I’ve been converting video all day on my day off. Of course, I haven’t been sitting here watching it all day. But, two episodes of Galactica are now encoded to wmv from avi so that I can play it via Media Center on the XB 360. For some reason Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, neglected to give the XB 360 DivX or XviD decoding capability. Go figure 😛

But, I’ve been using Windows Media Encoder to change my video to suit the hunk of junk. It has taken all day to do three episodes of Galactica. I think the last will finally be done before bed, after which I have one more which will probably go a good bit of the day tomorrow.

It’s upscaling 608×336 vids to 1280×720. It’s doing a rather good job, me thinks. I’ve played part of two episodes and they look SD broadcast quality–which isn’t too stinkin’ bad, even on my 720p TV.

So, the Ruthie shall now be able to see the last 4 (and most important) episodes of the season 😀 w00t!

And thus begins Geekfest ’07. lol. Actually, I have to get through a day of work, which includes a demo I’m not looking forward to. Bleh! But, after work, Ruthie and I shall be headed to Atlanta. I bet traffic in B’ham is going to be a joy 😛

There’s going to be so much to see there, and so little time to see it all. My Jedi costume has been mended by the lovely Ruthie, the creator of the awesome threads; it had seen lots of action at the last D*C we went to in ’05, so it certainly needed a lil fixing.

Anyhoo, should be a hoot. Pictures shall most certainly be posted, at some point. I’m pretty sure Cristine said she purchased Internet access, so reports shall come in semi-daily 🙂

So, I gave my house a bath today. The exterior is 100% vinyl, so it has accumulated a bunch of mold and webs in the year since I bought the joint. My dad brought over a pressure washer, and it has worked wonders. It got rid of most of the web-age, and has also gotten rid of nearly all of the mold. It was almost like wiping the house with water. I can only imagine the water bill this coming month 🙂 Well worth it, though. Maybe next time I’ll go 4-6 months before pressure washing 🙂 Next spring. Mark it down.

I went with Ruthie and a couple other friends to a Huntsville Stars game last night. For all of you non-Huntsville types, they’re the AA affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers. It was a nice game, though they lost 3-2. I’m only really interested when the West Tennessee Diamondjacks come to town–they’re the AA affiliate of the Cubs 😀 Joe Davis Stadium, where the Stars play, is the most underwhelming stadium you’ve ever seen. It was built in the 80s, and you can absolutely tell they’ve made relatively no effort at renovation. If anything, they’ve regressed; there’s now a chain-link fence in the outfield where a wall used to be. It was a nice game, though, and good company.

I’ve been watching War of the Worlds season 2 on YouTube–actually, I’m in the process of downloading them all from YouTube, too. It really isn’t all that bad; it’s certainly a different show from what it was in the first season. Harrison Blackwood is a completely different character. Unfortunately, it was so “bad” that it’ll probably never make it to DVD and all I’ll have are low-res YouTube downloads *sigh* At least the series did have an end; they knew the series was cancelled so they wrapped things up.

I never got to see the second season of War of the Worlds. When it was aired, my dad thought I was too young to see it. So, I never did see it. I knew that they killed off half of all of the known characters, and that the world was really dark.

I’d like to hoist a Smirnoff to the soul who posted this.

House approves foreign wiretap bill

The Lefties complain about wiretapping, saying it’s illegal. They complain about Bush going around FISA and then they decide to update FISA and make it legal?!

…from Space.com…

Wow, the gal’s been waiting 21 years to get up there. I do hope there aren’t any more delays…that was a long wait! I just can’t imagine how awful that wait was, especially given that we’ve lost two orbiters in the interim. She has guts 🙂

So, Glorybreeze and Dubiago got down with their bad mechanical chickens the other day 🙂

(click on picture to take the quiz)

Star Trek

Zachary Quinto really does look like Nimoy back in the hippy days of the 60s. He still looks like the bad guy, though, who will eat your brain and take away your superpowers 😛 Still nothing on the plot. I guess that’s potentially still pretty fluid, particularly since they haven’t started filming yet. I’m totally going on opening night on this one 😀

Oh, and there’s this:

Indiana Jones

Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) is back in this one, which had been rumored for quite some time. It comes out May 22, 2008 🙂

So, I heard the most disturbing thing this morning. I really don’t know why, specifically, it was disturbing, but it got me quite perturbed. Perhaps equally odd is that I wake up to NPR in the morning. They do have decent news coverage, even if it is a lefty slant in many cases. That being said, I wouldn’t listen to their political commentary even if a lefty tied me to a chair and made me 😛

Anyhoo, I usually listen to the news when I am waking up. I usually lay there for about 10-15 minutes just listening as my brain boots up for the day. They got to a story about the war in Iraq, of course. The House and Senate have been failing left and right to pass withdrawal measures–go figure, with both houses under Democratic control 😛

The last thing I heard before going into a total tizzy and jumping out of bed was that the House is trying to pass a measure, instead, to ban permanent US bases. I jumped out of bed spouting nearly every curse known to humankind.

The Democrats are, of course, saying that we’ve lost to the terrorists and it’s time to scamper away and let chaos take hold. The Republicans see the insurgency as a setback, but an overcome-able one. Neither party seems to have publically acknowledged that it took 20 years or so to rebuild Germany after WWII. Here we are, a mere four years after we went into Iraq, and we’re already “weary” of it.

The comparison obviously has its flaws–there were no large-scale insurgency movements to the degree we see in Iraq today, in Germany or Japan. But, the process of rebuilding a country is something we’ve done before. The added insurgency here, obviously, adds certain difficulty to it. We are the ones who tore the country up, we’re the ones who supplanted a dictator. We owe the Iraqi people big-time; we need to leave the country better than it was when we came in.

It’s going to take a long time, just as it did in post-Nazi Germany. It may take longer because of that insurgency–which is probably more comparable to Northern Ireland than Germany. But, the cost of a completely chaotic Iraq without our presence is pretty damn high. The cost of surrender to the insurgents is even higher.

It was one thing to pull out of Vietnam…Vietnam wasn’t officially a war, it was a training exercise for the South Vietnamese army. The price is far higher if we run from Iraq, all because we’re uncomfortable with going toe-to-toe with the filth that is the insurgency.

The banning of permanent US bases in Iraq just puts a nail in the coffin for the Democrats. They really don’t seem to know WTF they are doing. They don’t know the consequences of the actions they are trying to take, or the implications to the greater extremist Islamic movement. If we pull out of Iraq completely, there’s going to be hell to pay. Iraq will look to us in the future and hate us for abandoning them, it will embolden those elements of Al-Qaeda in Iraq which are inflicting harm on us and the Iraqis.

I’m just upset because we’re obviously war-weary–or so the Democrats would have the general populace believe. Perhaps there is some truth to that; people have had 2-3 tours in Iraq lasting up to 18 months. Then again, was it any different in WWII? I’m convinced that, if we were to fight WWII today, we’d probably lose the damn thing 😛