Great Frontline program — The Wounded Platoon

I just listened to this as a podcast and then watched the video online after that.  It’s a really interesting slice and view into the Iraq war — where they just focus on one specific platoon.  ”Wounded” refers more to the psychological rather than physical wounds — although the latter relates to the former…

The original materials, background, and discussion can be seen here.

The 7 chapter program can be seen in its entirety here:

Kitty shot

Cutest teddy bear kitty helps me with laundry.

Updated Site!

Woohoo!

So after over a year of owning this site w/ little more than 10 posts and pages geared towards AIDS LifeCycle fundraising and training, I’ve finally merged my personal site into this site and updated it.  So now this is the

New home of Tracey Jaquith and Dumb Bunny Productions.

I’ve got new a new navigation layout and structure, updated CSS and style, and about 20 main info pages added.  I’ll be tweaking it a bit, but the biggest changeover is now live!  This site aims to blend blogging with a more traditional website.

Star Wars re-remastered to high quality 1977 version!

So I wanted to sit down in my updated home theatre and watch one of my favorite films, “Star Wars”. Problem is, I have two versions on DVD, and neither are ideal. The 2004 DVD version has remastered audio and video, but also added scenes and changes I really don’t like. The 1977 DVD version is a poor quality transfer and encoding.

So I combined the 1977 and 2004 DVDs into the highest quality 1977 version of the film! I show all my scripts and techniques here, too, so you can make the same version from your two DVDs, too!
http://www.archive.org/details/reremaster

star wars comparison of two films

ffmpeg for time-lapse, sets of images, and even *archiving*!

I now use the FFMPEG package compiled locally on my Mac Leopard laptop.

If you want to take a bunch of JPEG images, you can turn them into a “motion JPEG” AVI video file (which is ideal for time-lapse). What’s neat about ffmpeg, is you can turn a directory of JPEGs into an AVI and later recreate the JPEGs from the AVI.

Thus, I can take 100-1000 JPEG images from a “shoot” and create a video time-lapse of all the JPEG images in a given subdir in a command-line shell (terminal):
ffmpeg -r 6 -i "%04d.jpg" -an -vcodec copy out.avi

Even cooler, you can go directly back to *the same JPEG* images like so (this is where you can see it is a lossless conversion from JPEGs to Motion JPEG and back):
ffmpeg -i out.avi -vcodec copy "%04d.jpg"


“-r 6″ is the framerate, ie: “make the video play 6 JPEG images per second”.

It doesn’t get much nicer than that! Not to mention, the encoding is FAST! I recently moved from mencoder/mplayer to ffmpeg since you can specify a complete copy of the input JPEGs (lossless from the source) as well as compress them down a bit (as you like).

For the lossless conversion, the (not entirely obvious) *key* to success is to use the “-vcodec copy” *after* the source file(s).

You can get this running on Windows with Cygwin, Mac with terminal, and any linux distribution like Ubuntu.

THANK YOU DONORS!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

donors to my AIDS LifeCycle8 bikeride!

I took about 500 photos myself during the seven days of riding. Hunter also took about that many photos, too. I will make a combined album soon and edit a video as well and put links to them on this site.

However, for now, you can see    ~100 of my best photos on my public albums here:

Photo album (1 of 2)

Photo album (2 of 2)

Finished the ride!

Well, Hunter and I made it home safe and sound last night!

We finished just before the course formally closed, yesterday (saturday) around 3pm.
(A lot of us were late due to two accident-caused road closure/delays and then Hunter and I decided to sneak off course a block to reward ourselves with Peets mocha freddos just before riding in.   We flew from LAX to SFO and then BART-ed and were home just after midnight.  Was sooo nice to see the kitties again and get things airing out!

Some interesting summary thoughts:

• Day 6 got entirely cancelled and we had to be bussed from camp to camp. We originally thought it was due to the uphill and downhill being deemed “too dangerous” in the rain by the CHP, but it was actually because that pass got closed temporarily due to rain related accidents and only ~250 riders (~10%) made it out on the rainy road before the “hold”. We had a 3 hour permit to cone off a single lane of route 101/1 on this narrow “no shoulder” bridge, and by the time the pass was reopened, not all the riders were likely to make it through the pass. CHP didn’t want to extend the times so they asked us to cancel that day. *First time* that has happened in 16 years of LifeCycle / AIDSRide !   Of course, the irony is that the rains stopped early in the morning by about 8am, and Hunter and I (and the riders who have similar pace — at least 50% of the riders) could have easily made that road closure for a really wonderfully beautiful perfect biking weather day.
• Although the weather was a bit ominous at times, we only got about three 5-10 minute very light sprinkles of rain while biking or in the nonsleeping hours of camp.  It did rain one morning pretty good — causing a lot of tents to flood.  We prepared a bit better with a tarp under our tent (and had a thick air mattress) so we didn’t get tooo wet.
• I was slightly crabby or something Day1 (due to lack of sleep and foggy wet start) but every day pretty much got *more* beautiful and better as it went on.  If fact, I loved every day but day6 (which wasn’t awful — just disappointing that the route got cancelled.)
• This year the biggest difference was the fact that while last year was hot and dry nearly every single day, this ride was a slight bit cool (though nicely never cold at all) and *very* humid (comparatively) every day.  Strange this time of year!
• Day 5 was a big change of course this year.  Last year was a total cakewalk (or “champagne ride” as the pros sometime call last day of Tour de France ) at only 43 miles and limited hills (w/ so so scenery).  This year was a noteably tougher nearly 70 miles where the ride to lunch was *jaw droppingly* gorgeous (riding wine country a al the movie “Sideways” into Solvang for the first time in ALC history) and fantastic.  However, after lunch was quite challenging where we headed directly westward for Lompoc — which meant the picking up strong wind was all headwind on flats and downhills and we were working hard on a *lot* of uphills.  So there was “no recovery” period from lunch to camp.  

Overall, once again an utterly fantastic ride!

We knew so many people this year it was like a rolling party of socializing and eating (well with determined-to-finish work on the bike in between ).  It’s soooo nice to have found this wonderful community of people who care for others and everyone in the Ride.  I’ve been thinking it’s a lot like the communities people find in churches (having grown up Methodist but now non-religious).

Rain delay at start day6

Well we are all waiting to roll after CA Highway Patrol
Shut down the course due to early rain.
Not sure if we’ll get cleared to ride
Was an early accident on only
big downhill of the day.

Rumor is now day may be cancelled
and will have to bus 2000+ riders
and bikes. We will see…

Starting Day 6!

So far so good.
We made it safe and dry until now.
Today started light rain with wet tent.
It’s let up over breakfast mostly
so we are hoping hoping for a break
Today and crossing our fingers

Today’s highlights are Santa Barbara,
Hopefully dolphin coastal sightings,
And an ice cream stop — it’s
Normally super hot today!

Yesterday’s day 5 “red dress day” was
A blast even though it was a bit of a
Hard finish with hills and headwinds

Thanks all for your support, interest,
And comments!

Halfway through AIDS LifeCycle

We finished day three’s ride today. I an feeling very strong still and enjoying the unbelievably pretty inland agricultural “salad bowl” of CA and then the dryer wide open grasslands too. The weather has been quite good – not too hot and not too cool. The colder mornings are offset by the rather unseasonly humidity

Hunter is doing well too. Each day seems to get more social and more fun. We know and keep meeting more wonderful people

What a fantastic event!