Vroooooom

02.22.2011

I managed to take the riding portion of the Motorcycle Class again without incident, and even managed to ride my motorcycle to the Harley dealership and back so as to get some practice riding that beast. Ironic that I drove it 13 miles to where I could practice turning (which I really needed to do, and still need to practice some more).

Suffice it to say that I've survived the class, plus my first ride.

I really need to take some pictures of the bike and post them while it's still nice and pretty.

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Busy Week - The Update

02.17.2011

My busy week has been progressing as planned.

Much to my surprise, the motorcycle was delivered on Tuesday. Thanks to some help from Ponytail Jason, the bike arrived at the house and is ready and raring to go in the garage. Oddly difficult was getting the tags/title in a nice, legal manner, just because if you technically follow the rules of what you can or can't do without an in-state title or a license tag, you can't get anything finished (at least not without taking the bike to the courthouse without a tag). But, it's now titled and tagged and legalized. Which brings me to...

The return of motorcycle class starting on Friday night. Technically it starts tonight, but I'm skipping the paperwork portion since I really just want to get comfortable riding again. I'm hoping that by the end of Saturday's class I'll be ready to (safely) ride my bike to Sunday's class. We'll see how that works out.

Gina's belated Valentine's dinner seems to have gone off without incident. Nothing was burned, everything stayed down, and it was actually pretty good. Go me!

Now you can anxiously await an entry for Monday to see if motorcycle class went ok. You just sit there and stare at the internet until then.

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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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