Bad driving, videos that can’t be converted and a broken hose
In the safety of my living room, I’m watching some really bad driving right now. Virtually. One wall of the room is serving as a screen this evening, and the projected game involves cars that can hit multiple light poles without ever scratching the paint. Try that with your father’s Olds. There’s lots of motor noise, a mix of sirens and gunfire. Entertainment for someone else. I just find the whole thing to be distracting.
I’ve been trying to convert a large video file for several days now. The original work was in FLV, I think, but with the wonder of web assistants, I saved the file locally in MP4 format. No problem watching the show with a variety of player software but I want more (more, more). My goal is to end up with an AVI encoded in Divx, using a decent sound codec. So far, I’ve wasted hours of processor time, tested a number of promising programs and resolved absolutely nothing. It’s a plot to drive me, slowly but surely, into a mumbling shell of a man. In passing, that has nothing to do with the virtual driving that covers the nearest patch of paint.
The pool will soon be “warm enough”, but my backwash hose has split along the edge. That would be par for the price if the hose had spent a season or two in service. Not so; the hose was installed, new, less than three weeks ago and was used maybe three times before developing “a parallel method of egress”. No sense trying to return cheap plastic to the hardware store; they’d only offer me more of the same. I guess we’re headed for a duct tape solution over the weekend.
