bt’s Weblog

Two Shrub quotes from today’s news.

On Iraqi violence: “After conferring today with his top military commander in Iraq and the ambassador there, Mr. Bush called for patience, diplomacy, negotiation and compromise.”

On Dubai World Ports: “The Bush administration said Friday it won’t reconsider its approval for a United Arab Emirates company to take over significant operations at six U.S. ports.”

Okay, would the real W please stand up?

A story about seaports might be expected to have some fishy odor but this is more like the odor from New Orleans basements months after Hurricane Katarina passed over.
Don’t you find it odd that an administration that doesn’t want to tell us anything was so quick to release the following ’secret agreement’ with Dubai?

White House Had Secret Agreement (AP on CNN, February 22, 2006)

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration secretly required a company in the United Arab Emirates to cooperate with future U.S. investigations before approving its takeover of operations at six American ports, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. It chose not to impose other, routine restrictions.

As part of the $6.8 billion purchase, state-owned Dubai Ports World agreed to reveal records on demand about ‘foreign operational direction’ of its business at U.S. ports, the documents said. Those records broadly include details about the design, maintenance or operation of ports and equipment.

The administration did not require Dubai Ports to keep copies of business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to court orders. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate U.S. government requests. Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries.

‘They’re not lax but they’re not draconian,’ said James Lewis, a former U.S. official who worked on such agreements. If officials had predicted the firestorm of criticism over the deal, Lewis said, ‘they might have made them sound harder.’

The conditions involving the sale of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. were detailed in U.S. documents marked ‘confidential.’ Such records are regularly guarded as trade secrets, and it is highly unusual for them to be made public.

The concessions - described previously by the Homeland Security Department as unprecedented among maritime companies - reflect the close relationship between the United States and the United Arab Emirates. [Unprecented, my ass. That smells like a port-a-potty gone bad. ed]

Okay, say your one of the seven UAE emeers who runs Dubai (a democracy it isn’t) and your trusted ally, G.W. Shrub, who cherishes keeping everything he does secret, publishes a document that paints a target on your back, front and forehead quicker than you can say, ‘National Security, trust me.’ Wouldn’t you feel a bit ill at ease being revealed as a partner of the ‘Great Satan’ in the war against your fellow Arabs? I would.

Just another example of the self-serving, incompetent ones who are ruining our country. Oh, did I say ‘ruining’? Naturally I meant ‘wrecking.’ And I should point out that W knew nothing (NOTHING) about this deal which ‘did not rise to that level’ in the approval process. Might we wonder if ’sink to that level’ is more apt?

I’ve learned much about our shipping infrastructure in the past two days. One item that strikes me is that most of it is run by overseas companies. I suppose that’s reasonable since our monster trade deficit comes from buying more overseas goods than we sell back to them.
It strikes me as well that the CNN ‘poll’ on Netscape.Com showed that 85% of the respondents said “No” when asked if Dubai Ports World should run six of our container handling ports. These polls aren’t scientific but I seldom see such a lopsided tally.
While mostly everyone is looking at security I thought I’d look elsewhere - the money. After all, this is probably Bush bid’ness as usual. The press stories have turned up some interesting connections that I suppose we shouldn’t pay any attention to because it’s probably what’s really behind the Bush-Rove Curtain.

It is no secret that this administration has pursued an aggressive antiregulatory agenda, and it has elevated corporate leaders to its highest positions. Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose department convened the panel that approved the ports deal, came to government after serving as the chief executive of the CSX Corporation, which was a major port operator when he worked there. (After he left, CSX sold its port operations to Dubai Ports World.) (NY Times Editorial February 22, 2006)
U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow also told reporters he did not know of the decision even though he chairs the committee that approved the sale of British-based P&O to Dubai Ports World based in the United Arab Emirates. (Yahoo! News ‘Bush unaware of Dubai ports deal before approval’ By Tabassum Zakaria Wed Feb 22, 6:40 PM ET)
Treasury Secretary Snow said he had no knowledge that the company he once headed, CSX Corp., had sold its global port assets to Dubai Ports World for $1.15 billion in 2004 — the year after Snow left to join the administration. (Yahoo! News By Tabassum Zakaria Wed Feb 22, 6:40 PM ET)

Okay, let’s stop a moment. U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow does not know that the company he headed, CFX, was sold to Dubai Ports World for $1,150,000,000. (roughly) two years ago, a year after he left CFX to become Treasury Secretary. This despite the fact that he chaired the committee that approved the sale of British based P&O to Dubai Ports World. This despite the claim that the P&O to Dubai Ports World deal was ‘throughly investigated’ by the department he heads, the department that convened the panel that approved this $6,800,000,000. (roughly) sale of our ports to DPW.

Secretary Snow, I know a guy in Flushing who can get you a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge. His name is Abdulla al-Sheik but everyone calls him ‘Louie.’

The political tug-of-war spread to the White House nomination of David Sanborn, one of several Americans on Dubai Ports World’s senior management team, to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.
In his new job Sanborn would have oversight of his former employer, a possible conflict of interest, said Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson (news, bio, voting record), who plans to block Sanborn’s nomination until more hearings are held.” (Yahoo! News By Tabassum Zakaria Wed Feb 22, 6:40 PM ET)

Okay, a current senior manager of the company that has been ‘throughly investigated’ and cleared for this new U.S. ports deal is to be appointed the head of our U.S. Maritime Administration which oversees all our ports and shipping. No conflict there.

It seemed clear from today’s session that the port deal may continue to give rise to political attacks, counterattacks and misunderstanding. In a subplot, the North Carolina Democratic Party called on Senator Elizabeth Dole, Republican of North Carolina and an Armed Services Committee member, not to take part in any deliberations of the port deal. Her husband, former Senator Bob Dole, has been retained by Dubai Ports World to help shepherd the deal through Congress. (David Stout, NY Times, February 23, 2006 ‘At Senate Briefing on Port Deal, Bush Aides Stand Firm’)

Bob Dole takes time off from peddling Viagra to ’shepherd’ the Dubai Ports World deal through Congress. Why bother? Congress had nothing to do with the deal in the first place. Bet you Bob is picking up a big chunk of change for shepherding this little lamb through this Republican pa$ture. Obvious question - is this a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

I wonder if there’s a Carly$le Group connection somewhere in this deal?

The George Will wannabe, David Brooks (no relation to Mel or Donny) writes his NY Times columns as if he were the emotionally removed observer applying only reason and facts to the issue he is explaining (in depth) to those less astute than he. Think ‘Deep Thoughts.’

Today, in a piece on the U.S. Ports affair he blew it. He adopted the Karl Rove inspired mantra that says if you are against Bush you are the terrorist enemy.

It is instructive that in a piece titled, “Kicking Arabs In The Teeth,” he tags Michael Savage, a ‘right-wing’ radio commentator as, “the radio hatemonger Michael Savage.” My, my Mr. Brooks and what say you of the esteemed Rush Limbaugh? or the equally esteemed Bill (SHUT UP!) O’Reilly?

Brooks, without his usual ‘logical, rational’ padding states without elaboration, “But let’s be clear: the opposition to the acquisition by Dubai Ports World is completely bogus.” Well thank you for that conclusion but where’s the in-depth argument to back it up?

For a finale on Arab kicking Brooks hits the Al Jazeera news agency, C-Span, CNN and unnamed Congress critters with a broadside one might expect from Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh or Faux’s own Bill O’Reilly. C-Span??? The channel that broadcasts hearings, call-ins and such directly, without any commentary???

The strongest argument the fundamentalists have is that they are engaged in a holy war against the racist West, which imposes one set of harsh rules on Arabs and another set of rules on everybody else. Now comes a group of politicians to prove them gloriously right.
God must love Hamas and Moktada al-Sadr. He has given them the America First brigades of Capitol Hill. God must love the folks at Al Jazeera. They won’t have to work to stoke resentments this week. All the garbage they need will be spewing forth from press conferences and photo ops on C-Span and CNN.

Ah, such indignation. Mr. Brooks, thy bubble has burst and thy cover is blown. I wonder if NY Times hires cleaning people to wipe the spittle off their Op-Ed columnists’ computer monitors.

I’m being snide. So sue me.

This is what came with the ADS capture device and from what I read it is one of the leaders in movie making software. Although I captured tape to DVD and VCD files I was more interested in combining some mpg clips into one file. Each clip has a header I wanted to remove (except for the first one) before making one video clip.

The Ulead booklet that ADS Tech sends with its capture product is a very bare bones intro to the package. Like the other booklet, it has English, French and German instructions. It also has some ‘unfortunate’ statements like “Note that the feature set may differ depending on your build.” I’m a mesomorph so what do I get that an ectomorph doesn’t? Does this software favor one build over another? Should I contact the ACLU? Oh well.

The version 9 logo is a babe in a sleeveless thingie holding a digital camera and staring straight at you. I had ample opportunity to study her during the install where she dominates the splash screen which stayed up for the five minutes it seemed to take to install Ulead. Alas, every time the program is started, there she is, the brown-eyed beauty, staring at me for THIRTY freaking seconds. Excuse me, Ulead, but get that shit off my computer. She’s obviously a wonderful, wholesome young woman and I hope she gets royalties on each package she appears on but not on my computer. I’m not interested in anyone holding a digital camera much less one who stares at me.

Believe it or not, even though the software works and does what I want it to do I will not buy it or recommend it to others just because of that affront to my intelligence. WTF does this woman have to do with movie editing software? Nothing? I thought as much. Could we perchance be using the soft (sex) sell to titillate our customers? Do female users get a WWF hunk to stare at them? Sheeesh.

Oh, was I talking about movie editing? Got sidetracked, I guess. VideoStudio 9 has very good help once you know you have to click on the ‘?’ to get it. It’s on the top, right side so I should have known it was the Help button. I tried clipping without help and was ready to uninstall the softbabeware I was so frustrated. After all these years I still need to remind myself to RTFM (RTBM in British/Australian English).

A minor irritant - select a group of files to load into the ‘library’ and they are listed in almost reverse order. It’s a Windoze thing, I believe. Fortunately, you click on the ‘Name’ heading and they sort by name, thank the maker.Clipping is easy although I’d like a finer control on moving the slider. Maybe I’ll find that some shift-arrow combination will work but that will take more reading.

I loaded eleven parts of a video, alphabetically, into the ‘library’ and then dropped them all into the ‘Storyboard’ viewer. They lined up correctly. I then went one at a time and set the clipping pointer to remove the heading from clips 2-11. After that I selected ‘Share’ which is where the output options are hidden. The ‘Export’ option under ‘Clip’ doesn’t create a new file. Don’t ask. For starters, I selected the ‘Like the first clip’ as the output format and zoom, off it went to make a combined video.

Some problems come up when the first clip isn’t some standard (I’m guessing) because you get an odd message about missing a decoder and that’s the end. I found that going into the options and FIRST selecting the encoding type (MPEG-1 or whatever) you can duplicate just about any combination of size and frames per second that video clips may have.

Not all of the combinations produce a ‘playable’ video, as I learned by experimenting. First of all, if you have 320×288 pixels per frame input you can’t stretch the data to 640×480 and expect to get a better picture. That aside, I tried an MPEG-2 format specifying the frames per second and size and for some reason only the VLC (freebie) media player showed it at normal speed. Windows Media, DivX, Nero Showtime and even Ulead Studio showed it at about half the frame rate I specified. I’m assuming that VLC “figured it out” and that the others were using what they were given and showed it in slow motion.

This area is somewhat new for me so in time such strange effects will turn out to be simple, dumb things you did events.

There are other controls for color, hue and the like and I tried them on parts of clips to clean up the image. I believe it worked but can’t say for sure since I’m not there yet.

Now this software can do a thousand things to make pretty, family, fun, business, office, impressive presentations but for now I’m not interested. I can see that the software has five layers in the timeline view and built-in transitions. I can also see that it would take more time than I want to spend making a really snazzy presentation of Aunt Emily’s 80th birthday bash.

I mentioned earlier that I tried the capture and gave up. It’s possible that it works fine since it is keyed to the ADS hardware but why bother when I have the ADS interface?

In sum - get the babe off my screen and if I need it I’ll buy the full package. For now, I’ll use it because it came with the hardware and I don’t have a good alternative. Well, I have Nero Vision Express which came with my Sony DRU-800A but it doesn’t seem to be as capable as Ulead’s Movie Maker.

This is one of three applications that come with the ADS InstantDVD+MP3 capture device. Unlike the capture option in the Ulead suite this is specifically designed for the hardware and after a brief shot at using Ulead for capture I returned to this application.

The first screen is a startup wizard which is okay for the first time but everything it asks for can be set in the main window. In fact, I didn’t realize that I was resetting the defaults to DVD when I wanted to do MPEG-1 decoding (DVD is MPEG-2). You will also see a “No device found” warning if the box isn’t turned on. From experience, stop there turn on the box and start over because the main window won’t acquire the device by itself. Once you’ve started using the software, I’d suggest pressing ‘Cancel’ for the startup window so you can get to the main window and then do what you want.

The main window has that burnished steel look (with rounded corners) which is all the rage it seems. The information is well placed and there are buttons for selecting the many options by category: Input/Output, Audio/Video Formats, Color/Brightness, etc. The operational buttons are at the bottom of the ample black viewing area which you can enlarge if you wish.

As I said earlier in the hardware writeup I took a narrow path of VCR to DVD and did some VCD and SVCD trials as well. I/O allows you to select one of four video inputs: S-video, RCA (Composite) , tuner or DV (camera) and two outputs: S-video and RCA. Format selection has presets like DVD better (3.5 mb/s) or DivX (MPEG4) and a custom button which opens up a large number of possibilities depending on the encoding scheme you select. Lots of room for experimenting. I did nothing with audio but accept defaults.

There are other things you can set, like date and time for a recording which presumably means you have a tuner attached and you leave the program running so it can catch your favorite episode of whatever.

The help is the ubiquitous pdf file but is not indexed or linked. It is more like a simple user’s guide and not helpful for asking ‘how to’ questions.

[rant start]Call me biased but seeing the patent numbers each time Adobe Acrobat Reader starts drives me to distraction. A note to Adobe - I don’t give a shit about your patents because I have no desire to steal your precious knowledge. You made yourself the standard so now live with having to supply folks like me a free reader. Nah Nah, Nah Nah Nah. [rant end]

The process of capture is trivial once you begin. Just go have a drink or something because capture happens (only) in real time. Getting to the starting point is a bit tricky if not annoying because first, the start, stop, pause buttons refer to the recording and not to the VCR. Second, you can’t see what the VCR is doing if you pause the recording. Third and most annoying, there is a significant lag from pressing ‘record’ to the actual recording start. I had to try some tape segments four or five times to get it to start in the right place. In hindsight, I should simply start ahead and then crop the clip later. You learn.

In summary, Captain Wiz is a good interface that makes the task as easy as possible. Just make sure you check out all of the options so you’re not overwriting files or capturing in a mode you really don’t want. As for the directions, they are only helpful for presenting the big picture. The details are yours to learn by doing.