a couple huge lists i came across, including many personal collections...

http://forum.o2.pl/temat.php?id_p=1293507&start=1440 (the posts by deserted)

http://www.sitewrench.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27


better bring a lunch...

When DVD Spells B-A-D
Some Great Films Suffer in Transition To New Format
November 12, 2003
By FRED KAPLAN
The New York Times

a great article about things that drive us nuts about the dvd industry/format and why we are not giving up on our laserdisc collection any time soon...

for instance, here he adresses a great example of some of the issues at the very heart of the matter...

Digital technology seems, on the face of it, a preposterously inadequate medium for storing movies, and we should gape in wonder that DVDs yield coherent pictures at all, much less the gloriously sharp, detailed images they churn out under the best of conditions. Consider: A DVD stores only 17 gigabytes of data. A two-hour film, transferred to digital data and otherwise untreated, would take up more than 150 gigabytes.
So the data must first be massively compressed, mainly by digitally sampling a frame, then sampling only the information that changes in subsequent frames.
This is no big deal for a scene of someone standing still against a blank wall. But it's a major challenge for a scene of someone running through traffic surrounded by dozens of flashing lights and moving objects.

while ld video definitely has its own issues, it is NOT compressed and cav laserdiscs even store actual individual frames of film, something no other format does even today...

If a film is old and damaged, the compression machine will "read" random dirt and scratches in the same way it reads motion. If the machine's operator doesn't pay attention and make adjustments, or if the machine is subpar, the digitized image will be full of waves, zigzags and other distracting distortions.
Similar problems can plague color or, if it's a black-and-white film, the gradations of gray. When transferring film from a negative to a print, someone has to practice the fine art of "color timing." The same thing has to be done, though electronically, when transferring it to DVD. The job can be done well or it can be done badly.
"The main reason a lot of DVDs are so bad," says Robert A. Harris, president of the Film Preserve, one of the top film-restoring companies, "is that the people making them don't know what they're doing and don't care what they're doing."

well, why should they care??? they are going to price these things to sell to any shlub, so, they will not bother... dvd regularly cheaps out, while makers of ld knew they could not sell them at the prices they were asking unless they threw in GOOD extras... Boogie Nights is a great example... criterion paid for the john holmes documentary the film was based on, but when the dvd came around, new line was not willing to pay for it... the dvd was around $30, the ld was nearly $100... but, you get what you pay for... and, right now, many ld collectors are selling off their discs at insane prices, therefore, now is a great time to buy...

Doing a DVD right takes time and money. A good Telecine machine, which transfers film to an image suited for television, costs about $2 million. Use of an outside lab's Telecine facilities can cost up to $1,000 an hour.
The Criterion Collection, which produces some of the finest DVDs of classic films, routinely takes months to make a digital transfer. Lee Klein, Criterion's chief technician, says: "If there's a scratch, we draw it out frame by frame. When there's 12 pieces of debris on each frame, it takes a long time."
Most studios don't bother.
Some simply take the master that was made for laser disc, or even for VHS videotape, and transfer it to DVD. This was an especially common practice in the infancy of DVD, four to six years ago.

and he gives a few good examples in the article of lousy dvd's, showing the widespread apathy of dvd makers... their attitude is getting better, so, i hope by the time hd-dvd is the standard, they will have learned and can offer a consistently worthy product...


i am NOT saying that laserdisc is necesarily better in every way to dvd, my point is that laserdisc is still a viable format today, for those willing to pay, and should not have been discontinued so early (the last u.s. laserdisc release was in 2000)... many ld collectors out there are already regretting selling off their collection when they are left with substandard dvd's, or even no dvd release available, such as the theatrical cuts of close encounters and star wars... and those two are great examples because there will NEVER be a dvd release of them...

laserdisc is a format for the serious film lover, dvd is the next vhs, the format for the masses...
what hd-dvd will be remains to be seen...

today, we finally got our Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Collector's Edition LaserDisc Box Set!

it is a gorgeous set, great high-res cover, three discs, the film on three sides, and three sides of extras... in fact, the documentary runs 140 minutes and the movie is just 137... this is the laserdisc upon which the Collector's Edition DVD is based, (which we also have, of course) and so far as we can tell, it has almost all of the extras that appear on the dvd...
got it off of ebay for just over $20 and it is in excellent condition...

this was the last ce3k item we wanted, we already had the dvd, the CAV Criterion set, the CLV Criterion set, and a couple releases of the inferior "Special Edition" version of the film... and, we also have the collector's edition versions of the theatrical one-sheet poster and soundtrack cd, both released at the same time as the laserdisc set...

so, this set fills a gaping hole in our collection...


we will watch it tonight or tomorrow, but, we popped on side three (which is cav) and it looks fantastic, you can tell it is the same transfer used for the dvd... released in '98, dolby digital 5.1, thx-certified, surely this is going to be on our list of the best looking laserdiscs ever made...

i love quotes... i love words, i love good writing, and i love thought boiled down to its irreducable minimum, so, quotes sort of wrap it all up into one for me... "the wisdom of many, the wit of one" i think is the way someone once put it... i have a db in my psion filled with great quotes and RefDesk.com's thought of the day email keeps me well-stocked with consistently great quotes...


so, anyway, i came across this page today, which has random quotes at the bottom, so, i reloaded a few dozen times...

some favorites...

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
Rich Cook

When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Sir Winston Churchill

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is "Probably because of something you did."
[sounds like a jack handey deep thought to me - i_p]

Free speech only goes so far until you need the right to bear arms.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers

We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.

it's been reported all over the place, here is how Nybble covers it...

_________FIRST MOBILE PHONE VIRUS_________
http://snipurl.com/77lq

The first ever computer virus that can infect mobile phones has been discovered. The virus - called Cabir - is a proof-of-concept worm that replicates on Symbian phones. This worm repeatedly sends itself to the first Bluetooth-enabled device that it can find, regardless of the type of device. For example, even a Bluetooth-enabled printer will be attacked if it is within range. The worm spreads as a .SIS file, which is installed into the APPS directory.

If the virus succeeds in penetrating the phone, it writes the inscription 'Caribe' on the screen and is then activated every time that the phone is turned on. There is no payload, apart from the vastly shortened battery life caused by the constant scanning for Bluetooth-enabled devices.

as far as symbian devices go, i don't see how this could ever become much of a problem... the Symbian OS started life as the EPOC OS, which is what the psion model 5 and up used, and, unless symbian has changed it drastically for the worse, it should simply be a matter of deleting the errant files...
i have had more than a couple applications i installed wreak varying degrees of havoc on my 5 and all i had to do was hit my System/Apps folder, get rid of the application's subfolder, then go to Apps/Install and get rid of the .sis installation file... worst case scenario might involve searching for any files the app tries to hide (can't really hide things very well with such a transparent directory structure) and/or running a spy prog to find all running apps... hell, just popping up the list of openly running apps should be enough...
given that these are the sorts of tasks any user should know how to do, plus the fact that this new app running and draining battery power should be very noticable, i just don't see how this could ever be a real problem...

maybe i am missing something...

today, Nicole Kidman is 37...
she is, without a doubt, first choice on our list of favorite eye candy girls... (milla and charlize would probably round out the top three...)

nicole is simply perfect... we first fell in love with her in Moulin Rouge, and have since seen her in Eyes Wide Shut, The Others, Far And Away, Malice, and To Die For and thought she was just yummy in all of them...
(oh yeah, and she is a good actress as well :P her best performance i have seen so far is probably To Die For...)
last week we even bought two 8x10 photos of her in moulin rouge costume from that cool movie poster/stuff shop in nob hill and miss mary picked up frames for them today and has them over in her corner... (for the record, we didn't know her b-day was coming up when we bought them, we aren't THAT fanatical, we found out because it was on today in sci-fi history this morning... they are also talking about her on fark, btw...)

to borrow a great line i once heard used to describe someone else, she has been the cause of countless gay men and straight women to question their preference for over a decade...


and we try not to think about the whole weirdo tom cruise thing o_O

see, we have now added several thousand words to our site with these blogs, so, we show up more in search results, so, we are getting many many more hits...
and, following the tradition of posting interesting keywords, here are some that i thought were odd or cool or whatever...

let me get our regular keyword stuff out of the way first...

for as long as we have had our collection online, we get lots of hits from people looking for dreamcast stuff, since our dreamcast page has a lot of stuff, a few rare items people would be looking for, full titles, and even catalog numbers... dreamcast-related searches are our biggest bringers of traffic...

next, or maybe tied, would be all the searches for porn using google image search... you see, the directory of pics from when we saw a band called "Bozo Porno Circus", every pic has "porno" in the filename...

we also get a surpring number of hits for people looking for the "sounds from hell" wav file that is in our wav directory...

recently, we have also been getting some hits from people searcing for movie titles, and a few for bands we have mentioned here and there on the site...

and, with my recent posts on the subject, we are pulling in some mp3 blog-related searches...


ok, now for the singularities...

whisper dish
mentioned in the post from when we went to alamogordo...

jesse diaz pastor las vegas
mentioned in my recent post about our wedding...

virtual drugs
yeah, made a post about that...

clive barker signing pics forbidden planet
whoa... huh?
i assume those terms match to the "horror night" post, but, i have no clue what this guy was looking for...

what is the k-pax alternate ending plot spoiler
so, lemme' think... probably the "list of movies we have seen" post and the "horror night" post appear on the same archive page and have all those terms between them...

talking cat video
whoa, now that is a weird one... i would have to poke around a bit to figure out where they landed...

intitleindex.of mp3 chab
this may be the oddest one... who would be looking for mp3's and chabs simultaneously?
though, both are in our media directory, i don't know anyone else besides us who keeps voice chabs online...
or is there a band called chab?
(btw, for non-dc'ers, "Ch@b", sometimes spelled "Chab" in casual use, is a japanese instant messager service, and is built in to japanese Dreamcast browsers... it is the only real IM choice for dreamcast browser users...)

limpbizkit.mid
i thought the midi craze was over... we have not added any to our collection in a long time, and only have this one for something like historical value, in that it is the first midi we ever in heard...

amarillo yard signs
argh! does this mean someone knows the story behind these??? or are they also searching for the answer?

archived yahoo webcam feeds
i don't get this one, either... feeds are live, not archived, and what is a 'yahoo webcam'?
nor can i think off the top of my head where they might have landed on our site using these terms... though, now that i think about it, i bet most or all of those terms appear in the sidebar of every page of my blog here...

dreameye homebrew
well, THAT would be nice... but, i don't think anyone is working on it...

angelfire briefcase links page
don't get this one... what is an angelfire briefcase? i know yahoo briefcases, but, not angelfire... and are they searching for a page of links TO angelfire briefcases? i just don't get it...
anyway, the terms all probably appear on our sitemap...

penn jillette pc computing
good to know someone else reads them... (you can read tem, too, if you follow the "Penniphile" link on my sidebar...)


so, nothing TOO terribly exciting, but, we are just gettin started here and many more words will be added as months roll by, which means man more interesting search terms...
so, i will post about this again in the future...

these are just a few links that i am keeping my eye on or have already found good stuff at...

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Terry_UK/files/

http://thenewpink.net/womenfolk/

http://www.bumrocks.com/

http://bootleg.freakin.nl/

Webjay - Listener created radio
http://webjay.org/playthispage

http://www.fatplanet.com.au/mp3_archive.html

another list of mp3 blogs
http://musik.antville.org/stories/676094/


i really like this "gba jukebox" mp3 player...
it has at least one major drawback, though: no external power choice, it requires a AA batt and it only lasts a few hours...
a good point is that it records, but, a bad point is that it does not record in mp3 format... so, these ".GB3" files it makes are almost totally useless to anyone if i uploaded them...

ok, so, here is what is currenly on my mp3 player's 128MB card...

first, the gb3 files i have recorded, mostly movie scenes...

• Imprinting Protocol
  the scene from A.I.
  
• Roy and Chon In Jail
  from Shanghai Noon from chon screaming in chinese to roy saying "let's adios, partner"...
  
• Roy and Chon - Cowboys
  roy preparing chon for their journey to carson city from roy saying "just like that, at sort of a rakish angle" to the end of the kid rock song...
  
• When She Loved Me
  from Toy Story 2, from woody saying "hey, watcha' doing way up there?" to the end of the song...
  
• Our Precious Bodily Fluids
  the famous line from Dr. Strangelove
  
• About Yayo
  from Get Shorty, the scene in the car between mr. escobar and bo...
  
• Ray Barboni
  also from Get Shorty, with ray, harry, and "the bro", from "you got a big problem, harry" to "alright, knock it off, harry, we haven't got a lot of time here"...
  
• There's A Change In My Life
  from Leap of Faith, from the dj whispering "thirty seconds" to the end of the song...
  
• Poltergeist
  the great, creepy music that plays during the end credits since i can't find it on mp3...
  
• MoL - Layers of Harmony
  an alternate version of Melodies of Life from the Final Fantasy IX import soundtrack...
  
• FFIX
  the little theme that plays in the menus of Final Fantasy IX... (recorded from the import soundtrack, not the game)
  
• Come What May
  the studio version from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack...
  
• Red Room
  what a great song... from the second Moulin Rouge soundtrack...
  
• It's Not Going To Stop
  from the Magnolia soundtrack...
  
• Air East 31
  the traffic controller scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  
• Constitutional Peasant
  the whole scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
  
• Still No Sign Of Land
  aka Cannibalism, by monty python, from one of my many old dr. demento tapes...
  
• Argument Clinic
  my favorite monty python bit ever... also from an old dr. d tape...
  
• Go sell crazy someplace else...
  the line from As Good As It Gets... (the rest of the line is, "we're all stocked up here.")
  
• Danny & Withnail
  part of the first scene with danny in Withnail & I, from "i don't advise getting a haircut", through the argument about withnail's drug tolerance, to danny leaving with "have either of you got shoes?"...
  
• I'm gonna' pull your head off
  another great withnail line...
  
• Alright, this is the plan...
  withnail's intoxication plan...
  
• Speed is like...
  the excellent description by "I" of what speed is like...
  
• I DEMAND TO HAVE SOME BOOZE!!
  withnail again...
  
• Danny
  the entire first danny scene from Withnail & I, from "danny's here... 'headhunter' to his friends" to the end, "have either of you got shoes?"...
  

and, the mp3's...
these i can obviously share, so, if you want something i have, lemme' know...

• Freaks and Geeks
  the theme song by joan jett...
  
• More Human Than Human
  by rob zombie or white zombie or whoever...
  
• Wicked Web
  a so-so live version of a great waterdeep song... (i cannot find anything but live waterdeep stuff!!!)
  
• He Will Come
  another so-so live version of another great waterdeep song...
  
• Kyle's Mom Is a Bitch
  hey, it's a great song! (but, no, i can't say i've ever seen much south park)
  
• Fark.com spot by hip2dajive (#1)
  "In the prehistoric age of the internet..."
  
• Fark.com spot by Smiln' Jay
  "In the beginning, the internet was a vast and confusing wasteland..."
  (btw, both these fark spots (and a few more) are in our mp3 directory... and so are the waterdeep songs, the freaks and geeks theme song, and a few more...)
  
• Master of Puppets
  niiiiice...
  
• One
  i need more metallica...
  
• He Will Come
  a slightly better live version of the song by waterdeep...
  
• POTO Techno
  some weird techno version of The Phantom of the Opera... will probably get deleted next time i need space...
  
• Spirit of Radio
  bootleg live version...
  
• Tom Sawyer
  another bootleg live rush song... i want studio version of both of these... these bootlegs suck (a lot of people singing along and such) and they are like 10 megs each!
  

and that is what i have been listening to lately...
i use ChangeDetection on the mp3 blogs i want to keep an eye on and have been getting a new song or two every two or three days, which bumps something off, so, the collection i have is always changing...

i came late to the mp3 thing, but, it sure is alot of fun...
well... except downloading on dial-up :P

a fascinating article about a guy getting to spend a whole lot of time digging through stanley kubrick's house...

Stanley Kubrick's films were landmark events - majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery - this is what he found

and here are some excerpts giving you a hint of the weirdness within...

starting with a bit of background...

nine years had passed since Kubrick's last film, Full Metal Jacket. All anyone outside his circle knew about him was that he was living in a vast country house somewhere near St Albans - or a "secret lair", according to a Sunday Times article of that year - behaving presumably like some kind of mad hermit genius. Nobody even knew what he looked like. It had been 16 years since a photograph of him had been published.
He'd gone from making a film a year in the 1950s (including the brilliant, horrific Paths Of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the 1960s (Lolita, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey all came out within a six-year period), to two films a decade in the 1970s and 1980s (there had been a seven-year gap between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1990s, absolutely nothing. What the hell was he doing in there? According to rumours, he was passing his time being terrified of germs and refusing to let his chauffeur drive over 30mph.

and...

"The good news," wrote Nicholas Wapshott in the Times in 1997, bemoaning the ever-lengthening gaps between his films, "is that Kubrick is a hoarder ... There is an extensive archive of material at his home in Childwick Bury. When that is eventually opened, we may get close to understanding the tangled brain which brought to life HAL, the Droogs and Jack Torrance."

and then, inside kubrick's world...

There are boxes everywhere - shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes. These are the boxes that contain the legendary Kubrick archive.

---

Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. "This used to be the cinema," he says.
"Is it the library now?" I ask.
"Look closer at the books," says Tony.
I do. "Bloody hell," I say. "Every book in this room is about Napoleon!"
"Look in the drawers," says Tony.
I do.
"It's all about Napoleon, too!" I say. "Everything in here is about Napoleon!"

"Somewhere else in this house," Tony says, "is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon's inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it'll tell you."
"Who made up the cards?" I ask.
"Stanley," says Tony. "With some assistants."
"How long did it take?" I ask.
"Years," says Tony. "The late 1960s."

---

In one portable cabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes related to Eyes Wide Shut, marked EWS - Portman Square, EWS - Kensington & Chelsea, etc, etc. I choose the one marked EWS - Islington because that's where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaner's, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find, to my astonishment, pictures of the doorways of the houses in my own street. Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words, "Hooker doorway?"
"Huh," I think. So somebody within the Kubrick organisation (it was, in fact, his nephew) once walked up my street, on Kubrick's orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth.
It is not, though, as incredible a coincidence as it may at first seem. Judging by the writing on the boxes, probably just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this cabin.

---

The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front - Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California, and so on - and they are in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten "F-P" on the positive ones and "F-N" on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked "F-C".

---

"Stanley loved typefaces." Jan pauses. "I tell you what else he loved."
"What?" I ask.
"Stationery," says Jan.
I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. "His great hobby was stationery," he says. "One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, 'What are you going to do with all that ink?' He said, 'I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.' Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink." Jan pauses. "He loved stationery, pads, everything like that."

---

I suppose that the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the town from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.
It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If 2001, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn't ripped.

so, as i write this, it is almost june 6th, our wedding anniversary...
well, that and the 7th...

allow me to explain...

and since i am in no hurry, i will start from when we met...

in 1995, i was living in an apartment on hermosa beach, california... (btw, i hated it, the smell and noise of the ocean were horrible...)
late on november 6th, my best friend, skully, came over with his girlfriend at the time, jade, and her best friend, mary...
mary and i took to each other immediately, and she even wrote in her diary that night, "tonight, i met the man i am going to marry"...

in the following months, the four of us did a lot together and it was not long before mary and i started saying we would get married at our nearest opportunity... being from vegas, i kept us reminded that all we had to do was take the four hour drive and shell out a few bucks...

so, since we were open about this, a pact was made... skully made mary and i swear that if we ever ran off and got married, we would page him with a special code, "77777", immediately after, no excuses... he introduced us, he demanded to be the first to know and we agreed he deserved it... if we had a normal wedding, the plan was for him to be my best man, but, that never came up...

it was around june 1st that we finally got around to deciding to go to vegas... there was a day or two of preparation and, if i recall correctly, we arrived in vegas, in a rented plymouth breeze, about the 3rd...

on the night of the 6th we were deciding what to do with the evening and one of us said to the other "how about we go get married?" and the other said "well, it IS what we came here for" and off we went, down to get our license... there were an awful lot of people in there, considering it was probably 10 or so at night... vegas is the only truly 24-hour city i have lived in, you can do pretty much anything, anytime... even 24-hour wedding chapels... though, i think the license place was going to close at 11pm...
i remember the clerks did not have the burned-out look i expected, they looked like they were dispensing miracles... somehow, they had not lost the romance of it all, it seemed...
to this day i wonder how many other couples that were in there that night are still together...

after the license, it was time to decide where to get married... skully always said we should do the drive-thru elvis impersonator wedding... and we always said ummmm, no... however, as we looked around, the cheapest and easiest was "the world famous little white chapel" on the strip and they had a drive-thru...

we just wanted to be married (though, elvis need not be involved), so, we went there...

we pull up and the window is on the passenger side (my side, some people are born to drive, some people are born to work the radio, and i am the latter) and there is a bell... so, i ring the bell and eventually a woman came to the window and started us on paperwork... after we filled out a few forms and gave them their money, we had to sit a bit and wait for a minister...

as we sat there, i had a revelation...
"you know what? we are GETTING married! no, i mean, for months we have been INTENDING to get married, and here in a bit we will BE married, but, at this moment we are GETTING married!"
then, suddenly, all the traditions made sense...
"this will only happen once! geez, i kinda' wish someone was here to see it, maybe take some pictures! in fact, we could have dressed up for it! or maybe even been well-rested and sober!"

i decided i would at least put my cigarette out...

so, as we waited, we noticed it was getting late... see, we met on the 6th, so, we thought it was going to be cool to have been married on the 6th...
the preacher (Pastor Jesse Diaz, the certificate says) showed up a few minutes before midnight... he leaned quite a bit out the window and asked if we had rings... well, in fact we did, but, we had already had a private and special moment of putting them on each other's finger months before, so, we told him we would not be re-exchanging rings, as it were... he seemed to think this was odd, but, continued anyway...
he told me to look on my bride and repeat after him and i said my vows to mary...
and then it was her turn and then he pronounced us man and wife...


and we noticed the time...
it was a few minutes after midnight...
so, the pastor jesse diaz leaned out and began our wedding some time before midnight, june 6th, and he pronounced us some time after midnight, june 7th, and this dawned on us and we thought it was actually pretty cool...
we decided at that very moment to forever celebrate both days as our anniversary...

(for the record, our marriage certificate says june 6th...)


now, if only we could buy that rental car we were in at the time...


anyway, if you have been paying attention, there is still something left to be done...
yes, we left the little white chapel and went over to the excalibur hotel and casino, my favorite place of employment ever (and the place where my brother married his bride), and went to the payphones just inside the back entrance... i dialled skully's number, put in a whole bunch of change, and entered 77777...
skully was watching tv with his parents when his pager went off... his voice in the darkness said "oh my god!" and he looked at his mom and dad and declared "zane and mary just got married"...
we were well-liked by his parents, so, there were a total of three people happy for us that night, not counting us...

and no one else in the world knew yet...


so, anyway, yes, we got married eight years ago, in the middle of the night, in a drive thru, in a rented plymouth breeze, on the las vegas strip, and since our wedding spanned midnight, we have two anniversary days...

and we think that is pretty cool...

on april 28, a request was posted on fark.com for people to make their own radio commercial for the site...
there a are a couple really good ones, if you are familiar with fark...

(and, to make sure they don't get lost, i have added them all to our mp3 subdir...)

after you get past the first few posts, anyway...

covers some usual ld vs. dvd stuff, with some dvhs stuff thrown in and even a couple chinese formats... also interesting are some good numbers about compression of audio formats on dvd, superbit dvd, dvhs, and ld, which is a very important point of comparison in home video formats...


i still say laserdisc is very worthwhile, dvd is a transitional format, hd-dvd will be here eventually and that format will be much more worth having than current dvd... dvd will be remembered for its faults... dvd will be like discovision is to the modern laserdisc...

if hd-dvd hurries along, dvd may some day end up as "obscure" as ld (in the mass-market mind)...

well, another one down...

let's see, i think that is either five or six in three years... sheesh...

it had been making some odd noises for a couple months and refusing to boot once in a while, but, last night, the screensaver kicked on, which meant reading the disc, and i hear a bit of a grinding noise...
and then i heard nothing but the cooling fan...

poor little thing puts in 12-hour days, every day, and the disc it runs 99% of the time is a burned dreampassport premier cd... not the best-made burn, either... and all the loading of japanese fonts, etc., takes its toll, little by little, until it finally screams "you can't fire me, i quit!" and gives up the ghost...

i borrowed miss mary's drive for the moment... (we stopped putting the screws back in long ago, so, it is a quick operation...)

among all our spare parts we don't have a single healthy gd-rom drive (though, we have a few dead/sick ones), so, we are going to have to go track one down... should be simple enough and it keeps getting cheaper every time this comes up...

i know i used to post at dcbg every time i blew a gd-rom drive, i wonder if i could go find those posts... would be interesting to see a timeline...