Dr Smurf?

I've been trying to convert the season finale of a certain TV show from videotape to a DVD format so that Jenn can watch her favourite show in the nursing home (they broadcast it when she didn't have access to TV period).

Been a long process. I used a video card that Kevin gave me to save segments of the show into .avi format. But then it was difficult to do. The cheap free programs that do this either just convert them uncompressed (like PC Cam) or crash when I rewind the tape (like VitualDub)! I finally did most of it using something called Capture Flux, but ended up with 11 Gb + movie files!

I was trying to find a decent converter and Kevin got me on to something called AviDemux which seems to work quite well, only, well compare what I see when I play the gigafiles in Media Player Classic, and Avidemux:

 

Is this his real identity, Poppa Smurf?

Dr Atomic?

There's a doco on ABC1 about the making of the opera Dr Atomic. This is mostly about the making the of the first atomic bomb, and the moral dilemmas that surrounded that. An interesting idea but why did it have to be OPERA?

It really drives me to distraction trying to understand the words in Opera, whether in English or not. I mean, I'd much rather hear something along the likes of Sweeney Todd, or some sort of Joss Whedon take on it all.Strange stuff (the Doctor Atomic -Bhagavad Gîta Chorus is also odd)!

Einstein of the Beach

Mind you, thinking about strange things, I can remember listening to pretty much all of Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass one afternoon on ABC radio. In fact, I had no idea what it was and listened intently, lying in the dark on my bed until the end when the announcer said what it was (this is way back in the early 80s, well before the net).

Strange Days indeed.