Recently in home Category

Andy Ihnatko recently posted a photo on flickr of his attempts to test several HD formatted digital camcorders. The photo itself is interesting in that he's got three of these things to play with - that's pretty cool.

What I'm curious about is: are they worth the money? And the effort? We have a newish mini-DV type camcorder that works pretty well. I plug a firewire cable in and can edit things in iMovie and turn the tapes into movies to share with the family - and that's fun and everything, but I basically have to watch the footage before I can do anything with it. I usually use this time to review what I want to keep and get rid of, so it's useful, but as anyone who's done any editing of home movies, or any kind of editing of movies, knows, you usually have a lot more footage than you need.

What it comes down to is... do these cameras speed up the editing process at all? Does it make importing faster? Is there a conversion process to deal with to get the footage into iMovie?

One of the reasons I loathe making the family movies is all the time it takes to import the footage - and as you might imagine, with 4 kids, there's a lot of footage. Since the newer camcorder we have can only fit about an hour on a tape (and we've only tried it a few times so far, just making sure it works ok), that means I'll have a lot of work ahead of me, and a lot of footage to log - and quite a bit of tape swapping to do. Again, it is usually worth the trouble and effort in the end, but it's a lot of work to do - so is there a way to avoid some of it?

I need some real world feedback - which camera's are worth it? Which ones are dogs? And which ones work with the Mac OS X (which seems like a silly question these days, with Apples ever increasing market share....

Over the weekend, we went to go see the Bridgeport Bluefish take on the Long Island Ducks - and no, I'm not making the names up - honest. We got there early to meet up with the rest of our group - some other folks from my sons Cub Scout Pack - and so were in our seats and feeding children by the 6:05 game start (I got to mouth the National Anthem while waiting for a salad and some pretzels, I think). Thanks to our Pack leader, we got upgraded to seats that were just about on the field - and since we were behind home plate, it couldn't get much better than that.

A good tip for those going to a local, or "farm team" type game - go to your local AAA office for tickets or other specials. Our team offers Bluefish Bucks. AAA sells them at 0.85¢ for each $1 in Bluefish Bucks - so for the $85 I spent on Bucks, we got $100 worth of stuff at the game - well worth the extra effort to get the Bucks, especially since spending $100 at the park on food and "stuff" is insanely easy.

Anyway, late in the 6th inning Ethan was being a bit... cranky. I decided to take him and walk around a bit, figuring that if he fell asleep while we were doing that (carrying him is a good way to make that happen, and the hooded sweatshirt he had on wouldn't hurt), it wasn't the worst thing in the world. I had just gotten up to the walk way between the field seats and the cheap seats when I heard a ball being hit, followed by the crowd making the noise usually associated with a foul-tip that's going into the stands. Seeing as how they'd knocked a few others in the same area, I started looking to see where everyone else was looking, then looking in that direction - to find the ball coming down about 20 feet in front of me. It bounced once, then bounced again a few feet in front of me, and then it was in my outstretched hand - I hadn't really thought about it, just grabbed for the ball. It wasn't until I felt someone behind me that I started to think about the fact that I was carrying Ethan at the time - had that been a MLB game, we might have been crushed in the frenzy to get the ball. That was close.

I walked up some more steps to get to the top of the park, acknowledging all the "Good catch" comments, not really thinking about what I had done - I'm not a huge sports person, so it was more than a little surreal - when Cap'n Long Island (one of the mascots) approached me to sign the ball. He then asked me to stay put, and took the ball over to BB, the 7 foot tall bluefish, to get his signature. Ethan was a little put out by the ball disappearing at first, but when I explained what was happening, and then when we had the ball back and he could see it, he was ok with it - and a little excited about it, too.

After walking around with Ethan for a bit, I returned, to find that Noah and his friend were both excited to see (aka touch) the ball. Ethan kept asking to hold it, but he also kept trying to throw it, so that didn't last very long - clearly he had the wrong idea and was trying to help the umpire out with his dwindling supply of balls.

The 9th inning gave us more excitement, but that was in the game itself: the Ducks managed to catch up the 5 runs they needed to tie the game, and then they managed to deny the Bluefish any runs in the bottom of the 9th. We ended up leaving at 10:15 or so, before the 10th inning started. We had wanted to stay for the fireworks, but with two kids asleep, two more on their way, and Jen scheduled to be at work at 7:00 the next morning, it wasn't likely we'd be able to stay for that long - mirroring every other attempt we've made to catch a game that has fireworks after it. The closest that we've come is seeing the Connecticut Cutters fireworks from the parking lot after the game, and that was mostly obscured by trees.

Sunday we went to some kid's pirate themed birthday party. That some kid would, of course, be Logan, my "God-child." I won't get into the reason for the quotes there, so let's just leave that alone for the time being. Ethan, having known about the Pirate theme for days, brought his own hat to fit in - and ended up being the only appropriately attired guest in attendance. Who knew?

After dinner we went to the SBC Restaurant in Branford. We've always had a good time there, and this proved to be no exception: they had hired a magician to go from table to table, keeping the kids happy. This guy did a good job with some little tricks to keep the kids happy, then made a turtle, a sword and a mermaid out of balloons before moving on to another family. It's safe to say that it was the first balloon mermaid he had ever made - and quite possibly his last....

I came home from Noah's baseball game yesterday to find a "Sorry we missed you" note from the fine folks at the USPS. It seems that someone is trying to send us a certified letter and no-one was home to sign for it. Now, for most people, the question becomes: who's sending us a certified letter? And even more importantly, why?

Did we inherit some money? Are we overdue on some bill? Is the town about to take our property and turn it into a park? Did my letter to the furnace maker have something close to the desired effect? Except for the last one, I'm not sure. The furnace maker actually had something in the mail that same day, telling me I was foolish for neglecting to include the serial number of our furnace. Silly me, thinking that if my name is the same as the one that paid for the dang thing, that they'd be able to look me up. But I digress.

The problem here is that I can go to the USPS website and track the certified letter - it's got it's own tracking number and everything. But when you go to the page, you learn more about the letter and where it's going than you do about where it's supposed to end up. While I can see that this would be useful for the sender, it seems that having even the city and state that it's coming from might also be helpful.

For the sender, to maybe make sure they entered the 20 digit tracking number in properly (especially since it can be hard to read the handwriting on the little slip).

For the recipient, to maybe give you a small clue as to who's trying to get in touch with you. Granted, something like "New York, NY" might not tell you much, but it's a little bit more than knowing that someone from somewhere is trying to send you some bits of paper and really wants to make sure you have it.

But that's just my thoughts on the matter.

Oh, and Noah's team won, in case you were wondering.

When we bought our house, 10 years and 8 months ago, we discovered that the boiler was rather old (40+ years - it was installed when the house was brand new) and needed to be replaced. Phone calls to various oil companies resulted in us sticking with the company that serviced the equipment for the previous owners, and we bought a nice, compact, efficient boiler to take it's place.

Now, 8 months outside of the "we'll replace it free" part of the warranty, the dang thing is leaking. The oil company points us to the manufacturer, since it's still "under their warranty" - and the warranty says that we have to pay a pro-rated amount for a new block and then installation by the oil company. To the tune of $1500+.

Now, I know King George wants me to take that "economic stimulus" payment, er, advance on next years taxes, and buy up a bunch of cheap, disposable electronics to help out the economy, but let's face it: at this point, I'll be spending it on keeping the hot water going in the house and gas for the car. I'm not an economist, but I don't really see how that's doing all that much to help the economy. But that's not the point.

Here we are, dealing with a leak in the boiler block. What's supposed to happen is that the water enters the block, which is heated by the rest of the boiler, and then it goes out down the pipes into the water tank and eventually out my taps. Instead what's happening is that there is a leak, so water - very very very very very hot water - is leaking out of the block and onto the floor. It's been doing that for a while apparently, because when I went to get something out of our second fridge, there was water on the side of it. The far side of the fridge from the boiler. Like, 15-20 feet from the boiler. F*#&$&#&#.

So, while I now wait for the manufacturer to get back to me about what, if anything they will do about extending our warranty, I ponder the pickle I find myself in. We've got kitty litter on the floor to soak up the excess water, and strict orders to the kids to avoid their lengthy, very hot showers. I cringe whenever the dishwasher or washing machine are used.

You'll note that I've avoided mentioning the name of the manufacturer. I'm doing that for two reasons - first I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and hoping that they'll do the right thing here. Second, I'm planning another post for after their decision. The reason for leaving the name out now is that there are certain keyword searches I've done to find out... that the problem we're having isn't a lone instance. It's actually a pretty big deal - like I called some dealers in Connecticut that sell and service their products, mentioned the model I had, and they were able to guess what problem I'm having. Like hundreds of pages found referencing the problem when I search Google. Like I'm just cranky as all get out about the whole thing.

So, un-named manufacturer, what will you do? The right thing? Or the one that saves you some money but loses you yet another customer? And gets yet another page on the internet bad mouthing your company and products? I know what I'm hoping for....