Our Tivo records The Daily Show at 11 PM every night. Usually, the TV must be on NBC every time because the local news comes on a few seconds early and every recording of The Daily Show starts with a few seconds of the late news on NBC before it switches the channel to Comedy Central.

So we have this news woman with the craziest hair and she’s always teasing it one way or another so it’s like a real surprise every time you watch the news. “My God,” you’ll say, “Can those curls be any tighter?” Anyway, that first frame of video that comes on when you play the recording is always of this woman with the crazy hair in the most unflattering of facial expressions. She’ll be in the middle of some long vowel sound and also in the middle of blinking and you see her for a split second and then the channel switches and she’s gone.

Tivo allows me to pause right on that first frame though so I properly get my kicks before moving on.

So I’m working on two major digital archival projects for my family. First, I’m making high resolution scans of thousands of old family photos, having them identified, compiling notes, sorting them, and will be able to print any family photo I ever want and will be able to supply any family photos on CD or DVD to anyone in the family.

Second, I’m taking many old family videotapes and converting them to digital format for editing and viewing.

The photo part of it, I have all worked out. I’m saving the photos as lossless TIF files at the maximum optical resolution of my higher end scanner. The video side, however, isn’t so friendly. I have no problems with the conversion and manipulation of analog video to digital. I’m aware of all the issues involved. The main goal of the project is to have as perfect a lossless digital copy on hand that I can edit it down to anything I want at any time. I’m using a HuffyUV codec to encode to AVI. The problem is, I have a lot of footage I want in this format and if I want to keep it around, we’re talking about hundreds if not thousands of gigabytes of storage space that I need. That’s TB or terabytes folks! My Apple Performa from ‘94 had a 250 MB hard drive and that was ample. My last computer had a 10 GB drive and I eventually had to install a secondary 80 GB. Now, I’ve got 160 GB internal, a 160 external firewire, and I need a lot, lot, lot more.

So am I overdoing the quality on the video? My goal is not simply to convert video to DVD quality MPEG-2. I want to encode in the highest quality format so that I don’t have to do this crap again - I mean the videotapes aren’t getting better and any conversion I ever have to do in the future shouldn’t have to be from VHS. Anyone have any advice? Am I just way ahead of the storage technology? Anyone hear of any terabyte-sized drives on the near horizon?

Of all the nicknames that people give to their babies, “Scooter” probably has to be my least favorite. “We named him Scooter because he scoots around!” Lady, who doesn’t scoot when you’re half a year old? Try a little harder. That’s like nicknaming your child “Babbles.”

There was a “Scooter” in the neighborhood when I was a kid. I think he was dirty. I don’t remember much more than that.

I could go either way on all this Life Is Good merchandise. Why aren’t houses and cars enough anymore? Now I’m in competition with the Joneses for who has the better attitude? Is my attitude orders of magnitude better for every Life Is Good item I’m to wear?

So I dropped my wife off at the airport early this morning for her flight to Seattle where she will be for the week. I sure will miss her. I don’t usually remember my dreams but I remember last night’s. You might think I dreamed of her smiling face, her warm embrace, her in a flirty sundress in a field of Black-Eyed Susans.

No, I dreamed of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with potato chips in the middle. I dreamed of how crunchy and good that is.

I’d like to say there is some connection there: some deep-rooted emotion I can connect to peanut butter and jelly with chips in the middle. Jelly makes me very happy. My wife makes me very happy! Yeah, there it is!