Canto LXV

Warning - lots of side-thoughts (and therefore parentheses).

After another less-than-exciting Christmas this year, Steph and I decided to splurge a little and upgrade our viewing world. (Personally, all Christmases are less-than-exciting after about age 6, 7 or 8. I mean, I just can't be that excited about the gifts I receive now. I'm grateful and enjoy them an such, but I'm no longer freaking out because I got a new bike or something. The really zealous passion is gone. Maybe if I had gotten a Wii.) We had an older DVD player from a few years ago (a 5-disc carousel - how is that useful for DVDs?!?), and it had a rather annoying habit of freezing or skipping. Usually all you had to do was open and close it and it would be fine, but it was really, really annoying. So I managed to talk Steph into spending a whole $50 for a new DVD player. I figure in a couple of years we'll be in the market for a sweet HD TV and Blu Ray player once Steph's become my sugar momma. (By the way, she's on her way - she interviewed for a job in the library next door to where she works, it went well, and we'll know more in a week or two. Fancier title and more $$$! That can only be a good thing for me!) But to go with our nice, new player, we also did the Netflix thing. I must admit, it's rather nice! We're only doing the 1 DVD at-a-time, unlimited in a month. But this is about as much as we can watch, since we just watch one on the weekend, mail it in, and the next one is here in time for the next weekend. I've been trying to use this as an opportunity to see many movies that I always meant to see, but never got around to. Thus far my contributions are Midnight Cowboy, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and High Noon. Steph has supplied Star Trek II, Star Trek IV, Spider and Mulholland Drive. I'll let you make your own judgments about that. But it's been fun and provoked some interesting discussion about the movies afterwards.

We've also been watching the HBO mini-series Rome, thanks to my officemate's special lady friend. It's really good! I may get annoyed about some of the inter-personal stuff and it's role in the larger historical events, but I can still say it's been a lot of fun to watch. It's like Star Wars, in that it's following 2 minor characters (Titus Pullo and Lucius Varenus vs. R2-D2 and C-3PO) that are center stage to the defining people and events of the age. Done with the first season, we'll get around to the second season soon.

In some technical news, I put together all the pieces for our computer, have a Windows XP boot disc (CD), but it's not working yet. I'm very unhappy about this. Our glorious new machine should be done by now! The problem seems to be the hard drive. I know we need to partition and format it before we can install stuff on it, but for some reason it never gives me the option to do so. I think I know what the problem is, but we don't have a 3.5" floppy drive to install the RAID drivers. So now we need to get a USB floppy drive or something like that. Sigh. It's almost done.