Many YouTube videos have such low technical quality as to be barely watchable, so my sister Jean was impressed by an OK copy, despite being a vertically cropped version with the wrong aspect ratio, of the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night doing “If I Fell.” Here’s how it appears and sounds on YouTube…
… and here’s my own transfer, from LaserDisc, captured on a Pinnacle 500 PCI. Better?
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/JAN/IfIFell.flv 480 360]
Go back to the very funny Men in Coats video I posted and watch the first three minutes. It’s Mambo music from Cuba. The first tune is “Mambo Jambo,” and here’s a recording of it by Prado Perez, from 1959, the year Castro took over.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JAN/MamboJambo.mp3]Great stuff! OK, now go back to the K3 New Year video and listen from 0:08 to 0:20. It’s some of the same music used by Men in Coats. See? I said you’d heard it before.
Mambo was big in the late 40’s into the 50’s, and one of its biggest names was this guy, whose studio later gave the green light to Star Trek.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JAN/ILoveLucy.mp3]Ding, dong, the Bush gone… well, almost. Not been posting much. Sorry! We went out to eat two nights in a row, but not tonight, because it snowed today. Still working on Eric’s computer.
To gain control over the failed drive I put it in an external PATA-to-USB case I saved after the 80 GB drive in it failed, not too long after I copied everything on it to a 160 GB USB drive, that has already been replaced with a 500 GB drive. I ran CHKDSK on the drive and it fixed a bunch of index errors. Then booting into safe mode I took ownership of all the folders of interest and I got everything worth getting off it, but I’ll still probably junk the drive, because it’s five years old. I’ll make the 2-year-old 200 GB D: drive the primary and install XP on that.
This is what I’m looking at right now for Eric’s PC:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545
Not fun. It was fine yesterday, and now it’s anything but. AAUGH!
Looks like I’m going to have to resort to putting the primary drive into a USB case, attach it to my computer, and see if there’s still a file system on it. Agg-oh-knee.
Here it is, the first snow of the winter, and we’re promised about a foot of it, so I’m glad the snow thrower started right up and is ready to go. This will be its tenth season.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/DEC/SnowThrower.flv 480 360]
Carol and I sometimes talk about the fact that our neighborhood doesn’t have natural gas service, but we’re surrounded by streets that do. The last time we had that discussion was in August, when heating oil was heading for $5/gal. But now with heating oil $2.50/gallon or less, I’m reminded of the downside of natural gas.
