We spent yesterday at Summerfest, which is Fairview Park’s annual summer carnival.  We met Lori and her kids there.  Soon after her brother-in-law Andrew came by and spent the day.  What follows are excepts of the day via my cellphone:

Lori’s daughter Ally spent some time on the kiddie train:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Lori and Andrew argued about who loved me more:

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We spent some time watching the kids from “School of Rock”:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

…and Kadie danced:

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There was some kind of juggler there (although Andrew thought I was filming him):

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and we ended the evening with fireworks!

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I’ve had this video of my great-niece on my phone for a couple years.  It’s extra cute when she sees herself in the front screen of the phone and clobbers me.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

I took this on July 1, 2007.  Abbey had just turned 1!

One solution is to upload the videos directly to YouTube:

YouTube does the conversion and maintains the audio in the resulting video.

But what if I don’t want to go through the trouble of uploading and waiting for the video to be converted? Linux to the rescue!

First of all, install ffmpeg and mencoder:
(actually, I’m not sure if you need ffmpeg or not. In my case it didn’t hurt anything.)

sudo apt-get install mencoder ffmpeg

Then copy the video(s) to your computer, open a terminal window and change to the directory in which you’ve copied the files.

Then run mencoder:

mencoder input_filename.3g2 -o output_filename.avi -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc

• mp3lame is the used audio-codec (here mp3)
• lavc is the used video-codec (here libavcodec)

After the conversion is complete you should have a playable (audio included!) .avi file in the same folder! Easy.

Here’s a video I just pulled off my phone and converted –
Happy Birthday Max!

Personally, I thought the boat would be bigger.

What can I say?  Of course I couldn’t find a picture of a phone in a pitcher of orange juice – so this one will have to suffice.  Although it would be more accurate if that was a wad of money down in the bottom of the toilet.

Damn.

So now I’m using my dad’s old Samsung.  After a few days of using it, I suppose it’s not too bad.  It’s not loud enough and it lacks a few key features I really liked in my old LG, but what the hell…  my NE2 (“New Every Two”) is coming up in January.

As long as I keep the new one away from orange juice.  And vodka.  And me when I’m tailgating.

Carrie and I can talk to each other (and any other Verizon customer) without using our minutes anytime of the day or night. (Have you seen the commercials asking you “Are you ‘in’?” Well, I guess this means we’re ‘in’).

We spent alot of time trying to decide whether we really need cell phones or not and finally decided to catch up to the rest of the world. My whole family has cell phones (I think they all do) and Carrie’s dad has a cell phone. We both noticed the number of cell phones on vacation and remarked that having one (or two, as the case may be) would have made things way easier. And of course, anyone who knows me knows how much faith and love I have in my car. So having the ability to call for help should we ever get stranded is a big plus.

So… I guess it’s time to give out our new numbers. Well, not here of course. Give us call and we’ll talk.

Can you hear me now?