Several interesting things have happened over the last few days. They’re all ‘cool’ enough to combine in a single post 
First of all, last weekend we went to Tilburg for several family visits. We started the trip with lunch at my mum’s, then moved to ‘opa Cees’ and in the evening I went to the movie “I’m not there” with Eva. It is a nice movie, but some knowledge about Dylan helps to be able to make sense of it all. I recognized some of the settings, but Hans had to fill me in the day after on some other stuff. Speaking of which, on Sunday we hooked up with Hans and Lucie in the early afternoon, as Hans and I went to see a concert together (tradition to give concert tickets for his birthday ). We went to see Ruud Hermans in 013 (guests included JW Roy and Ilse de Lange). All in all an entertaining show and nice to be out with my uncle again.
A second cool thing happened yesterday: On the last regular competition day of the bridge season at “de Lindeboom” we (I played with Serena) scored +27 imps for a first place. First time this season The funny thing is that I was pretty brain dead after a long day at work and wasn’t too sure about my concentration. As Jacco put it: “sometimes it helps not to think too much”. I think we played pretty sharply yesterday and were lucky at least once. The latter doesn’t happen to us too much. Also we made some good decisions. For example in 3rd position I picked up:
| xx |
| AQxxxx |
| xx |
| xxx |
Everyone was vulnerable. Serena started the bidding with 1♦ and my RHO bid 2♣. Now, bidding 2♥ would be 8-11 and 3♥ would be weak. Neither felt good, nor did a double. Figuring that the bidding wouldn’t end there I passed. They ended up in a 4♠ contract going down by a bundle. Good call (even though someone suggested that not bidding with this hand is criminal).
The third cool thing is that I sort of figured out how to transfer movies from Eva’s new video camera and how to encode them in such a way that they can be viewed here. Turns out that this is far from easy. I used this setup and fiddled a bit with ffmpeg to make it all work:
I’m not completely satisfied with the results just yet. The tool I used (ffmpeg) has a lot of options and I’ll have to fiddle with them some more to make the output better. For those of you interested, the command I used for encoding is: ffmpeg -i in.mpg -ar 44100 -o out.flv