badmigraine

Last time I salivated over skis, it was thinking of Olin Mark IV Comps, Head bindings, Barrecrafters poles and maybe Dolomite boots with Scott poles. This was maybe a couple weeks ago...

What, thursday., babies or skis?

Thanks Markie, good to find you still here too!

I've been out for awhile due to babies and knee surgeries, and I don't have much cartilage left on either side. Last season I went snowboarding one moderate day at Naeba, but the hammering and shock put the hurt on my knees for three weeks afterward. I'm thinking that skiing posture and independent-leg suspension will be easier on my poor boys than boarding. But what kind of boots and skis should I buy? I haven't looked at two plank setups since the 80s, and haven't shopped or looked at mags for gear in about 3 seasons. As for skiing style, before I took up boarding, I liked to go fa

Note that DVD is not an easy format to edit. It is not designed for that. I got a mini DVD vidcam to film my baby. The camera and DVDs are great, easy to view and to copy. However, it requires various different applications to transcode or convert them into an editable format, and the conversion results in further loss of quality. In addition, mini DVDs don't fit into slit-type DVD players found on MacBooks and other computers. You or your family/friend who will view the DVD needs a tray-type drive for that. A couple months ago I ended up getting a miniDV vidcam. It is bonehead simple to

The leaf-polishing crew isn't Japan-only. We had that in my L.A. high-rise office back in the 90s. You rent the plants, they come around in purple polo shirts and water/polish them regularly. They also have small snips and trim the dead leaves. My idea of Japan-only jobs is the one I've had here for a decade. When I returned to Michigan, vowing never to come back to Japan, I couldn't find squat to do. Nobody would hire me. I ran out of money in 2 years, then came back here again as Mr. Employable and here I am making a great salary. Weird.

Mantas, haw haw! But wait till you see the list of what I dislike about Windows...it may take me a few days to type it up. (^-^)

I like my MacBook well enough, but here are some things I dislike about Apple: I don't like those little balls for closing and minimizing/maximizing apps. I don't like how Safari fails to display some Internet pages correctly when IE or Firefox or Opera all work fine (including encoding errors). I don't like iPhoto. I hate the way it wants to organize my pics into "rolls". I never thought of digital pics as "rolls" of film, it seems to me a stupid goof to help somebody like my Dad or Stepmom organize their pics. After using Picasa for a couple of days, I just don't want to both

Jibs, I saw the same kind of thing at Meguro Station in March, 2004. I showed up around 10 am and noticed a couple of women lying on gurneys and blankets on the upper floor and there was a puddle of vomit next to one. I thought maybe they'd had food poisoning. Then I heard the announcements... When I got down to the tracks, they were just backing the train up slowly from where the mess had been, so the crew could finish the cleanup. You could see where blood had jetted on the cement wall several meters behind the track, and, as I will never forget, some pieces of skin on the rails. You co

Ocean, mogski is a rather large, near-albino form of Kiwi who sleeps passed out next to toilets, once swore that rear-entry boots were the best he's ever had, and who even used a dental mirror to look under a door at someone who was undressed.

Last night I downloaded trial versions of both DVDxDV ($20) and Cinematize ($129). Here's the report. DVDxDV DVDxDV is for Macs only. I downloaded and installed it into my MacBook with no trouble. The MacBook slot loader can't take miniDVDs, so I had to use my PC to make a regular-sized copy of the source miniDVD using Roxio DVD Suite. Then, on my MacBook, I started up DVDxDV and inserted the DVD. The program opened the DVD with no trouble, but the audio and video tracks were out of synch. The built-in and online help menus suggested this was a bug in previous versions that has now been

Well, thanks to Mantas's link to the Apple support forums, I found there are two products that supposedly make what I am doing simple. The cheaper one is DVDxDV. You put in the DVD, select the footage you want, and it converts it to a Quicktime file, which iMovie loves. Of course there is a quality loss, but for home movies of babies vomiting, dragging themselves across the floor on elbows like auto crash victims trying to escape the wreck, and the odd shot of Mogski embracing a shrub at downhill speed, this ought to do the trick. DVDxDX has a 30-day free trial and it costs $20 to keep. I'll g

Yeah, as Kumapix noted, iMovie can't grab scenes off the DVD camera even when its plugged in. I will have to figure out how to import the source DVD from vidcam into the computer. I thought it would be simple, but after 30 pages of user manual and dozens of screenshots and choices and acronyms, I gave up. I couldn't figure it out. I thought it would be simple, but it isn't. In addition to weird and unexpected complexity, it seemed that each DVD would take the full 30 minutes to download...there is no "4x" or "8x" type speedup involved. With over 25 of these 30-minute DVDs, we are ta

Thanks, Kpix. I guess this confirms what I found. It's not enough to simply connect a device that can play the source miniDVD (or put it in the computer's optical drive). None of iDVD, iMovie, Roxio's latest PC DVD suite or another one I tried on a trial version will edit from source this way. You first have to transcode or convert the ENTIRE DVD file into another format, then you can start editing. The conversion part is always some clunky add-on or command-line type process that doesn't always work right and takes a long time. It's just too much fiddling for this to be an easy or regular, le

What's the golden road to sucking scenes off a collection of miniDVDs, assembling them into a single movie, then burning it to a regular-sized DVD? I've got a Sony vidcam that records onto mini DVDs. We've made dozens of these 30-minute mini DVDs over the last couple years. But only a parent could watch one from start to finish. No outside person could stand to see yet another shot of a baby gurgling or the dogs at the jikka. This pile of DVDs can all be edited down to a single short flick for family and friends abroad. But I can't seem to find any easy way on either a Mac or a PC to