2007 — 21 May: Hey now...
The catch phrase of the "Hank Kingsley" character (played by Jeffrey Tambor) on the superb Larry Sanders show. We made a start last night on the first DVD of that four-DVD box set that showed up three weeks ago. After two episodes my cheek muscles ache from the constant smiling; I watched some of the (many) extras, too. Mr Shandling is an immensely funny man. All the other news, namely CD re-ripping, is (almost — see below) far too boring to relate.
In between changing CDs and reading The God delusion, I pause to drool slightly over this. It's evidently a snip at $1,999 plus post and packing:
Curse the day my son sent me the link! I'm almost sure it isn't because he wants my Roku player. I'm also slightly puzzled by the VU meters on what is, after all, only a playback device. (Mind you, I had a pair of these meters on an enormous Technics T-8000 power amp once, now that I think about it. My, those were the days!) By the way, tall young Thomas, these pictures are of a network player, not my old amplifier!
David the Ripper
Ever seeking faster, better, more efficient (yaddah, yaddah) working processes and practices, it occurred to me that there was nothing to stop me running a second CD extraction process on my Gateway XP machine (which is now essentially "empty" and freshly re-installed). Plus, as I have paid for the extracter that I'm running on the HP XP machine, I have almost no qualms in running the second "instantiation" of it in its 30-day free trial mode figuring, what the heck, if this takes more than 30 days I shall shoot myself.
Hah! I think the world should know that an Intel Pentium D (dual core) running at 2.8GHz with 3GB of RAM to sprawl around in is simply no match for an Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 running at 2.13GHz with a mere 2GB of RAM. Besides, when trying to keep both machines ripping to the max, there's simply no time left over for continuing with Mr Dawkins' elegant demolition job on God. Let alone taking in all the "news" that NPR is dribbling out. So it's back to the one machine, and damn the torpedoes.
Guess what? There are also CDs in my collection (in the loft, that is) that didn't even make it into my database in the first place, though (so far) all of them seem to have made it through the ripping process. I wonder what I was smoking last time around?
It's not just OS X
I mentioned here (and not for the first time) how Firefox had crashed the iMac. Well, today, I extracted a couple of Annie Lennox audio tracks from a bonus DVD, recording them directly to .wav files (using Audacity) and then converting them to my new choice of high quality VBR MP3. They are actually fine and play perfectly. But, came the first time to try playing them and — whammo — Windows Media Player 11 on this XP Pro machine crashed and burned, taking the entire machine with it. Switch off, count to ten, here we go again...