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.