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DVD and muscle relaxers
Saturday, February 5 2011
Gretchen was so incapacitated today by her leg muscle pain that I had to take care of some errands she'd intended to do. One of these was to send a DVD through the mail to an animal rights organization using the most rapid delivery service available. This was that documentary we'd watched the other day about ordinary people experimenting with going vegan for a few months. Evidently it hasn't been released yet, and there is a possible ownership clusterfuck regarding some of the clips used in it. For some reason, the filmmaker herself didn't have a ready copy to send to the people who need to determine such things, and the easiest copy she could get her hands on was Gretchen's. As I was preparing to take it to the post office, I noted that a couple inches of snow had fallen last night and Dug Hill Road had yet to be plowed. Wait a minute, I thought, this thing that needed to be physically shipped, it was just a movie: information! Why not use the internet? So after phone call or two (interspersed with Gretchen trying to get one of the doctors in her family to write her a quickie pain killer prescription), it was agreed that I should try to send the movie over the internet.
But now I had to take the DVD and turn it into a file. And so the journey down the rabbit hole began. I didn't have any particular application for turning DVDs into media files, so I looked around online and tried several. One sort of worked, though audio slowed down to giant-talk about three quarters of the way through. Another was "freeware" that only did 30% of the necessary work before demanding payment. The application that worked was something called WinX Free DVD to AVI Ripper. It's pretty slick and totally free (and no, not the kind of free that requires a visit to thePirateBay.org). But once I had my 900 Megabyte AVI file, I realized that it was going to require eight hours for me to upload it over my crappy DSL line (whose upload bandwith is only about 320 kb/s). Clearly I couldn't send it as an email attachment; I'd have to host it on a web server. But even just getting it to a web server proved difficult; if the internet goes down during the eight hour upload, there's a good chance that the FTP process will begin again from the beginning, throwing away all those hours of previous uploading. FTP is an old technology; it's not like Bittorrent or even the original Napster, which handle/d network outages much more gracefully. [In the end I had to segment the AVI file into a RAR archive of ten parts and then reassemble it into a single piece on the server by issuing command line commands in a Putty window. But that wouldn't be for another day a half.]
We thought it best to ship the DVD in addition to placing the AVI rip on a server. By this point Gretchen had managed to get a prescription for a muscle relaxer, so I'd piled up a few errands to do while in town. Also, the snowplows had come through and Dug Hill Road seemed passable.
But then it turned out that the Hurley post office closes at 11:30. On Gretchen's advice (via cellphone), I hurried to Uptown Kingston, where the post office was still open. Once I had the DVD in the mail, I could relax. None of my other destinations would be closing soon. I did a little grocery shopping (getting fresh mushrooms, canned mushrooms, large-bottle IPAs, lettuce, cooking wine, canned artichoke hearts, and fresh bagels) and also bought some small lag bolts from Herzog's (so I can install a small vise in the laboratory). Pseudoephedrine has been hard to get at Hannaford, so I thought I'd get it at Neko's Pharmacy when picking up Gretchen's prescription. That proved to be a mistake. They didn't have anything but name-brand Sudafed, and it cost about 300% more than it should have.
On the way home, I walked the dogs in the cornfield across Wynkoop from the Hurley Mountain Inn. The snow was so deep that the dogs and I had to keep to the main track, where a vehicle had trampled down the snow. Otherwise, the field was an impassable desert of two-foot snow covered with a crust of insufficient strength to support a 40 pound dog.
On the drive home, Sally helped herself to one of the four fresh bagels I'd bought. As she's gotten older, she's become as food-obsessed as any Labrador Retriever. She didn't used to be that way.
What had started out as snow gradually changed to rain as temperatures rose a little above freezing. Water trickled down past the icicles hanging from the roof. I've been monitoring the place in our house where water leaks when our roof is suffering from ice dams, and though this year has looked to be a bad one for ice dams, I hadn't seen any so far. But today a leak appeared at the top of one of the windows in the living room (directly beneath the bottom of the soutwest roof valley). I put a container in the window to catch the water; there wasn't much else I could do. Ice dams are a fundamental defect of the house's system of roof valleys and the only saving grace is that the steepness of the roof keeps such leaks to mere drips on the rare occasions when they occur.
Lacking other options, I spent most of the day working at my computer. Today I added another feature to my DHTML database mapper that allowed edits to existing tables to show up immediately in the map. In the past, I had to refresh to show those changes. But the mapper tool is too much like a real application for such clunkiness.
This evening Gretchen and I tried watching Dinner for Schmucks. But it wasn't very funny, there were a lot of inter-character misunderstandings (Gretchen hates that), and the humor was mostly of the cringe-inducing variety, so Gretchen gave up on it and decided to watch something else. But I wasn't so easily defeated. I went into the laboratory and watched the rest of the movie on my computer. It's amazing that such an all-star cast of comic talent managed to produce such a dud. I understand that humor is a product of its time, and it's rare, for example, for people in their 70s who found Bob Hope hilarious to understand The Onion or even Jon Stewart. And for a moment I found myself wondering if perhaps humor had moved on, leaving me and my increasingly-decrepit generation in the dust. But a few lines of dialog later I was sure I knew what the problem was: aside from an occasional funny line, Dinner for Schmucks is a very poorly-written movie. They should have hired one hilarious-but-unknown comic (a population that includes a large fraction of the people with whom I regularly socialize) and, with the money they saved from not hiring Steve Carrell, come up something more pungently funny.
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