Monday, March 20, 2006
Today it seemed as though Muni completely ignored my bus route. I waited from 8:08 AM to 8:30 AM and no bus for my route passed in either direction. As I started waiting, a very cold rain began to fall, and it continued steadily even after I gave up waiting. I had been holding my umbrella and carrying a small shopping bag (the "monitor stand") as well as my backpack, so my fingers were numb even though I carried the shopping bag with the same hand as the umbrella and alternated which hand was kept in my pocket. The monitor stand aka utensil holder from Crate and Barrel didn't work out as I had expected. It's the right height, but too small in the width, so I'll return it. I'm sure I can find something similar, though—I just need the right size. I'm guessing medium-sized salad bowl. Today I worked mostly on completing video transcription and began captioning with MAGpie. I created a test file with about a minute's worth of captioning and was successful in getting it to play synched with video in RealPlayer. The SMIL file wouldn't play in Windows Media Player or Quicktime, and I think it's because the SMIL file references the Real format—I think I need to create separate SMIL files for each player format once the conversion is done. I wouldn't call this easy work. The transcription alone took about 5 hours. We had to send it back to the speaker for proofing which took about a day's turnaround (a quicker response than I might have expected from our busy faculty). It took most of today to split the captioning up into bite-sized chunks in MAGpie. Once the start times for each caption are set in MAGpie, MAGpie automatically generates the corresponding RealText and SMIL files, but even those have to be hand-edited since I'm working with a streaming file on a server I don't own and the filenames will change once it's uploaded to the server and I wanted to add additional metadata. But at least I know the technology works with RealPlayer. When I figure out if we can do the WMP and Quicktime conversions, I'll need to figure out how to create a simple, elegant interface on the web page for this to let people choose their player and turn captioning on or off. If we don't have enough time, I might need to forego elegance and go with just plain simple. Chatted with student DU about computer hardware. Dentist appointment—just a cleaning, all is well. Didn't feel well after my appointment—some mild stomach problems—so I went home. Patrick has been having severe allergy symptoms today, and we've coincidentally run out of food, so we ordered in. We would have ordered from Xiao Loong, but they are closed on Mondays, so we ordered from another place instead. Patrick's fortune: Stubbornness is not a good virtue (3, 4, 6, 8, 44, 45; map). My fortune: To be beautiful externally is like a glass rose; one false move and it can crack (2, 4, 8, 14, 18, 26; blue). These were the first fortune cookies I can recall which attempt to teach people Chinese. For example, on the back of one, it says "LEARN CHINESE" followed by an English word and then the Pinyan and then the Chinese characters. Map is Di-tu and Blue is Lan-se. The brand of cookie is called Super-K and it is manufactured by Kari-Out Company in New York (800-433-8799).