rickshangle.com

I think it was Justin Timberlake’s third outing as saturday night live combo host / musical guest on last Saturday, and I don’t care who says I’m lame for believing it’s beyond refute: the guy is extremely and broadly talented. SNL’s first post-Fey season is wanting. Last week’s was a gem.

I like singers who can do comedy well (JT) and actresses who can sing and dance well (ex. Kate Winslet). The list goes on. Just not here.

Evidence of Justin + SNL synergy:

a) Omletteville revisited. So hot. Kelley and I do the “gonna bring on in to Omletteville-eah!” around the house all the time, and we crack up. Also, we’re huge f-ing nerds.

b) Barry Gibb Talk Show round 3 (featuring Fallon, of course, who took time off from coke-frenzying/shark-jumping to do some quality comedy; neither round 2 nor 3 was as tremendous as the first (Cruz Bustamante! eh ah eh!), but the concept is just so f-ing great; also - eh just want to taaeeehlk to yuh!)

c) Make her open the box (NSFW - if that link was news to you, you’re living in the past (which is normally known as “12 months into my future”). I think it’s very possible this come close to being this year’s “I’m Rick James, b-eotch.”

d) so yeah, clearly JT’s good-looking in that sort of subtle, abstract way that makes a woman want to have sex with a man. And he can sing, and I think I saw him play a piano or something. He is well-rounded. I’m also sure he has an enormous Pheromone sac and male genitals, which is fine.

I have no doubt my wife thinks about JT occasionally while we’re having sex, and I’d just like to point out that picking Kate Winslet as my JT counterpoint up above was a completely random thing of no real consequence.

In my standard/excellent style of getting on “deck” with things a year or five behind the wavefront, I recently became aware of 5ives. If your A.D.D. prohibits you from getting all the way to 1 (or 3) on any given top-ten list, check it out and, at last, get your satisfaction.

That looks like fun. Let’s kick off the party right, six-style:

Six Things that Should Be Nuked from Orbit, no order, 12-16-2006:

1. Oasis albums after “Be Here Now”[1].
2. Any Fanninghive-related organism.
3. Noise-canceling headphones sold by Brookstone.
4. The xenomorph-infested atmospheric engineering facility residing on LV-426.
5. The TV Mini Series Event The Lost Room. I know life’s not f-ing fair, Peter Krause. Neither is the fact that this show sucks in a most intense and onerous way, except for the presence of Julianna Margulies… which was only a passing fancy/distraction once Kelley told me she saw JM in a sushi place in NYC once, and that (on that particular night) she has a freakishly huge head in proportion to her body. Instant downgrade from “stone fox on the career rebound distracting me from the belief that The Lost Room was being written as it was being filmed” to “new-style Burger King commecial freakism”.[0]
6. Not being able to think of six things that should be nuked from orbit, due to a general sort of malaise/torpor/vapor filling the room this evening. But wait, I got it…
6.1: Malaise vapors!
7. (bonus) The Burger King commercial Burger King.

[0] I’m all about making friends in Hollywood.
[1] Be Here Now should also possibly be nuked from orbit. If a half-yield, sort of 1 kiloton nuke is possible, I’d consider it. But then again, do you want the target destroyed or not? Of course the answer is “you want it vaporized”. Be Here Now, mon amore.

TiVoDecode Manager is a one-click OS X interface to pull TiVo video from your series 2 TiVo and save it as a VLC-playable MPEG file.

Pros:

1. More or less one-click.
1. You don’t have to hack your TiVo - operates via the TiVo2Go/media access key interface.
1. It’s free. A lot of software is in this day and age, but still…

Cons:

1. Doesn’t claim to work with anything other than TiVo series 2 (so forget series 3, OEMs, etc)
1. Queue function doesn’t really work well on my system (which is probably a function of the fact my Tivos are WIFI-attached, and therefore extremely slow to transmit data.)
1. I’m confident this whole process breaks any number of right-to-use and terms-of-use systems inherent to tivo function, so enjoy it while it lasts[1].
1. Nonexistent reporting on transfer status.

[1] ie. until Tivo releases a patch to ensure that any alleged “TiVo2Go clients” connecting to the box are exactly what they say they are.

feel the burn

No, I have not started slaughtering the Jedi, but my current undertaking is nearly as ominous and potentially as difficult (at least for me).

For the first time in about five years, I am actively archiving home data from my “tier 1″ storage (sadly = ATA and SATA disk) straight to archival media (DVD+R single layer, at this point).[0]

This decision and subsequent action is driven by a combination of factors:

1. Recent loss of a hard drive acting as disk-based backup for my iTunes library (”Audio Core”)
2. A lockdown on year-end funds from my CIO
3. 1+2 = current loss of backup for said iTunes library, which is a code-orange operational alert, necessitating the need for reclamation of disk real-estate for that purpose
4. The firm realization that I have way too much video data[1] on tier-1 storage that I only occasionally watch, but am not willing to permanently part with or invest the time to re-rip as necessary
5. The begrudging realization that although I would generally recommend none of my customers (nor my worst enemy) use optical media (at least of a non-magneto-optical nature) as backup for any number of reasons [2], it might fit the bill[3] for this particular mission
6. ATA disk is just so f(!@#)ng unreliable when you don’t have RAID protecting it. That may not be a particularly politic assertion given my job (which sometimes involves designing solutions featuring always RAID-protected ATA and SATA disk), but it’s so, so true.

So here I find myself with Toast open, dragging my handbrake-ripped copy of Star Trek: The Next Generation - the Complete Seventh Season to burn, baby, burn when the question pops up (sort of like that old VH-1 show, Pop Up Video[4]: how am I going to index this stuff when it gets spread across 1, 10, 100, 6×10^23 DVDs?

There are a number of OS X utilities that will keep indexes for me, but I’m a real man, dammit. My solution is going to have to be incredibly complex to the point of (and perhaps beyond) non-usability before I’m happy with it.

So I’m basically doing this.

What am I going to do with / how am I going to use this metadata when all is said and done? Will I ever be able to find a single thing I archive off to DVD? These are not important questions for now, fool, for they will all be answered anon. Stay tuned.

[1] All legitimately, uh, handbrake‘d from my own DVD collection, mind.

[2] Poor and variable shelf life, marginal cost-per-GB value, horrible options for automation, sub-shite performance.

[3] Probably more reliable than spinning disk given c 1940’s fuse-based electrical grid in my house, relatively low cost barrier to entry, DR suitability.

[4] The example pop-up in the Wiki features Lisa Loeb, who is hot.

[0] It should probably be noted that this great purge actually began last week within iTunes, but that’s another post.

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update

Ends with a combo of triumph and sorrow.

My thoughts go out to his family, and my good friend Mark who counted James as a friend since college.

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This is all over the place, but in the interest of the one ‘dark matter’ phantom non-reader I have on the West Coast, I’m posting to spread the news. Ripped it straight from Engadget [link].

This is funny in a somewhat Fight Club/Project Mayhem-esque sort of way.

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