On The Same Planet

Yesterday, Upstairs Guy made it sound like we were on different planets with our testing. This morning me and Automation Guy joined him in his lab, and in a nutshell, in Plain English, the videos he was testing with were tweaked to be low impact, while I was using the torture test clips. And to add to the confusion, the one torture test clip he thought was a beautiful still frame, I showed him was actually a movie which choked the machine so badly it stuck on the first frame. A little massaging of the FF button showed many more frames.

So we went to Boss, and updated him.

One good thing, is this will probably get me a 32GB RAM upgrade for my laptop.

In other news, morning Hgl was 84. And did not feel all that low, which means I'm getting used to being in control of my blood sugars. Bad news is I am also gaining weight, which is the well known side effect of using insulin to control blood sugar.   

Lunchtime was way late, so I went to Boston Market. Their garlic roasted chicken is lovely, but I couldn't even come close to finishing it.  One reason I went there is I was hoping to eat at the new Mission City Grill in the same shopping center, but it is still just an empty storefront. The three open places on that side I abhor. Panera bread, Chipotle, and Habit burger. As for the latter, I have never understood the cult of the hamburger. Not a huge fan. I grew up on paper thin 9¢ burgers, before the Scottish place was invented. Cheeseburgers were 11¢. Mexican cuisine is an oxymoron, and Panera is a totally disorganized menu by and for yuppie scum.

The new center needs a Thai place and a buffet. There's an excellent Chinese place way on the other side, and a lovely Japanese place, but they both close after lunch for a few hours. Now that there's a Target anchoring the center, they should consider staying open without those breaks. For years they shared the area with a gutted Albertson's and Walgreen's. Walgreen's built a much smaller building out by the street, next to the existing Boston Market.

Home, took the long way so I could stop at Home Depot for a heavy duty toilet auger. They had two rows of them, one labeled as $39 and the other $49, but both were filled with the cheaper one. I really wanted the 10' version, but settled for the 3'. Big, though.

Home, re-did the Bells DVD using the clip which would fit on a 25GB disc, in Corel DVD Factory, but it crashed after 45 minutes. Applied the two patches, and it crashed after 19 minutues. Completely re-did it in Nero, and it has been cranking for 2 hours, 50 minutes to go. Fingers crossed. Nero has a craptastic way of designating chapter locations, while Corel has a lovely wheel widget as well as the ability to poke the elapsed time in directly. Nero only has a slider, and no way to expand it. I may have to look into spending Real Money on something like Adobe. I miss Ulead. Corel bought them, and then didn't maintain their products.

Plans for tomorrow:
Be lazy
1 pm to Janice's and re-program her remote and maybe install a new router.
4 pm she is taking me to a creab feed to benefit poor Portuguese. I think this is being held at the Portuguese social hall across the street from where I used to live in Mountain View.

I'm Full

But I still needed chocolate.

Morning laziness. Spook was in bed with me, grabbed my leg when I started to get up. Got up anyway.

The dvd burn which I had started last night failed. Had it succeeded the computer would have shut down afterwards.
Tried it two more times with different settings, no joy. Never made it out of the compiling state. Just now changed the settings to a lower resolution and no "fit to disk" feature. we'll see.

Discovered while doing a web search for blu-ray authoring tools that I already have the best but did not know it. If this current test fails, I'll do the whole project again using that one.  Cyberlink Power 2 Go. Doesn't sound like a DVD tool. Unless you know that's what Cyberlink does.

Over to Janice's, to fix a mistake I made in programming her Logitch remote. She doesn't Get It™ that the little Cisco cable box is what controls her TV feed. And it needs to be facing the remote, not buried in a drawer, for her to change channels. And not seeing the box I set up her TV for direct control, which gave her random off-the-air channels, some HD, other not, most crappy looking.

But the first job was to get Netflix working. She streams through her blu-ray player, and it had been prompting her to update firmware for ages, but she ignored it. Finally Sony blocked all streaming because the update had serious security fixes. As soon as we updated, she could stream Netflix.


It took 3 tries to get the remote right, but now it's done, no brains required, and I showed her how to use the help button on the remote, which is pretty smart.

She wanted a Prius demo, so I drove us to Starbucks, we chatted for an hour, then went to the Portuguese social hall and hooked up with the people who had our crab feed tickets. Which also got us about 30 places closer to the front of the line. Interesting feed. No lining up, just sit at the table and they bring bread, salad and crab to your table. One of the party went up to the drinks counter and got us sodas and such, and there were desserts there too but no one else in my group was doing that so I didn't. Unlike most crab feeds, they served hot crab legs, you had to ask special for cold, and then it took a long time to get them. I ate a lot of crab - the hot was overcooked and a but mushy, but I finally got about 6 cold legs in two clumps, and that was excellent. Would have had more, but Janice wanted to bail.

Dropped her off at her place, an came home to another DVD burn fail. Sad, because it was 80° outside and the aircon was set to 78, so with the computer running all afternoon it was warm in the house.

Goosed the aircon down to 74, which helped. No need for dinner tonight. But I did make two glasses of chocolate milk.

Now that Spook is parking herself on the bed, I set up another webcam in the bedroom, but I'm not getting an IP address from it, have to plug it into the router I think.

Plans for tomorrow:
Thinking of going to a park and taking some photos. I ought to get the bike out of the shed, inflate the tires and take it for a ride. One bad thing about the Prius is it can't take my bike rack.
Enjoy the summer weather