Location and Hygiene and HBO has Good TV: Minimal Daily Post

Constant access to readily hot water is truly one of the best things about living in a post-industrialized world, cause no matter how cool she may be, I am no Starbuck.

::is *so* clean that she squeaks::

Speaking of post-industrial: I have lived at my apartment for over 9 months without noticing that a manufacturing plant is completely visible from my back door. I think it is the Jif plant over on Winchester, but I don't know for sure.

Its presence makes me feel happy in a way only people who also grew up in almost total agrarian societies can imagine. I can see Downtown and big buildings, I can see a factory - I live on Sesame Street.

Well - not quite - but right where I live is almost at a dividing line: There are warehouses at my back and and elementary school and the fringes of a historical district at my front. My worldview on a daily basis is shaped by which exit I take to leave my house.


I find this entirely stimulating.

In other news, I have found that more than 2 episodes of Carnivale on a work day is just too much for my brain to handle. As it is, I was so unable to figure out what was going on with the Russian kids in "The River" until they smacked me over the head with it (literally!) and I ended up getting caught up in the soap elements of "Lonnigan, Texas" and totally missed any significance other than the Lodge stuff. And Brother Justin. Who I love and just got hot in a really bad-wrong way.

Day-Am.

*Finally* saw Deadwood "Requiem for a Gleet" (ouch!) and will now trawl back in my Flist looking for discussion. If I am unable to locate any discussion, I will start one here and participation will be manditory.

::looks sternly over glasses::

AVI Tech Question

Okay - so I have all of these avi video files that are, I assume, all using mpeg-4 in either a divx or xvid container. Am I right so far?

So - I also know that these files (most of them are bittorrented) are labelled something like "Desperate_Housewives_1x05_hdtv_xvid_tcm" or "Lost_1x13_hdtvlol_avi" or something. This is just an example - I've never even downloaded Lost.

I have 2 questions:

1. What does "LOL" and "TCM" mean? Is it something to do with the audio compression?

2.Is there a way to correct for what I assume is a frame-rate inconsistency? For example: certain avi files seem to play jerky for me - the movement looks a bit *off* - now the audio will generally sync but the actual play is just - stuttery. I am not certain but it may be on the files labelled TCM (I need to actually look at this in depth). Coverting the avi to mpeg2 does not improve the movement issues, probably because this does not correct frame rate problems.

According to g-spot, these files play just fine and I have all the necessary stuff running in the background.

But I want smooth looking video - How do I achieve this? What am I doing wrong? Is this a PAL-NTSC thing? I thought we had worked all those issues out. Do I need to force film something? Force feed something? Should I use the force?