badmigraine
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Posts posted by badmigraine
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Slightly off topic, but last night at the bar Mogs and I saw the following liqueur on the menu:
"Noily Prat"
I can recommend this drink to a few of my company colleagues. One of them could even be the official Prat spokesman.
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Do I prefer crows?
Of caws!
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I can never remember my blackouts.
I had a good one about four years ago when it snowed almost a meter in Michigan, and according to my sister after the usual beers and cocktails runup, I had a bottle and a half of red and then some tequila on the rocks. I sang along to the entire Pink Floyd-The Wall album, then ran around the snowdrifts barefoot and in my boxer shorts, and finally slipped and fell in front of the garage door biting a deep gash in my tongue.
I remember waking up, relatively hangover-free, and everyone kind of smirking and shaking their heads when I asked what had happened to my tongue, and whose bare footsteps were in the snow outside. It took them most of the morning to convince me that it was ME. Felt like it was a practical joke or something, then finally realized with a shock that they were right, and I had been on autopilot.
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I can never remember my blackouts.
I had a good one about four years ago when it snowed almost a meter in Michigan, and according to my sister after the usual beers and cocktails runup, I had a bottle and a half of red and then some tequila on the rocks. I sang along to the entire Pink Floyd-The Wall album, then ran around the snowdrifts barefoot and in my boxer shorts, and finally slipped and fell in front of the garage door biting a deep gash in my tongue.
I remember waking up, relatively hangover-free, and everyone kind of smirking and shaking their heads when I asked what had happened to my tongue, and whose bare footsteps were in the snow outside.
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"Evermore," quoth the raven... "Evermore"..!
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There's some eikawa-site that coincidentally also hosts a BBS with English technical, FAQ and other forums about YahooBB. I wish I'd gone there before getting my own YahooBB, not because of any language issue but because of the anecdotal accounts of various issues that also came up for me, and the accumulated user wisdom of the ages on how best to handle them.
I don't have the URL here at work, but if I remember this later, I'll post it from home!
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10 man yen doesn't sound like a "brush", more like a wallop.
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A lot of it has to do with how long your hair is, and what type you have. When I was in my teens, I had long curly hair, and in most showers it took me over 5 minutes just to get it properly wet, let alone wash and rinse it. Not to mention all the other stuff you have to do in a shower.
Flash forward to my shaved-head style from '98 to '02... I was in and out of the shower in less than 3 minutes, and that included full body soaping and scrubbing.
Great on workdays, at the beach and wearing helmets. Sometimes having a hairstyle is a tragic loss of time.
Then again, for men anyway, there's always the Hairless Years waiting for you so better to find other things to complain about than hair.
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I used to follow this stuff and I have an anti-gun bias, but in this case, sadly, the NRA is right.
Clinton's ban was typical hot-air politics. It didn't really do any of the things avid supporters like Ms. Brady would have us believe.
The analogy would be banning a kind of sliced pickle at some Buger King outlets. After the ban, you could get the same pickles at other restaurants, and even Burger King was offering similar pickles that taste and look pretty much the same as the ones they are now forbidden to serve.
The real gun issue in the US isn't banning this or that type of gun, it's how to disarm the entire population at one fell swoop, so that criminals don't have access to the weapons. There are millions of unregistered and untraceable firearms floating around the US, ranging from arquebuses to high-tech composite miniatures.
"Let's ban guns" won't work.
Last I checked, marijuana, heroin and ecstasy were "banned" items, but you can get them easily enough in most places. And somebody who is determined to get them, will get them.
My personal view...the focus in the US is on the wrong thing. The real focus should be on "why are Americans so prone to gun violence?" Most families in Switzerland have an M-1 rifle in their house, but you don't hear about their problem of gun violence. There's something irresponsible and frightening about a country where at any moment you could be picked off by an insane sniper, or have your car jacked with a pistol in your face in front of the local shopping mall. Why is it like this in the US?
Given the US agenda, maybe Bush or Kerry is better off proposing a gun ban in Iraq.
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Here's my take on Macs...I've always admired them, but even when I've had plenty of money and needed a new computer, I never bought a Mac.
I guess I just don't want one.
I can't picture myself using and enjoying a Mac. Just like I can't picture myself riding a Harley, wearing three-button suits, or being attracted to blonde women. It's just not me.
Unless somebody gives me one for free of course.
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I like this Po Bronson.
I myself have retired twice already, and I'm only 41.
Even better--if work continues like it is now, then I think I'll soon feel another retirement coming on.
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For me the holy grail of personal computing is an OS where you can switch the user interface into any language you want. All menus, dialogue boxes, system and error messages, etc. would be in the language you select.
Right now, this is Apple OSX, which I can't use because I don't have an Apple computer...and it's MS Windows 2000 Pro or XP Pro combined with the MS MUI ("Multilanguage User Interface"...not available to single or retail users, only for volume licenses of 5 seats or more).
People like me are left out in the cold. I can't buy a PC at Bic Camera, secure in the knowledge that I can flip the Japanese XP into English XP, and cope with the barrage of weird network and error messages that I am bound to get over the months of installing and playing with various apps and utilities. My Japanese Win XP will only ever be Japanese.
I could buy English XP for 25,000 yen. I could dual-boot my system with, say, English Win2000, which I already own. But I don't want to dual boot and reinstall all my apps on the new partition.
Ho-hum. What a drag. I just want my wife to be able to use a fully Japanese machine, then flip it to English for me.
And running native Japanese apps on an English OS doesn't work very well.
Heck, even the MS IME on an English OS screws up the Japanese often enough. The e-mail body displays correctly, but the subject line is mojibake. The e-mail displays correctly in Outlook, but is mojibake in Notes. Who knows what it is? Wrong character set selected I guess. Some web pages lack the correct META tag. Ho-hum. This is arcane hobbyist stuff, not a seamless solution to a simple problem. The technology is still not ready...unless you own a Mac.
Anybody know of a version of Linux that does the multilanguage user interface trick?
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42 inch plasma
Wow!
Makes me want to rent sci fi DVDs..! I can smell the popcorn now...
Maybe I'm revealing too much about my age here, but here goes...
"TV party tonight!
TV party tonight
Got nothin better to do
Than watch TV, and have a couple of brews.."
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Maybe I didn't say it right...
I like TV enough to spend about 2 man for a 28+ inch model. I did that a few years back here in Tokyo, and I did it a couple years ago in the US The trend used to be, every year they got cheaper and loaded with more and more features.
Now there's a new trend...the TVs all got "better"...in fact, they are too good for me.
I just can't see spending more than 2-3 man on this. With the tedious crap on TV, I don't watch much. A DVD is nice once in awhile, esp. now that we have a new baby and don't go out evenings anymore.
But if I have to make it an investment, then count me out.
TVs. They moved to the Ritz, and I am still living in a rented place.
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It used to be that you could get a fairly large TV (28-31 inches say) for about 3-4 man. You still can, in the US...made by Japanese companies no less.
But in Japan, these standard non-flat TVs have been taken off the market to force you into paying at least triple the price for the dubious pleasure of watching television.
"Mooo..." Let's pretend there was never anything cheaper...we're too good for it now. The screen had--good heavens!!--a slight curvature!! Terrible. Who could ever want one of THOSE.
200,000 might get you a tiny 23-inch LCD or plasma screen...or you can drop 9 or 10 man on a flat-screen standard model.
There's no sweet spot in the market anymore. What about someone who remembers a 30+ inch TV for 3 man? And actually bought one here in 1999, then bought one in the US in 2003? ANSWER: you don't get to watch TV much anymore. Maybe this is a good thing.
Sure I want a 50-inch plasma model. Me and everyone else... But when I get to the store on too much coffee and in an impulse-buying mood, I just can't bring myself to buy any TV remotely that expensive.
I mean, come on. Is there anything on TV or DVDs that is going to make me feel better about dropping $3000+ on a television ?! I understand retail is all about revenue per square meter, but this is crazy. Who are all these people dropping thousands on TVs that used to cost them a fraction of that?
Sheesh.
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It's not really a question of the camera technology, because the camera puts out the same kind of DVD as you get when you rent Harry Potter or Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS...minus the copy protection of course!
The problem is that DVDs are in a weird .vob and .inf file format...and each DVD has a few of them sprinkled around. I'm not clear on how they all make up one DVD, but I'm sure I'll be learning this soon.
The PC editing software I've tried so far requires transcoding or recoding of this .vob file into another format such as avi, dvx, wav, mpeg2, etc., before it can edit it.
This is a processor-heavy job that can take hours. You go away and read a book while it is being done. Even on the latest fast machine it takes forever. Professional studios use hardware transcoders dedicated to just this job. I wonder what those look like.
It would be nice if I could just edit the .vob file itself, but I guess we're not at that stage yet. And why is there more than 1 .vob file on my DVD? This editing technology is just not ready yet. Now I know what it feels like to be a "early adopter".
There are some Internet pages and forums for "DVD rippers"...it all sounds so neat, but you have to spend hours patching together various utilities and transcoding and doing all this weird stuff. You need several programs, some are buggy, some aren't free. The major editing suites like Roxio's and ULEAD are cobbled-together packages of several such different programs masquerading as a single unit. Lots of bugs and incompatibilities. It's not ready yet folks. Too soon. Come back in a couple of years maybe.
I've heard iMovie can do it better, but I don't have a Mac.
Another option is to read the manual for my DVD camera, to see if I can record directly in a format that is easily edited.
The problem there is that such format, though editable, would not be a DVD file that could be played on my Dad's DVD player back home. I'd have to convert to DVD format, or poor-quality VCD formet or something.
Another option is to use the stark clunky Sony software that came with the camera to edit the disc while it is still in the videocamera. The manual says I can do this. I think this is because the info on the DVD before I "finalize" it in the camera is in editable format, probably MPEG2 or something. When done in-camera editing, I could then finalize the disc, pop it into my PC and make copies of the DVD for friends. I'm going to try that this weekend. Whoppee.
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Same as when you put it in your DVD player. Chapters with thumbnails showing how each chapter starts.
The problem I'm now having is with the cruddy movie editing software (ULEAD Movie Factory) that shipped with the new DVD burning drive I just put into my PC. The damn thing is so buggy and doesn't even do what it says it will. I can easily burn a straight copy of the DVDs I made in my new videocam, but I have yet to be able to edit them.
Sure I can use the Sony editing software that came with the camera, but it is clunky and nothing special.
I need a Mac and iMovie I guess. This part of DVD authoring is just not ready yet on the PC platform. Maybe next year the programs will do what they say they would.
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Sorry, by "other countries" I meant other countries than Oz (didn't mention NZ, as Mogs told me it's not necessary).
If I lived in Oz,I'd be at Niseko every season for sure.
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I don't think the DVD cameras are a great leap over the tape ones either. I think I would have been thrilled with each one. This DVD one is my first, so I can't really say what the practical differences are.
Yes, you can just pop the DVD into your puter and start editing away--you don't have to "capture" the data from the camera or tape/disc onto your hard drive. I have two drive bays, one with a DVD ROM and the other with a DVD R/RW that I just put in this afternoon. So I can make rapid DVD copies of the miniDVDs, to mail to my family.
It's also quick to jump around and edit, no fast forwarding or rewinding, just skipping like on a CD.
The other advantage I suppose is that DVDs are easier to watch (chapter menus-but didn't I hear some tapes have these now too?) than a tape, you don't have to play them back through the camera or a special digital tape accessory player. And I think the miniDVDs are smaller and lighter than the tapes.
The downside is each mini DVD is only 32 mins. long (I think you can get an hour out of them if you change the recording format).
I think you can get 3CCD ones, but you have to spend big bucks. Might want to wait a couple years until it is all perfected and much cheaper.
We just had a baby, hence the "oh just buy the damn thing" approach to a vidcam. Heh!
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I think this is all overblown. The Aussies come to ski in Japan and now make investments because they have such limited skiing in Oz. Japan isn't a jet lag destination, and they can ski during their summer. A nice hook.
I can't think of many other countries that would view Japan as a ski holiday destination.
It's tough to imagine what a foreign ski operator could do to a Japanese resort to make this an attractive destination for ski holidays. Expensive, inconvenient, lack of advanced terrain and the language issue. Anybody with enough cash for a weeklong hotel ski stay will be off to the US, Canada or Europe. Any ski bum with duct-taped gloves looking for couch accommodations will remain in his/her natural habitat.
I could maybe see wealthy tourists from non-ski countries coming to Japan.
As far as Niseko powder goes, it is better than Colorado's increasingly rare champagne powder, but the comparison to Whistler is silly because that resort is not particularly known for its powder. It's known for other stuff. The real powder destination in the US is Utah...nobody has to tell the Aussies this as Mogs and I heard plenty of Oz accents on the Snowbird tram.
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In terms of new stuff for the season, how about a new right medial meniscus cartilage to replace the one I trashed while showing Naeba how moguls are done at high speed on a snowboard.
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OK, now I've been playing with it for a few more days and I can tell you it's the Real Deal. It is a really nice machine, works in low light, simple to use, if you buy the J version here you can download the E manual for the same model off Sony's US site...a total breeze.
As for copying the DVDs, you can download the data to your computer, then use the camera itself to burn additional copies of the mini DVD. That's easy but the DVD-Rs cost about 850 yen each, so they're expensive copies. I haven't priced the regular size DVD-R or RW blanks, but I doubt they are 850 yen each.
I don't have a DVD burner, so I tried a number of software applications (freeware, shareware and trial versions of commercial programs) to use my CD burner to make a "video CD" (VCD or SVCD). I am now an expert in all the ways this doesn't work right...example: first you have to transcode the DVD's .VOB and maybe some other files into MPEG2. Most MPEG encoders take about 4-5 seconds PER FRAME, even on a fast computer. They use almost all the processing power, so you can't do anything with your machine while they are tasking. With DVD at 30 frames per second, it took my computer over 2.5 hrs. just to transcode one 30-minute DVD.
After that, I used a program to burn an SVCD...it wouldn't play on my computer DVD-ROM, my J DVD player or my US DVD player. Same when I made a VCD. No go. Just hours of wasted time and tweaking when I could have been sleeping or reading Sherlock Holmes stories while eating chips.
The upshot of this and my advice to you and to myself is, forget about that crap. This is 2004, almost 2005, and you've just bought a DVD-burning handycam. Why, why why would you do this without having a DVD burner on your computer? You really want a DVD burner to enjoy this camera to the fullest. Then you could do your editing on the computer, and burn DVDs for everyone to see your amazing life.
See you at BIC then. It's either a new puter, or a new DVD drive for me.
Memory Loss
in General off-topic discussions
Posted
I don't remember posting that twice.