Stu, Jason, Jason’s brother Adam, and I are all going to Vegas next weekend for my bachelor party. Come 9:30p on Saturday the 30th, though, you know where I’ll be?

Front and center for the Cirque du Soleil show, KA!

Actually, literally front and center. Stu and I, middle of the first row. Of course, tickets are $150 a piece, so I can’t say it didn’t cost me, but I’ve yet to be disappointed by a Cirque show.

Oh, hell yeah. I’m altogether too stoked. Jenn is going to be soooo jealous.

I’ve been considering getting a PSP for a while now but just haven’t been pushed over the edge. My gadget interest has been generally low for a while with no cool tech really calling out to me lately, so the PSP has surfaced again as something I might be interested in.

I was at the store this morning picking up a copy of the Rush album The Spirit of Radio: Greatest Hits 1974 - 1987 (Neil Peart being arguably the best drummer ever) and the guy at the store mentioned they were coming out with a new PSP value pack of some sort that includes more stuff.

A little research brings us to the PSP Entertainment Pack, which is like the existing “Value Pack” but with a 1GB memory stick, a movie, and a game. A little better deal for the money, though, granted, the system’s not brand-spanking-new to the market, either.

It’s something to think about. I hate to be on the tail end of technology, but it’s becoming a better deal so it might be worth a shot.

For folks curious, Jenn and I are registered at Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Macy’s.

I’ve been looking at ways I can make my DVD collection more accessible. I find that I end up watching crappy On-Demand movies through cable rather than getting into the ol’ DVD collection because the DVD collection is a pain in the ass to find things in and it ends up being, frankly, too much effort. (Yeah, the collection is that big. Well into the hundreds of discs.)

The notion of a media center PC springs to mind, but the problem I’ve seen with most media servers is that they require you to rip the DVD into just the video and a single soundtrack or some such, losing the menu and the features and the rest of the DVD that you paid for. I want the whole thing - I bought the movie and all the extras, I want access to all of that.

I found MediaPortal today and I think that may be the answer. It’s got native support for Daemon Tools so you can just rip your DVD to ISO format and have the media server play it just as though you had put the physical DVD into the drive. That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Plus it’s free!

I may have to get a test of this going at home. If it pans out, the new year may find me building a home theater PC with a loooot of storage and ripping the DVD collection onto that. I’d like to enjoy the movies I own again and not just be in the media storage business. The iPod has liberated me from CDs (well, the iPod with iTunes and a fairly sizable external drive); it’s time to be free of DVDs as well.

Amazon has this new “video on demand” service called “Amazon Unbox.” For about a second it looked interesting - get digital versions of movies rather than buying DVDs - until you look at the license agreement you have to accept to get these movies.

There’s a great write-up of this at Boing Boing.

I think I’ll be passing on the old Amazon Unbox.