Young Frankenstien

Not a bad film, this black and white comedy showcases some fantastic acting but some meh scenes. The original version was something like 4 hours long and you can still feel that it's not quite coheisive. Written as a homage to the original (with some of the same set hardware, like the lab!), it's more of a fun film with a side point that if people had been nicer maybe the original wouldn't have gone beserk.

I'd say a B+

YPF

So this is a film about people having sex. It's the greatest Canadian film ever, which I guess says something about the Canadian film industry. Not a bad film and something that a teenager could watch and learn from (the sex scenes where mostly realistic, people enjoying themselves but the inevitable awkwardness was real too). But no real plot or enlightenment so I'd say a B+ at most. Interesting but not something to really talk about later. I did like the bit about the Exes where he left his wine glass. Good stuff.

Dyson vacuum cleaners

Not a movie but good stuff none the less, I tried one of these a week ago for the first time and now I'm a true beliver. It's amazing to use a vacum cleaner that's made by an engineering company. It does not make your rug cleaner, it makes it clean. Good stuff.

Lois McMaster Bujold's "The Sharing Knife" series

Looks like there will be 4 books, although only the first 3 have been published so far, this series is both an excellent high fantasy story and one that presents some good examples of how to form healthy relationships, both stressing to never lie to your SO and the fact that if you can solve a problem generally you can dig down and solve what's causing the problem to be a problem. Very well done most of the time although I think at times you can tell the author gets bored and pays less attention to certain aspects of the book then she could.

Excellent series across the board, if you're looking for realistic high fantasy I really recommend it.

American History X

Good acting and an ok script, where at first the film does a good job of portraying a how people are lured into radical racisim it eventually devolves into sterotypes. Not a bad story but it's not hard to make Skinheads look bad. Reasonably interesting though, maybe a B

Crimes and Misdemenors

Ok, probably spelled that wrong. This is another "typical" Woody Allen movie where he pretty much just catalogs the lives of people he's known. The topic here is morality and if you don't get caught who cares what you did. I think it's a pretty bleak point of view but insteresting to watch. Not a bad film, interestingish story and interesting ideas. A-

Media Center Setup!

So I finally set up a Home Theatre PC. Probably will re-build it from scratch now that I know what I'm doing, but I don't have the redo the time consuming part (ripping movies from DVD and transcoding them to H.264 (MPEG4).

So...if you want the fun and joy I've had you'll want:

• A TV Tuner Card (Hauppauge is a common one)
• Vista Premium Home or Ultimate
• Lots of free time to insert DVDs
• A DVD ripper (I use DVDFab, lots of people prefer AnyDVD, DVDDecrypter is free but does not support new formats)
• Assorted cables etc to plug everything in - most video cards have an adapter that will let you do S-Video out. My Geforce 7800 GT does
• TV Pack 2008 (Note this might not be legal, I doubt MS cares but it's OEM only
• Latest CCCP Codec pack (yes, I know you're too cool for Codec Packs, so am I. Get it, alternatively the latests FFDshow tryouts will work)
• Handbrake or Ripbot (Ripbot is probably better since you can update your H.264 encoder with out waiting for a new version of Ripbot, but it takes frigging forever to open your VOB files
• Understanding of what things are (i.e. VOBs are simply mpeg2 encoded video and an AAC audio stream, you'll have to demux them (break them into video and audio seperately) then put them back together (the two utilities listed above do  this for you)
• A MCE compadible remote
• http://www.mediabrowser.tv/ (a godly plugin for VMC)
  
• Lots of hard drive space (even in h.264 format a single movie takes about 2 gig of space).

Some tweaks:

LIVE TV Quality Trouble:
1)
Change BitRate:
First of all check the key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\DVR] and find the KEY DefAvgBitRate
Change it to somewhere between: 20000000 and 90000000
Select DECIMAL VALUE when changing.

DISABLE YOUR DIGITAL AUDIO IF THAT"S NOT WHAT YOU ARE USING - it will cause stuttering.

Download this registry patch and apply it:

http://homepage.eircom.net/~rock2002/Blog/v7-WMP11-MKV-MKA.reg

Tada, you're done!