1) My reverse dictionary came in! My reverse dictionary came in! Is it wrong that I’m this excited about it?
2) I won a grant to go to London this Summer to do some research.
3) If you want to use Mac OS X to convert MPEG-1 video so that it will play on an iPaq, you’ll need PocketMVP on the iPaq. Then use ffmpegx to convert the video. Select either divx or mpeg-4 (I like mpeg-4) as the codec. Set the video bitrate to between 125 and 200. Set the target size to whatever you want and the video dimensions to whatever you want (I like 320×240). Set the audio sample rate to 44.1 and the other thing to the lowest it will go (11 or 22). Mono. Hit encode. I can get 43 minutes of MPEG-1 video down to less than 50 MB. Completely watchable.
4) When I haven’t been proctoring final exams this week, I’ve been interviewing people for jobs on campus. And when I haven’t been doing this, I’ve been in committee meetings designed, among other things, to hire my assistant. That’s right. I’m going to have an assistant.
5) Our air conditioner has quit working. I suspect that we need freon, which is keeping the compressor from switching on. The good news is that in the course of ruling out problems, I replaced our complicated digital thermostat (the kind that you can say “keep the house 72 degrees from 9:00 am until noon, then 80 from noon until 3:30, then 72 from…”) with a very simple digital one where you say “keep the house 72 degrees at all times.”
6) It dawned on me the other day, as I was having a CD player installed in my car, that I have not had a working CD player in my car since the early 90s, when my CD player died with a CD of Journey’s Greatest Hits in it. I know. It wasn’t mine. And I only put it in there because I liked the opening riff of “Separate Ways.” I know. Shut up. I liked it. Anyway, the hitch was this: the CD player would play the CD but it wouldn’t eject it. And then, the one time I managed to get the CD ejected? I stuck it back in to see if the CD player was fixed. It wasn’t. And so I had it in there for a few more years.
7) I have about 30 essays left to grade and then I can begin tallying grades. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
I am completely uninterested in the final episode of Friends.
I sold that car for $350!!….. I could have gotten more,but there was this damn CD stuck in the player.
You got the right reverse dictionary, I see. There are imitators, but the original is still the best.
Did you get a copy for your assistant? Are you going to nickname that assistant Smithers?
Tallying grades? You’re a moron. Will you please let me show you how to work up an Excel spread sheet? You can actually program it to assign the letter grades once the final percentage has been computed.
So should I not admit that I ripped that very same CD to iTunes? Journey and Foreigner are (make that were) my dirty little secrets.
Imagine when you can get a DVD of the final season of Friends stuck in the car’s player. Hey! The Trifecta!
Oh that’s cruel. Just plain cruel.