cygweb

A new river may form in Iraq soon. A river of cash. I feel it's ludicrous to grant billions of dollars of our money to that country. Of course, I didn't feel we should have gone to war with Iraq in the first place. I think we should spend as much money as necessary to support the current troop deployment there for six more months and then take most (if not all) of them out of there. Station a carrier or three in the Persian Gulf for regional protection and let Iraq begin governing itself as soon as possible. Their oil production should fund their reconstruction. Are our leaders afraid that if we leave now, Saddam will pop out of his foxhole and retake the country?

I heard Ahmed Chalabi on NPR yesterday say that under Saddam, Iraq built $130 billion in debt, and reconstruction funds should be grants, not loans. He said that making the funds loans could be construed as confirmation of the US's desire for Iraqi oil revenues. That's quite a leap. I'm not over there (nor do I want to visit), but are we really to think that the war caused $20 billion in infrastructure damage? It seems to me that our government wants to pump American technology into Iraq in order to increase our influence in the region. I don't agree with that.

Please feel free to comment. I don't profess to know everything there is about the situation. I just know that I don't want my tax dollars going to Iraq.

I bought a Sony DVD+/-RW drive online from NewEgg and received it Monday. It's replaced my Lite-On 16x CD-RW, which has been moved down to the basement. In addition to regular CD burning duties, I'm planning to use the new drive to archive multimedia (like my collection of Enterprise MPEGs) and to convert our Hi8 videotapes to DVDs. I have experience capturing and compressing short Hi8 clips, but capturing 30-60 minutes of video at a time, compressing the video to MPEG-2 & the audio to AC-3, and authoring a DVD will be a learning process for me. I'm going to test out the Pegasys TMPGENC products and see how they do for this.

If you've got some experience doing this sort of thing, feel free to chime in. Especially if you have software recommendations. I don't mind having control of the encoding process, but the DVD authoring process itself (menus, layout, etc.) is something I'll be doing for the first time.

I was a little behind on my sleep yesterday, so when the Colts were down 21-0 at the half, I stuck around for "Monday Night at the Mic" and then headed to bed. Sounds like I missed one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history. DOH! I picked the Colts to upset the Bucs, but my need for slumber outweighed my faith in them, I guess. That's why they play the games. Tony Dungy must be one heck of a coach. Semi-related note: perhaps the Colts' Ricky Williams should start calling himself "Rick" or "Ricky A."; he's getting no love from Yahoo. His player profile page is here, but his references in Yahoo!'s NFL news continue to point here. Lazy editors.

It was nice to see the Eagles beat the Redskins. However, I had both Akers and Hall in my Yahoo fantasy league and started Akers. Starting Hall would have made me victorious this week. Double DOH! Cyg's Calorie Outlets also lost this week - I guess I should have had some faith and started Travis Henry, but I wouldn't have beaten my opponent with him in the lineup.

The Steelers are starting to crack.

Heard on NPR on the way in to work that 55% of Californians voted for the recall of Gov. Gray Davis, and that Arnold beat Cruz Bustamante by a decisive margin. They had snippets of Arnold's victory speech and he sounded good. I just hope he can give the state the leadership it needs to dig itself out of its $8B budget defecit.

I liked Arnold's comment about finding his entry on the ballot: "Always look for the longest name."

Good luck, Governor Schwarzenegger. Think anyone else from Predator will run for a governorship, or President? My guess would be Carl Weathers; it would be fitting to put Apollo Creed in the White House. ;)

I only feel the need to post about Slashdot comments when I think they're really funny. This one is.

In honor of the start of the NHL season tonight, I've added a block of NHL news to the site. It's based on the same code I created to grab Yahoo's NFL news. Enjoy.

Every once in a while I would get annoyed as I'd have to scroll certain pages on this site to see the text. When the page initally came up, the text wasn't there. I went to the MT forums and found this thread. It referred to the IE6 Peekaboo Bug, which appeared to be what I was seeing. I placed a few "line-height: 1.2em;"s in my stylesheet and it looks like that fixed the problem. It was occurring on at least the Comments page popups and the individual entry pages. If you are an IE6 user and you happen to see it anywhere else, please let me know.

Update: Coincidentally, News.com is running an article on IE's lack of W3C compliance. The quotes from MS are particularly smug. (Source: Slashdot)

I'm wondering if I have any readers coming here to check out the NFL and NHL news, whether that's your main goal (n.p.i.) or not. I'm thinking about increasing the functionality of my scrubbers and that got me to wondering...

In the absence of an MT poll plugin, please leave a comment if you have one either way. Thanks.

I have to say that my initial foray into DVD authoring is going pretty well. I managed to encode about 1 hour 45 minutes worth of Hi8 footage and burn it to a DVD-R courtesy of BTWinCap, VirtualVCR, TMPGENC Plus & DVD Author, and BeSweet. I got some pointers from DVDRHelp.com, but for the most part I was already familiar with the process of recording the video and transcoding it to MPEG-2.

I also caught wind of a new, convenient tool for shrinking MPEG-2 video files without needing to decompress and recompress the video. Nic's ReJig is a super-convenient and fast tool; I found the reference to it on Doom9's front page.

I now have a pretty decent method for capturing, processing, and authoring our home video for DVD. I didn't imagine I would be able to do this when we bought our first DVD player in '99.

I was reading a Rob Hurtt article and he mentioned in his last paragraph that BRUUUUUUUCE needs just 1.5 sacks to match Reggie White's all-time sack record. I knew he was only a few behind the record when the season started, so it's likely that he'll set a new record in only a few weeks. I think the fans in Buffalo will have enough class to celebrate if he breaks the record when the 'Skins visit Buffalo on Sunday. I know I will.

Either I have a poor team or a poor strategy (or both); my fantasy hockey team is currently next-to-last in our rotisserie league. I've shaken up my roster this week in hopes of jumpstarting the stats. I'm a casual hockey fan, so it's hard for me to keep up with who's hot & not at this point.

Rotisserie-style scoring is very new to me - I'm so used to the head-to-head style. Weaker teams have a much more difficult time in a rotisserie league.

Oh my goodness... William Shatner just did a Star-Trek-themed opening for Monday Night Football. Cool beyond belief!

I must say, Steven Tyler trades lines with Hank Williams, Jr. much better than Snoop Dogg does.

Here are some handy links if you'd like to order the DVD and/or CD from Amazon:

 

Don blogged on Monday about a free web hosting offer from 1&1. 3 years, no credit card info required, shell access to an outfitted Linux server. I signed up yesterday and will test Movable Type there in hopes of moving this blog. I may break my base URL and article IDs in the process; http://alexharden.org/blog/ might make things easier to manage. We'll see. I think I know who has references to this blog, so it shouldn't be a big deal to change.

I received my RIR DVD yesterday and began watching the documentary; it's very neat to see what goes on behind the scenes. I also took the concert disc and began the process of transcoding the audio into CDs I can listen to in the car. Thankfully, the AC3 stereo track was 448kbps, which is very transparent. They also included a 448kbps 5.1 surround track, but I don't have a surround sound system right now.

I'll probably watch the concert this weekend. It'll be great to have a Rush concert on DVD in the library. One note about the video though: anyone with a widescreen TV that can't zoom in on a 4:3 source might be disappointed with it. The producers chose a matted (letterboxed) presentation for the picture as opposed to anamorphic widescreen. However, the video looks clean, crisp, and great!

It looks like 1 & 1 is the real deal. I got a base MT site up in about 20 minutes last night, including the time it took me to edit mt.cfg with the parameters for the backend MySQL server they've set me up with. I'm finalizing my file layout before I point alexharden.org there. This blog's base URL will change to http://alexharden.org/blog/ after the move.

The next thing I'm going to configure out there is Gallery. I don't plan on hosting a ton of pics, but as long as I keep recent ones out there, the grandparents will be happy.

Looks like the DNS change has propagated and things seem to be working here. I put in a redirect from the old URL to this page; http://alexharden.org/blog/ is the new home URL. I'm going to take this opportunity to make a few more changes to the site. Let me know if you see any problems.

I didn't realize the difference between a Sousaphone and a tuba until today. I was watching Barney with my son and the show was about marching bands. No, I was never in the school band...

Parking Fee: $6.
Pack of 20 ride tickets: $14.
Dinner for two from "Decades": $19.50.
The look on your son's face after he gets five miniature-sized Hershey candies on his first Trick-or-Treat experience: priceless.

In just a few short years, "Halloween In Hershey" has turned from a sign of the Hershey chocolate company's holiday generosity into a managed, minimally expensed, and generally stingy experience. In prior years, there were 8-10 stations throughout the park where kids could go and receive regular-sized bars/packages of Hershey candies. This year, they relegated the candy giving to a cordoned path where each child (including my 3-year-old) had their hand stamped and was allowed to receive one miniature-sized candy ("one per customer, please" is an exact quote) from each of five stations.

I hope the penny-pinching executives responsible for "right-sizing" this experience are happy; I doubt we'll be visiting "Halloween In Hershey" in future years.

Arizona fans get two NFL games this weekend as tonight's MNF game between the Dolphins and the Chargers has been moved from San Diego to Tempe due to wildfires in San Diego County. This kind of thing doesn't happen very often in the NFL; the linked article is an interesting read. Let's hope those fires are able to be contained soon.

Rush's 1989 album Presto has always been one of my favorites. However, along with Roll The Bones, the two Rupert-Hine-produced albums have a lot of headroom and a light touch on bass. I've been wanting to remaster Presto for a while now, mainly to give it a bit more punch on bass and to put its overall volume at a level similar to Counterparts and Test For Echo. I think I've finally done it.

I was looking forward to the season premiere of 24 last night, but I didn't look around for previews and such. I watched the episode cold. I liked it. My thoughts on it follow.

The Trick-or-Treaters came around last night. We had decent weather (dry and in the upper 40's) so there were plenty of kids out. Our little guy joined the fray this year and got much more candy that he did at Hersheypark. I expect to share in the booty this year more than I will in future years. ;)