davidcook

Teeth first : rwrylsin and I had check-ups at the dentist yesterday. Amazingly, since the last time we saw a dentist was in Australia, our teeth are in pretty good shape. I need some of my old fillings replaced, since they have a couple of gaps, but no new fillings required. Considering how much chocolate and fizzy soft drink I consume, that's quite amazing.

Fencing: Edinburgh International (an FIE satellite) tournament on the weekend. Slightly disappointing turnout - 38 entries, compared to 53 last year, and compared to 120+ entries in most of the large UK tournaments. I thought I was fencing ok, but the results don't really bear that out - won 2 of 5 in the first round, 2 of 5 in the second round, and was seeded 17th into the DE. One pool bout in the second round turned into a bit of an epic - one of the fencers in the pool had won all of his bouts up to that point, mainly because he has a very quick fleche attack - no-one had managed to stop it or even get a double-hit on it up to then. We traded hits up to 2-2, and then he fleched at me - and we got a double. He fleched again - another double. 4-4, and the next hit would win it - he fleched again, and again, and a few more times after that - every time a double hit. We ran out of time, priority was decided for the last minute, and then there was a brief flurry of action that ended up with him winning the bout.
On to the DE bout - I was up 10-7 at the start of the third period, after catching up during the second, and I was still up 13-12 with a minute to go ... and then I ran out of concentration, and lost 13-15. I had 8 minutes of good concentration ... in a 9-minute bout. Next stop, Birmingham !

rwrylsin's Mac has a DVD writer. I have a number of XviD-encoded avi files that I ... acquired recently. How can we write them all to a DVD ? And before that, how can we even play them on the Mac ?
On my PC, I downloaded VLC, and these files play fine - I have never downloaded an XviD or DivX codec on this computer.
On the Mac, the files didn't play in Quicktime. We downloaded VLC, and they still didn't play. rwrylsin followed instructions we found on getting XviD working which involved downloading the DivX codec and some other thing which runs XviD through DivX (?? I may be misremembering/misunderstanding), but they still don't play. Help ? Surely this sort of thing should Just Work[tm] ?