I hate this country sometimes, I really fucking do.

Two things:

-- I can't recall if I posted a link to this story already, but if you haven't already seen a link elsewhere, when one member of an elderly gay couple fell down and needed to be admitted to a hospital, Sonoma County proceeded to confine them to separate nursing homes and sell off all of their possessions. It's ghastly behavior, and people wonder why Obama's declaration that gay and lesbian couples have hospital rights was necessary. Appalling.

-- elorie has been keeping up lately with the story of a woman in Georgia whose metaphysical store is on the verge of being shut down because it violates a local ordinance against fortune-telling. elorie has contacted the woman in question and has more information here on how you may be able to help this story hit CNN.

Uh, no.

You know what's morbidly amusing? Watching the episode of Top Gear from season six where they go to Iceland, and when they're driving on the beach Richard goes, "Oh, that volcano over there is twenty years overdue to go off. I hope it goes off today!"

Ehhh, maybe not THAT day.

WOOHOO!

My new MP3 player is here! My new MP3 player is here!

I'm glad I got the chance to get it before I had to hit the dentist, because it's really nice to get something new as a pick-me-up. It's basically a knock-off iPod touch, really, and only 16GB, but as long as it plays and doesn't konk out after five minutes I'll be thrilled simply due to how much I can put on it. It actually looks really nice for $37, quite frankly. The only problem I had so far is that the set-up disc comes up as Mandarin (I believe, don't quote me on it) and I'm not sure how to change it to English, but it doesn't really matter since I can just open it up as a folder and move files over from the computer.

Well, okay, that, and I won't have time to charge it before I have to leave for work. But I can charge it at work, so if I bring both MP3 players with me I can just play with it later. :D

Question

Does anybody know of a program that will convert an AVI file to AMV that:

a.) is free
b.) refrains from putting a watermark on the resulting file
c.) doesn't take four million year to convert the damn file?

It took me forever to find a free one that works without a hassle and it just took two hours to convert an hour-long file. Ugh.

EDIT: Never mind, got the disc that came with the player to work properly. My only problem so far has been getting a bloody video to play on it ... everything else on the little thing works perfectly.