jr conlin's ink stained banana

i'm not exactly sure why i drove an hour to sit in a room with significantly older people snacking on, well, i'm not really sure what, hearing a guy talk about the subtleties of a beverage i don't really enjoy for about an hour, but it was free.

i think.

i mean i didn't have to pay anything, and thanks to a pre-scheduled calendar alarm that sounded suspiciously like a cellphone ring, something i could skip out on right around the start of the second flight of aged grape juice. Ah fake cell phone calls, how i love you.

Ah well, at least i got my festive plasti-tree out of the deal.

Ah the Yule season. A time when we celebrate the darkest nights by decorating the pre-mulch and littering the living room with needles. It's a bit like tossing a festive head on a pike and wrapping it with blinking lights.

Oddly, Anne Marie seems to have a different opinion about these things.

She loves having a tree for the holidays, decorating it and bringing a little joyous paganism memories into the Holiday season. Still, with us going down to L.A. for the actual Christmas holiday, she was a little down on getting a all natural fire hazard tree for this year. So she did the unexpected.

She asked about getting a fake tree.

Yeah, i know what you're thinking. Mostly because it's exactly what i was thinking. Most of the fake trees i grew up with looked like someone tossed a few garbage bags through the shredder and tied them together with coat hangers. i suggested the most realistic one i could think of. Sadly, it was rejected. Possibly because it's hard to have a quiet holiday while speaking over the leaf blower motor.

Fortunately, progress has marched on and the fine craft of the other sort of resin filled greenery has gotten much better. A fair bit pricier too, but i figure that i can annualize it over five or six years and recoup the cost. i may also be able to rig it up for WiFi and save on broadband for a month or two. Of course, now the trick is finding one in stock (and figuring out where to store it once spring arrives).

Sigh. Things were so much easier when i was a bachelor.

It was amazing what one could do with enough rolls of the properly colored duct tape.

Right now, i've got two computers maxed out transcoding video streams. A third is maxed out restructuring some audio. i really want to do some 8Mpx image manipulations, but i'd have to do that on the media box. That's about 4GHz of CPU plugging away, and will probably continue to do so for the next hour or so. Not too surprisingly, the new 2GHz AMD64 is out pacing the relatively venerable 1.7GHz P4.

i already caught myself thinking about whether this would be faster if i had dual 64s in more than one machine.

i'm afraid to look at the power meter.

My brother no longer has a PVR.

Well, let me rephrase that. He never really had one to begin with. Back in the early days of home recording, he dropped $200 on a Direct to DVD burner which has decided to instead turn itself into toast. It still functions as a DVD player, but unless one wants to pretend that the planet has been overrun by over exposed martians and their buzzing anthem, recording off of the cable is no longer really an option.

This, of course, means that my young nieces will be unable to watch the show they've been promised (and more likely pestering my brother about for days). So, Uncle JR has set about fixing that there problem.

Oddly, at this point would normally come a tirade of swearing and bile filled hate toward some unnamed wage slave shackled to both a luke warm soldering iron and a C64 to build the driver. That's not the case. In fact, things have almost gone "too well". Certainly, well enough for me to consider jinxing the affair by discussing it publicly (but what the hell, it's not like i really had anything else to talk about).

At lunch today, i headed over to Fry's to pick up a cheapo USB video encoder. Strangely enough, i think i actually found one, albeit one i'd never heard of from Taiwan, but the packaging had only 20% Engrish, so i took it as a sign. Priced at $60, i paid $50 and got a $30 rebate form, for a final cost of around $20. Naturally, this confused me, since normally i expect pricing to work the other way. A bit of dorking about and i was able to get things running quite nicely on my laptop. A bit more dorking and i was able to get it hooked up to my media box. A tad more dorking and i realized that a 1GHz IPX really isn't able to capture DVD quality streams (not an altogether unexpected issue, really) but i was able to easily wire up the laptop again and got things going.

In the future, recording to QVGA will be just dandy.

Video is recording to laptop, soon it will be loading up to my website, where my good brother will be able to pull it down and share it with the kids. Heck, i may be able to run it through the compressor and make a 15fps QVGA version that should be a quarter of the size of the original, just in case he wants to grab it quickly.

i'll let him burn the DVD if he wants.

Heck, add in that i also moved the wireless access point in the living room four inches and gained 20% signal.

i'm now fully expecting my living room to either catch fire or be hit by a meteor seconds before the video finishes recording. Watch the news. It should be quite spectacular.

• i wonder if my house is still there?
• Whoops, the 405 is closed up ahead. Thank you Y!Sal. (i've really got to convince production into making that a real product.)
• Huh, now that computers are so popular will White Out still be made in correctional institutes?
• i wonder why so many SUVs are sold without turn signals? You'd think the CHP would have something to say about that.
• At $2.87 per gallon, the guy driving the 20' RV pulling that trailer full of dirt bikes and 4 wheelers must be the richest man in the world.
• i think my butt's asleep. Wait? Is this Soledad? What happened between King City and here? i think i was asleep.

Well, made it through safely, although danish free (seriously, next time through Buelton, stop at Andersen's and get one. You will not be sorry). Hopefully back to more regular geekery come tomorrow.