Where are the pretzels again?

You'd think one big sign would be enough.

Recipe I might try

I keep wondering where my mom got all her recipe ideas that she had me make over these past few years, and while checking her email recently, I saw one of her emails from Betty Crocker and got this one for a Beefy Italian Ramen skillet dinner. I printed this one as I'm always looking for creative uses for ramen noodles.

Hard coded subs figured out

What you need is a package I found called AVI ReComp. I used version 1.5.0.

If you have anything other than an AVI, like an MKV, you need to pull out the audio and video streams as an AVI. I was trying to use Media Coder to do this as well as hard code the subs, but it kept giving me problems. I used something else to grab my video file out. MKVToolsNix can viably pull out the streams. I did it once before, but it looks like I'll have to relearn how to use it.

Get your sub file extracted or just ready. I wanted to preserve not just the fonts, but color and styling as well, and AVI ReComp does a 2 pass method that did exactly what I wanted. It takes a while, but when the results are as you expect it, it's worth it. The sub file I worked from is a Advanced Sub Station alpha file.

Once you have your AVI and subtitle file, open AVI ReComp. Specify your input AVI, the output destination, then under Additions, you Enable Subs and the file that you are using. Go to Queue and add the job to the queue, after which you can Start.

During install, the AVI ReComp installer tried to put in Xvid, but I have a version of that already. When it came to one file it had an issue with, I told it to Ignore the problem and I still got results.

The end result is an AVI with hard coded subs that I don't have to worry about anymore as an MKV, which is good because I have a few MKVs with sub streams I have to deal with.

Wabi sabi

Moss on bricks - wabi or sabi?

Last unknown song finally identified!

The last unknown track from my Mystery CD found in 2004 while in Toronto for Anime North, found during an excursion to Chinatown while parked in the garage at Dragon City, was identified as a track by Koizumi Kyouko called "Harukaze no Yuuwaku" but as you can see by this Youtube link, the poster of that video didn't spell the romanized title the way I would have and had trouble finding the video.

depressed to tears

I could use some good news.

I got a phone call from my older sister that has left me depressed to tears and I don't need that right now.

I was waiting for a phone call but from a prospective job possibility.

I need help so bad.

So have the hang up phone calls stopped finally?

I don't know if it's due to the snow or what, but I haven't gotten any
more hang up phone calls since some time around Thursday. I know who
they're from, basically, and I sent off a letter a while back explaining
things. So the letter must have finally gotten around to the proper
people it was intended for, and a stop was put to the harassment.

Of course, I won't be surprised if I get some other sort of letter like
my mom did years ago that sparked this entire tragic journey of bad
decisions and a refusal to assume responsibility. If something like that
arrives, it'd better have the right person addressed on there and sent
Certified so I can laugh at it and have it sent back unreceived.

People don't know most of what I went through these last 11 years. I was
there as it unfolded right in front of me, and nobody listened to me as
I made pleas about what was going on and nobody helped. And I've never
been thanked for what I did, one of those was preventing my
grandparents' house from exploding due to incomplete combustion of
propane and spending an entire week waking up each day in the basement
with a massive headache because the pressure of the gas had gone up due
to a new tank being installed and nobody checked the damn furnace until
I got the idea that something was horribly wrong. If I hadn't figured
out how to adjust the fuel pressure in the furnace, we would have been
dead and the house would have been on the news. Someone freakin' thank
me for that!!

I took care of my mother with the help of the ladies from Caring Hands
that she was able to have come in, and nobody has ever thanked me.
Instead I get indirectly told that people blame me for what happened.
Well, my mom's wishes was for not to be shut up in a nursing home,
tossed aside along with her dignity. She saw what happened to her
parents and she could get around to some degree and she didn't want
that. It would have been disgraceful to not honor her wishes while she
was still able to voice her decisions.

If anyone has a problem with me stating my view on that whole mess, too
bad. How about helping me now while you still can and while I'm trying
to figure things out? Hypocrisy is a bad thing.

Should I rename this blog?

I've been thinking that maybe I should name this blog "My View of the
World" because obviously some people don't agree with my view.

To them, I say: Too BAD. Suck it.

I reject your reality and substitute my own in its place.

These opinions are fictional. Any similarity to real opinions is merely
a coincidence.

Also: Get a Life. You have more important things to worry about instead
of the random pen scratchings of one person. Go Away and GTFO. If you
don't like some of the things I have to say, don't read my blog. Calling
it libel will get you laughed out of court by not only the judge but the
bailiff and everyone else there. I do not post lies or falsehoods, only
opinions and things as I see them. Anything that affects me and how the
world treats me I consider fair game, so if you don't want something to
end up here, carefully consider how to word things and how I might end
up taking the general context of your words.

Thank you.

FAIL

Installed the DVD burner

Last night for some reason, I decided to just go ahead and install the
DVD burner I finally ordered. It's a Super Writemaster branded burner.
After a brief install in my mom's Dell, I knew it at least worked a read
CDs. Now it was time to test it as a DVD burner.

I arranged DVD Flick to make a disk with 2 24-minute episodes and then a
short clip after that. I set it up to use my 16G thumbdrive as an
external "scratchpad" drive as I had envisioned. While DVD Flick bitched
at me because the 16G Cruzer was Fat32 and therefore limited in the size
of the files it was to create (claiming some files might get as big as
2Gigs), I still had it go ahead and use it.

The program went through and created what I asked it to do. The longest
steps were encoding the video and then combining sources. After the
sources were combined, it just needed to copy the files over into DVD
naming structure.

For what I had it work on, it took about 3 hours, and that wasn't a full
disk of 4 or 5 episodes. I know the processor on this P4 tower is kinda
slow, but I didn't think it was THAT slow. The thumbdrive could be the
bottleneck in the process. I should look at the comparative data speeds
of a high speed 2.0 thumbdrive compared to the IDE Seagate hard drive.
It might be a good idea to maybe get a 2nd HD in there just for using as
a DVD Flick scratchpad, as I call it.

Oh yeah, about the tower. During install, I had to move the included CD
burner to another bay in the case. I noticed it was also set to Cable
Select. Who the hell keeps doing that? You can't use Cable Select unless
you have the special cable made for that, which would have holes punched
in the ribbon cable on the Drive Select wires. My burner went in set to
Master and plugged into the end of the ribbon cable on that channel (IDE
cable ends need to be terminated anyway), and while I can plug in the CD
burner as Slave, there's an issue with power plugs. I need to get a
Y-shapted extender cable. It seems whoever put together this tower used
a power supply with really short 4-wire power plugs.

Anywho, DVD Flick finishes making the files. I load up my burning
program. Even though I have the speed set to 4X, it takes only 5 minutes
to burn what I asked for, which is about right since a full disk would
be about 10 to 13 minutes. I'll check it soon for errors.

Also, I finally got to see my imported HK DVD of the 2nd Cardcaptor
Sakura movie in widescreen aspect for the first time! I bought that at
Anime North in 2001, if I remember right. I would like to rip the video
off the disk, extract the subtitles, and fix the aspect ratio of the
video to play on regular TVs.

And now I'm looking for the data DVD some guy wrote out for me a while
back, instead of the CD I hoped he would have done.