Terabytes + solid state drives = THE ULTIMATE HTPC

Except not for me. Yet.

But surprisingly, this weekend, in the middle of being sick and babysitting a sick niece and a sick wife, I managed to get the three one terabyte drives I recently received formatted and sort of installed in my machine. The plan, and one must always have a plan, is to eventually backup my DVD collection (which is obviously huge) from physical copies in boxes to manageable .iso files on these drives. Then plug those badboys into my HTPC, and enjoy the world of tomorrow today. Relaxing on my couch (futon from the dumpster) with my ill-street-blues Harmony remote (totally worth the money) and wireless keyboard, surfing through the hundreds of thousands of hours of bonus features these dual layer DVDs have to offer.

The benefits?

1.) Once on hard drive, I can clear up about 20 cubic feet of storage space in my office’s closet, moving these archaic physical packages to the garage.

2. Easier access. Everything will be alphabetized on the drives, which is theoretically possible with hard copies. Anyone who’s had a substantial collection of media, be it games, music cds, vinyl, or dvds knows this is easier said than done. Things get put in the wrong cases, cases get put in the wrong spots, and eventually chaos rears its ugly minotaur-like head and eats the world in a dark cloud.

3. It’s totally bad-ass. I figure each DVD will take ~4.35 gigabyte. Divided by 0. Approaching infinite. Something like 200 full DVDs on a drive (albeit probably re-encoded for space concerns). Talk about a nerdversation piece at any geek party.

But the downsides…

1.) Talk about an enormous investment of time. Ripping, encoding dual layer discs to single layer sizes, rarring and creating parity files for data integrity, yada yada. Could take untold years. By that time HD-Graph technology will be here, and we’ll all be the zombie slaves of Venutians.

2.) I will kill at least one DVD-RW drive in this process. At least.

3.) I will want a 1:1 backup of each. Because that’s how I am. And that’s ridiculous.

So we’ll see. At the rate I’m going the drives might just end up sitting on my desk until these nifty new solid state drives (which a buddy has, and loves for his OS drive) eventually hit reasonable sizes, and the cycle of hoarding begins anew.

Also: I really need to buy some IDE to SATA power converters. Quite a few…

Eating: oatmeal, eggs. Coffee!

Twittering and twhirling

Prelude: Tonight’s definitely “one of those nights”. Everything’s broken at work. I feel like I haven’t woken up yet even though I’m an energy drink and half a venti coffee deep. It’s almost 3am, my night’s close to half over. My eyelids are still covered in crust.

Body: At the recommendation of some friends, I’ve joined up to Twitter, and it seems pretty cool. It’s kind of like IRC, kind of like a message board, but not really like either. Mostly, it’s reminding me how out of the loop I am on these things. Five years ago, I would have been King Internet up on this twitter nonsense. Now, I’m just limping along. But whatever, if you’re interested in seeing my updates about getting coffee, scratching myself, or aborted haikus, check me out on Twitter. Codename: Asciigod.

I’ve also installed the Twhirl application. Again this is at the recommendation of friends. It’s sitting there idling on my home PC while I write this at work. What magic will it produce? Not sure.

Now I really need to figure out some useful apps for Twitter, like Rememberthemilk and that blood sugar twitter thing Steve showed me. However, I don’t have free SMS on my phones. Hrm. I’ve been thinking of upgrading to an iphone or something, but I’m not sure what kind of plans they offer, and how expensive they may be. Guess it may be time to find out.

Other than all of this, I’m feeling completely “soggy”. I really need another shower and a shave to help wake up, but it doesn’t look like that’s  in the cards for tonight. Too much to do at work.

Managing my RSS feeds: the Bloglines bloat

It seems like it’s been months, years even, of agonizing toil and self-flagellation (school) since I last checked my RSS reader, Bloglines. In reality, it had only been about a month, yet this tentacled beast that captures my RSS feeds had begun to resemble an oldschool political cartoon. You know the kind. Black and white, detailed, giant octopus wrapping its many squirming arms around Abe Lincoln, a bear that represents the Soviet Union, a mass of railroad tracks, and freed, voting slaves – all while gnashing its cute little beak around the ghost of Benjamin Franklin. Shit’s bananas, out of control, cream pie (ew?).

I’m a procrastinator at heart, and there’s a point of imagined critical mass when I view something like this as a nightmare. The very idea of opening the bloglines website just to look at all those feeds, crawling like worms, upset my stomach.

But I faced my fears today, and cleaned up that shit. Does that make me a hero? Probably. Am I asking for a reward? Only financial.

So I hope to be back to checking people’s blogs, and trying to find more “personal” type blogs; I axed a few of the bigger ones. Sorry if you missed my awesome input. Every superhero needs some quiet time in his Fortress of Solitude.

L O L </ridiculousness>

Also, I kicked the living crap out of four tests this week. Take that scantron!

P.S. Ghostroach spotted at an Atlantic City casino.

Capturing online lectures to mp3 format

Taking college courses online is great. You’re not tied to an inflexible lecture schedule. There’s less commuting. As busy, working adults, my wife and I can tailor our schedules around careers and family. With lectures and course content being online it’s easy to pick up where we left off, studying how and when we want.

In some instances though, those same advantages can prove to be drawbacks. Lectures often last upwards of two hours. Often the course material available online is thorough to the point of excess, and even though – in the olden days – one could theoretically spend hours a week reading low-tech, printed course material or researching periodicals and reference material at the library, I don’t think it was a common problem. When you’re faced with all this immediately available information on a course website it can be overwhelming. A week’s worth of work can turn into many hours spent online fostering neurotic, completist urges. Reading a text book is straightforward. Cruising a course website can be a meandering, branching time sink.

With that in mind, I’ve been searching for a way to record my course lectures into a more portable format. They are presented in some form of (I assume proprietary) web browsing tool and there’s no download option to be found.

Originally, I wanted to use Audacity, a pretty serviceable open-sourced sound editing suite. According to some dox I’d read, recording sounds this way should have been easy. In the line-in mixer, I’d have an option to record directly from my sound drivers. Nope. Failing this, there should be some options in my Control Panel’s (Vista) Sound area that I could enable. Couldn’t find anything and was way too lazy to download device drivers to properly patch up my system. Last option? Run a cord from the line-out to the microphone input on my sound card and record this way. This had me picturing explosions, plus if I was too lazy to install drivers, there’s no way I intended on dig through boxes of cords and wires to find the appropriate cord.

My search led me to Freecorder, a free browser based recording toolbar. “What the hell?” you say. “Exactly.”

Turns out it works fabulously. A simple download and install (Internet Explorer or Firefox only. Opera users like me are left wallowing in our k-radedness) loads the toolbar in the browser. The recording options are fairly robust: you can choose a wide variety of mp3 bitrates, or export as .wav file. So far there’s been no hiccup, and the only drawback I can find is that the program splits the mp3 into bite-sized chunks after its recorded. Perhaps this is a function of me recording off of a website that changes “slides” every couple of minutes as a new topic is covered, perhaps it’s a setting to be changed, or perhaps it’s a feature saved for the “Professional”, paid for version of the software. Regardless, it’s not that big of a deal to me, especially considering the ease of use.

Another thing that’s great is it appears to not save any periods of silence. For instance, I’ll start an hour long lecture and go do something else. If I forget to turn it off, I haven’t noticed it filling up my hard drives with hours of silent data. As someone who has ran into this problem converting analog cassette tapes to .wav format, this is a nice trick to discover.

Couple that with the aforementioned ease of use, and Freecorder is a pretty tight little score that I bet a lot of people could get a lot of use out of. Now my wife and I can load this to our mp3 players and listen on the go, giving ourselves more time to focus on the important things in life, like our new Pornographic Mp3’s for the Blind production company.

Thanks Freecorder!

I Have No Mouth, But I Must Yelp

File under: Old News

There’s a friend of mine who lives in California and can keep up on the latest Karaoke happenings and restaurants with Yelp. I kind of imagine that in certain places (major metropolitan areas mostly), Yelp probably has a pretty active community. I envision people cruising in convertibles, checking their iPhones for the latest reports on what’s hip, hot and happening. Not so much here. Still, it’s a pretty good idea even if it has been done before in other forums. Unfortunately their doesn’t seem to be a universally popular tool of this kind on the internet. Yet.

Regardless, I’ve started posting some reviews for places in my area. Hopefully some people will find them useful and appreciate it. Later, I’ll have to do some digging around to see what people recommend in my area. A cursory exploration has suggested restaurants are popular here. And that’s about it.

So, I’ve updated my blogroll a little, and focused more on personal friend’s sites and myself. Goodbye Get Rich Slowly, I outgrew your training wheels.

Check out my Yelp profile here.

School and loathing

School’s started back up and I couldn’t be happier. This summer I had pretty much nothing to do but work, scheme and take care of doctor’s obligations. It was a real bummer man. So it’s nice to be back on campus. Even if I’m a dirty old man, I can still pass for a dirty young man. I get carded buying Depends.

My wife’s decided to attend my classes with me which is tight. It cuts down on the girl watching, but that’s OK, I feel creeped-out doing that anyway. A lot of guys are interested in younger women, but for some reason they’re usually not that appealing to me. I prefer my women to have been beaten down by life. Others see wrinkles, I see canyons waiting to be filled with fresh tears. Ego-trippin-son.

But nah, it’s cool to have my wife along. It gives us a chance to hang out, I imagine it’s going to be good for studying, and most importantly it wakes me up on time to get to school. All my classes are at night which is a bonus in that it also serves to get me geared up to tackle working when I get done.

Another rad thing is my new automobile. This is my first car with air conditioning. It’s also my first car that wasn’t produced in either the 80s or early 90s. Just barely, but still. It’s hard to stress how much less grueling commuting to school is in a car that (hopefully) won’t break down 3 or 4 times a semester. Fact: I have had AAA premium service just to safeguard against my cars breaking down while I’m on the road. Between my wife and I, we’ve used it EIGHT times in the past 10 months. That’s some bang for your buck. On a side note, eight is the maximum number of service calls two people can make over the course of a year. My timing, thank you Lord, continues to be impeccable.

My wife’s also enjoying getting back to school for personal reasons. She’s re-registered as a student, but hasn’t technically enrolled in any classes. She does have two undergraduate degrees (Spanish and Environmental Science and Policy), and works in her field. But she’s a woman of many interests, and wants to further her education soon. Nothing is concrete, but she’s been considering Engineering or Law. Either way, I know she will succeed at what she chooses; she’s a real smart woman, with a far greater work ethic and focus than I possess. So, yeah, this is getting her back on track with the schedule and routine of classes. I hope it helps her as much as it helps me.

What’s nice about this year is the books are cheap. I’ve been noticing a trend towards more online course material, which is great. Maybe it’s partially a product of taking upperclassman level course, which may be produced to be flexible for working adults. Mostly, it’s probably just the sheer convenience for the students and, I assume professors, to do a majority of the interaction online. Either way, it makes books a lot cheaper, and the content a lot richer. For a Finance class for instance, all of the text is available online with lectures, multiple practice quizzes, expanded materials, forums, etc, all of which can be taken at ones leisure. Working overnight, with a lot of downtime, this is obviously an awesome benefit for me. I realize this isn’t breaking news, but I’m glad it broke in my collegiate career.

Also, I’m trying out this Textbook Rental Service called Chegg.com (which is a URL strangely similar to a well known porn torrent site…). It’s for a math text, and it’s something I’m positive I won’t need once I pass the course. So using this site will save me around 80 bucks if I’d bought the text outright at a bookstore. Pretty nifty I think, we’ll see how the shipping time is. Apparently they also plant a tree for each rental, which is a nice gimmick, but completely secondary to the cost saving benefits.

.,-~~”( EDiT!!!) “~~-,. Chegg.com coupon code: LQ10 (5% off nukca!)

Aside from that, I’ve picked up a fun little web based RPG called Kingdom Of Loathing. From my short introduction to the game, it appears a lot like an oldschool favorite of mine from the BBS (Bulletin Board) days: Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD or, these days LOTGD). Essentially, you get a certain number of “turns” a day, which is really nice in lowering the addiction factor. I’m assuming games like World Of Warcraft are fun, but I’m worried I’d end up doing nothing else if I started playing. You use these turns to do adventure-y things, all designed around a warped sense of humor of puns, beer and bum jokes. The basic gameplay mechanic is great, easy to get immersed in, and thus far addicting enough.

I haven’t delved much further into it, but I’m seeing hints of MMORPG stuff like crafting, “meatsmithing” (don’t ask), clan gaming, etc. There looks to be a lot of depth to this crude game, but I’m sure that’s all been covered elsewhere on the interweb.

Not so long story made short: I like it. I would highly recommend it to anyone with similar sensibilities to my own, which, chances are if you’re reading this you possess.

Had a good holiday weekend (Labor Day). Fixed a friend’s computer which had the most viruses on it I’d ever seen. By a long shot. That including my sister’s computer when she was like 16 years old, and my mother in law’s computer who’s Internet Explorer taskbar looks like the interface to a supercomputer. It was a bitch, but that’s what the “computer friend” does I guess.

And now, back to work. Homework calls.

CHEERZ!

Hidden Gemz: Ascii From Tha Vault #003

Well, I guess this post is sort of late. There was a renegade demo party that just ended. If I had posted this two days ago, it could have been an advertisement. As it stands, I guess it’s a footnote. That’s fitting.

Anyway, this party was called RVScene. It was held outside of NViDiA’s major US demo party, NVScene. I’m sure it was fun, but I couldn’t attend. But I was there in spirit, with this pretty crappy, pretty rushed File_id.diz art I did for the organizers.

I’m sure I’ll have more news about it soon, when everyone “recovers”.

Truckin on down the line!

Note, it’s only about a 1/3 of the usable area of the screen because traditionally, file_id.diz files had a standard width of like 39 characters. So, I wanted to make sure it would fit in case, you know, someone decided to upload this to a Oblivion/2 BBS or something. Everyone needs download credits!

Hidden Gemz: Ascii From Tha Vault #002

So another Anonymous friend of mine requested an ascii signature for some bulletin board. He showed me another user’s signature, and yeah, there’s limitations whenever making an ascii signature these days. Formating, font type, etc, all tend to make an oldschool thing turn into a hunking pile of doo. This is what I drew for him:

And this is the result of the webification:

Just another in a long line of ascii art related examples of why progress sucks.

:]]

It’s crazy. I can’t believe it’s been two weeks since I last wrote on here. Life’s obviously been pretty busy, stressful, rewarding, and melancholy. It always is.

I got a new car. A new used car. Finally, after weeks of hustling, lining up loans, staying up til all hours of the afternoon, calling sellers punks, smashing my fist into doors and meeting people at Panera breads. It’s a 2000 Nissan Maxima. Average mileage. Luxurious air conditioning, leather seats, moonroof aka “bird window” and a blown subwoofer. The price was right, and the loan is manageable and will further build my credit. This is all good stuff. We already put 600 miles on it. That’s a bit extreme, but happy times call for long drives and cool night air. Baby baby.

Other things I’m trying to build: my apartment’s furniture. Status: standstill. I’m having a really hard justifying dropping a couple grand on a nice living room set from a major retailer. On the other hand finding a truck, searching Craigslist, and arranging pick-up with my schedule is near impossible. If it wasn’t so perplexing to not have furniture to relax in this wouldn’t be that important. I’m sitting in folding beach chairs. Something obviously needs to be done, but when? And what?

I’ve been trying to find good information online about haggling for furniture. I particularly enjoy haggling, especially on things that I feel I should be getting for about a fourth of the retail price. I.e. Furniture. Too expensive really. But there seems to be a dearth of information about this lost art, and all the google searches I’ve done for local furniture stores (supposedly better to deal with!) have yielded nothing but high-end furniture boutiques. That’s not to rule those out but… I think I’d rather have an actual house before magnificent furniture.

I found a futon in the dumpster at my apartment complex. It’s really ironic. I kept it and will be getting the mattress dry-cleaned (hopefully!) before use. There’s approximately 800 dollars saved on an office couch. Karma++

In related “finding stuff in the dumpster news” (wait for it…) my new computer build has gone critical. At this point I assume it’s a failed motherboard. That is a bitch and a half. I’ve spent the last three weeks trying to stabilize the system, port my applications – which there are a lot! – over to 64bit Vista, downgrading to 32bit Vista, messing with my laptop, blah blah, everything. It’s been a nightmare. On top of that I have a friend’s PC to fix, this PC I found in the dumpster that I have to password crack, an idling server, my old network storage box, my out of work HTPC, my laptop, and my old PC to take care of. Hahaha. Jesus. That’s a lot of spicy computers!!!

Three servers died tonight at work. Cause of death failed redundancy at the UPS level. We can save them.

It’s, been :]]~ crazy on the streets. ^_^

Flixster: Everyone Loves Shrek

Here’s some listening material while you put your pants on

There was a time, not so long ago, when I was on top of Internet Trends. Some of this was just because I was young, angry and full of energy to expend on completely pointless tasks. (Like this blog? Asshole.) But another reason was that I’d mine this log of URLs vomited by the zeitgeist for ideas to write about for this magazine I used to work at. Back then there wasn’t any Digg or similar sites to spread viral activity like the bathrooms at the Paradise Garage. You could actually get paid for finding stupid, marginally interesting internet memes and writing about them in a print magazine. Maybe you still can, but back then it didn’t seem like you were TOTALLY stealing money by just copying and pasting your browser history into a textfile and throwing your byline on it.

Since then, the internet has (d)evolved. Anyone under 25 with a passing interest in remaining “connected” is guaranteed to know what’s the hottest YouTube video of the moment. In fact, me even believing YouTube is still cutting edge shows how completely lame I’ve become. I’m sure there are dozens of more in-your-face, bleeding edge sites for people to get their LOLs on. When I visit 4chan or similar web forums, I’m literally lost. Clicking on links trying to find my way around makes me nauseous. Helen Keller thinks I’m a herb. Do people still even use the term “herb”? For reference it means “sucker duck”.

So it’s with equal parts excitement, interest and confusion that I joined Flixster. Flixster is a “social networking site”, you know, like Friendster or Orkut, oriented around movies. It’s IMDB with herpes, and I’m kinda digging it.

There’s some problems with it:

Everyone on the site is 13 years old and/or mentally handicapped. This means everything is either rated 5 out of 5 stars, or 1 out of 5 stars. There is no middle ground in their ratings. Luckily, these ratings tend to balance out, so you’re stuck with Citizen Kane and Batman: Ice Dude’s Revenge staring each other down at 3 stars. This is common on ratings based systems. People, in general, are horribly retarded and it’s a great thing that the most power we give them in life is the right to vote in elections and on internet movie sites. For now, voting requires leaving the house, this ensures politicians can sometimes build roads that just don’t go The Mall. But I digress.

You know what? I’m already bored with writing this. I was bored with the concept of Flixster two days ago, which was about 10 hours after I joined. Hahaha. Unfortunately I can’t continue this farce of a blog post. The end.

Here’s my profile.