The changing of seasons

Friday was the last day of Winter and my last day at work before our one week holiday in Japan begins. The end of Winter was warm and sunny and it felt more like Summer holidays with both the campus and our offices strangely quiet. It was the perfect atmosphere for beginning a holiday.

In the morning I had a video conference demonstrating the my web form contributions to the capability browser project. The web application isn't finished yet but that's because the only time I have had to work on it has been my spare time, at night, on the train. Despite this being a high level project, my regular work has had to take priority, especially as one of my group managers has now left and my supervisor and only other web person in the group has been off sick for two weeks.

Anyway, I'm going to put all the behind me and hopefully enjoy this holiday. In preparation I have been converting various media files into formats suitable for the Zaurus and MP4 player. I thought it would be nice to watch an English movie or two in the hotel and have some video entertainment ready for the night flight back to Australia.

I bought a Western Digital 160G Passport portable hard disk drive to store the information and photographs on as we travel. I thought I might copy some unwatched movies from our Hotchip PVR and view them on the computer. However, the USB file copying from the PVR was really slow, probably USB 1.1. The 3G file was also split into two in the process, possibly because of a file system limitation (FAT32?). It also seems so far that the file must be converted before it can be viewed, despite me downloading the recommended codecs, and that this must be done in the Hotchip's File Explorer application. I have yet to try this as my laptop lacks the power and my "big hard disk" laptop is currently busy converting a pile of DVD's I recently bought into a format suitable for my portable players.

One more day before we fly out. Yum cha for lunch, a trip up to the cemetary for father's day, then take Kita over to the in-laws in the evening. He'll be staying with their two cavaliers. Hope it's a nice holiday for him too.

Updates on the trip will be at travel.allrong.net

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