Here’s a photo I took recently in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Normal Jesus Painting?

There is one problem, this is what I see:

The True Stroy of Jesus

That’s all for tonight. I’m back home tomorrow, wohoo!

More of a brain dump for me again. I keep losing these settings, so it’s handy to have them on my site.

The command below will turn a normal avi into one that can be played on a Creative Zen. It should also work for other mp3 player like ipod etc., that need video at 320×240. I use Mplayer under cygwin when I’m stuck on a windows machine (in work). It’ll work the same from a dos shell on windows, or from a terminal on *nix.

mencoder.exe <input file> -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:v4mv:mbd=2:trell \
-vf expand=:::::4/3,scale=320:-11,harddup -oac mp3lame -lameopts \
fast:preset=medium -ffourcc DX50 -o <output file>

And in bash niceness do a whole dir and dump the output into the ./Zen dir (you’ll have to make it first)…

for i in *.avi ; do mencoder.exe $i -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
vcodec=mpeg4:v4mv:mbd=2:trel -vf expand=:::::4/3,scale=320:-11,harddup \
-oac mp3lame -lameopts fast:preset=medium -ffourcc DX50 -o ./Zen/$i ; done

If for some reason the index didn’t save with the file, the below will generate it, and save it into a new file. This can also be used to repair regular .avi’s with no index (One’s that won’t let you skip through them).

mencoder.exe -idx <input file> -ovc copy -oac copy -o <output file>

Update:

Was testing this under *nix today. If you are on a SMP machine, this will use two threads. Increase the number if you have quad core, etc.

mencoder.exe <input file> -ovc lavc -lavcopts threads=2 \vcodec=mpeg4:v4mv:mbd=2:trell \
-vf expand=:::::4/3,scale=320:-11,harddup -oac mp3lame -lameopts \
fast:preset=medium -ffourcc DX50 -o <output file>

I noticed all my categories titles got replaced with “”. The wordpress 2.6 update caused this. I must try and fix it later, as I have a copy of the DB before the upgrade somewhere.
Wordpress 2.6 is impressive though.

I got this bicycle second hand in 2003. It’s a 2002 model Trek 1000 with the orange colour scheme.

She is as the factory made her

It’s all stock in the photo. You can see all the oil on the floor. This was before I knew much about bikes, and used the wrong oil of the chain. I quite enjoy this bike, it looks well and is fun to ride. It served as my main mode of transport for a few years, so the bike does not owe me anything. It didn’t come with the greatest of components though. It’s a full sora groupset which I now know how bad it is having used better. I was never very good at maintaining this bike, purely due to laziness. Eventually certain parts went bad. I had thought of upgrading it, but the for the money I would spend on it, I could easily get a new bike that is better. That is what I eventually did, and is how I ended up with my Terry Dolan (to be detailed later). I still enjoyed the bike, so  I decided I’d do it up anyway. The first step involved was to strip it down and to do so I required a bike stand. I was doing this over the Christmas holidays so making a rack myself was the fastest method. This was quite easy. Some two by four attached vertically to a work bench, and then two pieces coming out of the top. Think inverted L. The seat post slips into the the top two, into a groove drilled into them. Hinged at the other side, and closed with G clamps either side of the seat post. Surprisingly steady and works well enough for my needs. Stripping down the parts was quite easy.

Bike stripped down and cleaned in the home made bike stand.

The book “The Bicycling Guide to Complete Bicycle Maintenance and Repair” is what I followed. I got a toolkit like this on ebay. The tools were the main thing holding me back on repairs in the past, as bicycles use a lot of specific tools. Getting a kit is definitely something I would recommend. I bought a 105 groupset on ebay, and a pair of Mavic Aksium wheels, Selle Italia Filante Trans Am saddle, Shimano M520 SPD’s and some other parts of CRC. It took about two days to put it all together and it was well worth the effort.

The finished product, looking a lot better. 105 groupset and Mavic Aksium Wheels

A few months later it’s still going strong and fun to cycle. The bike is probably a bit small for me (54cm frame) but I use it as my commuting bike and I have no problems with it for this purpose.

A few months on and It's still going strong.

I’m still in .bd land. Last week here for this current trip. Counting down the hours until I get out Bangladesh reminds me of some sort of film where zombies are trying to break into your car and you drive through the city. It’s like that here, except with beggars when you are stuck at traffic lights.
Needless to say I haven’t been leaving the hotel apart from going to work. I am instead occuyping my time with the gym instead and keeping with the healthy felling, I also gave up smoking. So all in all not a bad result from this excursion.

The reason I’m in the gym is I need to do some training for the Into the West cycle from Mullingar to Galway. It’s a two day event, cycle down on the Saturday and back on the Sunday. I’ll post more details on it nearer the time.
I actually managed to burn my face with sweat in the gym. That was a first for me. I must have lost over 2 litres of water in that 2 hour session. Luckily I had some dioralyte with me. I’m thinking these might be an excellent item to bring with me on long cycles.
I must detail my bikes in the next post…

I’m in Bangladesh at the minute. Crafty motherfuckers here. I work on connecting one box to a network on one side, and then to another box on the other. Went into work yesterday and it turns out they won’t have the other box until August. Yeah, sorry lads, I’m not going to wait around for you.
I think this will finally push me to redo my CV. I’ll have 12 months done here september. I should be here until August, and not a moment later. Another job in August and then holidays. Hopefully I can line up a few interviews for then.
Also during the holidays I hope to “the Galway” cycle this year. It’s from Mullingar to Galway on the Saturday. Stay over night, and then back on the Sunday. It’s a charity gig, and it’s not a race, more so an event. The turns was 400 for it last year I’m told. I’m not going to get much training in being stuck in hell Bangladesh, but hopefully the exercise bike in the gym will be enough to keep my legs in shape.
Bangladesh: What of it?
Not much. haven’t ventured outside much as I’m not taking malaria tablets(Malarone) as I think they are horrible bastards. We went outside for about 3 minutes the first night, and just got hassled by begging kids and rickshaw drivers. Not thanks.

There a campaign at the minute but the RSA, He drives, She Dies. It bangs on about how women get killed moreso when a man is driving, etc,etc. One flaw in the statistic is that man is not stupid enough to take a lift from a woman driver. Drum Roll Please!