Mostly Harmless

Excite@Home may, or may not, shutdown tonight — midnight or sooner. This would apparently mean that the Excite for AT&T@Home web page which I’ve never even looked at until tonight will go away and be replaced by something else I will also ignore.

AT&T claims that there will be no internet service interruption.

They’d better be right — they just fixed their news server this afternoon (apparently). How am I supposed to download BtVS at 56k?

The upside would be that my monthly 6-gig download limit at Easynews would seem extravagant. As it is though, it’s starting to cramp my style… I’m at 3.37 gigs, I just queued up a 443 meg download, and it’ll be 19 days ’til my download counter resets.

If my"free"news server tanks I’ll have to check out these guys, the Premium Plus account will let you download 9 gigs a day — if you bounce between all 16 of their servers.

I figure 9 gigs/day should be sufficient, since I can only theoretically download 7.5 gigs a day anyway.

BTW, my VCDs and SVCDs are working just fine in my Pioneer DV-343. SVCDs are, as the kids say,"da bomb!"

I spent around 90 minutes this afternoon dodging the teaming hordes of post-Turkey Day shoppers while searching for a Pioneer DV-343 DVD player. That was enough time to hit just about every place in town that sells DVD players (AFAIK).

BB had stacks of DV-341s and DV-440s. AK had one display unit (but I’m boycotting them… and it was $30 more expensive there). Circuit City – Ha! They continue to be one of the most worthless stores in existence. The mall, worthless. The other mall, why bother. A couple of other places were closed.

So I got home and spent 3 minutes ordering it from Amazon. It took me three minutes because I did a last minute comparison between the 333 and 343, ordered it with 1-click, and then changed my shipping options. It’ll be here Wednesday.

In other news, the Vikings have about 5 seconds to score a touchdown to tie the game. And the Winner is: Chicago. Have a day.

BTW, the bathroom sink is still clogged. I finally got all the hoses and such so I could fire up the Drain King. I hooked it up and let the pressure build… and build… and build… and… nothing!

Nothing, that is, except a small approximation of Old Faithful when I turned off the water. The Drain King expands to fill the pipe when the water is running, when the water is shut off it deflates and a jet of water shoots out of the drain, assuming the clog is still there.

I quickly learned to block the drain to avoid drenching the bathroom (again).

Numerous attempts were made, the pipes groaned, nothing worked. Something must be busted somewhere.

I thought I’d share the fact that I’ve lost all track of time. I haven’t had to go to work for 3 days and have stayed up very late for 4 days; now the clock says 10:40pm but to me it feels more like 5ish.

All the more reason to make sure my artificial daylight device is engaged for Monday morning. This device consists of a small 40-watt desk lamp and a 24-hour timer — the timer turns the light on for about an hour in the morning at approximately the same time my alarm clock goes off.

The point of all this fabulous technology is to increase the odds that I will get out of bed sometime before 9am, preferably 8am. It works pretty well.

You can buy a lamp with a built-in timer and dimer that simulates dawn and dusk for about $200. I felt that my free solution (since I already had the timer and lamp) was preferable, even though it can be a bit harsh when the light clicks on in the morning.

The expensive lamp with all the dimming finery can be faked with about $80 worth of X-10 equipment if you are of a mind to do that.

Sad but True: it occurs to me that I cannot continue with my SVCD creation experiments until I buy a DVD player ‘cuz I don’t have any way to actually play SVCDs.

Now, VCDs I can do without too much fuss but VCD is limited to MPEG1 for compression. We all know that MPEG1 sucks ass…

SVCD lets you use MPEG2 and VBR (or is that the same damn difference?). Anywho, point is you get a much nicer picture out of MPEG2. I can play one of my SVCD MPEG2 files with VCDHelp.com.) Running the S-video out from the PowerBook gives a moderately decent picture on the TV though, even with MPEG1.

Toast Titanium lets me make just about anything QuickTime understands into a VCD but does nothing for SVCD. My computer spent 6 hours last night converting a 50 minute DivX file into a crappy MPEG1 file — I guess I’ve figured out I shouldn’t try that again (meaning divx to mpeg1, a good QuickTime movie worked just fine). The manual says it could take up to 10 minutes per minute of the original file to do the export. Mine took 7.1 minutes per minute. I shoulda got the G4/867! Regardless of that, someone needs to optimize their code a bit more.

There are ways, however, to make SVCDs with Toast but I can’t tell if I’ve got it right just yet, hence the need for a DVD player (which I hear can also play DVDs… hmmm).

VCDHelp.com has a"big ass list"of DVD players. The Pioneer DV-343 ($150 street price) seems to be highly regarded as it will play just about any disk you put in it, and any mostly-compliant VCD or SVCD you throw at it. It doesn’t do MP3s though, for that you need the DV-444 (and an extra $100).

I’m thinkin’ that tomorrow I will visit Worst Buy and if they don’t have a DV-343 in stock I’ll snag it from Amazon ($149.88 w/free shipping, woo!) since I’m boycotting Audio Dinks (WTF is up with needing an 8 hour appointment to install a car stereo? Bah!).