Category: LiveJournal Archives

we became one of the powerless for a couple of hours last night… we seemed to be plagued with bad luck. I was trying to cook burgers and Country Ribs and the fire just would not co-operate with me. It kept getting colder and colder. When we finally got the burgers off, they were quite dry from cooking for so long just to get done. The ribs though, having been cooked over a second load of charcoal and wood, looked much better. I haven’t had any yet, but I’m looking forward to them. Then, when we finally had dinner in front of us (dry burgers and slightly chewy tater tots – as they were cooked twice), we started to watch our movie, The Sting. For the first half our or so, we seemed to be stopping every 5-10 minutes for one thing or another (checking the ribs, checking the cookies, checking the weather since we heard the Tornado sirens, checking the animals, etc.) and then, when we finally got rid of all our distractions and got settled in to watch for real, the power went off. Sheesh. Apparently we weren’t meant to watch that damn movie, at least not all in once sitting.

So we went around and unplugged all the TVs and expensive electronics to make sure they wouldn’t get shorted out (yeah, too little too late) we started trying to investigate what the source of the power outage was. We could see that all the streetlights were still on and that all the people across the street still had power. We couldnt’ really see the windows on either of our neighbors’ houses, but we could guess that at least one of them had power as well. When her AC unit outside the bedroom window came on, it was kind of a dead giveaway. So we finally gave up on the night and went to bed. About two hours later, the power came on and while we had turned off or unplugged most everything in the house, a couple of lights did come back on, so I went around and turned them off.

It really wasn’t too big a deal, even though I did forget that we were now on city water.

I’m starting the first of many 3-day weekends this summer. I was told I had
too much comp time built up so for the summer I get Fridays off. Today, so
far, I’ve finished picking up the office (from purging for the yard sale);
cleaned & swept the shed; started the clearcoat on my computer case (though
I may need another can, 3 so far); straightened up the kitchen a
bit, and built a bike-rack for the bed of the Baja. I guess I could say
I’ve been pretty productive, I would probably be guilt free were I to start
playing my game now (I picked up Riddick Wednesday). I get to start
in Nick’s D&D game tonight (if I can find his apartment, that is). I’m
playing a MysticTheurge who happens to suffer from a slight Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder. Sean’s Cleric is going to help him out with his
pure/sanitary food & water until I start getting some Cleric levels. It
should be pretty Groovy.

Tw weeks ago, we tried Netflix. And we loved it.

Unfortunately, they don’t want to take our money, and since they’re not taking our money, they don’t want to give us any more movies. So we have one movie checked out to us, with two more open slots. With a queue of over 50 waiting to come to us, we’re stuck not getting anything. We tried to pay with our check card, we tried to pay direct with our checking account info, and now we’ve even activated a credit card to try and pay (all our credit cards were deactivated to keep us from spending), but they haven’t seemed to accept that payment yet either. It’s become a huge pain in the ass for a service that we have grown to love in only two weeks. I hope we don’t have to shop around for some other, similar service just because they screwed up.

Heather’s contacted both Netflix and the company that handles their direct checking transfer, and neither one has been overly helpful. They really don’t seem to want to take our money. How many companies can say they already have enough business and don’t need any more customers. None that I know of. Hopefully this will get worked out as we’ve just got the one movie left to watch, then we’re out of movies entirely.

Of course, ReplayTV hasn’t taken our money either.

Well, that’s better. a little bit of tweaking and a restart and I have the movie running. VideoLan may not be the best DVD player, but its not bad. It plays the movie and is a minimal install. Oh, and it’s free and can play almost anything in the world. I bet it can even play out of region DVDs. Now if I could just figure out how to get it to play on my TV at home, I’d be set. I could watch all my downloaded episodes of 24 on something other than the computer.

So, yeah, hmm, the movie’s a bit dark, but then again, I’m not really watching it, it’s mostly just on for entertainment while I sit here mindlessly. Ah hah… now I’ve found teh Overlay video controls and reset that as well. Okay. We’re all set to sit here and do nothing for two and a half hours.

Yeah, Scarlett Johansson has a nice butt.

I sent this quiz to Heather over ICQ, but her student assistant was sitting at the desk. Her assistant took the quiz instead and informed me that she definitely needed a boob job. Now, for one, I didn’t really intend to discover if Carrie (Heather’s assistant) needed a boob job, I had no desire to even find that out. Also, I have to say, Carrie’s really cute, and doesn’t need a boob job at all. It’d be too wierd to tell her that though.

Heather informed me that she’s not inhibited like that at all, but that still doesn’t make it any less awkward for me, since I already thought she was cute…

Anyway, on to another subject. I saw The Day After Tomorrow last night. It was pretty good and had some really cool concepts and effects. Jake Gyllenhaal was good in it too, even though his character was much smaller than I expected. Contrary to the ads, the movie seemed to be a lot more about Dennis Quaid, who left a pretty bad impression on me the one time I worked anywhere near him.

Speaking of working, I almost had the opportunity to make nearly $1,000 working for Hot Rod TV, but it kind of fell through. They needed a PA to help them drive the Hot Rod Power Tour from Dallas to Green Bay. It would have been about 4-6 hours of driving a day and about 2 hours of real work a night as over 3000 cars toured across the country. Unfortunately, not an hour after they called to see if I was interested, their regular PA apparently signed on and they didn’t need me anymore. that would have been really fun, a real adventure. Oh well, I’ll get by without it, I just won’t get my new camera like I had hoped.

phht. I’m running out of steam.

So I’m working in the lab for the next three hours. I’ve brought some DVDs to entertain myself today. I was working on the SOVA web page again, trying to clean up some of the messes we created when coding it in a great hurry. I’m trying out a new menu system, but it’s using a whole different set of tools and it’s kind of frustrating me right now, so maybe it’s good that I’m in here.

Of course now I’m having hella-trouble getting the DVD to play. dangit.

I need to start writing here again, but not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Things just seem so slow, I don’t know that there’s anything anyone will care about, even though there’s fucktons of stuff going through my head lately.

From Go-Quiz.com

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.

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.