Month: August 2003

I get tons of ideas. Mostly for software, web services, and the like. It’s kind of like I’m always thinking about how things can be improved, or what I want my computers to do and how to make it happen. The vast majority of these things never get done, because I forget them or I just don’t have the time to see them through. But I’m working on one such nugget that will be really cool by the time I’m done (which will be soon). Here’s how it works.

For a long time now, I’d wish that I had an inventory of my DVDs. I had actually started to enter all this data onto my Newton, but somewhere in the G’s I got really tired of it. Plus the program I was using, CardMEDIA, wasn’t really what I wanted. I know that all of the information about these movies is already out there: IMDB has it all, and you can even download most of their data for your own personal (not online!) use. Every DVD has a barcode, of course, but IMDB doesn’t list them (also you can’t download their DVD technical data, which sucks). Enterprising guy that I am, I managed to obtain from a poorly-designed website the list of 30,000 North American DVD releases: with barcodes, titles, studio, length, and rating. By cross-referencing the title with the IMDB data, I added director and plot summaries to my list, and I could add anything else that I wanted from IMDB. At this moment, I’m pretty damn happy with this.

The next step is to get this data on my Newton, so I can carry it around with me and build the list of things that I have. Once I load the data into a Newton database program (I’m using FilePad), I can use my InPath barcode scanner to scan my DVD barcodes and check off that I have the titles. Later, when I’m at the store looking at a $13.99 DVD deal, I can just filter out the titles that I have to make sure I won’t be buying something I already have. Etc, etc.

This is Felix, our latest addition. I totally can’t remember if I’ve posted a photo of him before, so here it is. Felix is a bit of a special cat. He is a polydactyl cat, meaning that he has extra toes on his feed. In his case, he has two extra toes on his left front paw and one extra on all other feet. This inevitably leads to nicknames like “bigfoot” and “alottatoes”. He also has a tendency to hit first and ask questions later: when he encounters something new, he’ll sooner hit it than sniff it. This even goes for things which he may want to eat, which means he’s on the table every day at dinnertime trying to whack some beets off your plate.

as you likely already know, we power-hungry North-Easters sent ourselves spiraling into a blackout on Thursday. I was at work when it happened. At first we thought we had just tripped a local breaker, but then the UPSes in the nearby machine room began their bleeping chorus. It took about an hour an a half to get home by car, since the subway wasn’t running (streetcars outside on King St. were dead in their tracks). Hilarity then ensued as the power stayed out for at least 24 hours at our apartment and our water and phone were down for periods of time.

We had a weekend getaway planned for Darien Lake. After finally getting through to them and finding out that they were open, we decided to go to Niagara Falls (where there was power) and spend the night, then cross over to New York on Saturday morning. All in all things went pretty smoothly. When we came back all of our fish were still alive, despite the fact that their filters were off for over a day.