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.

I’m generally irritated today and I don’t think it’s any one particular thing, so I can’t say what the root of it is, but I’ll gladly share some of the stuff pissing me off. Granted, more of a cathartic effort for me than a great entry for the readers.

There’s one week left for RSVPs to come back for the wedding and we’ve only gotten about half back. Yeah, folks have a week left, but I think it’s time to start chasing people down. There’s really no margin for folks to just be showing up without having replied. Which means I’m going to have to start getting email reminders out to folks with email and call the rest personally. I’m not sure what the difficulty is with sending a pre-addressed, pre-stamped postcard, but apparently it’s a showstopper for some folks.

I’m concerned that a good friend of mine is becoming a workaholic, possibly entirely out of boredom, as they have become fairly distant in recent times. Not to mention pretty conservative with information about what they’ve been up to. I’m not interested in the gory details of peoples’ lives, but when you get together to talk to someone and it’s a one-way information sharing street unless you ask just the right questions, it becomes a little stilted.

On that same note, I got an instant message from another friend who seems to know a hell of a lot more about what I’m doing than I know about what they’re doing. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten together with this friend, but somehow they are entirely up to speed on a lot of things - things I’ve not posted, emailed, IM’d or talked to them about. That’s a little disconcerting, and I’m not sure how I really feel about it. I’m glad to reconnect with this friend, but I think if my friend wants to know what’s up with me and Jenn… they should ask me and Jenn.

I’m super bored with the latest project at work which involves a hell of a lot of “review this stuff you’ve already done.” And I’m tired of people telling me when I mention how boring it is that, “you have to take the good with the bad” or “business needs require tasks that aren’t as fun sometimes” or whatever. I get it. I mean, I’m doing what needs to be done, right? That doesn’t make it fun, it only justifies the requirement. I’m not debating the requirement. I’m debating my motivational difficulties in completing the task.

Anyway, it’ll get done, I just have this vehement ennui.

Hey, that’s a good band name. “Vehement Ennui.”

Okay, done ranting. Time to get to work.