Rich's Posts

Stephanie came to visit me in Arizona. Over the weekend we drove up the Apache Trail in Tonto National Forest.

My first trip with KLA-Tencor was to Israel for an applications symposium. While not a vacation, I was able to do a small amount of sight seeing during my down time.

Before I started my summer internship at A123Systems I spent some time touring Japan.

The second half of my trip to China included excursions to Xian and Shanghai

I went to Beijing to work on fuel cell research along with some American students.

Kheema literally translates to "ground meat" from Hindi. One of the first curry dishes I made in Australia was a kangaroo kheema, which was probably the best dish I made while I was there. When we had some ground venison which my mother didn't want to touch, I figured it was a good time to document the recipe.

This is a stew I invented using red lentils and rice. I have not been able to find a pre-existing dish with a similar recipe, so I just call it lentils and rice.

I had invited Jeff to tour South Korea with me, but he had different plans. He is good friends with Evan and Megan, and so we visited them in Taipei for a week. They were great hosts, and made the trip very easy, which was great after Korea where I was struggling to figure everything out for myself.

Before I started my research in Beijing I made two weeks of holiday in South Korea and Taiwan. In case you are planning on going to Korea, plan ahead. I was writing exams two days before I left so I ignored it, and then I wasn't able to schedule a DMZ tour or a visit to the massive shipyards of Samsung or Hyundai Heavy Industries.

Note: These notes are largely obsolete and are provided for reference. Codecs have advanced beyond H264 (although H264 is still hugely popular and a safe choice for compatiblity), and Handbrake has become a mature and user friendly GUI application that performs this work.

I started encoding DVDs when my friend got an iPod Video in 2006 and he was trying to put videos on his iPod. Since then I've given up iPod support on my videos, and instead find myself trying some of the more fun modern options available to H264. Now I watch my videos through MythVideo, and I can take some movies on my usb key to watch on a PS3 or Xbox360 with my friends.

My scripts have evolved extensively, as I've used ffmpeg, mencoder, and now handbrake to perform my encoding. The first resource I used was on the Ubuntu Wiki, although now the article has become fragmented. The only thing which I pull from this page any more is dumping a DVD in Windows (ironically).