Writing Wrongs

Forgot that I have band practice tonight, which might mean no update till tomorrow unless I do it now. So I'm spending lunch hour at Starbucks ingesting alternative forms of calories.

Yesterday was busy at work, and got busier. Lunch was with automation guy and sales guy at Andy's BBQ. Made the mistake of ordering the Italian sausage. I keep forgetting that it's nasty stuff most places.

Managed to scratch my reading glasses. Good thing I buy them 5 at a time, and always have a spare in the car.

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Where did all these people come from? 1:25 pm on a school day doesn't strike me as coffee rush hour.

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After work hopped on the expressway and  went to the Computer History Museum for a panel discussion called "Univac to Web 2.0" with the theme allegedly being how political polling and campaigns have been/will be affected by Internet improvements. The panelists were two former Obama PR people and one PR guy who had headed Meg Whitman's campaign after being a Bush white house minion. The moderator was a Harvard historian.

None of them knew squat about technology.

Things started out promising, with the CHM CEO showing a clip from Walter Cronkite & crew on the first election night where CBS used Univac to predict an election. 1952, the machine predicted Eisenhower in a landslide but CBS went with all the other polls which predicted an almost tie race with Adlai Stevenson.  One of the panelists noted that the Univac had better data. He pointed out that the polls were done by telephone in a time when only the relatively affluent had phones.

The panel devolved quickly into discussions of past political campaigns, with almost no mention of technology. The moderator chose (written) questions from the audience which did not touch on technology. I was sitting in the back row and saw many people bail after the first 20 minutes. It just wasn't very interesting. One amusing item is two of those panelists now work for Facebook. In roles for which they have no apparent qualifications. Hmmmm.

Home, there was another note from Roxio support, it blamed Tivo for the problem, with no hints on why he thought this or what it may be. I replied that I want my $$ back.

I'd done some searches at work and found out two things: There is a freeware program which can convert Tivo to MPEG without the reduction in resolution which Roxio performs, and  the issue I was seeing was probably because I was using Tivo's fast transfer (which creates a transport stream file) instead of normal transfer (which builds a program stream file compatible with DVDs).

So, before I went to bed I started a slow transfer, and this morning I ran the file through both Roxio and the freeware program, and they both worked. I was able to import the converted freeware file into Corel's video editor, edit out the commercials, insert chapter marks and export an ISO file which I'll try to burn to a DVD later.

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work so far has been a bit wonky. A couple of new assignments will be challenging to write tests for, because they are about how other devices communicate with ours, and the results will only show on those other devices.

Someone on flickr.com has created a phony group called "flickr" which he/she/it claims is for newbies to see what all kinds of things are on the site. I received an invitation to post my SportsClock mockup on their group. Declined. But it did inspire me to put in a full description of the image, which was created in MSPaint and is not  a photograph.

YOTB rehearsals tonight
Plans for tomorrow:
work
pack for weekend trip
go to sleep early to make it to the train on time Saturday.