I’m not even ready for the 101 course, yet. My sister Anne asked me if
there was any way I could make a DVD of one of her videos for her. I
don’t (yet) have a DVD recorder, but I offered to try to do the
equivalent with a Video CD (VCD) or Super VideoCD. My ThinkPad has a
firewire cable, and it only took a few weeks to find one with the right
connectors for that and the video camera. Windows XP cheerfully
volunteers to record off the camera, but I thought I’d try the MGI
VideoWave 4 that came bundled with the laptop. First try shows promise
- a 4.9 gigabyte AVI file. Need to clean another 10 gig off my laptop
and defrag it to ensure I have room to capture the whole thing – there
was another 10 minutes to go when I stopped it. After that, I’ll try
Dr. DivX or Nero to see what I can produce. A first attempt with Nero
to create an SVCD resulted in a CD that sounded like an aircraft taking
off in the laptop and a really jittery picture, and nothing from the
DVD player but a “Check disc” message. Don’t know if it was bad media
or not the right format, or perhaps there are other options I need to
select. Will have to try again later.

Hope our network downtime didn’t cause concern. Laura and I
disassembled the office and did some serious rearranging to make room
for the new furniture, due soon. Rewiring cable internet, DSL, the
house ethernet, the wireless, the web site, ftp site, the printers,…
man! Lots of stuff to reconfigure. Still got to figure out how to wire
the dual line phone and fax machine.  As a reward, we went to Gould Hill Orchards for a half peck of MacIntosh apples and an afternoon snack of cheddar cheese and apples. Mmmm…..

We in the computer industry have a special responsibility to ensure
that the general public does not have a false sense of security about
things computerized. “It must be true, the computer said so” or “I read
it on the Internet” are chilling examples. Here, it seems an unreliable
computer system is replacing a more reliable, although slower and more
expensive, manual voting systems…

Can Diebold Be This Stupid?.
“UPDATED: BlackBoxBoting.org says lawyers for Diebold, maker of
electronic voting systems, have forced the site to shut down on
alleged…” from Dan Gillmor’s eJournal