Camera Phone Fun

As I mentioned before, I picked up a Nokia 3650 phone and have been running around taking pictures.
Here’s one I took today on my way to a meeting at work:


The phone has so many functions, I still haven’t figured out how to do one tenth of what it can do.
In other news, I bought the full set of Giant Robot DVDs.

For those that don’t know, Johnny Sokko and Giant Robot is a series from Japan in the late 60s that was dubbed into English and shown in the US in the 70s, when I was a young boy.
My brother and I loved Giant Robot because he was controlled by the young boy, Johnny Sokko. We could easily imagine ourselves being Johnny and would often act out Giant Robots movements.

I played the first episode for the girls yesterday and they loved it. Thanks to the interent, almost anything from my memory is instantly available to me.

Late night update

Sleep beckons…
For the Superbowl, we made yet another Turducken.


Here is demonstrate the layered Turducken

The stuffing wasn’t quite as tasty this year, but it was still enjoyable.
On Saturday I switched Michele and I over to T-mobile and we both picked up new Nokia 3650 phones.
We are still learning how to program and use them, but soon enough I will have some sort of moblog/photoblog going. All in due time.

Done

Our CD library has been ripped to MP3s.
The process took about 4 days. I ripped on two computers at night and Michele helped out during the day ripping a stack of CDs, even though she thinks I’m a data hog.
The end result:


Over 5000 songs taking up just over 30 gigs of space. Not bad for a library.

Here are the bags of ripped CDs before I put them away. Out of the almost 400 we ripped, only 5 had problems that wouldn’t let the CD-ROM read them. I’ll probably pick up a CD polisher and see if I can fix them. The girls’ game CDs could use a little polishing.
In other news, Zoe entered her first Science Fair.

She won the ‘Most Fun’ award for her investigation. I’m so proud.

Click.. Whirr… Rip… /repeat

I listened.
Rather than sending my CDs off to be ripped, I’ve decided to rip my CDs myself.
I played around the last two days and finally got going in earnest tonight. Due to a little tweaking and unsing Musicmatch Jukebox Plus, I can rip most CDs at 30x speed. That means that most CDs are done in 2-3 minutes.
I’ve got two computers going and the CDs are going in and out about as fast as I can spin around in the chair. I can’t really do much else, even read since I’m getting interrupted every few minutes.
It’s suprising to me how fast it is going, several hundred CDs have been ripped already.

*raises head above foxhole*

Well, it looks like the flame war between LA.com, lablogs.com, and blogging.la has calmed down to a low simmer.
I am shocked to find that the discussion never ran into Godwin’s Law.
Hopefully now we can move forward and get to what I have hoping to help organize for a while, an all-LA blogger get-together or mini-conference.
Anyone care to shake hands over dinner at IHOP? I’m buying. (Just think of the blogging & picture possibilities from that dinner…)

Catching up with my circle of bloggers

Browsing around my blogroll, I see even my wife has updated.
She mocks my current plans to rip our CD library and calls me a ‘data hog’.
Martin posts our recent evening out with the Gen[M]ay crew.
The blogging.la peeps are in a bit of a spat with the LA.com people. IMHO, LA.com looks like any other generic portal on the web. I mean really, do we need a “Who is LA’s hottest entertainment reporter?”. I think not.
Sonny Parlin who’s new blog I discussed a bit ago, has got a kick ass design going. I dig how he did his Top Picks section. I don’t know if it’s Sonny or his wife, Kara, who did the design, but it is the roxxor.
Matt says that Best Western hotels are all going to provide free wifi. I have an new favorite hotel.
Lastly, here’s some scoopage for you low carb folks. During the Superbowl, Coca Cola will reveal their new low carb version. Using Splenda (aka Sucralose), Coca Cola Ultra will have 12 grams of carbs and 45 calories.



You read it here first…

More thoughts on ripping

I spent a large part of the weekend cleaning things. While Michele cleaned the girls room, I cleaned the linen closet on Saturday. On Sunday I cleaned the garage and finally go a chance to sort out our CD collection in hopes of getting them all ripped.


After sorting out things that didn’t need to get ripped, putting scattered CDs back in the jewel cases, I got a final total of what I want to rip. 376 CDs. There are three rows of 100 and the rest add up to 76. Much bigger than I thought.
I began to wonder if the cost was really worth it and considered what it would take to do it myself. I did a few tests and found that it takes about 10 minutes to rip a CD and that if you do 6 an hour, you are doing good.
Doing the math 376 CD / 6 CD/hr = 62.66 hrs to rip them all.
Let’s say I can spend 4 hrs/night doing ripping, it will take 62.66 hrs / 4hrs/night = 16 nights to rip them.
Half a month? Geez. At $6/hr this is quite a low paying job.
So I’m still torn. I want all the CDs ripped, but the cost to send it to RipDigital is high. On the other hand, spending more than two weeks ripping CDs for hours at a time is a pain as well.
What do you, loyal Cruft readers, think I should do?