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More warm weather today, though there is a sharp wind coming in that threatens to blow away all the sunshine.

We scooted to the zoo today, to enjoy the nice weather. It was crowded of course, but we saw a unique sight that made it all worthwhile. Two Radiated Tortoises were pushing each other around. One got behind the other and pushed it, as though it was trying to flip the other one over. After scooting each other around for a few minutes, one tortoise began to climb up onto the other one. The first tortoise was mounting the other one! He slowly got himself into position, and then stretched his neck out as far as he could up into the sky, and began to thrust over and over. It was quite strange, and was disturbingly reminiscent of an old man climbing stairs with a walker. Mother’s shielded their children’s eyes, guys hooted, and a man with a video camera zoomed in close to get a good shot of the reptilian coitus.

This detailed description of the process thanks to “this very informative document”:http://www.unc.edu/~dtkirkpa/stuff/radiated.html.

bq. Males will begin to attempt to mate when they are about a foot long, and females when they are a few inches longer. Males usually do not succeed in mating until they are over 13 inches in length, due to the disparity in sizes between the young male and mature females. When mating does take place, the male begins the procedure by following and circling the female, bobbing his head up and down and sniffing at the female’s hind legs. He may attempt to lift her up with the front edge of his shell, presumably to keep her from moving away. If the female remains stationary the male will mount her from the rear, positioning his tail under and against her tail. He then strikes the lower anal region of his plastron against the rear of the female’s carapace by pumping his rear legs in and out. In addition to the noise of their shells striking together, the male will also hiss or grunt at this time. All in all, it can be a fairly noisy procedure!

Then, after arriving at home, I was pulling the scooter around to the back when an old woman walked out of our back yard. “What’s a 12 year old like you doing with a motorcycle?” She asked.

“Um, I’m not 12, I’m 21, and she’s 23.” I replied. “We stay young looking through good nutrition!”

“Oh my! Is is April Fools Day already? You kids look so young!”

Then I got curious as to why she was in our yard. She had a big bag of cans, and a little grabbing tool, like the kind convicts use to pick up litter by the highway. She turned around and walked off down the street with her bag of cans. After I parked my scooter in the back, Madalene looked into our recycling bin, and found that all the cans had been pilfered. I’m not mad really, since the cans are still going to be recycled, as I assume she was getting them for the money, but its still kind of strange. She didn’t look homeless, and her hair had even been done up nicely recently, and she was dressed well. Maybe she was just enterprising with her sources of income.

I don’t really mind that she was surprised about my age. I’ve heard that it can be harder to guess ages of people from other races. I’m suitably white-bread, and she was african-american, so maybe that was the case. Its actually a regular occurrence to have african-american folks from our neighborhood be shocked at our age. This is probably the fourth or fifth time that people right outside our house have been surprised about our age. They tend to think we are in high school or something. Sometimes I get embarrassed about it, but then I remember that my youthful good looks mean that when I’m 50, no one will believe it. Everyone else will be losing their hair, stooping when they walk, getting fake teeth, and I’ll have my youthful appearance and vigor. Then I’ll be laughing at all those people who think I’m still a teenager! Ha!

The weather was very pleasant today, so I pulled out the scooter, and took it for a spin. The tires were dangerously low on air, making handling a bit touchy, but a quick stop at the Gas-O-Mart yielded a tire pressure of 29psi in the front, and 31psi in the rear, perfect for dipping into corners at high speeds, and flying past bystanders, light as a feather.

I noticed the scooter was covered in filth, from all the rainy muck we had several weeks ago, which was the last time I had taken the scooter out of its protective shed. I decided to go to a carwash to get the scooter cleaned, because I noticed a few small rust spots on the exhaust system, and I wanted to get the road muck off before they got any bigger. I went to the nearby wash, and found a huge line stretching 5 or more cars back from each of the 4 stalls. Clearly everyone had the same idea as myself, “Nice day, wash the motor vehicle.” I knew of another carwash, so I took off like a crimson dragonfly.

The second carwash had a line as well, though much shorter. I got into the queue behind a filthy truck, and in front of a sour looking woman in a filthy sedan. When the truck finished its wash, I pulled into the stall, put the scooter on it’s center stand, fed some quarters to the machine, and began to spray off the filth. From within the shell of grime emerged my dear scooter. Glistening in the sun, it was quite a sight. I wheeled the scooter out of the stall to an area off to the side where I could use my soft cloth to wipe the scooter dry.

Now that I was done, I decided to take the scooter on a ride around town. Where to go? Why not Dennis’ house! Dennis wasn’t home, however, but I remembered his missive from the day before, “If I’m not at home, I’m probably at the music building on campus.” So I jetted off to the music building on his campus. Dennis studies there as a Music Composition major, and works there as a side job as well. I got there, and saw his car, but no Dennis. I found some of his friends, one of which is a Mac user, who wanted to ask me about some software. We chatted for a bit, and I continued my search. Then I found some more of Dennis’ friends, and queried them as to Dennis’ location. “The symphony,” they replied, “he just left for the symphony with his new girlfriend.” Curse the man, taking off with his girlfriend! Oh well, its all for the best, I suppose.

Then I went home, watched some Space Ghost, ate a sandwich, and called Dennis on his cell phone, which I was quite certain he had turned off (he always does, for symphony performances). I left him a long and rambling message, requesting his presence after the symphony, since I want to meet his new girlfriend. I baited him with the promise of Root Beer, since there is a fine Root Beer merchant near our house. Hopefully he’ll bite, and come over after the symphony. If all goes well, we’ll soon be drinking sweet Root Beer together. But even if he doesn’t come over, I might go get some Root Beer anyway, because all this writing is making me thirsty.

Huzzah! The browser formerly known as Chimera has finally hit 0.7 after much waiting and trepidation. All Mac users go “download and enjoy”:http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/camino/releases/Camino-0.7.dmg.gz the goodness that is the new version of your favorite browser. Unless its not your favorite browser, in which case you should go download it anyway so you can give the new Camino a second chance.

A new project is in my sights! Not to say that the video project is no longer interesting, but it requires many long hours of rendering. When you look at a little encoding progress bar that boasts 28 hours left for a three pass VBR encode, you can’t do much except wait.

The new project is to help Madalene with some data from her lab. She uses Matlab to do many of her calculations, and Matlab has its own little scripting language for automating procedures and creating more complex algorithms. She has a huge number of data files, each one containing data that needs to be fed into Matlab via a little program someone wrote in its scripting language. Unfortunately, the file outputs Lotus 1-2-3 documents, that are not formatted for easy manipulation. Madalene has to manually input data for over 200 files, and then open up each of the 200-odd Lotus 1-2-3 documents in Excel, copy and paste out the values she needs, and then do her calculations. Any time anyone says to me that they have to hand process 200 files, one thing comes to my mind. PERL(Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister)!

Perl, as a programming language, is great for processing text files, and gathering up data. It is right up there among the most useful programming languages ever, in terms of day to day usefulness. It really lends itself to little ‘glue’ programs, things that don’t do much besides connect two things that don’t normally connect well. In this case, I have decided to aid Madalene, as well as improve my knowledge of Perl (which is woefully inadequate) by writing a script to go through these hundreds of files, grab the values necessary, feed them to Matlab, gather the output, and produce a single, well formatted Excel document. Not a difficult task for Perl, but it is still of a magnitude that I’ve never attempted before. Assuming all goes well, I’ll come out of it with a better understanding of Perl and Matlab, and the satisfaction of being able to show a bunch of stuffy researchers who The Man is by automating part of their process. Just kidding, they aren’t stuffy researchers, but if I pull this off, I’ll still get to be The Man, for a day or so at least.

This evening’s excitement involves the ripping and burning of DVDs into SVCDs, making some backups, and producing very nice quality films on CD-R. An SVCD is a format very similar to DVD, except on a standard CD. A movie can fit on a single CD at a quality level similar to a rental VHS. Span a movie over 3 or 4 CDs, and it is practically DVD quality. The internet can be a rich source of disk images for these types of videos, and they are easy to make on your home computer as well, using software like “forty-two”:http://homepage.mac.com/kaicherry/index2.html for the Mac, and “DVD2SVCD”:http://www.dvd2svcd.org for the PC. Both programs work well, and serve as a controller for many other smaller programs. There are a large number of steps required to go from DVD to SVCD, and those programs do a good job of wrapping all the programs needed for each step into a single interface. Keep in mind though that neither program is fully one-clickable. Depending on what you want to do, you still have to expect to do some learning in order to get things to come out right. I recommend checking out “VCDHelp”:http://www.dvdrhelp.com and “Doom9″:http://www.doom9.org, both of which are treasure troves of info. They also have support forums, which, properly utilized, can yield mountains of info.

My most interesting project of the evening is a copy of “Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0245429 which I received. This film was imported to the US from Japan by Disney, who did a reasonably good job dubbing and editing it. They then released it as “Spirited Away” which you may remember coming out last year. The film is by “Hayao Miyazaki”:http://us.imdb.com/Name?Miyazaki,%20Hayao, who also did “Mononoke Hime”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0119698 which was another Disney import to the US, released here as “Princess Mononoke”. The copy of “Spirited Away” I got is the original version from Japan.

Unfortunately, this means that the copy of the film I have is entirely in Japanese, which I don’t speak. However, thanks to the wide and wonderful internet, someone took the time to translate the film, and create a subtitle file for the film. The subtitle file includes the subtitles, along with corresponding time codes. Some trickery in the SVCD software, and the disembodied subtitles are attached to their rightful locations on the video.

Why all the trouble, when an English version exists? The simple reason is that dubbed versions of foreign films are almost always inferior to subbed versions. Hired voice actors usually aren’t very good, and make the film sound cheesy. The long answer is that I prefer to view films in the way that the director had originally intended. This means widescreen, not pan ‘n’ scan, original soundtracks, director’s cuts when available, etc. When someone is creating a movie, they have a very intense vision of what they are trying to convey. Each shot, each scene, is carefully laid out like an individual little painting. When some half-rate editor goes and decides how the film should pan back and forth in order to fit a standard 4:3 television so that people can feel like their TV is bigger than it is, that negates all the careful planning that went into each shot. Likewise with the voice actors. When a director chooses his actors, they aren’t just randomly picking yokels off the street, they are picking people they know are right for the character. Having to read some subtitles is a small price to pay to get the vocal impressions that the director originally intended for me to hear. I can’t understand the words, but the emotions and tensions in the voice go across language barriers.

So anyway, I’ll go to great lengths to get an original version with subtitles, as opposed to a dubbed version. However, don’t feel too bad if you watch “Spirited Away” or “Princess Mononoke” and enjoyed the dubbing. Disney, for all their meddling, have access to some pretty skilled voice actors, and produce high quality dubs.

The browser formerly known as Chimera for OS X has been renamed “Camino” and now has a “new webpage”:http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/! Don’t go looking for downloads yet, however, because the new version isn’t available yet. However, I’ve heard that 0.7 is basically complete, they just need to finish going through and replacing every instance of Chimera with Camino. This means 0.7 should be available really soon now. An annoying setback for a project like this, but an unfortunate reality.

As to the name, some people are afraid that it brings to mind images of 70′s era half-car/half-pickup monstrosities, but I find the name perfectly acceptable. It means “path” or “road” in Spanish, and seems to be rather appropriate. And besides, I don’t care what its called, as long as it continues to bring forth all that delicious browser goodness that it has already brought me.

Today I lined up another job interview. The interview isn’t until next week, but its at a good place, and could be a very fun job. I’ve got all the skills necessary, and I think that I’ve got a very good chance at the position, now that my foot is in the door. The pay isn’t much to look at, and its only part time, but the position has the potential to be very rewarding and fun, and thats what really counts in a job. Now I just have to wait till my interview next week.

In the meantime, its Tax-Time! Yay! Taxes are coming along nicely, and it looks like I’ll be getting a modest refund, which is always nice. Well, its not nice really, because all it means is that I either overpaid in the first place, or that critical programs are being cut just so I can get a few extra bucks to spend on liqour and potato chips at the local Try ‘n’ Save to bolster the economy or something. However, with a solid dose of delusion, I can easily convince myself that the money is some sort of Christmas present from Jolly ‘ole Saint Dubya, bless his little soul. Those school children and impoverished people don’t need the money anyway. Maybe I’ll use some of the refund to renew some of my languishing civil rights group memberships, and my Zoo Parent membership (I’m the proud adoptive parent of a “Golden Headed Lion Tamarin(The cutest little monkey in the world)”:http://www.primate.wisc.edu/pin/factsheets/leontopithecus_chrysomelas.html).

I awoke this morning to a vicious headache. I don’t know what would have caused it, though general dehydration probably played some part. A tall glass of water and 400mg of Ibuprofen later, I’m beginning to feel a bit of an improvement.

I had a dream last night that involved a Gameboy, though instead of accepting little cartridges like Gameboys normally do, it accepted tiny CDs. It was given to me by someone with an umbrella, who later turned out to be a homicidal maniac. He tried to kill a professor of physics, who’s wife had been hitting on me at a party. Then he tried to kill me, but I got away. I was also at a large building where someone had set up large tables with hundreds of different varieties of coffee in pots that you could sample. It was night, and the large yard surrounding the building was pitch black. I ran out into the yard, then got afraid, and ran back to the coffee area. When I returned, I was accused, rather harshly, of being a blue leprechaun. The accusers apologized when they realized that the actual blue leprechaun was watching TV in another room. I played the Gameboy for a little while, and then went to court to testify against the homicidal maniac who tried to kill the professor and his wife. Thats about all I remember, which is a lot, considering I rarely remember my dreams.