Raymond Johnson @ downclimb.com

  "Fantastic!"   Every once in a great while, I dive deep down the rabbit hole of media formats and the codecs 1 that encode and decode them. Sometimes it's photos, sometimes it's audio, and this time it's video. I'm no expert in these things, but rather an enthusiast who (a) likes to create and organize digital media and (b) likes knowing that the formats I'm choosing are going to meet my present and future needs. In the past few months I've been adding Blu-ray movies to my media server. I've relied on H.264/AVC as my video format for a long time (more than a decade, maybe?), but with H.265/HEVC now pretty mainstream and AV1 emerging, I figured it was time to refresh my knowledge and get to know how these different tools might serve me. This is going to be a long post, so I'm going to take a moment here to establish the four considerations I make whenever I'm encoding media, whether it's video, audio, or photos. The four consider...

RAGBRAI 2022 I feel obligated to keep my 22-year blogging streak intact here, even if what I'm about to say isn't particularly meaningful to anyone. So here it goes. The year got off to a rough start. On New Year's Eve 2021, I came home after evacuating from the Marshall Fire. The fire destroyed over 1000 homes nearby, and the flames came within sight of my building. I spent that night at my sister's, sleeping in a recliner next to my ailing mother. Mom died less than two weeks later, finally succumbing to the stroke she had suffered the previous July. Really, nothing was great for mom after dad died in 2019, but it was nice to have her here in Colorado for a few years and I can't thank my sister and nephew enough for the care they gave her in those final months. It was hard for everyone. My work at the Department of Education kept me exceedingly busy. I felt like the whole year was a constant state of never getting caught up. The last time I took a Friday off, I wo...

In January of 2020, I set my sights on riding Ride the Rockies. After finishing my 5th RAGBRAI in 2019 and riding both the Buffalo Bicycle Challenge and Pedal the Plains that fall, riding the premiere bicycle tour in Colorado was something I wanted to do. As spring approached, I trained, kept my weight down, and then saw my plans change as the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the cancellation of all the summer bicycle tours. Given the choice of a refund or moving my registration to 2021, I moved my registration. Riding the Rockies would have to wait another year. As it turned out, even if the organizers hadn’t postponed RTR in 2020, I wouldn’t have done it. In April, I had shock wave lithotripsy to break up a kidney stone, and in May, I got a deep vein thrombosis in my left calf. (These were unrelated. I’d had bouts with kidney stones for a few years, and, the best I can tell, the DVT was triggered by the abrupt transition from a super-hard Zwift ride in the late evening to sleeping wit...