Stuff

Wow, not a single post for the entire weekend, even though I was actually on the computer a lot and did a lot of reading. Returning to work today was a lot easier than it usually is after a long weekend, except that my legs are a little sore, as they always are if I take off more than 2 days.

Is anyone else keeping up with Google's latest shenanigans? Although that may be too frivolous a word for it. I'm considering going as Google-free as possible, which would mean dumping this blog and starting again somewhere else. I've done it before, of course.

I've been trying to write another movie review, but I have discovered something: it is much easier to write a review about a movie you hate. The latest movie is so bland and mediocre there's not much I can say about it, except it has a couple of interesting and period-accurate guns.

I was following some links earlier and found this. That looks like a good collection of books. I have volume 2 of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I know I once had volume 1 as well, but I have somehow lost track of it. The ones I have were published several decades ago, I think, in the same format, except volume 1 has a yellow cover and volume 2 has a red cover. Just more books that I picked up long ago in a used book store on the theory that I would need to read them someday. I have a lot of books like that.

Another way I spent my time over the weekend was trying to learn how to burn DVDs. All I can say so far is that I'm doing something wrong, but I don't know what. My next step is to get some regular DVD-R's and see if they work. My machine doesn't seem to be able to burn DVD-RW's. It came with it's own DVD burning software when I bought it. I've burned CDs many times, including using CD-RW's. It also came with its own DVD viewing software (InterVideo WinDVD), which operates much more smoothly than WinMedia and is what I use to take all the screen caps. I have successfully ripped some DVDs using DVD Shrink (freeware). I just can't seem to figure out how to burn the rips.

The Lee Van Cleef "marathon" on Encore Westerns was something of a let-down. I was expecting a marathon, but they showed only three movies. I did get all three, however. Two of them had him as the star, the third was a much older one which had him as one of the lesser bad guys. Van Cleef seems to have sort of gone backwards in his looks, that is, he was much uglier when young. He seemed to grow into his face better as he got older.

Now if one of those channels would just re-run The Master. Just so I could remind myself how bad it was, if nothing else.