The power went out for about 15 minutes today around 11am… It’s a beautiful day out, so I wonder what caused the outage… I don’t even know if it was just our building or if it was more widespread… Not a big deal, although I noticed that my toilet doesn’t refill the tank without power, which seems kind of strange to me.

I went out to pick up a copy of Risk and get some Jamba Juice down at Alewife… Adam is hosting a “dork game” night here on Tuesday and we needed a copy of Risk, so I went out to Toys R’ Us to grab one, and noticed they were having a Buy 1 Get 1 Free sale, so I picked up the 20th Anniversary Edition of Trivial Pursuit, which I had wanted anyway. I grabbed some lunch, then walked across the street to Newbury Comics to score the new Autechre LP “Draft 7.30”, which I am listening to now. I then walked back across the street to the Hippie Mart to visit the Jamba Juice within.

I walk over to the sacred area to discover that THE JAMBA JUICE IS GONE!!!! No explanation, no justification, just gone. I guess it is time to find the alternate Jamba over at BU..

Anyone know of any good headless automated CD ripping/encoding software for Unix/Linux? I want to be able to stick a CD in my fileserver and have it automatically encoded for me without any interaction..

Today was my second day of shooting on the set of Midnight Zombie Maniacs… I even remembered to bring my camera this time and take some pictures. I once again had a awesome time and can’t wait to see the finished product. I saw the trailer Nick had whipped up and it was great, and the dailies I saw today looked great too… I even had a few stellar moments today, imho.. :P

I talked with Nick and when he has finished the final cut he is going to give it to me on MiniDV instead of VHS… This is a good thing, since it is a real PITA for me to play VHS anymore (and MiniDV will look 800x better). I figure once I get my hands on that final cut I will throw together a DVD for him just for fun… He said he has a pretty funny set of outtakes, plus the trailer I saw today, plus the stills I took… Should be a pretty substantial DVD…

I got home after midnight and it took awhile to clean myself up… I still have some black under/around my fingernails… I will have to get some nail polish remover or something to get it off… I guess that’s what I get for using tooth black to blacken my fingernails… :) I had a nice Psycho moment when I washed all the dried fake blood out of my hair and watched it spiral down the drain in the tub… Very sexy….

Corinna came over last night and we headed out to see her friend’s band, Third Nipple play at the Zeitgeist over in Inman Square. They were alright, but they were a bit too improv wanky for me… I think as a whole they are a group of good musicians, but they would have needed a bit more focus to their music to keep my attention… It was just kinda a quasi-jazz jam session, but far more experimental, sparse, and avant-garde for my tastes.

We walked back to my apartment after the show, which was kinda fun/crappy due to the rain. When we got back to my apartment we changed into dry clothes, ate some garlic toast and chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies, and watched the first half of Jackass: The Movie on DVD. I’ve seen it a bunch now, but it still holds my attention. We watched the second half of it this morning, went out to breakfast, and I left her at her apartment to do some painting. I’m going to go do a second day of shooting on the zombie movie over at MassArt. Corinna wanted to do the zombie thing again as well but she had too much going on with her renovations to lose even more time..

Corinna took me out to (finally) see Gangs of New York last night, and it was just as wonderful as everyone says. I was stunned at the cinematography, the framing, the script… I guess the only things I found that were flawed were Cameron Diaz, who just seemed out of place and did her usual ditzy job of stumbling through a role, and Henry Thomas, who I couldn’t take seriously once I realized he was the kid from E.T. I didn’t really mind the length of the film, even if it was the most-cited reason why my friends didn’t want to go see the movie with me.

Tonight Corinna and I are going to the Zeitgeist to hear her friends’ band play. It’s a late show, at 10:30, so hopefully I will be able to keep awake… I woke up around 6am this morning, so I am a bit yawny..

Here’s my answers to this week’s Friday Five.

1. What was the first band you saw in concert? Man, this is stretching my memory, but I’m pretty sure it was a local Hopatcong band called the Monels. They sucked, but their claim to fame was that they were on the Gong Show.

2. Who is your favorite artist/band now? Oh, there is no way I can narrow that down to one, so you’re going to have to accept a few answers: Talking Heads, Faith No More, David Bowie, and Skinny Puppy.

3. What’s your favorite song? This one I can do: Talking Heads - Heaven (especially the performance from “Stop Making Sense”)

4. If you could play any instrument, what would it be? Drums.

5. If you could meet any musical icon (past or present), who would it be and why? I don’t know… I tend to prefer my role as listener… Whenever I have met a musician I have respected I tend to turn into babbling fan.

So just before Christmas it was revealed that Universal had screwed up the transfer for the DVDs of Back to the Future II & III. Not only that, but they had screwed them up for the Region 2 release, and knew that the transfer was screwed up when preparing the North American release, but elected to release the DVDs with the error and “fix it later”. Well, they have finally started shipping the replacement discs, so I dropped my DVDs in the mail tonight to get replacements. For images comparing how the transfer SHOULD look and how Universal screwed it up, look here.

I wasn’t sure how long it would take for them to send me the replacements, so I decided to back up the DVDs before I mailed them off. In the past if I wanted to make a backup of movie that was double layer I was kinda screwed, but fortunately technology wins out again. Enter DVD2one, which does some magical decompression magic to squeeze a double-layer disc to fit onto one disc. In addition to it’s straightforward sounding usage, you can use “Movie Only” mode, where you can recompress the feature less by throwing out all the menus and special features. In “Movie Only” mode you can also select which audio, subtitle, and angles you wish to backup. For instance, the Back to the Future DVDs were about 8GB each. The feature with all the Audio Tracks and Subtitles was about 5.5GB. The feature had a 5.1 french track and two other audio tracks (at least one was a commentary) that I could throw out, saving only the 5.1 english track. I’m not sure exactly how much recompression was necessary after throwing all that audio data out, but it couldn’t have been much. Anyway, DVD2one is wicked cool, and I highly recommend it to anyone with a DVD writer. They are very close to releasing an OSX version, according to threads and screenshots in the forums. Apparently they already have their recompression engine running under OSX, which sounds to me like the hard part.

One other thing about DVD2one: They released a new version today that lets you selectively drop audio tracks in “full disc” mode too, so you can preserve all the menus and stuff but still lower your recompression needs… I haven’t tried it yet but it sounds pretty sweet!

We have been having problems with our fridge since we moved in… The freezer was condensing water and dripping it into the fridge, which is not good. They came to fix it a few weeks ago, but the problem persisted… I re-reported the problem about a week ago, and they came today to replace the fridge (instead of just replacing a part like they originally stated). The new fridge is nicer, bigger, and fancier… I definately can’t complain!

I think I have an alien embedded in my left thigh, just above the knee, on my left side. A pain has developed there overnight, and it doesn’t feel like I bruised it or anything, and it isn’t an intense pain, but just some kind of pain below the skin. Hence, I have an alien embedded in my left thigh. Her name is Phyllis.

I want to be able to press a key (or key combo) in Mutt and have it submit all the messages in the folder (or all the marked messages) to SpamAssassin/Razor. I think I would do a better job of submitting stuff to Razor if this were the case. Alas, I am apparently too dumb to figure this out. Dumb or lazy, actually…. And in the grand scheme of things, I vote lazy.

Apparently some people are coming over tonight for some dorky board gaming.. I believe Risk or Shogun will be in order, but we will see… I would be up for some Risk, but I’ve never played Shogun (a.k.a. Samurai Swords), so I might not be in the mood to learn a new game… Regardless, it will be good to see friends…

I ordered a spindle of 25 4x DVD-Rs from Shop4Tech last week, and I am dying for them to arrive. I had a bunch of blanks that I coastered trying to find an easy way to move Good Eats episodes off the TiVo and onto DVDs… If ONE of the DVD players in this house would work with RWs I would be a happy camper, but alas, I had to break lots of eggs to get it to work… And in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t ever really work out, but I think that is mostly because of the players we have here… Anyway, \$2/disc seems like a reasonable price for DVD-Rs (esp. at 4x), so hopefully they won’t suck..

I’m wicked hungry, but I don’t want to eat breakfast, as I do enjoy lunch so… What to have for lunch… Perhaps I wouldn’t be so god-damned hungry if Phyllis the Parasite wasn’t hogging my nutrients…. The bitch.

A preview track from the new Tomahawk album “Mit Gas” is available here. I am going to the Tuesday, May 20th show here in Boston as well as the Friday, May 23rd show in NYC, if anyone else is interested…. (You’d have to go and buy your own tickets real soon, though)…

Corinna just headed out a few minutes ago, she’s been crashing here the past few nights due to the lack of non-nasty bathroom and copious splinters abound at her new place. We got alot of demolishion work done there, which is actually kinda fun, feeding my primal male destruction bits.. Her parents are in town for a few days to help her out and move her, so I get a few “days off”. My body could use the recoup time, especially my hands, which have become perforated with little splinter holes from removing the nasty panelling.

Here is this weeks Friday Five. The questions were at least a bit more interesting this week than the past few..

1. How many houses/apartments have you lived in throughout your life 7 apartments/houses (plus the 5 different dorm rooms I lived in at RIT)
2. Which was your favorite and why Hopatcong, cuz I was near my family and friends.
3. Do you find moving house more exciting or stressful? Why It is one of the worst experiences I have had to deal with, so I guess that would be considered stressful. Once all of my stuff is physically moved into the new place, the excitment begins (unpacking is even kinda fun)
4. What’s more important, location or price Location.
5. What features does your dream house have (pool, spa bath, big yard, etc.) Office, Secret Passages, Pool w/ Hot Tub, Deck, Big-Ass Charcoal Grill, Huge Garage and Driveway, Cool Neighbors close but not too close, and other stuff I haven’t thought of yet…