Short takes for Friday, August 26, 2005
- Lance Armstrong had a very good interviewon Larry King Live. Unfortunately, we will never know the truth about Lance Armstrong. Only Lance Armstrong knows the truth. And he is saying that he is innocent of any blood doping allegations. Everyone else (including the French journalists) is seeing through a lens of speculation. The journalists believe Lance is guilty. So everything they see “proves” their assertions of guilt. Every LA supporter (myself included) assumes that Lance is being framed by an over-zealous and highly jealous brood of “journalists.” So everything we see “proves” that folks are out to smear a good man.But all of us must come to the point where we have to accept the unkwown. No matter what happens from this point forward, Lance will always have a question mark on his career. He can never “prove” his innocence – no matter how hard he tries. As Americans, we must learn to live with the fact that all people are innocent until proven guilty. So let’s start acting that way. Lance is innocent. No one has proven that he has done anything wrong. Until proof is available, Lance is innocent.
- I added an external USB hard disk to the main computer in our house. It’s nice to have an additional 160GB to exploit! But, it’s not enough. Actually, it is enough – but it won’t solve my nagging problems. Every year, we get copies of Dana’s basketball games. And we convert these video tapes into DVD disks (for ourselves and Dana’s coaches). But it is really hard to work with these files. An average game results in ~10GB of video footage. And our internal hard disk can’t handle more than a handful of such files at any given point in time. That’s generally not a porblem. I can keep a few active and “archive” the rest to the external disk, right?Uh, no. Not really. Apparently, it’s not so easy to move +10GB files from one disk to another. I’m not certain whether the problem is the number of extents or what. But I can’t move them to the external USB drive. So it’s time to select what’s behind Door #2. And the tool of choice is DivX. I’ve used DivX for quite some time. But I have always used a DivX player – not the encoder itself. But I downloaded the trial version of the encoder from DivX.com. Wow. My +13GB file is now a +475MB DivX file. The quality is pretty darned good. I am sure that I will lose something when projecting it on a typical TV. But it is more than enough for long-term storage. I can store every game this season with room to spare. And I can then import any part of the saved files into the end-of-year video I build. Man, technology sure is grand.
- I finally finished caulking the shower stall in my daughter’s room. So once everything cures, we’ll be a three and 1/2 bath house!
- Google Talk on GAIM is working well. It’s good to have a client that supports file transfer. Now I just have to fix the trouble with Gaim through our corporate firewall. Oh well. That’s for another time
-CyclingRoo-
Tags: Lance Armstrong , DivX