Well, I should just get used to it — Mondays never really go the way one would anticipate. First off, I quite frankly wasn’t in the mood to do the work thing today when I got there. I just wasn’t. But, I found myself of a slightly different opinion an hour after I got there (about the time we sat down for morning coffee). I always dread Mondays (especially if I’ve been gone for a weekend) due to the additional workload that can arise unexpectedly (because I generally don’t check my email when I’m not at home over a weekend).
Fortunately, there really weren’t any fires to put out or even anything remotely resembling a fire, past or present. That’s always nice. But, as usual, I didn’t really get to do some of what I had anticipated doing. I did, however, get something completed that needed to be done at some point in time, so that’s a Good Thing. Also managed to fix a bug or two and get a fix out the door for that stuff. All-in-all, it was a quite productive Monday.
In looking around now, I would guess that we received about an inch of rainfall over the weekend. I wished I’d have put out the rain gauge before we left, but alas…not the end of the world. There is a reasonably good amount of water coming up through the floor in the basement now (although it’s not as bad as last year, when things were really wet at the outset of spring and it was puddling in the basement — which it’s not doing this year). Dealing with it again, though, only solidifies my need to get that sump basin dug. That is definitely going to be a summer project.
But, the rainfall and warm temperatures have really greened up things around the place. Trees are budding now, and I looked at the bushes out in front of the house a bit this afternoon to discover that they’re budding out as well. I was a little concerned about that because there are seven bushes in the front of the house, and I cut each one back significantly as they were getting a bit unwieldy. When one makes major cuts like that, one must also wonder if it was too much. So far, so good.
I finally uploaded the last few days’ worth of pictures to Flickr. I only uploaded something like 27 pictures, which wasn’t bad (considering I took about 100). For each picture that makes it to Flickr, though, there are probably three to five that don’t. Depends upon several factors, but I’ve come to take at least two pictures of everything. Just for that backup. One thing I prefer, though, is to actually keep up with daily photo uploads to Flickr, because it’s much easier to manage the descriptions and whatnot. I didn’t have much choice in this case (because I didn’t have my camera dock or the time to mess with uploads over the weekend), but I can appreciate keeping on top of it.
In other news, my FireWire cable showed up today. Hooray! So I hooked the camcorder up to my good computer via FireWire…and it’s a significant improvement over the USB connection. I have been doing some testing with it tonight, and have discovered that I seem to prefer using a third-party application to capture video from the device (with the FireWire cable) as opposed to using the capture driver/program that came with the camera. I can usually (so far) get fewer dropped video frames during a transfer while using the third-party program. Unless there’s hard drive activity on that device (my pictures and video are stored on a separate physical drive (80GB) under two different partitions (one for pictures and music, the other for video) than the system drives), I generally get a less than a half percent frame drop rate, which ain’t bad. Something like 40 dropped frames over the course of about 8,000. I was getting significantly more drops than that using the native software that came with the camera (more like a 5% drop rate).
There are several factors at play, though. So time will tell what performs the best. To its credit, I was capturing video to a different drive (non-dedicated to video) with the native software, so that’s a potential cause for problems right there. Additionally, I was doing more multitasking at the time. So I will need to play around with it more, but I really like the fact that capturing DV like that over the FireWire cable is fantastically higher quality than the USB option or using the analog component cable and my capture card. So I’m very impressed at this point in time.
Anyway, it’s getting to be nearly midnight now, and I want to photo blog the 81st post here, which will happen shortly after I hit the publish button for this post. That said, I bid thee farewell…until next time…
–MZ