Month: March 2012

This week has flown by and not in a good way. It’s not been a bad week either just full.

The original plan was to edit and write.

I’d planned to have my car serviced.

While the car was having it’s fluids changed I was going to go to a friends place and see about getting my fluids drained. Both of us could use a nice long session of sweaty naked ugly bumping. Me and my friend, not me and the car… although i suppose we could bump uglies IN the car hummmm sounds kind of fun. I’ve got a squeegee and the leather seats would clean just fine.

That’s not happening this week.

My Godson is home from the military and I wanted to spend some time with him. He’s a different young man now. The changes I’ve seen, are good ones. I’m absolutely sure that he’s going to continue growing into a fantastic man.

One of my best friends had a little incident at his business. The incident was captured on the surveillance system and you’d think that getting the video off said surveilance systems would have been cake… So I opened my mouth and said yeah sure when I got asked to pull the video.

I found out quite by surprise that my friend was in the hospital when I got to his business. Needless to say I was worried but my Godson was at the hospital with him so I figured the best thing I can do is get the video so it’s one less thing for them as a family to worry about.

This is an example of the typical story of my life. Getting the video was anything but easy. It took two computers. The one that I was able to successfully use to get the video was my netbook.  I’m not complaining because it worked.

It was a lot like pulling teeth with a pair of rusty pliers in a barn, with the zombie apocalypse happening while you have explosive diarrhea.

The netbook has a processor that is about half as fast at the processor in my smartphone. And my netbook only has 2Gig of memory… Can you say SLOW? “Good children, I knew you could.”

Techie digression… Non Techies, well I’d suggest you skip ahead a bit.

Don’t get me wrong, My Netbook is more than enough for email, the occasional word processing document and surfing the web. But this application was pushing at the fringes of it’s ability.

The single most annoying thing was that the manufacturer of the surveilance unit goes to great lengths to tell you ON thier web site and in their manual that they write the video in H264 format. This is pretty much an industry standard and my Mac has all the stuff necessary to read this format directly.

What they don’t tell you is that you can’t do something as simple as plugging a drive into the USB port on the side of the surveillance base station and say Copy this file, or copy from this time index to that time index. Nope they make you view the event through their web interface or through their application. BOTH of which require Windows and that you either BUY a 3rd partys software or that you find a time limited freebie to actually COPY the video that you see.

Personally I HATE with a passion a vendor that says here’s our software… Then when you load it they tell you it’s necessary to load something else from another vendor.  If you’re like me and your goal is to keep the amount of changes to your operating system to a minimum then that kind of makes their software useless doesn’t it? Unfortunately there was no other alternative.

Now I have to clean up two machines instead of one. My windows XP machine and my Netbook both have this vendors crap software and the 3rd and 4th party software on them. Grrrrrrr!

The Win XP machine kinda worked but the image was doubled and the color was all wrong. There was no error per se… The system thought it was doing everything correctly and If I hadn’t checked the file I’d have said “Done” then delivered something completely useless. Which led me to using the Netbook and Windows 7.

The added frustration was that the surveillance unit isn’t on a network. It will be! I guarantee that! I had to create a private network with fixed IP addresses and  a small switch. Not a big deal unless you have to keep switching IP addresses in Windows so that you can talk to the Internet and then talk to the private network and then back again because the 3rd party software you’ve had to download doesn’t actually download everything you need until you’re actually installing it.

Techie Comment… Non Techies skip this or you’ll start bleeding from your eyes.

Windows can become a stone bitch when you’re messing with IP addresses. XP practically demands that you reboot every freakin time you change an IP. (Yeah, I know it’s not every time but it’s inconsistent enough that you might as well reboot. All us techies just love ipconfig telling us the ethernet adapter can’t obtain an ipaddress.)

After battling with getting the files onto my computer I figure I’m home free. The files are converted to AVI in the process of saving them to a hard disk. WRONG Wouldn’t you know it, the CODEC for AVI playback is either not installed on my friends machine or the files are in an almost but not quite AVI format. (Hair Pulling, grumbling, Grrrr.)

So I play the video on my Mac, it’s grainy but it’s the same quality that you get watching the surveillance monitor live. The problem is that I’m playing it for My friends wife and she’s noticing things that I thought nothing about. Suffice it to say these are things that she’s going to have a discussion with him about. Folks… You really need to tell me if I’m supposed to edit your video content!

It’s a classic reminder that stepping into an office to scratch your balls, rearrange your tackle, or flat rub one out…. DON’T forget to check for nasty little cameras.

As I’m writing this, my Mac is humming away writing all the video to an industry standard DVD. And before I deliver the DVD I’m going to test it in every player I have here at the house. I’m really wanting to get this project off my plate.

I guess I need to make sure that none of my porn collection got built into the DVD too… Hummmm.

I’m about a week behind in the hard copy editing of the book. So I really need to focus on that.

We’ve got a storm coming in over the weekend that is supposed to drop a foot of snow or more on us but the weather reports are confllicting. I’ve gotta batten down the hatches just in case.

Then last night… I’m getting ready for bed and my Muse scratches his fingernails across my brain. It’s essentially the same sound as fingernails on an old style blackboard but LOUDER!

So at 12:30 am I’m at my computer writing a short story. I finally got to bed at 3 am, I’m having a slow start to my day but I like the short story. It needs a couple of tweaks but i was pleased overall with the result.

So today, I’m going to be busy with laundry, poo patrol cause it needs to get done before the rain, snow or what ever. Maybe if I’m really lucky… I can tend to draining my own fluids.

Nahhh I won’t be that lucky!

Off to get the rest of the day started.