mandrake.net

Been out of town, went to Pittsburgh, went to Long Island, threw a nice 4th of July party, etc… Also been quite busy building up my media collection, I now have 409 movies ripped, and about 1400 tv shows, with still a big pile of dvds and hddvds to rip sitting on my floor / desk

Also, you can see from the pics on flickr that we started putting shelving up finally. still a lot of work to do on getting these shelves built, as they’re all custom to fit a bizarre corner of the room.

We have recently inherited a stray cat who has been wandering up onto our porch, which is pretty interesting. He definitely looks like he must have a home somewhere, but he is too afraid of us to come say hello. Wonder if he’s lost? There ARE some houses nearby but not TOO close, maybe he wandered too far from home.

Had a BBQ and saw Quinn’s (the CEO) daughter for the first time in person – saw her on the phone a few times (all our calls are video at work). Also saw hank and dan and gus and a bunch of people I used to work in an office with all the time before I started working out here in the boonies out of my house. I miss being in an office with people sometimes, but I really love working out of my house, too.

Speaking of working out of the house, I love working out of my new office. I need to get it set up a little more still – I definitely want to build some built-in shelving – some on the sides of my displays and then some in the ‘dead space’ over near the entrance from the house with the stairs. Also I definitely need a couch in here. I want to figure out a nice looking way to mount my guitars on the wall, too.

I also made some progress with the bluray ripping machine. I was having some problems getting windows to recognize the usb keyboard + mouse that I had plugged into it. Apparently the windows usb hid driver went off the deep end. FUN! But, with the addition of a ps2 keyboard and mouse to my collection, all is right with the world. Now to install the drive, fix the drivers for the system, figure which of all this ram is the correct ram for the system, and configure software to start digitizing the last of my media.

Well – the office should be ‘done’ tomorrow – the bathroom mirror is hung now, the second coat of stain is down on the floor, the slate tile in the bathroom has seal on it, and everything is just starting to look done. I’m hoping to move in on like thursday or so, and the pics of my desk area should be pretty slick I think.

I finished all the regular dvd ripping over the weekend, now I’m up to 1.2 terabytes of stored media. Now that I have the media system kinda working I will not feel bad buying new media. I have a new bluray / hddvd combo player that I plan on ripping the rest of my media with, but I have not gotten around to actually getting it going yet. Was thinking I’d get to that over the weekend, but I didn’t. Definitely by this weekend, I think.

And one last thing – valgrind for OSX has made it into the trunk. With dtrace, valgrind, and Snow Leopard (10.6) – I think OS X has finally become a serious developer platform… Now if only we could do something about the shitty window manager! I know I’m picky having spent years writing my own custom setup in the past, but this is pretty terribad. I have some osx hacks I use to get something almost like sloppy focus, but it breaks a lot. One day maybe I’ll get around to replacing Finder I wonder how much work that would be.

Well – the New TV Mount finally showed up. Thing is monstrous and super heavy, but very fluid and seems like it will do the job perfectly. I’m pretty excited. Hopefully I will put the TV up on the wall tomorrow or Saturday – I’m going to need a lot of help, the mount alone weighs 70 lbs.

In other news, I have begun the dvd ripping project to digitize all my media and make it more easily accessible around the house, and I’m ripping 4 dvds currently at once and adding metadeta as I go, so that it will play on all my media players including the appletv. I’m hoping that I will have made a sizable dent in my collection by the time I move into the office next week.

And yes I know I was hoping to be moved in by the end of this week into my new office, but there’s a lot going on with all the construction / work on the house / etc… I traded that for having the patio done in time for my guests to arrive tonight for the weekend.  Now it won’t be ready until next weekend – c’est la vie