Saturday:

First there was Enemy Territory. If you like a strong element of tactical thinking in your 3D shooter gaming, you owe it to yourself to bribe someone with broadband to download this wonderful free “expansion” for Return To Castle Wolfenstein. See, it’s not so much an add-on as it is a wholly stand-alone free product that happens to be based on the RTCW game. How cool is that? Oddly enough I like the game and I’m not into the uber-realistic thing.

Then… I started tinkering with myHTPC. Hoo boy. You see, there’s a computer in the living room built for the sole purpose of playing video and audio computer files on the entertainment center. The interface has always been a bit on the cumbersome side. Now, however, I have a delightfully easy menu-driven system that will run picture slideshows, play up as much queued music as I want, or show videos… all controlled by my ATI Remote Wonder.

The basic install of myHTPC will do all of that and download a weather report into the bargain, but of course I couldn’t just leave that alone. I needed a custom background. (Easy.) I wanted to use my preferred media players (Winamp for music, BSPlayer for videos) instead of the default (Windows Media Player 9, ugh).

But wait, there’s more! Reading the myHTPC forums taught me that I could, in theory, add a song display progress indicator to the mix. The trick is to utilize something called Serious Samurize, a tool I’d never even heard of previously. Wow. If you’re at all into nifty desktop widgets for Windows, you must give it a whirl. It’s intensely geeky, so of course I dig it lots. Heh.

After some tinkering, cursing, downloading of scripting tools and various other widgets, I have a system that will allow me to launch and kill the Samurize process (no point having the song now-play data showing while videos are playing) and just generally do almost all of the neat things I want that multimedia box to do.

It only took me, oh, almost all day Saturday. And the next (tedious) step will be a systematic renaming of all the music files on that computer… oh, hold me back!

Sunday:

Went to work and hammered on the backup system a while. After a couple of hours of tinkering I realized that the Snap server (remember that damned thing?) has a very annoying habit: It sets its own timestamp on files pretty much at random, and no matter how many times you try to copy over files and give them the correct timestamp each of those files will henceforth be re-set with the timestamp of the last attempted copy.

Argh! So this is why Rsync was taking longer and longer every night! This is why the entire backup run was taking nearly 24 hours to complete every day!

It then took me a couple of trial runs to determine that the Rsync option best suited for the task of synchronizing directories on the Snap server is the ‘–size-only’ directive. (The ‘–ignore-times’ directive did not work at all as advertised.) As I write this, a fresh automated backup run should be underway, and may in fact be nearly completed. The graphs will tell…

Monday:

After a relatively peaceful day of work, I was absconded with by Mari and Doug for a night of Yule partying at Lilith and Geoffrey’s house. Huzzah! Many wonderful friends were in attendance, good ham was consumed, nifty presents were exchanged, and much joyousness ensued. All in all, it was one of the better gatherings of The Usual Suspects And Then Some.

(Next year, hopefully, I’ll be able to buy more than just a couple of meager gifts. My friends deserve a bit better. Le sigh.)

I have Tuesday off since I’m still burning vacation days like crazy before I lose ’em at year’s end. Look for me to be kicking back between bouts of housework and holiday decoration and kid wrangling…

Here’s the capsule review of the Two Towers “extended” showing today:

Only two restored scenes were particularly useful. The most important is the Boromir/Faramir Flashback. Say what you will about its overall usefulness to the plot, it was very interesting backstory in its own right. The other scene is the Eowyn’s Stew bit, mostly useful for showing us what a good cook Eowyn is. No no, that’s not right. It’s useful because we find out Aragorn’s age (which isn’t interesting in and of itself, but learning his age tells us something about his lineage).

Another restored sequence is a bit of characterization goofiness from Merry and Pippin, where they find Saruman’s stash of pipeweed. Oddly enough I was delighted to see that sequence, since it’s one of the few bits from the books that remains vivid in my mind years after the reading. Your enjoyment mileage may vary, of course. Of questionable value is another “let’s give Merry and Pippin more screen time” sequence involving some magic water…

As with Fellowship, most of the restored footage took the form of “making existing scenes just a bit longer.” Well, I can’t forget the additional Gimli, Comic Relief Dwarf moments. Le sigh. I was sort of hoping that the trend begun with the Fellowship extended release would continue, but apparently the movies’ creators don’t share my despair at using the dwarf almost exclusively for very cheap laughs. Ah well.

Is Two Towers better in its extended form? Absolutely. Nothing is changed about the overall tone or pacing, and while some of the originally-excised scenes weren’t necessary for the sake of audience comprehension (we don’t need to see Theodred’s funeral: we know he’s dead) they don’t detract from the film either. No, not even the Comic Relief Dwarf moments. (I admit to laughing at the last one of those.)

Mind you, most of the people who might find this review useful have probably already purchased the appropriate DVD release. Ah well…