Why do all of the cool t-shirts on the web cost like $17? Where are the $7 tees?

My first impression of looking at this picture was that it was mediocre at best. Go ahead and look at it now. I’ll wait.

Back now? Looking at it now later, I notice the girl in orange, which totally changes my opinion.

Anyway, not much going on here. Cold and stuff. My car could really use a tune up/tire brake rotation/checkup. I also need a haircut, but for whatever [stupid] reason I continue to push it off. I did laundry, which made me feel better than it should have. I also felt like I worked all weekend. And how is it that a person would have no qualms about marrying someone they hardly know? What sense does that make? What sense does this sentance make? None. It’s 2am and bedtime for bonzo.

Spam poetry for your enjoyment:

suddenly the sandwich taught miserable,
suddenly immediate wife mentioned out yours.

my side steps across love explain,
hard anybody fire wrong respect goes,
young is anybody you different?

bought here find.

bought out disappoint mischievous already,
somewhere drew evening again yours.

reply letters the commit find end.
how purpose being.

Watched Dukes of Hazzard and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room over the weekend. I thought both of them were excellent. Why didn’t anyone tell me that Jay Chandrasekhar directed it? He had a cameo with Rabbit. Farva was in it, along with Kenny from Garden State, Jessica Simpson, and Willie smoking an apple as a bong. Good times.

Aquarius January 20 – February 18

The stars understand that faith is difficult in the modern world, but trust them when they tell you that the derivative of a constant is always zero.

This Dilbert is hilarious and all too true.
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2006020523365.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/loupiote/91959961/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/buzzby09/93504263/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/floyduk/94255561/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/themightyjimbo/93489485/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hobo_pd/93652752/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pochacco20/94496171/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/salli/93013028/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexandrend/95459027/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/notcatherinezeta/94943445/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/schizoo23/95464358/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leahcim/93603573/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xdrei/94116827/

I don’t know about you guys, but I love dvd commentaries. I’m not entirely sure why, but I do. And just about as much as I love audio commentaries, I love linux, transcoding, and my avel linkplayer2. Why you may ask? Because the synergy of those things allows me to be lazy and just watch movies without having to deal with the phyical dvds. BUT, it also means that the movies that I watch don’t have the commentaries on them. So, when I do own a great movie, such as Garden State, I figure, hey, I’m a reasonably bright individual, why don’t you re-encode the movie to include the audio commentaries? Well, that’s just what I did, and I’m going to tell you how I did it.

Rip & transcode w/ dvdrip. This gives you a project directory in ~/.dvdrip, the vob files, and a shiny, newly-ripped avi. For me this took about 2.5 hours and made my system virtually unusable. Load avg was over 10 for the duration. :( Time for new ram. 2GB anyone? :)

Rip the audio from the vobs like so (the vobs are in the directory vob/001/):

tccat -i "vob/001/" -t vob -d 0 -S 0 | tcdemux -a 2 -x ac3 -S 0 -M 2 \\
 -d 0 | tcextract -t vob -a 2 -x ac3 -d 0 > commentary-1.ac3
tccat -i "vob/001/" -t vob -d 0 -S 0 | tcdemux -a 3 -x ac3 -S 0 -M 2 \\
 -d 0 | tcextract -t vob -a 3 -x ac3 -d 0 > commentary-2.ac3

Garden State has 4 ac3 audio tracks: 0 is english, 1 is spanish, 2 is the first commentary, and 3 is the second commentary.

Add the commentaries to the original avi:

avimerge -o tmp.avi -i garden_state_xvid_dvdrip.avi -p commentary-1.ac3
avimerge -o garden_state_xvid_dvdrip_with_commentary.avi -i tmp.avi \\
 -p commentary-2.ac3

Voila! Now you have an even shinier and newer avi with 3 total audio tracks and 2 new audio commentaries. Looks like each new audio track cost us roughly 141MB! in additional storage space, but, hey, it’s worth it.

Tune in next time for another installment of Thomas’s Cool and Overly Complex Technology, we’ll discuss the possible advantages of the new h264 codec to improve quality while decreasing filesize.

References:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_DVD-Ripping
http://dominia.org/djao/dvdsub.html
http://www.transcoding.org/cgi-bin/transcode?Command_Examples/Multi-Audio_AVI-Files
http://www.transcoding.org/cgi-bin/transcode?Command_Examples/Pass-Through_Modes
http://www.bunkus.org/dvdripping4linux/single/index.html#tricks_extraaudio

Technorati Tags: dvdrip, dvd, rip, transcode, audio, tracks, linux, avimerge, dual, vob, avi, add, extract, passthrough

I need more cheese. I think I’m on my last two slices, which I am about to eat for supper. And I just was at Kroger like two days ago, but I didn’t realize… :( Yes, yes, I know. I have a rough life.

I just bough sheets on Amazon, from Macys. Quite odd.

Time to eat and finish Episode IV.

Since these are all tabbed in Firefox at the moment, I’ll throw them in as well.

http://www.digitalapoptosis.com/archives/montreal/000777.html
http://shahin.ca/foto/286/
http://www.joesnyc.streetnine.com/archives/montoursville_pennsylvania_ca_1920_my_greatgrandfather-january_28_2006_31.html
http://iveseenbetter.com/archives/000616.html
http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/archives/photos_architecture/060123_1441.shtml
http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/archives/photos_landscape/060125_1444.shtml

I’ve been slacking on updating this thing again. I just can’t seem to scrape up much to talk about.

Just got back from skiing in VT. The skiing was much better than I was expecting, so that was good. I am still working on getting the tiredness and soreness to go away.

I think that Wendy’s is sometimes ripping me off… :( But I can’t seem to stop going.

I read some more on Jim Cramer’s book on the plane rides, and finally finished it. Hopefully soon I’ll be doing my research/homework into stocks and start playing in the stock market.

I also just yesterday hooked Marc up with a blog and photoblog. You should check them out.

Enough update for now, I just woke up from a nap and I really need to eat something…

Well, folks, you heard it here first. Peeps are trying to raise funds to get Firefly back on the air. They’ve got $387 (as of this writing), so throw in some change; I might even, too

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mintchaos/86325832/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/effpunkt/85392401/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cybele_malinowski/85425383/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timothymorgan/86895027/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdiddley/86146628/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/anxiousdog/86123766/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aphrodite/84987452/
http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/archives/photos_architecture/060112_1428.shtml

The last one was the best that I had seen in quite some time. Now that I’ve subscribed to the interestingness feed from flickr, I get to see a lot more raw numbers of pictures, which increases the number of really good pics that I get to come across.

RUN, do not walk, and find the movie “The Third Wheel”. I have no idea how I’ve missed this awesome movie since it came out in ’02. Go now. Don’t wait. What are you waiting for? Why are you still reading this? Seriously, go rent it. Download it. Do whatever you need to do to watch this movie. Seriously. Do it. Do it. Do it.