Mostly Harmless

If it’s still Saturday when you read this there’s a chance in hell that you can make it over to CompUSA in time to nab a spindle of 100 Imation CD-Rs (24x, 700 meg) for $24.99 (after rebates, limit one per customer).

The price gets down to $24.99 after a $5 instant savings and a $10 rebate. So it’s still just $34.99 even if you don’t send in the form. Not to shabby.

I’ve already got 3 spindles of 50 CD-Rs sitting here next to my computer. One spindle has 24 blanks. One spindle is empty; which I will use for temporary storage whilst sorting the contents of the third spindle which contains the parts used to make the VCDs I’ve been burning. The VCDs are stored in separate, black binders.

In other words, I have:

One Spindle to Burn Them All,

One Spindle to Sort Them,

One Spindle to Recreate Them All,

And in the Darkness Bind Them

On Friday — erm, the previous Friday; so I’m behind a little bit… — an elite (sorry,"l337") paramilitary team of plumbers toting a nuclear-powered drain snake were victorious over The Drain Clog that Ate Cincinnati. The drain is clear! The water flows!

Actually, I wasn’t here when the strike team parachuted in but I think it’s safe to assume that: (a) the apartment complex was cordoned off and traffic was redirected around the building; (b) the team consisted of 10-20 highly trained, mustachioed individuals, most of them named"Mario"or"Luigi", wearing colorful overalls over standard SWAT-issue riot gear; (c) after the successful extraction the drain clog was escorted out of the building wearing Festivus, they are conducting unspeakable, vicious experiments.

Looking at the calendar I see I’ve had a Newsfeeds.com"Premium Plus"account for about 5 days now AND I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW MUCH THEY SUCK!

With the"plus"account I have access to 18 of their news servers — and I need just about every damn one of them. (Actually, I’m only using 7 of them, but it feels like more.)

Where to begin… (1) the retention is good but the completion sucks; (2) if I happen to find all the parts on a particular server (good luck there) there will be at least a couple of CRC errors in downloading (almost always); (3) since their web interface is crap, relative to EasyNews, I can’t combine pre-uudecoded files into a single zip file and download that, so I have to download 20-25% more to get the same amount of data; (4) because of (#3) it’s pretty easy to hit the 500 meg per server limit, especially with all the re-downloading of parts you thought you had (see #2).

Now, the special multimedia server has a 750 meg/day limit. I’ve never hit that limit because the server is so damn slow and overloaded that sometimes the file transfer will just plain stop mid-file and hang there… so I have to keep checking on it just to make sure it’s still going. Hence it is the server of last resort.

For a company claiming that they have great servers, tremendous bandwidth and lots of incoming newsfeeds they have a huge amount of variation in the completeness of files across the servers. So here’s the typical downloading session: (A) try the AT&T news server, note that there are typically no new files; (B) spend a few hours bouncing between Newsfeeds’ servers getting as many parts of the file as possible, (C) go to EasyNews and get the remaining parts.

In this way I can nurse my remaining 1 gig at EasyNews for another couple of weeks.

I hear you asking"Is that worth all the bother?"The answer is, no, not really, but I’m already paid up for the month and I keep hoping that they’ll get better… there is some mention of a CRC problem they’re trying to track down, and download speed has been good the last two nights, but I still spent hours downloading (and re-downloading) files I could have queued up in about 5 minutes at EasyNews.

After all of this grief I have 14.9 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (site), including the unaired pilot. Burning VCDs, SVCDs and the RAR parts I’ve used about 36 CDs in the last 3 weeks… but I still have 70+ blanks at the ready.

Seventy CDs won’t last long though, the Repostathon has 56 more episodes scheduled from now til the end of February, not counting new episodes.

So, I am currently 95.1 episodes away from a complete set… yow! I’d buy these on DVD if I could, we are currently in Season 6 and Season 1 won’t be released til January 15th. Does that mean I wait til 2007/2008 to buy _this_ season, or do I download episodes the same night they air. Hmmmm.

(Yeah, I videotape the new ones, but an SVCD with no commercials made from a digital satellite source that I can play in my DVD player is a bit nicer, especially since I have no cable TV at the moment.)

So here’s the effect of the Excite@Home bankruptcy on moi: my new homepage (that I don’t use) should be set to http://home.attbroadband.com/ instead of http://home.excite.com/.

Yawn.

I escaped the horrific fate of being relegated to 56k Hell by being a former MediaOne customer. Skippy!

OTOH, it looks like the local news server is f*cked up again — unless people suddenly stopped posting MP3s. Grrr.

I thought of a little money making scheme the other day while checking out commercial news feeds: my own commercial news feed! It seems like half of the news feeds are just reselling newsfeeds.com content anyway.

The difference would be that my news server would only carry a handful of binary groups (i.e. Buffy and Futurama) and the retention would be freakin huge. Charge $5/mo. and dominate the niche.

Now if I could only find some free servers and free bandwidth… $)

UPDATE: my net connection is good but _this_ server is down. Assume that if you’re reading this that it is back up.