Monthly Archives: February 2016

by Husband

Monday Monologue #179

An interior monologue from me (and sometimes the wife).

  • We had a pretty god run in the park on Sunday. Another warm weekend. It seemed almost spring-like. Of course temperatures are falling back to normal tomorrow and Wednesday.
  • This is the first leap day post of this blog. I’m pretty sure we published at least one on our “old” blog. We’ve had many leap years, obviously, but February 29th still seems unusual.
  • I attended yet another service today for someone who was lost too soon. It’s sad.
  • The wife and I are starting to think about de-winterizing our boat. Hopefully there will not be that many more nights where the temperature drops well below freezing.

Friday Featurette #178

The Husband on top of The Wife with her legs togetherThis actually wasn’t the photo that I planned to upload; but I’m going to keep it anyway since I’m somewhat discombobulated over the funeral services from someone who left us way too soon. It strikes close to home whenever we lose a compatriot whose kids are the same ages as ours (or younger). And, sadly, that seems to be happening more frequently.

Wednesday Weirdness #178

Our last remaining old-style CRT television is dead. I don’t know exactly when it stopped working since we don’t use it much; but that doesn’t make it any less of a nuisance. It’s wall mounted so I’ll need to get on a ladder to remove it. Plus, the wall bracket not suitable for a LCD TV so I’ll have two large items that need to be disposed of. And ultimately I’ll need to purchase and mount a replacement. It doesn’t need to be done now; but, it’s yet another thing on my to-do list.

by Husband

Monday Monologue #178

An interior monologue from me (and sometimes the wife).

  • Today was a glorious day especially for February. In fact, the air conditioner ran briefly in the morning until we turned it off and opened some windows. And, our run I the park was great. Bright sunshine to go along with the warm weather. Definitely a day to remember.
  • The cable company sent us some new adapters AKA boxes for our televisions which were previously connected directly to cable. What a nuisance. First they scanned for channels. Then they updated their firmware. Then they scanned for channels again. Then I had to call for “activation” which didn’t work. So then I had to call again, wait for a live person, have them activated once more and wait one more time for them to scan for channels. What a gigantic nuisance.
  • I finally declared victory regarding the issue we’ve been having with our computer. It’s been over a week since it last happened so I think the problem is resolved. And, if it isn’t, it will be almost impossible to track down since it can now go weeks without happening.
  • We got some new running shoes today in the mail today. As always, we didn’t quite realize how worn out our old ones were until we saw them side by side with the new ones. They really weren’t even in good enough shape to save for yard work so we just threw them away.
by Husband

Friday Featurette #177

Here is another video that’s kinda big while I’m experimenting with the audio stream. We like having a “sound track”; but prefer lower quality settings, if possible, since it’s just for relating the atmosphere. We have done a few silent movies as a last resort when we’ve had technical difficulties. I don’t expect that will happen much anymore now that we’ve got a super-fast computer and can redo the conversion process with different settings much more quickly. Have a great weekend. Its supposed to be almost 70-degrees here on Saturday.

by Husband

Traditional Thursday #177

Today’s video is gigantic. Partly because its long. And partly because I had to increase the bitrate to stop the transcoding process from introducing a weird echo in the audio stream. I’m using an “updated” audio encoder that, apparently, is not as good for lower bitrates as the previous version. I thought creating a bigger file was better than removing the audio completely. Hopefully that doesn’t make it too large for you to enjoy it. I’ll work on tuning the audio parameters in future videos.

Wednesday Weirdness #177

It may be too soon to declare victory; but we haven’t had any issues with the computer since the last device driver configuration change I made on Sunday. So, perhaps, the problem is finally fixed. Even if it still hangs sometime in the future, it’s definitely happening a lot less than it was previously. And, now that its not such an annoyance, I’m not spending as much time searching for a solution. Computers are mostly great inventions. But, sometimes, they can be a gigantic nuisance.