One down
December 12, 2007
I don’t know why I’m counting down Hanne’s finals–they’re not even mine. I guess I feel somewhat relieved to do so since she’s been studying morning, noon, and night for what feels like the last two weeks, and at some point I’d love to get my girlfriend back. Call me selfish, if you will, and as much as I enjoy making sure she’s got dinner in front of her and a beer or a glass or wine for when she decides to stop studying later, I’d like to be able to do things other than watch her study. Soon.
The State of Oregon was kind enough to refund tax revenues for a good portion of the state, so I found myself with a substantial check in my hands Saturday afternoon. I’d already spent it by Saturday night. My DVD ripping project is going well, but by my calculations I’ll need more than the 500 GB I have allocated for the project, so I bought another 500 GB drive to pick up the slack. That didn’t run the whole refund I got, though, but I transfered the rest to my credit card to pay down the balance a bit. I got it up to an uncomfortable level that makes me nervous, even though I know that by carrying a balance of under $1000 I’m still doing better than a lot of other people. I had just put two other major (well, major for me) charges on my card, so I thought it best to take a chunk out.
The first charge was the renewal for my Bally membership, and the second was payment for a night in Hood River, Oregon. For Christmas, Hanne asked that we go somewhere and just get out of the city. It didn’t have to be exotic of far away, just out of Portland city limits. I originally suggested staying a night at McMenamins Edgefield, but they didn’t have anything interesting available. So instead, I looked to Hood River, and we’re booked for the Saturday night after Christmas at the Oak Street Hotel in Hood River, just down the street from the Full Sail Brewery at the Double Mountain Brewery. I can assure you that that was a complete coincidence. Really. It should be a nice trip. Just time to get away, eat a nice meal or two, drink some good beer, maybe a bottle of wine. I’m looking forward to it.
Back to my DVD project, though. It’s going slowly, but steadily. Right now, I estimate that I’ve ripped about 140 movies, and I have maybe 130 more to go. It’s not the ripping that’s slow, but the compression that comes afterward. As I think I said in an earlier post, ripping a DVD takes about 20-25 minutes, but then it takes me around 2 hours per title to compress it from about 6.5 GB to a more manageable 2.5 GB. Fortunately, I can queue up multiple titles to be compressed, so if I keep ripping DVDs and keep adding them to the queue, my computer will be churning away until it’s done. Lots of fun. I started a batch last night, and I know it’ll still be going when I get home tonight. I’ll rip five or six more, and that can run overnight.
Busy little computer, it is. On the bright side of all this work, within a couple of weeks I’ll have my entire DVD library at my fingertips without ever having to swap out another DVD. I thought I’d then solved that problem by getting a 400-disc DVD changer, but it became a hassle to keep a printed manifest updated. Storage is cheap, this is the best solution. Of course, I say that knowign that at some point I get to go back and do it all over again either with high-def content or with my DVDs so they’re uncompressed. Plus bonus materials and whatnot. After all, wat’s the point of buying the 4-disc extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies if I’m just going to ignore the stuff on the other two-discs of each movie? Well, I’ve watched every piece of bonus materal on each of those discs, so in addition to solidifying myself as a big honkin’ dork, at least I’ve gotten my money’s worth.
This Friday should be a nice day, maybe even rivaling last Friday’s plans. At 1 PM is the company holiday party, so I have the distinct pleasure of drinking and eating a lot amongst my new coworkers. I’ve also been told that there’s an envelope for me I need to get before I leave, so the contents are piquing my interest thus far. I can’t stay too late and/or drink too much, though, because later that evening Hanne and I are going to the Roseland Theater to see David Gray and Collective Soul. Hanne likes David Gray, I like Collective Soul. That works perfectly. I haven’t seen Collective Soul in concert since…wow, 2001. That was a good year for concerts, too. Collective Soul. Depeche Mode, and Eric Clapton all in the same summer. Great show, too. Dan, Heather Darrow, a friend from the dorm (who’s name is escaping me for the moment, sadly), and myself piled into Dan’s van and trekked up to Green Bay to hear CS play at UW Green Bay. We didn’t get back until after 3 AM and after taking the wheel following Dan nearly running us off the road when he dozed off, I pretty much booked it back to Beloit as quickly as that van would take us. I think I topped out at 85 MPH.
Collective Soul has pretty much been relegated to second or third tier status now, but I still dig their music. Last night as I was walking to the store to buy Hanne some soup for dinner, I had my iPod play my 25 most-played tracks, which turned out to be “Heavy” by Collective Soul, the entirety of ‘Welcome to the Monkey House” by The Dandy Warhols (often in the album order), the first few tracks of “Guero” by Beck, and a few miscellaneous tracks by other artists. Odd that my #1 most-listened to song in my iTunes library is the very song that my sister uses for my ringtone when I call her. Hmmmmm. There’s a certain poetry in that. Or just luck.
I joined NetFlix this week. I love them. I joined on Monday, I got my first three movies on Tuesday. Sweet. I added 75 movies to my queue, most of which I just came across and though “Man, I’ve always wanted to watch this movie!” or “Gosh I’d like to see this again!” I’m really looking forward to some of the movies I’ll be receiving in short order.
With our completion of the first two seasons of “House,” I managed to con Hanne into watching “Nip/Tuck.” It’s been awhile since I watched the older episodes of the series so I wanted to see them again, and I’ve been very surprised at how much Hanne has been enjoying the show. Good thing I have the first three seasons on DVD, because we’re already into the second season after only a week of viewing.
Of course, with my new digital movie library, I’ve been hankering to watch movies instead of TV just to play around with my new toys, but I’m pretty much catering to Hanne’s every whim at the moment so she doesn’t snap and go crazy, so wat she says goes.
Just don’t let her know that.
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