I took care of the bunnies, the dishes and my dinner in 40 minutes. I rule. Then in between I got a call from a car dealership about my upcoming test drive. He said: “Would you mind driving a C3, because I don’t have the DS3 here on hand”. So I was like “HUH?”. If I come in to take a look at a particular car, I’m not gonna drive the next best thing… I think the man had some spacecake. He said he’ll make sure he has the right car, alright. A CS3 is quite a nice car too from the looks of it. Show me your best blue eyes mah man. hahahaha. If he doesn’t have it on hand or goofed, no biggie, I also have an appointment next door. xD. God I hate sales people. I usually havs them for lunch, but when it comes to cars I do my best sales show for dad so he’ll come with me. lol.

It’s quite fun too. It’s like the only thing a daughter and her dad can actually do together after a certain age. Dad is there to go car shopping with you, or demolish build the Ikea closet.

Then that organisation I sent a visual design to, hopped right on the boat and tried to schedule another meeting with me. Gonna answer tomorrow. Hope they like it, but then if they didn’t they wouldn’t be so quick.

Right now: Fringe Double FINALE. I earned it.

Johnny K. jokes always do well in the fandom.

So, after trying to be faster than the damned error message could show up I reluctantly got the old empty ink cartridges from downstairs.

For now, I’m going to let it be since I have to study. I have a feeling this will return. I think they should rename the product to “McAfee total destruction”.

The true Mini rip-off.

Somewhat like a mini-chrysler, introduced in the UK as a chrysler.

“If you can get over the smiley face grill”, the Mazda 2 is for you!” xD I kinda like it: it’s beastybratmode.

Must say, lots better than the 207. Both in shape and in tax, or what’s left of the tax dedux.

Been around for ages, the Ibiza. Always liked those cars, and the Leon. Nope, no Cupra for me. It costs a little too much new. Keeping my eye out on occasions though ;)

Now I haven’t managed to make an appointment for the Lancia yet since the nearest dealership was not in the direction of the other 4. The problem with most of these cars is that I either don’t like the previous model when looking for an occasion, or that the car itself has been on the market 2-3 years. Only the Ibiza and Mazda have enough choice in occasions. Audi is unaffordable for me, but if you stretch it into occasions, the A1 might be a possibility. At least then you have a car with a decent engine xD. I worry the above cars won’t have the powarrrrr though: I only selected eco models. I’m used to driving 80KW/ 110 horse power. Most don’t reach over 90 horse powers.

Chix and cars don’t mix, chix and computers don’t mix: I do whatever the hell I like (to understand). I also said: once cars get a real (and buggy) operating system, please count me in! xD.

Small car accident
I braked as I wanted park my car at a store I needed to go to. There was a bicyclist, so I had to wait. KABOOF! Guy rams me from behind.

Got out of the car, he said: “Oh didn’t see ya there, the sun was in my eyes. You were waiting for the bicyclist to go past you, right?“. OH MAN. So the damage on my car isn’t a lot. Some of his paint on my paint, and a few scratches. His number plate was quite smashed up but other than that it didn’t look very serious either. Scared the shit out of me though. So I got his information and was on my way for some more annoyance. I am going to make a joke now and you may laugh: the only way I can get a guy’s number is when he rear-ends my car!

Supermarket woes
I get to the supermarket, I get a cart. SOMEONE STOLE MY CART IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SUPERMARKET. There was nuttin’ in it yet, but I was pissy. CART-STEALERS. You know, fellow citizens, this isn’t Amsterdam by bicycle: park one, steal one! This isn’t the same forced community sharing:P I kind of know what happened. In the stall outside there was one cart “held together” with duct tape. I avoided that one and the row I picked my cart from was getting thinner fast. I think people just came in looking to score a cart from another unsuspecting shopper.

A while later I see a confused old man walking around. I asked “What’s wrong?”. He said: “Someone stole my cart!”. YOU TOO? So then I had to get another one, and let it be known, I GET THE CART WHICH CONSTANTLY WANTS TO TURN RIGHT. It was really busy at the supermarket too. Even though I sorta have something to do with that supermarket nao, I AIN’T SHOPPING THERE AGAIN. It’s too small and the employees leave goods out in the pathways you can then fall over. Went through a half hour of hell. Then found out the only way I could get my cart to the car is by pushing it sideways.

Next time I’m going in prepared *ties bandana*. I’m taking one string to tie myself to the shopping cart so I can catch the shopping cart thief, and one oil can/dispenser for any direction preference that cart might have except the right one: mine.

Oooo pissy.

Cooking, To be one with Nature
Luckily I got to feed my friend who was over here for my famous “~enough cholesterol to kill a small horse~” pizza! She wanted to know how to make it so she took notes for the entire process. I don’t believe she will ever be a kitchen princess. Neither am I, by the way. My food tastes good, but I make such a mess. I also don’t cook with “set amounts”. I just grab salt with my hands and “estimate the amount”. Like everything I do, it must be looking like “Dr. Chaos” just churned out something good. There’s still one third left. So I’m gonna be set up for tomorrow too.

Ah yes, and I almost forgot to take care of the bunnies. My dad’s hobby. So when he is away, he leaves me with a chart on how many grams to feed the little runts. Next Thursday one of the bunnies is gonna be a mom. He said: “If you find a dead one, toss it”. *_* Well, I grew up here. I’ve seen him “get rid of some into the freezer” quite a couple of times. I could name all internal organs by the time I was six. =_= But I always hated it when little bunnies are stillborn. I saved one bunny but unfortunately not the litter by convincing my dad to “pull gently” to get the stillborn out. The rabbit would be stew anyways if he didn’t.That one survived. Then once his most prized rabbit (male) was taken down by a fever. I sat in the garage fanning it the entire evening. He lived :D When my dad is in, I usually don’t care but even though I have an exam on that day, when I come home I’ll check up how she’s doing.

I’m not too sure the plants are gonna live, because they don’t visibly breathe and all, but if it’s something like chives I’m more likely to remember watering them. They’re practical like that, and so am I. I would never want useless plants in my house. Herbs are fine though. I already live rural, it takes me 10 meters to find a tree and hug it. No need to exaggerate. Every day I come home, I’m trying to run over this pheasant that seems to taunt me by running across the street. One day roadkill will be my dinner.

When my friend was here, all of a sudden we heard a frantic buzzing. I left the door open for some air, since it was warm today. Appears it was a bumble bee that landed on his back on the kitchen floor. I have NEVER heard that sound so loudly. It sounded like an engine was about to take off. The poor thing was in total panic trying to get on his feet again. Who knew that if bumblebees landed on their backs somehow, they have no way to get up?! I never knew that. We got him back on his feet and he was more than happy to leave the house.

There really is no middle way for me, apparently. I hope I have the same energy trying to re-do my philosophy assignment. Technically I didn’t fail because there’s an initial handover and commentary returned but from the looks of the amount of red text I can basically do the entire thing again. Butthurt! Though I would make a great politician, he said. lol.

Also sent out 4 variants of a website design to that charity I’m working for. Wish I could show it to you, the kids look so cuuute.

Tints of brown is still one horrible set of colours to work with. Depending on the type of screen / graphic card “tan” is somehow upgraded too bright or downgraded too flat. Hope they like it:) Also hope they can put one in gear themselves and come up with texts and menu items. We shall see! If they’re game, I’m game. I keep my promises. I promised to tell them when it’s becoming “too much” (working, studying and this). But… I see stuff like this as an opportunity to get into contact with more people, do something good for the (global) community and have some fun outside of work that isn’t “shutting myself in, within 4 walls”. So desu ne~ use it as long as I still have the energy, I’d say.

Did some research on cars today. Toyata Auris at least has decent engines. Kia Rio is really not bad, my friend was right. Only has itty bitty engines. Might go test drive all three (yes, DS3 too). Oh Doiha-chan (my old Peugeot), please hang on before October. October they’ll be raising the tax on luxury goods to 21%. I would be a douchebag if I don’t buy another car before that time.

Let’s go! Burning rubber :D

Nobody ever died from a hard day’s work, but I sure do know what else can flame people out. A few weeks ago they said on the news burnout rose to 14%. from 11% in one year. I’m just happy it didn’t happen to me. I told this a business contact one day in grey past: all that stands between you and ill health are the wrong kind of people. Determined to make a difference one day. Because I have a heart? Maybe. Can’t say I don’t have one, even though some people insist to confuse their own confusion as something that belongs to me or get seriously confused with what I’m actually saying. It’s most likely in my own best interest I do something that makes people around me enjoy their job because I want to enjoy mine. I’m quite through ignoring people’s problems or heave and pull a couple dozen without a license because I have no other possibility. Prepared to work insanely to get a grip on it, with or without permission, on or off office hours, as long as I’m healthy: I should find any way possible to butt into the real problem. This world is one big fishtank of problems, none of them ever start or finish with a zero or one [binary]. You know me, I’m “where ever the problem is”. Walking around for 8 years, all problems I’ve seen talk and wear shoes. Everything else sorts itself out if that’s kept “under control”; automagically. Quite funny that it’s only ‘under control’ for humans when it starts with trust and freedom, isn’t it? I never did like it, and my personal norms of right and wrong always did override any social norm. How else do you become a female engineer? If I would have accepted the “technology is not for chix fad”, I wouldn’t have done it. A little naive of what that would mean in the “big bad world”, but being deaf really has its charms;) I’m very persistent in my “shoulds”. The only thing a person should learn is how to be flexible in moulding their environment to reflect their values. Patience: I have none, that’s why I’m obligated to go through extreme measures and be a bit extreme in my spare time. The truth is people call it patience, the absence of flexibility, but what they really mean is to accept things that shouldn’t be accepted as a normal state. I live my small existence to challenge that, whichever way. Trust me, you’ll thank nameless people like me to at least “try” 100 years down the road.

Now look at the tables below that relates to one of the hypotheses. The nominal variable “Happy now?” is the dependent variable, and whether or not you have a handicap or chronic disease the independent variable (also nominal). How do you choose the test? I think it’s by the dependent variable. If it’s nominal and you’re looking to predict one variable from another the test is logistic regresion. In this case, if you work with logistic regression the dependent variable is the “criterium variable” (Happy Now?) and the independent variable is the “predictor variable” (Handicap?). You are looking for how much % more or less the addition of the predictor variable can predict that someone will be happy or not. SPSS pukes up some numbers:

According to this the addition of a chronic disease or handicap results in a 67.2% of succesfully predicting whether someone is happy or not. So, the addition of the predictor results in a 2.5% more chance of succesfully predicting against the 64.7% in general. NAO, the result of this test is significant because in “Variables in the Equation” the column “Sig” says .034, which is 3.4%. Anything below 5% is a significant result. BUT! You have to check the B-value. B = -1.139. That means: a low value on one is equal to a high value on the other. Negative B-value is opposite, positive B-value high/high or low/low. In other words: If you’re high on happiness, you’re low on handicap. If you’re low on happiness, you’re high on handicap. In other words: HYPOTHESIS CONFIRMED.

A guy named “Wald” also has something to do with results being significant or not, but somehow never got why if “Sig” can tell me everything?

Who said I don’t do numbers? WIKIPEDIA? Y U MAKE IT SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND? This:

Hell will freeze over before I understand it. I’m IT man, Big Calculator should do what it’s good at: CALCULATIN’.

Kolmogorov-Smirnov is another one of those tests…. Screw it, at around this time it’s “Da comrad, some vodka“. Whomever said a BSc / MSc Psychology is “fun stuff” is badly mistaking.

p.s. Professor-kuns. Do know I can chart these rules in one A4 so any idiot can understand. Y U SPEND 50 pages on it?

It’s been too long! I haven’t watched anime in ages, but I’m really interested in seeing this movie. Other than that, one AMV video editor made a lasting impression on me back then. He/she edited Kenshin on a Megadeth song called “Trust”. I’m not sure, but I think the amv is based on this one.

It somewhat resembles a “Mini” I think, only it’s bigger. New completely unaffordable with the engine I want need. The problem with this car is, it’s only been on the market for about 2 years, so there’s only …. expensive occasions. Oh yea! Exactly that color, with the white rooftop. Preferably 1.6 because that’s what I’m used to. However, I’ve noticed from my parents car the engines have improved quite a bit. Even though Doiha-chan is more powerful than the diesel version 1.6 lemon, I might be shocked driving in this car.

I want a lemon! If only they put this car on the market a few years earlier! I’ll look around, see if the amount still makes me faint.

Mérde, the competitor sure knows how to fffuuuuuuuuu a good car:

Left is the model I got, only 5-dr, and the right is their ‘new model’ (out a long while by now). No, I say no!

Next time take it easy on the wine. lol. Beer is the beverage of choice haha. I was totally confused when I read it, the only thing mildly scandinavian about the rest of the entry is that most good metal comes from Scandinavia.

Recorded some more summaries today, while cooking. Every once in a while before what is in the pan is going to burn, I run back and forth from the stove to the stairs to hear if my computer is still yapping to itself. If it isn’t I run up the stairs and put on the next text to read and record.

Do I get tired of myself? Yes! Yesterday I fell asleep with my netbook still on my tummy until I figured out that I was hugging my netbook instead of my pillow about halfway through the night.

It appears VideoLan is possibly taking/skimming off ‘silences’ from the audio file, making it shorter than the actual video file. So the original AAC is just fine coming out of dgmpegdec, but it’s VideoLan’s conversion causing the length difference.

That’s nice… but if Winamp won’t play my AAC and I can’t use disk write mode and VideoLan is cutting off unwanted milliseconds or even seconds from my audiofile… what do I do then?

Solution:
Drop the AAC into Yamb, and convert it to mp4.

The mp4 will play in Winamp, and therefor you can use disk writer. Winamp does not cut bits off it thinks it doesn’t need, hence the end product has no sync problem. I know VideoLan is a popular player, but it certainly isn’t any good for converting AAC.

The problem:

• VFapi reader is an old program, this is why even after running the *.bat and installing the *.inf virtualdub gives you the message: “Could not locate decompressor VIFP” once you want to frameserve a converted d2v project from dgmpgdec (“fake avi”).

The solution:
What you need to do is place the file VFCodec.dll in both %System32 and %SysWow64. %SysWow64 ironally actually contains the regsvr32 which enables registering 32 bit dll’s. Then you need to open up a cmd window (run as administrator) and type in:

cd \windows\syswow64 [HIT ENTER]
rundll32.exe advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection C:\PATH_TO_VFAPI\
vifp.inf,DefaultInstall [HIT ENTER]

What you’ve just done is tell the correct regsvr32 to register the VFapi dll.

The problem:

• There is a 64-bit edition of virtualdub available for download. Do NOT download this edition, because it will never work with VFApi.

The solution:
Use the 32-bit edition.

The problem:

• You’ve installed Lame mp3 encoder but can’t see it in Virtualdub. It’s the same problem as VFapi.

The solution:
Installing Lame for mp3 encoding also only succeeds if you do type in cmd:

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\rundll32.exe setupapi.dll,InstallHinfSection
DefaultInstall 0 c:\PATH_TO_LAME\LameACM.inf [HIT ENTER]

Make sure it’s the 32 bit edition you’ve downloaded! Don’t forget to run cmd as administrator.

That’s it. You can download x264 from here and install without further problems.

I’m still looking for the solution, but for the time being I’ve found some info on the program’s User Manual. Next time I’ll do a conversion which requires aac stripping, I’ll try and figure out the answer for you. If anyone already knows, please share!

To be quite honest, I even thought of closing Solstice Productions for a while because I release so little these days. Nonetheless this site has some useful video tutorials I want to keep around. Like you, I consistently forget what settings I need to use when I’m encoding or converting something.

I’ve developed a new theme for the website since the old one was getting more and more problems with newer browsers. I’ll come back sometime and update / correct some information on this site. Enjoy!

Required programs:

• dgMpegdec (successor of DVD2AVI)
• VirtualDub
• VFApi
• Winamp

Open the TS file in dgmpegdec.
Check if the option “Demux tracks” is enabled under Audio -> Output Method.
File -> Save Project.

This will create a D2V project file and an AAC audio file.

Processing the audio
The AAC file must be converted to WAV first, as it is a readable format for virtualdub. I usually convert audio files by using Winamp on disk writer mode.

Processing the video
Open VFAPI and load the D2V file.
After that click convert.

A file is created that is basically a “fake avi” which will read out the TS content.
Open the fake avi in virtualdub and apply filters like resizing and compression settings under Video.
Make sure you select the wav file you created under ‘Audio’ and to apply compression settings.
Now do: file, save as.

Title: 7 steps to Buzzer Beat
Used footage: Buzzer Beat, Fuji tv getsu 9 drama, summer 2009. Additionally a scene from Natgeo’s “The Universe” series for the rocket.
Score: Read the roll off titles at the end, there are just too many used.
File details: RAW 706 x 396, in the following versions:

• Divx 1 pass quality based (2)
• Xvid 4030 Kbps
• MPEG2 4000 Kbps
• audio all 128kb/s mp3

HARDSUB

• Divx 1 pass quality based (2)

Check download availability

FOLLOWING DESCRIPTION CONTAINS SPOILERS!

And here is a short description for the 7 steps of Buzzer Beat.

Step 1: Cavemen; exaggerated agression [Basketball scenes]. I got this idea because I was still listening to Humanaut by Mnemic while starting up an episode of Buzzer Beat. The opening for Buzzer Beat just happened to match the “lift off” feeling of this song.

Step 2: Satan. I always thought Yoyogi was a creepy guy. The little beard just made it all the worse. It didn’t take long to match that with Stephen Lynch’ BEELZ.

Step 3: Betrayal. Here we see Naoki walking in on Yoyogi and Natsuki. From there on I gave Naoki some spunk by using Revolucian – Bale out. The way Naoki SHOULD have reacted.

Step 4: Meaningful male dialogue. Secretly I made this because Yamapi said “this and this dialogue is very interesting” (gehehe). This one came into play when I was looking over my music collection for really crude dialogue. I found it in Crotchduster.

Step 5: Anticlimax. Where would Buzzer Beat be without the blooming romance between Naoki and Riko? I’m so not good at doing sappy editing, so you’ll just have to forgive me for making a prank.

Step 6: Meaningful female dialogue. I figured, if I were going to do a “male dialogue” I would also need to do a female dialogue. Since I am neither genders but an alien, I thought the pranks should be equally shared.

Step 7: P-Cup ω to Strauss. That’s right! I edited all the yummy Yamapi “in the shower, in the bath tub, squeezing tits” scenes together on nothing other than classical music. A fancy rack like that deserves some fancy music.

I spent most of the editing so far on getting the intro right, of which I will give a sneak preview by a screen capture.

As you can see the intro has a pretty big warning icons. Contains violence, sex, drugs, mobbing and swearing.

Generally this OPV is all about exaggerating. I simply took 7 bits of pieces of this story and exaggerated it to no end. The end result will be so evil it has no equal. Especially somewhere in the chapter ‘Meaningful male dialog’, I’m trying really hard not to let Yamapi say the last sentence to that but I make absolutely no promises hahaha. God help me if it fits with the facial expression and mouth movements…

Let’s just say the one thing I’m not exaggerating are the warnings on this video.