Hundred Dollar Things
Chain Mail Tee Shirt
Fireworks CS3
Maple

The Problem With Videora
Situation: I’ve come into possession of the entire works of Monty Python & Co. This pleases me, and will suffice until I can afford the huge boxed set.

The Zune desktop software won’t natively handle avi files (which is silly), so I’m using the Videora iPod Converter. This used to be a great freeware video recoder, but has suffered somewhat for the addition of talking advertisements offering two free iPhones.

Additionally, it would appear that not a lot of intensive testing has gone into the application. I discovered this after converting a season’s worth of Flying Circus episodes, prepending each episode name with “MP: “. This was a mistake. The NTFS filesystem’s name scheme doesn’t allow colons anywhere. Videora, apparently, doesn’t know that.

Nor does iTunes. Videora by default adds all converted videos to the iTunes library.

The upshot of all this is that I have two gigs of Monty Python that I can see in iTunes, but not anywhere else. iTunes reports the full filename and path, but it’s not visible in Windows Explorer or even at the command prompt level (dir etc). Explorer reports the size of the containing folder without taking into account these missing files. I can’t even see them when I use a Linux bootdisk. Which makes sense, I suppose.

There is one anomalous file, however, that appeared after the conversion batch. It’s called “MP”, no extension, and has a size of exactly 0 bytes. I’m deleting it.

And suddenly iTunes can’t find the videos. Looking at the hard drive properties, deleting the file does nothing to the available disk space, but suddenly iTunes can’t find 2gigs of video.

What on earth.

unrelated
Scrabble is addictive. So is Facebook. Ergo, Scrabulous. Like how time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so (10 points to whoever gets that reference).

Between that, and getting up for a seven ay em shift at the coffee shop (apparently no one told me that said shift was unnecessary as of Wednesday), I’m on a good… four hours? of sleep. But it was all worth it. EXULTeD – 96 points. Pwned.

addendum
My worthy opponent won the next game. … Psh.