the dangers of secondary sources

1. When reading Bujold and first meeting Byerly, I went, "hey, that's the name of a local chain of grocery stores. huh, funny coincidence." Reading the Bujold mailing list FAQs, I learn that Byerly was named after the grocery stores (Bujold lives, roughly speaking, in my hometown). okaaaay.

2. Watching the making of/rehearsals for the various HSMs (shut up I like seeing how dancing turns into dancing), I learn that the baseball-playing jock character who refuses to dance is in fact...one of the best dancers in the cast and described by a fellow cast member as "some people - not naming names of course - really just aren't meant to play baseball." that was a strange casting choice, disney. (of course, not less strange than so many of the choices involved in HSM.)

3. Are some of the HSM cast members actually pretty good at this singing and dancing thing, or have I been stockholmed into thinking that?

(no subject)

1. I'm over at DW, with this same username. I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet, but it's there waiting for me until I decide. Feel free to subscribe/grant access/whatever, although I'm going to hold off doing so until I figure out that account's purpose.

2. I ripped a bunch of videos off youtube intending to put them on my iPod. I used kickyoutube.com to generate mp4s, but they won't load on my iPod - iTunes tells me the file type isn't recognized. I think it's a codec problem: the mp4s I have on my iPod have an MPEG-4 codec, while the ones I just ripped have an H.264 codec. How do I fix this? Alternatively, what's a better way to re-rip that will encode with the right codecs? Or, is this the totally wrong cause, and what are some other probable causes?