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badmigraine

SnowJapan Member
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Everything posted by badmigraine

  1. 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...
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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.
  5. 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. (^-^)
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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.
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 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
  12. 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
  13. 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
  14. Dumb question, but when you get a service without a regular phone line, how does the IP phone work? Is the connection quality acceptable? Are there service or web outages when it is down or not working right? It works as long as your modem is powered up, right? You don't have to be on the PC to use it, right?
  15. Hmmm... I got download speed of 2948 k and upload of 355 k. That's a lot faster than I have gotten in previous checks of my Yahoo BB. I'm moving to a new place though so all bets are off.
  16. Holy crap, you guys are all getting much faster speeds than me. Listen to my tale of woe... In 2000-2002, I had "12 mbps" Yahoo BB that actually only worked around 300kps. Then from 2003-2004 in the US, I had Comcast DSL advertised at maybe "5 mpbs", but again it actually worked at only 300 kbps or so. Now from mid-2004 I've had the "54 mbps" YahooBB, with no problems or complaints except that it only works around 300k or 700k. WTF?! Why me? I think it's time to change providers. I own an NTT phone line, got it 10 years ago, but I don't need to use it if my provider g
  17. Seems like there is no longer much of a price difference between these two services. I've had Yahoo BB for a couple of years now. I chose the fastest of their options. The speed was advertised as "up to 52 megabits". Actual speed depends on your distance from the exchange and the number of other customers on the same line. My actual speed is normally only around 300k or 700k, which makes me wonder why I had to pay extra for the 52MB service (there were cheaper services with slower speeds like 30MB and 16MB). I'm moving to a new place and could go either way. I hear fiber optic shill
  18. My eldest is 2.5 years old. Is it too soon? I think she might like it, in addition to sledding, but even so, does the ski gear even come that small? Size 14.5 cm boots?
  19. Thanks, Coldcat. Locale is indeed US English. I'll look for the /etc/scim configuration file and see if I can get it to work that way. The actual input editor menu options don't include this choice.
  20. Any ideas on how to make Japanese language input work when English is set as the system language in Ubuntu? In Ubuntu, if I set the system language to Japanese at login, then the Japanese input toolbar appears and functions normally. Naturally, all other menus and apps are also in Japanese. However, if I set the system language to English at login, even though I have Japanese support and fonts installed, and even though the Japanese input manager (scim-anthy) appears in the English menu and allows me to set the key commands and etc., the input toolbar/system just never starts or app
  21. Thanks, Ocean, you just saved me the bother of having to make my own decision whether to download it or not. Haw, haw!
  22. Yes, for a long time even after Vista is released, Windows XP will still be on sale both as a standalone retail box, and also as the pre-installed OS on OEM machines such as Dell, HP, IBM, etc. And in XP you will be able to do everything people do today, going forward. Office, Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, whatever. Games, DVD burning software, iTunes, etc. None of that is going to change or be cut off for a long time. You can still buy Windows 98 today, brand-new. Even as late as 2005 I could still find, on the IBM site, ThinkPads for sale with the option for Win
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