Bozzo is being discharged from the nursing home next week.  They said they’ve reached a plateau in his therapy and haven’t seen any improvement in awhile, so they’ve gone as far as they can, and they said they have no reason to keep him there any longer.  They stressed that he needs 24/7 supervision though, and should not be left alone at all.  Penny and Clayton have told them that they feel they can provide the coverage he needs, so they’re sending him home.  He still isn’t able to walk on his own, which is the main problem.  His memory and cognition skills have also gotten a little worseas well, so we have to keep an eye on that as well.

But for the time being he’ll be back where he wants to be–at home.  He hasn’t liked the nursing home, and says the food is pretty bad, so he’s anxious to get back home again.  Hopefully he understands that he’s expected to get motivated every day, out of bed, dressed, and move around a bit.  Since the nursing home has required this all during his stay, maybe he’ll stick with it and not fall back to his old lazy ways.  He knows he’ll end up back in that nursing home if we can’t handle him, so maybe that’ll keep him motivated.  We’ve scheduled an aide to come in 3 days a week for a couple hours a day to help with him, and we might do more days if it works out and he can afford it.  It’ll give Penny and/or Clayton a few hours off on these days.  So we’ll see how it goes.

Penny and Bob found this family photo at my dad’s house recently.  This photo was taken in November of 1962.  In it are, from left to right: Clifford, Clayton, Harold, Donna, Penny, Loretta, and Karen.  Beth and I hadn’t been born yet.  But what fascinates me is the fact that, based on the month and year written on the back of this photo, my mom was one or two months pregnant with ME at the time!  I just stare at her face in the photo and wonder if she even knew I was in there cookin’ yet.  Beth was still about 5 years from being born, but there’s gotta be just a teeny weeny trace of me showing somewhere in this photo.

We had a nice combined birthday party for Matt and my dad last night.  It went well, everyone had a lot of pizza, cake and ice cream, and had a good time.  I took a little video and photos of the event, and burned a DVD of it so Penny could see the party, and today Sandy, Kevin and I stopped up at the hospital to see her and watch the video and photos with her.  I think she enjoyed it.

Sandy and I got Matt driving lessons for his birthday, since he said that’s all he wanted was his license (and a car).  We’re taking him out driving several times a week, and he also has his driving school classes several times a week along with school, so he’s plenty busy these days.

I have recently begun successfully creating DVD projects from start to finish. Previously the entire process was always bogged down at some point that I’d always get bored and quit “for now”, or I’d get errors somewhere along the line and not know how to continue on. I now feel pretty confident that I can complete an entire project in very little time, and the hurdles that I run into are easily jumped over. Here’s the process and software that has proven to be the most successful for me:

First I record the video of the event with my Sony MiniDV recorder. Usually I also have digital photos from the same event that Sandy has taken as well, so I’ll put these on the same DVD with the event video just to offer more options to the viewer.

Next I transfer the recorded video from tape to my PC digitally, using Firewire and Sony’s DVGate, a great video transfer utility that came with the camera. Normally I prefer to use a more full-featured application than those bundled with hardware, but in this case, for transferring digital video, I have found much more difficulty with every other option I tried. This one is simply the easiest and offers the best results. The main issue I kept running into was dropped frames. If the PC does just about anything else while transferring a video, frames are dropped at random points when the transfer couldn’t go as fast as the tape was playing. DVGate, however, is the only program I’ve found that includes “dropped frame recovery”, and I have yet to lose a single frame of video using this program. It does take longer to transfer though, since it analyzes the entire video first and then transfers it, each cut separately if desired, and breaks the resulting video files into 2GB chunks. Well worth the added time it takes though, in my opinion. 

After the video is transferred I bring it into Pinnacle Studio 8, which came with my video card. It’s also available separately, and they’re now on version 10, which is probably pretty sweet, but I haven’t been able to afford it yet, especially with version 8 still working so well for me. Anyway, I load all the files into Studio 8 and then assemble the video in the order I want, add any transitions I want, and also any beginning and ending title frames and/or credit screens. When I need these, I just create an image in Paint Shop Pro 10 at 1024×768 and add all the text and graphics I want, then save it as a JPG in the same folder as the digital photos I’ve taken of the same event. Note: I usually end up “punching up” the text I put on the title screens by adding bevel effects and/or drop shadow effects, otherwise all the text tends to look very flat on TV. 

Once the video is assembled, I have Studio 8 create a DVD-compatible MPEG file of the video. This creates a full-quality video with little or no compression loss. This part take a while to render, but since it’s not done in real time I usually just minimize it while it works and go on to other things. 

After the video is done I start a new project in Studio again, this time using the digital photos I’ve taken. Most of the time I re-use the same titling & credits images that I used in the video as well. The process in Studio is identical to the video process I described above, since you’re basically doing the same thing–creating another video–only this time you’re just using still photographs. I even add some transitions between most photos to kick it up a notch, just like the video itself. Once this is assembled it’s back to rendering again. Still photos usually render very quickly though, so this step will definitely go faster than the last one. 

When both MPEG files are created, I exit Studio 8. I’m done with it for this project. Next I load Nero Vision, a nice, simple DVD Maker. It comes free with Nero Burning ROM 6 and 7. Vision provides a step-by-step “wizard” that walks you through creating menu screens (some themes are even animated), titles, graphics, etc., until my layout is complete. I can change any text, colors, images, etc., to create totally custom menus, and there is very little I can’t customize in some way with this program, from what I can tell. Once I’m done tweaking the settings, I burn the DVD in Vision as my final step. 

I can then put the DVD in all of my players and verify that it works fine. What I also like to do at this point it extract a copy of it–usually with DVD Shrink or DVD Decrypter–and keep it on my hard drive so I can quickly burn more copies of it for relatives, etc., as needed, without needed the disc again. It’s also a handy way to keep a backup copy in case your dog decides your DVD makes a pretty good Frisbee Chew Toy.

I received this letter in the mail yesterday from a food workers union. It’s about the changes that have occurred at SuperValu on 80th Street since the new owners purchased it in 2005. The letter explains how all of the employees were terminated and had to re-apply for their jobs. Most were hired back, however, and even received raises, although their health insurance plan was changed, which resulted in those who were enrolled in it paying more for the same coverage. The letter ends by asking everyone to stop shopping at SuperValu until a new contract is accepted that provides for good jobs and affordable health care for all employees.

This is a very confusing letter to me. My first thought was that this union wants to put SuperValu out of business, which leaves all of these people unemployed. If everyone stops shopping at SuperValu, that’s exactly what will happen. How does the union benefit from this? And how do the employees themselves feel about this letter from the union that supposedly supports them? I was curious enough to ask, so I did.

I talked to a SuperValu employee, and this employee told me that they haven’t even paid union dues for months! Considering that, the union really doesn’t seem to have anything to lose if these employees all end up without jobs. But have they really been fighting for a new contract all this time? This employee went on to explain that their last union contract had also been expired for over a year prior to the new owners even buying the store–because the old owner only wanted to sell, and didn’t want to negotiate a new contract. It sounds to me like this is a non-union store, and it has been for some time. So why can’t the union just give up this store instead of possibly causing many people to become unemployed?

I’m not sure about anyone else, but if I were working there, I’d be glad to have a job these days, and I wouldn’t be too happy about this letter from a union supposedly supporting me, by telling everyone to stop patronizing the store I earn my living from.

Please excuse me now, I have to go shopping for a few things….AT SUPERVALU!

Good morning!  We had a big snow storm last night.  It was nice and tidy though, it didn’t stick around and linger.  We had good warning yesterday morning, including an advisory on the scanner to all public service personnel that there will be a storm between 4:00pm and midnight.  It came pretty much right on schedule.  I’m not sure how long it stayed, but it was gone in the morning and the animated radar map showed that it looked to be a few hours East of us already, with nothing left behind.

It looks like we got about 6 to 8 inches here.  I shoveled Sandy out so she could get to work this morning, and then Kevin and I went over to do Mahirose’s driveway and sidewalk for her.  When we got back our neighbor was snowblowing our sidewalk and offered to do our driveway as well!  This saved me a bunch more shoveling, so it was a big relief.  I took a few photos, and one of them is today’s photo of the day.  Which, in case you missed it, is now REALLY a “photo of the day” album.  I started on January 15th, and I plan to post at least one photo in there every single day.  Sometimes they may not be MY photos, but they’re certainly all favorites of mine, whether they’re stock photographs, my own photos, or a work of digital art, so make sure you stop in there frequently if you don’t happen to visit the site every day and see it on the main page.

I recently acquired a new “toy” that I have been playing with a lot lately. It’s the Radio Shack PRO-97 Handheld Scanner. This isn’t a scanner in the computer sense, it’s a “Police Scanner.” I have been a scanner enthusiast since I was a kid. My dad has also been one since the first models were introduced many years ago when I was a kid. I remember our family owning many scanners having as little as 8 channels, each one requiring the purchase of a “crystal” costing $5 – $15 each which contained a specific frequency for whatever particular service (Police, Fire, Weather, etc.) you wanted for your listening area. There was an LED for each channel, and the scanner would blink them in sequence as it scanned the 8 channels. Later on, crystal scanners were phased out for programmable models. Now you could just punch in the frequency you wanted and save it into a memory location in the scanner and there it was, at no extra cost. Early models had limited band coverage and as little as 10 to 50 channels.

The one I began looking at closely was the Radio Shack PRO-95. It was advertised at $149 back in November. With 1,000 channels, all the bands, and a PC interface, it looked really sweet and made me almost drool. So I began saving. Eventually I knew I’d have this hot little scanner in my hand with all of its cool features.

I researched everything I could about the Radio Shack PRO-95 when its price recently became amazingly affordable at $99. After I had convinced myself that I just couldn’t wait any longer (I hadn’t bought a new scanner in many years, after all) I started my search. It didn’t take long for me to learn that the PRO-95 had been discontinued and was no longer available anywhere. Radio Shack’s website showed that it was available at only 1 store in this area–the Zion Radio Shack. So I went there on a mission to find it. As you can imagine, they didn’t have it, even though the web said they did. They confirmed that it was shown to be in stock–1 unit–at their store, and then said that it must be an inventory miscount, because they don’t have one. They did, however, have its replacement model–the PRO-97–which had just come in this week. It was a much better scanner with many more features. The price was $149–the same price that the PRO-95 was in November. After thinking about it and researching the additional features, I took the plunge. 

The first exciting revelation I had with this new scanner was the ability to connect it to a PC and program it via the computer! This required the additional purchase of a PC interface cable (serial port connection) and transfer software–which Radio Shack employees themselves seem to be clueless about. I learned everything from the web before purchasing, so I had a pretty good idea of what it was capable of. There are several different applications available for interfacing this scanner with a PC, and after some testing I found Starrsoft Win97 (specific for the PRO-97 scanner) to be the best by far. It amazingly allows loading and saving of virtually every single feature on the PRO-97, including not only saving the 1,000 channel frequencies it will hold, but also all the “little things” like how long you want the backlight to stay lit when you turn it on, whether you want it to automatically turn on the backlight whenever you press a key, whether the “Priority” feature is on or off, etc., and many of these features aren’t even programmable without the software!

You don’t know what a relief it is to be able to automatically save or load the entire scanner contents like this though. I can remember spending hours and hours programming mine and my dad’s handheld and desktop scanners after their batteries have died and we lost 100 or so channels from the memory banks. Sheesh, what a pain. Imagine having to do that with the THOUSAND channels this scanner now has! It takes less than a minute to transfer the entire scanner to the PC or vice versa. So basically it’s no sweat at all. Program it ONCE and I never have to do it again. And you also not only program a frequency into each memory location but also a text description of what it is. So whenever that channel talks on the scanner you see exactly what channel it is–in English–on the display.

And as the commercials always put it: But wait–There’s more! After manually programming the 100 or so local frequencies I had, I did another web search and actually found a site dedicated to scanner enthusiasts (RadioReference.com), and it includes the ability to let you transfer entire categories from their database directly into your scanner! A little more searching verified that this particular scanner was indeed compatible with it, so I was golden. I joined the website, and was then asked to donate a small fee to enable the ability to interface with their database (and also enable several other site features). So I paid them a few dollars and I could instantly connect to the site directly through StarrSoft’s Win97 and transfer entire frequency groups.

One thing I like about this is that I don’t even have to program the text descriptions into each channel now. The descriptions are transferred to each channel with the frequencies themselves. But imagine the possibilities here: Since you narrow your search by country, by state, then by city, you can instantly choose any new city–for example Milwaukee–and transfer all of their frequencies into a single bank of your scanner. This is awesome, very fast, and simple to do with Win97. You can even specify which Bank to transfer the frequencies to (the PRO-97 has 10 banks of 100 channels each), and name each Bank with a text description. So now my PRO-97 has a “Milwaukee Area” bank, a “Racine Area” bank, and two “Kenosha Area” banks, and I still have over 600 channels unused. Scanners have certainly come a long way, and I’m really having fun with this new one.  Now all I need to do is get my dad to buy one and I can instantly program his with no effort whatsoever!