cygweb

I haven't had much to post about lately. I've been working with new versions of the tools I use to convert DVD content to MPEG4/Ogg content. I'm about to start working on two more Rush covers. My parents visited us over Labor Day weekend and we had a great time! Now I'm trying to find out how I can get my hands on great seats for the Rush show in Hershey on October 25th.

Well, I'll be able to see my second concert of Rush's Vapor Trails Tour from the 10th row of the new Giant Center in Hershey! I just got my tickets through Ticketbastard's Internet presale service this morning. I saw the second show of the tour in Scranton, and it was great! Cameras are supposed to be allowed in the venue, so I hope to take plenty of pics to share...

Well, I had a nice (but short) road trip to Long Island to hang with my buddy Don & his fiance Naomi and to go see the Dream Theater/Satch/King's X show at Jones Beach on Saturday night. Don and I did a lot of media swapping and PS2 playing. I made great time on both the to and fro trips (3:20 between Harrisburg, PA, and Hempstead, NY - not bad!) and the driving was fine. On Friday night we went out for beer and wings and watched Slap Shot. On Saturday we went to a computer show to get parts and went to a nice local Japanese restaurant for dinner before the concert. After the concert we hooked up with some friends and hit the local TGI Friday's for a late-night snack. I felt like I was in college again!
On Sunday, we went out early for bagels and after breakfast I hit the road! Thanks Don and Naomi for a great time!

I've been playing with video encoding for a while now and have settled on DivX video, Ogg Vorbis, and the Ogg multimedia container (as implemented by Tobias' Ogg DirectShow filters as my current standard. I have an iPAQ and have been playing with DivX AVI's on it for about a year. Now the first version of the player I use that supports OGMs is out and I'm helping to test it. If you're interested, you can check out this thread that I've started on the player's message board.

I'm a huge Google fan. They have just made public their News site, which uses their search technology to scour about 4000 news sites, categorize stories, and consolidate coverage of each story so that you can read about it at different sites. Too cool. I use My Yahoo as my main home page and get a lot of news from there and Slashdot.