Ugh, what a day!

Got to office only to find that all forms of connectivity were down, apart from a miserably unstable VSNL dialup link. That was the brigh side of things.

The wife didn’t let me take Biju’s monitor back to office, so Gopi annexed my office desktop, handed his monitor to Biju, and I got stuck with my crip^H^H^Hnotebook. Luckily it behaved itself today – it only barfed when I actually had some work to do. Thanks to the efficient folks at Exocore, that happens rarely – but today was one of those days.

Anyway, no one reads my diary to find out how my daytime job goes, so on with the diary.

First of all, I decided to make life miserable for everyone by playing “Absolutely Everybody” on the office boombox till Biju almost came crawling in begging for mercy. I have this thing about getting stuck with tunes, which I then proceed to hum, sing or play all day long. No amount of “vol–” or “song++” messages on my IM will get me out of the groove (OK, who said “rut”????) Life is good.

IAC, because of bad connectivity, I decided to postpone putting up photos for a day, but decided to dig into the video conversion business under Linux.

Picked Shanu’s brain (what’s left of it – you should hear the volume he sets his earphones to!) to discover that there has been major advancement on this front – you can actually capture to AVI now and (with a powerful enough machine) pipe it through an mpeg encoder all at the same time.

Naturally, things don’t work as advertised when one first sets out to do stuff, but then, in the words of Jerry Pournelle – “what’s the point of being an expert if everyone can do all the things you can do?” Yeah, right. Under normal circumstances, I would have been chuckling with the “evil” dial set to “11″, but today I was at the mercy of Shanu. Of course I cannot resist a challenge, so I am going to stop here for a while, and do some experimenting of my own….

Stay tuned!