Last weekend I traded in my Blackberry 8830 for a Blackberry 8310. It’s even better with better GPS and a camera. I also switched to AT&T. I spent over an hour standing in the Verizon store to return my old one, then another hour in a Cingular store to buy the new one. And it was $75 cheaper! It was pretty amazing how many account names, numbers and passwords I heard thrown around just by hanging out near the counter for 2 hours. The lady at the Verizon Wireless store yelled my number and password into the phone in front of two different sets of customers. So if anyone needs account names and passwords from any wireless carrier, just hang out around the counter on a busy day.

Been selling tons of DVDs. More than $300 on them so far. And today I finished transferring them all to my hard drives. It’s nice being rid of them all. Netflix is working out really well too.

Emily had a friend spend the night last night. Today we went Geocaching. Ended up going on a long walk that took us to a cemetery that we just happened to be looking for earlier. So we found another geocache there. Supper at Wendy’s yesterday. It’s been a pretty full weekend so far. Oh yeah, had teacher meetings yesterday and the kids haven’t had school for 2 days. I’m hoping to find some good haunted houses or maybe a maze to go to this weekend.

Last week I bought a new cell phone. It’s a Blackberry 8830 and it rocks. It’s got the best web browsing capabilities of any cell phone I’ve ever owned, it tethers internet to my laptop and it easily syncs all of my Outlook data to it. Plus it does really cool things with Google Maps and GPS. There’s even a geocaching program I can buy for it. My only complaint is that it doesn’t have a camera. I was able to sell my old LG phone for more than half of the cost of this phone. And since this phone is a replacement for my Pocket PC, I’m selling that too. In the end, I’ll be making almost $100 from buying this new phone.

Listened to a couple episodes of a podcast tonight called Public Nuisance Radio which isn’t the best show ever, but it introduced me to a new song I like. It’s by a band called The Vandals and the song is called My Girlfriend’s Dead. It’s in their playlist so go listen to it. It seems like all my favorite podcasts have really slowed down or quit lately. I need to find some new ones to listen to. At least the first one I tried gave me some new music, even if I’m not crazy about the show.

Yesterday the kids and I bought a couple pumpkins and they carved them. The one on the left is Emily’s and the one on the right is Payton’s. I was surprised to hear that they’d never done this before. I don’t know why I never got them pumpkins before, I guess I just never thought of it. I think it’s been more than 10 years since I carved one. In fact, I think the last time was when Sylvia and I stole a giant one from a pumpkin stand, not realizing that carrying it 2 miles to my parents house on foot would be really hard. Part of the time we made a sling out of our jackets and carried it between us.

My cat climbs on everything. He climbed up the side of one of my shirts to get to the top of my closet in that picture. It’s annoying. I’m really torn on the issue of declawing him. But I’m starting to think it’ll have to be done soon. I thought that I wouldn’t care before since I don’t ever intend to own any nice furniture that he would scratch up. But I can’t have him destroying my shirts.

I throw him out of my office 3 or 4 times a day and shut the door to keep him out. He loves to go behind my desk and chew on wires. He’s also chewed on the plants a little and once spilled a little dirt on my laptop. It’d sure suck to have the whole plant come crashing down on the laptop keyboard. So I have to lock him out of my room when I leave. This evening he was playing behind the desk and stepped on the main power supply to everything, shutting off my desktop. Not that I was using it, but I wanted to kill him. Tonight I put my large collection of Priority Mail boxes to good use and fenced him out of the area with the wires:

The boxes were the perfect height, and I was able to use the sticky strip on the top of them to stick them to the desk so they don’t fall over. We’ll see how long this lasts. Right now he’s laying on my lap, purring. Normally I would have thrown him out of the room by now so this is looking good.

I guess his name is Charcoal since that’s what the kids are insisting on.

Right now I’m listening to Episode 7 of Haxor Radio. It’s probably one of the most informative shows I’ve ever heard, covering radio shack policies and a bunch of cell phone stuff that’s interesting to me. Plus they hax0r MY Radio Shack account info. Go listen to their shows.

Around 2000 or 2001, I decided that owning CDs was pointless and sold them all on Ebay. I no longer own any audio CDs and have kept my collection in digital form ever since then. I’ve moved from an mp3 CD player in my car, to an mp3 discman, a few miscellaneous handheld mp3 players and finally to my 30 gig Ipod. I think it was a pretty good call since audio CDs are pretty much dead for a lot of people. And I think DVDs are going the same way. To be replaced by Blu-ray or HD DVD? Nah, screw those formats too. DVDs in all forms are on the way out. They’ll all disappear much quicker than VHS did. That’s my prediction and I’m sticking to it.

With the cable companies offering more and more on demand every day, actually owning your movies is becoming pointless. Why spend $15.00 to own one when you can see it on demand? Getting an account on Netflix for $5.00/month makes owning DVDs stupid. Even McDonald’s is renting DVDs for $1.00/night now. Competition like this will force Blockbuster to keep lowering their rental prices. The networks are starting to let people watch/download their primetime TV shows online for free. Doesn’t Netflix even let you watch your rentals online now? Not to mention the ease in which anyone can download any of this stuff for free on bittorrent.

But the one thing that really sold me on ridding myself of DVDs is my Xbox 360. It lets me mp4ize my entire video collection and watch it all from the TV. I hooked a 500 gig external hard drive to it, which fits everything I own onto it. A few clicks of the remote plays any of it. And it’s easy enough for the kids to use too. I love that thing. And since Ipods also play the mpeg-4 format, I can easily transfer any of it to my Ipod for vacations. Apple TV does the same thing if you want to be more legit about buying online movies to watch on TV, even though the files are locked down and it’s a little pricey now. But the prices will come down and the DRM will disappear and/or become reasonable eventually.

Anyway, now that I’ve slammed the DVD format for 3 paragraphs, I expect everyone to visit my Amazon store page to buy the DVDs I’m selling. Here’s the link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/shops/index.html/104-8363450-8480721?ie=UTF8&sellerID=A3EFPXZUK73XP2

There’s only 45 up right now, but by the time I finish entering the rest of them there should be over 100 of them. There’s some good stuff up there, if you’re into those old, antiquated DVD things.

Speaking of that, Amazon has a really nice system for selling things. There are no up front costs like Ebay has. And the total time to list each item is just a minute or two.

NEXT MORNING EDIT: Woo, Finding Nemo sold! That’s like $2.00 I made! I need to go buy a bunch of DVD shipping envelopes today. I put my two school books up from last year too. The one I paid about $90 for last year is going to sell for $30 and the one I paid about $40 for I’ll be lucky if I get $5.00 for it. I only kept the books because I hoped they might be used again this year for a similar class. But no. I tried to sell the $90 book back to the book store the other day and they offered me $15. I told them I’d just sell it on Amazon. I thought I’d get a little more than $30 for it though. Never buy books from the student book store again.

My desktop computer rips DVDs in about 2 hours and my laptop rips them in usually under an hour. It’ll probably take a few weeks, but I plan to rip them all. I need more computers.

Last year some random horrible podcast I was listening to played a song called Sari by Nellie McKay. Since then I’ve been hooked on her music. I kept listening to that horrible podcast for months, hoping they’d introduce me to some other great artist, but they never did. Last night Molly and I went to see her live in Portland. It’s probably the best small concert I’ve ever been to. It was a pretty small place (The Aladdin theater) and we were fairly close to the stage. Nellie’s hilarious and threw all kinds of bizarre commentary and jokes in between her songs. She seemed high the whole time.

Nellie McKay on YouTube

The official Nellie McKay site

A Nellie McKay fan site

Emily and I were in line at Albertsons today and I saw a paperback of Stephen King’s old book called The Mist. On the front it read “now a major motion picture.” It’s the first I’ve heard of it and it comes out next month! It’s one of my all-time favorite Stephen King stories.

Here’s the trailer for it.

Here’s the imdb page for it.

It’s written/produced/directed by Frank Darabont, the same guy who wrote/produced/directed The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. Those two are my favorite Stephen King movie adaptations. The trailer looks awesome and I can’t wait to see this.