Domestic Geek

As promised, I'm beginning my countdown to the delivery of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to my doorstep on Saturday, July 21st (well, to my community mailbox anyway).

I'm dying to see if any of my predictions about the final book are valid. After the last fiasco of waiting for UPS when it was really coming USPS, I'm ready this year. Hopefully the mail will come early and I can read all day that Saturday. I really wish we had cooler release party events around here. I've been reading about some of the more spectacular ones and it makes the ones here locally seem really lame. Oh, well.

I guess I'm not going to get my Hogwart's scarf done since I've yet to learn to knit, huh? Whoops! Well, maybe by the time the movie comes out for book 7? Yeah, that's the ticket!

Remember how I was so excited last week that USA had the season premieres of The 4400 and The Dead Zone on their site last Monday? Well, apparently that was a one shot deal. Jerks. I can get The Dead Zone through iTunes, but not The 4400. Damn it! So not cool.

You know how I said the only thing I was going to miss when we dropped our satellite package down to the bare minimum was Mythbusters and the stuff on The USA Network? Well, I guess it's only going to be Mythbusters now.

Yesterday was the season premieres for both The 4400 and The Dead Zone. I did one quick check of their site hoping for episodes to watch before I sank to bit torrenting them or something and THERE THEY WERE! Woo Hoo!!!! You have no idea how happy that made me!

I hope they keep showing them.

So Marcus and I spent a good part of this weekend ripping some of our DVD collection to our iTunes Server (with a handy little program called Handbrake so we can view them on our AppleTV. What sucks about the iTunes information palette is it is geared towards songs/music. What to do if you want to add metadata to the movie files so that you can see the rating, synopsis, director, actors, etc? You go download a cool little app called MetaX that I found through the Handbrake forums. It can grab the data from Amazon for you and then embed it into the movie file or you can enter in all that info yourself, if you're so inclined. It's pretty darned cool!

So, I found another used book store today that I had never been to before and found a couple of more Stephen King novels. It's called Half Price Books and sits just a little bit East of Broadway on Girard. They had a lot of books there. It's really close to work, so I'll have to go back when I have more time and money to spend. One was called Black House and I was totally shocked to actually find it. It's co-authored by Peter Straub, the author with whom King teamed to write The Talisman. I also found The Dark Half.