To be honest, calculus is not mixing with anything right now. Vector calculus sucks. I know of no one who would disagree with me on this point. Our final is on Tuesday at noon, and the studying is going slowly. Thankfully, two of my roommates are in my class, so that helps some with studying. Only 2 school days left in this term for me. After that, I head home for a month to be with my family. I know my wife and daughter will be happy.


I've been playing around with a piece of software I downloaded. It's from Microsoft, a company I both admire and hate. Anyway, it's a free download called Photo Story 3. It allows you to create photo slide shows. You can ad text to an image, using the font and color you choose. You can choose the transitions as well as transition times, and how long each slide stays on the screen. You can have movement as well, zooming in, out, left, right, up, down...however you choose. You can also add music (mp3, wav, wma formats). My only complaint here is that some of my mp3's could not be read. You can choose which slide the song plays over. For my latest creation, I have approximately 6 songs. I used Van Halen's "Jump" for the images of my daughter in the bouncing castle. One improvement they could make is allowing you to choose the starting point of the song in case you don't want to start from the beginning, but it's free so you can't complain too much. I was a little concerned about transitions between songs, but the program automatically fades in and out between tracks.

After creating my 11 minute video, I was left with the task of converting it to play on DVD (those grandparents may want to watch it). I had been using VSO's DivxToDVD program for quite some time to convert from avi and wmv to DVD. I was asked if I wanted to search for updates tonight (for the first time ever) and I thought, "What the hell?" APPARENTLY, the version I had been using was beta and was therefore free. However, they no longer support the beta version and when my program checked for an update, it must have realized that I was using a free version because it stopped working. No longer can I joyfully convert my Windows crap to DVD (MPEG) format. Since I was being forced into paying for the legal use of a converter, I elected to leave behind DivxToDVD and its primitive UI and chose to go with WinAVI. It has a great GUI, allows conversion to RM, AVI, and WMV. It also supports converting to DVD (MPEG) format. Life is good once again. Well, it's time for me to leave once again. I will try to not be such a stranger to my own blog. It's just been slightly de-prioritized due to the impending finals.