I’ll cheat and combine days. A couple of them were half-days with work that wouldn’t be obvious. Concrete footings for additional support were set, and now the beam and posts have been added, but I won’t bore you with that. The windows are in, and it’s looking a lot more like a room now.
Click to enlarge
This announcement from Adobe about Flash has implications for this blog. Very good ones! Video quality will go way up, and I should be able to save videos directly to a Flash-ready format, instead of having to go through a two-step process of saving as an AVI and converting to FLV. You can count on me jumping on this right away!
One thing that makes some people cynical — not me, of course, but “some people” — is a failed CEO getting nearly $50 million to go away, on top of a $5m severance package. Case in point: Kevin Rollins at DELL Computer Corporation.
We found our way to where we wanted to go for a Sunday trip, but then we got lost. The Davis Mega Maze, in rural Sterling, Massachusetts is a great way to do a lot of walking, get dehydrated, and frustrated for $15 per person. You could do that for free, of course, but then you wouldn’t have the fun of walking along paths surrounded by corn that’s higher than an elephant’s eye.
The teens, Eric and his cousin Kate, made it through the maze before we did, so the grown-ups resorted to asking for hints from a couple of the guides. This year’s theme is “Lost Vegas,” so when you get to the end you’re given a gold poker chip. To do the maze properly and really master it, you should go early and take advantage of the all-day admission to go through more than once.
Groucho Marx died 30 years ago today, just three days after Elvis’ demise. Being 44 years old when Elvis was born in 1935, and having been in ill health for some time when Elvis died at age 42, Groucho’s death was no surprise.
A brief clip from Duck Soup that I posted is here. The first Marx Brothers movie was The Cocoanuts. It’s old. How old? It was released in August 1929, two months before the stock market crash!
Here are the first 7 or so minutes of The Cocoanuts. Irving Berlin wrote the music. It sounds as though Berlin had been listening to a lot of George Gershwin before writing this score.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/AUG07/Cocoanuts.flv 400 300]
The “why a duck” gag isn’t in this clip. Maybe I’ll post it later.
NPR has a short feature (a featurette?) on the 25th anniversary of the completion of the development of Compact Disc. The CD format was introduced in America in 1983. Here is a brief audio snippet from the NPR featurette.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/AUG07/LDCD.mp3]They characterize LaserDisc as having been a flop, and they call it a digital video disc. The first point is debatable and the second is simply incorrect.
LD was never a big success, but after the LaserDisc format was bought from Philips by Pioneer it found its place as a high-end niche product, and it remained in production until after DVD got going in 1998. So LD lasted for roughly 20 years, and its supplementary material, alternate audio tracks and chapter stops were a model for the DVD format.
Digital sound was added to LD around 1985, but at no time did it have digital video. It was FM analog, just like VHS, but with much higher quality. The video in yesterday’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers post was taken from a 20-year-old LaserDisc.
