Monthly Archives: December 2005

Weather!

It’s ugly!

I’m spending some time in Truckee, CA with some of my old college chums, and currently we are getting hammered by rain and wind gusting to 60mph. I-80 is reportedly going to be closed due to landslides for the next two days at least, and the furnace in the place we are staying is out because water from flooding has filled the crawlspace and the furnace is now in standing water.

Exciting!

We are running the gas fireplace full bore, and the temperature is holding a lovely 58 degrees, but the temperature is supposed to drop down to something like 23 tonight. Still, we aren’t going anywhere anytime fast, so I think hot coffee and the like will be the order of the day, as well as lots of sweaters.

Using FFMPEG to make PSP video

I spent a little while trying to figure this out, apparently the -r argument is significant:

ffmpeg -i superman_the_mechanical_monsters.mpeg \
    -title "Superman: The Mechanical Monsters" \ 
     -s 320x240 -b 512 -ar 24000 -ab 64 -r 29.970030 -f psp M4V12345.MP4

The -title seemed fubarred, but the rest seems to work. I’ll refine this more later.

Filenames apparently need to be of the form M4VXXXXX.MP4, where the X’s are digits.

Time for Christmas Pasta…

Christmas Pasta Shapes from Costplus

For tonight’s dinner plan, I’m doing the same thing that I did last year, a variation of Rachel Ray’s Christmas Pasta recipe. I find her base recipe simply has too much meat in it, mine will be more like a amatriciana sauce, with onions and red pepper flake, seasoned with some sweet and some spicy italian sausages. Of course, we do have to use the classic Christmas Pasta shapes that we got from Cost Plus. Yum!

R.I.P. Brainwagon Radio

Well, I wish my experiment in podcasting was going out with a bang instead of a whimper, but for now, I’m closing the saga that was Brainwagon Radio. It may return in some retooled form in the future: I’m thinking that to really revitalize my interest in doing podcasts I need to find an appropriate cohost and develop a better setup. For now, the 98 episodes stand as an attempt to utilize a new media before I even understood what it was, what I should use it for, or who my audience was. Perhaps when I have a personal answer to one of those questions, I’ll be back to try it again.

Until then, I hope that I didn’t bore you all, and that you drop in and read my blog, which I will continue to keep. I also hope that at least a couple of you were inspired to reach out to others who reside in the Long Tail and create your own podcasts.

It really has been a blast.