A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I got a new job.

The warehouse that I now work in is just under 30 minutes away. Once I get comfortable with the location of speed traps and where the cops like to hide, I’m sure I’ll get that time down to 15 minutes.

I expected to sit down at my new desk and begin writing code right away, but they’ve got different plans for me. I will likely not be allowed to touch their system for two months! Instead, I will be moving from department to department, learning how everyone else interacts with the system I’ll be maintaining. I’ll be trained in each one like I was a new hire for that group, starting with Receiving. This is similar to Virilion’s orientation program, except that Tech For Less will have me work in each department for a week and have me write a report at the end of each week.

I made several laps through the warehouse, and I felt like a kid in a candy store. So. Many. Toys. Everywhere!

I was let go early, so the sun was still out on the way home. I took this video of my favorite part of the drive, seeing the mountains that make me feel so insignificant (in a good way):

You may hear me making silly noises and stupid comments in the background. Please ignore them. This is Titus Blvd, the lone road that leads to the village we live in on post. It is also the only place you can hit 40 MPH.

In yesterday’s post I mentioned my desire to add video to more of my blog entries. I’ve been reluctant to do so in the past because I always have trouble with video. I run into issues with codecs, or just not having the right software to edit or even display video.

Best Buy had Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (PE7) on sale yesterday. I bought it because I’ve heard very good things about that program, specifically that it is much better than Windows Movie Maker (WMM). I’ve dabbled with WMM a few times and found it to be simple, but limited. If PE7 was anything like it, then I’d be happy.

It’s been about two hours now. I’m trying to apply a transition from one scene to the next in our cruise video (from last year). This is the best I can do:

That looks like shit. Why is the current scene spilling into the transition? Why isn’t it showing the next scene instead? I searched online for help, and everything I could find either was specific to Premiere Elements 4 or required me to start a paid subscription.

I fired up Windows Movie Maker and loaded the same two scenes. It took me five seconds to do what I wanted:

So, the free program I already had does this extremely simple thing better than the paid program. Had I just pirated this app, I would have paid $0 and lost nothing but a few hundred megabytes of hard drive space (which I would have gotten right back after I uninstalled this piece of crap).

If any of you can offer some (free) advice on how to do transitions correctly, I would very much appreciate it.

When Nadia and I are watching TV in the living room or at our computers or are otherwise occupied, the cats congregate on our bed. This guarantees that the bed will always be covered in hair and I will choke every night.

While watching 24: Redemption (I’m pretty happy this show is finally coming back on the air), I caught most of them on the bed again:

Using Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Photo together has made it much easier for me to post on a regular basis. I don’t need to fight with HTML anymore, I don’t need to manually upload or resize images, and I don’t have to manually add the bit of JavaScript needed to display the larger images in a pop-up window.

My next thing to do is to add video to my posts, as I did above. We’ll see if I can continue this trend.