Great quote from The Philadelphia Story
I was watching a TCM showing of The Philadelphia Story, and loved this great line from Cary Grant, talking about the sleazy tabloid publisher Sidney Kidd's sense of entitlement:
The world's his oyster, with an R in every month...
In Robert Osborne's intro, he mentioned that Grant never won a competitive Oscar, which seems scandalous.
Apheresis – January 20th
I watched The Town during my donation this morning, which had been delayed while I finished the antibiotics prescribed for my pneumonia.
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Hop
Carole and I went with Mandy to see the new movie Hop at the Mall. It's from the same people who did Despicable Me, so my hopes were high, and it was fun, but it really could have been a lot better.
Kaley Cuoco's eyebrows looked weird, but Carole complimented me on focusing on her eyebrows instead of her other noticeable attributes. And who knew that that's where jelly beans come from?
My rating: 
The Lincoln Lawyer
Carole and I went with Mandy to see The Lincoln Lawyer with Matthew McConaughey. It wasn't bad, but afterward we all felt that they had cut too much of the book's story - even though none of us had read the book. They butchered Marissa Tomei in the cutting room, it seems.
It was cool seeing the local sites - Lincoln Heights, Mt. Washington, El Sereno. We went to Cheesecake Factory for a quick bite afterward.
My rating: 
Date night
I didn't decide on Ruth's Chris for Valentine's Day until the middle of January, and by then I only had two choices of reservation times: 4:45, and 9:15. We chose 4:45. Our server Thomas was pretty good, but we stumped him when we asked about the large steak fries. He said he'd been with the company for over three years, and in Pasadena for about a year, and had never heard of them; we were certain that we'd had them in Pasadena at our last visit just over a year ago. We were happy to leave it at that, but he did some checking on his own and found out that Pasadena (only) had served steak fries up until a year ago, but they were no longer on the menu by the time he transferred. The meal was good, as always.
Afterward we walked down to the Laemmle to see The King's Speech. About five minutes before the movie started, an older couple came down our row, past four open seats, then past our seats, and sat down right next to Carole. We moved down one seat, but it was still a little weird. Who does that?
The movie was very good. No one does a British movie quite like the British, right? I'd heard the raves for Firth and Rush, but found Helena Bonham Carter was just about perfect.
Love and Other Drugs
Anne Hathaway never let her character become a caricature. I liked it, but at the end of the movie I seriously discussed ways to stop people from using their phones during the movie. My idea is to use a laser pointer to target the face of the phone, to at least let people know that everyone else sees their damn phone. Mandy gave it a thumbs up.
The Switch
Carole and Mandy went hiking at Monrovia Canyon this morning, and afterward I met them at the mall for The Switch. Pretty fun.
Sounds of the Universe
I'm really looking forward to the new Depeche Mode album, Sounds of the Universe, which releases on April 20th. The early single Wrong is classic but modern, and the video is perfectly dark.
My favorite line from LA Confidential
I watched LA Confidential last night and this morning, and it's full of really good lines. Here's my favorite.
Straight-laced Lt. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) and hard-nosed, volatile Bud White (Russell Crowe) follow leads about their case to District Attorney Ellis Loew himself. They meet him in his office, and he rebuffs their attempts to get information about his connections to their crooked captain. After some give-and-take, he tells them to leave, and goes into an adjoining bathroom. Bud White follows him in, and looks menacing, until the DA tells them: "Come on, don't try this 'good cop-bad cop' crap on me. I practically invented it..."
Bud White slams his head against the mirror a couple of times, then pushes his head into the toilet for repeated dunkings and flushings. When the information still isn't forthcoming, Bud drags him back into the main office, slams him through some protective wooden railings and holds him by his legs out the seventh floor window. As he dangles there, screaming in fear, the DA finally gives up the information. Bud drags him back in and dumps him on the floor of his office, where he lays there quivering in distress.
Ed Exley delivers the line with understated calm: "Was that how you used to run the good cop-bad cop?"
Moving your iTunes library to another drive/folder
For a while, I've stored my music in to PGPdisk folders, each mounted into an NTFS sub-directory. Originally, primary music files went in one folder, and secondary files went in the other folder. Like many good intentions, this setup didn't last long once I ran out of space in my primary folder, and started using the secondary folder for overflow.
This worked well enough, but I wanted to change it, for a couple of reasons. First, I'm trying to get away from PGPdisk and move all my encrypted file systems to TrueCrypt, for long-term flexibility and cost savings. Secondly, I wanted a single, large area for all my music, so I didn't have to remember (or search for) where a particular artist might be located.
Monday, I did some research, and found this site: HOWTO: Move your iTunes music while preserving library data. The description seemed very straightforward, so I went to work.
First, I created a single, 105gb TrueCrypt volume. At some point I want to move this volume to an external disk drive, and wanted it to fit even if I went with a 120gb drive. I only have 70gb of music now, so it also gave me a big chunk of space to grow into. TrueCrypt is good - very good - but it takes a while to create, encrypt, and format a 105gb volume, especially one stored on a network drive. I started on Monday afternoon, and it took about 16 hours to finish.
On Tuesday, I copied the files from my current PGPdisk folders onto the new TrueCrypt volume. This took about three hours total. Later that afternoon, I created a backup of my iTunes folder per the instructions.
This morning, I copied the XML and ITL files to my Linux box. I substituted the new file location in the XML file, and zeroed out the ITL files, also per the instructions. I copied the updated files back to my Windows system, and started up iTunes.
iTunes started, but didn't display anything. I watched for a while on the Task Manager and saw it was working on something, but no status bar was displayed (contrary to the instructions). After fifteen minutes or so, I got a dialog box saying my ITL file was corrupted, had been saved, and was then rebuilt. I spent a few minutes poking around in iTunes to make sure it was reading from the new location.
Everything looks good so far. I had no real podcast subscriptions, so losing them is not a big deal. All my custom play lists are intact, and everything appears in order. Fry's has a 250gb external drive for $99 - I'll probably head out there on Thursday to check it out.
Tivo upgrade
The Tivo in the family room came with 75 hours of recording time, which seemed like a lot at the time. Over the years everyone put in the shows they wanted to record, and with some proper maintenance we made everything fit.
With the new season upon us, we had hit the limits. First, we started recording Rachael Ray every day, so we can burn it to DVD and send it to Cindy. Between the four of us, we also started recording a lot of the new shoes, to see if they're worth watching. We still record a few things for Jason to watch when he comes over, too - Bill Maher, Kings programming. Add it all up, and we were overextended.
The solution: a Tivo upgrade from Weakness.com. They sent a new 160gb — the largest that would go in without an OS upgrade — along with a new mounting bracket, new quiter fans, cabling, tools, the work. It took me about an hour to do the upgrade - I worked slowly to make sure the existing programming wasn't lost or damaged - and I'll admit to more than a little trepidation when I plugged it in after the upgrade. It came up without a hitch, and the System Information screen showed a new total capacity of 207 hours, give or take.
The first DVD writer from Newegg was DOA, and the replacement isn't expected until Friday at the earliest. With the new capacity, and the ability to burn off some of the older shows (along with weekly dumps of Cindy's Rachael Ray shows), we should be good to go for the foreseeable future.
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