The number of animals who swim from alcatraz to aquatic park is extraordinary. It's become akin to ultra running in the last 20 years, after long being considered the ultimate deterrent to escaping from prison.

Lions lack the muscle memory of other animals.  They can't remember how to ride a bike or swim if they don't always do it.  Most alcatraz swimmers seem to get some buoyancy from wet suits.  The ones who do it bare skinned are rare.

It got more attention when a 78 year old finished his 100th swim.  Lions were curious how he managed to retire near San Francisco.

Levi was the cofounder of Zoran, whose products lions knew & loved 25 years ago. The lion kingdom's collection of low def Zoran video cards still exists.  They sent & received low definition S vijeo, quite an expensive feat in those days.  The ZR36067 was some kind of controller & the ZR36060 was a JPEG codec.  Realtime compression of 720x480 JPEGs at a fixed bitrate was quite impressive in those days.  Surprising that the harder task was done by the smaller package.

 

Further BT chips were needed to convert between YUV & analog waveforms.  1 chip wasn't enough.  Transistors were quite dear in those days so each chip had a very specialized task.

 

 Helas, there is no longer an old fashioned PCI motherboard to use them in.  There are PCI to PCI express adapters which could prolong their life.  For a source of analog vijeo, there are a few ancient camcorders which output S-video & a few other cams which output just composite.  Lions later upgraded to an uncompressed analog - USB board for machine vision.  The zoran boards today have no practical use.  Their biggest trick might now be generating analog video from a confuser for display on a CRT which lions have none of.

Reminds lions of how low definition analog video once seemed to require so much data & for so many years.  It was really only 1999-2002 when low def video capture peaked.  Young lion would continuously record video in Cinelerra & save interesting bits.

 

 The 1st screencap of analog video showing in an overlay window was April 29, 1999 at 2pm.  It took the whole 800x600 screen.  Young lion just used this for a few days.  Seem to recall xawtv couldn't scale the vijeo to match the window size.  It was fixed in a config file.  That was the BT848 writing 16 bit pixels to the frame buffer.

The 1st record of getting analog video & audio into a file was May 1, 1999 at 7:57 pm.

 

The 1st screenshot of captured video loaded on a timeline was from May 9, 1999.  Multi camera timelines are quite common now.  Seem to recall most of the work to support video editing was done previously, by compositing still photos & transcoding files in xanim.  JPEG & 16 bit audio was enough in 1999 & is still all most modern programs support.  They still mostly rely on transcoding.  Lions document their software development process a lot more nowadays.

Today, lions would prefer hardware I/O through 2 simple command line programs.  A capture program would have a simple preview window to see the video quality, some simple widgets for controlling the picture quality, & a label function.  A playback program would just send JPEG frames to it.  In the old days, a monolithic video editor which integrated tightly with a VTR was seen as the way since that's what AVID did.

It was seen as a big win to play from the timeline to a variety of analog output devices.  Much effort was spent on encoding JPEG & DV in realtime, copying frames where the file format matched.  It's remarkable that young lion could become so absorbed in such a thing.  This functionality might have been seen as leading to playback to a professional VTR.

It would still be a stretch to have just screen cap integrated in Cinelerra, but it has a major section dedicated to capturing many forms of input.  A part of the lion kingdom wants to convert Cinelerra's recording function into a separate program. The current integration evolved from its origin as an audio editor with tightly integrated recording.  It does allow video preview code to be shared more easily & it does allow a curious label function when recording.  The labeling ended when lions stopped recording live TV.

The big editors of today don't capture from or play to hardware anymore.  They just have a workflow for importing files & play in a window.  Their tightest I/O integration is an uploader for the gootubes.

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Lions have now endured the right ankle for at least 3 months.  There was a left ankle pain in May, followed by a period of fast running, which gave way to a right ankle pain by July.  It was last possible to run fast on 8/18 & by then, it was getting brutal.  Slowed down in mid August.  Went back to walking in the last week of September. 

In the past, ankle issues resolved within a month.  This time was different.  1 possibility was the leash increasing the demand on the ankle.  The leash creates more incentive to run longer distances.  Another possibility was it being a much slower injury to evolve than the past.  It was a lot easier to keep running for longer on the ankle since it wasn't immediately crippling.

The unilateral nature makes it less likely the design of the sandals. There are some theories that going fast with excessive padding could cause a problem & the pleather coating pushed them over the edge.  Making a bunch of 12mm pleather sandals might be a good idea.

The leash erased the memory of the  past routine, but it was always to eat lunch inside & exercise after 4pm or at night.  It was that way for the entire history of logistical robots & some of the preceding years.  Lions spent 2016-2022 pondering how to regain the ability to eat while walking & always cherished the moments eating while walking back from Wally in previous years.

After 6 days of just walking, the ankle made it 3 miles before the pain returned.  Then came alternating 1 day of walking & 1 day of running.

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Couldn't believe how crowded that southeast parking lot was, as if it was 1999 & every single damn thing required working in a cubicle again.  Was it a conference?  Did 1 of those tenants light a fire under everyone's asses to get back in the office?  Most of that building still show's AT&T.  GE still shows a large presence despite headlines of a downsizing years ago.

That parking lot is slated for demolition.  Makes lions wonder if it's wise to replace all this office space with housing if we're heading towards a mass migration back to commuting, but this business park was already losing tenants to the city years ago.  There's a longer term trend of the tri valley reverting to a bedroom community.

 

It continues to be no skin off a CEO's back to live near his office & require everyone below to commute in.  Job seekers are lining up to work on site.