Category Archives: Other

Other

Running Resumes Post – The First

Today I did manage to get up at 05:00, run from around 05:15 to 05:35, and get to work by 07:15ish. I have the actual time in my log, but alas, I am too lazy to pull it out.

Swimming is important. Swimming makes the upper body strong. I really need to look up the pool schedule here at Wash U. I went through all of the trouble and expense of buying swim trunks and some goggles. I might as well use them.

Work today consisted mainly of filling out an AHA fellowship proposal, which I’m not exactly finished with. I’d say I’m 2/3 finished with filling in the forms, and then comes reference forms, mailing reference forms, inserting other documents into the pdf using Adobe Acrobat™, etc.

I also spent some time trying to figure out why Hermenegild’s laptop won’t run our visualization software correctly. It seems to be some kind of problem with a crossmojination of OpenGL libraries of one sort or another. After spending about an hour on it, and checking through all of the usual suspects, I left it to him to fiddle around with it and do some more googling. I’m a little disappointed in Ubuntu on this one, but it could be a cruddy chipset from Intel. It’s the i915 video chip, so if you have any Linux DRI/DRM/OpenGL experience with that chip, please do let me know.

That’s about all for now. There’s some musing going on on the Internets™ about whether Microsoft is really making a change with this online services crap. My guess is, no. They always put the cart before the horse. They design things first to bring in money, and second to perform a useful function. This is not the way of the coming world. The useful function has to be the goal. Making money is artfully tacked on in the background. Not that it shouldn’t be thought of… it’s more of a design issue with the function part.

Anyway, I’m waxing poetic. Here are today’s stats:

Sleep Water Exercise Coffee Alcohol
08:00 h 2.364 L 00:18 1/2 cup equiv. 1 drink

My Wine List as of November 2005

I keep a list of wines to try based on recommendations from people and blogs. I’ve made it world-readable for your perusal. Note that I can’t endorse most if any of these wines, since a lot of them are on my list because I want to try them.

If you’ve had any, I welcome comments.

I also welcome further recommendations. I prefer good value (for instance, Chilean wines) over prestige (for instance, most French wines) and its attendant price. More expensive bottles are okay, but they had better be worth it.

Oh, and the list is here. If you try any of them, please let me know how it went!

Everbody wants a log

Recently, I started logging all of my work hours. Due to hurricane shenanigans, the plots so far have been rather odd-looking.

As the captions in my gallery say, these are strictly time spent on project and work logistics. These do not include break time. They do not include personal logistics, even those that are tangentially related to or supportive of my work-related activities. This is just time spent writing, setting up simulations, getting necessary documents, sending necessary documents, etc. My total time for September was 34.95 hours. Total time for October was 47.33. This despite the fact that I spent almost two weeks on moving-related activities. I predict that my November numbers will be much higher, since it’s the first month not totally screwed up by Hurricane Katrina-related activities. Total hours for November may be as high as 100 or more.

This logging has been very interesting for me to look back on. As a result, I’m going to start logging other aspects of my life. Minutes of exercise per day. Hours of sleep per day. Volumes of water, of caffeinated beverages, etc consumed per day. I’m debating posting the stats daily, in order to encourage me to blog more. I’m also adding “Blog post” to my nightly checklist, in order to encourage me to keep posting. It’s easy to let a blog atrophy. I have high aims for this blog, so I can’t let that carry on the way it’s been going.

Comments and complaints are welcome, as long as you don’t blog-spam me. That’s been quite a problem lately.

Reclaiming my Name

I have almost reclaimed my name! For a while, all the news about Brock Lesnar and Mike Tice usurped my google rankings. There is now only one hit about them left on the first results page when you type “brock tice” into google, and it’s the last one. Soon, the whole page shall be mine once more!

Encoding Movies for the iPod Video using Linux

If you want to encode video that you have on DVD for your iPod Video, a nice utility called HandBrake will do it for you. It works pretty well on Mac OS X, but my laptop’s a little slow in the I/O department, and I prefer to use my Linux desktop for encoding.

Caveat: it’s illegal to rip commercial, encrypted DVDs to your computer. Non-encrypted DVDs for which you have copyright permission, for example your home videos, are legal to rip. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s a little script I wrote to rip DVDs using HandBrake for linux:


#!/bin/bash
# Filename is dvd2ipod
# $1 - output filename
# $2 - title number
handbrake -f mp4 -i /dev/dvdrw \
-o $1 -t $2 -e ffmpeg -E faac -w 320

It assumes that you’ve installed HandBrake, and renamed HBTest to ‘handbrake’ and put it somewhere in your path. It also assumes that your DVD drive is /dev/dvdrw. This outputs video in a format that iTunes will let you import, and subsequently play on your iPod Video. I didn’t set anything for audio tracks, subtitles, etc. It uses the defaults. You can easily modify this script for that. The important things are the dimensions ( -w 320 ) and the codecs ( -e ffmpeg, -f mp4, -E faac ). The first argument is the output filename you want, and the second is the title number that you want from the DVD. Say you have a DVD from your wedding with two titles — the wedding, and the reception. If the wedding is title 1, and the reception is title 2, to rip the reception, you’d do this:


dvd2ipod OurWeddingReception.mp4 2

Wait a bit, ignore the error messages as long as it keeps encoding, and enjoy showing your friends/family/coworkers your reception (or whatever)!

ADDENDUM 2007-02-07: You can now use larger movie sizes, up to 640×480, so you may want to change that if you plan on playing to an external display device. Otherwise, stick with what’s written above, as the 5G video ipod only has a QVGA screen.