Convert Any Video File To DVD

I wrote this quick shell script that will convert any video file that will play on your linux box to a NTSC-DVD that will play on your dvd player.

Save this to a file "convert.sh", stick a dvd into your burner, shell out, and type "sh convert.sh

rm -f dvd.mpg
rm -f DVD/VIDEO_TS/*.*
ffmpeg -i $1 -target ntsc-dvd -sameq dvd.mpg
dvdauthor --title -f dvd.mpg -o DVD
dvdauthor -T -o DVD
growisofs -Z /dev/dvd0 -dvd-video DVD
eject /dev/dvd0

Requirements: the codex for the video file you are trying to convert, ffmpeg, dvdauthor, and growisofs. 

Working From Home Today

Hiyat is very sick today -- Gabe and Zack kept her up all night last night so I decided to stay at home and work today.  Luckily I only have one meeting today, and that one is with IBM so it can be done over the phone no problem. I've been spending my time working on process and governance documentation anyway, so doing it from home is in many ways more efficient and productive anyway.

Plust it gives me time at home with the family and hopefully Hiyat can catch some Zs. I feel really bad for her. 

Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past

 

Downloaded this on the Wii Virtual Console the other day. What a great game. Gabe and I can sit for a long time solving the puzzles and beating the bosses in this game. Truly one of the best RPGs ever made... In total 2-D 16-bit graphics. Great stuff. 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_A_Link_to_the_Past

Six Million Dollar Man Season 1

I thank thee, o gods of bittorrent for delivering unto me Six Million Dollar Man Season One.

Most shows I loved as a kid -- like Knight Rider, The Hulk, Chips, etc are unwatchable by a non eight year old. But this one is better.

They actually took the time to develop character back in the 70's and this show is really, really, underrated. It's totally watchable even 20+ years later. The pace is almost relaxing. The plot lines are as full of holes as ever, but the imagination and characterization is great.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071054/

Stardust

This one was Hiyat's pick but it was actually pretty good. Was nice to watch a fantasy movie that didn't take it self so... seriously. It reminded me of watching stuff like Time Bandits and Willow which was really, really, fun. You listening, Peter Jackson? Lighten up and make a movie that's fun and under 6 hours to watch.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486655/

Letters From Iwo Jima

 

Very good movie. Told from the Japanese perspective on the US invasion of Iwo Jima, a small island off the coast of Japan that was of vital strategic importance. An airstrip located there could easily facilitate the bombing of Japan (which it did). 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498380/

37th Birthday

I just turned 37. Had friends over on the weekend, and family over last night. Everyone was very generous!

It's hard to believe that statistically my life is half over... what have I learned last year?

• Have few vices, but cultivate the ones that you have. For example, if you are going to smoke, smoke a good cigar and relish the experience. Not only will this help to moderate the vice (good cigars are expensive) but you will enjoy them so much more.
• Nothing beats having kids. They're worth giving up anything for and they teach you so much about yourself that it's crazy.
• Everything good in life is messy. As Gabe says: "life is messy, we clean it up."
• After kids, being married is the next hardest and next best thing you can do.
• Do things on your time, not on someone else's. E.g. get a PVR and watch tv shows when you want, not when the channels want you to. Rent a bunch of movies and rip them so you can watch them when you want. This allows you to put your family and kids first, and do these things in your spare time.
• Living in quiet and close to nature is important and allows you to feel grounded and in touch with your community.
• Activity is important. Make sure everyone gets some exercise every once in a while.
• When your wife is cooking, shut up and stay out of the kitchen. Hang out nearby, though so she can talk to you if she wants you.

Sunshine

 

 

 

When you think of the word sunshine, it typicaly evokes warm, cozy feelings. Cats napping. Quiet, lazy afternoons.

Not so in Sunshine, the brilliant SF movie just out on DVD. It's played by a utterly convincing international group of actors in the movie, suggesting a truly international effort by mankind to "fix" something with the sun.  What that something is we never find out, but it's going out, and quickly. Earth is dying, and the only hope of saving it is to chuck a manhattan-sized cube of something exotic into the sun and re-ignite it, forming a "sun within the sun".

The sun is of course the star of the movie. Somehow it becomes a living, breathing character. Life sustaining yet so powerful that it can vaporize you if you're inside the orbit of Mercury, where the movie takes place.

The movie is not without it's problems. Artificial gravity is used, but all the other technology is just a decade or two ahead of our time. The spaceship seems quite conventional and convincing (great effects) but yet it can stop, orbit the sun, match orbits with another spaceship, and resume it's course.

But it doesn't distract you from this excellent movie. Well worth a look -- sci-fi at it's best. 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/

2007 By The Numbers

I'm doing 2007 year end reports at work and in the spirit of that I thought I'd run the numbers for myself this year. With a lot of questionable math, here's what I've come up with: 

Children

• 3, up 1 from last year.
  
• 24 (Zack) + 12 (Maya) + 5 (Gabe) = 41lbs (or 410,000 calories retained - the equivalent of 760 big macs).

Wives

• Holding steady at 1.

Aikido

• 140 classes attended.
• 36 classes taught.
  

Travel

• # of countries = 1 (Canada).
• Toronto x3
• Ft Mac x1
• Distance travelled in the air = 8553.61km

Music

• #songs
• top artist: Bloc Party (371 tracks listened to)
• top album:
  
• top song: This Modern Love by Bloc Party

Books

• # read: 11
• # of pages: 3908
  

RSS Feeds

• # of subscriptions: 111
  
• # read: 58926
• Avg reads per month: 9821
  

Bottles of Scotch

• Purchased: 1, a decent Auchentoshan 10. I seem to have emptied my collection though.
• Consumed: unknown. Like I say, my collection is now empty.
  

Cigars

• Purchased: 30 (minis)
• Smoked: 4 

PSI Spies: The True Story of America's Psychic Warfare Program

Interesting, crazy stuff... great Christmas reading though.

'Remote Viewing' is the term used to describe a psychic or paranormal ability to see places and events far removed from the normal line of physical sight. This would such psychically gifted men and women the perfect reconnaissance and information gatherers on an enemy's operations. In short, it would make them the perfect spy. What is not generally known is that the Russians during the height of the Cold War tried to develop a remote viewing program. When the American military discovered this, they embarked on a similar program. Award-winning journalist Jim Marrs lays out the entire story of this little known aspect to the Cold War confrontation between the Russians and the Americans in "Psi Spies: The True Story Of America's Psychic Warfare Program". He reveals how the U.S. Army trained men and women to try to psychically access secrets of Soviet command centers, missile complexes, biological warfare centers -- even the Kremlin itself. Also included are the stories of how skilled remote viewers learned about the fate of the Mars Observer that was 'lost' as it entered orbit around Mars; gained knowledge of a series of mysteries (the most prominent of which was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy); and even applying remote viewing to the legendary Loch Ness Monster. Of special note are the tips on how the reader can develop remote viewing abilities themselves! "Psi Spies" is a deftly written, thoroughly fascinating, informed and informative reading recommended for anyone with an interest in Metaphysical Studies and 20th Century American Military History.

- Midwest Book Review

http://www.amazon.com/PSI-Spies-Americas-Psychic-Warfare/dp/1564149609/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200084900&sr=1-1

2012: The War for Souls

Not a bad book, but doesn't end well.

The idea is that there are 3 earths in parallel dimensions: one where the American revolution never happened, one where the dinosaurs never died out, and ours.

In the mirror human earth, the reptilians have invaded using dimensional gates hidden under 14 sacred sites around the earth. They do this by stealing the human's "souls" -- the electromagnetic field around our bodies that contains our personality. Then the humans become docile and willing to be slaves.

Next they're coming for our earth, with only one half crazy writer that's plugged into all 3 earths through his writing to stop them. Worth a read.

Archaeologist Martin Winters gets out of the collapsing Great Pyramid of Khufu just in time to see a gigantic lens arise from the rubble. Simultaneously at equally ancient monument sites all over the world, other lenses emerge. What's happening is a kind of alien invasion, but the aliens, whose advance agents have been subverting human society for some time, aren't really another species. They're their world's degenerates, whose earlier incursions into human history inspired the way the evil beings of religious mythology have been represented. In short, they're demons, fortunately killable but possessed of awesome power by the standards of Martin's world, which is one of three parallel Earths. The others are the invaders' and ours, in which buff sf writer Wiley Dale is compulsively and automatically writing Martin's story, which is more transmission than story. Eventually the demonic aliens pop up in Wiley's as well as Martin's Kansas homeland. Each Earth has advantages over the others; one of those, in both Martin's and the aliens' worlds, is that the physical existence of the soul has been discovered. The implications of that discovery drive the action of Strieber's hyperactive cosmological thriller. Despite Wiley and his cop buddy's excruciating hardy-har-he-man palaver and the exposition turning to cardboard whenever love is mentioned, it's immensely entertaining, and it's optioned for a big, splashy, FX-laden movie. Oh boy!

- Booklist

http://www.amazon.com/2012-War-Souls-Whitley-Strieber/dp/0765318962/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200084669&sr=8-1

Tunnel In The Sky by Robert Heinlein

I'm almost done listening to Heinlein's Tunnel In The Sky on my ipod. What a fabulous book -- I read this in my youth and it's great for one in their early teens.

The book was written in 1955 and it's age shows as part of it's charm. Everyone is witty in the 50's sense of the term, very intelligent, and very, very independent.

The gist of the story is that humanity has created "gateways" that open up the galaxy to humanity's burgeoning population for colonization. Rod Walker is part of a high school course on "colonial studies" or survival skills. His final exam is to be dropped on an uncolonized planet for a week or two and survive... the problem is that the return call never comes.

You follow Rod as he searches out the remnants of his classmates as they build a new society on their unknown world. Great stuff. The best part of this book is how people far in the future survive with hunting and camping skills right out of the wild west.

http://www.amazon.com/Tunnel-Sky-Robert-Heinlein/dp/1416505512/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200082407&sr=8-1

Super Mario Galaxy

 

 

I've never played any game like this. The physics are awesome -- you're out in space and pretty much every piece of rock has earth normal gravity of it's own. The playability is awesome too with the great use of the wii controls.

But what pushed it over the top for me is that fact that I can play it with Gabe. He can use his own controller, point it at the screen to pick up power-ups or grab enemies to hold them. So we play the game together, which is so cool. Great game! 

http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/supermario128/review.html?sid=6182474

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

Some words to describe this book: amazing, twisted, messianic, holistic, germane, and useless.

This book describes Pinchbeck's autobiographical journey through the underworld of his subconscious and the mytho-historic underpinnings of the human civilization with the Mayan 2012 end time as his focal point. Pinchbeck's use of psychodelics echoes Graham Handcock's work but in a more personal, germane sense. He seems to know that he's going a bit mad through this journey, but knows there's something there as well, some mysterious other that beckons to us all -- perhaps in 2012 if we can save ourselves from a economic/environmental apocalypse. An amazing work, but one that mysteriously doesn't seem to go anywhere.

From Publishers Weekly
Pinchbeck, journalist and author of the drug-riddled psychonaut investigation Breaking Open the Head, has set out to create an "extravagant thought experiment" centering around the Mayan prophecy that 2012 will bring about the end of the world as we know it, "the conclusion of a vast evolutionary cycle, and the potential gateway to a higher level of manifestation." More specifically, Pinchbeck's claim is that we are in the final stages of a fundamental global shift from a society based on materiality to one based on spirituality. Intermittently fascinating, especially in his autobiographical interludes, Pinchbeck tackles Stonehenge and the Burning Man festival, crop circles and globalization, modern hallucinogens and the ancient prophesy of the Plumed Serpent featured in his subtitle. His description of difficult-to-translate experiences, like his experimentation with a little-known hallucinogenic drug called dripropyltryptamine (DPT), are striking for their lucidity: "For several weeks after taking DPT, I picked up flickering hypnagogic imagery when I closed my eyes at night ... In one scene, I entered a column of fire rising from the center of Stonehenge again and again, feeling myself pleasantly annihilated by the flames each time." Pinchbeck's teleological exploration can overwhelm, and his meandering focus can frustrate, but as a thought experiment, Pinchbeck's exotic epic is a paradigm-buster capable of forcing the most cynical reader outside her comfort zone.

http://www.amazon.com/2012-Return-Quetzalcoatl-Daniel-Pinchbeck/dp/B000ZJTRDM/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199310462&sr=8-2