A Weekend In Des Moines

Posted on by Jordan

As I think I mentioned before, this weekend was notable in that Heather and I didn’t have any plans for it.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think we were bored though!

Saturday was spent mostly cleaning… but after being on the go for so long the place really needed it.

I should back up though, Friday night we walked over to eat dinner and go to a movie at the mall we live next to. It only took us a year to actually get around to doing that! Heather and I often walk around the outside mall in the evenings when we want to go for a walk, and frequently we comment that we should take advantage of our location to walk to dinner and a movie, but ether we have been busy, or there haven’t been movies we wanted to see, or other things just kind of got in the way. Not anymore though! We finally walked over to a movie.

Ok then, back to Saturday… We had a wonderfully lazy morning, then cleaned like mad, then had a chance to go over to a friends house and meet a friend of theirs who is starting a mission of sorts in Mexico. It was neat to hear them talk about what they have seen in Mexico, and what they hope to be able to do there. It was also nice to just be together with friends from church in that kind of “around the kitchen table” setting and just enjoy being together.

While talking that night we found out about an annual event in Des Moines, called the “World Food Festival.” We were excited to learn that it was an all-weekend event, so decided to swing through after church Sunday.

As you can kind of see, it was a little crowded there, but there was no shortage of food to be had. Apparently we should have been writing down what we tried, because I can’t remember anymore… It seemed so obvious at the time, hmm…

Heather had some chicken fried rice, and a spring roll, I had a gyro, and then we sampled some Ethiopian rice dish, and some vaguely South-American vegetable pastry:

The pictures are from my phone, as somehow despite our intentions of learning more about photography, we managed to forget to bring a camera with us today. As you can start to see from the view behind me in the first picture, there were some interesting things we could have taken, if only we had planned ahead a little better. I suppose this let us enjoy the food more, although frankly the authentic spring roll, and the rice dish weren’t big hits with us.

I suppose it’s cheating to throw up this post with a few hours left in the day but I can all but assure we won’t be doing anything else blog-worthy today 🙂

-Jordan

P.S I just realized I haven’t ever put up a post about the Farmer’s Market here in Des Moines… despite having pictures and even some video from when my parents came to visit. I guess I should keep that in my idea list… In the meantime this festival isn’t at the same site, and was perhaps a quarter of the size of the farmers market, just to give prospective against something that I haven’t ever talked about directly.

An Education In Aerospace

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I finished watching the last episode of “From The Earth To The Moon” this week.

It concludes a small tangent we took, exploring the glory days of the space program, that has been really interesting.

It all started when I found out that “The Right Stuff” was on Netflix streaming. It was a movie I have heard reference from time to time, and always wanted to see. The movie is *over three hours* long, so Heather didn’t stand a chance, and I had to break it into more than one session, but I found it really, really interesting. Heather enjoyed what she saw, and I think she caught a big chunk of it. The movie stars with test pilots in the early jet aircraft prototypes after WWII, and progresses to the end of the Gemini program. As long as it was, I feel like they had to skim over so much.

I happen to have mentioned something about the movie at work, and a co-worker brought my attention to “From The Earth To The Moon.” It, like “Band Of Brothers” (a favorite of Heather and mine) was made after Tom Hanks did a movie about the subject, got interested in the larger story, and partnered with HBO to make a multi-part TV series.  The Moon-race set being inspired by “Apollo – 13”  and the WWII set being inspired by “Saving Private Ryan.” Band of Brothers was done second, and I would consider it to be a somewhat better product, although the subject matter is far more intense… not for everyone I suppose.

Going back to “From The Earth To The Moon,”  They briefly cover most of “The Right Stuff” in the first few minutes, and then lay the context for the Apollo program, then follow it through to the last mission. All I can really say is that I am still in awe of what they managed to pull off in such a short time. If you have Netflix, or a local rental place that had a good collection of older classic movies and TV (I can’t imagine many having a TV mini-series from 1998… but Netflix does!)  I highly recommend you check both the movie and the TV show out!

I think it is fair to say I had more interest in the subject than Heather did, but it was still really fun to get to share learning new things about the space program with her. Although we hadn’t actually finished all the episodes when we were in Chicago, the trip provided a sort of climax when we got to see the Gemini capsule from Jim Lovell!

Jim Lovell was also the commander on Apollo – 13, and had donated a few items from that mission… gloves, helmet, flight manuals, etc. Getting to actually see the hardware, in the middle of reviewing the history was a fun treat!

Now that we have finished “From The Earth To The Moon” I am pushing to wrap things up with “Apollo – 13,” but after 15 hours of space oriented viewing, I think Heather may be ready for a break!

-Jordan

Windows Media Center Movie Project

Posted on by Jordan

This is going to be kind of technical, but I have to document the process somewhere….

I have a Windows Media Center PC, hooked to our TV. We don’t have cable, so its not acting as a DVR. I have been planning to setup a plugin called “My Movies” that does a nice graphical browser of all movies stored on a Windows Home Server box, which I happen to have.

I actually had most of this setup months ago, but had run into some problems coping movies to the server. My motivation for all of this is the fact that Heather owns *hundreds* of DVDs. To save space we threw out the cases, and put all the disks into a book. The problem is, its hard to even remember what the movie is about sometimes if they have a generic printing on the disk. The My Movies plugin gives you a picture of the box, and a synopsis, as well as actor list, etc. All really cool, but it was being stubborn about working.

First let me outline the problem:

  • My Movies is a free* tool that will do everything I mentioned before, and auto-add any movie placed in a folder it is watching.
  • It also provides hooks to copy movies using AnyDVD.
  • AnyDVD is kind of expensive for a hobby project of questionable long-term value.
  • there are a number of other cheaper tools that do the same thing as AnyDVD, ranging all the way down to free
  • none of these tools seem to work with My Movies, in the sense that you can just hit the “copy” button
  • I am starting to suspect the My Movies people did this on purpose, as there is no discernible reason the other tools wouldn’t work the same way.
  • Trying to find a work-around was painful, as nobody wants to host the entire tool-set to go from factory DVD to playable files on your hard drive, lest the incur the wrath of the MPAA

After something like 12-18 hours of fussing with it, I finally found a system that’s working. I did have one DVD fail to read so far. I have some ideas for that, but I will come back to it after I have worked through the majority of our library.

The system that works:

  • have dvd43 running, this will allow other applications to read the disk
  • use dvd Shrink  “backup” option to re sample the disk, set the target folder as the movies folder on the server

I think that I may be able to use “superDVDRipper” to get a usable video out of the one disk DVDshrink failed to read, but its slow and kind of finicky… so I will deal with that later.

-Jordan