Axodys

I figured out how to create an XVCD tonight using EyeTV’s best quality recording mode and GNUvcdtoolsX. It’s a little bit more involved than a straight export to Toast you can do when you record at VCD quality, but it works and the quality is a lot better for scenes with a lot of action (like basketball games). The downside is you can only fit about 35 minutes onto a cd at the higher bitrate and that’s about five minutes short of providing enough time to record an entire high school basketball game (the main videos I’ll be converting to XVCD).

Once you get a video into VCD or XVCD format there are some definite advantages over convential videotape though that are worth the slight loss of quality:

• Duplicating a CD only takes a few minutes.
• Multiple levels of slow motion.
• A goto button that will instantly take you to a specific time in the video.
• No degradation in image quality over time.
• Built-in menu screens.

I received a little email today indicating that I had been selected to alpha-test Game Neverending and suddenly my entire evening disappeared. In fact I became so absorbed in this new web-based rpg that I didn’t even watch the second half of Monday Night Football.

In some ways gne reminds me of a MUD in the sense of being an online world you can explore, but it’s also distinctly different in that a very big component is your character’s ability to make items. Karma is another interesting aspect of the game; you gain it by doing things for other characters. The scary thing is that the creators have indicated that this test world is only about 5% of what the final product will become. Exciting stuff.

There weren’t any football games on television today that I was just dying to see, but there were a couple games whose outcomes I found interesting. I was hoping that Cincinnati would be able to take down Ohio State sans Maurice Clarett and they almost did, leading throughout the game before finally sucumbing 23-19. Watching Florida trounce Tennessee was without a doubt the most enjoyable game of the day for me. I love the fact that everyone thought the Gators were done after last week’s Miami debacle and instead they came out and stuck it the Volunteers. The other national broadcast game, Colorado at UCLA, was only mildly entertaining to me so I ended up spending most of my time watching the Florida game.

Mark Pilgrim has been getting interested in FOAF (friend of a friend) RDF files today. Coincidentally I’ve been getting interested in finding out more about RDF the last couple days and recently breezed through a couple of the FOAF related sites he mentions. Since multiple people seem to be getting interested in FOAF thanks to Mark I decided to join the party and created my own FOAF file (and added the link tag to my index file). Here’s hoping something interesting comes out of this.

Baseball Primer offers an in-depth statistical analysis of what went down in the AL West before and after the All-Star break. Statistics aside, age and injury seem like the biggest downfall for the M’s this year.

At this point the Mariners are actually still alive for the Wildcard spot, but their margin for error is now essentially zero. It’s disappointing that the season turned out this way after last year’s amazing year. Mary and I intended to attend a few more games than the one we saw in April, but it didn’t happen. I honestly lost a lot of motivation over the course of the summer with the possibility of a strike hanging over our heads.

I had a nice productive morning and had quite a bit of energy, but it seems to have slipped away after I ate lunch. Now I’m feeling tired and lethargic. Perhaps a nap is in order.

A father and son jumped out of the stands at tonight’s Royals - White Sox game and attacked Royals first base coach Tom Gamboa. [Photos from the scene]

This is just plain scary. I’m glad Coach Gamboa came through relatively unscathed, but it’s disappointing that security didn’t stop this from happening. The first base and third base areas seem like a logical place to position security guards to intercept hooligans. I wonder if it will become standard practice for MLB parks to position people in those spots to prevent incidents like this.

I’m also curious to find out just how stupid the two attackers’ motivation was. I’m guessing it was something idiotic along the lines of we just wanted to see if we could do it.

At $200 the newly announce Logitech IO seems a bit expensive and a little bulky to me, but it’s still a cool idea. It’s kind of wild to imagine a pen with a perfect memory of everything it’s ever written or drawn. Assuming this item is popular enough to spawn future models I wonder how long it will be before we see versions that are indistinguishable from a standard pen?

Brent announced a list of potential features for NetNewsWire Pro today and they look pretty promising. I’m really curious to see just what the pricing will be, but I’m guessing somewhere in the $30-$40 range. As popular as NetNewsWire has been as a freeware application I expect he’ll be able to sell quite a few licenses.

It’s not even 11 PM yet and I’m feeling sleepy. That’s kind of annoying as I have a variety of things I’d still like to accomplish before I go to sleep. I did manage to raise the ground level under our new fence today using several loads of dirt from our corner dirt pile. It was cool outside after a day of solid rain but I quickly broke a sweat and had to dry my glasses repeatedly over the course of my dirt hauling.

On a slightly different note I think I’m finally going to give O’Reilly’s Safari service a try in the next couple days. Their title offerings are quite impressive and include quite a few books from other publishers.