I’ve been following the fight against leukemia waged by brave little Esten Maxwell, son of local musician Tom Maxwell. Tom posted today about Esten’s recent visit to the sedation clinic. Its a very emotional read.
Get well soon, Esten! You’ve got a lot of fans out here on the Internets.
I love the marketing campaign for Raleigh Wide Open III, announcing the grand opening of the new convention center September 5th and 6th. The signs hanging from Fayetteville Street lightposts are hilarious. They say “Thou art now in Funky Towne,” “Get down with thy bad self,” “Get thine merriment on,” among others.
Very clever!
Here are the commands I’m using for importing DVDs into the iPod. Shown is the script for the Muppets DVD. It requires the libdvdcss libraries to be added, as well as the MP4Box app. MP4Box takes the mencoder-encoded file and stamps it with the appropriate iPod bits to make it show.
GUEST="Vincent_Price"; time mencoder dvd://8 -dvd-device /dev/scd0 -sws 9 -of lavf -lavfopts format=mp4 -vf scale=320:240 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1381:vbv_maxrate=1500:vbv_bufsize=2000:nocabac:me=umh:trellis=1:level_idc=30:global_header:threads=2:pass=1:turbo -oac faac -faacopts mpeg=4:object=2:br=160:raw -channels 2 -srate 48000 -o Muppets-$GUEST.mp4 && MP4Box -add Muppets-$GUEST.mp4 output/Muppets-$GUEST.mp4 && [ -f output/Muppets-$GUEST.mp4 ] && rm Muppets-$GUEST.mp4 && echo "done."
Also see this helpful Ubuntu forum post for other cool tools.
I’m glad Western North Carolina will be getting a good drink from Tropical Storm/Depression Fay. Lord knows they need it. As for me, though, I’m still sitting on 300+ gallons of rainwater, so I reluctantly removed the downspout hose from my tank when the first drops came down this morning.
I fiddled with my new tank pump this weekend in an effort to test it out. Turns out the 1″ suction hose I bought had the threads stripped on one connector. After much time spent patiently threading and rethreading the connector into the pump I finally got it on there properly. By that time it was already dark outside, so the pump will wait another week or two when it is dry again.
I have to say I’ve been very pleased with this August’s weather. It hasn’t been baking hot for the first summer in a while. Of course, we paid that price earlier this summer but even that didn’t last too long. We’ve also had reliable rain this month, which is a welcome change.
Yesterday was the first day of school and this morning I’m on my way to a full-blown cold. Coincidence?
