This is another really typical blog post. Nothing interesting here.

I had a lot to do today, and didn’t get enough done. In the morning I got up at a reasonable time for the weekend – 9:30am, and called the family back home. It is hard to find good times to call America because usually in the morning I’ve got to go to work and can’t spend too long on the phone. After chatting with Alana and Mom I started in on folding the laundry, which had been waiting for me since Saturday. My wife was catching up on sleep, since I think she didn’t make it home from her work-related drinking party until very late.

I had a bit of work to do for NTCIR (an academic workshop I’m involved in) and standard checking up on email and the web, then I spent some time writing blog posts. I’ve been meaning to write about a bunch of things, and finally knocked a few of them out. There’s still more on the list, and I’m not sure why I’m writing these things since I don’t know who is reading, but I think it will be nice to have these things down for posterity. In eighty years maybe it will be interesting for me to go back and read these things. Assuming the technology still exists to access such ancient data. 🙂

R. cooked up some spaghetti for lunch, and we worked on the leftover meat sauce that I made a while back. It was good. She added some spices to it, so it was a bit hot too. Nice though. Then she headed out to work and I went to the local Jusco to buy some clothes for running: it has been getting cold lately, and I want to keep jogging, so I needed to get some good sweat pants and a light jacket.

More bad things to put in doughnuts

While shopping, I ran by the Mister Donut shop and saw another doughnut combination that I just really don’t think should exist. I wrote about unusual food combinations before and think this is another good example: a Shrimp Gratan donut that has shrimp, a white cream sauce, macaroni, and mushrooms. That doesn’t sound bad really, I just don’t want that in a doughnut shop.

Jogging

Once I came back from that, I needed to test out the cold weather running gear so I took off for a jog. Since it was still 4pm, there was a bit of sun out (only for another hour though) so I thought I would try to find a new loop. I had a nice 6.8km loop, and a nice 4.3km loop, but nothing longer. We live in a nice area for running (for Japan) I think: we are right on the Tokyo Bay on a little canal that runs up between us and an island that is used for loading and unloading boats and storing trains. There is a big park on the island. I can see the loading docks from my balcony, so I’ve been trying to find a way to get out there and jog alongside the open bay. Today was the closest I have ever come, but I failed. I don’t think that loading docks are really open to the public.

You see two pictures of the route that I took that were recorded with my cell phone. It has a nice little GPS program that can do all that stuff. The website that displays the data isn’t very good though and it drops a lot of the little location dots. Bummer. I tried to get over to the bay twice, and was stopped by dead ends or major highways. I’ll have to check the area out with Google Maps more and see if I can get over there somehow, because the view must be great.

Running back up the canal area at night is really nice: you can see the Monorail glide by over on the other side of the canal, there is a nice big horse racing stadium that is lit up sometimes, and there are some nice towers that make neat reflections over the water (including ours.) Hopefully I’ll be able to keep on jogging through winter. The new running clothes worked great, and the jacket was too hot, so I almost ended taking that off. Should be great for even colder weather, and Tokyo usually doesn’t get down to much below 0 Celsius, so I think I’ll be fine.

After the run I came home, took a shower, vacuumed, did the dishes (man I have got to take a picture of our dishwasher. It is comically small – only slightly wider than my outspread hands) then had some leftover curry.

Dealing with HD Video is much harder than it should be

R. has been trying to make a DVD of a video she took for her friend’s wedding, but she used this completely high-tech 1080p HD video camera. (Not ours, borrowed from her sister.) I couldn’t get that thing to transfer data onto my OSX machine, couldn’t get it to transfer data onto my big ThinkPad, didn’t want to try to do it on my linux machine, and had major problems doing it with the little ThinkPad that R. uses, but finally that went through. She burned a few DVDs and finally asked me why she couldn’t watch them. Hm. Good question. Checking the DVDs out, it is clear: the program that she used to edit the DVDs only seems to burn to a format that can be ready by Blu-Ray DVD players, of which we have none. She just wants a normal DVD. I have iMovie on my Mac which can do that, but it can’t read the files spit out by that camera.

So she asked me to do something about this. I spend some time with the “HD Writer 2.5” software that Panasonic included with the camera (and which wouldn’t install on the beefier ThinkPad) and found a way to export to MPEG-2. That is a pretty reasonable format, so I was pretty sure I could get that to import on the Mac. Annoyingly, you have to export each scene one at a time. Then getting the network settings on all the machine right so I could copy them over the internal network took more time, but finally I got the files moved over to the Mac, and…

Wouldn’t you know it OSX can’t read MPEG-2 out of the box due to probably licensing issues. I needed to buy a $20 add-on to get Quicktime to read MPEG-2. So annoying. Once that was purchased and installed, I could import the MPEG-2 files. Great! It is only going to take 299 minutes.

Oh man, you’ve got to be kidding me. I’m going to bed. I hope this thing finishes by morning.