Busy Week

02.13.2011

On tap for this week:

• Valentine's Day - I'm not sure what day we'll actually do it, but I promised Gina I would cook her dinner.
• Motorcycle delivery - My motorcycle is supposed to arrive from New Hampshire by Friday. The tracking site did show it was hovering around DC for 4 days, but now it just says "In Route". I'm hoping that doesn't mean "Lost".
• Return of the Motorcycle Class - I'm taking a refresher class at the Harley dealership to make sure I don't kill myself just by sitting on the motorcycle when it gets here. I don't think 4 days of class a year ago qualifies me to get out in rush hour traffic.
• Money stuff - I've got to send off some forms to consolidate my 401K account(s) and check on some stocks.

This just feels like a very busy week.

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Snow Day Ripping

02.10.2011

Today was a snow day (well, it was icy when I woke up even though most of it probably cleared up by noon - but I'm not going to let that ruin my snow day!).  I spent the day doing various chores around the house.  Some cleaning, some straightening, some organizing, laundry.  You know, manly things.  While doing all of this I had the PCs ripping away on DVDs.  Besides various movies, I managed to get the complete series of Friends and Joey saved off.

For those of you who may be curious:

• 10 seasons of Friends takes up 58GB with a running time of 3.9 days.
• 2 seasons of Joey take up 9.5GB with a running time of 16.2 hours.

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Lots Going On, Day 2

02.08.2011

I've been ripping DVDs. It's oddly fun.

In my DVD to iTunes project, my big goal is to copy TV shows. There are times I'd like to watch a random TV show but don't want to go through the hassle of digging a disc out or track down the show I'm thinking of. I've had pretty good luck copying my movies so far, but I wondered how the TV shows were laid out. Turns out they're laid out the same as movies.

Each episode is stored on the disc under the main folder. The key is to look for the files that are roughly 24 minutes long. I decided to go with Friends first. I like Friends, it's one of my "go-to" shows when I've got a half hour to waste. So I started ripping away and it's all going smoothly.

Right now I'm using 3 computers to rip. They're not clustered or anything so as to share the workload, so it's weird to see what 3 generations of processors can do. My last computer that I bought last year (the newest) can rip a 2 hour DVD in roughly 2 hours. Ripping in real-time seemed normal, it was the first computer I tried it on so I just expected that to be the norm. On the laptop that I bought roughly 3 years ago (a 32-bit processor) it takes roughly 3½ hours to rip the same size movie. The ancient desktop PC from 5 years ago, which I don't even remember what processor it was, but it was damn fast 5 years ago, takes 5 hours to rip the 2 hour movie.

To make it feel like I'm not being bogged down, I've got the old PC ripping moves (taking anywhere from 2 hours to 5 hours depending on the disc), and ripping Friends on the laptop (roughly 90 minutes to rip 6 episodes) and the new PC (25 minutes for 6 episodes). Since starting Friends yesterday I've gotten almost halfway through the 4th season so far.

That means at this rate it will take about a month to rip everything Star Trek. I'm glad this is a long-term hobby.

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Lots Going On, Day 1

02.07.2011

Yes yes yes, lots going on right now.

I'm in the final stages of wrapping up (or maybe whipping up) my home media network/iTunes server. My goal is to try and rip my DVDs into iTunes where I can watch things at my whim on the household tvs. I'm turning the old desktop PC that's been sitting in the closet for night on 2 years into a dvd-ripper/iTunes server. Right now I'm (hopefully) updating video drivers and finding a place in my computer room to put the monstrosity.

Last April I got on a motorcycle for the first time and found out I liked it. I then managed to promptly spend motorcycle money on the 2010 kitchen remodel & landscaping. Well, I've finally caught up on bills and last week I purchased a motorcycle from a dealer in New Hampshire. It's not due to arrive until next week, so I'll just scatter tidbits about it throughout the week.

I'm learning a little about Oracle PL/SQL. Not sure if anything will come of this one or not.

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I need to clean my glasses.

02.04.2011

This morning whilst surfing the internet with my breakfast, I was on the Internet Movie Database looking at the front page's scrolling list of what's hot and saw "Kung Fu Panda 2 New Porno".

Turns out it was a New Promo, but for a split second I wondered why IMDB was showing previews for new computer animated animal porn.

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