Gustav

I recently watched NOVA’s program on Hurricane Katrina called Storm That Drowned A City. It was a fascinating program detailing the timeline of Katrina’s march to New Orleans, focusing on how the storm’s surges undermined and overran the city’s levees. The takeaway was that the city is no better protected now than it was three years ago.

Now comes Tropical Storm Gustav, a storm which could quickly get nasty that is now making a turn towards New Orleans. The next week may provide a chance to see if we’ve learned anything.

Funky Towne

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!

iPod video recipe

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.

No room for Fay

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.

Sneeze season has begun

Yesterday was the first day of school and this morning I’m on my way to a full-blown cold. Coincidence?