Tuesday, May 24, 2005

A Smattering of Items

Today, I have several items. I haven't posted regularly for the past few days, so I have a few items worth discussing.

First up, American Idol. Watched the last performances tonight, and I think that the contestants did OK, but definitely not their best. I would have to call this one a toss-up, and for me that's fine. They are both great, though I like Bo a little better.

Next on the list, ASF file format. This format is used by several digital video camera makes, including the Mustek DV4500 that my wife has. And I have to say, I HATE IT! Why, oh why, could they not just use MPEG-4... The side of the camera says "MPEG-4", but it's not. It's ASF MPEG-4. BIG BIG BIG DIFFERENCE!! And basically, it makes it useless to me as a Mac user. Even when using my Windows PC, I can't find a suitable application, commercial, shareware, or otherwise, for converting it to a format usable by iMovie. It would definitely be in Apple's best interest to license the codec for this file format for the iLife app's on Mac OS X. So, right now, I am looking to get a new MiniDV camera to take on our vacation. Hopefully, I can find something reasonable on eBay.

On the .NET front, I have been chugging along fighting it's idiosyncrasies for some time now. Nothing in particular today worth mentioning, though tomorrow, I will probably go into the details of a problem I spent most of the day today working on. I found the culprit causing my many hours of headache, but, the why aspect of it, I have not quite figured out. I'll talk about that more tomorrow.

I am getting ready to do some more work with the Mac OS X widgets this evening. I have been tinkering mostly with the graphics I want to use for my widget, and have gotten myself stuck in that mode, and have not really been productive. This evening that should hopefully change. I'll keep you posted.

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