K. Close III

Friday, May 21st, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | 5 Comments

So I’ve restarted keeping a database of my DVDs. I’ve done this at least once before, if not more. This time I borrowed a barcode scanner from work. It was retired from the lab when we moved to a magnetic stripe reader and it was about to be surplused (the governmental equibalent to thrown in the trash, only the trash is a warehouse of crap no one wants but the state officially owns). Anyhoo, I took it home last night, and the software I use to catalog my DVDs and CDs (collectorz.com) supports searching by Barcode. All I had to do was set up a search queue and pull each DVD out about two inches and scan the barcode (conveniently, all DVD barcodes are in the upper right hand corner of the case so you don’t even have to take them off the shelf, just lean them out a bit). Then I hit search and one after the next, it searched the internet databases for those particular barcodes. Of all my DVDs, I think I had to manually enter 10 (thats out of 179).

Holy crap, I have 179 movies!? and thats not even counting the TV series DVDs. Schnikeys!

Anyway, yeah, so some of my editions aren’t actually online, so if I want to really make this accurate, I have to scan some covers and shit, but otherwise, its all going very well. I’ll probably set up a space on pelovish for all this in case anyone is interested and wants to view me as a very limited lending library.

Friday, May 21st, 2004 | LiveJournal Archives | 2 Comments

I just realized on my way into work this morning. that I don’t take as many pictures as I used to. I guess I got tired of taking pictures of the animals and Heather and ran out of things that weren’t just “boring.” As a result, I just fell out of the habit of snapping shots when something less than boring poped up. I’m gonna have to work harder at taking more pictures.

Anyway, a lot of stuff has happened since the last time I updated. Heather and I had been musing about changing the philosophy aroudn how we watch TV and movies. As I had said earlier, we were looking at getting ReplayTV and Netflix. So as of Tuesday, we now have our ReplayTV unit and we started trying out Netflix. We had ordered the ReplayTV unit on Friday, but it was 9-10 days for free delivery. We signed up for the 14 day trial for Netflix at lunch on Tuesday because it was a 14 day trial and on Tuesday, 14 days later would be the first, so we wouldn’t have to worry about not having money. So over lunch, we sat and ate, while adding movies to our queue. I decided to take the afternoon off and push on to the end of the Transformers game and not twenty minutes after heather left, the UPS man showed up with our ReplayTV unit.

Now let’s do some quick math. I ordered the ReplayTV unit on Friday, the 14th, and requested free shipping which was 9-10 days. At best, that would be the 23rd, and yet, here it was, at our house on the 18th, a whole five days early. I was astounded. Best shipping I’d ever gotten for free.

So anyway, back to what I was saying. Heather and I had decided we were going to try these two services and see how our lives would adapt to this new take on entertainment , not being a slave to the TV by watching whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, though we did have to set things to record to do so; while at the same time, never actually going to the video store, so we no longer really have total control of what movie we watch and when, though we have control of what three movies are at the house at a time). It’s almost exactly the opposite of how we used to view entertainment in our house, so we wanted to see if we’d like it or not. So far, the two services together have been nothing but fun. We’ve spent hours , literally) simply sitting on Netflix.com rating movies that we’ve seen, which results in relatively accurate recommendations that we then consider adding to our already heaping queue of movies we just want to see, recommendations or not. So after two and a half days playing around with ReplayTV, we recieved our first three movies from Netflix. Its been a big week to say the least.

Here’s our Queue, currently.