Is this on?

I am testing out my e-mail posting method to my blog. I am off to
Africa for 2 weeks; I hope to post photos and bits as often as I can
(because who really wants to read one huge post -- we are in the era of
soundbites, even personal notes.) I am expecting that South Africa will
have internet; Botswana, not so much. I hope to pick out only the best
photos -- no torturous slide shows here.

Dream (with Michael Chabon)

I am a spy. Maybe an assasin too. I sneak around the underground parking structure. My backpack stitching strains with the books stuffed in so tight that the backpack is almost as thick as it is tall. I emerge, walking up the ramp into the light. I have my mission and set out.

I walk around Chinatown, peering in the red-painted restaurants with the neon signs and the spinning ducks in the windows. I forget my mission now (in the wakened state) but I remember I keep running around looking for something, running from someone one.

I walke back down into the parking structure, to meet with my team. I stoop under a concrete ledge to get down into the parking area and find my team waiting. Then I realize that the whole plot was a story, written by the guy that wrote Summerland (I can remember the cover of the book -- that is how I know it was him) standing in front of me. I am not real -- I am just a character in his latest spy thriller.

A team member (call him Alfie) stands behind his pickup and unties a moacha brown sweater (the color of coffee after 2 heaping tablespoons of artifical creamer) from the rear loading hatch. His boyfriend had died earlier in the mission -- a casualty of the secret war we were in. Written on the back of the sweater in big, black block print was the note (like you would write on a note on a fridge) "Speaking of lemonade -- " and I can't see the rest of the note. Alfie crumples in tears, the loss of his boyfriend finally sinking in -- the final message is a mundane message about lemonade. I went over and encircled him in my arms, comforting him as he clutched the sweater to his chest, still sobbing those wet, wracked-with-uncontrollable-grief tears.

Speaking of Downloading Movies

Netflix + TiVo = Networked Movies on Demand

My New Favorite Codec: h264

In preparation for 40 hours worth of flights coming up, I have been preparing loads of television programming for viewing on my laptop. This includes the West Wing (seasons 1 and part of 2), South Park (seasons 1-4, 6 & 7) and Farscape (best of season 1). I don't want to lug all those DVDs around, so I am condensing them into smaller, computer-only viewable files. In that pursuit, I have been experimenting with the latest codecs: Xvid, DivX, MPEG-4 (implementation via ffmpeg) and the latest kid on the block: h264.

h264 has been just recently added to my mac encoder ffmpegX -- it is slow to encode (probably three times as slow as DivX) but boy howdy! does it create georgeous rips. It reduced the file size down to ~20% of the original MPEG-2 file with no loss in frame size (frame is still 720 px wide), frame rate or visible quality that I can see.

Doing some sniffing for another reason, I re-stumbled across Apple's Tiger preview page on the topic. Combine that with the new iMacs or some form factor similar and that the new HDTV DVDs (well, at least one version of the new HD DVDs -- but the splintered world of HD DVDs is a rant for a different post) support h264 as one of the codecs and you have the Apple future of consumer HDTV.

Given Jobs' dual CEOness, I expect him to have figured out both the content and the tech sides. I imagine he will update Quicktime to do something similar to that of iTunes music store where you can buy HDTV content online. (Read Mark Cuban's thoughts on this development of this as well.)

My prediction: this time next year, there will be some Pixar (Incredibles?)HDTV release for viewing on your Mac.