Yep, I have 500+ GB of entertainment and pictures scattered across 3 computers on 5 hard drives.    Last weekend I spent ~6-hour shuffling files and burning files off onto DVDs to make room for more stuff.  It’s insanity managing this stuff manually and my husband can’t really navigate the network to find stuff because the non-sense file structure I made up is all in my head.  Sigh … try searching through 500+GB of stuff to find the one file you want!!!  Oh and then cleaning up the temp file mess created after I’ve moved Gigs of data from one location to another.  There’s got to be a better way and if anyone knows a way that’s doesn’t require any special technical knowledge, please tell me.

So here’s how my entertainment life goes.  I have two ways of getting entertainment from the Internet.  I either do a direct file download or I use a bittorrent program.  Each method downloads to different hard drives.  The bittorrent program downloads to a “working” directory and then automatically moves the files to an “inbox” directory when the downloads are completed.  From there it’s up to me to move the files into the appropriate directories with the rest of the episodes of that particular show or manga.  I used to keep things separated by whether it was a current series or a series which we had captured and watched all the episodes, but given that we have run out of HD space several times, which initiates the purchase of either another hard drive or a furious reschuffling of files onto hard drives with extra space accompanied by burning off onto DVD, things sorta got outta hand.  There are files everywhere with episodes of a series sometimes fragmented across two or more hard drives :(.   All hell breaks loose at home when we have a hard drive failure, as you can imagine. (Oh!  lesson learned:  never place an external hard drive on a sub woofer.  When you think about it, it seems obvious — big magnetic field —  but when you have limited shelf space a subwoofer seems like a good shelf — Doh!)  We have 3 computers that handle this horrible system.  One laptop (HP 6000 series) we use to do the downloading (it has 2 external hard drives attached), one  that is connected to the TV so we can watch the content (HP 7000 series Pavillion Media laptop), and another that has a high capacity hard drive to store more stuff (a Jen-built gaming rig for her lucky husband).  All are connected by wires running through the walls of house because a wireless network could not support the bandwidth we use. 

Sigh … so what would make my life easy?  Well, I’ve had my eye on one of those Media Servers, but it looks like I still have a little bit of wait and I don’t want to upgrade to Vista yet.  Plus, I don’t know whether it will make my life any easier.  If there’s someone out there who knows more about the Media Server, hear my call and set me straight on its capabilities and how I might integrate this into my computer mess.

The thing that would help me the most is a better way to manage my downloads as they come in.  As of now I am using the lousy filter that comes with the bittorrent software I use.  The filter is a simple name filter so it downloads everything with a certain string pattern from the RSS feeds I get regardless of its source, file format, the series episode number, or language.  Consequently, I end up either downloading or having my download cue littered with many versions of the same series that I have to go through and sort out manually.  After it’s downloaded it would be nice if it automatically went into a folder with the other episodes of the shows.  Then I would love to have an interface for when I actually want to view the content that would show me what new episodes have been downloaded that I haven’t watched yet, and from that interface I can view the content rather than having to root around on  the network to find my content.  I guess that sounds like a PVR, but for the internet and that’s what I want.

Oh, and another thing.  With respect to the Media Center storage capacity — whatever is thought of as reasonable, double it.  In the past few months, more of the shows I have downloaded are huge HD files at upto 1280 x 720 (widescreen) resolution (I’m sure 1920 by 1080 is coming soon) with 5.1 sound.  These files are roughly 2x the size of files I was downloading a year ago.  They are also using encoding that require more processing power so RAM has now become very important when playing these big files.  Take note :).

My husband and I are back from 9 days in Singapore. We went for vacation and a good friend’s wedding. The wedding was wonderful! We watched the solemnization ceremony, which was nearly identical to the civil wedding ceremony my husband and I had, and we went to the dinner. The dinner was sumptuous with a little bit of theater. Our good friend put on a great party and my husband and I were honored to be invited :).

Singapore, as usual, is nice. Our vacation started off a little bumpy, though. Upon arrival to our hotel, we found out that our room wasn’t ready, so we went to the hotel’s restaurant for some lunch. We were pretty ragged looking from the plane ride and looked quite out of place. To make a long story short, one of the ladies at the table sitting next to us purse went missing and she blamed my husband and me. We went through a couple of rounds of questioning with the hotel security staff and the police before being left alone. We were quite displeased. I personally was very scared because breaking the laws in Singapore carry heavy penalties and I didn’t know what our rights would be if we had been formally accused. After that it was pleasant warm days of walking around, eating, and shopping.

We visited the Singapore History Museum and the Asian Civilization Museum. Both museums were quite large and we could not finish them in the time we had. I really recommend visiting the History Museum coupled with a visit to military fort on Sentosa island to get a good feel for the history of Singapore. It’s an interesting history and I think through experiencing these sites, I understand better why Singapore is what it is. It’s a careful balance between many cultures that could be easily warring with each other. The element of geography also plays a great importance to Singapore then and now as a trade port and at the center of mix of countries in political turmoil. These aspects of Singapore I found very interesting :).

The last full day of our stay we visited the Juroung Bird Park. The Bird Park is a compact bird zoo and it takes about 3 – 4 hours to see everything along with a few shows. The selection of birds is good and the park is good condition (the flamingo habitat was being renovated while we were there). There’s not much in the way of food though. We were most impressed with the falconalry exhibit. There were 20 or so birds of prey on display in open falconalry cages. I’m always amazed to see how big the American Bald eagle is. We took the MRT out to the bird park and along our 1+ hour journey we got a good look at alot of Singapore and there are an unbelieveable amount of people living on that small island. Most of them are densily packed into high rise structures that rise out the land much like tract housing at home — but much taller. It’s overwhelming to think about. This too was quite interesting. We wondered what all the people do.

To summarize, it was a good trip with good food and some fine siteseeing. Despite this being our 4th visit we still haven’t seen all there is to see in Singapore and since the city-nation is always in flux, I imagine we will not run out of things to see there in the future.

Droolz … Here’s the progress on my future retirement home.  It still needs more gadgets and to drive itself, though.  The interior is a little tacky too, … but I’ll take it as soon as it can drive itself (and when my husband and I have some $$$).

http://www.luxurylaunches.com/transport/p2000i_rv_by_newell_sizzles_for_more_then_a_million_dollars.php

Ahhhh …Life on the open road.  I can’t wait :).  Maybe I should have been a trucker …

I ate candy for dinner last night.  But I brushed my teeth really well before I went to bed, so it can’t be all that bad, right?

My husband and I went to Comic Con for the first time this year.  I bought us 4-day passes over the Internet, thinking that we’d be able to leisurely go about attending the conference.  I was so wrong.  Due to other life things we couldn’t go to the the preview party on Wednesday night, so we waited until opening day on Thursday.  The line to get into Comic Con basically began at my house in San Marcos as traffic was pretty bad, even at 10AM (!!!), through out the 30-mile journey.  When we got to downtown San Diego, the closest parking was at the Park Ball, which is a good 20-min walk to the convention center (not so bad).  When we got to the convention center we looked for the badge pick-up only to be told to get in line.  Which line?  This line?  And so we walked along the front length of the convention center and the line didn’t end.  At the corner of the convention center we asked a person in line how long he had been  in line.  He said he had been in line for about an hour, but that the line was moving fast.  My husband was ready to punt at this point, but we thought for fun that we’d see how long this line was, so on we walked along the side of the convention center, along the back of the convention center and finally into Seaport Village!  And this was the line for people who had pre-registered for the conference weeks, even months, in advance!  I was baffled.  At the end of line I asked the couple of young men that got in line behind us whether they had been to Comic Con before and whether it was worth standing in this line.  One of them said, “Well it’s big and it keeps getting bigger every year, but I really couldn’t say.”  Against my husband wishes we waited in that line.  And we waited, and waited, and it was 90+ deg F, and we had no beverage.  The only source of beverage appeared 30 minutes into the wait and it was a roach coach that had long ago run out of water.  The selections were milk, grape juice, cranberry juice, and clamato (I kid you not about the Clamato).  Sticky juice in hand, we waited in the hot sun for another hour before we got our badges.  Needless to say, my husband and I got nasty sun burns (I imagine most of the goths that were in line didn’t make it as they had burst into flames and were reduced to ash shortly after passing the roach coach).

And into the show … due to the unexpected traffic and the line to pick-up badges, we were 3-hours behind the schedule we had so carefully laid out the night before.  The first panel we attended was one on making plastic models yourself.  It was pretty interesting, but I know I’ll never do this.  After that we went on down to the convention floor.  We only got through 1/3 of the way down the hall before a lecture on MMORPGs started.  The floor was crowded!  Being a person of relatively short stature, it was difficult to see anything and when I stood still I got body slammed by overly enthusiastic fanboys (and girls) rushing off the floor, eyes glistening with joy about the purchase they just made.  Anyhow, the section I got to see was like a giant comic book flea market.  There were comic books, comic book and anime toys of all sort, there were “vintage” t-shirts (actually, more like someone went around to every Goodwill and Salvation Army sale and bought all the t-shirts), and fan art on sale.

The most interesting place to me was called “Artist Alley” and this is where various artists hawk there drawings to willing buyers.  Most of these artists draw fan art of their favorite comic book or sci-fi characters or they are artists who are trying to break in comic production professionally.  It was interesting seeing the different mediums the artists used to make reproductions.  They sold individual hand drawn sketches, drawings, and painting.  Most had sketchbooks to sell which were reproduced using laser printing (both b/w and color) or printed on a press.  Some sold some very nice books that ranged from spiral bound Kinko’s produced books to nice professionally printed and bound books (these were typically $25+ to purchase).  And a few of the artists sold short run lithographs for quite a bit of money each.  One artist had his art printed on what looked like semi-gloss photo paper.  I asked him what the technology was and he said it was some sort of Kodak process.  I asked if inkjet was used and gave me an indignant look and said, “I don’t think so, but it is archival if that what you’re getting at.”  I took a good look at the print and I could see no evidence of the printing technology (no screen dots or banding) and the colors were bright and the area fills were perfect.  Anyhow, most of the artists there were drawing away like their hands possessed a mind of their own as they did business and talked to potential customers.  I ended up buying one artists book of “Queen Amaidala” drawings for $15.  Apparently this guy really likes Queen Amaidala as reflected in the drawings in which she was so carefully drawn and lovingly imagined.  It’s a nice keepsake.

About the rest of comic con —

The rest of the show floor was crowded with booths from various corporations from comic publishers, to video game developers, to movie studios.  I looked though the ADV video booth, the Square Enix booth, and the Sony Playstation booth.  The ADV booth was co-sponsered by Best Buy and from it various anime DVD’s could be purchased.  The Square Enix booth was selling figurines from the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts video game series (the items listed as show exclusives had already sold out.  I wanted a Bahamut figure, but they didn’t have anything small, but then again Bahamut is never anything small in any of his incarnations.  They also had some very nice FFX sword minatures.  Personally, I thought it would be more fun to have life size swords so we could experience the ridiculousness that characterizes FFX swords).

Basically this show has morphed into Hollywood’s testing ground for new Sci-Fi and action based blockbuster movies and TV shows.  A lot of movie and TV show announcements were made.  At its heart, though, this show is still about American comics and not being an American comic fan, I didn’t feel a real attachment to the show.  The crowd present was a mix of everyone — young and old, male and female, and all ethnic make-ups.  This was quite unexpected.  The other things to note are that these people are wired, the artists print, a large portion of them are gamers, they are very much the early adopters of new technology, and they are very forward thinking in terms of pop culture.  In other words, these are people that PRINT graphic arts and use computers, so of course we should care about them :).

As for the other 3-days of the show — we attempted to return on Friday to finish the convention floor, but after driving around downtown SD for two hours, we realized that there was absolutely no parking, so we punted and went home.  We did not go Saturday or Sunday either as the conference logistics, or lack of, utterly defeated our will to experience the rest of the convention.  Will we go again?  Probably not a for while unless they take the convention to a city that is better able to handle the amount to attendees and I or my husband suddenly get into American comics.