Walking the walking trail; scouring the back yard, Saturday lunch; hanging laundry around the house; putting furniture by the street; rain today; chaotic sleeping patterns; Reformatting old journal entries; reworking the pensive guys sections, again; What must it be like to look like either Christian Beal or Jason Behr?; Dealing with video drivers - leave sanity behind and enter

Thursday after my trip to Gateway Rescue Mission, I made a trip to WalMart and then back to the walking trail.

There an unlevel part of the path, because I later noticed a slight ache in my left hip. It's one of those things that is not severe but irritating.

When I got back home, I scoured, for the first in weeks, the back yard for limbs and debris. I was fearful, it was going to be a tedious task. But it only took about 30 minutes. This makes me think all the prep work I did earlier has paid off.

Friday? Unless I do the journal on a daily basis, everything merges together. I think Friday it was wet and rainy, and I didn't go anywhere.

Yesterday was chilly, and I felt a strong need to go out for lunch which I did. Alas, the restaurant was very crowded, surprisingly, because usually it's not on Saturdays. I'd brought along the latest "The New Yorker" to dawdle over, but it was so noisy, that I left after about 30 minutes.

On the way back, I stopped at the walking path again. I did a normal round the first time; a much quicker round, the second; and a leisurely round, the last.

In an effort to cut costs, when I wash laundry, instead of using the dryer, which is a huge consumer of electricity, I've started bringing everything in. I hand jeans, sweat pants and towels over the doors. Shirts of any kind go on hangers, and I hook them to the molding of an open door. Small items go on a drying rack. So far, nothing has taken more than 24 hours to be dry.

Also yesterday, I put out by the street two old inexpensive bookcases and an ancient chest. Within literally a couple of minutes, someone was knocking on the door wanting to know if they could have them. They needed a stand for the microwave. If fact they had seen me from down the street while driving.

I'm slightly amazed by this. Put something by the street, and someone will take it. No matter what.

It rained most of today. A friend and I had our usual lunch at Macaronni. Afterwards I took a nap. My sleeping patterns are so chaotic that I don't even remember when I did what.

I've been working on changing the format of the old entries in the journal. I'm almost finished with 1999. Sometimes I come across something that is painful. But not too much. It was the year of mother's open heart surgery, so there were two months in which I made only one entry, so the work has not been insurmountable.

I've hemmed and hawed about how to do the pensive guys section, that I felt like another change was of no consequence at this point. The thumbnail page is fine. But click on the link underneath and go the larger image directly.

I've eliminated the secondary page of a double column of photos. And for the largest images, I've migrated to a much more versatile slideshow arrangement. Much more flexible. But it means a separate page for each photo.

Always with this type of project, the most difficult part is in creating the concept and the layout. Which will be used again and again. So a mistake at the beginning can cause big ripples later.

So far, I've only done three sections: "I Am African", Christian Bael and Jason Behr. Of course, I spelled all the Bael photos as Beal; the African photos as Africian; and Behr as Berh. Then I crisscrossed the Bael and Behr pages.

Of course, to use the photos, you've first got to find them. And I wanted only photos in which the person appears to be musing, or thinking, or looking into the distance.A Mona-Lisa-smile is ok.

I've downloaded a selection of photos of Rufus Wainwright. And I think he is the most pensive I've encountered. The only other snaps were from concerts. I've not even started on that grouping.

I've decided I'd murder to look like Jason Behr. Jesus, he is so sexy. And Christian is certainly no slouch either. I want a machine from the future that will let me inhabit their bodies a few hours each day. I don't want to take over their brains, I just want to eavesdrop a little. What must it be like to look like either one of them.

I think that it was on Friday that I tried to figure out a way to improve the quality of the "Torchwood" videos I've saved from Google Video. Their help page says to check the video card and driver, something I'd not thought of.

I did, and it is a Radeon 1GP345M manufactured by ATI/AMD with a driver date of 2003. At the ATI site, I could not find anything related to my card. I read some more, and the article said for legacy cards to check the computer maker. So on the Sony website, I did find a slightly later driver. Which I downloaded.

After even more reading I discovered a third party source DH Mod tool V4 that offered support for legacy cards including the ATI 345M.

But first you need .net framework 2.0, which I'd deleted at some point. So I went to Microsoft and discovered to install .net, I first needed to install Windows Installer 3.0, which I did. Then I installed .net.

Then back to ATI to install the generic Catalyst driver. Which you have to run, but not save. If you save it, you get an error saying the zip file is corrupt. OK! Then back to DH Mod, to install the driver upgrade.

Well, crap! What a convoluted process.

If you want to look at a streaming video at Google, you can view with Adobe Flash Player 7.0+. If you want to view a downloaded video, you need the Google Video Player.

After I did all this, I was so blinded by looking at the screen that I couldn't tell if there was any difference or not.

Of course, there could be problems with the original video, how it was saved, my broadband connection, my RAM or video RAM. Or phase of the moon.

PAX!