Engaged on Mt. Adams!

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More details to come later…

Courntey's engagement ring Top of Mt. Adams

Last weekend my girlfriend Courtney and I and hiked Mt. Adams in New Hampshire with two other friends from church (Shannon Fogwell and her boyfriend Dave). I proposed to Courtney at the top of King Ravine, a short distance below the summit, and she said yes! I had given Shannon and Dave a heads-up about the proposal, so after we took a break at a nice scenic point at the top of King Ravine, Shannon and Dave packed up their packs and I suggested they go on to the summit and Courtney and I would catch up. We both had to go to the bathroom. When Courtney and I were ready to go, I pulled out the ring and we enjoyed several precious minutes together watching the clouds clear over this beautiful landscape:

King Ravine, Mt. Adams

I chose to propose on a hike because we first met on a hike and we we both love the outdoors. I chose Mt. Adams because I figured Courtney was probably expecting the proposal to come on our upcoming trip this August to the Sierra Nevadas. I figured she especially wasn’t expecting a proposal on a trip with other friends.

Courtney and I first met hiking nearby Mt. Washington, the tallest mountain in the northeast, more than a year ago. Although Mt. Washington has sentimental value for both of us, we like to joke about the autoroad and cog railway that take tourists to the a cafeteria, gift shop, and museum at the top. I chose Mt. Adams because it’s the tallest mountain in the northeast with a natural summit. There is also a great view of Mt. Washington from the top of Mt. Adams, and since both mountains are close to home, Courtney and I can return often to hike them.

Mt. Adams panorama

Celtics!

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We’re running out of bandwagons to jump on in Boston. I can’t say I watched more than a few regular season Celtics games this year, but Celtics did an amazing job of scrapping together a team of fighters that played good defense and got the job done. Watching them completely destroy the Lakers last night was amazing and seemed like a good way to win. There is no question that they were better. There was also the usual Boston-style post-championship rioting.

Side note – does anyone know what Kevin Garnett is talking about in this post-game interview?

It’s interesting that even though the Celtics are a historically successful team, you didn’t hear anything about them in Boston until part way through this season. I gues they hadn’t done much recently to get excited about and the Red Sox and Patriots were stealing all the attention. But I also wonder if the NBA has lost popularity. I haven’t really been an NBA fan since Jerry Reinsdorf’s destruction of the Bulls in 1999. I’ve tried, but now I just like baseball better. I can’t decide if the NBA was more popular and exciting during the 90’s or if my perception of the NBA’s popularity was skewed because I grew up in Chicago. It seemed like everyone everywhere cared about basketball. There was the Dream Team, Jordan, Pippen, Brid, Magic, Ewing, Rodman, etc. Maybe the marketing machine behind Michael Jordan just can’t be matched. Maybe it was because the Bulls were the only good team in Chicago (well, the White Sox were ok, but there was the baseball strike). Maybe basketball was more popular.

Canon A570 IS movies

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This winter I bought a new digital camera, the Canon A570 IS. It was a great purchase. It was inexpensive, takes excellent pictures, has optical image stabilization, nice manual settings, uses AA batteries, and has very little lag between when you press the shutter button and when it actually takes the picture. It’s movie mode is also great, although it takes MJPEG videos, which are very large. I spent a very long time figuring out the best way to edit the videos and then compress them to some standard format. I chose Cinelerra as my video editor, and Microsoft MPEG4-v2 as my compression codec.

Unfortunately the movies do not load correctly into Cinelerra the way the camera saves them – the audio is messed up. I found I had to run the movies through mencoder using this command before I could open them in Cinelerra:
mencoder input.avi -ovc copy -oac pcm -o output.avi

When I was done composing my movie in Cinelerra, I export the movie using the “Quicktime for Linux” file format and choose “Uncompressed RGB” from the video setup menu and “Twos Complement” from the audio setup. The movie that gets rendered is huge, but then I compress it with ffmpeg to MPEG4 using this command. The resulting video will play in Windows Media Player. qscale sets the quantization level, and is an alternative to setting a static bitrate:
ffmpeg -i input.avi -f avi -b 2000k -qscale 5 -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec mp3 -ar 48000 -ab 128k output.avi