"Editorial"
I must be doing pretty well to be making another entry so soon. I can't but wonder why I'm making so many entries now. Why wasn't I motivated in January? Well I really don't know. Of course if
my counter is any indication it must be a good a idea to keep this up. I mean 13 hits in a day! And none of them were even me. I think that's pretty good really. I also sent off 13 emails to other blogs requesting a reciprocal link. Only one has written me back so far, to say no thanks. Now if only we could move on to actually sending me an email :-) (hint-hint).
I did stumble across
this story thanks to
Drudge Report today however. What it says is some sources in the Middle East are reporting that bin Laden was captured a while ago but news hasn't been released yet because Bush wants to spring the news on us in time for the election. Now personally I see a problem with the whole premise. Firstly I was just thinking about this the other day while watching one of the local shrill liberals on the news channel go on and on about how failed Bush is and how he "hasn't even caught bin Laden". The worst possible thing that could happen now is for bin Laden to be captured between about July and early November. The shrill liberal conspiracy nuts will never shut up for the rest of time about that. And now some middle-east source says bin Laden is in captivity, secretly until such time this news can be shared for maximum political gain.
Now it may make sense to keep the information of the capture secret for a while so bin Laden isn't a maurder for the Middle East types even more than he is already. That makes sense. Seems like there are many more advantages to keeping the news of the capture a secret that there are of releasing the information. Even though Bush is being so pummeled and punished politically for not capturing him. But all that can be second to national security. I can only imagine what we'll find out about the last few years in say 20 or 30 years from now.
I also came across
this story thanks to
slashdot.org. This one says a large portion of the crosswalk signs in New York City don't actually do anything. Does anybody else ever get that feeling about a lot of things? If I vote absentee, does my vote really go anywhere? How would I know exactly? Or for that matter maybe some on the other end is inspecting each ballot and throwing out the ones with the holes pushed in. I mean I realize in theory this mass placebo isn't really that big of a deal, having dormant cross-walk buttons in place makes more sense than spending the money to tear them out, but it does kind of imply some kind of rats-in-a-maze mentality. Is that really all we are? Rats unaware of the giant experiment we're in, desperately holding on to old habits of pushing a button out of some psychological need to believe we have control over something even if that something is making a sign tell us it's safe to cross the street...I doubt I'm making a wit of sense at this point. But that doesn't matter much.
For any new visitors: this isn't a normal entry. I very rarely if ever link to a news story and then comment on it. You know, just so we're clear.
What else? Well a while back I captured Cowboy Bebop: The Movie via cable premium channel. But I used a high quality and non-stop for the whole movie so I ended up with a 5+ gigabyte MPEG. So the first problem was transferring that file from the computer I use to capture to my main computer with the editor installed. I used
HJSplit to split the MPEG into several pieces, transferred them over the network and re-joined the pieces. So that wasn't so hard. I captured the movie a week or two ago, decided to sample it down to SVCD quality for placement on a DVD yesterday. But the file is too big for my chosen editor, Video deLuxe so I found a utility to split the MPEG into six pieces, which I would then re-assemble with Video deLuxe. So I finally get the six pieces and try to import them with the editor only to get some generic error messages: I imported the video but lost the audio portion. I was guessing from the extremely unhelpful error message I received that the MPEG splitter never added any sort of end-of-file signal that Video deLuxe was looking for. But that's only a guess. Oh great! So then I had to search the Internet for a utility to rip the audio from the video clips and save them separately so I could drop the audio into the video, so I'm finally able to export the damn thing as a working MPEG file in SVCD, prime for burning to a DVD.
But I ran into a problem: the utility I found to rip the audio only rips to .WAV format. So for each 903 Meg video clip I had a 4+ gigabyte .WAV file. Well that's too much space to take up in such a short period of time so my HDD was about 80% fragmented. So where am I now? Find yet another utility that will rip the audio in MP3 format instead of .WAV, at least that's my guess for my best choice. I just hope it's worth it and I produce a watch able DVD. I doubt I'll ever watch it even once :-). I was thinking of putting more than just that movie on the DVD, since that movie in SVCD quality would not take up the whole DVD. Perhaps the pilot and two-part final episode of the show? Why do I feel a "why not use VHS for that?" coming on? ehhhh; shutup.
I've now downloaded a new program,
Konvertor (which I guess is French) that converts from every possible format to every other possible format. So I just did a test run on the first chunk of the movie and the resulting MP3 was 13.8 megabytes. A four gig wave versus a 14 meg mp3 :-) isn't that amazing? Oh, it isn't. So I'll make an SVCD of each chunk so I have each one, then combine all those files into one long movie. I'm sure this is educational on some level, and I'll be able to use this some where some how.
I still can't believe a person who does and experiences so little can manage to write so much so consistently. And I'm not even gong out of my way to find to stuff to write about. How is this possible? So I hope this entry was half entertaining and enjoying.
