Let me just say that I never really appreciated to a great enough extent the fact that professors at UTD weren’t (as) handout happy as all of my teachers at HP seemed to be. Sure, some of my classes at UTD generated their fair share of paper (especially those with reading assignments to print off and such), but even then it will wasn’t to the same extent. My parents had apparently started cleaning stuff out of the garage, and one of the boxes that they brought in was a bunch of my stored school work from HP. By the time I got done quickly flipping through everything and pulling out all the paper to recycle, I had made a mountain that was as high at the ottoman that I was sitting on. The funny (or sad, depending on how you look at it) thing is, there’s a whole second box for me to go through tomorrow and do the exact same thing to.
The Proposal was a very decent movie, especially in a genre that isn’t favored too heavily on my normal movie viewing list. Will I buy it on DVD? It’s possible, but it’s really going to depend on if I could see myself watching it over and over again. Right now my Magic 8-Ball would have to give a response of “Outlook not so good” to that question; that fact doesn’t impact the fact that it was enjoyable though. My score: 8/10.
Personal - Dallas
Doing the math, I actually won’t be able to rip and convert the entire rest of my DVD collection by the time that the DVDs get taken away approximately a week from today. So, my ingenious plan to solve this is to focus mainly on converting all of the movies between now and then, and what I’ll do with my TV show seasons is simply rip the whole disc and leave it in VOB form. This is slightly less compatible as far as streaming goes, but I can run all the conversions remotely later on and not have issues racing against the clock.
I’m pretty sure I have nothing preordered from Amazon currently which would get shipped here after I move to Seattle. For a month or so I’ll probably refrain from Amazon purchasing (while I’m in my corporate apartment) and just hold off until I find my permanent location. I don’t think the next month or so will see a big uptick in items that I would normally be purchasing from Amazon, so I should be perfectly good with this plan. If not, well, physical stores I guess have to exist for some reason.
Personal - Dallas
After an ultimate game today pushed back later into the afternoon so at least the sun wouldn’t be directly overhead was still insanely hot, I won’t really miss the 100+ degree days from summer here. Sure, I might be going a tad too far in the other direction and will need to wear a jacket for 75% of the year since my comfortable temperature level is likely about 10 degrees higher than that of people who have lived in Seattle for many years, but I still won’t miss the triple digit days. Perhaps if I could somehow average the two temperatures on any given day, then we might just have a very workable idea going.
My new car drives quite nicely, even if it does seem to have an affinity for eating credit cards and making them insanely difficult to retrieve. I’m not really sure what the proper course of action will be if I discover something wrong with it during the next week. It’s not like we can take it back to the dealership and let them keep it for a while since it has to be transported sometime at the start of next week.
Personal - Dallas
So, I did get my new car today: a 2009 Ford Escape XLT. I’ll play around with Sync this next week so I can learn how it works before it gets whisked off to Seattle, but so far I’m definitely very happy with it. Considering I went from a car that was 3-4 years old when I initially got it and was up in the 9-10 range now, this car definitely just has a nicer “feel” to it than my old one.
My plan for this upcoming week involved having lunch with one of my dad’s friends on Monday to discuss all of my money and finances, and then later on in the week I’ll probably be going up to HP one day to do some final stuff with Mr. Barrows and the online courses. I might also try to work in a Tuesday movie depending on my grandparents’ schedule. Basically, I should have enough stuff to do this week in order to stay busy, but not so much in order to be overwhelmed. That’s a very important line that I do not enjoy crossing at all.
Personal - Dallas
Perhaps this would be a post better suited from when our power is out and I have to make a post from my phone, but I can apply it to today pretty well also. I was switching out a switch in our garage since the existing one had problems with (fittingly enough) coming back on after power outages. I didn’t pay quite enough attention when I was pulling the power adapter though, so I instead killed our main router for a couple seconds. Well, this caused all sorts of problems with the router not being able to reacquire an IP from Verizon, so my dad had to inform me that I had broken the internet. If something like this ever happens when I’m up in Seattle, it’ll be one of the more difficult fixes since it won’t be something I can fix remotely. If only IPv6 would hurry up and get here, I wouldn’t need a router sitting to share the internet connection, and there would just be one less point of failure.
I’ll probably be getting my new car tomorrow which should give me about a week to get used to it before I’m left with no car for a week. Fortunately my mom won’t be working so I will be able to steal her car as necessary, but it’ll still be a hassle. I’m glad we’re getting it down here rather than up in Seattle because down here my dad can play the “game” of talking about the price with the salesman, and I can do what I do best: act really annoyed when we’ve been there for over two hours and I’m getting really hungry, and show up the manager by pulling up evidence on my phone that contradicts something he just told my dad (both of which happened earlier tonight, by the way).
Personal - Dallas
I finally got around to picking up my external drive today, so in the not too terribly distant future, I’m going to be backing up everything. Fortunately this can wait until right before I leave since the hard drive will be coming with me and not being sent with the rest of my stuff, but it’s convenient to have it purchased now so I can backup all my personal files before sending my desktop away. After I restore everything then I get to decide what to use a 1 TB external hard drive for, but I can never recall a time when I’ve had an issue trying to find ways to use storage.
Tomorrow my plan is to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it. I want to watch TV? Done. I want to play on my computer? Done. I want to go outside and play every sport known to man. Not gonna happen, but it would indicate that I’ve gone insane. In that case, that really opens up the possibilities for what I could do.
Personal - Dallas
My computer started freezing for no apparent reason this afternoon and even started acting like it did Saturday morning, but luckily the same fix made it work again. If it happens again then I might start to look at upgrading a couple things, but for now, I’ll tenatively assume that everything is working fine. I did do some upgrades after I got it running again, so maybe that will help whatever problem this seems to be.
Tomorrow night we’re going to eat dinner at Benihana with both sets of my grandparents, and during the day I’ll likely be running around with my grandfather to places like Fry’s and such. After dinner this evening, however, the topic came up of where we would be going on vacation for Thanksgiving and or Christmas. From the way the conversation was going, it sounds like Las Vegas might be in the cards again. We all know how much I enjoy a good Las Vegas trip, so it might not be a bad idea to start doing some research in order to assist that decision making process along.
Personal - Dallas
For the next couple of days, I’m going to be occupied with a lot of family goings on since my grandparents will be in town from Arkansas. Tomorrow this may not be too noticable since they won’t be getting here until the afternoon, but on Thursday it’s going to consume almost my entire day. Fortunately for me, this just means I can fill up my schedule with that rather than needing to deal with conflict resolution.
The Taking of Pelham 123 was a very good movie. One of the few flaws I had with it was just like the last Scott-directed movie with Denzel Washington which is that while the ending is good, the movie end on a down note rather than a big punch. Aside from that, I thought it was almost perfect. Definitely a purchase for me. My score: 9/10.
Personal - Dallas
For having a house with a pool, we actually use it quite infrequently. When you take into account the issues we’ve had with it in the past, it really makes you question whether or not it’s worth having one in the first place. Combine that with the current problem of the air blower coming on for no apparent reason, add in the fact that I’m moving to Seattle in three weeks, and you just end up with a recipe for a situation that neither of my parents are probably equipped to handle besides calling the pool people. Granted, I’m not that much more equipped than them, but I at least knew how to put the pool into service mode in order to hopefully override whatever was making the blower come on.
Tomorrow I’m very likely going to see The Taking of Pelham 123, so that + lunch will take up a good portion of my afternoon. I have nothing else on my schedule for tomorrow, but I think that should be enough in order to keep me occupied. If it isn’t, I’ll just have to come up with more stuff on the fly or suffer being bored.
Personal - Dallas
Three weeks from today (technically last night if you want to get extremely picky about it), I’ll be living in Seattle. Granted, I’ll be living in corporate housing with nothing more than what I bring in my backpack and a suitcase of clothes, but I’ll be living there nonetheless. Everything I need to do here before I leave has a definite deadline on it that is slowly by surely approaching.
One thing that may impact my decision on getting some sort of DVD cataloging software would be it’s integration with a media center frontend. It’s one thing to be able to see a list of all the movies I have ripped by their filenames but having something that’s sorted by genre with cover art and details about the movie. Even without a barcode scanner, that might just be something worth paying for.
Personal - Dallas