![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Highs and lows...
Oct. 15th, 2005 07:38 pmYesterday, I finally remembered to pick up some vodka at the liquor store next to our shop. It's a brand called Kamchatka, and its cost is such that I ran it through a drip Brita filter once to take out the heavy molecules, so to speak, before adding most of it to the skins of ten lemons, which is the first step in the preparation of limoncello. Here, as in Baikonur, I will play the recipe by ear (I really can't see spending three months, as is set forth in a number of recipes on the 'net.)
My derring-do in the kitchen continued this morning, when I dared to make some throw-together green chile to go along with fried potatoes and eggs. Although the consistence turned out reasonably well (despite the absence of a thickener), I used far too few green chiles, so the concoction is very, very mild.
My good mood of the morning evaporated as the morning progressed, and by the time I went home at a little after noon, I was in a true blue funk. I tried to get some things accomplished at home, but nothing came of the effort, so at 2 pm I went back to the store to pick up Galina.
Upon returning, I tried again to get a productive spark going, to no avail. Galina didn't help my mood with a few "honeydew" suggestions before she went back to the store to rearrange inventory on the shelves.
Things started to turn around after she returned when I again gave some thought to connecting the CVS one-time video camera to my desktop for the purpose of downloading the video segments I shot in Kazakhstan.
Earlier, when I tried to connect the device to my laptop, I missed the window of opportunity provided by the "Found New Hardware Wizard." Somehow, the camera ended up being recognized as a run-of-the-mill USB device and nothing I could do would get me to the point where I could install a proper driver for the thing. Furthermore, all of what I read online convinced me that, in the final analysis, it was more than likely that I had a problem with my home-brew cable.
A few minutes today with a multimeter disabused me of that notion, so today I connected the camera via the cable to my desktop. Upon getting the "Found New Hardware Wizard," I pointed it at an .inf file created by the appropriate software downloaded for that purpose, which it turn had me point to an appropriate .sys file (also downloaded) on my disk. After some false starts with a package called Ops, I finally got to the point where I successfully "opened" the camera and downloaded the video that I shot while in Baikonur.
All was not over. It turned out the .avi files taken from the camera would not play with the codecs I had on my desktop, nor could the Windows Media Player figure out where to get the appropriate codec to decompress the video information, so I ended up downloading something called ffdshow, which solved the problem in short order. The videos are - as expected - of fairly low quality, but watchable. I need to get hold of Drew and have him bring Huntür's camera over so we can take the video off of it. In theory, there's enough memory on the unit for way more than the 20 minutes it's set up for "out of the box," but I'll leave that for another day.
Apropos of Brita filters, one of the topics discussed at the ham breakfast last Friday morning was the news that our local water supply contains 15% more TTHMs (total trihalomethanes) than is specified by... someone or other. The reason given for this situation has to do with naturally occurring algae from our local water source and its interaction with the compounds introduced by the local water company to chlorinate the water supply. The situation is expected to last for a while, and officially, the water company has suggested that people might want to look elsewhere for drinking water until the situation is resolved. In today's environment, it's difficult to say whether the announcement points to an actual problem or is the result of some lawyer's recommendation to "play it safe" and warn of a nonexistent problem.
As it turns out, we've used drip Brita filters for several years, mostly to improve the taste of the local water. The drip filters, however, not only do not filter out TTHMs, they're also glacially slow when it comes to filtering. On the other hand, Brita does makes a two-stage filter that - among other things - takes out TTHMs, provides a higher rate of filtered water, and mounts on one's kitchen faucet, so earlier this evening, I installed a unit I bought yesterday at the local supermarket.
As I expected, the faucet-mounted unit provides water faster than the drip filters, which makes me wonder about the future of the 2-gallon container we've used up to now to store drip-filtered water for immediate use. I suspect we'll still use it, since even though the new filter provides a steady stream of water, I suspect my innate impatience (especially in the mornings when making coffee) will not brook having to wait for even the new filter to provide enough water fast enough.
Feht stopped by the store yesterday to drop of a UPS package, and I took advantage of the situation to take a late afternoon break and catch up on the past couple of months. He tells me that virtually everyone he knows is in the same pickle in which I find myself (no work), though he personally was fortunate enough to snag a client that has kept him inordinately busy since April. May we all be so lucky.
Cheers...
My derring-do in the kitchen continued this morning, when I dared to make some throw-together green chile to go along with fried potatoes and eggs. Although the consistence turned out reasonably well (despite the absence of a thickener), I used far too few green chiles, so the concoction is very, very mild.
My good mood of the morning evaporated as the morning progressed, and by the time I went home at a little after noon, I was in a true blue funk. I tried to get some things accomplished at home, but nothing came of the effort, so at 2 pm I went back to the store to pick up Galina.
Upon returning, I tried again to get a productive spark going, to no avail. Galina didn't help my mood with a few "honeydew" suggestions before she went back to the store to rearrange inventory on the shelves.
Things started to turn around after she returned when I again gave some thought to connecting the CVS one-time video camera to my desktop for the purpose of downloading the video segments I shot in Kazakhstan.
Earlier, when I tried to connect the device to my laptop, I missed the window of opportunity provided by the "Found New Hardware Wizard." Somehow, the camera ended up being recognized as a run-of-the-mill USB device and nothing I could do would get me to the point where I could install a proper driver for the thing. Furthermore, all of what I read online convinced me that, in the final analysis, it was more than likely that I had a problem with my home-brew cable.
A few minutes today with a multimeter disabused me of that notion, so today I connected the camera via the cable to my desktop. Upon getting the "Found New Hardware Wizard," I pointed it at an .inf file created by the appropriate software downloaded for that purpose, which it turn had me point to an appropriate .sys file (also downloaded) on my disk. After some false starts with a package called Ops, I finally got to the point where I successfully "opened" the camera and downloaded the video that I shot while in Baikonur.
All was not over. It turned out the .avi files taken from the camera would not play with the codecs I had on my desktop, nor could the Windows Media Player figure out where to get the appropriate codec to decompress the video information, so I ended up downloading something called ffdshow, which solved the problem in short order. The videos are - as expected - of fairly low quality, but watchable. I need to get hold of Drew and have him bring Huntür's camera over so we can take the video off of it. In theory, there's enough memory on the unit for way more than the 20 minutes it's set up for "out of the box," but I'll leave that for another day.
Apropos of Brita filters, one of the topics discussed at the ham breakfast last Friday morning was the news that our local water supply contains 15% more TTHMs (total trihalomethanes) than is specified by... someone or other. The reason given for this situation has to do with naturally occurring algae from our local water source and its interaction with the compounds introduced by the local water company to chlorinate the water supply. The situation is expected to last for a while, and officially, the water company has suggested that people might want to look elsewhere for drinking water until the situation is resolved. In today's environment, it's difficult to say whether the announcement points to an actual problem or is the result of some lawyer's recommendation to "play it safe" and warn of a nonexistent problem.
As it turns out, we've used drip Brita filters for several years, mostly to improve the taste of the local water. The drip filters, however, not only do not filter out TTHMs, they're also glacially slow when it comes to filtering. On the other hand, Brita does makes a two-stage filter that - among other things - takes out TTHMs, provides a higher rate of filtered water, and mounts on one's kitchen faucet, so earlier this evening, I installed a unit I bought yesterday at the local supermarket.
As I expected, the faucet-mounted unit provides water faster than the drip filters, which makes me wonder about the future of the 2-gallon container we've used up to now to store drip-filtered water for immediate use. I suspect we'll still use it, since even though the new filter provides a steady stream of water, I suspect my innate impatience (especially in the mornings when making coffee) will not brook having to wait for even the new filter to provide enough water fast enough.
Feht stopped by the store yesterday to drop of a UPS package, and I took advantage of the situation to take a late afternoon break and catch up on the past couple of months. He tells me that virtually everyone he knows is in the same pickle in which I find myself (no work), though he personally was fortunate enough to snag a client that has kept him inordinately busy since April. May we all be so lucky.
Cheers...
