I woke up at ten this morning and - dammit, I just had to turn that reading lamp off - found that the MPG file was still encoding from the previous night. So I fixed myself some breakfast and rubbed my lower jaw on the left, where the entry point for yesterday's novacaine (how do you spell that anyway?) still rather painfully resides. In spite of my minor discomfort, I was feeling pretty good about things. There was a fresh box of Frosted Mini-Wheats, bite-sized, and I haven't had mini-wheats in a fair while. The milk tasted like it was going a bit bad but this had minimal ill effect. The taste of a soggy milk-filled mini wheat is a near unstoppable force. And the milk was probably fine, as I'm more than a little neurotic when it comes to expiration dates and food.

I have one of the worst gastro-intestinal systems of anyone not diagnosed with a medical condition. My trio of green, white, and pink pills go with me whenever I venture into foreign territory. If the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are the Holy Trinity then surely Tums, Imodium, and Pepto Bismol can't be all that far behind.

Meanwhile, there was a massive thunderstorm and subsequent flood warnings that ensured my first perfect work day of the season; the magic, almost legendary zero customers. This meant I had to sort swimming lessons (a task I performed correctly but with the wrong timing such that my work was worse than useless) but also managed to breeze through roughly 200 pages of Goblet of Fire. I finished it tonight while still dicking around with the video. Damn that book has a great finale. It also leads breathlessly into the most fully-realized and deliberately paced of the series, Order of Phoenix, which I plan on starting immediately following the completion of this journal entry.

The final encode on the first of the three discs worked out well. I ended up burning it twice, since the first had severe artifacting when I put it in the set-top DVD player. As it turned out, the problem lay with the DVD player rather than the CD burner. For a good five minutes or so, it wouldn't read any Video CDs at all. After applying the dubious recovery methods usually reserved only for the troublesome burner, I achieved successful playback at least through the night. Meanwhile, my own stupidity and overzealous need to delete files has resulted in an additional seven or so hours of encoding time on disc two. Lest I jinx it, I will say no more on the matter.

I'm still trying to get the schedules worked out for my as yet uncertain DVD party on the seventh of August. There's a good possibility that it may be our last, so I kinda want to make sure it happens. The last hold-out should let me know by tomorrow or the day after. God willing, my current project will have reached successful completion by that point in time. Otherwise, it has been a rather quiet leisureful day. I even had some fun laughs with my mother doing stupid shit. Reminder: I have to look up billing practices for RIT for Dad. Tomorrow I wake up at ten, and with a little luck am in for an equally enjoyable day. For now, the computer will process it's video.

Here's a question for you: If a computer can now exactly how long it will take to reach the desired result, why can't it just skip ahead and get there? I swear that question sounded more intelligent in my head.