The Plentiful Vintage

Miracle Max: Now, all dead...well, with all dead, there's usually only one thing that you can do.

Inigo: What's that?

Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.

More progress:

• Make list.
• Reroute heating system flow.
• Replace porch lights.
• Move ceiling light fixtures around in back room, kitchen, and office.
• Clean out Subaru, and make arrangements to have it hauled away.
• Put away air conditioners for winter.
• Get new tires for the truck.
• Rip out the carpet in the living room.
• Head down to Jersey to see assorted crippled family members.
• Ride bike as much as possible.
• Play a round of golf.

I went through the Subaru's clothes today. It's been a couple of years since I've even tried to lie to myself that the old crate was just mostly dead. Yeah, I suppose I could've gotten it a new battery, and turned the engine over, but really, it was already on it's last legs when I got the truck, and it's been three years since I even last tried to start it. I do miss it sometimes. I drove it for almost twelve years, 175,000 miles worth. It was a good car for a very long time. It took me to Maine and DC and Boston and down the trails on my brothers' farm. I still miss the four-wheel drive. I hauled soccer gear and soccer players all over the northeast in it, and hauled myself and teammates to softball games from New Haven to Hanover, and from Burlington to Orono. I drove it through a blinding snowstorm to get to my grandmother's funeral with only a back massager plugged into the lighter for heat to defrost the windshield. I even fell in love in that car, for all the good it's done me.

Now it just sits there, a storage shed on wheels that have become semi-embedded in the tarmac of my driveway. It a place where I can stash lawn fertilizer, and where yellow-jackets can build their homes, but not much else. Tomorrow I'll call someone to haul it away. The final tally - $2.06 and 26 Garden State Parkway toll tokens.

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Speaking of dead, I just finished watching the last Dodger game of the season, a loss to the Padres. Wait til next year...

This is me taking a break from reviewing and revising SOPs. Lately I've been very turnip-like at home, and work has been busy. Yesterday afternoon was spent reinstalling WinXP on a machine that had been hijacked. A good chunk of today was spent disinfecting another machine. Feh. In my perfect world, people who write adware get tied up and handed over to Angelus along with a pair of rusty tweezers.

( More dull and boring... )

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The Dodgers take on the Twins tonight for the first time since the '65 Series. By coincidence, I just downloaded a copy of the 7th game of the '65 Series from mlb.com, so I'll have something to get me into the spirit of the thing before tonight's game kicks off.

Annoying, expensive weekend. Took the truck in for a tune up, an oil change, and to have them investigate the annoying metal on metal squeally noise the left front wheel has been making. I was pretty sure it had something to do with the brakes, since it went away when I applied them. Anyway, $400 later I have new front brakes. Feh.

That took up most of Saturday morning, and I spent the rest of the day installing the new hard drive and other upgrades I got for my computer. ( Tales of computer troubleshooting follow )

Today it was lovely out, but the only time I spent outside was mowing the lawn. That was tough on my back. The stabby pain hasn't come back, but it is still very stiff.

In other news, I have a new neighbor. Or maybe neighbors. It's been kind of weird. Earlier this year, my neighbors on one side put their house up for sale, but then took it off the market and stayed put. I have no idea why. Then a couple of months ago, I noticed a little "for rent" sign on the phone pole at the corner which listed the house on the other side of me. It dawned on me at that point that I hadn't seen much of my neighbors lately. The daughter was at the house, home from college for the summer, but I hadn't seen the parents in a while. Apparently they'd moved. The daughter eventually went back to college, and the house had been empty for about a month. This past week, a realtor's "For Lease" appeared on the front lawn, and Saturday there was a new car in the driveway. Today a bunch of sturdy young men were hauling stuff into the house from their pickup trucks. The trucks are gone, so I have no idea who is actually living there yet.

Catching up from a busy weekend.

Note to self: if you're going to NJ to register your new vehicle, don't wait until you're in White Plains to check to see if you remembered bring your paperwork with you, so that you don't have to drive all the way back to frelling Rhode Island to get it!

Started bright and early Friday morning. Left for NJ to register the truck at about 7:00. It was a great ride, no traffic at all. Then, at around 9:30, on 287 in White Plains, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn't have the paperwork to, you know, actually register the frelling truck with me. I had it in my hand as I was getting ready to go, but put it down on the counter when took a last trip to the bathroom, and NEVER PICKED IT UP AGAIN! This despite reminding myself not to forget it as I put it down.

Got off 287 at the first available exit (#4), but discovered there was no on-ramp going the other way. Drove around Westchester county (White Plains, Scarsdale, Valhalla) for a half hour looking for an on-ramp. Finally got pointed in the right direction, and burned serious rubber getting back home, fuming all the while. Pulled into driveway just after noon, grabbed the documents, and headed back out, still fuming. Up until now, I had made great time - no construction delays, accidents, little old ladies, nothing to stop me from driving as aggressively as possible. I figured I'd still have plenty of time to get to the DMV in Morristown before closing.

Nuh uh. Lessee, there was the construction delay in Darien (had to get off 95 onto Rt. 1 for an exit to get around it). Then there was an accident on the other side of 95 in Greenwich that everybody on my side of the road decided to slow down to look at. Huge construction delay on this side of the Tappan Zee Bridge chewed up more time, and then it was bumper to bumper on the other side as well. Then, as if all that wasn't enough, the skies opened up with a huge downpour for about fifteen minutes just as I was getting to NJ.

It was about 3:45 at this point, and I knew there was no way to get to Morristown by 4:30. I had once gone to a DMV office in Bergen County, not far from the Parkway, but it was years ago, and I only remembered approximately where it was. Didn't even remember exactly what town it was in, but I was desperate by this time so I got off the highway and started looking. Drove in the general direction I remembered and kept an eye out for signs. Finally I saw one of those little county road signs that shows the directions of the various town, and saw 'Wyckoff', and remembered that that was the town. Drove there, but couldn't find the little shopping center it was in. Finally found someone walking around in the rain, and asked directions. Turns out I had driven by it a couple of times, but they had built a newer shopping center in front of it. Walked in the door at 4:20. Wonder of wonders, there was no line, and being Friday night, everyone working there was extra helpful, because they all wanted to get the frell out of there for the weekend. The woman at the window even filled out some of the forms for me. Yay! Fifteen minutes later I was out the door with plates in hand, albeit a thousand dollars poorer.

When I'd planned this trip, I had told Alex I'd probably get down to his neck of the woods in the early afternoon, so he was sort of wondering what the hell had happened when I finally called from the payphone near the DMV. Got back onto the Parkway and headed south. More bumper-to-bumper from Bloomfield through East Orange, when it goes to four and then five lanes. From that point, it was smooth sailing down to Old Bridge. Alex, Durrah, and I went out for dinner and beer, and then I dropped them off around 9:30, and headed for home. Easy, fast trip back, got home just before 1 a.m. It was still wicked hot in the house, so I decided to check natter while waiting for the a/c to cool off the back room a bit. Next thing I know, it's 3 a.m., and I'm still up. Turned in, didn't fall asleep until about 4. And since I had to get up at 7 to help Victor and Lea move, that sucked. More on that later...

Picked up my new truck tonight. Two surprises - things I didn't notice when I took the test drive. First, it has cruise control. Yay! I didn't notice it because GM puts it on the signal stalk instead of on the wheel as most other makers do. Second, it doesn't have power windows. Hmmm... When I got the Subaru, I wasn't looking for power windows. I thought they'd be a waste of electricity. But I came to like them a lot, especially the ability to open other windows from the driver's seat. Now I'll have to crank 'em. Bother. Such a small thing to be annoyed about. OTOH, working radio/cassette/CD.

Another thing I noticed is that the windscreen is sloped more than on the Sub, and extends much farther out in front of me, so I will not easily be able to reach the spot I would normally put the radar detector. Will have to experiment with positioning it.

Tomorrow, I'll go get a tonneau cover, and start looking into getting a lockable cover. I also need to see how hard it's gonna be to attach my bike rack to it. I may need to get a new rack. Or, you know, throw the bike in the bed...

Meanwhile, I'm dubbing tapes of last week's Farscape ep for a couple of Buffistas. It was a great episode, so I don't mind watching it again. And again.

We're back to the hot, hazy, and humid. It was in the nineties, and the humidity is awful. But at least tomorrow I can drive to work in air-conditioned comfort

Speedy is up and running. Installed ULead Video Studio SE, applied all the patches, updated Direct X, and attached the camcorder. Sonuvagun, it actually worked. Well, sort of.

I took about twenty-five minutes of video at the F2F party. The first time I tried to capture the video, iteverything was going fine, but it cut out after 20 minutes, which turns out to be maximum file size. No problem. The second time, I stopped capturing at about fifteen minutes, after the end of the theremin show. The resulting avi file was over 3GB in size. Woo. The file was fine, except that it was much darker than what was showing on the camcorder monitor. The video is dark to begin with, but what was showing on the computer monitor was really dark. There were occasional sound glitches, too. Video Studio has no settings for brightness or contrast. I installed Adobe Premiere, which does have such settings, but wasn't able to figure out how to use them. To be honest, neither program is particularly user transparent, but Premiere is about as opaque as I suppose PhotoShop is to a beginner, aka, me.

No matter, I was just fooling around at this point, so I decided to try and make a VCD out of what I had, and see how that looked. Used Video Studio to convert the avi file to MPEG1, which shrank it from 3GB to about 140MB, then burned it to a CD with Nero. Stuck the disk in the Sampo. and it worked. Wow!

The quality of the image sucks, though, compared to the tape, or even the avi. The avi is dark, but there is plenty of resolution there. The mpg and resulting VCD are blotchy, and what little color there was is very washed out. OTOH, the image on the tv screen is about as bright as the original. I'm not sure what to do next. It may just be easier to distribute the video on VHS than as a VCD. I need to talk to somebody who's done this before.

Gorgeous day, but I really didn't feel all that well, so I didn't go outside at all. Did go out last night to the Camp Canada planning party at Marnie's. Had lots of fun supervising the little kids with Shane and Alka at the playground while the rest of the adults were playing volleyball. Later, we talked about the trip. Way fewer people going this year than last, only thirteen adults and four kids. The trip is going to be a long one, about eight hours to drive up, and I have nobody to share the ride with this year. Oh well, it's not like I don't drive everywhere else in the world by myself. Woulda been nice to have some company, though. Got to remember to arrange for some kind of vehicle tomorrow.