My RPI classmates Gail and Mark are on a cross-country RV trip, and they’re spending a few days in Silicon Valley before heading towards Arizona. We were able to get our calendars to align and they spent the afternoon and evening with us.

We talked, walked, and talked some more before going to downtown Los Gatos for dinner at Coup de Thai and gelato at Dolce Spazio, with lots more walking and talking included.

It was a great day.

I was busy all day, but I didn’t get much done other than a bit of cleanup, both physical and digital.

See you tomorrow!

I spent most of the day ripping more discs, mostly Marx Brothers DVDs. I also got started on ripping my Mel Brooks collection, which is on Blu-Ray, so it’s a much slower process.

One of the parts that slows me down is having to actually put the Blu-ray disc into my old player so I can see the menus and thereby find the chapter titles and what extras are on the disc – I still haven’t figured out how to do that on a Mac.

The other slowdown, of course, is the sheer size of a Blu-Ray file, typically well over 30GB.

Just for fun, I encoded The Secret Life of Walter Mitty on my Mac mini even though I’d already done it on the MacBook Air. I expected it to be faster on the mini because the mini has a fan which keeps the CPU cool (the MacBook Air is passively cooled, and the average CPU temperature got over 200F during the encoding).

And I was right, but not by a lot – the two machines ran neck-and-neck for an hour, but for a longer job, the fan in the mini makes a difference. Here’s a graph showing the two systems encoding Walter Mitty.

The best reason to do the encoding on the mini instead of the Air is that I’m not usually doing anything else on the mini!

Our spice supply was getting a little low; in fact, we were basically out of thyme. Our timing was good, though; Penzeys Spices was running a sale on thyme today – a quarter-cup jar was only $1, more than two dollars less than usual. So we headed up to Menlo Park today to restock.

It was a beautiful day, so we decided to take a walk before going to the store. We’d walked up and down Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park many times, but only the stretch between El Camino Real and Draeger’s Market. Today, we went further.

Just across the street from Draeger’s, we found Fremont Park, built on the remains of Camp Fremont, which was built during World War I to train soldiers – it basically turned Menlo Park into a real city.

We continued walking down Santa Cruz Avenue for about a mile, then turned north and walked to Valpariso Avenue, which separates Menlo Park from Atherton. We couldn’t see much of Atherton; nearly all of the properties on that side of the street were fenced and gated.

We returned to Menlo Park and did our shopping at Penzeys; I left with only nine different kinds of spices.

This evening, we met another candidate for the associate rabbi position at Shir Hadash; he, too, gave an interesting lesson, taking about Og of Bashan and challenging us to delve into the Torah, Talmud, and even later commentaries about him. He finished the lesson with a poem by George RR Martin, The Last of the Giants – not the source material I’d expect from a rabbinical candidate, but appropriate to the lesson.

I’ve been ripping discs and converting them to MP4 files all day (again). I finally figured out an efficient workflow and converted all six discs in The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection in just a few hours.

Then my new toy arrived, a UHD-capable Blu-Ray reader. Our late friend John had given us a Blu-Ray of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty a couple of years ago and we hadn’t gotten around to watching it; I thought it would be only fitting to make that my first Blu-Ray rip.

Ripping it was easy; converting it has been a bit of a battle. I use Handbrake to do the conversions, and it’s happy to use every bit of CPU power it can get. It typically converts a DVD in about 15 minutes – no problem. A Blu-Ray requires a lot more work – so much that the CPU in the MacBook Air got hot (over 180F) and slowed itself way down to protect itself. When I started the conversion, it was running at about 24 frames/second; by the end, it had slowed down to 6 frames/second.

I’m going to use my Mac mini for the next Blu-Ray conversion; it’s slightly slower than the Air, but it has a fan and should be able to run at full speed for a lot longer.

Shabbat Shalom!