06 February 2007:
Okay, so the new Star Trek Remastered torrent is finally out! I realize that I skipped the episode "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" but the lapse is only temporary. However, "Journey to Babel" is out and I'm giving first dibs on this website - I haven't published the torrent on any other website yet so if you act fast you should be able to get some decent downloading speeds. I'll make sure to leave enough bandwidth so that you can upload the file from me rather quickly.I'll publish "For the World is Hollow..." as soon as I get the chance, my encoding projects are severely backed up at the moment. Thanks to the inability for DVD+R DLs to play on certain DVD players, I have some House M.D. episodes to encode on to DVD+Rs. Also the unexpected airing of the final four Digimon features and a rather stubborn Kung Pow DVD last week did not help matters. But once I have the DVD+Rs in things should start to move more swimmingly.I've also begun the long and tedious challenge of transfering my VHS recordings to DivX. My Saturday Night Live recordings I'm encdoing straight from the cassette tapes myself, but most of my movie VHS tapes (bootleg & commercial) I'm downloading off of BitTorrent for obvious quality reasons.Since I've got some time before work starts up, I've been doing a lot of studying Arabic, exercising and reading. I just got the final installment of the Dune prequal trilogy: "The Battle of Corrin" in the mail today. These books weren't nearly as good as Frank Herbert's orginal novels but I am interested in finding out how the jihad ends. What I find most interesting about these books is that they explain how a lot of the technology, society and civilizations in the original Dune novels came to be. To a lesser extent, I've also begun making MP3-CD versions of my MiniDisc mix albums (SMASH). Since a lot of the music from the earliest albums were recorded on cassette tapes I've had to find them online and download them, which is a difficult thing to do for older music. Some of the existing music that I still have in MP3 format I've been trying to replace with files that are encoded in higher bitrates - better quality sound.The Arabic is coming along very well too. I've already halfway through the second unit of the first level. I'd like to be able to take a class to learn how to speak it and not just recognize it but I'm not sure how many schools around here offer a course. I've also begun looking for a decent book on the Geneva Conventions that I could read in addition to my fiction.Busy, busy, busy... just the way I like it!
