final is due then so I am going to be very, very busy this week working to get that completed.

Dominica watched several episodes of Bones on DVD while I worked.  She may even have finished the disc.  Once she is done with that then Netflix can begin to send up BluRays.  Sweet.

I got PlayOn hooked up and working from Dominica’s laptop to the PS3.  It was really easy to set up and it started working right away.  We did experience some problems with it involving playback continuity but I am thinking that those problems are very likely related to the way in which we are using the system with the wireless.  Once we have all of the computers switched over to wired, Gigabit Ethernet and have the PlayOn doing its local caching off of faster, desktop speed hard drive(s) then it will, I am guessing, work flawlessly.  The playback was choppy (leading me to believe that the issue was our network and not our Internet connection) the actual image and sound quality were amazing.

We watched two episodes of The Family Guy and they looked just as good or better than regular television.  That was through Hulu.  We don’t have Netflix working yet but will soon.  Hulu is the only thing working thus far but it sure is enough to make the software well worth it.  Very cool.  Mostly we will be watching Netflix as we pay to have our content be commercial free.  But when things are Hulu only that’s fine too.  The commercials are minimal.

This evening, when I took Oreo out for his late night walk, we had a surprise run in with a skunk.  I was holding Oreo’s leash in one hand and his full poop bag in the other and fumbling with the gate to the trash area up the hill from our house.  When the gate opened he was right there, just a few feet from us.  He was pretty surprised to see us as well but was trapped inside the gated area with nowhere to run to get away from us.  He immediately turned to spray us but luckily Oreo came with me as I backed away and we were able to get out of his threatened zone and he cautiously snuck out and ran down to the pond to get away from us.  Boy was that close.  Closest that I have ever been to a skunk that I could see like that.  I was sure that we were done for.

Katie said that she found gas in southern New Jersey today for $2.01!  That is amazing.  We are going to be seeing gas below the $2 mark this week almost for sure.  Who would have thought?

Dominica went to bed at nine thirty.  She has to be up extremely early tomorrow because her office has a really busy day planned and she is supposed to be in very early to help out.  Yes, she is going to work tomorrow and, we expect, Tuesday.  To help her out tomorrow I am staying home with Oreo so that she does not have to drive Oreo to daycare which takes at least another half an hour.  She also does not need to drop me at the train station which takes easily five to ten minutes.

So I am home tomorrow working a normal day.  My swim schedule for the week is going to be all messed up again.  At least I will still be in the city most of the week to get to the pool.  Just not on my usual days.  My life does not allow for schedules at the best of times.  I suppose that that makes me more able to adapt to changing schedules since that is just the norm for me.  I do not rely upon set schedules throughout my life.

My goal for tomorrow is to get as much of my final done as possible (I got my feedback tonight for the portion that I have done so far and I was told that I am on the right track, about which I was quite concerned, so tomorrow I can really hit it.)  Then, as time allows, to get the basement office assembled as much as possible.  The hardest part is figuring out how to deal with some of the temporary cabling issues and finding parts that are packed away never to be seen again like Dominica’s laptop’s basestation which would be very handy right about now.

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.

Download the SGL Podcast Episode 54 – MP3
Download the SGL Podcast Episode 54 – Ogg Vorbis

The theme of today’s show is Buttkicking Celtic Rock from Winnipeg, Manitoba (that’s in Canada.) It is a Celtic drinking song theme. All of today’s music is from the Dust Rhinos.

In today’s show we talk a little more about the Nintendo Wii, the Sony PS3 and our new PS2! We discuss the weather in the Northeast United States. And we talk about the Creative Zen Vision M and the Creative Zen Vision W as well as the Audacity audio editing software. Oreo got hurt during the making of the show (but not as a result of it) and so the show got spread out over two days. At the current time he is not able to walk on his rear right leg. He is putting on a brave face though.

Today’s Music:

Dust Rhinos: Sailing with the Captain, Jedi Drinking Test and New York Girls Live
Lascivious Biddies: MS Walk Announcement

At the time that the podcast was made the podOmatic site was unavailable and we were not able to post it there as well. I will post that version (the MP3 96kb/s version) as soon as the site is working again.

Misc:

SGL Podcast Episode 54 on OurMedia.