Back home again…
You want yout home and security,
You want to live like a salor at sea…
— Bob Seger, “Beautiful Loser”
Ahh, house setting. This is what single people do for everyone else. Watch their house while they are outta town. This week it was Michael & Morgan’s house, and it looks like the last week in July it’s gonna be dad’s house. Which is kinda handy – he’s got a pool 🙂
Watching Morgan & Michael’s house is interesting – there’s three dogs, two cats, and fish to deal with (ok, the fish aren’t exactly much of a problem – feed ’em, and otherwise they ignore ya.)
Time to pick up my stuff and leave in the morning. Then it’s back to my own bed (instead of a couch), and my nice desk to work at, rather than a living room table. Â
Being someplace else is nice for a while, but it really makes me even happier to be at home :-)Â Â
Studio 60!
Meredith calls me excitedly on Thursday to tell me Studio 60 was on (until she called, I hadn’t even turned on the TV)Â Every commercial break we were calling each other to chat about that part of the show.
Damn I’m glad to see that show back on again. Â
What the Fuck is Wrong With TV Now!?
No, I don’t mean what shows are on, I mean what actually shows on TV.
The more you mess with certain technologies, the more sensitive you get to it. Work with TV stuff for a bit, and you notice strange things. For instance, it doesn’t take long to notice when there’s even one or two frames of lag between the sound and picture.Â
Lately, I’ve been noticing that sort of synch errors whenever I watch TV – not just on a single station, but all of ’em, and it’s variable. I assumed it was a problem with Lance and Meredith’s set-top box, but then I stayed at Morgan and Michael’s house (who also use Cox Cable) and it’s still there. Â
That alone would be annoying, but, I can also see mpg compression errors all over the place. Lightly tiled background errors, motion tearing, etc. It’s like Cox has done something strange to try and improve how much bandwidth they use per customer per station. But it’s REALLY damned annoying. Oddly enough, it’s always on the movies or shows – it’s not in the commercials or the local spots!
Why, for the love of all that’s good, would they DEGRADE the quality of the signal on cable below what we already have on broadcast stations? I’d complain… but there’s not a damned thing that can be done about it. (Plus, uh, well… I don’t subscribe to cable. Meredith and Lance do 🙂
Work Gets Incredible
Wow. Things have been pretty good up to this point with out of town work, and some in town work. I don’t have any immediate out of town work (looks like mid July or August for my next Kenosha trip). So I thought things were going to slow down a bit. You know, every two weeks do another Spirit installation, which is good money. Â
Then my Dad’s company ends up with work for me (I just got through bidding it on Friday), and Tuesday I have a meeting for a month long project, with apparently another major project right behind it. And still the Spirit projects in the middle of that, and some web site jobs in the middle of that.
This is good and bad – good in the fact that I end up making well… amazingly good money. Problem is, my plan calls for me to start buiding up extra income streams in the middle of all this. Things like game projects and income stream websites means while I’m making money providing services, I’m still making money from previous efforts. I’ve been there before with games like Boulder Panic!, it’s just time to do it a little bigger. Also means when you have a down month, you’ve still got an income stream or two going on.
So, as usual, looks like The Plan doesn’t survive it’s brush with reality :-) That’s ok – as with all plans, there has to be contengencies for possible situations. And I already had some alternate plans. But it does descrease the overall profitability potential for the year – but I sure as hell ain’t turning down a couple months of work.