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At the moment the vice presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris is going on. I’m sort-of listening to it, and for whatever reason tonight has me thinking back to the “debates” we had as school board candidates when sixteen of us were running for Rockingham County (North Carolina) Board of Education. Though I did not win a seat, I have always been proud of my campaign and there hasn’t been a single moment’s regret. I had way too much fun throughout the entire process than to have been the least bit bitter about not winning.

So that sent me hurtling into the Wayback Machine(tm) of this particular blog. Every step of the way during that run, I was chronicling it here. And more than ever it strikes me that maybe this is a resource that others could benefit from. I mean, there NEEDS to be ...

Late last night I succeeded in finally putting every episode of Lost on my new iPod. And I didn’t buy them through iTunes and load ’em on the iPod either: instead I chose to rip them straight from my DVD sets.

This took a lot of work. And when I was starting it off with Season 3, I wound up encoding most of those episodes, then found a much better way to do it and so I started the whole process all over again. But in the end, they were all done (and I might buy the Season 4 episodes over iTunes to add them to my iPod’s inventory starting next month when Lost returns).

So how’d I do it, on a computer running Windows Vista? The first thing I did was use HandBrake, which is a free program for most platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) that converts DVDs ...

Want to run for office? Here’s how!

Putting video on an iPod (if you’re a Windows user)