Remember when my titles were some how creative? Ya me neither.

Today I apparently felt the need to catch up on my lack of cable TV subscription since the TV has hardly been off as long as I've been in the house. And I haven't even opened the PHP book.

I did go back to the condo for a while, mailed my one envelope, gave the dog a shot (twice), and then also went down to Fry's. Despite the one extremely negative experience I had there. I'm back to spending money with them apparently.

I wanted to buy the cheapest DVD burner available. I was about to buy a $30 one when I spotted a no-box OEM one for $20. Didn't realize until I got home it was a ROM-ONLY drive. Well I have another burner and I really needed it for booting computers off DVDs anyway. So haven't decided yet if I'm going to take it back. Although I think I may as well since what's the point of a drive these days if it doesn't also burn?

I also bought one of those little embedded print servers for another $20. See that's the one thing I really did actually need from Fry's. I didn't spend a lot of time studying the box for it either so I should probably test it in case it also has to go back.

Lastly I bought an Asus O!Play for only $90. Mostly because I can tell my current media extender/streamer/whatever is apparently slowly dieing. Although that it some how lasted this long is actually rather impressive. I can tell though, I don't know when it will finally die but I know it will die.

I bought O!Play and brought it back up to the house but didn't bring any media with me. I merely hooked it up to the TV to see how it looked and functioned. Reportedly it can handle really high quality H.264 media files without an issue. Even MKV files which I guess are some kind of 720p HD things. I don't really know since my current extender can't handle them. And I have no Blu-ray period never mind rips of them.

That's the other reason for getting a new extender: more complete support for a wider range of video formats. My current one handles the quality DivX no problem but either won't work at all or works very poorly with MP4/H.264 formats and won't even try the MKV files.

So right now my media server is encoding a few movies in MP4 "high quality" H.264. From what I could tell via a terminal services session over the Internet through a Himachi VPN connection it seems high quality. Oh and I'm ripping it straight from an 8 Gig VOB file too. So it should be the highest quality possible as far as H.264 files go anyway.

I'm using a freeware application called Format Factory which is just incredible. I just has so many formats to convert to. It's like "all-to-MP4", "all-to-WMV", "all-to-3gp", "all-to-MKV", so on and so forth. Maybe I should convert to MKV instead. I think that's just for really hi-def stuff taken from a blu-ray or raw satellite feed or something. Anyway format factory allows for converting directly from a VOB file to H.264 so I consider it pretty awesome.

Of course I there's always the possibility that the O!Play will simply play the VOB files directly. But if I can get the same quality at 1/8th the HDD space why should I do that? Right?

So those are the three things I bought although I don't think I can afford any of them. I am still looking into various online jobs so I'm hoping to make it up sometime soon.

Also, since my car is still missing a rather small yet important side window I think I'm going to have to play find-the-window at the local pick-in-pull in preparation for the coming rainy season. Apparently yes, it does occasionally rain where I am. Although most of September and all of October up to now has been incredibly mild: completely sunny and never really topping 80 degrees. I've not only been walking every day but walking between 11am and 1:30pm every day. Long walks too although I hardly notice since I'm not sweating profusely from the heat.

I often listen to a podcast called security now who did a special episode on Vitamin D and how important it is. I like the episode but haven't gone so far as to go into a store and try to find vitamin D supplement pills. Hopefully all this sun exposure will get me some of much needed vitamin D supplies into my body. Although this weather will end eventually and then I'll really be without my source of D. So I guess I will go and find some kind of pill form of D.

The only other thing I want to write about is my installation of MS office I have right now. Or perhaps my lack thereof. I an bring up word and leave it open for a while but eventually it crashes of its own accord. At least i think that's what's happening. I actually paste content in then try to copy-and-paste the same content back out to some other destination. It is at the point word will crash. I already did a "repair install" and a "re-install office". My next step will be:

• completely uninstall office
• delete any files in c:\program files that reference office
• go into my profile folder and delete any Microsoft or other references to office
• Also, I'm going to run CCleaner to clear up any thing else that may be left
• Then if I haven't already, I'll reboot the computer and see if that fixed it

Of course it could be a recent MS update to office that's causing the issue. It which case I will have the same reason after installing all the stupid patches.

Aren't computers fun? (Yes, the answer is yes)