OK, local television background extra is probably more like it, but I was on TV.

On Friday night, Bay Area Backroads aired their segment on Geocaching. A bunch of my friends were on it and I was in one scene at a dinner. I barely recognized myself in the quick pan of a dimly-lit room. The restaurant was Harry Hofbrau’s in Redwood City on August 15th, 2004.

I was disappointed that my other “special guest appearance” was cut. On the day they drove around in the Jeep, I happened to call Lee as he was driving around with Doug. I needed a hint on a cache that I was at on Maui. (It was actually missing and I replaced it.)

My TiVo recorded the show (as it does every week) and I took the opportunity to install and try out tyStudio, a video extraction tool for TiVo. It took a very long time to download the video off my TiVo, but that turned out to be the easy part. I cut out the segment and saved it as an MPEG2 stream. From there I had a hard time reencoding the 178MB file to a size appropriate for streaming on the web. I tried a bunch of utilities for several hours, but then finally got WinAVI to convert it to a Windows Media stream that looked pretty good.

I uploaded the segment so you can watch the whole thing or you can read the transcript. I guess this means my 15 frames of fame are all used up.