Surprise Visit

Two weeks ago Shawn and Crystal paid us a last minute surprise visit. They had taken a trip to Hawaii, were flying home "non-rev" (something like standby) and their flight to Phoenix was full, but a flight to Seattle had available seats. They called us up and asked if they could crash at our place for the night.

It was loads of fun to see them here even if it was for a short time. We got to catch up some that night. They went to church with us in the morning and then only had a few hours before needing to leave for the airport to catch a flight to Phoenix.

On the way to the airport we took them by Snoqualmie falls, which is only a ten minute drive from our house. This is always a fun site to take out-of-towners especially since it's so close.

Jen snapped this picture of us walking back to the car.

Capture Streaming Video and Audio

We're in Utah for Thanksgiving and Jen talked her family into doing a little talent show as part of the festivities. She wanted to do "The Fools" lip sync with her sisters. However, she left the cd at home. She asked me if I could rip the audio from her youtube video on her blog. After a little searching I found this page that describes how to download the actual *.flv file from youtube. Then I was able to demux the audio from the flash video file. Here's the three steps and the software I used:

1. Use the demo version of Replay A/V (retail $50) to locate the actual URL of the flash video being played. This software can be used to actually do the capture, but the demo version will only capture up to 5 MB. This doesn't matter since we only need to use it to find the URL of the source video being played since it is embedded in the swf file embedded in the html.

2. Paste this URL in the address bar of internet explorer and select "save" when prompted.

3. Drag and drop the saved *.flv file into FLV_Extract to demux the video and the audio and poof you've got yourself an mp3 file to burn to CD.

Kiera and Craig

As part of our trip to Utah we drove down to Pleasant Grove to visit Kiera and Craig in their new place. We had a nice evening catching up with them over dinner and roasted marshmallows :).

Dallin LOVED playing with the kids... of course that has been a common theme this whole trip... Dallin just loves being around his cousins both on my side and Jen's side.

Here are some pictures from our visit with the Conovers: